In the labyrinthine caverns of Kabir’s Crimson Forest, surrounded by a legion of potentially murderous alien rats, Alix couldn’t help but feel that she had perhaps made a misstep somewhere over the course of this field mission. And her life.

“I don’t suppose you guys speak English?” she asked as she swung by her ankles from their ceiling trap. She switched to Uni-Lang to add, “Or the Universal Language, maybe?”

The closest Aexon merely answered in a series of outraged squeaks. It waddled up to Alix’s face and swung its crystal dagger inches from her nose. Whether that was to make a point or a threat, Alix couldn’t begin to guess. If Figaro were there, he could have used his lingual analysis program to at least attempt to understand what they were saying, but the little robot was nowhere in sight. Alix hoped this meant he was outside somewhere, pinging the nearby survey team for help.

So all she had to do was hold out for her inevitable rescue.

The dagger-wielding Aexon, whom Alix presumed to be the leader, screeched out a command. Several Aexons scuttled from the cavern ceiling down the vine. Several tugged at her utility belt. Over her feet, Alix felt something sawing through the vine.

“Whoa, wait, wait!” she called up, before remembering that they couldn’t possibly understand her. She changed her strategy. “Uh, squeak squeak?”

The Aexons sawing at the vine paused momentarily, glared down at her, then resumed sawing more aggressively. Alix fell to the cave ground moments after, and a splitting pain shot through her head and back. She was fairly certain that impact had just cost her a few brain cells. Equally concerning was that her ankles were still bound together, and her utility belt had been stripped of her tranq gun, raygun, smart tablet, and worst of all, her liquor.

The Aexons hurried over to the leader with Alix’s supplies in hand, presenting each object to him. The leader picked up the tranq gun, turning it over in his claws and sniffing it delicately. He then pointed it square at Alix.

She froze. “Now, let’s all just be reasonable—”

A click, a stabbing pain in Alix’s neck, and the world went dark.

***

“Yo, Boss! Boss! Goddammit you meatbag, wake up!”

The voice seemed distant yet close at the same time. Alix blinked slowly, seeing nothing but a vast, turquoise blur hanging above her. She felt as though she were blanketed by fog. A pleasant drowsiness permeated her, made her muscles jelly and her mind long for another endless sleep. She could have stared limply at the ceiling forever, but the voice was right in her ear now.

“Come on, snap out of it!” A sharp, metal limb jabbed at her cheek. “You can’t die and leave me alone with these things, they’ll take me apart for scrap metal!”

Alix inhaled sharply. She rubbed her eyes, and her vision sharpened enough for her to get a sense of her surroundings. She was moving, enclosed in a cart with wooden spikes that caged her in. The cave ceiling above glowed blue, no doubt populated by some sort of bioluminescent chromists or fungus. Alix turned her head to the right. Several Aexons were pulling the cart. Two were at the sides of the cart, armed with her raygun and her tranq gun, respectively. A turn of her head to her left, and there was Figaro on her shoulder.

“Figaro?” Alix’s voice was sluggish and cracked. “What are you doing here?”

“What am I doing here?” Figaro threw his forelimbs up, vibrating with rage. “I got tackled by one of these rats when I followed you into the cave, and they shut me off and threw me in here with you! I’m only back on because you rolled over my activation button in your stupor. Lot of good it does me, anyway, I’m still stuck just the same. I told you it’d be dangerous to leave mapped territory!”

Alix slowly sat up, wincing. “How the hell are you stuck? You can crawl right through these bars.”

“And go where?” Figaro hissed. “I’ve been shut off for this whole God-forsaken ride. I have no idea where we are. You expect me to just wander around this subterranean hellscape and pray I just stumble onto the way out?”

“Fair point.” Alix looked over at the Aexon with the raygun. “We don’t want Rambo over here testing his aim on you, anyhow.”

“This is so unfair!” Figaro wailed.

“It is less than ideal, I’ll admit. But you have to look on the bright side, Figaro,” Alix said, rubbing the sore spot on her neck. “This is going to make a hell of an entry into the Compendium!”

“If you make it out of here alive to write about it!” Figaro snapped. “In fact, forget about writing in your stupid Compendium. If we make it out of this in one piece, we should sue Asteria Inc. They promised us that this was a virgin planet, devoid of intelligent life!”

Stolen novel; please report.

Those words sent Alix’s mind reeling again. Figaro’s point brought up a host of problems beyond their immediate captivity. Deimos X was slated for human colonization in a year. What would it mean for the colonists if they had to share their brand spanking new planet with a civilization of warrior rats? More pressing, what did the Aexons think of their new neighbors?

Based on Alix’s situation, nothing good.

“This is gonna sound crazy, Figaro, but we’ve got to try and play nice with these guys, at least until we can sneak away quietly,” Alix said under her breath to the robot. “We can’t make a bad impression.”

“Play nice? Just how much of that tranq juice is sloshing around in your skull?” Figaro scuttled up Alix’s hair and tapped the top of her head. “These walking flea hotels sure aren’t playing nice with us, in case you haven’t noticed.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Alix hissed at him. “They are a sentient species indigenous to this planet, making this mess a First Contact encounter, technically. We play this wrong, we could bungle interspecies relations badly enough that Asteria Inc. can kiss their colony goodbye. Or worse, we could get the Aexons mad enough to declare war on the humans already here. I don’t want that on my head, do you?”

Figaro scoffed. “I see what you’re saying, Boss, but I think that ship’s already sailed.”

Alix ignored him, turning her attention back to the surrounding Aexon guards. Even with the light from the cavern ceiling, it was still difficult to see far ahead. She couldn’t make much out of the ones far down the trail. The ones pulling the cart were locked in a quiet conversation of squeaks and trills. The armed ones flanking the cart were dead silent, sparing her not so much as a glance.

“Figaro, you think you can run a lingual analysis on the drivers up there?” Alix asked.

Figaro heaved a heavy, beleaguered sigh. “I can try, I suppose. But there ain’t a lot to work off, Boss. Their squeaking and squawking is pretty far outside the typical parameters my program was designed to cover.”

Figaro hopped off Alix’s shoulder and made a beeline for the front of the cart. He crouched behind a spike and listened in. His eyes shot out and stretched out toward his subjects of study, recording the Aexon drivers’ facial expressions and gestures as they spoke. After what felt like an eternity, he crawled back over to Alix.

“Well?” she asked.

“I think I can string together some impressive sentences. I hope. Maybe.” Figaro threw up his forelimbs in helplessness. “They are definitely indigenous to this planet, like you said. Their language shares zero common ancestry with any other languages in my database. My circuits nearly overheated from trying to make sense of their gobbledygook.”

“Well, let’s take your sentences out for a test drive on our guards. Maybe we can negotiate our release. Tell me how to say hello.” Alix rubbed her hands together, feeling excited for the first time since her capture. Not many living could call themselves the first ambassador to a sentient alien species. She was going to be the first human ever to greet the Aexons in their own tongue. That had to net her some sort of Nobel prize or something, right?

“Please, your big fat sapient tongue could never. I shall establish communications with the rat people.” Figaro straightened up and walked over to the other edge of the cage, where the Aexon armed with a raygun was walking. Figaro raised one limb and waved. He caught the guard’s attention with a clipped, commanding squeak. As the Aexon stared Figaro down in silence, Figaro launched into a sequence of frenetic, animated squeaks, clicks, and trills, gesturing grandly like a master orator.

Once Figaro finished, the Aexon guard continued to glare down at him. Then, without warning, the guard fired off a blast an inch away from Figaro. Figaro yelped and scrambled back to Alix. The guard snarled something in Alix and Figaro’s direction, then went back to ignoring them.

“Huh.” Figaro scratched his head. “Might need to do another analysis. Tweak things just a tad.”

Alix dragged her hand over her face. “Well, we’re off to a stellar start. With you at the helm, we could go on to join the United Interstellar Nations.”

“Careful, don’t choke on all that sarcasm, now!” Figaro fired back. “And I’m not the one who tried to imprison one in a steel cage! Oh, they’re just rodents, you said, same as on Erato IV, you said—”

The cart halted abruptly as Figaro continued to rant in Alix’s ear. She held up a hand to silence him. “Figaro, shut up for a second.”

“How ‘bout you shut up for a second?”

“Figaro, something’s happening!” Alix pointed ahead where the cart drivers had stopped. The Aexons farther down the trail were in front of what looked like a dead end slightly uphill, the wall towering high above the little rodents. Then, all the Aexons except for the two guards rushed the wall and pushed against it. After a moment or so, part of the rock began to yield, an arched stretch of the wall opening outward like a swinging door.

Several of the Aexons hurried back down to pull the cart up to the new entrance. Alix and Figaro stared ahead in silence as they rolled up to the archway. When they got close enough that Alix could clearly see through to the other side, her heart dropped to her stomach.

Instead of a stretch of tunnel like the one they’d been traveling down, the archway led to a vast underground chamber, with the ceiling curving up to be at least a kilometer high, and too wide across for Alix to even begin to estimate. Filling the space were towers and spires that reached nearly to the ceiling, surrounded by numerous smaller buildings whose designs harkened to some alien meld of classical, brutalist, and gothic styles. There were neon blue temples, hanging gardens composed of pink mossy vines and the ghostly bloom of gypsum flowers, amphitheaters sufficient to seat thousands of Aexons, and even courtyards sporting mosaics of ostentatiously-dressed Aexon figures. There were statues in the city squares as well, intricately carved from stone and towering as giants. The maze of streets was all lit by the same bioluminescent blue that had lit the tunnel, only denser and brighter. That blue material also decorated buildings, windows, anywhere that required the steady presence of light and color. At some points, the blue was so densely packed it was blinding. Thousands of denizens moved between the buildings, some on foot, some riding atop large, saddled reptiles, others pulled in boxy carriages or carried atop palanquins. The city pulsed with life.

“Holy hell,” squealed Figaro from Alix’s shoulder as the cart began its journey to the city proper. “We’re in a Rat Atlantis.”