A Sea Of Green

They cut a white scar across a sea of green.

Engines and the turbulence of alien air combined to fill the lander with a roar calamitous enough to fit the epochal occasion. Inside, they held on and kept words to themselves as the cabin pitched wildly. Even the little portholes were enough to let the green in though. The clear light of this foreign sun bounced off the world below and shone back brilliantly into the cabin painting the interior with a beaming, viridian glow.

Kiana held her pack tightly to her chest as the lander took another sickening, turbulent drop. Looking around she seemed to be the only one bothered by the rough descent, but then again, the only flight she’d ever been on previously had been to the cryo facility. Across from Kiana, Dr. Rey held onto his bag as well, though seemingly more out of concern for its contents than fear for himself. The botanist’s face glowed as he looked up with shining eyes in the jade light; cargo shorts, cargo vest, bush hat, hiking boots, sample containers filling every spare pocket, the man looked giddy to be setting out on such an adventure. Next to him, the zoologist Dr. Marwa looked markedly more dignified. Her clothes were more modern, her expression more reserved as she scrolled on her tab through what data Kiana couldn’t imagine. This was an exploration party afterall, they were here for the discovery.

The atmosphere thickened and the roar of the engines pitched ever louder to a thunderous clamor. This was a landing party, and the planet below resisted their incursion.

A few seats away from the scientists, Lieutenant Stern sat by the aft door with a pack twice the size of any others and a rifle firmly held between her tall boots. Her square head snapped up at the increasing noise and in a curt movement pulled on the headset next to her seat. Square shoulders, square jaw, square mouth, only a square fringe of hair to indicate that she was no longer actively serving; she brusquely gestured to the rest of the group to put theirs on as well.

Headset on, the din subsided but the lurching only got worse. Kiana looked down and grabbed her bag as tight as she could, white knuckles betraying her unease. Stern pointed firmly next to Kiana then at the final member of their group. He sat straight backed, hands folded in his lap, eyes closed, as though dosing through the final descent of a flight back home to Taipei. Winnie Yu, represented The Council of the CRS Delaney’s Fortune in their party, but it was clear he thought little of the task. Kiana was half tempted to let him ride out the descent with the roaring in his ears, some Voice of the People was he. His position was meant to be filled by someone to speak for the likes of her the common berths, not by someone who very nearly could’ve bought their way onto The Council outright. Chance had a funny way sometimes though, and here they were.

Lt. Stern pointed sharply again, so Kiana tapped him on the shoulder and gestured to her headset. Yu placed his set over his ears and promptly refolded his hands in his lap and closed his eyes once more. You wouldn’t want to be too troubled by landing on a new world, Kiana thought. They weren’t going to be the first to set foot on the planet, that honor had gone to the ship’s Delaney Corp. head and a couple atmospheric scientists a few months back, so their own moment of history seemingly mattered little to Winnie Yu.

The lander dropped once more and she let out a gasp.

“Are you feeling alright Miss Hano?” Dr. Rey’s voice crackled in her ear over the headset, as he looked gently across the cabin at her.

“Yes, quite alright thank you doctor.” She replied ashamed that her fear had been so evident. Another drop, another gasp escaped.

He chuckled, and replied in his soft Southland drawl, “I told you to call me Gabriel.”

“And I told you to call me Kiana.” She quipped back. In the short, hazy time she’d been awake Dr. Gabriel Rey had been a bright spot, the enthusiasm he shared with Dr. Marwa, despite not being able to communicate very well much of the time due to their different languages, was infectious. Bright, but not as bright as the planet that shone below.

“Very well, Kiana,” he smiled. “It may make you feel better to have a look over your shoulder. The continent below is coming into clearer view.”

At that their party turned to look out their nearest portholes, even unflappable Lt. Stern craned her wide neck around to take a glimpse. Winne Yu sat unperturbed. His loss, Kiana judged as she turned to stick her face in the window.

The lander cleared a low layer of clouds and beneath them rushed a tapestry of green. Forest and chartreuse, jade and lime, pale moss green and greens descending so deep in color they turned nearly purple. All of it blanketed a rippling landscape of little ridges running amok as they slowly climbed the great western flank of the old shield volcano. Here and there ice blue lakes poked from beneath the foliage, reminders of the little creeks that slowly pulled this fallen giant back into the seas. So much like home, she thought in wonder, but so much more of it.

Going this fast, every forest Kiana had ever explored, every path she’d ever walked, every ridge she’d ever climbed, every plant she’d ever learned, every stream she’d ever drank would’ve passed by in the blink of an eye. But here it stretched on and on as the slope climbed ever higher. Certainly the conservation of Hawaii had been an important accomplishment, for her people, for all of humanity. One place where they could stem the tide of ecology loss. It was important, but that didn’t mean it was large. Not compared to this.

The planet was just a little smaller and more dense than Earth, and most of its landmass sat locked beneath ice far away up at the poles, but it mattered little. This one stretching continent held more wild forest than Earth had seen in the last thousand years. Well, a thousand years before they left at least. Westward, the continent stretched around the equator in a great green belt, plenty for others to explore, even just this corner of the new world Kiana saw was more than she could see in twenty lifetimes. The land rose up to meet them and the forest finally began to thin a touch as the mountains climbed into the rain shadow of the crater rim.

On the eastern flank of this oblong continent was a great bite. From space an almost perfect semi-circle of green was filled with bright blue water. It was a hard thing not to notice. Almost two hundred kilometers across where it met the sea and three thousand meters at the top of the rim, the scale was like nothing they could comprehend. Kiana knew volcanoes well, even still it was a little hard to believe this monster could have been one.

The lander crested the rim, one break of bare rock in this world of green as the craggy peaks of the rim reached up like gray fingers into the azure sky, and then they were across. The mountains plunged once more into the dark, lush forest of the crater.

As they circled around on their final approach Lt. Stern’s voice came over their headsets. “Alright everyone listen up.” She leaned in, eager to give a safety briefing. “Now I know we’re all excited to get out and see what’s down there, but we are taking this step by step. The lander should have us down a couple hours before nightfall, Dr. Marwa you’ll establish contact with the ship on the comms unit while I set up a perimeter. Kiana, Dr. Rey you’ll unload the gear so the lander can get on to the rendezvous point. Mr. Yu, you’ll…are you listening?

“Yes Morgan, I’m listening.” Winnie Yu opened his eyes to unleash a withering stare at the lieutenant. “More to the point, we’ve been over this a hundred times. I’ll take the water sampling kit with Miss Hano down to the river and verify that it’s safe to drink, before helping pitch the tents. The lot of you all seem so keen for this adventure but all the same seem to take all the adventure out of it.”

Stern replied with a stare all her own, “And you’d prefer we go down there with no plan?”

“Ha!” Yu barked, “I’d prefer to be asleep on the ship waiting for all these formalities to be taken care of so we can get on with building this new society. Instead it seems like I’ll be in for a tired, dirty, long week of camping with you, the good doctors, and Miss Hano.”

“A tired, dirty, long week of historic discovery Mr. Yu.” Dr. Rey grinned, needling the entitled heir.

“And I wish you all the best with it Dr. Rey, but I would appreciate a moment of peace before we embark on this endeavor.”

Stern beckoned their attention with a rough cough, unwilling to be thrown off. “Once we have camp set up we should have some time to poke around a bit, but no one’s going very far. Radar show’s a storm system coming in this evening. I don’t want anyone out when it hits.” She paused to pull open her utility belt. “And remember, we’re good in the tents, and we feel good about the atmospheric mix here but this isn’t Earth.” She pulled out a small inhaler, one of several kept in her hip pack. “The presence of atmospheric ammonia and other nasty gasses can cause real trouble for us if we’re not careful. Fortunately the good scientists aboard the Fortune have us covered, stinging eyes and nostrils, confusion, eventual suffocation, not for us. So long as we–”

“Use our inhalers every fifteen minutes.” The group chimed back in a mocking chorus.

They’d all heard the safety briefing a hundred times. Kiana still found it hard to believe that all they’d need to walk on an alien world was an inhaler. But that was the recommendation of the research teams. Years of atmospheric research had happened while they approached the planet and before she’d be woken up. The first landing party had deliberately done so without suits, partly to feed the hubris of the Delaney family, and partly to prove it could be done. The life the earlier landing parties had studied, while certainly very different from Earthlife on a cellular level, posed no threat to humans, some of it may even be suitable as food. That was part of her job here after all.

For her whole life Kiana had walked one of Earth’s few remaining forests, learned how to live as one with it, and did her best to show others the way. The great eastern flank of Mauna Kea was covered in an undulating blanket of jungle when Kiana was born, and as she grew so did the jungle thanks to improved protections while forests around much of the rest of the world dwindled into nothingness. Her mother, like her mother’s mother, and on back for generations, had taught her to thrive beneath the towering trees. She’d taken to it with great talent and love, so when the island’s interior finally reopened to foreign scientific expeditions Kiana was at the top of the list to serve as guide. She knew how to respect the island and her jungle, how to find the best routes for crossing tough terrain, knew how to read the winds and the clouds for dangerous weather, knew which plants were for eating and which were for healing and how to safely discover the properties of those plants that hadn’t been seen for generations.

Now, against all odds, her little skillset so suited to a time before her’s was useful once more. On a jungle planet. A thousand years away.

In a great swing, the lander curled back in towards the craggy peaks of the crater rim, engines now pushed to their limits scrubbing off the last of their descending speed, as they circled down to their target. A thousand meters below the rim they’d spotted their landing site months ago from the Fortune, a rare wide meadow on a low ridge next to where one of the larger rivers that ran down to the sea sprang forth.

Past the window, the peaks of the crater rim were replaced by the peaks of trees, if they could truly be called trees, then in an instant the roar died and they were down. The second landing party on a new planet. Kiana’s fear and unease wiped clean by unbridled excitement.

Lt. Stern stood, shouldered her pack and rifle, turning to the group as the aft cargo door began to lower.

“It’s a whole new world, don’t have too much fun out there,” she cracked with an uncharacteristic smile, then turned to face as the doors lowered and alien air flooded the lander.

A thousand sensations hit Kiana at once. Light first, blue and green and brilliantly bright, flooded in. A humid heat like her bones barely remembered rolled in next, accompanied shortly by a riot of strange and alluring smells utterly unlike anything she’d ever experienced. Then, just perceptibly, at the back of her throat and corners of her eyes, the foretold burn of ammonia greeted them all in turn. The group took a collective gasp from their inhalers as they stood on uneasy legs, stumbling towards the lowered door. The world seemed to hold its breath as they spilled forth onto the grassy hillside, but no, their ears gradually readjusted after the deafening descent and new sounds came rolling in. The wind whispered through the trees, down the hill the water of the river rolled over smoothed stones, and over top of it all a hum, a chorus, a symphony of life.

Kiana had never heard anything so beautiful.

The trills and cries and buzzes and songs of a million alien beings came rolling in before they could even step out of the lander. Dr. Rey burst forth ebulliently, running out into the field, arms waving wildly before collapsing with tears of joy. Lt. Stern strode past him with booted feet, but her head betrayed her bewonderment as she looked agog at everything that surrounded her. Dr. Marwa hurried down to the botanist, helped him up and the pair embraced in a giddy pile with tears brimming and laughs on their lips. Even Winnie Yu had softened at such an incredible sight, walking out with a smile on his lips.

With legs barely able to hold her up, Kiana walked off the landing ramp and her bare toes pressed pleasantly into the soft grass of the hillside and the warm, rich, alien dirt that lay beneath. The sight before her, almost too beautiful to comprehend. The hill rolled away with its grass and awestruck landing party, to a dense line of forest beyond. From this high on the rim though, the entire crater seemed to open up before them. A tangle of steep, flora-clad ridges ran down the stretching slopes. Off, barely visible in the far distance the sea stretched out to a horizon mottled with towering clouds. It was a trick of the altitude Kiana knew well.

From up high it looked like a few short steps would take you to the sea, but it wasn’t so, the snarl of ridges below stretched for leagues and leagues. The terrain they hid was rugged, and steep, and if not for the rivers, almost wholly impassable. But all the same the sea was their goal. As the first exploration party, in the coming days they’d pass through the elevations following along the rivers to explore all the different biomes held within this one crater on this one coast of this one continent on this one planet in the whole great universe. What Kiana saw was more than she could explore in all her life, a prize so worth the price she paid for it that her heart sang in tune with the chorus of all the jungle around her.

Frankly Kiana couldn’t believe that her bet, her blind ambition, had truly paid off. She had a happy life in Hilo, a family who she loved, steady work guiding in the park, her friends weren’t so lucky as she was but they were still as true as anyone could ask for. All the same, years had passed and while her jungle grew, others around the globe collapsed and blew away on the hot winds. For the first time in her life Kiana began to feel the confinement of her island life, and worse, there was nowhere else to go. So when her aunt called her from a business trip to Tokyo to say that she could secure them both berths on the next Delaney ship, she put aside all her good sense and jumped at the chance. Not out of desperation, or to make the best out of a bad situation, or out of a sense of duty to the human enterprise, but simply to satiate her own unyielding desire for adventure.

And against all the odds, she’d found it. Adventure like she never could have imagined. Not in suits on some ball of ice, or scrabbling across barren lifeless rocks, but adventure with her toes dug into warm, alien soil. Just like home, but so much more. Her smile spread across cheeks that hadn’t moved like that in a thousand years.

“Are you ready Miss Hano?” Yu interjected into her reverie, snapping her back into the here and now, as he held up the water sampling kit.

“Ah,” she blinked, “yes, of course, let’s go. There’s a lot to set up, but this should only take a minute.” The rest of the group had overcome their first wave of wonder, and was beginning to go about their appointed tasks.

Winnie Yu scoffed, “Don’t you want to wear some shoes?” he asked skeptically.

Kiana looked down at her dark, calloused toes digging into the grass, next to his booted feet. His laces were drawn tight, stubbornly resisting any foreign incursion.

She laughed, “Not today Winnie,” he winced at the casual use of his first name, but she carried on, “Today, I want to experience everything.”

The pair headed off over the shoulder of the hill, but it wasn’t long before Kiana’s heart caught in her chest again. Standing below the rim of the crater from this distance the peaks rose nearly as high as she could crane her head back, up in a sheer green curtain, rippling with hundreds of narrow ridges where the rains washed their way back to the sea. It was like visiting her family in Kaneohe, with one marked exception. Where there the mountains flowed almost directly into the turquoise sea, here a different, but no less brilliantly blue, water was in attendance. Out of the jungle, just up slope from them, emerged a coursing, braided river. It flowed wide and shallow over a bed of light gray stones, nearly a dozen streams darted this way and that around little gravel islands. While in the main channel it snaked lazily around the hill glowing a brilliant azure, loaded with the fine silt of the gray rocks. Up this high the water had little time to pick up more than a touch of the light silt so the water glowed brighter than Kaneohe Bay on a clear day.

Yu carried on ahead, barely seeming to register the view in front of him, and Kiana tripped along after him laughing and giddy with joy. At the river bank her toes traded warm soil for smooth pebbles and Kiana waded out across the first couple channels to an island of flat stones. She squatted in the crystalline water and stacked a graceful cairn of rocks, one on top of another, the first human edifice on this new planet.

Winnie Yu shook his head and bent down at the first channel he came across and filled several test tubes with the water. After completing her sculpture, Kiana waded back across to check on the results.

“How are we looking?” she asked.

Green lights came on one by one on the side of the sampling kit.

“Just as they expected, this was all a silly formality, the observation teams could practically tell all of this from the ship,” he replied nonchalantly, “Very little in these waters other than the silt of the stones at this altitude, what biological mass there is matches the samples the first landing party gathered and will have no effect on our bodies. But frankly, there’s so little life in it, it’s hard to see how it could be a concern. There hasn’t been water this clean on Earth since the time of Christ.”

Kiana could feel the truth of his words with her feet, the water was crisp and bracing despite the warmth of the air, but it was also soft and sparkling pure. Suddenly she didn’t just want to feel it with her toes. She waded out and dove into a deep channel, crystal waters washed over her pulling away the eons of time she had crossed, welcoming her to their world.

Winnie Yu laughed and shook his head, “I’ll leave you to it Miss Hano,” he chuckled as she came back up for a breath, “Don’t forget your inhaler,” he warned as he walked away.

The water had indeed attracted the ammonia in the air to her eyes and nose and throat, but it mattered little. One puff and Kiana comfortably flipped onto her back to float in the slow current of a side channel and let the waters wash away all her doubts, all her worries, all thoughts of any kind as Kiana Hano, drifted as one with a new world.

As the sun dipped towards the crater rim she finally came out of her trance, and made her way back up the hill, still beaming from ear to ear. Walking, she grabbed some samples of local flora with a gloved hand and placed them into her sampler, it would warn her of any potentially problematic compounds in the flora she was most interested in testing for edibility. By instinct though she dabbed little samples on spots of skin around her body, not willing to fully trust the machine. She’d dab some on her companions too when she got back to camp, more data points for her to consider as she continued her discoveries.

Approaching the lander she felt a pang of guilt, seeing all the equipment unloaded and tents already being erected. Though it seemed Dr. Rey hadn’t been much more help than her. He lay on his stomach at the edge of the field holding a magnifying glass up to some small bushes as he exclaimed happily to himself. Looking at the haul they’d pulled out of the lander, Kiana had to chuckle to herself.

Hard to imagine we’ll do anything deserving to be called ‘bushcraft’ with this much gear. We’ve barely left behind any comforts of home. She thought.

Indeed, beyond the tents, bedrolls, and personal provisions that fit in their respective packs, the two doctors hauled along a nearly complete laboratory of testing equipment and a full glass shop worth of sample containers. Then in Lt. Stern’s towering pack, they carried an array of communications devices, next to which the group leader and Winnie Yu now knelt sorting out how to best make contact with the Fortune.

The sun continued its slow descent towards the rim as Kiana helped Dr. Marwa set up the last of the tents and camp kitchen. She was just about to join the group at the comms pack when a whisper came in on the wind.

“Pssst, Kiana!”

She looked around, and could barely see Dr. Rey waving to her from his place now almost wholly swallowed up by the bushes.

“Come over, have a look!” He whispered to her, “Quickly! Quietly!”

In the purple evening light Kiana crouched town and scurried over to the botanist. He put a finger to his lips and ducked off ahead of her into the bush. They scurried along a winding trail, that must have been formed by some unseen larger creatures, that dipped and dove around overhanging foliage, damp and nearly black in the fading light. After a moment they ducked into the forest proper as tall tree-like organisms rose up to dapple the lavender sky. Dr. Rey led the way deftly, only softly brushing against the foliage but barely making any noise. Kiana recognized the careful steps of another who had spent his fair share of time in heavy bush.

He motioned her even lower as they slowed to a crawl. The foliage opened ahead of them and they could see down a steep embankment and out over a bend in the river before it disappeared into the swallowing jungle a couple hundred meters downstream. Dr. Rey pressed his finger to his lips again and pointed to the far bank. Kiana held her breath as she lay prone in the warm soil, eyes scouring the tumult of greenery that was the far bank. Then suddenly, movement.

At first just a shift here, and a flash there, but her keen eyes knew all too well how to peer through seemingly impenetrable leaf cover. Something walked over there, something large. Adrenaline coursed through her body, yet she remained still as a stuck stone, so all her senses opened up completely. Her fingers could feel every grit of the soft soil beneath her, her nose could register a thousand alien smells on the gentle evening breeze, her ears filled with the orchestra of alien life that sounded all around them till it felt like she could have heard a footstep half a mile away, her eyes dilated to saucers and the evening light grew brighter and brighter.

Then, more movement. A flurry burst forth from the far bank in a cacophony. Half a dozen pale pink creatures took flight from their hiding spots and flapped wildly through the open air trilling wildly. Kiana stayed stone still, only her fingers dug deeper into the dirt. That was not what her eyes had been following. The forest still shifted and scraped and shivered. In one lumbering movement the creature slid free of the forest and out onto the rocky bank of the river.

From this far it looked long and low, but that was a trick of the distance, the creature was hulking, massive. Likely almost four meters from end to end, it walked remarkably lightly on six legs, barely shifting any stones beneath its great weight. At its front a square head stuck forth that seemed fixated on the ground before it. Dr. Rey grasped her hand and they looked at each other, eyes wide with wild excitement. They knew there was a good chance of large animal life on the planet, but the first landing parties hadn’t made any direct observations, so they could only guess what it would look like. It seemed the expedition was bound for unbelievable discovery if this is how lucky they got on the first night.

The creature slid out across the wide bank towards a deep channel of the water, still brilliant and blue even in the failing light. Its hide had seemed a mottled green when she first saw it, but now it looked to be almost a pearly gray.

“Chromatophores,” Dr. Rey whispered reverently.

Kiana didn’t understand the word but took his meaning as the creature approached the water and its skin shifted again to take on the glacial blue of the water. Once the creature was up to its bulk in the water it arched its back and pulled its forelegs from the stream and craned its neck high into the air. The animal looked natural with four rear legs sitting in the stream and front limbs free in the air; Kiana even noticed what looked like fairly mobile digits at the ends of the forelimbs. The head, which looked so square earlier, now showed dual functionality. A wide, square set of dark eyes peered forth into the forest surrounding Kiana and Dr. Rey, while on all six legs the creature could have easily found open paths through the jungle for its great mass, but now that head could rotate freely providing a clear view from a high vantage.

The creature scanned the forest around, silently drinking in the evening light with its so-alien eyes. Then it turned its gaze towards them and the world froze around Kiana. The chorus of life fell away, the feeling of the humus beneath her chest drifted into a barely noticeable pressure. The great, dark eyes of this magnificent, beautiful, terrible creature drew her in and in as it looked directly at their hiding spot in the foliage. This was a creature made for this land, and more than that, it was a creature wise of the land. In the creature’s eyes she could see generations of wisdom for living in this wild place, and she thought for a fleeting moment maybe it could see something similar in her eyes. But it was getting rather dark, and their hide was better than that, the creature’s gaze slid around the rest of the river and then it let out a long, haunting bugle that echoed down the river.

The far bank once again began to shift and shake as four more creatures stepped forth, forelegs rising to stretch in the evening air once they cleared the bush. They slid whisper quiet across the gravelly bank and the troop slowly made their way down the winding, braided stream, wading where they could, swimming seamlessly where they needed. They called deeply to one another in a gentle evening song that filled the forest with a low, warm hum.

Kiana and Dr. Rey stayed frozen in their spot, hands clutched fiercely together as if lessening their grip would dispel the apparition before them. But the creatures went their own way, according to their own reasons, and before they knew it the troop disappeared into the trees off where the river bent beneath the cover of the canopy once more.

Finally Dr. Rey let out a great, reverent sigh. A sigh that contained all the hopes and dreams of a man who gave up his whole life, and had his investment returned a thousand fold.
“I believe we may have come to the right place Kiana,” he finally whispered, tears sparkling in his light eyes.

“Indeed Doctor,” she agreed, “should we go tell the others?”

He squeezed her hand a little tighter. “Maybe for tonight we just keep this between us. Dr. Marwa would be upset we didn’t gather any evidence, and I wouldn’t want to worry the Lieutenant and Mr. Yu unnecessarily.”

She smiled back, “Of course, afterall I’m sure there will be plenty more to see in the days to come.”

They walked back in companionable silence as the jungle sang them its sweet evening song. Overhead great clouds were rolling in from the ocean, in this world missing any reddish sunset hue, instead they stacked high in the changing, fading light like great lavender confections. As they approached camp, alien traces of teal lightning began to course through the interior of the thunderheads.

The group was still gathered around the comms equipment as they approached.

“Where’d you get off to go?” Lt. Sterns demanded.

“I spotted some interesting flying fauna, little, pink, flighted creatures.” Dr. Rey volunteered, “Miss Hano was gracious enough to come and help me try to get a better look at them, but alas they slipped away.”

Lt. Sterns gave Kiana a sharp look, reprimand for leaving her established perimeter.

Dr. Marwa was somewhat more enthused. “You saw large fauna?!” she burst forth “And flying no less?! Where? Did you get any video?”

Dr. Rey took her by the shoulders and led her away to satiate her curiosity for the evening, so he and Kiana could savor their transcendent sighting just the two of them for one night.

“What’s the latest with the comms?” Kiana asked, hoping to shift attention from herself.

“Best fabrication systems known to mankind can’t make a fucking radio is what.” Winnie Yu spat.

Kiana lifted an inquisitive eyebrow to the Lieutenant.

“We knew this was a possibility.” She brushed off the complaint. “Atmospheric scattering in this new air is worse than we’d expected, and the storm rolling in certainly isn’t helping anything. We’ve established enough to let the Fortune know we’re down safe, but we haven’t received a reply, and its orbit just took it out of comms range for the next couple of hours.”

“So what do we do?”

“No change of plans for now, though this storm looks like it means business.” Sterns nodded over Kiana’s shoulder where the clouds now towered high into the evening sky coursing with silent, teal light. “We’ll reassess in the morning, but we don’t really need to be in direct contact for any stage of this mission. Come morning we’ll dispatch our lander to the extraction point and begin making our way down river.”

“Glad to hear it.” Kiana nodded, and stepped lightly through the soft grass to her tent as the first fat, warm drops of rain began to tumble their lazy way down from the clouds above.

Tucked safely into her bedroll, under a well-pitched tent, nestled into warm earth, Kian beamed the smile of the truly blessed. The rains quickened, tapping against the roof of her tent, sending forth a new chorus of alien smells from the moistening soils. She pulled on a sleeping oxygen mask, saddened she wouldn’t be able to breathe the free air all night long. Maybe someday they’d figure out a medication to eliminate the need for such cumbersome accouterments, a pill to make this place truly home. For now though, Kiana listened to the rains, as a residual glow of ecstasy coursed along her nerves, and she drifted off into the all-consuming sleep of one tucked safely away from the storm.

Sunrise came in a pale aquamarine. Kiana pulled off her mask and slipped silently out of her tent into the predawn light as the rest of the camp still slept. Wandering down to the river it became clear that while the worst of the rain had passed overnight the cloudcover certainly hadn’t lifted. The sky was an undulating gray-green sheet, waving in a great ceiling till it met the impenetrable curtain of the crater rim. The world felt so contained in that morning silence, not a breath of wind, no noise from the jungle yet, just the hushed whisper of the river running over the stones. Cresting the small rise before the river she was greeted with a sight right out of her home. The evening rains had created dozens of crystal white water falls in every steep little ravine all around the canyon rim. The rains collected unseen up in the high peaks and then plummeted back down in spectacular fashion only moments later lacing the green curtain with tendrils of white. It was a sight Kiana had seen plenty of on visits to Kauai and Oahu, and it brought a smile to her lips every time.

The curtain of the crater rim wasn’t far from their location though, and all that water was headed to the same place. The braided river before Kiana now coursed with considerably more energy than the previous evening, trickling side channels from earlier now ran with easily enough vigor to pull her out into the main current, and for the first time she noticed just how high the high water mark was. During floods at that level, this would be no peaceful braided stream, but a torrenting menace tearing away everything in its path. Even at the current flow Kiana was careful where she put her feet as she squatted down to splash some water up onto her face.

Long, silent moments passed as the morning grew gradually brighter, shifting from pale moss, to the clear blue of full daylight albeit obscured by the heavy layer of clouds that didn’t seem to be going anywhere fast, trapped as they were by the crater rim. Kiana sat on the smooth stones of the bank and truly considered the flora around her for the first time. The trees properly towered, some thirty meters tall at their upper branches, but the closer Kiana looked the less treelike they seemed. Each had a smooth gray trunk segmented into a stack of cylinders almost like bamboo, except at the joints a spray of new branches would spring out each with their own cylindrical sections and branching offshoots. On the largest specimens this could continue five or six times until one massive trunk would fan out to cover ten meters in any direction. Those were the exception though. Much of the foliage was more compact, and much more dense. They all shared the same structure though, cylinders with leaves or limbs fanning out from the joints. As she thought about it, it seemed rather unlikely that these would be classified as true trees for a multitude of reasons, more likely they’d be named some kind of grass, if they weren’t given a wholly alien taxonomy that was.

Using her well-trained eyes Kiana spotted around from her riverside vantage for any other useful things in the dense bush. After a minute she spotted what appeared to be fruiting bodies hanging high in a tree on the other side of the river. Looking closer she found more hanging on a bush at the far river’s edge. Her survivalist’s mind knew nothing else in these forests presented so much opportunity, nor so much danger. It wouldn’t be too surprising for convergent evolution to have pushed these plants into producing something that would help them spread their offspring with the help of local animals, but just as on Earth many species were rather picky about just who helped carry off the next generation. All something for further careful research as they made their way down river.

For now the rain picked up a bit and even with just a little extra jolt the river coursed even higher. Belly grumbling, Kiana retreated back to the camp to discuss the best course of action with the team, and find something to eat that didn’t require days worth of testing to even consider chewing. She was both pleased and dismayed by what she found at camp. Dr. Rey was humming happily away in the morning drizzle bent over the camp kitchen preparing a hot breakfast. Idly, Kiana wondered how easily they might convince some coffee plants to take root here, the weather certainly seemed amenable enough. On the other hand, Lt. Sterns was crouched by the comms unit swearing softly into the mouthpiece as she struggled to make a connection.

“Well that all but settles it then,” she spat. “Damn clouds are scattering our best bands of radio contact. Minimal contact as the storm rolled in is gone completely now that the clouds have socked in,” she hung up the headset with visible frustration. “The Fortune is almost directly overhead now and we can’t get a peep. Our best shot at contacting the ship will be getting to clearer skies further down the mountain.”

Looking downhill, Kiana harbored more than a few doubts about this plan. Where yesterday their vantage point gave a clear and expansive view all the way to the ocean, this morning there were only shifting mists sliding up and down the winding ridges below them. For all she knew the cloudbank backed up all the way to the bay and beyond. Or it may break up as soon as they descended a few hundred meters, the Lieutenant was probably right that their best shot was to carry on.

Dr. Marwa and Winnie Yu arose shortly and they all shared a companionable breakfast in the light morning rain. Once their gear was packed and ready Lt. Sterns gathered them all together again.

“Alright, so you all know the plan. We dispatch our lander to the mouth of the river and make our way down to it over the next three days. This crater is large, but still that’s only twenty clicks of river to cover each day so we should have plenty of time for side exploration, although we won’t be leaving the river valley.” She gestured with a thumb over her shoulder at the comms unit, now looking particularly useless dripping wet from the rain. “Comms can’t regain contact with the other parties nor the Fortune, and as I said our best chance of doing so will be to lose some elevation and hopefully get free of these clouds. That said, the atmospheric scattering means we can’t communicate reliably with our lander either. So if we’re going downriver we will need to commit this morning and dispatch the lander ahead of us in case the weather doesn’t break, and there aren’t any eligible midway landing points so if we send the lander off we will be committing to the whole trip.” She paused and looked around the group. “Now, I know I’m eager to get out there and don’t have any issues sending off the lander, but before committing us all I wanted to put it to a vote.”

Dr. Rey gave Kiana a knowing glance, but held his tongue not wanting to create unnecessary fear of the gentle giants they saw the evening before, and nodded his assent.

“I’m certainly eager,” Kiana offered. “I do feel compelled to share though, I was down at the river this morning and the river has risen considerably since we saw it yesterday and conditions may have changed since they were able to scout our run from the ship.”

Lt. Sterns nodded, grateful to have some actual active discussion to attend to. “I saw that as well Kiana, honestly though I think it’s more of an asset than a liability. Our boat runs an incredibly shallow draft, but with water levels like we had last night it would’ve been a pretty bumpy ride. More water is likely good for our journey if anything.”

“I never let a little rain ruin a good expedition.” Dr. Marwa stumbled out in her halting accent, although her beaming smile indicated she’d heard the turn of phrase doing fieldwork in the past.

All eyes turned to Winnie who took a long hit off his inhaler, eyes still watering from the ammonia being pulled down by the rain. “Well as miserable as this is, it seems to me there’s a fair chance this is actually good weather for this place. If we turn back now they’ll just send me back in a few weeks and then it could be pouring.” He puffed another forced breath. “Let’s get this done with.”

With that the crew sprang into action as the rains quickened a little more. Bags were sealed up with their personal provisions, spare equipment was loaded on the lander and the boat was brought out. In a great roar the lander lifted off into the low cloud bank above and disappeared from sight just moments before disappearing from hearing as well. They stood on their high, bare knob surrounded on all sides by creeping mists with the only path forward carved by the river.

Fortunately their boat was a marvel of engineering that seemed much more at home on this new world than their comms equipment did. By the side of a river channel Sterns activated the systems and it sprung to life unfolding itself like a blooming flower. Electric motors inflated the long, tan tubes that came to a sharp point on the prow, and would later power the jet motor that allowed the craft to draw such fantastically low amounts of water. Fifteen feet from end to end with room in the tubes for their science and comms equipment there was plenty of room for their small party. She even had the courtesy of providing a sun and rain shade for her rear seats, though Kiana hoped to sit up front and enjoy the feeling of the rain and the spray of the river. Winnie Yu however promptly sat himself with his booted feet in one of the driest seats at the stern.

Sitting on the river bank, unfolded and powered up, the boat looked ready, eager even, to carry them off on their adventure. Kiana was eager to join it. She made to vault over the front tube when a scold caught her mid-jump.

“Kiana!” Lt. Sterns frowned, “waltzing about barefoot and no protective equipment may have been fine in Hawaii, and I’m inclined to let you take your chances once we’ve made camp, but out on the river we need all hands available. Boots and PFD please.”

Chastened and more than a little embarrassed, she slipped an inflatable life preserver over her head and reluctantly laced up her light boots. With that, Sterns gave the raft a final push and they were off, out in the brilliant sapphire water and picking up speed.

Kiana’s heart raced as they quickly passed away from their first camp, sailed smoothly around the river bend that she and Dr. Rey had seen the previous evening, and carried off to parts truly unknown. With the river at this flow Sterns didn’t need to do much to pilot the craft, only the occasional course correction to steer them into the most promising looking channels. The river braided back and forth, twisting in and out on itself, always spreading across the same wide, gray, gravelly bed. Beyond though, the scenery only became more breathtaking. Before long the clouds swallowed up the high mountains of the crater rim, but it mattered little because the valley they traveled in tightened in on itself. Gradually, the banks rose up like two sheer walls of greenery, above the undulating ridges on either side was only gray mist and the mysterious loomings of even higher walls in their tightening canyon. Kiana realized just how much of an anomaly their landing site had been, where the low hill allowed them to walk easily down to the river. For much of its path the river wound between these precipitous curtains of green.

Each bend unveiled a new mystery and Kiana rode into it headfirst, savoring every drop of rain, every runnel of river, every fold in the valley walls that plumbed back into the dizzying, dense heart of the forest. Here the river channeled all its energy into the wall of a sharp corner for so long that the plants dangled out above them from a towering overhang above them a dozen meters overhead, its underbelly revealing they smooth gray stone that hid beneath the foliage. There a little rivulet ran down from a hanging canyon above them in a cascade of white, Kiana craned her neck to follow the little stream back as far as she could see before their lazy pace inevitably pulled her away. When more of the pink, flighted creatures broke from the bank in a flurry Dr. Marwa burst out in an excited string of her native Swahili and nearly fell out of the boat. They all laughed as Dr. Rey caught her by the shirt and pulled her back in.

Kiana floated upon the cloud that was their boat as they meandered around the bends, and even the leisurely pace of the river felt far too fast for how much she wanted to drink in the nature. As the day progressed, more life awoke and the chorus of the jungle once more joined the rushing of the river, and once more Kiana’s heart sang in harmony with it all.

Eventually the rushing blue ran around a wider bend where the wall of the now nearly sheer canyon reached back into the jungle with an open floodplain. It was the first glimpse of open terrain they’d seen all day, so Sterns upped the throttle and ran them up onto the bank to stop for lunch. Just a meter or so above the rushing waters, the little nook was tucked away, protected on all sides, but it pushed back into a little gulch that folded into the more dominant wall behind. Soft grass covered the plain with a delicate fuzz and Kiana hopped off, sad that her toes didn’t dig into the friendly soil.

Lieutenant Sterns looked around the little shelf and nodded, apparently satisfied that they were sufficiently protected by the rising valley walls around them. Winnie Yu, grabbed the comms pack and immediately sought shelter under a clutch of trees by the valley wall to try and coax the systems into working. Kiana wasn’t too optimistic about his chances, if anything the cloud level had lowered as they’d descended and the canyon walls had certainly tightened, mists whipped past the crests of their little enclave. She instead walked a slow circle around the clearing looking for likely test subjects.

The local plants did seem to yield fruits of a sort now that she was really looking. In a world of green any other hues tended to stick out even if they were small. One set of low bushes yielded a clutch of orange berries, a small shaggy tree provided a couple oblong fruits that faded from pale green to dark red, a taller tree held what looked like coconuts from afar but turned out to be smooth and purple, flesh barely conceding when she dug into it with her knife. All of it went into the sampler, and then dabbed onto her skin. Results had come back so neutral the night before, and the oblong fruits looked so appealing she was very nearly ready to try dabbing it inside of her lips just to advance the study. She was pondering just how fast she could confidently eat the food of this new world when the doctors interrupted her pondering.

“Does it remind you of home Kiana?” Dr. Rey asked, “It feels just like the Catlins to me, I almost can’t believe it.”

“Just like home doctor, this fruit seems so familiar I can almost taste it,” she laughed at herself “But I suppose you wouldn’t even call it fruit.”

Dr. Rey smiled, “Technically, certainly not. But we get to reinvent the meanings of our own words here, if fruit serves, I say let it serve.”

“Do you think we were chosen for this landing party because we have experience in places like this? You studied the Catlins for years right? One of the few rainforests off the islands that maintained its size.”

Dr. Marwa nodded at this and smiled. “My home, near Ngorongoro,” she started, searching for her words and choosing them carefully, her sharp mind not held back by the unfamiliar language she traded in, “Much like this, volcanic, steep, jungle.” She paused and frowned. “More animals though.”

Rey laughed and encouraged her in his friendly Kiwi timbre, “Ever the zoologist Dr. Marwa, look at all the life around you!” He ran his hand through the leaves of a nearby bush. “But don’t worry my friend, we’ll find some fauna for you yet.” Turning to Kiana, he asked. “We were wondering if you’d help guide a little expedition.”

“Of course!” she chipped, happy to get back into her element. “Where to?”

“Not far, just up this little gulch a bit to help me gather some samples.” He smiled. “Oh, and if you could flush some more of those pink flying creatures, Dr. Marwa would be much obliged.”

Kiana led their little troop off, beneath the tree cover that descended the valley walls. Deft steps laced along the easiest paths, natural as anything had ever been to her. She shimmied up trees to gather leaves, trunk samples, more fruit, even a few beetle-looking creatures for Dr. Marwa who was enamored. Her limbs worked the happy rhythm of someone living their calling.

Then, the hair stood up on the back of her neck. A heavy weight had shifted in the forest nearby, and she couldn’t tell where. Craning their necks to get a view down to the field, they watched in awe as another creature like those from the previous evening stepped forth from the jungle at the bottom of a seemingly unscalable wall. Yet clearly it was scalable, by this massive creature that by rights should have ripped the trees straight from the rock. These beings were more made for this place than they could ever know.

Kiana grabbed the doctors and dove for better cover. If anything this one was larger, larger and prouder. It walked across the field on its hind four legs; not bothering to camouflage with the terrain, it kept a distinctive blue streak down its back.

From their hiding spot, they could see where Lieutenant Sterns had ducked for cover along the edge of the field. She trained her rifle on the creature, but thankfully held her fire. Aside from being large and imposing and surprising, it had done little to actually threaten them.

Then Winnie Yu stumbled forth from the treeline. Carrying the comms pack he froze stick still in the misty rain. In response the creature looked him square on, and let out a great grunt. Far from the bugles of the previous night, this sound hit like a foghorn, low and unrelenting. Yu dropped the pack and dove for the boat, what he was hoping to find Kiana could only imagine.

She heard a snicker next to her. Dr. Rey looked up with his sparkling, mischievous eyes. The laugh was contagious, and soon Kiana found herself struggling to keep in her giggles.

The creature seemingly cared very little for their incursion. It walked across the field, ignoring Winnie where he hid in the boat, and stepped out into the river. Then came something unexpected, the creature reared up once more as it entered the deep water. It walked on only its hindmost legs, allowing it to wade easily across the coursing river. Then as quickly as it came, the creature disappeared once more into the jungle across the water.

They scurried back to the boat and pulled Winnie Yu out, now struggling to regain his dignity after running from a creature who did little more than let out a grunt.

“What was that thing?” Yu whispered, as though concerned he may draw it back.

“Large herbivore of some kind.” Dr. Marwa offered.

“How do you know that?” Sterns demanded, concerned her secure area had been so easily breached.

“Flat teeth. Short claws.” The dark zoologist shrugged, as if nothing could be more obvious.

“I’m inclined to agree.” Dr. Rey added. “Kiana and I saw a troop of them last night, traveling quite companionably. I’ll leave the classification to our good zoologist, but it seems unlikely that primarily carnivorous creatures would travel in family groups like that, they seemed to be headed by a matriarch…or patriarch, again I leave the classification to Dr. Marwa.”

“You saw others?!” Sterns, Marwa, and Yu demanded in unison, equal parts angry, annoyed, and frustrated.

“We didn’t want to spoil the fun of discovery for you all.” The botanist’s soft southland drawl, and disarming smile seemed to stymie further pressing.

“What should we call them?” Dr. Marwa wondered, shifting the subject.

“Well I leave that to the first one of us to spot them.” Rey turned to Kiana. “You’re our bushman, you certainly have sharper eyes than me. I saw some rustling and pulled you over, but you are the first human to set eyes upon those magnificent creatures. What will you call them?”

Kiana thought for a long moment, remembering the gentle way they moved through their terrain, how every movement seemed built for this place, how they ruled these lands and humans would only ever be visitors. “Ali’i” she offered, “chiefs of the jungle.”

They sat down for a lunch by the boat. Sterns, Yu and Marwa all looked around incessantly for their own reasons, jumping at every shift in the foliage that surrounded their gully. Dr. Rey and Kiana simply sat in glowing silence, savoring the feel of the warm misty rain on their skin, and the hum of life all around them. Before long though, it became clear that the river wasn’t done rising. The boat shifted as the water came up, and Lt. Sterns rallied them to attention.

“Best to get back on the water before we get flooded out here,” she decreed, “According to our map we have a couple clicks of tight canyon left to navigate before things open up and we have a hope of finding a camp for the night.”

Just like that they were back out once more, drifting, floating, flying over the blue, through the green. The rain came harder now, no longer just a lazy mist, but proper fat, warm drops. With it the river raised higher, their meandering pace from the morning was just a memory as they picked up speed down the river. The little twisting gullies that carved back into the canyon walls now all spat forth frothing creeks of their own.

“Lieutenant,” Kiana asked hesitantly, “Remind me again about our level of concern with regard to flooding.”

The seasoned soldier, remained unflappable even as Winnie Yu’s eyes widened in his usually serene face. “Negligible in this area per all geological markers. These little gullies don’t drain enough area to create a proper flash, and the rim of the canyon limits how far away we need to be concerned about rainfall.” She jetted the motor to weave between a couple stuck trees that protruded from the rushing water. “That said, we can certainly expect our pace to increase if the rain keeps up like this.”

Kiana tried to keep faith in the team of researchers up on the Fortune, pairing what they saw through their telescopes with geologic records from Earth. She found it rather difficult as the canyon continued to tighten, and water continued to rush in. Any braiding of the stream was now fully submerged; the water was just opalescent blue from wall to wall, save where it was whipped up to whitecaps by submerged obstacles.

Their little boat, fortunately, was built for just such conditions. The waters rose and raged around them, turning from placid bends, to playful riffles, to rolling rapids. Sterns deftly dodged them this way and that, following the deep channels, guiding them by massive stones that had tumbled down from the heights above in ages past. Kiana took heart in knowing, that no matter how much they didn’t know about the rapids of the river, they could at least be confident they wouldn’t happen across any unexpected waterfalls. That was simply a matter of altitude change over distance. Such calculations seemed to be panning out as the river quieted once more despite the added water moving through it. It became a great placid ribbon, winding back and forth through the canyon walls. Then it became a lake, wide and straight for half a kilometer before it turned sharply.

They rode in silence, enjoying the respite from the rushing waters, and Kiana savored once more the hum of jungle life that filled the canyon around them. But beneath the hum, another sound appeared. At first just a gentle bass to the music that surrounded them, but as it grew more notes were added, until it was a ponderous roar.

Rounding the bend at the end of the lake the roaring mouth came into view. Inside the turn of the river a great ridge had given way in the recent rains creating a great dam across much of the river. The electric waters backed up and up, creating the lake they had just crossed, before tumbling through a narrow channel in the rocks and onward in their journey back to the sea.

Lt. Sterns upped the throttle and took them toward the far wall as the current gained irresistible momentum. “Kiana! Grab a hold of something,” she bellowed over the roar “We’ll need to tie up and scout this!”

Standing at the front of the boat, Kiana reached out with the bowline as they approached the wall, wrapping it quickly around a tree that hung out over the water. The current quickly pulled the stern downstream and snapped the line tight. They held, even as the line groaned, Kiana reached out with another line to try and secure a redundant anchor. But in a blink the tree gave way. They watched in horror as it pulled free from whatever feeble support its roots had held it in place, and with it came a mountain of foliage and dirt. Fronds, branches, and wet alien earth fell into the boat and the tree vanished into the water as the bowline snapped free, sending them tail-first into the torrent.

“Stay low!” Sterns shouted, roaring the engine of the boat to match the river, desperately trying to regain control.

They rolled over the edge of the rapid and into a frothing, angry sluice of white. The boat bounced sharply off several protruding rocks, sending Marwa and Yu face first onto the floor of the raft. Miraculously, Sterns regained control, turning them back forward to steer them into the deepest channels even as water poured over the tubes, turning their vessel into a mess of grey mud.

A huge boulder stuck out stubborn and uncaring in the middle of the mayhem, sending great chutes of water off its unflinching shoulders. Sterns in a split second, decided to take the left channel. She guessed wrong. The channel quickly slammed them back against the boulder, before rolling over the front of a huge wave. The boat reared up high, pitching inexorably to the right.

“Get to the highs–” Sterns screamed, but it was too late, the boat flipped and Kiana met the raging, furious water before she could even grab a breath.

On the backside of the great boulder the rushing waters sucked in and down in a furious undertow, and Kiana was pushed down and down and down before she could so much as reach out. The white water shifted from bright to nearly black in a second and she lost all sense of up or down. There was only inescapable pressure. Pressure and darkness.

Growing up on the islands Kiana had learned her way around an undertow, how to avoid them, how to get out of them, how to outlast them even if you didn’t have breath. You simply held your calm, the ocean was ever changing, don’t panic, take your opportunity for escape. But this was no ocean, no set was coming to an end, no respite was coming for her. As these thoughts worked their way through her mind panic, deadly panic came to her, coursing through her veins, adrenaline drinking up her already insufficient oxygen. Her thoughts began to fail then, tumbling in the dark pressure, bones jarring as they hit rock, ligaments tearing as the water thrashed her in all directions. With her last thought she reached up desperately for the PFD around her neck that by rights should have already self-inflated. Her numb, battered fingers fumbled in the tumbling water that pinned her to the cold river bottom. The manual-inflation pull danced between her fingers, as panic finally used up her last bit of air, and the darkness closed in around her.

— -

The sky was searing white.

The shock of the brightness and pain only made Kiana open her eyes further which made it worse, and in turn made her gasp a deep breath that brought the burning pain down her throat and into her lungs. She coughed, she choked, she thrashed about, but it did little, the river still carried her as it would despite her protestations.

Then a thought finally made its way through her crashing panic. Wait, I’m breathing.

It was true. Sure, each breath burned with raw ammonia but at least it was a breath, there was enough oxygen in the mix to keep her going. That would have to be enough for now. With great effort Kiana pried her eyes open once more to let in the searing whiteness, but now she was ready. Above, the clouds had lifted considerably and now were a flat white sky high above, burning brightly in the afternoon light. Below, the green curtains of the canyon reached up and swirled around her. She was caught in an eddy. Fortunately her PFD had finally deployed, either just as she’d lost consciousness or right after, and pulled her out of the torrent where she’d been trapped. She tried to sigh in relief, but that only let in more burning and set her to violently coughing once more.

Peering through bleary, stinging eyes, Kiana looked around and began to kick her way to shore. A little beach of grey pebbles rose up above an elbow in the river where she’d eddied out. Coughing, kicking, fighting, Kiana pulled herself free of the cyanic water and collapsed into the round pebbles.

Each breath was worse than the last though; she couldn’t lie there. Without the medication from her inhaler the ammonia in her eyes and nose and throat only built and built. She reached for her belt where her inhalers were tucked into a pouch and her panic returned. The whipping waters had ripped them all free, there was no respite from the onslaught of the atmosphere. Panic made her breathe harder, which made it worse and worse as her heart rate began to climb.

Kiana looked wildly around through eyes filled with tears. She couldn’t see much but she could tell she was alone on this stretch of river. No boat. No companions. No supplies. Adrenaline coursed through her exhausted veins once more and set her to shaking.

But wait, there was something. Something drifting out in the eddy, a blotch of green not quite the right shade for this world twirled in the circling waters. On trembling legs Kiana stumbled back out into the river. It was a pack, drenched but still zipped tight. Shaking fingers barely able to grasp the straps she hauled it ashore. It was Dr. Rey’s. She tore into it with the last of her wits seeking any relief from the pain that was subsuming her breath by breath. No inhalers, they all had been instructed to keep those on their belts, but there was a sleeping respirator tucked into the bedroll.

She slipped the mask over her face and gulped in a clean breath of air. Relief was reluctant to come. Kiana fell back into the gravel, greedily gulping in the more suitable atmosphere. Breath by breath the burning slowly faded, above the searing sea of white resolved into a high ceiling of swirling clouds. Tears poured out of her eyes, down her cheeks, and rolled in fat droplets onto the stones under her head. In. Out. In. She fought against her shaking, against her body’s instinct to hyperventilate, against every panicked response that ran through her.

Eventually the burning ebbed as the daylight began to shift, indicating the swift arrival of night. Nerves finally at rest, Kiana sat up to take stock of her situation. She’d surely been on the bank for over an hour at that point, and in the river for who knows how long before that. No one had come by. So either they were stuck upstream, or had all been washed past her little crook in the river. Looking up and down stream the water still ran high, wall to wall, through the canyon, either option seemed plausible.

In Rey’s pack she took stock of the few supplies on which her life now depended. The sleeping mask could purify enough air to let her breathe for a week-straight if needed. If I need more than that I’m probably done for anyhow, she thought. There was the bedroll, now soaked through, but still some protection should the weather turn again, no tent though, those were all stored in the boat. There, of course, was a plethora of sample containers of all shapes and sizes, some help those will be. The packets of spare food had soaked through and broken open, now coated the inside of the pack’s main pocket. As she continued to work her way through she ate what morsels she could salvage to grab every available calorie while she could. Along the way she found a knife, now we’re talking, several meters of paracord, a small field first aid kit, a lantern, a cookstove. And there, buried at the bottom, the one tool that might actually save her, a flare gun with a couple charges. But that was it, her heart sank. No GPS, no comms, no tab, nothing beyond the gun had any chance of letting anyone know she was still alive.

Loading the gun with weary fingers, she raised it and shot the brilliant charge into the sky. It arced up lazily, clearing the tops of the canyon walls before exploding in a wide flash just as the cloud ceiling above gave way for the first time all day. Through the shifting hole Kiana could see the telltale colors of evening.

She built a little cairn in the gravel, and placed the lantern on top of it as a beacon should anyone come by in the evening. For now though, Kiana was in no shape to look for anyone. Every fiber of her being burned with exhaustion. If she went out into the coursing river all she’d do is be swept away and lose the few supplies keeping her alive. So she limped up to the treeline to find a sheltered spot to weather the night.

Above, the clouds dissipated bit by bit, letting in more of the twilight sky and eventually the first stars as their light fought its way through the atmosphere. Lounging on the sopping bedroll, scrounging what drenched food she could from the pack, not one thought made its way along Kiana’s fried neurons. Until the moons came out.

Darkness fell and the clouds finally peeled away as the moons began to rise. She’d known they existed, but the rains came too early for them to make an appearance the previous evening. Sixteen moons in all, several were too small to see in all but the most ideal conditions, tonight five of them climbed over the rim of the canyon as night took hold, casting a meager light back onto Kiana’s refuge. In truth, they all danced an endlessly complicated series of orbits in and around each other, but from her spot all Kiana could see was a stately line of glowing white stones chasing one another up into the night sky. How could I have ever thought this place like home? She wondered as she drifted off into a restless sleep.

Dawn arrived an eternity and an instant later. On one side, her battered body called out for sleep with every fiber of her being. On the other, her wary subconscious mind would not permit even a momentary lapse of attention. In the end, she drifted through the starry evening in some liminal space between waking and dreaming, for now, that would have to do.

The light broke first deep purple, then lilac, then slowly faded to the aquamarine blue of day. The only clouds above sat much higher, in thin wisps that coursed through the currents of the upper atmosphere. Grudgingly, Kiana forced herself to leave her little nook and consider her situation. The flare in the evening, and lantern through the night had failed to signal anyone, presuming they’re alive, the unwelcome thought barged in. She shuddered from head to toe, forcing the thought from her being, even if they’d all fallen out of the boat someone had to have survived, and given how she was pinned in the rapid and then floated downstream unconscious it seemed very unlikely they’d be above her.

She turned to face the river and shivered once again. Absent the rain, the water level had dropped considerably and it once again was showing the forms of its braided bed. The most sensible thing would be to put on her PFD and float down to try and find the rest of the crew. But her bones rejected the idea, just the thought was enough to set her lungs to burning and her heart thumping into her throat.

No river today, that’s for sure, she decided.

But that only left a couple bad options. She could wait, in a normal recovery situation that would be the smart thing to do. But out here on a nameless planet things were anything but normal. A proper rescue that could benefit from her staying still would be days away, and her companions may well be in need of her help. So she had to move, and that meant on foot.

Looking around, the prospect seemed daunting. Walls of greenery rose around her on all sides, and that was from her vantage point on the relatively clear river bank. Once she walked into the trees, orienteering would be nearly impossible. Still…that was the option at hand, so how best to approach it? Looking again with a calmer mind a few blessings revealed themselves. First, she’d floated clear of the tight neck of canyon where they’d met trouble, here the valley walls still climbed precipitously but they weren’t completely sheer. Second, from her bank a little depression wound back into the jungle and eventually up the valley wall to a tall ridge that seemed relatively devoid of high trees. A place to do some scouting. If she made it up that high she could easily follow the ridgeline down, keep sight of the river, and look out for the boat. And signal with the flares, this thought was considerably more welcome in her mind, and drove her to action. She only had two shots left with the gun, so wasting another one down here would be foolish, but having a plan of action at times was all one needed.

Stepping back beneath the trees, Kiana reentered her element. The ground steepened almost immediately but that was nothing she hadn’t encountered before, her feet step by step remembered their strength. She slipped easily through the riot of foliage, and once more the world began to seem like something she understood.

Life was everywhere. Filling every patch of ground, growing out of every protrusion, hanging on top of itself. Once more the forest came awake around her with its own song. As she climbed Kiana nearly forgot her troubles, entranced as she was by the strange plants, with too dark leaves that grew in ways that were different in a thousand subtle ways. She marveled at the creatures that crawled through the hanging gardens of this forest, all miniscule here and oddly not that odd. After all, how much more alien could a bug really be? Still, she gently let them crawl across her hand when they would and appreciated their colors and movements. She climbed past more bushes full of fruit, and they set her stomach to rumbling. That’s a way to make things worse, she thought, but still her instincts called out at the familiar site begging her to take a bite and fuel her body.

All the while though Kiana fought to breathe through the sleeping mask that was the only thing truly keeping her alive in this world that seemed too much like home for her own good. She laughed ruefully, thinking how she’d considered the inhalers an encumbrance. She’d been so free, only a puff every once and a while. Now every breath was a labor that echoed in her ears. Her view ahead was clear but around the fringes of the mask curving glass warped the world leaving her with only the claustrophobic tunnel of vision directly ahead.

Before long, she made the ridge and the world resolved around her. Through the thick growth she could see the winding river down below, and on the far side there was another, similarly braided and brilliantly blue. The ridge wound its way down to where the two streams presumably met in a confluence. Behind her, she could just make out the peaks of the crater rim as they reached into the late morning sky. She waited several minutes, looking, listening. The rivers wound, the jungle hummed, but there was no sign of her companions she could sense. She fired another flare into the clear blue above, it exploded brilliantly and would have been visible for miles around if anyone was in position to see it. She couldn’t stay perched up on the ridge, but she had to hope someone saw her signal and knew she was alive.

The star climbed overhead as she began the long slow journey down along the ridge. With the clouds gone overhead, the planet unleashed a heat that only the tropics could muster. Soon Kiana’s clothes were soaked through once again and the forest around her fell into a hypnotic stupor suppressed by the heat. Step by precarious step she worked her way down the ridge, rarely more than a few paces wide and flanked by precipitous drops on either side. One misstep now would almost surely be her doom. Slick roots coursed through the soil threatening to catch her feet and send her tumbling, while the faceplate of her sleeping mask grew foggier and foggier with her perspiration. Eventually she had no choice but to begin pulling the mask off periodically, deal with the burning in her eyes and throat, to wipe away some of the fog, lest she miss an errant root or unsecure rock.

Kiana had walked ridges like this a thousand times, this was her home, but rarely had anything felt so unnatural as the star took its toll and exhaustion piled on exhaustion. Every handhold, every step, every movement required exacting precision. But her vision blurred and the rasping of the mask’s filter echoed in her ears. Still, step-by-step she made her way along the ridge, keeping what eye she could down to the river in hopes of seeing some sign of salvation. Eventually even that hope died as the canyon tightened again and the river disappeared beneath the overhanging cliffs below. She could hear the torrent rushing even over the grating flow of her mask, and thanked her stars she hadn’t decided to brave the river.

Eventually she made her way to the top of a little rise that afforded a clear view for a good distance along the ridge. Here it widened and softened a bit and below her a little clear meadow held on improbably above the lush walls that dropped off around it. Kiana’s feet ached for nothing more than to sink into the soft soil while she rested in the shade of the surrounding trees. Just as she began to make her descent, movement caught her eye.

Out from the bush tumbled two small creatures. Not the pink flighted beings she’d seen earlier, no these were more like the ali’i but much smaller. Could the same species really be so different? Kiana wondered, remembering the imposing majesty of the ali’i they’d seen in the clearing. These were more the size of large puppies, but they shared the same six-limbed body structure as the larger creatures. As they playfully rolled out onto the grass another difference became apparent, they rolled onto their hind limbs and began to totter around upright. There were three of these little creatures all yipping pleasantly in the afternoon light.

Kiana was transfixed. Adrenaline coursed through her, amplifying all she saw and heard around her, and she silently slipped through the foliage down the slope to a good hide where she could observe these creatures. While if she had to put a word on it she would’ve called the ali’i from their first night a herd, the way these little creatures played and rolled and chattered they seemed much more like a pack. Down their backs each one kept a stripe of dark red, even though they seemed to share the color-shifting skin of their larger cousins. One of the little creatures was decidedly less sure on its hind legs and was bowled over by one of its siblings. When it tried to scurry away with only its forelegs aloft the others chittered in a manner that seemed distinctly derisive. Poor thing, Kiana thought, her mind compelled by empathy as her mind drew a thousand parallels to the creatures from Earth she knew so well, of which almost all were certainly incorrect. Then the foliage shook on the far side of the clearing and time stood still.

Stepping, sliding, slithering from the undergrowth emerged a larger beast. Mother, Kiana’s mind offered, as if the term had any bearing on these creatures. It stepped forth on all six limbs, sliding through the thick greenery, barely disturbing a branch, then in a sinuous, powerful motion it stood onto its back legs and strode across the clearing towards the pups, and Kiana.

She held her breath, certain that the rasping of the mask would give her away. Over the being’s head and down its back it held the same deep stripe of red as the pups, elsewhere gray hide hugged limbs of exquisite musculature. A pair of arms on each side ended in nimble digits that deftly lifted leaves toward its head where it subtly breathed in the scent, tracking. A thick tail brushed above the grass, balancing the creature’s weight, lending it the coiled grace of a striding gymnast. The head was rounder and more pronounced, pierced by a set of large, keen, black eyes. Back on Hawaii, part of what kept their forest protected was the fact that they could act as a final haven for the great jungle cats of the world, so Kiana was all too familiar with a predator in its home territory. That is what strode across the grass toward her now. Holding her breath felt insufficient, she was sure it would smell her, hear her heart thundering in her chest.

The black eyes flicked up from the pups and landed directly on Kiana’s hide. The world collapsed to nothing more than those perceptive wells of darkness. The hum of the forest faded completely away. The burning in Kiana’s chest as her lungs called for air mattered little. The star above and the earth below blurred into irrelevance, as Kiana peered into this creature’s eyes and found she saw more than just evolutionary fitness. She saw intelligence.

A moment or a minute later the creature averted its rapacious stare, and returned to its pups. It picked up the one that had trouble standing, and pulled it in close. To the others it let out a deep utterance somewhere between a purr and a yowl that seemed to shake the leaves even around Kiana meters away. It certainly pulled the other pups into line as they immediately settled down. Then they were gone. A few strides of the creature’s powerful, long legs and it was back to the meadow’s edge, a blink later and they all sank down onto all six limbs and slid silently back beneath the undergrowth.

Minutes passed after the rustling of the leaves had stilled and Kiana remained frozen, only allowing herself the barest whispers of breath, certain that any movement or sound would alert the creatures to her presence. Koa, warriors, her mind offered. These beasts contained little of the distinguished grace of the ali’i, but one glance could show you their deadly intent. Eventually the noise of the jungle spurred her to action, the forest now held something to properly fear but that didn’t mean she could remain in her hide forever. The sun was now heading decidedly for the horizon and she had hopes to not spend the night up on the high ridge. Ahead, it seemed, the ridge carried on to the confluence of the two streams on either side. A sensible place to make camp and try to find her companions.

The heat abated now as the star approached the tops of the western hills beyond her. At this elevation the ocean was just out of sight, but the lack of further peaks indicated that this maze of valleys did eventually end. She was free to move now, stepping lightly between the trees, but every so often a chill would crawl up her spine that stopped her in her tracks. Some part of her mind grew convinced she was being watched. She’d freeze and suddenly the rasping of her mask was the loudest racket she’d ever heard, certainly drawing every koa for miles around down upon her. They fascinated and terrified Kiana, and her mind began to call up their images in the patterns of the leaves in the dusky light. Standing dark and still, powerful arms hanging at their sides, stout digits gripping branches with a terrible force, dark eyes watching inescapably her every move.

The light was failing, and the rational part of Kiana’s mind knew these apparitions for what they were. Her best self knew these were beautiful creatures of the natural world meant to be admired. She knew that even the scant pack dynamics she’d seen indicated a remarkable intelligence that was certainly one of the greatest scientific discoveries in human history. But that was not the part of her mind in charge right now. Her primal mind drove her limbs. It saw the menacing patterns off in the leaves for what they were, hunters. And it fled.

Ahead on the ridge the thick foliage abated, she could see the last of daylight in a clearing. Panicked, Kiana rushed through the forest, leaves, branches whipping at her face, threatening to rip off the one thing actually keeping her alive. Her heart thundered, her blood rushed, her breath screamed in and out of the mask. And then she reached the light as the world gave out beneath her.

There were no trees here because there was no more land. The ridge fell away and Kiana fell with it, tumbling down the slope, screaming, beyond any semblance of control. Then the ground rushed up to meet her with ferocious speed and forced all the air from her lungs. Kiana rolled over, coughing, sputtering, gasping for air, and grasping her fingers into the dirt, looking for purchase, certain the ground would betray her once again.

But of course it wouldn’t, the ground meant her no ill will. It simply was what it was, and it was carved. Mind finally calming in the last rays of daylight, she stood up in awe of the scene around her. No natural force had carved away the ridge like this. It stepped down in decisive tiers. Overgrown in places with greenery in some places but largely around her clear tiers of gray rock descended in great steps down to a pool of brilliant water. It looked for all the world she was in a quarry. And beyond, beyond the lake but before the confluence of the rivers in the distance was something even stranger. Great rectangular heaps sat in radial rows around the lake, fanning out. They were covered with greenery in most places, but here and there gray stone poked through. Next to them they’d almost certainly look like just strange hills, but from up here there was no denying these forms were built.

Kiana traced around the shelf where she’d landed and began to make her way down to the pool, barely able to keep track of where she was going, unable to take her eyes off these curious structures. How could they have missed this from the ship? She wondered, certainly anything so clearly manufactured should have stood out in this organically carved landscape. But then the light began to shift and the obvious radiality she’d seen from above began to fade away. Before long the forms looked like little more than undulating hillets. Kiana remembered what she saw though, and curiosity drove her forward, former fear now just a fading memory.

Walking around the pool she washed off the sweat from the day before heading up a long, consistent slope that led to the strange mounds. A wide flat area ran from the slope between the first pair of mounds then on out to the meeting rivers beyond. It was as though a road had been carved from the quarry to some long forgotten support town. But that can’t be, can it? Her head swam as she approached the first structure. Its sloping sides were matted with twisting, dark greenery, but brushing it aside she could feel smooth condensed stone. Concrete. Her mind decided. But how?

She traced around the low structure feeling for any changes in its design, but plants and rain and time had worn it down to just a rounded block. Rounding the back though, an opening appeared. Dark and sharply square it reached into the mound and down into the earth below. Feeling more and more certain that these ancient barrows were of incredible importance Kiana went to peer down this carved shaft. But then movement in her blurred periphery froze her stock still.

The world collapsed around her once more as adrenaline flooded her veins. It had looked like one of the pups from earlier, scurrying hurriedly back into the undergrowth. Scurrying as though it had been called sharply back. Kiana became an animal once more. Her ears opened, taking in every last note of the evening hum that surrounded her. Her eyes grew, seeking every last photon of information they could discern. Again her respirator became the greatest encumbrance she could imagine, blurring her vision, rasping breath echoing off the hills that surrounded her. Step by silent step, she backed away from the structure and out onto the open road. Quickly and quietly as she could she drew the knife from its sheath and the flare gun from its pocket, all the while scanning, listening, sensing. Being hunted.

Then there it was, moving around the corner of the far structure towards the pond, a great koa, stepping low and powerfully on all its legs, hide a deep mottled green. It would have been all but invisible if it wasn’t coming inexorably towards her. Kiana squared up to the creature and then one, two more appeared. Similarly sliding silently across the darkening ground. A pack. They worked in formation cutting off Kiana’s hope of retreat, she was forced to back step by step blindly deeper into the maze of structures behind her. She raised the knife and flare gun in a false show of bravery.

“Hey!” she shouted, “Get back! I see you! Get back!”

The creatures turned their heads in curiosity, unaccustomed to the sound of humans, but they did not stop. Instead they looked at one another and issued a series of low clicking purrs, accompanied by a rapid flashing of colors along the sides of their heads and in unison fanned out further. Communicating. They rose onto their hind legs until they each towered over her, and their skin shifted back to show the same angry red stripe that ran over their head and down their backs. Sturdy digits gripped chunks of dark rock chipped away to vicious points. Tools. Dark eyes measured her up, rows to sharp teeth flashed in the evening light, and step by step they backed her along the street. Panic now coursed along Kiana’s limbs and her hands shook, giving away any game of her bluster, and her mind descended into a blind panic.

Then, a hoot. A sound so distinctly of old Earth that Kiana was sure she’d imagined it. Then another. Hooooot, hooooot. It drifted through the twilight air haunting the evening, a sound she’d heard a thousand times before, the pueo calling an end to the day. She turned towards the sound just in time to see a human face duck back into the shadows of one of the structures’ openings. But the creatures had heard as well, their heads had turned slightly at the strange sound, but they couldn’t have seen the face. Let’s hope that’s enough.

Kiana unleashed all the adrenaline coursing through her in one powerful leap as she darted away from the creatures and towards the opening she could only hope led to safety. The creatures broke formation and gave chase. By blind luck, Kiana had a step on them, and she ran like she never had before, certain that at any moment one of the creatures would reach up and take her feet out from under her and that would be it. She ran and ran and then in a final lunge dove into the darkness of the structure, turning in the air to blindly fire the flare behind her. The charge bounced off one of the creatures’ chest before exploding in a shower of sparks against a far wall. The creatures howled a bone chilling banshee cry that turned her veins to ice just before the back of her head met the ground behind her and darkness rushed in around her.

— -

“Oh good, you’re not dead yet,” a voice croaked.

Kiana awoke to a strange light. She gasped and sputtered, head splitting, instinctively she ripped off her mask only to be swiftly reminded that would only make matters worse. She fell back against a damp wall, heart thundering as she slipped the mask back on with shaking hands. Her trembling only worsened when she reached up to probe the wound at the back of her head, it was only then that she realized it had already been bound. Someone had treated her while she was knocked out.

“Not dead yet,” the voice croaked again, “now you get to wait for the reaper with us.” A rueful, cackling laugh descended into a fit of coughs.

On a tucked up ledge above Kiana, Winnie Yu laid in the pale green light of a pocket lantern, his clothes in tatters, his body shook as the fit rocked him. Kiana struggled to reconcile the pitiful sight before her with the aloof and distinguished businessman from the flight down to the surface. Her head splitting as it was, she couldn’t manage it.

“Mr. Yu?” she wondered, gasping as he rolled over to reveal his clothes weren’t the only things in tatters, “What happened?”

“Same as happened to you, I suppose,” he wheezed. “Damned fool Sterns lost control of the boat and sent us all swimming, only I went over a series of particularly unfriendly little falls on my way.” The wan light of the lantern illuminated a chest torn to strips of flesh.

“My god,” she whispered, reaching out, compelled to help this suffering man.

“Stop.” He barked. “Rey’s fumbling ministrations were enough agony for one day. We’ve been through the supplies you brought in that pack. There’s nothing more to be done for me. I knew this expedition was foolish from the outset, but I didn’t think it’d take my life.” Tears glistened at the corners of his eyes as he wheezed out the aching words.

“Oh, but I’m sure we can do something.” Even as the words came out she couldn’t believe them. This man’s chest was in tatters, they were stranded, holed up inside some cave or structure, and hunted by alien life considerably more hostile than anything they’d been prepared for.

“Spare me your lies Miss Hano.” Yu rolled away, back heaving in pain.

“Wait,” the thought finally made its way through Kiana’s cotton-filled mind. “You said Rey, is Doctor Rey with you as well?”

“Who do you think pulled you up? I can’t do more than tear a couple pieces of gauze.” Another wheezing cough shook him. “Follow the ramp up behind you. He’s keeping watch.”

Kiana laid a reassuring hand on the man’s shoulder as another fit worked through his body. After a time he seemed to calm, and then drift off to an uneasy sleep, and Kiana went to seek out Dr. Rey. Looking around the room it seemed as though he’d somehow pulled her into an upper chamber within the structure, and a circular plug filled a hole in the floor like some immovable manhole. Hopefully immovable enough to keep those creatures out, she thought. The ramp switch-backed through the stone of the structure, and she fumbled along in the blackness until she spilled out onto some sort of roof terrace under a spray of stars. Low walls protectively hemmed in by a ring of flat stone atop the edifice, out here once again, all was covered in ages of plant growth. On the far side sat Dr. Rey, stared up at the row of moons that climbed into the sky once more.

The botanist held a finger to his lips and waved her over. “Good evening Miss Hano,” he welcomed in a low voice as she joined him, “I hope I didn’t make too much of a mess of your head wrap.”

“Not at all Doctor, thank you very much for your help.” She tried to whisper back, but the mask made her words come out crackling and grating.

“Oh! Some small measure of good news,” he opened the pouch on his belt and handed Kiana a fresh inhaler.

She ripped the mask off without a second thought and sucked in a long draught. The relief came in a cool wave, first spreading through her lungs, then coursing along her adrenaline wrecked veins to soothe her throat, her mouth, her nose, her eyes. Every fiber of her being sighed with ecstatic relief as she took her first breath of free air in what felt like an eternity.

“A small measure Doctor?” she took another ravenous gulp of the sweet evening air. “This seems more like a miracle to me.”

“No, the miracle was that you wandered along, and with a pack full of supplies nonetheless.” He extended a welcoming hand to her shoulder, and she returned the gesture. “Mr. Yu and I stumbled out of the river with all our inhalers and not much else. The supplies in the pack you carried may just give him a fighting chance.”

She smiled sadly, if the little first aid kit she carried in was all they had, things were very grim indeed. “He still seems to be in a very bad way Doctor.”

“Indeed, but thanks to you he has a course of field antibiotics in his system, for all the good they are likely to do, topical antiseptic on his wounds, and a bedroll on which to try and survive the night.”

“It was your pack.”

He smiled, “So it was, and you who pulled it from the river and brought it to us when we needed it most.”

She thought for a moment, “But wait, why’d you leave his wounds uncovered.”

“Ah, well that’s where things get a bit tricky. You see you did a bit of a number on yourself when you came to us.” He pointed to her headwrap. “And given that I believe you may be our best shot at getting out of this alive, I decided to prioritize some supplies for your head wound, so that we could possibly strategize the best way to help Mr. Yu, should he make it through the night.”

Feeling the back of her head and wincing at the tenderness and gauze that almost certainly would need to be changed before too long, Kiana began to appreciate their conundrum. “What happened after I dove in towards you guys?”

“Well it was quite the bit of heroics there Miss Hano,” he chuckled softly. “Diving in and shooting your flare at those creatures all in one go. Fortunately the trick worked, because if they’d simply chased in after you we’d probably all be dead. Instead the flare gave them enough of a fright that they ran off and I had a chance to pull us all up into the upper level of this structure and seal off the entry hole. I bound your head, and treated Mr. Yu, before I found my way up here to keep an eye out should those creatures return. These structures seem steep and tall enough to keep them from climbing up here, but fortunately it seems like your flare gave them enough of a fright to keep them away for a little while, so hopefully we won’t have to put that theory to the test.”

“Well considering I was pretty certain I was about to become dinner, I’d say that went about as well as it could have. Thanks for signaling me.”

“Any time.”

They sat in companionable silence for a while, before Kiana broke in “So what were those creatures?”

The botanist laughed, and replied in his soft Southland drawl “I was just about to ask you the same thing.”

“Well I came down the ridge up there earlier today and ran into one and its pups. At first I thought it was just a smaller ali’i, but they way they move…” She trailed off remembering the bone chilling stares the creatures had given her. “No, they’re built similarly. But they’re not the same.” She thought for a long moment. “I couldn’t say that they’re more or less intelligent than the ali’i, but their intelligence does seem to be of a different sort.”

“Indeed.” Dr. Rey agreed. “We looked down from the Fortune and didn’t see any lights shining back at us and assumed this world was unspoken for, but this…” He dragged his hand along the side of the low wall, clearing away the overgrowth to reveal the smooth, seemingly manufactured stone beneath. “This would seem to tell a different story. You called the offspring pups. Why is that?”

“It was the way they played I suppose, rolling around sort of teaming up on each other. Honestly it would have been cute if I hadn’t been so horrified.” She pondered. “I’ve only seen footage of wolves and their pups, but I’ve seen plenty of big cats working on the islands and their cubs. Familial but fiercely independent. This wasn’t like that, they seemed to be more of a unit together.” She remembered the three creatures looming before her, working in unison to back her into a corner. “Then the way they pursued me just before I saw you, I know it’s not right to draw analogies like this but it felt like being hunted by a pack.”

“I think given the circumstances we can let the technical distinctions be drawn by Dr. Mawa.” His unerring optimism shocked Kiana, but helped lift her spirits. “What I saw certainly looked like coordinated behavior, more importantly they seemed to be actively and intricately communicating as they approached you, and perhaps most importantly two of them carried sharpened stones like hand axes.”

“Communication and tool use.” Kiana whispered, wondering what sort of a mess they had found themselves in. “Was I wrong to assume hostile intentions? Maybe they’re just quite intelligent and curious?”

“I think it’s best to play it safe on calls like that for now. Especially when they’re actively backing you into a corner with no real means of self-defense.”

“I named the ali’i for how they seemed to inhabit this place, chiefs, masters of the forest. And when I saw the creatures on the ridge another name came to mind for them, Koa, fierce warriors. Do you think that may be their relationship.”

“Unfortunately Kiana, I reckon not.” He cleared a way more overgrowth until a patch of smooth stone shone in the pale moonlight. “I think you may have it the wrong way around, and I fear their relationship may be rather more contentious. While you were knocked out I investigated this structure where we’ve taken shelter, and I think it may provide more answers than we realize.”

“Yeah, when I came down from the ridge I felt for all the world like I walked into some overgrown town. What are these things?”

“Well that’s just the thing, they’re concrete.”

One word, and the whole world reoriented itself in Kiana’s mind.

“Concrete?…But how?”

“It seems these koa may be much smarter than we realize. We’ve seen that they make and use tools, communicate and work collectively. Really on the scale of technological advancement cement and concrete are just right around the corner on the timescales of evolution.” He looked up towards the crater rim, just barely visible above the ridges and surrounding trees, black teeth jutting into the starry night sky. “Honestly in a place like this with so much previous volcanic activity there may be enough naturally occurring lime that they wouldn’t have even needed to control fire to a significant extent to make it.”

Pieces fell together in Kiana’s mind. “The quarry!”

“Yes, that’s what I thought when I saw it too. It’s all been covered over by years of blowing soil and overgrowth, but the end of the ridge seems decidedly carved away doesn’t it?”

“So what the ali’i are…were advancing technologically, then…what?”

“Not the ali’i. The size of these structures makes no sense for them, the koa on the other hand, well this could be a tailor-made den for a small pack couldn’t it?”

More fragments fell into place, pushing through the trauma-clogged pathways of Kiana’s mind. The openings, the elevated interior chambers, the sheltered roof perch. It was a perfect, if somewhat crude, refuge for a creature to nestle into.

“But that ridge is seriously carved back.” She pondered. “More than they could possibly have needed for this little group of buildings, why dig all of that lime up?”

“Well that’s the question isn’t it Kiana?” He smiled an impish grin, eyes glinting in the moonlight. Even trapped on an alien world, with a companion struggling to survive the night, the deep mysteries of the universe lit up Dr. Gabriel Rey.

“Ok so, the koa have like their version of ancient Crete, going on here, building a settlement, mining lime for whatever purpose, and then…nothing?” She waved her hand over the settlement. “I mean overgrowth like this doesn’t happen overnight, not even in the jungle, these things have been getting buried for probably hundreds of years at this point. They clearly made serious advancements, but we didn’t exactly stumble upon the Roman Empire here.”

“Well that’s where things really get interesting.” He stood up and began to gently pace back and forth in the dim moonlight. “At the risk of getting very far ahead of ourselves, I’d say it seems like we’ve stumbled upon their form of a post-apocalyptic society. Although it seems that the collapse struck very early on in their development.”

Kiana thought for a long moment, mind connecting dots she’d learned in school back on Earth, a different life entirely. “So is this the answer to that paradox, um…” She searched for the term, then it bubbled forth from a froth of memory. “Fermi’s Paradox, right? The reason the galaxy seems so empty…well empty before we showed up here I guess. But anyway, there aren’t alien civilizations around every corner despite the fact that the galaxy has been here way more than long enough for that to have happened by now. Did we inadvertently clear some hurdle that other creatures haven’t for one reason or another?”

“That may be the case…” The botanist looked up into the shower of stars that twinkled in the clear night of a world with no light. “But while I understand Fermi’s math, well at least as well as I can, I’ve always felt his paradox was a little too reliant on cold numbers.” He stopped pacing, but didn’t take his eyes off the sky. “I mean we’re talking about life here, and life is never that tidy. I’d imagine that successful societies would expand into new star systems in fits and starts. Maybe they’d expand suddenly and then regress, maybe they’d expand incredibly slowly spending millions of years reworking each system they landed in, maybe they’d really make an attempt at an interstellar society so they never could go too far, or maybe us humans truly are unexceptional and what we’ve done is rather the norm given just how vast space is and how far apart roughly similar planets tend to be, maybe other species have reached out and expanded but effectively just delayed the inevitable. In spite of how much of a miracle this planet is in its compatibility to us, it’s far from a given that we’ll settle here and thrive.”

“Or maybe we’re just the lucky ones who made it this far first.” Kiana needled the pondering doctor.

“Ha, yes Miss Hano maybe, although whether we’re lucky or not certainly remains to be seen.” He stretched his hands up into the sky. “I just stand here and look at all of that though, I think of all the other botanists on all the other Delaney Ships and what they might be finding out there. Each planet would beg you to fit some answer to the paradox, but a sample of two planets isn’t exactly very compelling evidence. We could be on some bare rock thinking maybe truly earthlike planets are far rarer than we thought when we set out. We could be on a perfectly earthlike world, water, wind, warmth, all of it but no life, and we’d think that maybe the advent of life really was just a one off event. Or we could be out there finding life that is so unlike anything our human minds can comprehend we’d wonder why we ever thought there was a paradox to begin with.”

“But instead we’re here…” Kiana’s eyes looked off into the dark jungle that at once felt so familiar and so strange.

“Exactly! We’re here, here on this garden of a planet, thinking wow, not only must life be common, but it’s also shockingly earthlike, this just must be how complex matter forms over time in the right conditions.” He took his eyes off the heavens and pulled Kiana in with their glinting vigor. “So you’re right to wonder about old Fermi! Of course you are. From our little sample it sure doesn’t seem like life is all that rare, and we’re seeing that maybe there is a stumbling block in early societies in general or at least there was one here, so maybe we really are the first to reach out beyond our home system successfully.”

“It does sort of beg the question though…” Kiana ran her hand through the ages of overgrowth that began to bury the remains of the society they’d stumbled into.

“Of what happened here?” The Doctor provided. “Indeed, impossible to say, but I can’t imagine that their list of concerns is likely to have been much different from ours: disease, changing climate, collapse of a fragile society, asteroids, volcanoes, gamma ray bursts. Could have been any of it, or maybe a combination of several. Given what we’ve seen, maybe we can eliminate nuclear war or misaligned AI from the list, but then again we’ve been on the ground here for just a couple days, and clearly our studies from the Fortune were of limited efficacy. We’ve already found much more than we bargained for, who knows what else lies around the corner?”

“Well that’s a comforting thought.” Whispered Kiana, thinking of Winnie Yu fighting for his life down below.

“We came seeking adventure Kiana, and sure enough we’ve found it. Up to a couple hours ago I thought it was going to claim my life, now that you’ve found your way to us though, I’m feeling like there’s much more discovery in store for us.” His smile could have almost made Kiana believe such a thing was possible. “I’m going to head below to keep Mr. Yu company through the night, you should take some rest for yourself. Tomorrow’s a new day.”

“Indeed Doctor, good night.”

He padded softly back into the structure, leaving Kiana alone with her thoughts and the swirling stars. Before too long, despite all her naked fear that the creatures might return, exhaustion took its toll and she slept beneath the open sky, skin warmed by the alien air that felt so much like home. As she slipped off to sleep she could just imagine she was back in Hilo on her grandmother’s lanai listening to the trade winds and the night sounds of the jungle.

Dawn crept in slow and soft; Kiana stirred as the morning sky dipped from lilac to pale aqua. No creatures returned, and the absence of news on Mr. Yu indicated that he had survived the night. She sat as the sky lightened and the last of the little moons blinked out for the day. A good and restful night, one sorely needed at that, but a new day had come and it was filled with challenges. Kiana thought for a long while about their best plan, nothing was a sure or even a particularly good bet, but then nothing in a survival situation ever was. All she could do was deal with one thing and then the next and the next and the next until they were safe or out of luck. First order of business, she thought, make sure Winnie Yu doesn’t get any worse.

Heading below, the pair was stirring in the dim light.

“How are you feeling today Mr. Yu?” Kiana asked mildly.

“Like a million goddamned dollars,” he croaked miserably, “how do you think I’m doing?”

“Well you’re alive, so that’s a plus.”

“Speak for yourself.” He rolled over to reveal his tattered chest, bandages soaked through with blood in the night.

“I’m afraid we have very little left to help him with Kiana.” Dr. Rey added gravely. “All our antiseptic is used up, and we’re down to just a couple rolls of gauze.”

She instinctively reached up to the wrap on her head and gently pulled it free; it was soaked as well, but the bleeding was done and all she had was a very large sore spot on the back of her head. Time for some field medicine then.

“Dr. Rey, if you’d be so kind as to get some water boiling on the cookstove, I need to step out and collect some supplies.” She kindly asked.

“Supplies?” Yu groaned, alarmed, “What kind of supplies could you expect to find out there?”

“The kind to save your miserable ass.” She quipped back. Rey helped her lever out the entry cover and she slipped back out onto the overgrown street.

She followed the way out to the confluence of the two rivers, in the absence of rain the waters had continued to subside and they flowed placidly into one another, glowing pale turquoise. It was a relief to be in such a situation and at least only be dealing with such sparkling clean water. All the same, Winnie Yu wouldn’t be going anywhere without a more suitable covering for his wounds. Kiana wandered upstream until she was once again enveloped in the forest. Banana leaves would really do the trick, she thought idly as she weaved between the overhanging plants, leaves of a thousand different shapes reached out helpfully. This one too small, this one just a frond of a million little hairs, this one too spiky, this one…oh that one just seems poisonous to look at. Aha. The shrub reached up with large round leaves glinting dark green in the morning light. On one leaf a family of colorful little worms rolled lazily around munching on the soft foliage. Well if it’s good enough for you guys, I guess I’ll just have to hope it’s good enough for Winnie. It was far from an even reasonably safe chance to take. Kiana thought she’d sampled a bush that looked like this on the first evening, but couldn’t be sure. What she was sure about though, was that if Winnie Yu couldn’t keep his wounds covered enough to move he was as good as dead. She grabbed a dozen large leaves and carried on.

Maskless once more, Kiana was entranced by the beauty of the alien forest as she stepped lightly in the springy soil. There was more small animal life here, smaller cousins of the pink flighted creatures they’d seen several times. Hexapodal body architecture did seem to be the default design on this world, although even in just this little patch of forest Kiana could see dozens of unique implementations. Skittering up and down the trunks of the tall trees were a bevy of little gliders in a whole rainbow of colors. Webbed skin arched between their limbs and little plumes of soft feathers trailed behind them as they gracefully glided tree to tree, chittering and looking at her with dark eyes, curious about this alien who came walking through their forest.

She came across another small tree with the oblong fruits and scared off a small terrestrial creature that darted off on all six legs, slipping beneath the foliage and barely making a rustle in its escape. The fruits on this tree seemed more ripe than any she’d seen so far, fading from dark red on the tip to a soft sorbet orange near the stem. If it was the same fruit, it had already tested quite benignly, and she hadn’t reacted negatively when she’d sampled it on her skin. Oh you little temptresses, she thought. The sight of them set her stomach to rumbling, but she could deal with hunger for days more if needed. It was Winnie Yu she was thinking about. With so much blood loss he wouldn’t be going anywhere far under his own power, and even staying alive was going to require as much fuel as they could give him. It was a colossal risk, but even if these fruits had just a few digestible sugars it could be the difference between life and death. Don’t say I never did anything for you Winnie. Kiana cut off a small piece and chewed it slowly. The fruit was cool and crisp, pleasantly juicy, and the flavor. Well, the flavor was like nothing she’d ever tasted before, a whole new constellation of sensory experience had just been opened up. Now, days without a proper meal it was the most delicious thing she’d ever tasted. Juice running down under her tongue, it was all she could do to spit out the sampled bit and not swallow it all in one go. Better to be as safe as possible though.

Minutes passed as Kiana waited anxiously for any negative effects. But the morning simply carried on as it had been in its pleasant way. The jungle buzzed, the river ran, and minute by minute her anxiety faded away. She trimmed off several dozen of the fruits and carried everything back to her companions using her shirt as a makeshift basket.

Winnie Yu sucked in sharp breaths between his teeth as she climbed back into their refuge, Dr. Rey was dabbing away at his wounds with bits of boiled cloth.

“Did you find what you were looking for?” he asked.

“That and then some.” She knelt and spilled her bounty out on the smooth stone.
“And what exactly do you think all of that is for?” Yu asked testily.

“For patching you up, keeping you on your feet, and getting us out of here.”

“Oh, you have got to be kidding me.” He sighed. “That’s just what I need right now, to be poisoned by some alien plants as I slowly bleed out in this fucking cave.”

Dr. Rey continued dabbing mildly despite his patient’s miserable demeanor. “Mr. Yu, I think you need to remember there is a reason why Kiana was hand picked for this excursion. There are two million souls aboard the Fortune and none have the survival experience in jungle environments that Miss Hano possesses.”

It was a vote of confidence a mile beyond anything Kiana felt about herself, but if it meant Yu would let her help him she’d take it.

“Well, I was thinking banana leaves would be the ideal thing,” she explained “but obviously we’re just looking for close enough here. I’d sampled leaves like this when we first landed and they didn’t show any problematic compounds, plus they’re nice and large so we can get those wounds covered up and not go through all our gauze in one dressing.”

“Jesus christ.” Yu swore softly under his breath. “And then what are those? Little fruits of some sort? I know you imagine yourself to be some child of the forest out there, but this planet wants us dead, and we don’t need you helping it.”

“I’d sampled these as well,” she quipped back. “Benign as well. But I didn’t trust the sampler so I’ve now sampled it on myself first on skin, and just now with a chew and spit. Nothing harmful here that I can see.”
“You’re out of your fucking mind. You think we’re just going to walk out of here happy as clams eating alien fruits and singing kumbaya?”

“No, in fact Winnie, I don’t think we’re walking anywhere. And I know with the amount of blood you’ve lost we have three goals, keep your wounds clean, cover them, and give you nutrients to help and rebuild the blood you’ve lost. Now Dr. Rey has been so kind as to tend to the first goal. If you’d stop fussing we’ll get your wounds dressed with these leaves so you can at least be somewhat mobile. And yes I acknowledge foraged foods are a big risk, but given the fact that you’re normally simply unpleasant and not the actively repellant asshole you’re being right now I’m assuming you have blood loss anemia. Without some sort of digestible sugars in your system you’ll only grow weaker until we have no way of moving you over the terrain we need to cross.’

“Like it or not Mr. Yu, this planet is your option, you can trust it and try to survive, or we might as well leave you here.” She let the reality of the situation hang heavily before continuing. “And because I stand by what I say, I’ll dress your wounds myself, and I’ll eat the fruits with you. I wouldn’t recommend these steps if I thought there was a better way, but this is as minimized as I can make your risk. In the end though, you’ll simply have to take the leap. So what’s it going to be?”

He sighed a long, frustrated breath. “Give me the goddamned leaves.”

—

The raft was only a few logs lashed together with paracord, but it was by far the best part of their current arrangement.

Dressing Winnie Yu’s wounds had been difficult, but getting him to climb aboard made it seem like a walk in the park. Kiana could hardly blame him for hesitancy though, the craft hardly inspired confidence in her skills as a bushwoman. Even calling it a raft was a bit of a stretch, more like a float. But they needed to move, and they needed to keep Yu out of the water. And it filled both of those purposes well enough, all things considered. Now they drifted along in the vibrant water under the light of the late morning. The Doctor and the Voice of the People, rode sitting atop the lashed logs as Kiana trailed behind doing what she could to keep them in the deepest channels of the river.

Her stomach turned over on itself as she kicked along, questioning how much sense she had left. Certainly Yu was direly in need of digestible sugars to help replace some of the blood lost so for him to eat the fruits made some sort of survival sense. Kiana joining him was uncut lunacy, just a half baked ploy to help a dying man who wouldn’t help himself. He wouldn’t have gone for it if I hadn’t backed it up, she told herself. And it was the truth. But it was also the truth that Kiana wanted to eat the little fruits as well. She was hungry. But more than hungry she was curious.

Curious how this new world would hit her final sense. Much like everything else she’d seen, heard, felt and smelt, the firm flesh of the fruits opened up new doors in her perception of the universe she hadn’t known existed. It was cool and crisp and clean and tart and sweet-oh-so-sweet. The chances that they actually contained readily digestible compounds was low, but the chances of the planet they now explored were unfathomably low and here they were. The sweetness worked its way down her tongue and up into her mind, her body yearning for the molecules the taste indicated. She’d devoured four of the little fruits before her sense finally caught up with her. That was utter stupidity. Now, an hour and change later, her stomach protested her transgression. Her mind may have craved the sweet alien taste, but the microbes in her gut were looking for more familiar fare. I guess they’ll adapt or they won’t, she resigned. She wasn’t optimistic about any of their survival if they had to get out with no food, so either they could live on what the jungle gave them or they were done either way.

Despite her stomach’s protests she hadn’t thrown up, and Winnie Yu bore any discomfort he felt in reserved silence. An upset stomach was the least of his concerns right now. As the morning wore on and she drifted slowly along behind the raft, her stomach eventually settled and it seemed the fruits did have something to offer them as she gradually felt more and more vital. Her mood rose along with her blood sugar, and before she knew it, in spite of everything, Kiana fell in love with her new world once more.

Below the confluence, the water cleared considerably. In deep pockets it was still a vivid aquamarine, but for the most part they could look straight down to the gray pebbles that made up the river bed. Basking in the lazy morning sun, Kiana reached a comfortable equilibrium between the warm light and cool water; if she let her attention slip she could almost imagine she was flying along the canyon floor.

The jungle was as awake and alive as they’d ever seen. The pink flying creatures swooped through the air in groups of half a dozen or so, snatching little insects out of the air. They were hexapods as well, middle limbs reached out in a web of skin to create a wide wing that allowed them to glide gracefully as they swooped and soared. In the river below, six-limbed bodies were also on display. Strange amphibious creatures of a score of different colors darted through the crystal water, rows of fins lining their torsos, perfectly navigating the river’s twisting braids.

“Incredible.” Dr. Rey muttered, as he took in the new beings. “Somewhere along the line this place must have favored hexapodal body architecture, and here we are to see it brought to full fruition. I’ve known more than a few biologists who would’ve contended that four-limbed was the only viable layout for linearly symmetrical beings.”

What a silly notion, Kiana mused, to think that you could know the nature of an alien being before visiting its home. Here she was neck deep in their lands and waters and if anything the mysteries only seemed to deepen.

As they floated on the walls of the canyon gradually began to recede and the turns of the river started to meander more than braid. Along the banks tall grasses grew up out of the water in the deeper eddy pockets; as the walls spread further back the grasses had more room to grow as they reached up covering floodplains in fields of pale green. At the edge of one of the larger plains Kiana thought she saw more of the same mounding structures they’d seen at the quarry, but they slipped around the bend before she could see too much.

The day passed in a dreamy stillness. The river wound through the little plains that occupied the lower flanks of the valley. The creatures they saw passed them by with no mind. Dr. Rey muttered softly to himself, still clearly delighted with each new discovery. Winnie Yu rode in silence, eyes fixed downstream. As the sun began to lower in the sky the walls tightened once more. Kiana kicked them to shore on a high bank looking over a wide, grass-filled eddy on the far bank. As secure of a camp as they could hope to find. After their success with the fruits, they all nibbled on the supply they had left, fully entrusting themselves to luck and the good graces of the planet.

Evening settled in and Dr. Rey wandered around their camp, seeking samples he could stuff into the containers that had stuck in his pockets through their ordeal. Kiana sat next to Yu quietly looking over the drifting waters. Without a sound or movement Kiana felt Yu’s body suddenly stiffen. Following his gaze she could see the cause emerging out of the grasses. A herd of ali’i had come to the evening shore for supper.

Five adults and a romp of younglings waded in the clear water, selecting the tenderest shoots and nibbling them lightly as they trumpeted a gentle song to one another. Several of the adults pulled down taller stalks so that the little ones could see and learn which stalks were best for picking. Kiana sat, enraptured.

“Can they sense us?” Winnie Yu finally whispered nervously.

“Maybe, but I doubt they’d pay us much mind if they do. It looks like they have everything they need over there to me.” Kiana smiled.

Yu softened almost imperceptibly, “Yes, I suppose you’re right.” They watched the familial scene for some time longer, the Doctor returned to join them, before Yu added. “It seems like that one’s limping.”

He was right, one of the adults moved with an aching slowness. Unable to reach up very high, several of the others helped pull down shoots for it to eat.

“A little society.” Dr. Rey whispered, “The healthy taking care of the injured for its own sake rather than for the good of the herd.”

It was a touching scene to behold, until Kiana caught a hint of movement out of the corner of her eye. Upstream from the ali’i, a koa stalked silently into the grasses. She let out a small gasp, the others looked at her, concerned. She signaled silently for them to retreat to a better hide where they all peeked out in nervous anticipation.

In a moment, the scene of familial bliss turned to visceral chaos. In silent unison three koa sprang from the grasses upon the limping ali’i, two wielded long sticks with cruel, sharpened heads while the third swung a large stone attached to a braided cord. Weapons. The gentle song of the ali’i transformed in an instant into a tumult of trumpeting wails. The little ones vanished almost instantly below the water line and back into the grass, but they were never the target, the koa had scouted a prime target and meant to have it. The koa with the swinging stone lassoed its prey around the neck as it filled the evening air with haunting howls. The other ali’i trumpeted as well, but seemed too afraid to intervene.

Even injured, size kept the captured ali’i alive for some time. The beast reared back onto its hind legs trying to pull the koa off the ground. This wasn’t the koa’s first kill though. It simply spooled out more cord when it needed, then yanked mercilessly back down when opportunity arose. All the while the other two lashed out with their spears, tearing great rents into the flesh of their victim, and sending torrents of purple blood swirling into the waters. Kiana could barely stand to watch, her heart breaking again with every lash of the spear and pull of the lasso.

And then it was over. The ali’i collapsed in exhaustion into the shallow water, and the koa wasted no time in delivering the final strike to their prey in silent efficiency. Kill made, they hauled their prize upstream into the grasses to enjoy the spoils of a successful hunt.

“Ah,” Dr. Rey finally broke the petrified silence, “I was afraid that might be the case.”

Every piece of new information Kiana encountered in this place seemed to turn her conception of it upside down. But to see this, so visceral, so close at hand, so practiced, so efficient…it defied her attempts to integrate the new information.

“Indeed.” Yu agreed, “It seems Miss Hano’s ali’i may not be the chiefs around here after all.”

She could only shake her head in shocked silence, before getting up to try and fashion them a suitable hide for the night now knowing what stalked the woods. Kiana took the first shift that night, eyes wide, ears straining into the purr of the jungle night. Eventually Dr. Rey took her position.

Morning found her stiff, cold, and more ready than anything to get the hell out of the forest. In the night a low fog had rolled in off the sea, shrouding the trees in swirling mist. All three ate what was left of their little fruits, knowing they’d need every spare calorie they could find to safely navigate another day on the river. In the silent morning, they slipped out from the banks and into the swirling mists of the river.

The waters ran in a hushed murmur of gray. For most of the morning the banks remained low, covered with reeds where they could see them through the blanket of fog. To their wary eyes each bend held sinister forms emerging out of the shifting vapors, holding spears, holding cudgels, poised to hunt. Kiana floated behind and constantly steered them into the middle of the stream, silently praying that deep water would be enough to keep them safe. Her passengers brokered no argument and let the miles slip by without a word.

The mists rose as the hours passed but so did the walls of the valley, tightening once again into a winding canyon. Kiana could feel as they all tensed when the water began to quicken its pace once more; now it was easily navigable, but at each bend they craned their necks around, certain they’d see another series of white caps waiting to upturn their flimsy little raft and swallow them whole.

By midafternoon the mists had risen to form a sky of steel. Once more the walls of the canyon reached up into the alien sky like jagged green teeth. Still the trio floated in unspoken unease, only the periodic puffs from their inhalers broke the imposing calm. The cool day seemed to suppress the very jungle itself. No hum enveloped them today, no pulse of life all around them, only the coursing waters and leaves shifting in the breeze. Just when all seemed unbreakably calm an echoing howl would bounce down the canyon sending them into adrenaline-soaked alert. Whether it was a herd of ali’i trumpeting happily, or a pack of koa signaling the attack Kiana couldn’t tell.

Late in the day they floated past another confluence and found another quarry. Clearly whatever development they had stumbled upon wasn’t a unique occasion. She’d been tracing the high ridge idly wondering if she could get a view out to the ocean if she climbed it, when it suddenly began to drop and as they came around its final shoulder great carved tiers revealed themselves. Between the bottom of the tiers and the river banks, just as upstream, was a little village of overgrown humps. Yu looked down concerned, these formations meant koa, at least in their limited experience. Kiana was already kicking them towards the far bank, hoping they’d slip past unnoticed by any beings on shore.

They continued their drifting float through the winding canyon walls as the light began to fade and the sky grew heavy with waiting rain, when suddenly they rounded a bend and saw something unique in the world of all-encompassing green, a thin column of oily smoke rising from the shore. On a shelf up above the bank of a deep bend a yawning mouth of a cave opened up in the towering wall of flora. Shelter. In front of it was a little campfire with wan, yellow flames barely staying alive, spitting up a column of uneasy smoke, and a dark figure, now waving to them eagerly. Dr. Mawa. They beached their little float and scrambled up to the shelf to find Dr. Mawa exhausted but in good health outside the cave.

Inside they found Lieutenant Morgan Sterns on the edge of death.

— -

Where Yu’s chest had been scraped, Stern’s was torn.

Kiana’s breath caught in her throat as she stepped into the cave and saw the poor lieutenant, struggling with every breath. Cuts like this wouldn’t be made by branches or rocks, to cut this deep would take claws, or blades. Long, jagged seams had been ripped down from collarbone to navel. Mawa had tried to patch her up as best she could with the scant first aid kit they’d managed to hold onto this far downriver but she clearly was no field medic. Now the gauze and bandages were soaked through and days overdue for changing. Sterns, miraculously, was alive though. She turned her head towards them as they entered.

“You’re a bit early for the funeral.” she croaked dryly through parched lips.

“Oh my dear, lieutenant,” Dr. Rey exclaimed, kneeling down and taking her hand. “What happened to you?”

“The creatures…” Dr. Mawa offered unsteadily.

“The koa.” Kiana whispered. Did they have claws sufficient for this, or would it have taken their tools? She wondered, either way based on what she’d seen, they were certainly the prime suspects for an attack of this nature.

“We held onto the raft after the accident, but the water was rushing so fast for miles and miles, and we couldn’t get it upright.” Mawa explained in her quiet, unsure accent. “We passed a confluence with these strange formations, but we saw creatures on the shore. Koa as you called them. So we kept floating on trying to get control of the boat so we could try and work back up river to find you all. But the raft was ripped in the accident, Lt. Sterns had it patched for a while as we floated along but they wouldn’t hold. So when we saw another confluence with the structures but no creatures, that’s when we were finally able to get the boat ashore.”

“That’s when those fuckers got us.” Sterns wheezed.

“Yes,” Mawa continued. “We were patching the raft when suddenly two of the creatures just appeared out of the structures. There was no warning, one second nothing, the next they were just there, standing a few meters away…purring and growling to one another. Talking, I think…”

“I leveled my rifle at them to try and scare them away, but they’d never seen anything like it, didn’t know to be scared.” The injured soldier recounted. “They just kept coming closer, had sharpened rocks in their hands, and vicious claws. I could tell they weren’t there for friendly contact. So I fired a shot over their heads to try and scare them off; I only scared them into attacking.” She coughed raggedly with the effort of speaking. “I’ve never seen something move so fast. Before I could even move one of ’em had ripped me open from tits to belt. I squeezed the trigger more out of panic than anything else. I hit the thing in the shoulder, didn’t really seem to phase it much but gave us a chance to retreat a bit.” Her coughing worsened suddenly.

Dr. Mawa stepped in, “I grabbed the pack we still had and the lieutenant and pulled us both into the river. The creatures didn’t seem to want to chase us into the deeper water, so we floated downstream for a while until I saw this cave where I hoped we could take shelter.” She looked around the group with dark, exhausted eyes. “That was two days ago. I was beginning to think…well, I was beginning to think the worst. Thank goodness you’re here.”

“Doesn’t look like the lot of you are likely to be very much help though.” Sterns uttered bitterly.

“Oh, don’t you worry lieutenant.” Dr. Rey encouraged gently. “Miss Hano will get you patched up just like she did for Mr. Yu. Isn’t that right Kiana?”

Kiana nodded warily, mind still running horrified circuits around the notion of actually being attacked by the koa.

“What with?” Sterns demanded, unbelieving. “Looks to me like you held on to a pack, same as us. I don’t doubt Miss Hano’s skill, but you can’t fix gouges like this with gauze and antiseptic ointment.”

“Like this.” Winnie Yu spoke up, stepping forward and opening his shirt to reveal the leaves that covered his torso.

Sterns’ eyes glinted in the fading light, taking in what she saw. “Kiana you’ve lost your goddamned mind. You’re supposed to be our bushwoman, keeping these idiots from putting themselves at worse danger. Now you’re wrapping them up with local flora, covered in who knows what.” She snorted in angry disbelief. “Even if that job gets Yu out of here he’s going to have to spend the rest of his life in quarantine, could be infected with god knows what alien parasite thanks to you. What other bright ideas did you come up with, eating the local fruits?”

“Well actually…” Dr. Rey replied sheepishly.

“Oh, now you are actually joking.” Sterns barked. “I can’t believe you guys made it all the way down here. Kiana you must have some luck to not all be dying of acute poisoning out in the forest.”

Sterns, in her morbid desperation, had cast her judgment on Kiana and it was harsh. Kiana knew anything she added would fall on deaf ears so held her tongue. But she also knew this woman was not long for the new world in her current state. She needed her wounds cleaned, she needed fresh and better bandages, she needed food and water to hold onto what little strength she had left. But Kiana could not convince her of these things, not with the tools she had at hand. Someone else would have to speak to her in words she could hear. In the end, of all people, it was Winnie Yu.

“You know perfectly well Lieutenant, that I didn’t come down here for discovery or adventure or to chart new lands or any other foolish notion the rest of you had in your heads.” He started dryly, cutting words forcing their way through Stern’s clouded mind. “I was sent down here by luck of the draw, to see for all the people frozen on the ship what there is to see. I know most of you think it isn’t fair that it’s me, but I’m who the ship chose, so here I am.”

“And what do you see Mr. Yu?” Sterns compelled.

“Opportunity.” Yu whispered gazing out into the fading light. “I mean an honest-to-god wonder. We all knew it from the moment we set foot out of the lander, even if you’re forgetting it now. I’m old enough to remember when Taiwan still had its forests, those days are long behind us, but it was never like this. Never this wild, never this beautiful. Never this much potential.’

“What Kiana told me is right, on more levels than I think any of us realize. This planet is our hope. We have to trust it, or we may as well set off again now.” He locked eyes with Sterns. “You can lie here and bleed out in an alien cave, or you can let Miss Hano help you and live to make us all a place in this world.”

Sterns let out a groaning sigh. “Fine. But I call bottom bunk in the quarantine quarters.”

Kiana nodded gratefully to Winnie Yu, feeling more respect for the man than she thought possible. With Sterns’ assent the rest of them went into action. The Doctors began boiling water on their stove, Yu took inventory of the supplies they had left, while Kiana slipped out in what little light remained to forage for the supplies that were Sterns’ only shot at living.

Moonrise found Kiana and Dr. Mawa sitting by the spitting, struggling fire, exhausted but unable to sleep just yet. Sterns was patched up as best they could manage, but it was clear the lieutenant wasn’t going anywhere.

Kiana sighed, breaking the silence as the line of pinprick moons climbed over the far wall. “I can’t wrap my head around it Doctor.” She shook her head. “It seems like the more I learn about this place the less I understand it.” Watching the koa hunt had been scarring enough, but cleaning Sterns’ wounds, seeing just how hostile one swipe could be had opened a whole new plane of horrors. “When I first saw the ali’i I thought, how could anything more imposing live in this place? But it seems I had everything upside down from the start.”

“I understand the feeling.” The dark zoologist replied, eyes filled with empathy. “I know from years of training and a lifetime of studies that I shouldn’t let a few pieces of interesting data skew my perception. But it’s the human way, we assign patterns that seem to fit, even if none truly exist. All the same it’s hard not to draw parallels here, given how familiar everything seems at first look.”

“The first time I saw a koa,” Kiana recalled, voice shaking. “My mind immediately jumped to what it saw, a predator, like a jungle cat.”

Mawa nodded, “And it was right to do so, given what we know of them now. That first instinct probably helped keep you from giving yourself away in surprise. But it’s also the human way to look beyond what our instincts say, to try and look one layer deeper into the world. That’s what I’m trying to do here, hopefully it will help us survive our next encounter with these creatures. There’s no doubt about their predatory nature, but a comparison to a big cat is wrong on a couple levels, not least of which is that nothing here could ever have been said to be a cat.”

Kiana chuckled, “I guess the six legs probably should’ve given it away.”

“Well there’s that.” Mawa agreed, laughing lightly. “But I think we should be more interested in their tools. You said earlier that you saw them with some sort of lasso and spears?”

“Yeah, they used them to take down an ali’i in the river.”

“That shows a level of planning and forethought absent from what we know of big cats. Or honestly any other predators we know of.” Her face glistened in the yellow fire light. “We have only limited evidence at this point Miss Hano, but it seems one way or another we’ve found intelligent life.”

“Somehow I don’t feel like we’ve won the lottery, even if all things considered we probably should,” she rued. “I mean actual, living, breathing, intelligent aliens. I thought I might see a lot of things when I signed up to get on the Fortune, but this just seemed a stretch too far to really believe.”
“Indeed.” Mawa nodded solemnly. “Part of my mind is running wild, this is the discovery of a thousand lifetimes.”

“But part of you realizes it only counts if we make it out of here alive.”
“Precisely.”

They sat in quiet contemplation for a while, idly stirring the spitting fire, minds running through the million ways they might perish in the jungle and forever be etched in history books as a note with too little information to be of much interest.

“Doctor,” Kiana broke in after a while. “I know you’ll say we don’t have enough evidence yet, but what do you think is the relationship between the two species? Clearly the koa are a predator here, but the two just seem so alike in so many different ways, it’s hard to not draw comparisons. I’ve seen way more differences among dog breeds than I see between the two. Is it really members of the same species hunting each other out there?”

Mawa chuckled softly again. “Now you’re cutting right to the heart of my field, Miss Hano. And you’re right we don’t have enough information. But in the end, even a full genomic sequence–if such a thing is even possible on these creatures–won’t give us the answers because nature doesn’t care about our categories.”

“How do you mean?”
“Well the idea of a species is a rather fuzzy concept when you start really drilling down into it. It’s tricky to draw a meaningful line and say here is where a new species starts. On a new planet with wholly new biology, well it’ll take years to come to a consensus and even then I’d probably understand researchers who disagreed. On the deepest level you could say an entire planet’s worth of species is all one in the same, there is no human and cat and bacteria, only earthlife. No ali’i and koa, only this planet’s life.”

“So it really could be the same species eating itself?” Disgust audible in Kiana’s voice.

“It certainly could be.” Mawa continued in her gentle, foreign voice that betrayed no judgment. “But would it really make you feel better if they were from different species? They’re clearly closely related no matter where we land on taxonomy. I’d guess certainly within the same family–if we apply the same categorical structure here–probably within the same genus.”

“I guess not…”
“We don’t have any evidence of actual hunting of other humans for sustenance, but we homo sapiens have done something very similar in our past. Honestly, probably worse.” She sighed. “We had plenty of human cousins when we started out, now we’re all that’s left. In a different world we could be out here joined by our neanderthal and denisovan cousins, but instead we’re here all alone. Maybe that’s what we’re witnessing here, the slow erasure of the ali’i, or maybe the two species live in some kind of equilibrium.”

“Well that’s the other feeling I can’t shake.” Kiana cut in. “The quarries, the structures, all buried back under the jungle. I can’t help but feel we’re seeing a system out of balance.”
“Or maybe it’s a system coming back into balance.” Mawa offered. “Given what I’ve seen and Dr. Rey described I am inclined to think that the koa are probably responsible for the buildings. They make the most sense as shelters for their size, plus they have the intelligence and the materials handy to build like that.”

“So what, maybe the koa and the ali’i are related species, but the koa developed a bit more tool-using intelligence, began to hunt the ali’i more effectively, maybe even like I don’t know, domesticated them or something, began to build the first parts of society, but then out of nowhere it just collapses.” Kiana conjectured.

Dr. Mawa laughed, “That’s certainly one possibility, Miss Hano. Although again, I urge us both to not see patterns where our mind merely puts them. We should continue to observe without judgment or preconceived notions to see what this new planet shows us. All we really know for certain is this is the first time earthlife has encountered this new life, and because of that we know we’re in wholly uncharted territory.”

“Unless some ancient aliens came and sprinkled starter life on Earth and here, so really we’re just seeing our long lost cousins.” Kiana needled with an impish smile.

“Oh don’t get me started on that!” Mawa laughed heartily.

“I suppose we’ll just keep our eyes open, plenty more to be seen tomorrow.”

“That we will.” Mawa agreed, before heading into their shelter for some much needed rest.

Morning rays poured past Kiana as she looked over the wounds of Lieutenant Sterns, a notable improvement from when they’d found her, but not nearly in good enough shape to travel.

“What do you reckon, Kiana?” Dr. Rey asked in his gentle Southland tones.

“I think that we can’t stay and she can’t go. Simple as that.” She replied matter-of-factly. “I’ll change these bandages, and she’ll survive a while longer out here, but it’s not good for much if we can’t get a signal out to the ship for extraction.”

“So leave me.” Sterns gruffed, bluster as always. “We’re all dead either way. But you might as well give it a go, maybe if one of you gets lucky you can warn everyone on the ship that the planet’s no good.”

Looking at her wounds Kiana found it hard to blame Sterns for her pessimism, but couldn’t agree with her assessment. They’d stumbled blind, caution into the wind, into a dangerous situation. Really, what did we think was going to happen? She wondered. Had they really imagined they’d cruise for a week through an alien jungle with no issues?

“We can’t just leave you Lieutenant.” Rey implored.

“Of course you can.” Sterns barked. “And the longer you stay here debating it, the lower your chances of making it out of here.”

The pair argued back and forth, as Kiana changed Sterns’ wound dressing. Until Winnie Yu cut in.

“I’ll stay with her.” He offered flatly. “You’ll be faster without me anyways.”

“Oh Mr. Yu, no…” Rey protested weakly.

“Save it Doctor. It’s really no question at all. I’m only in marginally better shape than the Lieutenant, and who knows how far it is to the coast.” Yu’s tone allowed no argument. “Leave us a pack and the rifle, and go while you can. Another storm could raise the water and trap us here.”

Kiana nodded solemnly, acknowledging the wisdom of Yu’s decision and respecting the risk he was taking. The thought of waiting in the cramped cave hoping for rescue brought a cold sweat to Kiana’s face.

“I don’t know how much the water level will matter.” Dr. Mawa interjected, she’d just slipped in from outside. “I’ve scouted down river as far as I safely could, and I don’t know if traveling the river will be an option for us. The canyon only tightens from here, and while the water here is calm I could hear rapids further down…I know our surveyors didn’t expect too much difficulty with elevation change but…”

“I’m not inclined to put too much trust in them either.” Kiana finished. “You’re right Doctor, with no boat and an unpredictable river I don’t think floating is in the cards for us.”

“But if we don’t float we don’t have much of an option for following the water, how will we travel?” Dr. Rey wondered.

“The ridges.” Kiana declared firmly. “I went up on one after the accident, it’s an effort to get up there but once we’re there the going is pretty easy and the ridgelines more or less follow the path of the river.”

“Plus, less chance up there of anything sneaking up on you.” Sterns croaked. “Now enough faffing about, get to it.” Even lying an inch from death the grizzled soldier knew how to motivate a troop.

The climb up to the ridge had proven even more challenging than Kiana anticipated. On the inside of a river bend like they were, the wall climbed almost vertically above the cave in a riotous drape of lush greenery. Every other handhold seemed to rip free of the fragile, gray soil with a chunk of plant and disappear behind them in the precipitous green behind them. Kiana led them step-by-step, wincing with each reach taken believing it would be her last. Fortunately the Doctors were no novices to precarious jungle travel. They trusted their guide and followed her like shadows.

By noon, they had made the ridge and were working their way along its knife edge toward the sea and hopefully, salvation. Once more the jungle came alive in the heat of the day as the sun beat down. Kiana poured sweat, every facet of her body ached and yearned for nothing more than to lie down in the dirt and be done; the song of the jungle turned hostile, an incessant clamor clouding her mind and hiding the sounds of any approaching koa; her eyes strained to absolute exhaustion looking for any sign of the predators. Beneath them, the ridge wound back and forth constantly sending off little descending spines in a zig-zagging maze. Again and again Kiana was forced to double them back after she realized she’d mistakenly led them down the wrong path. While the canyon was clear as daylight to follow, up here it would be all too easy to get lost when the jungle rose up above them and blocked all hope of orienteering.

They bore it all in stoic silence. Only the occasional hit of an inhaler bringing a human sound into the alien symphony. What more was there to say? They all felt the same, all exhausted, all at the end of their wits, all merely hoping against hope for survival. The day wore on and the sun dipped towards the far horizon.

Then all at once it was before them. Early evening rays shone through the branches as they fought their way along, until suddenly they were clear. The ridge fell away before them in a sheer cliff and they could see all the way out to the ocean. To one side a higher ridge arced around the open valley below all the way out to the sea. To another the river spat itself out of the canyon and over a line of rapids before taking its final few winds into the sea. But none of that caught their attention.

They were too busy looking at the city that lay before them.

—

“What was that about not finding Rome Miss Hano?” Dr. Rey asked impishly.

City. There was nothing else to call it really. Decayed and decrepit, yes. Covered every inch in a thick mat of jungle, absolutely. But it was only all the more impressive for how it withstood the rigors of time and disrepair. It was a fallen city now, but from high on the ridge each of them could imagine how it must have looked at its height, a proud metropolis, shining by the sea, hope to thousands of sapient beings.

“How could they have missed this from the Fortune?” Kiana wondered aloud.

From their vantage on the ridge it was all too clear. Sure, the structures were little more than green mounds now, but their organization was all too recognizable. Radial streets carved trenches through the miles of structures up to the flanking valley walls. Smaller alleys ran between in a tumult of haphazard complexity. The smallest paths ducked and dove between the hulking structures, turning the vista into a chaotic mass of disorder. But still, this should have been clear as day from above.

“Maybe we’re primed to see it because of the earlier settlements.” Rey offered. “In early days here we certainly discussed the possibility of intelligent life on the planet, but the absence of any electronic or communication technology made us think not.”

“Clearly foolish.” Mawa condemned.

“Clearly.” Rey agreed.

As they looked closer Rey’s comparison to a fallen Rome only became clearer. The structures here were orders of magnitude larger than those they’d found in the settlements. Not meant to house a few koa, but dozens. Their base walls stretched nearly a hundred meters a side and their tapered peaks reached up almost half as high. Off in the far distance they could see even more complex structures jutting up, a large circular complex like a plaza, a series of towers now half collapsed clawing forth from the carpeting green like gray bones reaching for the heavens. Kiana pulled the binoculars they took from Sterns out of her pack and glanced around. The nest of structures sucked her in, in its infinite complexity. Along one street the structures overhung with large shady eaves. On another water ran down the center in a neat channel.

“I guess we have our answer about what those other settlements were for.” Kiana concluded, eyes still drinking in the sight before her.

“Indeed.” Rey nodded. “If they didn’t know how to make cement themselves, they would have needed every bit of some seriously large natural lime deposits to build this place.”

“Look over there.” Kiana offered the binoculars to Rey.

He immediately gasped, “Oh my.”

Where the river escaped the canyon the rapids proved to be manufactured. The water backed up above them and flowed out into a series of elevated canals. Aqueducts. Bringing the clean water to the far reaches of the city. Through the riotous architecture Kiana hadn’t a hope of following the canals along their path, but now that her eyes were primed to look for it she could see the telltale shimmer of moving water peeking out across the city. Mawa looked before handing the binoculars back.

Kiana began looking around for a path through this jungle-laden maze. The larger avenues were a natural place to start. She glassed up and down a couple before they got lost in tangles of larger structures. On the third, her blood ran cold. Koa. A lot of them.

They walked down one of the avenues with a shining canal in the middle, at least a dozen of them. Several adults, juveniles of various sizes all traveling together. She looked down their path and in the far distance could just make out some faint movement that could only be more of the creatures. And they led ali’i. Led them like pack animals on ropes. Despite the ali’i’s tremendous size the koa seemed to keep them docile, docile and alive for a purpose Kiana didn’t care to imagine.

“What do you make of this Doctor?” She asked, handing the binoculars back to Mawa.

“Fascinating…” The doctor whispered, awestruck, after several minutes of following the creatures. “To my eyes I’d almost say they were in the process of domesticating those larger beasts.”

“Or redomesticating.” Rey offered, squinting into the distance, barely able to make out the moving forms.

“Indeed.” Mawa agreed, “Given the scale of this settlement I think domesticated agriculture is quite likely.”

“So what, are they like the last survivors after the collapse of the city?” Kiana puzzled.

“Given what we’ve seen so far, I’d bet they’re the first to return.” Mawa conjectured, not taking her eyes off the pack. “Clearly these creatures are abundantly comfortable and capable in the jungle. It would only make sense for a larger pack like this to all work together on something like domestic agriculture. And it seems to me that’s what this city was built for.”

“How do you mean Doctor?” Rey asked. “Do you think they raised the ali’i for food?”

“Ate them. Milked them in some fashion. Forced them to cultivate edible flora. Maybe all of the above.” Mawa’s gentle, foreign accent softened the words that still sent chills down Kiana’s spine. “Either way a great deal of these structures are much bigger than those we saw in the other settlements. My guess is cement came downriver, and food went back up. But this is where they were able to raise enough food to establish themselves.” She gasped. “Ah look, yes that makes sense.”

Kiana looked back through the glass. The pack had stopped and were cajoling the ali’i into the entrance of one of the larger, mounding structures. She felt sick. The two species were so alike. To her eyes it was humans farming gorillas. One species benefited from a mild increase in planning, coordination, and intelligence, enough to keep their cousins docile enough to use for food. The ali’i may be the chiefs out in the forest on their own, but they were not built for a place like this. Too graceful, too gentle, too much of the jungle to fend for their own interests once they were shackled and shuffled into holding pens. Kiana fought the tears in her eyes but they rolled down all the same, stinging with the impurities of alien air.

“How could they do that?” She sniffed quietly. “To their own cousins?”

“Humans have done the same and some worse unfortunately Miss Hano.” Mawa’s comforting tone unfit for her discomforting words. “Nature is full of inter-genus and interspecific predation, we just may have stumbled upon a society built upon it.”

Kiana steeled herself, “We need to get off this ridge before we lose the light.” she declared flatly. She’d have plenty of time to reconcile herself to the realities of what she saw later, for now she needed to focus on the job at hand.

Night caught them on the edge of the city. Too wary of what lurked within to venture the twisting streets, too hemmed in by the sheer walls that surrounded to go anywhere else. Kiana led their exhausted troop around the outermost structures where she could, and silently through the crooked streets where she couldn’t find a path around. The wan light of the moons climbing into the sky provided just enough light to turn the flank of every building into a shifting nightmare reaching out to snag them. They crept through the ruined streets with soundless steps. Kiana was sure it wouldn’t be enough. The koa were predators who built these twisting alleys for themselves. Every hit of an inhaler was a gunshot, announcing their progress to creatures miles away. Every rustle of overhanging foliage, a dinner bell. Above them the structures reached up into the dim moonlight like blunt teeth. Their sloping walls cut into the cold stars above. The jungle was silent here, no thrum of life, no song to sing to Kiana’s heart.

As the moons marched across the sky they made their slow progress through the city out towards the sea until they met an impenetrable wall of structure, at least twenty meters high spanning from the mountain flank they had no hope of climbing on one side out into the heart of the city as far as they could see on the other. Before them an arch of pure black provided the only path forward they could see. Every cell of her body rejected the imperative to step into the strange darkness. But her mind knew there was no choice, unscalable mountains surrounded behind, koa stalked the city that lay to the left. They needed to find their way through the outskirts and to the sea.

“No sense in delaying it Kiana.” Rey was resolute, mouth set firm, eyes twinkling in the moonlight as he scanned around for movement.

Kiana wrapped the lantern in as much cloth as she could pull out of her pack leaving only a peephole visible. If she had to risk giving them away with the light she was determined to do whatever she could to minimize it. With a deep breath she plunged into the black depths of the structure with the brave doctors silently on her heels.

Stepping inside the massive structure was to walk the paths of an alien mind. The little pinprick of lantern light meagerly illuminated cavernous, tiered chambers divided into sections with high walkways. All of it rendered exactingly out of the same smooth gray concrete. In the first several rooms shade-tolerant plants grew in tangles, but soon they passed out of the reach of any daylight and they were left in a world of stone and water. The path led down and down, the tiers that stepped down from the walkway plunged into black water that glimmered back in the lantern light. All was still, except for the drips of water that would in time haul even this hulking behemoth back into the sea. On the far walls other pathways twisted higher and higher accessing a hive of little alcoves. Apartments.

“I’ll bet those recesses are about the same size as the room we hid in with Mr. Yu.” Dr. Rey whispered, “It appears that’s a comfortable size for these creatures, although it seems to mean they lived rather communally here in these big central areas.”

Mawa made to respond, before Kiana cut her off with a glare. They were breathing too loudly for her liking, let alone speaking. Rey was right though, even the little they could see by the thin lantern light spoke of a society of incredible depth, cooperation, and sophistication. In several corners they saw rotting wood that certainly had been hewn into some more useful shape in an age now past. In another Fragments of pottery lay in a broken heap.

Mawa gasped. “Is that?!”

Kiana stopped her again with a brusque nod. She understood the doctor’s excitement but these discoveries only counted if they made it out.

After wandering the stony halls for an age of darkness, they came upon a little runnel of moving water. It bubbled happily down a carved channel that followed their pathway before plunging down into some deeper, unseen cavern. Plumbing. They turned upstream and followed as the path became a ramp that ascended upwards towards what they could only pray was escape. Half a dozen times as they climbed the channel split off, channeling the fresh water into the far reaches of the edifice. Kiana, unrelenting, followed it only upstream knowing their best shot at a way out was where this water was coming in.

It came on dreamlike in its suddenness. One second they were wandering another dark chamber, the next a wide flat stream was shining in the moonlight out a door to their right. The aqueduct. Without realizing, they’d wandered under the aqueduct they’d seen from the ridge. When she saw it through the binoculars Kiana assumed the structure would be like aqueducts from history books, impressive structures sure, but merely conveyances for water. This was something else, the scale of everything she’d seen from the ridge shifted and a shiver ran through her. How much more of the city lies buried under the ground? She wondered but her mind couldn’t begin to comprehend. If the city looked like it could hold tens of thousands before, now hundreds seemed much more likely. Maybe millions.

They followed the wide, easy path along the top of the aqueduct to where they could see the river in the far distance. There were miles yet to go but Kiana couldn’t help but feel they’d passed the crux. Navigating along the river to the sea couldn’t present the harrowing challenge that wandering through an alien crypt had, even as the roaring of the rapids grew and grew. Then a shadow detached from the wall.

Just steps ahead the prow of the aqueduct jutted out into the river as it escaped the canyon. The ancient dam that held the river and diverted a usable flow into the city was nothing more than an impenetrable hunk that hadn’t yet been washed out to sea. But it still did its job. The river backed up, gaining height until it tumbled over the eroded wall in a rushing torrent.

Behind them, the shadow slid off a wall of the aqueduct and resolved into the lithe form for a stalking koa. The creature, snakelike, slid up onto its back legs until it stood a head higher than any of them. No rocks, no clubs, no spears, no lassos. Still the creature was the most beautifully terrifying being Kiana had ever seen. Limbs rippled in the dim light, four sets of digits flexed and bent at the end of four long arms, relaxed but ready to pounce with no notice. She turned around and ushered the doctors behind her as they all crouched at defensive ready. Time tick tock ticked slower and slower until it crawled by with adrenaline clarity. Every graceful movement of the creature flowed through the moonlight, every heartbeat dragged for a year and a day.

Kiana untied the cloth she’d bound around the lantern, as they backed slowly away from the creature out onto the jagged precipice that diverted water into the aqueduct. The roar of the rapids dwindled away, as did the sting of ammonia in her eyes, until all Kiana could see was the focused set of dark alien eyes that followed her every move. She switched on the lantern and shone it at the creature. A lightning-fast twitch coursed through its supple muscles at the unexpected light, but that was all, it looked on, analyzing what to do next with the strange beings that had come to its world. In the light, eyes gleamed a dark amber red with cavernous pupils drinking in every photon that waved in front of them.

“Doctors, on me.” Kiana hissed.

In one powerful move she hurled the lantern at the creature catching it just below the mouth with a shattering thud. The koa pierced the night with a screaming yowl that bored through each of their minds and lodged its way into their souls. But Kiana didn’t wait to see what happened next. Sprinting, she grabbed the doctors and threw all three of them headlong into the angry white torrent that awaited below.

Kiana was ready this time, she hadn’t come this far for the river to get her now. She hit the water with lungs full of air and a vicious grip on each of her companions’ collars. Through the cascade they tumbled, limbs jolting in every direction, all sense of up or down utterly shattered. Still Kiana held her breath, and held her friends, and when she felt something solid she kicked off it towards what she hoped would be calmer waters.

They surfaced after falling for an eternity through the torrent into the placid waters below the dam. There was no sign of the creature they could see up on the aqueduct. Rey and Mawa were dazed but conscious, and she slipped out of the pack that was now threatening to drag her down into the dark waters. The trio floated downriver in exhausted silence for hours, never daring to take their eyes off the shore for fear that more shadows would detach and hunt them down here where there was no hope of escape.

Just as the sky was beginning to glow with the first traces of light, a new sound reached Kiana’s ears. A sound of home. A sound she’d never been so glad to hear. Crashing waves. The river guttered out in a wide stony delta where it met the sea. They hauled themselves to the far shore where sand reached up into the impenetrable jungle. There, atop a rolling dune, they looked out at salvation. Handsome, long waves broke along the curving coast, peeling into a brilliant white froth. In the distance, out on the sand of the wide beach, patiently waited their lander, their deliverance.

A mayday signal shot out of the lander and up to the worried minds of the Fortune just as predawn light shifted from azure to lilac. Kiana and the two doctors collapsed, spent, into the sand on the far side of the lander looking out at the marching lines of waves. If they dug deep enough the sand was still a little warm even all through the night. The gentle warmth crept into their fingers and toes as they looked out at the lightening sea. Nothing had ever felt so comforting. Kiana burst out in a fit of giddy, exhausted, relieved, overjoyed laughter and soon all three were rolling in the sand, tears streaming down their cheeks. Emotions, fear, relief all spilling over into cleansing catharsis.

After a time Kiana finally regained herself, and looked out at the waves. “It’s so much like home, but it can never be, can it?” she sighed.

Dr. Rey smiled softly, wondering eyes twinkling in the soft glow of dawn. “Oh, I wouldn’t say that Kiana. I think you’ll come to love it just as well in time.”

“Doctor…after all we’ve seen, how can you still believe that?”

“All I’ve seen,” he chuckled, “Is a troop of humans, cocky as always, stumble onto a dangerous new world wildly unprepared. That’s our doing, not the world’s. Looking back on our preparations now it all seems so woefully inadequate, but that’s not us at our best. At our best we can make a home here, and even find a way to live with the koa.”

“We can,” Dr. Mawa agreed. “But should we?”

Kiana was unsure if they truly could given the ordeal she’d just survived, and was less sure that they should.

Mawa went on softly, picking up the warm sand and pouring it into a little hill. “We have clearly arrived at a very interesting time in these species’ histories. Maybe they’re on their way to full collapse and extinction, but given what I’ve seen I’d guess that they’re more on the road to recovery.” Her tongue picked its way carefully around her words, trying to express the fire of ideas that hid behind her focused eyes. “We could easily come and wipe them out, maybe we even would inadvertently, but even if we set up a colony somewhere wholly uninhabited I don’t see a way in which our presence wouldn’t alter the course of these species’ paths.” She sighed, squashing her little castle. “It is their planet after all.”

“Another possibility, Doctor.” Rey drawled with an impish smile. “Perhaps growth and collapse is the normal state of affairs for these creatures. Pretty incredible timing to have caught them at this point, unless it has happened before, wouldn’t you say?” Mawa offered no rebuttal but turned to stirring swirls in front of her crossed legs, so Rey went on. “Clearly these beings are capable of becoming master masons, but their civilization hit some stopping point, just a wild guess but we haven’t seen any use of fire or metallurgy. Maybe that really is a crucial stepping stone for intelligent life. With that limit on technology, they may not ever be able to understand microbiology, with a city full of two closely related species. It could have been a hotbed for novel diseases.”

Mawa nodded solemnly. “In that case we could be their only chance to take the next step. We’d be obliged to stay. There are a lot of ifs though.”

“Indeed,” Rey smiled. “A whole heap to discover.”

Kiana was aghast, “I think you two are skipping the part where they built a society by raising their cousins like cattle.”

“You know jungle cats fairly well don’t you Kiana?” Dr. Mawa asked pointedly. “Would you judge a jaguar for hunting a panther to reduce competition?”

“Well no, but they’re just animals. The koa built fucking Rome, they’re clearly something else.”

“Does the ability to sculpt concrete make them moral actors?” The gentle zoologist prodded. “Are they guilty where jaguars are not?”

“I…I don’t know.” What had seemed quite clear a moment ago was now a muddy mess in her mind.

“Rome was built with plenty of human blood. One thing I’ve learned studying other creatures throughout my life, is to never assume they are any more, or any less, like people than they appear. If human morality is indeed some sort of universal, maybe it is our role to help them find a new way to live. If nothing else, Dr. Rey presents a strong hypothesis that keeping the ali’i like they do may actively be holding them back.”

“The big question I reckon.” Rey grinned with his friendly southland drawl. “Is will we find a way to ask them what they want before it’s too late?”

Kiana pushed her hands deep into the sand letting the warmth crawl up her battered arms, as her mind swirled with exhaustion and life’s deepest questions. Above the crashing sea the sky lightened to a soft pink as the sun crested the peaks of the crater behind them. Out in the heavens three new stars appeared far out to sea. Rescue. More landers, more humans, more ideas, more mouths to feed. Kiana wasn’t sure what to make of the koa, or the ali’i, or any of it. But as she dug her hands into sand, she knew she would spend her life protecting this place just like home.

The universe had answered one of the oldest questions but asked a new one of far more importance. You’re not alone. Now what?