Alien encounter colony ship back up

   My name is Tim Brockson, crew member of the Bratwurst III deep space colony ship. Our mission was listed as classified, revealed to those of us transit of its real importance. On the surface we knew the mission was a terraforming mission. Scouting out new potential inhabitable world, searching outside the Dimensional Instability Contaminated Zone and outside the registered territories of the Kuhrai, Croon Alliance, Zi'omp, Vi'ong, Ki'on'ta, claimed planets of human descended species especially the Andros and "immortals", and of course being like the Builders and the Celestials. Thankfully space is massive and terraforming technologies being what they are all of those are fairly easy to avoid. I mention them only to be certain it is mentioned we were making it a point to avoid them. Our scouting teams were equipped with every piece of surveying equipment including the now standard sapient psycho-layer detection equipment, including advanced relaies for it given past mistakes. Which i bring up for a reason. Normally missions like ours are sent out in stages, scout, establish, *terraform, seed, begin colonization.

   Scouting is simple, locate potential worlds and list them by levels of work needed to make them inhabitable for human beings. Basically anything from the planet is rocky in the right orbit but will need alot of work including stablizing its rotation by altering or giving it a moon, tectonic start ups in the core, and atmosphere generators; often also including water introduction. Those kinds of planets are long term investments and early marked worlds of that type are only now starting to see colonists who up in the form of seeding work forces to establish plant and animal life compatible with human habitation, ecosystem corporations working to establish functional life cycles that can become self sustaining. Its alot of work in other words. Establish just means marking, naming and claiming the planet by the way. Also yeah, colonization begins at the terraforming stage and made up primarily of the work force and their families. If we're lucky though scouting finds worlds with less work needed, already viable worlds. Although alterations to the colonists might be in order to survive there. Generally protein-nanite shifts of the colonists' biological systems (signed off for when becoming colonists), just for adapting to minor differences in atmosphere, gravity, resistence or immunity to local pathegens (no one wants a repeat of the grey veins of Armoda or the crimson algae from Bion. With the biggest shifts being able to digest local organisms if not completly compatible.

    We do try to avoid contaminating local ecosystems with too much Earth based life if the local ecosystems can be adjusted this much. A few planets were unfortunate, and since then the cross contamination of life forms of various planets has occured, it is something we endevor to avoid in the future with other inhabited planets. Something I feel should be brough up again is detecting sapient life. Sapient life as it turns out is far more common on already living worlds than we had previously thought. A number of "mistakes" are on record as to why we are careful about it now and increased the range and use of the sapience detectors. Turns out the universe isn't kind to sapient life and a long list of limitations and issues can be easily found in biology text books these days of examples of life forms held back by their physiology, specific mentality, social structures, life spans, habitat, and available resources along with neccesity to even expand their skills beyond basic survival.

  The classified nature of our mission was that we were a Xenogenesis mission. Meaning we were relocating sapient life forms from their home planets to a new world just for them; there isn't really anyway to not make that sound like we weren't evil invading aliens taking their planet and shoving them off onto a reservation that was less desirable for us. Although the captain tried when I noted the large number of "brains with tentacles" in stasis pods in the hold. These were "globs" a typically tiny (common limitation) sapient life form from the planet Paradisia. A world that was given to the Ophidians and Replicants centuries ago as part of their reperations for creating sapient life to serve as tools, toys, and weapons. However the scouting team back then failed to identify the very small marine and aquatic sapient life forms. The Ophidians and Replicants regarded them as a food source; a repeat of the "Living Tongues" mistake. As the captain put it as part of an apology to the globs, which had simple tools and weapons but no form of writing or hard form record keeping yet, a project was initiated to find another planet to put a large number of their kind on that didn't have a large number of "dragons" on it that would inhibit their natural progression. In other words due to the peace treaties we couldn't ask the "Paradisians" to leave the planet, or relocate the entire glob species, so a xenogenesis project was initiated to move a large number of them to a new "Eden" to live without further interference by any within our alliance.

   So for that reason we had 500,000 marine Globs, and 500,000 aquatic Globs, in stasis. In short we abducted one million sapient life forms from their home planet, put them in stasis, and intended to drop them off on a planet fitting their biological needs. Or release them once such a world was produced for them. According to the captain these Globs had been in stasis for over seventy years now, as the original intent was to drop them off in the oceans of Polymera. The Polymorphica there agreed to set aside a section of ocean and wet land for them to live in and watch over them. Unfortunatly due to the Dimension Drive Accident in nearby space resulting in planets within the Dimensional Instability Contaminated Zone as it came to be called, forming random dimensional overlap points. Which resulted in "mana fiends"  and "real magic" among monstrous creatures, oddly matching the local inhabitants to a certain degree. The planet was determined to be even less safe for the tiny Globs than Paradisia was. Other planets in the same zone would have worked as well, but again, magic and monsters were now showing up. Not as bad near the edges of the zone for worlds like Peres and Espara, terrible for those near the center like Polymera and Homnes though which have become "fantasy worlds", and virtually every planet in the zone has broken off contact with each other and the alliance now, except for Polymera, although temporal instabilities also occur in the zone so some of those planets have now been isolated for millenia, a temporal instability that shifts, more dilated at first but in recent years is starting to rejoin the normal flow of time for the rest of the galaxy. Although what we are seeing from the edge worlds just shows how different they have become, however I digress.

    The point was all the worlds in that zone are not safe for the colonists in the Bratwurst II. There were a number of planets selected by probes as potential colony worlds, rejected for one reason or another for human colonies, or on "stand by". Earlier terraforming projects were investments and generations of people having worked on establishing an artificial moon, building oceans and atmospheres are seldom too keen on abandoning their legacy of building a world to move to some random other planet full of alien life that would require them to undergo stasis augmentation to survive there; as previously stated. So yeah, with ever improving technology to probe for worlds and journey faster and further into space we have found many worlds that with just slight alterations to people would be perfectly inhabitable. Although certain criteria, again presence of sapient life forms, presence of micro-organisms that might prove a problem; especially with augmentations causing potential colonists to possibly become susceptible to those microbes, abundence of dangerous larger life forms (no one wants to build towns on a planet full of giant meat eating predators after all). Life is just something the universe does so we have been able to be pickier about where to colonize.

   Which brings me back to our mission, the Globs. So, here was the problem. Globs are about a foot long, have limited sensory abilities, soft squishy bodies, little short tendrils for grasping limbs, and survive in salt water and fresh water that is shallow. The largest native predators to Paradisia prior to introducing the Ophidians and larger food for them; that lived in those waters was a six to eight feet long fish/crustaceon like creature that primarily lived in the deeper oceans. It was assumed the planet was still fairly early on it developing complex life and the Globs were a sapient by random mutation case rather than environmental pressure which would generally produce hardier (relatively) sapient life forms. So we were looking for a world with plenty of warmer shore lines, shallow but not stagnant seas, inland fresh bodies of water connected to those seas via rivers. Plenty of microbial life forms for the Globs to consume, including stationary organisms for them to farm, going by studies of Glob society. No doubt we'd have to augment the Globs just as we do people to suit the environment better. However there in lies the problem, environmental conditions such as those tend to develop their own native food chains; and while larger organisms like those found on Earth are actually in the minority among naturally occuring living worlds; unfortunatly the size range of predators that move quickly in shallow water with armored bodies and peircing limbs and feeding mandibles tends to average out around two to three feet, the Globs evolved in an environment lacking such predators and have no natural defenses against them, and their technology against such creatures would be beyond pitiful; as again they never encountered such in their shallow water homes. A perfect world with the best options for them is impossible, and to make matters worse the release program. Even with augmentation we'd have to essentially either let them wake up slowly in the new environment or else wake them up in stations set up and then hand released slowly. Neither is perfect, the first runs the risk of a large sum being picked off by native predators and scavengers as they wake up, and then being sapient the panick of so many suddenly being in a new place. So our option would be the second one, our mission's second phase after finding a suitable planet and suitable location (minimal problems) would be to set up stations by the sea and closest large lake, and in lab wake up a small number of Globs from stasis in a tank. Unable to communicate with them; we are certain they use a combination of scent and ultrasonic sound, as well as some registered telepathy, to communicate. So we'd have to wake up the sapient life forms we abducted, into tanks, and then have machines carry those tanks into what to them would be unfamiliar waters and release them in small numbers at a time. That way some could get habituated to the new environment, and then over time at regular intervals release more and more of them till they were all released. The time scale looked to be a few years actually, long enough to also see if any of the earlier ones released were developing towns, reproducing, or developing any problematic reactions to each other or new ones introduced (don't want any sacrifices and murder to conserve resources, cannabalism, ect...). To be honest the presence of all these guide lines pretty much told me this was not the first time there was a mission like this.

   Our probes did eventually give us four potential world options that would work. One was so primitive it barely had anything above autotrophic organisms, would have required little augmentations to the Globs, and had nothing that could hurt them. Although our ecologist was against it, stating without some sort of threat or competition they'd end up over populating; however they would have their own kind, and it was a world fitting the criteria. The only other choices were a world of mostly deep oceans and scattered islands and one giant desert continent, which had very large predators in the deep water but next to no life on land, with many fish like organisms even in the shallow shorelines that the Globs could hunbt, as well as one that more a moon with mostly marsh environments and evidence of a one sub-sapient species that might decide Globs are easy spear fishing, and a world with very small oceans and mostly land that while its oceans would be the right shallow depths, were so limited on space we'd effectivly be trapping their entire civilization to a corner of the planet, practically doomed to extinction should they be hit by even one disaster as they'd have no chance to spread out.

   We ended up choosing the primitive planet, plenty of oceans, scattered continents, and food sources. We chose a set of large fresh water lakes connected to a gulf via a nice deep slow moving rivers for the release site. Setting up two landing points, one near the mouth of the river to release the salt water Globs in sets, the other by the lake. I was put on lake duty. At first after setting up the port our small team, consisting of my self and one other guard along with a team of six scientists we were pretty much just there in case anyone got cabin fevor. The atmosphere was just off enough that anyone without a gas arranger at least would be light headed and pass out in under an hour. The water however was perfect for the Globs. I wasn't really privy to the details but around month three of us taking tanks down the lake I did notice the Globs in the water had set up an arrangement of stones near where we release them and the new ones were greeted by the ones already there like some strange ceremony. It seemed primitive, but at the same time, not animal behavior, to imagine we had released what were effectively dragons and kaiju relative to them on their home world and evicted all of these to an alien world of water grass and tiny squishy things for them to eat; hard not to think of yourself like the titans of myth, would they pass down stories of a world over run by monsters so giants or gods saved them and brought them to a bountiful garden; or some far less flattering story of being evicted from their ancestral homes and dropped in some empty world.

   *If you could please pause a moment.

  Yes sir,

  *I think the truth inducer is too strong, he keeps going on about things we already know, we don't need a history lesson here.

  *Agreed, it would appear he suffered some inner turmoil over the specifics of the mission that the truth inducer is causing him to not just come out to us about but also himself.

  *Turning it down,

   *Now Mr. Brockson, you have established your mission, and that you had landed and the mission was underway. Now, when we answered the emergency beacon you are the only person we found, and all the Globs were suddenly five thousand miles away from the release point. We want you to explain this and only this alright.

  Alright, sir.