GEC-332091E (Jerendak)...
Sergeant Timmons looked down the line of low-built houses and shops, the small crowd of alien Onaeric going about their daily business, then over to his new partner.
"How old are you, Trinya?"
The young woman who was busy examining her feet, or perhaps it was the wide chitinous plate that the pair, the aliens, and in fact the whole village were riding on, took a moment before she looked up, "Hmm? Oh... How old am I? Minimum to join the Juniors, sir."
Junior Officer Training Corps, or JOTC, was normally a strictly school-only organization. It was the same as most paramilitary programs the world around; Young sentients who were interested in a military career getting a head start by getting the non-combat training out of the way. They focused on athletics, protocol, technology, that sort of thing. Normally. Timmons couldn't ever recall being sent out into the field when he'd been in school. The closest he'd gotten to the action was when his class had been mobilized to help evacuate a small town during a SDF emergency drill.
Not stomping around on the back of a kilometer-long centipede that was slowly munching it's way across an other-worldly forest that stretched from horizon to horizon. In her own little powered armor suit, at that.
"So sixteen."
"Yes, sir."
Maybe he should have read up on her when he'd first seen the one-and-a-third meter girl sitting across from him on the shuttle ride down, but there was already a lot of information to absorb from the briefing packet and he'd just started the section on his special charge when the doors had dropped and he'd found himself on the slowly-moving back of a unique piece of mega-fauna. Oh well. Make the best of what you have.
"Why are you here?"
"Because... JOTC was more about shooting things than discovery. I asked if I could take the SEC exams instead of the SDF exams, got high marks, and they sent me here. Oh, and my father's the current senator in the 33rd District."
"Ah." According to the statisticians, Sunset was in the top-top-top nations as far as eliminating government corruption went, but here was some right in front of him.
"Just good timing. I got the scores, that convinced him and enough other senators to put together a bill creating a field study program, and the Secretary-General signed it."
Was it really corruption then? Trinya had the scores, and wearing a (small) suit of SDF power armor around she wasn't in a whole lot of danger. He knew he would have liked to have been sent half-way across the galaxy when he was sixteen.
"Alright, well, let's put those scores to use. What can you tell me right off before we meet the locals?"
Trinya nodded, the movement invisible inside the fully enclosed helmet. She wasn't quite used to it yet, having had all of an hour of training and the shuttle ride down.
"Well," she knelt and ran an armored hand over the thick plate. "It looks like the Onaeric harvest some of their building materials from the carapace. My guess is that they make some kind of roof tiles from it."
Timmons agreed with that. There were a series of shallow scooped indentations all along the trailing edge of the carapace segment they were standing on, which was itself the last segment. It was smaller than the next, and the next beyond that.
"Possibly other goods as well. The material is a close analog to chitin, so it's reasonably durable but shapes well and could be used for a wide variety of purposes. I wonder how they harvest it, since the initial survey didn't record any metallurgy."
"Probably their beaks. Cut out the shape you like then pry it away. Speaking of beaks, let's go say hi."
"Alright."
Trinya rose and the pair began to walk towards the village. It was built in a long line down the center of the centipede. There was a horn or crest of some kind at the head which broke off the forest branches that might otherwise slowly batter the little hamlet to pieces. All of the low houses were designed to take advantage of this sheltering shield with the tallest coming up to just over Timmon's two meter height. This made them about three stories tall, however, as the Onaeric were just under a half-meter in height.
He'd seen the pictures, of course, but he really enjoyed seeing a new alien species in motion and had watched as little as possible to avoid any pre-conceptions.
Each Onaeric had three arm-legs that spread radially from a generally round torso. Each arm-leg ended in a thick three-fingered hand that had a single ball-jointed thumb on the inside wrist. The arm-legs joined to the body in a slight depression on the lower side of the torso, and between these on the underside was the beak. It was a flexible organ, something like the extendable beak on an octopus or squid, and he could see they used it like a fourth hand, holding objects while a hand worked on them or with another tool.
Between each arm-leg was a wide trench that housed one of the Onaeric's three eyes. These were large, ideal for the constant gloom of the forest, and were vaguely capsule shaped. These moved around in the trench - almost a socket as well as vertical brow-ridge - on a similar system to the beak. They could move out completely as well as up and down.
"I don't see any ears," he commented as they got closer. It was hard to tell though. They had fur; A short, thick layer of it covered nearly everything except the inside of the eye trenches.
"They must have something analogous," Trinya pointed out. "Listen to the untranslated audio feed."
Timmons did as she suggested. "That's... fantastic."
They were singing. Much like terrestrial birds, they sang and chirped back and forth to each other in both subtle and obvious melodies and harmonies.
"They'd make a good vocalist for a Marsh Squid symphony."
Timmons nodded and caught himself. Had she known that he'd discovered the Marsh Squid? Or was she just somehow familiar with one of the rarest of the sentient species in Sunset? There were perhaps a few hundred in the wider galaxy, and maybe a score on the various Sunset colony worlds.
"Let's introduce ourselves," Timmons paused at the edge of the village. Already a few Onaeric were looking his way, and a trio was making their way through the crowd in a manner that suggested the village elders or headman and his entourage.
