The terrifying sound of silence
"Where is the Human?"
A question that incites dread across the Galaxy. And no greater when the Human in question is an engineer.
For weeks after her arrival aboard the Coalition joint exploration vessel Ulmanar's Resilience, the Human Jenna had been pestering everyone about the technical specifications, tolerances, build schematics, design philosophy, power outputs, and countless other microscopic details.
At first everything seemed normal, Humans are known to be curios, especially the technically minded ones, and her job would entail managing parts of the vessel's systems, so everyone was as helpful as they could.
Then Jenna started tinkering.
'Optimizing' is how she described it.
Admittedly, most of her modifications resulted in marginal improvements to energy distribution and mechanical motion efficiency. Although the fact the power reactors started to make audible noise was... unusual, but the readings said everything was fine, and the fact a day passed without explosions put everyone at ease - this was partly why a Human engineer was brought along in the first place.
During a short stop at a supply station before our first descent onto an uncharted planet, Jenna was the first to rush off with several cargo drones in the direction of the shipyard district. She was the last to return mere minutes before the scheduled departure, all covered in dust and oil, and the drones straining under the weight of everything she had procured.
"Don't worry, it's gonna be awesome." she declared.
It had been a while since our training and none of us had encountered other Humans in the meantime, so all of us had forgotten to immediately be alarmed by those words and question everything she was doing.
The following weeks of transit to our destination were marked by a severe lack of Jenna interactions or even sightings. The shuttle bay was a mess of disassembled craft, loose parts flung about, and sparks and rattling noises coming from the bowels of whatever was going on.
Unbeknownst to us, for the idea itself was ludicrous, Jenna was only within the vessel half of the time during this period. The other half she was in her spacesuit tinkering with the exterior of the vessel. Laser cutters and cold welding, not to mention the vacuum of space, make for a very silent work environment.
Perhaps it was instinct for most of us to avoid the confusing actions of a predator species descendant, as once we arrived to the designated planet, we learned we only had two surface shuttles left. Out of sixteen.
"This baby can land now!" Jenna happily said.
Confused beyond measure, we asked: "What do you mean 'this baby?"
"The ship, you know, Ulmanar's Resilience. We can land the whole thing now instead of doing this boring shuttling down thing. Plus the terraforming bot wouldn't fit in a shuttle anyway."
"The what?" our confusion continued.
"Yeah, we're gonna terraform this planet, right? That's what I got from the briefing back before joining you guys." she explained with innocence in her eyes.
There must have been some miscommunication, but the work had been done, and as far as our own technicians (who were scolded harshly for not keeping track of such grand changes to the entire vessel) did confirm that, as far as their understanding of mechanics and physics went, Ulmanar's Resilience can now indeed endure descent and commence takeoff from up to a 6G world.
So I guess that's what we're doing now. Preliminary surveys from past unmanned missions had suggested this world was once in the past and potentially now habitable again, and we suppose the Humans had decided to just set that in motion before more detailed analysis had occurred.
"Oh yeah," Jenna interjected, "if it turns out this place is, like, super dangerous and a threat to the Galaxy if we accidentally wake something up, I modified one of the scanning dishes to be a deep drill laser. Two hours of firing it at the core of the planet and it'll go boom."
...
"The planet, not the laser dish. That will explode if left on for more than three hours."
...
