Taking his first breath of Ko's air, Brooks could feel how laden with moisture it was, even through the filter.

His system told him that this was a low-humidity day by local standards, at only 77%.

Curiosity got the better of him; he decided to take off his mask and take a deep breath.

The air was the most humid he'd ever breathed, like he was sitting over a steaming pot. He could feel some condense in his mouth, and had to swallow to clear it. It didn't help.

Putting his mask back on, he let it clear his airways.

And this was out over the water, he thought. Where the sea winds would keep the air fresher.

In the jungles where the !A!amo lived, the temperatures averaged forty-six and the relative humidity rarely dropped below ninety-five percent.

At those numbers, there was a risk of water condensing out into his lungs and drowning him. His mask would filter the excess moisture out, but the idea was . . . troubling.

I'm very far from home, he thought, remembering just how dry the air was in Antarctica.

The !Xomyi had evolved for this world, they could survive it. How would they fare in space on a ship that had to maintain a lower humidity? He didn't doubt the science teams had done their jobs and taken this into account as best they could, but it would be hard to make a ship feel like this inside.

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Already his exposed skin was sweating under the beating sun. It hit a critical threshold and his coolsuit kicked in, humming slightly.

He'd wondered if the !Xomyi would hear that hum and be alarmed, but it had been built so that the sound was a little out of their hearing range. They likely would not notice it.

Looking towards the shoreline, five kilometers to the West, he considered just how bad it would feel once they were in the jungle. He knew the numbers didn't tell you anything except that it would be miserable.

It had been said that they should give themselves at least 24 hours to acclimate before plunging in.

But Brooks disagreed. He did not feel rushed, even though they had little time. He had enough time, he thought. Success would be based on how he did, not the time itself.

Easy to think now, the thought came. When it was time for them to pull out, there would be no leeway. They had only estimates of when the moon would start to break up, but they could not be sure. If the moon started to break up earlier than expected, then he'd have to go or die.

Regardless of how much headway he'd made in convincing the !A!amo to give up everything they knew.

"We'll set out immediately," he told the drones.

"Are you certain you don't want to acclimate?" Kai asked him.

"Yes," he said. "This isn't the jungle - it's going to be much worse there. I want us there as soon as we can so we have as much time as possible to get used to our new environment." He smiled slightly. "This isn't my first time being on a new, and only semi-tolerable world."

Kai did not seem happy with his call, but she nodded. She had expected that Brooks might do this.

The winds here tore at them violently. There was nothing but ocean out East of them. There was only one small continent on the other hemisphere; the wind could fly almost unabated around the world, picking up tremendous speed.

One of the drones was battered by an unexpected gust and went tumbling, righting itself just before it fell out of sight.

Kai was battered by the same wind, stumbling towards the railing.

The railing was three meters tall, but through the bars she stared off the edge, down thirty meters towards the sea. The waves came up close to half that height.

She wasn't about to get blown over a three-meter fence. But she knew that if someone, somehow did go over, their odds of survival were almost zero. The winds made rescue drones unreliable, and the waves would batter aquatic ones. Only crawlers with ropes and nets, clinging to the pillars, could have a chance.

Stepping away from the railing and looking out towards the land, she almost regretted taking a field role again after all this time.