Departure preparations · Quarry Terrace
What the Chair Could Fix
Bob had survived the thing beneath the hull. Surviving it had put him in a chair. The Anne Bonny's autodoc held him in its patient geometry while the rest of the crew worked around the absence of their mechanic. Every task outside the treatment space still belonged to a ship on an unfamiliar world; inside it, the immediate task was simpler and slower. Bob had to recover.
The machine could treat what had happened to him. It could not make the time disappear. Rest would restore the margin that had kept him alive through the fight, but the wound had its own schedule. The crew would measure recovery in daily checks rather than the convenient boundary between one shift and the next. Preferred launch was still day forty-two. Day forty-five was still the limit.
A vibration ran through the ship. The point-defense cannon had found another movement outside the perimeter and fired three times. On the camera replay, a turtle-like shape appeared where the weapon had been looking. Donatello remained protected by his crew tag. The revised defenses were operating. Beyond the hull, Green Reach II still offered no reason to stop paying attention.
They could stay and wait for Bob, or leave him with Clauydio and keep surveying. Bob settled that part. Go on, he told them. The chair was where he needed to be; it did not have to become the center of everyone else's day. Victor, Kari, Elias, and Jin prepared the field trip while Clauydio remained aboard with him.
Ebb and Flo took the overnight supplies. Loading consumed about two hours: shelter, food, equipment, and the small necessities that became important once the ship was no longer close enough to fetch them from. The two UTVs retraced familiar ground toward the dense forest and the rocky outcrop beyond it. Behind them, the Anne Bonny stayed at Quarry Terrace, with one crew member healing and another keeping him company.
Late light · Dense forest
The Rings Underfoot
By the time the vehicles reached the dense-forest survey area, only about an hour of daylight remained. A full survey would have to wait. Victor and Elias began making camp while Kari inspected the surroundings and Jin watched the spaces between her and everything she wanted to examine. The ground had grown firmer beneath the trees, but it still yielded with a damp, spongy give.
Above them, pink, fleshy tubes descended from the trees on lines that looked like silk, their ends opening into small fronds. One worked at a leaf. Marks along the trees suggested a route upward and downward, a modest traffic that the crew had almost passed beneath without seeing. Here was an animal living its ordinary life at exactly the height curiosity would find it.
The ground offered something less legible. Whitish rings lay nearly flush with the surface, each with a raised outer margin and another ridge within it. They were regular enough to attract Kari's attention, but nothing in their appearance told her whether regular meant built, grown, or merely repeated. There were several of them around the camp.
She poked one with a stick. It felt softer than the surrounding ground, yet the stick did not sink into it. The surface deflected her pressure. Nothing opened, turned, or reached back. Jin kept watching the underbrush while she worked at the edge, trying to find the underside of a thing that seemed to have arranged itself without one.
Prying gave her an answer in the form of a broken stick. The ring stayed where it was. Kari had failed to get beneath it, and for the moment she accepted the limit. An unresponsive object could remain unresponsive until morning. The crew finished the camp around ground they had looked at, touched, and still did not understand.
A motion detector would have made the night easier. The packing check had left them without the intended equipment, and the proposed sensor arrangement never became an operating perimeter. They divided the night into two-hour watches instead. The tents were up. The vehicles were nearby. Beyond the last of the light, the pale rings disappeared into the forest floor.
Night watch · Sunrise
The Ground Woke First
Most of the night passed without an event worth waking the camp for. Watches changed; sleepers took back the hours they had spent awake. Elias held the last watch, already dressed and outside when light began to reach the forest. The rings were still there. Then their distance from the ground began to change.
The pale tops rose vertically. Fleshy lengths appeared beneath them, drawing the flat shapes upward into columns. Their centers turned and opened into clusters of finger-like parts. What had resisted Kari's stick now possessed a direction, an extension, and a place for all that hidden tissue to go. Elias watched the forest floor become occupied space.
Under the tents, the same movement found fabric instead of open air. Sleeping bags shifted. Two sleepers woke quickly to something wriggling beneath them; Kari woke later, rolled onto her side with part of her tent pushed about a foot above the ground. The floor moved back and forth under her. She sat up into a shelter that no longer held its expected shape.
When she tested the movement, the fingers tried to close around her through the tent. Fabric interrupted the grasp, and she pulled clear. She stood and made her way out rather than offer a second experiment from the same position. Around the tents, the columns kept coming up. The sleepers had come out without armor; Elias had the advantage of already being on watch.
Victor had his sword. Jin moved to give himself room and a line of fire. Kari went toward whichever UTV held her sampling equipment. The crew had space to gather themselves, but the camp had become a field of things whose reach was still unknown. Each rising head made the familiar gap between tent and vehicle look different.
For a moment, getting out had been enough. The ground forms rose and flexed without becoming a general charge against the camp. The crew still needed to know what they were. Victor moved toward one with a sharpened answer, intending to take off a piece that Kari could study.
Camp perimeter · The first cut
Farther Than It Looked
Victor's sword cut into the fleshy column and removed a chunk. It did not sever the whole thing. The animal flopped, then threw its upper end toward him, revealing more length than its first emergence had suggested. The answering strike missed. An experiment had become an exchange before anyone had established how much of the creature remained below their feet.
Jin backed away with his revolver ready. He watched for an actual hit or a grip, holding his shot while the creature swung and missed. Elias studied the neighboring forms before committing his pistol. The one beside him continued to rise, showing no response to the attack on its neighbor. He took a step clear of it and drew his weapon. The violence remained local.
Victor moved away from the cut animal, but the next sweep followed his changed position and reached far enough to miss him again. At the vehicle, Kari found the cased sniper rifle and threw it toward the commander. The case landed on the ground about halfway to him. It had come closer, which would have to serve for delivery. Elias fired at the moving column and missed.
Victor reached the case and took out the rifle. It was unloaded. Before he could turn it into the next answer, the creature struck again. This time the head caught his right leg. The impact took more of the margin he had left for bad luck, and the radial fingers wrapped around the limb. They looked almost hand-like, an enlarged circle of grasping parts with Victor fixed at its center.
That was the moment Jin had been waiting for. His revolver round went lengthwise through the animal, opening the far side in a spray of yellow fluid. The head remained on Victor's leg. The shot had damaged what held him without yet separating it from everything feeding up out of the ground.
Elias changed his aim. The upper end moved; the base offered something steadier. His next pistol round crossed the column from the side and disconnected the grasper from the buried portion. The base went down. The detached end stayed on Victor for another moment, then dropped away when he shook his leg. The fight stopped with the rest of the field still rising around them.
Kari brought containers and the first-aid kit. Victor's leg bore no visible marks from the grip. Inside the detached head, behind the fingers, a ring of circular teeth had been drawing itself into position. It had not reached the bite. The commander had the rifle, the yellow fluid, and an unharmed leg; Kari had a sample that finally showed what the pale ring had concealed.
Morning survey · Dense forest
What the Trees Were For
Kari collected the disconnected upper part and a separate sample of the yellow fluid. Its color could go in the record; its chemistry could wait for the instruments. The inner teeth belonged there too, along with the fact that they had not closed on Victor. A sample was useful only while the crew kept the observation separate from the answer they hoped it would become.
Beyond the tents, another column shot upward. Its base never left the hole. The head reached one of the pink hanging creatures, enclosed it, and drew the whole meal back down. The tree line and the forest floor had just become two ends of one action. What had looked like scattered hazards around a campsite was also an animal's way of reaching breakfast.
The ground animals were root jacks. The hanging leaf-eaters were thimble trappers. Those names gave the crew something to write beside what they had actually seen: a soft ring at rest, a fleshy extension, a radial grip, hidden teeth, and prey lowered into the ground. The forest was beginning to supply relationships as well as specimens.
As the morning continued, more root jacks took hanging prey. Others rose, waited, and eventually settled back into their holes without a meal. The ones beneath the tents pushed against the floors but did not chew through them. They found nothing they could take and went down again. The camp had interrupted a feeding ground without knowing that it had chosen one.
The crew's immediate recommendation was plain: do not camp over the pale rings. Whether either animal might feed settlers would require tests they had not made. For now, the practical discovery was where to put a sleeping bag. They watched until the encounter had become behavior they could describe, then resumed the forest survey.
Further examination found evidence of crust plows and clickshades in the area. Neither needed to appear in front of them to matter. The crew already knew what a clickshade could do at close range. Here it belonged to a forest containing leaves, hanging grazers, buried hunters, and traffic larger than the shapes they had sampled. The next destination was still the rocky outcrop. They packed the camp and made ready to move.
Afternoon travel · Toward the rocky outcrop
The Weight of the Samples
Aboard the Anne Bonny, Bob's daily recovery checks made progress. The injury cleared, but the wound still needed time; he had not become fit to join the expedition. Clauydio remained aboard with him. The field crew had their own work to finish, and after the camp and survey they turned Ebb and Flo toward the rocky ground ahead.
The UTVs traveled side by side. They had gone only a little farther when the surface broke. Pale crust collapsed into a cavern, taking the expected road out from in front of them. One vehicle stopped clear. The other stopped at the edge and teetered, equipment and samples part of the balance between firm ground and open space.
Kari tried to make herself an anchor. Holding on was not enough; she could feel that she could not sustain it by strength. The samples were still on the vehicle, and below it was a drop of about twenty feet. She changed the problem before her grip could become its answer, releasing and redirecting her tether around an anchor point.
The fastening held. The vehicle backed away from the edge, and the other UTV backed up as well. Both returned to ground that still existed. Nobody fell into the opening. The samples had not gone over. The crew had crossed the small distance between a failed hold and a workable attachment without needing to discover what waited at the bottom.
They were still short of the rocky outcrop. In the distance it looked pale and natural, more sandstone-like than a pile of broken plates. It resembled the material at Quarry Terrace, but resemblance did not tell them whether they were seeing its source. That question remained ahead of them, beyond the hole they had just opened.
From the edge they could look down far enough to estimate the drop. About twenty feet below, the cavern floor seemed to wriggle. The motion was difficult to separate into individuals. It was enough to make the empty space beneath the vehicles look occupied, and the surviving crust beneath their boots feel thinner than it had a minute earlier.
They had brought descaling solution and coated the carts before setting out. They considered fire and spray while keeping the vehicles clear of the opening. The forest had lifted itself beneath their tents at dawn. Here, farther along the same journey, the ground had fallen away and shown them something moving underneath.
