We should maintain our position and try not to provoke the being until we have an idea of how to communicate with it, Admiral, Ayaka said. As the leader on the ground, Fleet Admiral Bianchi had looked to her to open the discussion. After all, if you look at the situation from the beings side, were the invaders thatre interrupting its life. So its reaction is... understandable, in that light, even if it is both sapient and purposefully hostile.

Wherever we go, the law of nature still applies, Captain Marinakis interjected. The strong eat the weak, and mercy is a privilege of the strong. We have no idea if communication will even be possible, so Id rather eat than be eaten, Sir.

Nobody else spoke, letting Fleet Admiral Bianchi weigh the two options presented to him. They were on opposite ends of the spectrum, which was rare for the command team of Ayaka and Dimitrios, who were normally rather synchronized in their approach to problem solving.

The admiral, however, gave no sign of what he was thinking. Ayakas suggestion came directly from The Book, and would definitely be more in line with their mission of peaceful exploration. But Captain Marinakis also had a point; the one unbreakable law in the universeespecially now that humanitys exposure to mana and its subsequent evolution had overturned their perspective on the other laws of the universewas the law of the jungle. And the commanders on the ground had great freedom to overrule The Book, though they would eventually have to justify their actions when they returned to an area where real-time communication with CENTCOM was possible.

Task Force Proxima thus had a window of time to decide how to respond to the being. Everything was still unknown at the moment, thus, everything was possible and even permitted. If he so chose, Fleet Admiral Bianchi could pull up stakes and move on to Alpha Centauri instead of remaining in Proxima Centauri. Or even turn around and head home, though that would be disastrous to his career and perhaps even harmful to humanity as a species.

So instead of making a decision as to which end of the spectrum of possibilities his response would fall on, he changed tack. How long until our forges are completed? he asked his chief of staff, Lieutenant Commander Thabo Botha.

The probes just completed the detailed mapping pass on both asteroid belts. We have preliminary sites picked out based on initial spectrographic scans, and if all goes well, the forges will be completed in six months or so, Sir. Until then, well have to get... creative with what we already have.

Admiral Bianchi pinched the bridge of his nose. Its a good thing our engineers are the cream of the crop. Theres going to be a lot of jury-rigging if we cant send manned missions to the surface, he sighed. Until they developed an in-system industrial base, they would be reliant on forcing square pegs into round holes in terms of mission-specific gear. Luckily, though, they had trained for just that kind of situation.

If necessity was the mother of invention, limitation was its midwife.

The briefing continued for a few hours, barring a small break for a meal, as the leaders involved hammered out a tentative doctrine for dealing with what they had found themselves up against. Though they had all trained in simulations for subjective years, that didnt necessarily mean theyd been exposed to every single situation they could encounter in an infinite, ever-expanding universe.

And hostile root swatting at the explorers lander just so happened to be one of those situations they hadnt covered in their training missions.

A few days later.

Over the past few days, the rovers and drones had been collecting samples and performing rough analyses on them nonstop. Data had been flowing to and from orbit in a steady stream, and the engineers had outdone themselves by converting a landerTHE lander, as it just so happenedto an unmanned vehicle. Should anything happen to it, it wouldnt be nearly as big a loss as it would if it were filled with researchers, spacers, and soldiers.

Thanks to that, together with the first round of samples collected by the landing crew, the researchers had discovered a veritable smorgasbord of single-celled organisms that were along the same lines as those thatd once floated in the primordial soup on Earth and eventually became humankind. All of their discoveries had been scanned and replicated in the limited VR simulation, though their scanners werent quite up to dealing with mana yet.

There was a limit to tier 1 technology, after all, especially when it was trying to deal with mana. Any scanner that wanted to detect and recreate mana in virtual form to any usable degree of granularity and fidelity would need Aron to imbue it with intent, not just use the atomic printer to carve the runes and a converter to transmute electricity to mana and flood the runes with that mana. Aron was still the only runemaster in the human species, and only runemasters of the highest level could imbue runic constructs with intent.

And there simply werent enough hours in the day for him to personally imbue all of the hardware on entire fleets of thousands of ships, even if he were inclined to make the attempt.

Thus, the researchers had a wealth of information to study, though they would have to solve the issue of safely landing on Proxima Centauri bs surface in order to study the withering they had noticed in the first samples brought to the Farsight. The samples they had been taking over the past few days, unlike their very first, were being very carefully handled so as to avoid wasting them. They already knew what happened when they removed them from the mana saturating and surrounding the planet, so until they were ready to study the withering itself, they would ensure that the integrity of their samples remained intact.

Some of their initial discoveries had made the exploration of the surface even more important. One in particular, though, blew the rest completely out of the water in terms of importance. In fact, it was perhaps on the same level as the discovery of penicillin by Alexander Fleming in 80 BE.

Specifically, they had discovered miracle shit. Certain single-

celled organisms that resided on the planet, when provided with proper nutrients, would convert those nutrients into energy for themselves, and excrete the rest as pure mana, among other byproducts. Sure, the amount of each individual organisms miracle shit was minuscule, but that didnt matter; there were a LOT of those organisms, and quantity could make up for the lacking amount in each miracle shit.

Thus, the rovers were kept busy for an entire PCb-year (eleven E-days) collecting sample after sample and shipping it up to the Farsight via unmanned lander as the researchers polished and began implementing Operation Bear Baiting.

A single unmanned lander was sent to test the hypothesis that the being had detected the hardware itself. Should the being respond in the same fashion as it did before, by attempting to whip the shit out of the lander, it would suggest that the lander itself was what had disturbed the being. If it didnt, then it would suggest the opposite. Of course, they wouldnt be able to tell with any certainty, as they were still unable to tell if the being was sentient, sapient, or even nonsentient. After all, no one would claim that a Venus Flytrap or Pitcher Plant was sentient simply because they were capable of attracting insects and reacting to them by trapping and digesting them.

The lander slowly descended with all of its sensors tuned to their max sensitivity and range. And that was quite a range, as the vehicle itself had been refitted with spare sensors from the Farsights spares inventory along with a dedicated microfusion plant specifically to power them. The modifications hadnt exactly been easy for the engineering crews to make, but thanks to imperial technology being essentially modular in design, they had been within the realm of possibility.

But as any good engineer would tell people, knowing something COULD be done was 90% of actually doing it.

The lander continued descending until it reached the same elevation it had been at on its previous trip, where it hovered in place as practically the entire task force watched for roots with bated breath.

They didnt have to wait for long, as the suspected root system showed an initial uptick in mana pulse intensity and frequency similar to the previous invasion of its space, but it soon returned to quiescence and no actual attack took place.