Z’s Reviews > Alien Clay > Status Update

The revolt fails, someone snitched and the guards knew where and when and what, Arton is invited to see the Commandant once again who’s disappointed in his loyalties that he’s been privileged due to his academia but he was supposed to use their meetings to slip the C notes of the plan but he didn’t

He’s sentenced to be with Rasmussen in her cell, separated only by a thin mesh

the tech person is going to hack the ship to send down shuttles and fit as many ppl off to revolutionary sympathizing planets and when the next batch of prisoners comes Clem and his close team will remain behind to do it again and again, eventually when the ships start coming back from Kiln a place they never come back from he hopes it’ll be the prelude to a revolution

The engineer will jam the doors so reinforcements can’t come and they’ll storm w the guns they’ve collected in secret w the printers to storm the gantries, the guns are all individual little parts printed at various printers mirroring the life on Kiln being individual but a whole

A ship waits in orbit for the day the Commandant and his higher ups can go home and the codes to access it are what Arton smuggled

Arton believes himself bent not broken solely due to the fact the Mandate didn’t test him that much and by the time they got him all his friends were behind bars so there was no one to rat out, so he slips in now and provides extra hands in a cell that was established before his arrival

Security forces surround it and kill it

Clem’s little retinue of loyalists to the cause include the sole engineer, a few Dig Suport (incl MC, Ilmnus and Pareides who still thinks MC turned him in - they’re important since they have restricted access) and he wonders about Keev (who I confused as being Clem, he’s another macho veteran but it was Clem who fake attacked MC)

Clem waits for him at their bunk where Arton gives him the usb drive he palmed while pretending to be drunk w passcodes and such

A Kiln creature gets into the camp but they can’t find an entry point, it’s large sea-spidery w hook-stuffed limbs that are folded and runs around seemingly random and clumsy looking for Rasmussen who hoots back, a human and Kiln creature communicating

Dr. P shows Arton new writing, in a cell is Rasmussen who looks old but not as old as she should be/dead and she’s written w blood and excrement, she tells him “join me. A short path in a dry country”

Dr. P says the commandant won’t let her be killed, thinks she has some info to offer and listen to her, she invites Arton over, they sleep together

so as to reassure the Commandant that yes, humans are still the apex

Arton, tipsy at this point, goes to help her but ends up basically saying that any creature on Kiln would be symbiotic as they’ve seen already, so the stomach is its own independent creature, if it had feet it would be the same, so anthropomorphism can be achieved but it would be a group effort not individual

Commandant requests the team for dinner to present their findings and he’s scientific enough to be curious and actually read all their reports but orthodox enough to think he knows what the answers are, confirmation bias basically

Dr. P gives a rough sketch of what she thinks Kiln creatures who built the structures look like and it’s a mockery of science taking alien features and pasting them on a humanoid body

Dr. P says ancient Kilnish used this highly efficient solar collector as power source that they’ve cut down in order to maintain contamination

But Arton makes a notes that decontaminating Excursion teams every 3 days and not each time is not keeping quarantine but limiting exposure, one guy didn’t survive the last gassing cuz it killed a foreign part that was so deep inside he was using it