Offworld

[Mac Sirloin]

Heimlich strode into his boss' office confidently, instantly setting the Manager on edge and assuring him that something was terrifying the portly little man's brain. With a quick tamp to even them out, Heimlich laid a foot-tall stack of paperwork on Morris' desk and cleared his throat.
“Morris, sir, I'm not a very complex man. I've worked for you consistently and with dedication for fifteen years at this facility, and I loved every tedious minute of pencil pushing and research you've trusted me with. It has been an experience like no other, which is why I am disappointed to tell you that at the top of those papers is a request for a transfer back to Earth and a letter of resignation I spent quite a long time thinking of what to say, and more on how to explain the report beneath it, but I cannot stay.”
Morris sat back, and smiled carefully.
“Heimlich, my friend, whatever could these papers say?”
They were very old men. Morris had been somewhere around fifty when he'd arrived at the station and Heimlich surely had the youthful spring in his chubby step of a 60 year old man on his arrival, 30 years after Morris had made planetfall.
Heimlich frowned, and pushed his papers aside to reveal a coarse but detailed sketch of an alien creature staring out of the page with quizical nervousness.
“It's been decided to call them Kokans, sir, and they hate us.”
The report tried to dodge, leap and roll under the killing. It tried to feign curiosity, imply ignorance and convince of innocence. It tried.
“How many?” Morris said quietly.
“About sixty, sir. Most of them died in the fire, the rest were attacked by our forces.”
Morris looked at the sketch again. The creature was hairy and stout, with gangly double-elbowed arms and crooked little legs resting underneath it. There was a loincloth, with small tools stuffed into a pocket in it and a necklace sat around its stumpish fleshy head, the only colour in the picture was a sharp yellow that made Morris think of amber sitting in a lump on the necklace. Behind the sketch were photos. Dozens and then hundreds of them, of curious animals watching the photographer from afar. There was the one in the sketch, with the glinting necklace. It was hard to judge their size, at no point standing near enough a human subject to get a good sense of it, but after realizing that the seemingly limp trees sitting near them were the very same foot-thick monsters growing outside of Morris' window, he judged them each about 4 to five feet wide and almost ten feet tall. Some drank from the rank streams that covered the swampy lower continents. They were all relatively the same size and quite frail. A thin tablet computer showed them moving by folding their arms close and jogging along carefully before reaching a set speed and using the arms to spring forward in great heaving leaps. There was a loud crash as the camera jerked, and the creatures shot away at an almost impossible lope, not daring to look at the sound following after them.
“Sir, they've all but disappeared from the area. From what we've gathered from some of the graves we've found-graves that they-built, sir, we were lucky to find ourselves in a settlement of their most elderly. These creatures defy our own physical laws but match those of this world very, very well. Some of our teams have explored the deep woods and found their monstrous young. They hear us coming, who knows how far off, and they just wait in the woods for hours. They pull our craft out of the air without a thought.” Heimlich took a deep breath.
Morris kept reading the report. The creatures had stampeded a small human study camp, surrounded it and just...watched. There was video of them sitting around, scratching themslves idly and making low, inhuman sounds of communication. They'd cooed and barked at our researchers, recordings showed, but it wasn't until one thumped its way through the circle and pulled a soldier into the woods excitedly that the humans decided to attack. They found him -alive- sitting up in a tree with one of the things holding him tightly, dying from stab wounds from a knife broken in its thick neck.
“They've fled the area. We've located every settlement of theirs and each one is completely deserted. There are scrawled notes here and there, and the presence of a strange bright pigment makes it clear they remember the plasma very well, sir.”
Morris rubbed his face and finally looked at Heimlich. The cubby old man looked thoughtful, his face drawn.
“They are coming back with the young, sir. They are angry.”
The report showed grisly piles of once humans. Arms and legs and twitching, unrecognizable masses. The Kokans took their time in their revenge, it seemed.
“They're quite resilient at the younger ages, sir. We haven't reported a single casualty on their side, excepting one who ate our poisons. They're using that against us now, of course.”
There were pages and pages of a baffling, expansive circle slowly narrowing into discernability. Morris realized with little surprise that the greenish lumpy mass was the woods and the glowing dots were the Kokans and worse. They were within days of the central camp and as he looked closely Morris realized that there were thicker waves, with denser life signatures and larger groups not far behind.
“I think...we may need a few more letters of resignation.” He said, plainly.
Morris was forced to watch from orbit as their settlement was taken apart. The Kokans spent several weeks moving around the place, mashing what little military resistance was left and after a few tense days gathered all of the survivors, about sixty or so, into the small amphitheater deep in the facility. The cameras recorded the largest among the creatures slowly looming towards a defenseless group of humans, raising their arms to shrieks of human terror, lowering their fists carefully and staring up at the camera Morris was watching through as one, before pointing to their eyes and sidling out of the room, sealing it away. There was a horrible cheer among the human survivors, until they ran out of food and water and, eventually, each other.
Morris thought about calling in some sort of orbital bombardment, or reinforcements. Luckily, he also thought about the poison and the less-complex human weapons they'd left that had rapidly and effectively been used against his people. He thought about the precisely untouched equipment in the facility and the large vehicles dismantled with care in the hangar. He shuddered, and yet, for horribly human reasons, he grinned.