It took a few seconds for the humungous arthropod to detect two other presences. Soon he chipped into the com channel to get Frost on the line.

He hadn't seen the skala at first; not with his own senses. With his drones, his sensory perception wasn't relegated to his own body but distributed across multiple smaller ones, linked to the central nexus of his own conscious perception. He smelled, heard, and saw what they saw like a thousand eyes inside of his own linked to a brain already used to controlling multiple limbs, bodily organs, augmentative parasites and other such components with a precision at once naturalistic and borderline mechanistic. 

[color=39b54a]"Vazyrin here. Skala group detected. Around 12 of them, no firearms. A click or so away from our position. I cannot tell if they are here to scavenge or if they are a territorial patrol. That's not all."[/color]

His drones had picked up another signature; something like a faint tingle on their waving, whispy antennae. This wasn't a scent but a strange tingling that was almost electric. Elecromagnetic in particular. 

[color=39b54a]"There's something else - the pilot has gone to investigate it. I can't detect it properly from here with the atmospheric conditions however. Some sort of electronics. Someone ask them whatever it is they've made contact with."[/color]

Normally, he would have gone and told the skala to stay clear. He'd been among their kind before and this planet was not unfamiliar to him. It was a good place to hide away from Federation patrols and the locals understood that. 

The problem was that getting up meant giving his positions away and with an unidentified, potentially hostile presence in the clear, that meant making himself a target in an area with poor cover and visibility. 

[color=39b54a]"I can try to contact the skala through my drones. Maybe I can stall them or we can work out an agreement. What's your call?"[/color]