Chapter One: Sarah Has A Bad Day

        Sarah slotted her keycard into the company maker and scowled as a glowing red rectangle popped up onto her HUD.

         Script error. Please report to your supervisor.

         Sarah kicked the maker. The rectangular machine had been kicked a great many times in its long and storied history aboard the NovaDyne Survey Ship A1-201. It had been kicked when, two weeks ago, a bug had crept into its coffee programs and it had started making cups that had the ratio of coffee to sugar reversed, meaning people had sludgy masses of granulated sugar to drink. It had been kicked again, yesterday, when the Chief of Security had set it to making a new load of hyper-dense hollow point expander bullets for his favorite rifle and it had instead spat out several dozen copies of a romance novel from the 21 st  century with the smutty parts behind paywalls.

        And it was being kicked now, because Dr. Sarah Kappel was not about to put on a biohazard suit to start hacking her way through an alien jungle without her morning shot of coffee. The machine, being a heavy brick of fullerenes and ominous black glass, responded to her kick by almost breaking her toe. Sarah scowled, swore under her breath, then slotted her keycard back into the side of the Maker. This time, her HUD flared bright red and an alarm trill loud enough to make her jaw ache buzzed through her skull.

         Repeated attempts to insert fraudulent script will be registered as a C-crime and result in a 5% fine of any affiliate pay stubs.

         “Oh come the fuck on!” Sarah snarled.

        “Dr. Kappel.”

        Sarah spun around. The company maker was set in the central room of A1-201, which meant that the whole place was under observation at all times from someone. Most of the time, it was members of the survey science team, or the security staff. Working drones, like her. People who didn’t give a flying fuck what you were doing so long as whatever you were doing didn’t get in their way. But maybe twenty percent of the time, there was someone from management. And if there was anything more terrifying than a middle managers with a tiny bit of bureaucratic power, Sarah didn’t know if they existed.

        MinTech Craid was one of the worst middle  managers that she had ever worked under. He was about six feet tall, with the spindly build and Caucasian features of someone from the Belt. His parents had been Enclavers who had fled the Troubles with their money and their connections, and they had raised whole broods of kids away from the child taxes and the ecoprogrammes that Sarah’s parents had needed to deal with. This, combined with the most expensive education program in the solar system, produced people who were utterly convinced of two things.

        The first: Any kind of regulation of a capitalist system was essentially slavery.

        The second: Doing anything that your boss didn’t like was worthy of being spaced.

        Sarah gritted her teeth as Craid clasped his hands before his black clad belly – he was dressed in one of those skintight suits that only someone who was genefixed could get away with. “Damaging company property, especially when we’re thirty nine light years from Earth, is against regs.”

        “Sorry, uh, sir,” Sarah said, nodding. “I just need my coffee and, um, my card...” She tugged the card free.

        Craid stepped forward. He took the card from Sarah’s fingers before her brain even registered the mistake she had made. “This card is out of date,” he said, frowning as he waggled the card at her.

        “W-Well, I, I wasn’t...informed...that...we need a new one, uh, so...” Sarah trailed off.

        “An out of date card is also against regulations,” Craid said, pursing his lips slightly. “Dr. Kappel...” He smiled a sickly little smile. “How long have you needed to update your card?”

        “Uh,” she said. “Um, like, I think a week. I was saving up to buy the newest card from the company store.”

        “Ah,” Craid said. “So you knew  that you were using an out of date card?” he asked, narrowing his eyes at her.

        Sarah’s gut knotted. “W-What? I...ye, er, n-no, uh-” She stammered.

        “I think you’re trying to get one past me, Dr. Kappel,” Craid said, quietly, twirling the card between his fingers in an effortless display of manual dexterity. “I think you knew that you needed to update your card and were hoping that you could ignore the requirements – security requirements. Requirements put in place for your safety.”

        “No, sir!” Sarah said, shaking her head. “I...I’m just...I’ll get a new card. Right now.”

        “See that you do,” Craid said.

        He turned and he left.

        Sarah imagined throwing him into one of the biopits they had found last week. The ones full of digestive acid. Instead, she breathed in, closed her eyes, and tried to just focus on what she needed to do next to keep her job and get that raise. The way her budgets were jiggered right now, if she didn’t get the raise, she’d need to sell the next year of her contract at a cut-rate to get the funds she’d need to survive to that next year. But if she got the raise, she’d be able to retain her contract and then maybe find a job with an Earth based company, not NovaDyne. And if she got that, she might actually see her frigging parents more than once every year. But to get that raise, she needed to get good marks. To get good marks, she had to...get that card.

        Sarah was using her HUD to do the math on her budget as she walked through the corridors of the scout ship to the corporate store. The Maker was used far more than the store – since the store only sold HD objects. Stuff like new programs, HUD updates...and keycards. Since she was trying to both use the internal map and the internal calculator, Sarah nearly walked into a wall twice and did run into Dr. Bowers from biotech. He was currently in his civilian clothes and was reading from a tablet – and when the two of them bashed together, Sarah snapped her head to the side, her HUD winking off.

        Belatedly, the proximity alert chimed in her head.

        “Little late!” she groaned.

        Dr. Bowers laughed, picking his tablet up hurriedly. “Those things never work, huh?”

        Sarah blushed. She was glad Dr. Bowers didn’t look ticked off. He was, like her, from the slines. But he showed it a bit more overtly than she did. She was just brown skinned and short from a malnourished childhood. He had a huge hairlip that split his mouth jaggedly. It had been crudely repaired by a slinedoc so it wouldn’t get infected, but that didn’t make him any prettier, or make his speech any less carefully modulated. “I mean, I hear the upgraded proximity programs are a lot better, but, heh, I’m not made of...script...” She trailed off.

         Don’t look at his hairlip. Don’t look at his hairlip. Don’t look at his hairlip.

         She looked at his hairlip as Dr. Bowers said: “You got any more readings on the biopits?”

        “No, no, no, I was going to take two of the drones to check them,” she said, shaking her head. “Er. Uh. First. I was going to get a new card. Since, um, the maker isn’t accepting my old card anymore.”

        “Yeah, they finally updated it,” Bowers said, shaking his head. “And broke half the maker routines.” His tablet chimed. “Oh, the DNA on the xenos just came through. Gotta get to the germ lab. See you later, Sarah.”

        “Later!” Sarah waved after him.

        When she came to the company store, she had jiggered her budget. She would still be on track, assuming she got her raise, if she just cut out her weekly ice cream. That was okay. She needed to lose weight anyway. She could survive on rice for a few months without treats. Yeah. She could do this. She rubbed her hands together as the metal door hissed open and she stepped up to the counter on the company store. The woman who stood behind the counter looked bored out of her skull. Beyond ensuring that the HD items in the store were printed from the store’s maker, then checking to make sure they worked, she had nearly nothing to do on the ship. Sarah stepped up to the desk and smiled at her. “Hey,” she said.

        The woman glanced at her, then said – in a bored drone: “Welcome to the NovaDyne company store, your one stop shopping spot for all hard digital items. We accept universal credits and company scrip, though any purchases with UC will have a 10% surcharge.”

        “I need one of the new keycards,” Sarah said.

        “That’ll be five hundred Novabucks,” the woman said, her voice still bored.

        Sarah winced inwardly. She slotted her keycard into the desk, which chirruped. For a horrifying second, she thought the desk was going to reject her card. But after grumbling quietly, her HUD flashed up a green rectangle as the desk registered the money exchange. The large bar that represented her scrip whirred down to a painfully small number. Sarah’s eyebrow jumped as she nearly winced physically. The bored woman walked over to the maker, which started to whirr and grumble. It chimed a moment later, then opened to reveal a card that looked a bit like Sarah’s old card – save that it had a black edge, rather than a gray one.

        The woman held out the card. “Thank you for shopping at the company store,” she said. “You’ve earned two silver prize boxes, which can be redeemed at your quarters at any time for a five Novabuck fee.”

        Her HUD chimed and the silver boxes seemed to float in the air around Sarah. She smiled thinly.

        When she came back to the maker, she realized she didn’t have enough scrip left to buy coffee.

***

        Trappist-1a was the closest planet to Trappist-1 proper. The many planets of the Trappist solar system had been detected centuries ago, but it wasn’t until the invention of the Hypertropic Plane Shift Drive before humanity – or, more accurately, the corporations – could reach out and begin to survey the planets of the solar system for exploitation. There had been a fierce bidding war – then a fierce literal war in orbit around Trappist-1c – before the planet rights had been shaken out.

        NovaDyne had lost both wars and ended up with the least appealing of the earth-like worlds: Trappist-1a. Dominated by a vast jungle and shrouded by an atmosphere that was nearly 90% pollen by weight (this was only a mild exaggeration on Sarah’s part), Trappist-1a would need massive terraforming before it would ever be inhabitable by humans without space suits. Then they landed on it and discovered that the native fauna included a race of horse sized creatures with claws sharp enough to put a serious dent in tank armor, a horizontal leap of five meters and a voracious taste for anything made of carbon. They had taken to human beings like human beings had taken to chocolate, and had required three platoons of corpsec troopers to secure the landing site.

        But under the jungle, the planet had enough heavy metals, radioactives and refinable organics (mostly in the happy petrochemical family of products) that the company board had decided to shift from survey to exploitation mode immediately. For Sarah, that meant that her project of trying to understand how the acidic biopits she had discovered interacted with the less hostile fauna and flora of the planet had been basically shelved. Most of the team was instead working on creating an omnieffective pathogen to eradicate anything more complex than a monocular life form. Once the ecosystem was so much mulch, the heavy extraction could begin.

        In previous decades, NovaDyne had preferred to use asteroids for this kind of thing. But a side effect of losing the shooting war with StarCon meant that they had ceded all heavy lifting and suborbital rights to the larger, more muscular company. Any attempt to move an asteroid would lead to StarCon taking the war to Earth and, well…

        NovaDyne didn’t want that.

        Sarah grumbled under her breath as she wriggled into her biohazard suit. The egg shaped, stubby legged, tentacle limbed suit was somewhere between a suit and a vehicle. There was no helmet, no real leg or arm holes. Instead, she would hook her HUD to it while her body remained cocooned in the center of the suit. This had been a hasty modification when they realized that the silvery trees produced enough radio interference to jam up communications past a certain distance – so no long distance teleoperation. Yet another annoyance for her. She closed her eyes in the slightly comfortable caress of the heavy suit’s internal restraints, then focused. Her HUD connected her to the computer and suddenly, she was looking through the belly cameras. She hefted the writhing tentacle arms, wriggling them around. Once she was sure that she could remember how to use them, she sent a ping to C&C.

        [Kappel]: This is Sarah, reporting in. Hey C&C.

         [C&C]: Hey Sarah. You’re...hey, I thought the biopit survey was canned.

         [Kappel]: (sigh) yeah, they are. But I’m taking genetic samples for the omniphage. Can I get two defense drones. None of the chompies try and stop us from getting close, but…

         [C&C]: One sec. Okay, uh, we have one drone earmarked for you.

         [Kappel]: One?!

         [C&C]: Sorry, Sarah. You want to scrub the mish?

         [Kappel]: And get undertime demerits? No thanks. It’ll be fine. I’ll be fine!

         [C&C]: Okay Sarah, watch your ass out there.

        Sarah made sure that she wasn’t transmitting as she started to swear under her breath again. While her body wasn’t doing any of the actual work, she started to feel achy after only a few minutes of making her biohazard suit stomp forward and out of the hanger. Once she was out of the pristine metal of the hanger and down the gangplank, she got a camera full of the area immediately outside of the scout ship. Here, jungle had stomped flat under the stomping of dozens of heavy feet and then crushed again by the heavy tractor treads from the heavy as haulers when the first mineral results had come in. Flamers had bitten chunks out of the nearby forest, and a turret fence had been put up on hard, steel poles. Several security drones were ambling around the perimeter. They looked like dogs. Greyhounds, to be specific, save that they had machine guns on their shoulders. Those guns swiveled around and...well, the combination of the shape and the color always made Sarah think of that mascot from EduTech. Uh, Scooter the Solver?

        Scooter but packing heat.

        One of them peeled off from the edge of the perimeter and moved to lope behind her. She resisted the urge to pet the things head and instead focused on setting her suit to stomping forward along the course she had followed before. Passing between two turrets, she felt a prickling, tingling sensation riding along her back. From here on out, she was in the jungle. She stomped past the flamer tracks, then was between the trees proper. The trees didn’t look like Earth trees. They were bulbous and tall, narrow at the top, and their leaves and branches were clustered near the very tippy top. This made them top heavy and produced an odd swaying motion as the wind blew through them. The foliage along the ground was thick and veined and were covered in thorns that would have been deadly dangerous, if she hadn’t been in a heavily armored egg.

        Sarah took the walk to review what she had learned on previous expeditions. She was here to get genetic samples, that didn’t mean she couldn’t also do some surveying. Right? She might even get merits for it! Right? The biopits were...well, they were odd. Something had dug them – but she hadn’t found any animal or plant that might have done it. They were uniformly deep, about three meters each, and the bottom was filled with a circular lifeform that had, according to her initial studies, a physical structure similar to a Venus fly trap. Once you got past the very basic morphological similarities, though, everrrrrrrything went completely batshit.

        For one thing?

        Rather than digestive fluids, it had a fluid that seemed to be a general purpose anesthetic. She had done tests and saw it would work on a worrying effectiveness on human beings. Now, this wasn’t that odd, since, well, making something not move was a great first step on the road to eating it. She hadn’t identified how it would do that yet, since she had also done some ultrasounds of the terrain and saw that thick, fibrous clumps of root like structures spread through the ground around the pits. They led to other plants which she had originally thought were independent flowers.

        Were they providing photosynthesis?

        Camouflage?

        Symbiotes?

        Parasites?

        She had no idea.

        And now she never would. Once the omniphage – she supposed they most have settled on the exact vector for the mulcher – was released into the planet’s equivalent to the Gulf Stream, the biopits would be so much undifferentiated carbon slurry. She sighed in physical space and felt the warm heat of it against her face, even as her HUD showed her the trees parting and the first biopit clearing. She stomped up to stand near the pit and focused to extend the tentacle to the left of her hazard suit. The tip of the tentacle had a very tiny, extremely locked down maker. It could just about make any kind of scientific tool that NovaDyne had access too, though using it frivolously could rack up demerits.

        That was the last thing she needed right now.

        So, she formatted it into a sample taker with a thought and waited for the nanoscopic machines to do their work, constructing the sample taker from the brick of carbon in the belly of her hazard suit. As she waited and tried to ignore the worrying smell of ozone and the crackling heat that always came when the tentacle’s maker got to work, Sarah took a moment to look at the jungle. And for just a moment, she felt her heart beginning to break. Her grandparents had been from Brazil, before they had become changefugees and rushed northward in the Troubles. Somewhere along the way, they’d settled into the sline quarters of the northern megacities and acquired a Germanic surname, a penchant for swearing in Farsi, and new corporate citizenship from EduTech.

        But they’d never lost the stories of those last days before the Dieback. They told them to a young Sarah.

        Deep in her bones, she loved the biological world. Billions of years and billions of moments of presapient decision making crafted an ecosystem. While each individual actor in such a system carried amazingly little weight, the totality of their existence created something beyond marvelous. She could have studied Trappist-1a’s ecosystem and its interrelationships for centuries and would still be finding new, and amazing interactions. As it was, seeing the very tip of the trashberg felt painful.

        But…

        She needed that raise.

        She needed that job on Earth. If she got a job on Earth, she could see her parents again. Sarah sighed, a longing feeling stirring in her gut at the memory of Dad’s cooking, or Mom’s block wide parties, where the slines could get together and see what fun they could have without buying a single thing from the corporate stores. Citizenship could be ignored in the sline sectors, if you didn’t mind relying entirely on black market and universal credit. For at least a little bit. And...maybe she could  meet  someone.

        One of the problems with crewing on a survey ship was that the crews  changed  every few months, when they returned from distant solar systems with new data and new product, or when people quit the corporation and bought new citizenship. That, combined with the fact that she was a chubby dork  kind  of made it a little tricky to actually get a frigging date. But if she was back on Earth, she’d not only have a stable population to meet, but also a significantly  larger  one. One that would maybe include someone who’d  like  a chubby dork? Eh? Eh!

        Okay, she felt like a total moron for even thinking that. So, uh, instead of that, she could get put into one of the enclave projects. That thought hit her with nearly the same nostalgic force as thinking of her parents’ house. Imagine getting to rebuild the Earth’s ecosystem in those enclosed enclaves? The idea was that once the enclaves had proved they could reconstitute an ecosystem, they’d begin to spread them outwards. This would lower the price eventually to the point where even slines could get in!

        “A rising tide lifts all boats, right?” she muttered. “All I need-”

        Her eyes stopped their slow scanning of the jungle environments as she realized that the sleek, dark shape that had been concealed by her hazard suit’s shadow was now growing closer with a slow, predatory grace. Sarah froze. Her eyes widened and her mouth went dry as she realized it was one of the very aggressive alien predators. Up close, it was even scarier than it looked in the security briefing holograms. It was, after all, the size of a fucking horse. It’s skin was purple and covered with thick, armored slabs of chitinous plates. It had huge, sharp claws that thrust from its forelegs, like the talons of the velociraptor, but...you know. They had four each. Its muzzle was narrow and triangular and had a pair of curved tusks that thrust out to either side like the protective grid of a footballer’s helmet, angling inwards and tipped with gleaming beads of acidic venom.

        Her proximity alert chimed as its nose bumped against the belly of her hazard suit.

        [Kappel]: C&C. Come in.

         Nothing.

        Sarah gulped.

        Her security bot finally realized something was going on and turned its angular body around to bring the heavy machine guns to bear. Both started to hammer . Even inside of the hazard suit, the noise was overwhelming. Sarah had never heard anything so loud – her ears rang and she wished she could clap her hands over them. Instead, she simply had to grit her teeth and step back and away from the xeno as it exploded like an overripe melon being struck with a hammer, the armor plates peeling apart and the guts bursting against her camera. She clapped her tentacles against the body of her suit, crying out as if she had been the one splattered. “Ugh, ugh, ugh, guh!” She stepped backwards and stumbled into something that suddenly shifted and moved aside. The proximity alert chimed again – then again and again – and she heard the machine guns start for a stuttering moment before a squealing, screeching sound filled her ears. She wiped the last bit of the cameras off and saw that the security bot was being torn limb from limb by three of the bitey xenos.

        They had taken advantage, by pure animal instinct, of the bot’s distraction to leap onto its back. Their claws skittered along armor plating, leaving behind weals of silvery metal as they gouged chunks free. But then their claws found the weak points and started to jab in, severing electrical wires, slicing through pneumatic cables, even tearing out tufts of fibrous synthetic muscle. One had even clamped its jaws around the barrel of a machine gun and was levering it up and away, so that its stuttering gunfire shot into the air harmlessly.

        Almost like it... knew.

         Sarah turned and sprinted away. Well. Waddled.

        It felt like one of those nightmares, where something is chasing you, and never quite manages to catch up, but you never quite manage to get away. For Sarah, those dreams had always been set inside the sewer sections right underneath her home – recalling the time she had fallen through some rusting grating plates and dropped into a river of gray water. If someone hadn’t heard her screaming and rescued her, she’d have been washed right into the reprocessing center. Ever after, her nightmares had been narrow corridors and hideous stinks.

        Well.

        Now her nightmares would be jungles. Jungles and growling beasts that flanked her to the left and to the right, that rushed forward and made her veer hastily away to avoid their claws. Assuming, of course, she ever had nightmares in the future. Sarah wanted to vomit, but instead, she clenched her jaw, kept plodding forward, and kept frantically trying to signal C&C. But the radar jamming trees kept filling her ears with a hideous static. And through the panic, a cold, analytic part of her mind was tapping its fingers on a table and asking: What’s taking them so long? Get this over with.

         “Shut up shut up shut-” She stumbled through a set of trees and gaped.

        She was standing before a mountain. That was the first insane thought that bubbled through her head. But under the dull red light of Trappist 1a’s star – which loomed overhead, dominating the sky with its cold closeness - the thing she was looking at resolved into an animal. A massive animal. It had six trunk-like legs, each one as big around as her hazard suit’s entire frame, and they reached up towards a body that was somewhere between a beetle and an elephant. It had two huge wings that fanned to either side, iridescent and glowing with brilliant red veins. They looked pathetically small compared to its bulk, and the shape of the body was all wrong for fling. Sarah, normally, would have been fascinated, wondering at the evolutionary track that had produced it, wondering at the biological needs those wings filled.

        Instead, she was slightly more focused on the massive, hinged tusks that were mounted on either side of the perpendicular, narrow head. Six eyes sat in the center point of those tusks, protected by the curved bone, which sharpened to two wicked points. The tusks fanned outwards as the three smaller xenos that had been hounding her sprang forward and smashed into her back. She fell onto her hazard suit’s knees and nearly rolled forward onto the egg shaped belly.

        “Oh no no no no!” she shouted.

        The tusks swung forward, clapping shut, so that the two points crashed into either side of the hazard suit. Metal squealed and alarms blared and her HUD dropped her connection with a spray of static. She felt a moment of utter disorientation – and then she was sprawled on purple grass. Her face prickled and her eyes widened as she sucked in a startled gasp. Immediately, she tasted alien scents. Sickly sweet decay. The thick musk of the animals around her. And the pollen. Oh. Yeah. The pollen. Her throat tightened up and her nose suddenly closed. Her face went puffy as she clutched at her throat, her brain sending up panicking signals: You cannot breathe!

         Her HUD was just as helpful, filling her vision with: Warning! Anaphylactic Shock. Warning!

         She wheezed. Then the three animals to either side of her rushed forward. Their jaws closed around her arms. Their teeth didn’t sink in, though. Instead, they gently lifted her to her feet. Their breath was warm against her wrists and she shuddered as they started to walk forward. She put foot ahead of foot, her throat still tight and closed. Her eyes were half closed, and around the gathering darkness, she saw them pushing her towards the biopits.

        In the muzzy, half awareness of the moment, a thought rushed through her head: Huh. They’re not animals. They’re not animals at all.

         They proved it by pushing her to her knees before the pit. One put a claw on the edge of her neck, the hard bone rasping against her skin. Sarah sank forward, her face mashing against the grass as her lungs screamed for air – and then she tried to make a noise of protest as the claw hooked on her undersuit and then started to rip down. What had torn metal was more than good enough against cheap maker printed cloth – and her undersuit came apart like she was a fruit, being peeled by an uncaring god. Noses bumped against her skin, pushing at the tatters of her clothes. Sarah made weak whimpering sounds as she was rolled away from the two halves of her undersuit.

        She was utterly naked under an alien sky, sprawled right next to a biopit.

        The huge beast that had ripped open her hazard suit looked down at her with six, pitiless eyes, while the three smaller xenos stood around her, watching her. She reached out, towards the dull glow. As her vision went blacker and blacker, the glow of Trappist looked more and more like the warm yellow light of her home sun, as seen through the haze of pollution that tended to cluster over the sline sector. Her lungs were still screaming fitfully for air, and she felt the horrible, muffling sensation of closure every time she tried to choke something in or out past the puffiness that filled her. "

         I...guess I...always wanted to know what the biopits did…

         The xenos were waiting. Watching. She swore she could feel them telling her she had to take the next leap.

        Weakly, Sarah pushed against the ground.

        Rolled.

        Fell.

        The aliens stood around the biopit for a long moment. Crackling radio transmissions – barely heard over the distant cree cree cree of insects that filled the jungle – escaped from the ruined hulk of the hazard suit: “Dr. Kappel? Dr. Kappel, do you read us? We received a fragment...” Static. “Dr. Kappel?” Static. There was no chance for another transmission. The sleek xenos instead crawled onto the hazard suit and began to tear out the radio. Once it was silenced, they systemically began to rip chunks off the hazard suit while the biggest xeno scraped out holes in the dirt with a massive foot.

        Soon, the suit’s fragments – and the fragments of the droid, abandoned almost two miles back – were buried. Then, stolidly, the xenos walked into the pit, tumbling head first in without fear or hesitation, to be consumed. Turned into raw material for the great project.

        And the jungle was silent again.