It was the most promising-looking world yet—blue and white, blue-green and tan—ocean and clouds, forest and steppe, and no doubt desert. At higher latitudes, some of the white clearly was snow or ice, even in the summer hemisphere. In fact, the instruments insisted on it. They'd already reported temperatures in the habitable range, though the mid-latitude summer was rather cooler than one might wish. Nothing serious.
And the atmosphere promised to be breathable.
There was a complication though, of course: it had an obviously sapient life form. Broad-band monitoring had long-since found an object bearing a beacon, parked outside the planet's radiation belt. Commodore Tarimenloku examined the object on the viewscreen. Considering its location 55,000 miles above the planet, he told himself, it could be a processor for incoming mail pods, a processor with a homing beacon. It was assuming a lot to think that a race out in this Kargh-forsaken sector would have mail pods, but if they had hyperspace generators, mail pods would no doubt have to be invented.
There was radio here, there was no question about that, though only one broadcast source had reached the Blessed Flenyaagor. The voice even sounded human, and while that could be coincidence, the commodore was not addicted to coincidence as an explanation for anything. The words, of course, meant nothing to a son of Kargh.
That this object was here at all indicated a reasonably advanced civilization. If it was a pod processor, it indicated a multi-system civilization. And it was already clear that this was not a world with cities or the extensive use of powerful electronics—not a major planet. It would seem then to be a very minor world. Very minor.
Tarimenloku gave an order to pick up the pod processor or whatever it was; it should tell them something worth knowing about the technology here. He also gave an order to be alert for and destroy any missile sent up from the surface. These beings might detect them and send out either a war missile, or a message pod programmed to go to the nearest naval base, reporting an intruder.