Whether he knew it or not, and he probably wouldn't have appreciated it even if he had known, it was a young badger that first found out about the invasion.
He was too young to have a name yet, but old enough to think that going off into the wilderness on his own would be fun. And before then it probably would have been; South Island was still kept as a reserve for the semi or fully sapient animals at that point, and even the less intelligent carnivores amongst them were smart enough to eat from the farms that the more intelligent ones ran. A lone badger cub could be fairly safe walking around the woods, within reason.
The first team of SWAT bots to land came upon him when neither of them was expecting it; dense vegetation and badly tuned IR sensors left him almost invisible to them, while his own carelessness and their stealthware left him unaware of them, right up to the point where they rounded a clump of trees and nearly walked into each other.
The bots reacted with a kind of mechanical surprise, clearly not expecting to meet one of their targets so quickly. And in fairness, he was some way away from the main habitation zone of South Island. But they recovered from that surprise smoothly, reacting as they had been instructed.
The first shot came before the badger had even fully worked out that it was dealing with a type of animal that it was familiar with. There wasn't anything to show for the attack as such, the badger simply found itself feeling weak and disoriented all of a sudden. Without entirely intending to he lay down, pawing weakly at the ground in front of him and trying to focus on the strange animals that stood over it. The whole world was blurring and he felt somewhat sick, and so when one of the SWAT bots stepped closer and touched the back of his neck he felt grateful for a second of two as everything, including the feeling of weakness, faded away.
When he regained consciousness, gratitude was not high on his list of priorities.
Contact with South Islanders was restricted to those Humans trained in handling them. The ward-off fields just out from the shores were as much to keep intruders away as to keep the Islanders themselves in. The rangers had the kind of psychological and sociological training that was normally reserved for experts dealing with primitive tribes, which most of the rangers had to admit was fairly accurate.
And ranger Thomas Asher had to admit that standing there, facing a deputation of South Islanders who had taken to carrying impressively efficient spears and axes, he was glad of that training.
"You have to help us," Sally insisted, sitting up on her hind legs and gesturing to the carcass that they had laid at his feet when he arrived for his monthly check-in with the nominal government that they were forming. The uplifted chipmunk was one of the most intelligent animals on South Island, and apparently had a knack for leadership to go with it.
The carcass that she had presented him with was a robot of some kind, but what kind he wasn't sure. He certainly hadn't seem one like it before, with its armour plating and sophisticated internal structure. There were two things that worried him about it particularly.
"You've seen these things kidnapping your people?" he asked, seeking confirmation of what Sally had previously explained.
"Yes," she insisted. "This one was disactivated when a group of them came to take a family of foxes." She gestured to the fox sitting a few metres from her, looking decidedly dejected. Asher noticed that, in a twist on the standard mutations seen on the South Islanders as a result of their uplifting, this one appeared to have two tails. "Miles' family were taken, and he would have been as well if Cutter and Sonic hadn't intervened." She gestured this time to an unlikely pair: one clearly had been uplifted from wolf stock, and bore a polearm with very effective looking glaive-heads fitted to both ends, while the other was an oddity that Asher had heard about a couple of times from other rangers. Sonic was supposedly a hedgehog, and their records had him down as perfectly normal and calling himself Cinos, until nearly a year ago when he had vanished for a while, then suddenly turned up again now bright blue rather than brown, and calling himself Sonic. Not too smart before, his IQ seemed to have jumped somewhat in the process. What that process had been, they hadn't convinced the now cocky hedgehog to tell them.
Both of them were watching Asher carefully, and he realised that not only were they upset about this situation, but they might actually be capable of doing something about it. He wasn't an expert on weapons, but he was fairly sure that the gouge marks in the robot's armour would match up with the heads on that polearm. As for the rest of the damage... Sonic didn't seem to be armed, and it was hard to imagine what kind of weapon the barely equipped South Islanders could produce that would make parts of the robot look like they had been put up against a mulcher.
"Well, I can take these remains back to North Island," Asher allowed. "And we can get some experts to look at them. We should be able to find out where they came from fairly easily. From there we can work out how to deal with this."
"And how long will that take?" Sonic asked, sarcasm heavy in his tone. "I mean, you haven't done anything about them for three months now."
"Three months?" Asher looked at Sally for confirmation of this; so far she had only told him about a couple of recent incidents.
"We've had disappearances for three months now," Sally confirmed. "We can't be sure with some of them," she added, throwing a look at Sonic, "but the first unexplained disappearance was three months ago. It's only in the last two heptdays that we've actually caught these in the act. Until then it was when someone walked off on their own and just didn't come back. Now they're showing themselves around the outer farmlands. This is the only one that we've caught so far."
Asher shook his head in a kind of disbelief. The South Islanders were a taciturn lot sometimes, and it didn't surprise him that they hadn't mentioned this until now. He was a bit disappointed by it though, given that he was nominally trusted by them. "Well... I can get our techs to review the ward-off fields... If someone has been sneaking in then we should be able to track them."
"Aren't those fields meant to keep people out?" Cutter said sharply. "They keep us here easily enough."
"Yeah... We're in the process of upgrading bits of the system, so it's possible that someone found a way to protect themselves from the older system. I'll check it as soon as I get back to the station." People had been trying to get onto South Island for years, and it wouldn't surprise him to find that someone had worked out how to bypass the ward-off fields. They were employed in enough places that it was bound to happen sooner or later.
"And what are we going to do in the meantime?" Sonic asked. "Cutter and I can't be everywhere at once," he pointed out.
"If you're sure that there will be more attacks, then I suggest that you call your people in from the outer farms and bring them into Knothole." He gestured around him. "You've got plenty of room here for everyone to live for a while, and you can organise people to keep watch while they are out working on the farms." He deliberately avoided using terms like "guards"; it was bad enough that the South Islanders seemed to have discovered the concept of edged weapons without anyone noticing...
They exchanged a few more details, before Asher collected the remains and, with Cutter and Sonic keeping a watchful eye on him, went back to his hoverbout. On the way he wondered whether it was chance, or ignorance of such things as robots that had kept the South Islanders from mentioning the strange thing that really shouldn't have been inside the robot: Asher didn't get a proper look at it until he was well out of sight of any South Islanders, but it was clear that what was wired into critical parts of this machine were the remains of a young badger.