Dirge - Alan Dean Foster [8]
According to the exploration vessel’s accomplished and experienced medical staff, the Pitar on board carried nothing harmful to humans individually or as a group. The aliens had been completely cooperative with their human hosts, readily acceding to any and all requests for blood, tissue samples, or scans by assorted instrumentation. In fact, they were as interested in the results of such procedures as the men and women who carried them out. To the irritation of their landed colleagues, the Chagos’s techs had chosen not to release any information via relay. Like their appearance, the biology of the Pitar remained confined to the storage facilities of the ship. Only enough information was transmitted to reassure the relevant departments in Zurich, Gauteng, and elsewhere that these dozen representatives of a new intelligence posed no medical threat to humankind.
Not only had they been cooperative where biological testing was concerned, the twelve Pitar who had been delegated to represent their civilization had shown no hesitation at leaving their friends and shipmates behind while entrusting their lives and futures to their new human acquaintances. Following a succession of polite, formal farewells, their own craft had departed for home to announce the mutual discovery. Though there had been plenty of volunteers from among the Chagos’s crew to travel with them, as the dozen chosen Pitar had elected to do in the company of their human counterparts, the Pitar preferred to proceed in a different fashion, according to their own traditions. Human travelers and ambassadors would be more than welcome in the very near future, Pranchavit and his superiors on the Chagos had been assured. The Pitar they were conveying to Earth would establish formal relations and commence arrangements for the exchange of diplomatic personnel.
Events were proceeding so smoothly and the declarations from the Chagos were so reassuring that after its first day in orbit no one thought it necessary to further monitor the newly arrived KK-drive craft. So it was that the release of a shuttlecraft from the starship’s hold was not noticed until it was skimming the upper levels of the atmosphere, and was not remarked upon until an insecure watcher aboard one of the two nearby orbiting stations tentatively brought the matter of the unscheduled and unannounced trajectory to a superior. That individual regarded the confirming readout in puzzled and then stunned silence before demanding re-reconfirmation. When this was provided, a controlled state of all-hell-breaking-loose promptly went into effect on both stations.
When the situation was communicated to the surface, the relevant authorities had more than a little difficulty accepting the evidence. Ground-based instrumentation confirmed not only the existence of the unauthorized shuttle descent but its path and velocity. No one panicked—no matter what was on board the vessel, it could not be terribly threatening. The shuttle was not large, was not disrupting normal atmospheric traffic patterns, and had promptly put itself in touch with and under the guidance of Denpasar authority. It had begun an unannounced descent but had subsequently taken time to carefully clear its final approach with ground control.
The contact personnel who were hastily summoned from downtime and off-duty to configure an appropriate reception team were bemused and in certain cases angry, but none of them were fearful. The shuttle was approaching openly, if irregularly. There was as yet no evidence of malice on the part of its crew: only a kind of ceremonious irreverence.
By the time the shuttle appeared beneath the low-hanging, moisture-heavy clouds, a proper if irritated greeting party had managed to assemble in the reception foyer that had been specifically designed to put first-time arrivals to Earth at ease. Several high-level executives were frantically checking