The attack on Regnar’s expedition

The attack on Regnar’s expedition is the first large-scale operational disaster to reveal that the danger on Regis III can defeat not only individuals but an entire coordinated human expedition. Regnar’s twenty-two-person convoy disappears beyond the range of ordinary communication, leaving behind an ambiguous scene of silence, damaged minds, and four missing men. Its aftermath changes the expedition’s scientific questions into an ethical and strategic crisis: whether humanity is confronting an intelligent adversary, an ancient mechanism, or a planetary force that cannot properly be treated as an enemy.

Causes and Background

The expedition was sent after the mining teams found tiny black metallic specks, the supposed “flies,” and discovered unusual minerals on the caterpillar tracks of the Condor’s transporters. Earlier drilling had already exposed a deep history of Regis III in which terrestrial life had repeatedly vanished while reddish-black metallic strata appeared. These seams, found in remote regions as well as near the ruins, suggested that a vast non-geological process had reshaped the planet. The scientists could not establish whether the layers came from an ancient ferro-metallic meteor, localized nuclear reactions, or some connection with the destruction of the Lyran civilization. What they could establish was the disturbing coincidence between the disappearance of land life and the emergence of metallic deposits.

The decision to investigate farther north-east therefore joined scientific curiosity to a growing suspicion that the planet’s ruins and metallic formations belonged to the same history. Regnar led a fully equipped convoy of twenty-two men carrying oxygen, food, and nuclear fuel. The force included energobots, the Condor’s mobile cannon, transporters, robots, and twelve Arctan automatons equipped with automatic excavators and drills. The expedition was not a small reconnaissance party but a mobile scientific and military system, designed to work independently while remaining connected to the Invincible.

The Loss of Contact

The convoy maintained continuous radio and television contact during its advance. When the curvature of Regis III blocked the direct line of ultra-short waves, the Invincible placed a television relay into stationary orbit, preserving reception and making the expedition’s isolation seem technically manageable. At night the convoy formed a defensive circle beneath a force field, then resumed its march the following day. Around noon, Regnar reported that he had stopped beside ruins located in a small, shallow crater and almost completely covered by sand. He intended to examine them more closely.

An hour later, radio reception deteriorated under heavy static. The technicians shifted to a clearer short-wave band, but the improvement did not last. As the distant storm moving eastward toward the expedition grew quieter, contact was suddenly interrupted. More than a dozen increasingly powerful fadings preceded the break, and television reception worsened at the same time. This was the crucial anomaly: the television signal had been relayed from outside the atmosphere and should not have depended on the state of the ionosphere. At one o’clock, all communication ceased. The technicians and physicists could not explain it. The effect resembled a wall of metal descending across the desert, sealing a convoy located roughly one hundred miles from the Invincible.

The storm initially offered a plausible explanation. Rohan wondered whether the black cloud might possess a strange screening action, but the physicists doubted that ionized air could form a layer dense enough to block the signals. When the storm died down around six o’clock and the expedition still did not respond, Horpach ordered two reconnaissance craft to search for it. Their deployment marked the transition from routine exploration to emergency recovery, yet the first attempt to see what had happened produced no simple answer.

Discovery and Recovery

Rohan was assigned the rescue mission and spent the night preparing the enormous double-decker supercopter. The seven-thousand-ton craft was loaded with additional fuel, supplies, and weaponry. It took off north-east at sunrise, climbed to nine miles to reach the stratosphere and maximize speed while reducing the chance of encountering the black cloud, and landed less than an hour later in the sand-filled crater. The crater’s lower reaches were still shadowed, and the crew had to act before the craft’s downward jets stirred up obscuring clouds of sand.

From an altitude of fifteen hundred feet, the monitors detected a suspicious arrangement in the crater’s northern sector: small rectangles placed with geometric precision around a larger steel-gray rectangle. Rohan, Gaarb, and Ballmin immediately recognized the vehicles of Regnar’s expedition. The discovery gave the rescue party a physical location but not an explanation. The vehicles were present in the crater, arranged as evidence of an organized expedition, while the people who had operated them were absent or incapacitated.

The rescue craft landed cautiously, and two reconnaissance vehicles moved out under the protection of a mobile force field. The crater was shaped like a shallow bowl with a jagged rim; its central volcanic cone was coated in a ruddy-black crust of lava. An hour later, the recovered expedition members were brought beneath the supercopter. Only eighteen of the original twenty-two men remained. The fate of the other four was unknown, and the missing were not accounted for by any ordinary battlefield report or confirmed body count.

Most of the survivors came voluntarily, but five had to be forced away from the places where they had been found. Five stretchers carried severely affected men to an improvised sick bay on the lower deck. The other thirteen were taken to a separate cabin. Their faces were masklike, and they were so helpless that others had to undress them and remove their boots before laying them on their bunks. Most remained passive and calm; several of those who had resisted rescue wailed in eerie voices. The scene transformed the expedition’s disappearance into a medical and psychological mystery as well as a military one. The survivors had not simply been defeated: they appeared stripped of ordinary initiative and self-possession.

Immediate Consequences

Rohan left the rescued men in the physician’s care and used every available resource to search for the four missing members. He commandeered the abandoned vehicles and staffed them with personnel from his own team, dispatching the final patrol just as the radio operator announced that contact with the Invincible had been restored. The recovery therefore remained incomplete. Eighteen men had been brought back, but the crater still held the unresolved fate of four others, and the survivors themselves could not supply a coherent account of the event.

The incident also altered Rohan’s position within the expedition. He had already become the coordinator of the exploratory work, leaving the vicinity of the Invincible only briefly and not every day. The disaster made that coordinating role concrete: he now had to manage search operations, medical evacuation, communications, abandoned equipment, and the uncertain boundary between rescue and further exposure. Regnar’s convoy, designed to extend human knowledge into the planet’s interior, became instead a damaged extension of the crisis aboard the ship.

The attack’s most important operational consequence was the recognition that communication itself had become vulnerable. Horpach later treated the isolation of Regnar’s team, followed by the destruction of reconnaissance planes, as evidence that the hostile formations could obstruct information exchange. The proposed explanation was that the metallic cloud had inherited an ancient anti-communication function: higher automatons may once have used radio waves to coordinate, and disrupting those signals may have been one of the cloud’s earliest survival behaviors. Whether or not this hypothesis was correct, the attack demonstrated that the Invincible could be made blind and deaf without being physically struck.

Interpretation and Strategic Crisis

The expedition’s fate intensified the dispute over what kind of existence the metallic formations represented. One line of reasoning held that Regis III was an old planet, perhaps six billion years old, orbiting a sun already near the end of its life. Land life had disappeared while life persisted in the ocean, possibly because oxygen was maintained by algae or seaweed. Another possibility was that concealed aquatic beings had built a civilization below the sea. The attack on Regnar’s convoy made such speculation emotionally compelling, but it did not confirm it. Horpach rejected the idea that intelligent aquatic beings had overcome the expedition, arguing that an intelligent aquatic civilization would probably have sought access to land long before.

A later biological interpretation proposed that life on land had vanished more than five million years earlier, while oceanic life survived. The biologist suggested that a rocket from another system, perhaps from the region of a nova, had once landed on Regis III. From that beginning, mechanisms created by rational beings might have continued to evolve after their makers disappeared. Their evolution would not be biological but inanimate: an ancient tool could become part of the planet’s natural forces, adapting across millions of years to destroy anything alive or intelligent on land while leaving the ocean outside its domain.

This interpretation recast the attack on Regnar’s expedition. The black cloud was not necessarily planning, hating, or taking revenge. Its actions could be local responses without a strategic mind: blocking communication, attacking exposed machines, scattering when struck, and regenerating or multiplying after destruction. The mechanisms were described as lacking powerful intellect precisely because they did not behave like a unified strategist. Yet their absence of reason did not make them harmless. They were perfectly adapted to the conditions of Regis III, possessed apparently inexhaustible means of regeneration, and were invulnerable to dangers fatal to biological life.

Horpach refused to abandon the planet on the strength of a hypothesis. He wanted certainty, an accurate diagnosis, and samples of the flying mechanical fauna brought aboard the Invincible. The recovery of Regnar’s survivors thus became part of a larger demand for proof: the expedition had suffered an unexplained attack, but the commander still needed material evidence before deciding that further investigation was pointless. The difference between Horpach’s insistence on certainty and the biologist’s call for withdrawal expresses the central strategic dilemma created by the disaster. Technical power could rescue some victims and gather evidence, but it could not guarantee comprehension or control.

Ethical Significance

For Rohan, the consequences eventually exceeded tactics. Reflecting on the attack and the deaths associated with the expedition, he came to see the human response as a sequence of errors: the crew had trusted their cannons and sensors too much, made rash decisions, and paid for those decisions with human lives. He rejected the language of conquest, heroic survival, and retribution. If the metallic formations were the products of inanimate evolution, punishing them for the Condor’s fate or Regnar’s disaster would be as meaningless as whipping the ocean for sinking a ship.

Rohan’s conclusion was not passive resignation but a redefinition of human responsibility. He understood galactocentrism not as a doctrine that privileged humanity’s search for familiar intelligence, but as the obligation not to interfere in processes that did not concern human beings. Regis III was not an empty place simply because its land lacked recognizable life or civilization. Over millions of years, its metallic inhabitants had established an equilibrium of survival based on radiation and material forces. The attack on Regnar’s expedition therefore becomes the moment when exploration’s map of the planet turns into an ethical boundary: humans may occupy an empty place, but they have no automatic right to attack something that already exists.