Madeline grasped the straps of her restraints tightly as the emergency thrusters kicked in. Her knuckles went white from the pressure. Vertigo made her stomach feel as though it was being crushed, and she cursed.
She hummed to herself, an indistinct tune, anything to distract her, anything to calm her down. Madeline was certain she would throw up any second now.
Then instantly, all momentum was gone, and the airbags deployed, covering her in a firm embrace as the harness prevented her from hitting the roof. Afterwards, the bags soon deflated, and she was left panting in her escape pod.
The light came on automatically, and her P.D.A’s virtual intelligence connected to the pod’s computer and ran the survival protocols.
A holographic screen lit up in front of her, and a video began to play.
“Hello, Madeline; you have just gone through a traumatic experience and are most likely in shock. Please breath slowly and calm down; once you are settled, I will go through the information you will need to survive until rescue arrives,” a synthetic male voice said.
Madeline did as she was instructed and got control of her breathing; as she did so, the V.I. said, “remember there is no rush in this scenario; take as much time as is required; hastiness will only lead to mistakes.”
“Thank you, Robert, I will”, replied Madeline. Madeline had named her V.I after a charming gentleman she had met five years ago
She had no idea how long she took to calm down, but eventually, her breathing slowed, and her hands stopped shaking; she undid her harness and stretched.
The stretching brought the trembling back, but it quickly subsided, and with one last intake of air, she felt she was ready.
“Ok, Robert, play the video!” she ordered.
The V.I did as instructed, and the film began.
“Hello, survivor,” a second synthetic voice said. “You have found yourself on an uninhabited world; the world you are on is….” There was a brief pause as the life pod’s onboard systems checked its logs and cross-referenced them with reading from the sensors.
“A Class 3 Death World designated as S-41234 (DW-4), survival prospects are minimal until help arrives,” said the voice.
“That’s encouraging,” said Madeline, clicking her tongue.
“To increase your chances of survival, you must link up with as many of the other survivors as possible; this pod will not survive the rigorous environmental conditions for more than a few days”, the voice explained.
“To ensure the maximum chances of surviving until rescue arrives, only the hardiest amongst you should attempt the journey at first”, the voice paused for a moment as a scan was performed on the pod.
“Occupant is registered as Human, from Sol-3 know colloquially as Earth, a Class 8 Death World”, stated the voice.
“Species Homo Sapiens is certified to travel and link up with the nearest life pod; the location has been added to the PDA; please remove the emergency supplies from the locker and begin the procedure,” the voice said, and the screen went blank.
“Well, that wasn’t very specific,” said Madeline, blowing air through her nostrils.
She stood up and took her P.D.A, a bag containing five nutrient bars (a standard form of emergency ration), three water bottles, a knife, a fire striker, an air filter, some general-purpose antibiotics, a reverse osmosis pump, a first aid kit and some kindling.
Madeline pressed the emergency release on the door, and light came flooding into the pod; she shielded her eyes and stepped outside.
Her surroundings were tranquil; tree analogues stretched as far as the eye could see and covered the ground were other plants that bore a superficial resemblance to ferns; apart from the wind, the place was strangely quiet, with no bird song or insect chirps.
“Funny,” she thought, “I had wanted to land on the planet, and I got what I wanted.”
“Be careful what you wish for, I suppose”, she added out loud.
Madeline looked up, her ship had blown a hole in the canopy, and she could see the sky, blue with white clouds much like Earth.
This wasn’t Earth, though, and she did not need a computer to tell her that. The gravity was lower for one, the air was not as dense, and the sun’s rays that managed to hit her felt off, not as warm as they should be.
S-41234 (DW-4) was a famous tourist destination. She could still remember that tacky advertisement that had brought her here “Come and fly over a genuine Death World, see a world where everything living seeks only blood, where the very air can kill you.”
Of course, no one was supposed to land on it; this place was a living hell to everyone on the cruise ship that had brought her here, everyone except Madeline, of course.
Humans were relatively new to the Galactic scene; relatively, it had been over three hundred years since first contact.
They had made one hell of an impact, even before anyone knew anything about them. A sapient race evolving on a Death World was a novelty in and of itself. Only three other species held the honour.
What made humanity unique was that they were from a class 8. The next closest ones were the Tu’ril’nep ta, from Si’chit a Class 2.
As such, everyone knew about humanity; even people on the other end of the galaxy knew about them; people who had never seen one and probably never would in their lifetimes had heard the stories.
A race that could drink poison, eat toxic waste and freshen their breath with chemical weapons. Most humans found it all comical, even with context; after all, they were perfectly average to themselves.
“But that’s enough thinking about evolutionary oddities. It’s time to get moving,” Madeline told herself, blowing her blonde locks from her face.
She checked her P.D.A; it displayed a compass with a directional marker pointing her to the nearest pod. The pods’ computers had linked up and were already coordinating the other survivors.
Madeline had no idea who she would find at the other end, but she knew they must be terrified.
She took one last look at her escape pod; it was spherical, two meters in diameter, and pure white. The parachute and afterburners were visible. Emergency backups in case the gravity chute fails.
Madeline hoped no one else’s chute had been damaged; the shock of her landing could kill most other species.
Strapping the bag to her back, she looked once again at her P.D.A, two kilometres to the nearest pod,
“Let’s get going,” Madeline told herself, slapping her sides.
***
Pushing aside a particularly stubborn bush, Madeline felt a certain sense of satisfaction as the stem cracked and it got out of her way.
Madeline began sweating even with the lower gravity, slightly higher oxygen content, and less intense sunlight. She was not unfit, but she also did not do any meaningful exercise and was starting to regret it.
S-41234 (DW-4) was a well-documented planet with a survey team coming to inspect the planet every two standard galactic years. She also knew much about it, having gone through numerous species profiles and geological videos while in quarantine.
All Deathworlders and species from habitable worlds Class 8 and above needed to undergo quarantine and decontamination before being given free roam on a vessel or space station. To prevent any pathogens from wreaking havoc among those with weaker immune systems. Two weeks stuck in a room with nothing but the extranet to keep her company.
The world was relatively early in its development, life having crawled out of the oceans just 150 million years ago. As such large land herbivores and carnivores had evolved just twenty million years ago, give or take a few hundred thousand years.
This made Madeline confident; the largest predator was the zumawelu, named after the woman who had discovered it. A jaguar-sized cross between a lizard, cat and hedgehog. It looked fearsome, and it was, but even with only a five per cent difference in gravity between here and Earth, it had led to a vastly different musculature and skeletal structure.
Madeline was confident that if she did encounter one, all she would have to do was stand her ground; as the apex predator of this world, it would not be used to anything, even attempting to fight back. Even if it did attack, her punches could crush its bones. At least she hoped so; she did not know much about bone tensile strength. Was that even relevant?
The lower gravity also created another problem; with less force holding everything down, everything could be taller. She meant everything; the pseudo trees were massive, and given time, their descendent would make General Sherman look puny.
Even the rocks and earth were held higher, meaning she needed to clamber over stones and roots.
She checked her PDA and asked, “How much longer till I’m there?”
“At your current rate, you should arrive in approximately forty-five minutes”, replied Robert.
“Two kilometres over rough terrain, with no previous experience, in less than an hour,” said Madeline; she did not know if it was impressive, but it sounded impressive. If it weren’t, she would lie, keep her morale up.
She saw some movement out of the corner of her eye. It was probably not a zumawelu; they were relegated to the plains, and their large size hindered them in dense forest.
Madeline saw what looked like a lizard staring at her; it was clinging to a tree trunk not with claws but with a single large pad at the end of its six feet. It was about the size of a giant iguana; its mouth was closed, but from how its eyes were positioned, she was sure it was carnivorous.
It stared at her, both curious and wary but not afraid. It was covered in shiny red scales; Madeline wondered if that meant it was poisonous or maybe venomous. It flashed a yellow sail that ran along its back, most likely a warning.
She had no idea what it was, the world had only been discovered four hundred years ago, and with such a small presence, the scientists would not have catalogued everything by now.
“If I make it out alive, I’m naming your species myself,” Madeline said. Then, holding up her PDA, she took a quick picture. There was no sound, though there was an app you could download that made it for you.
The not-quite lizard just looked at her, confused, until its attention was drawn to something crawling on the ground.
With one swift motion, it fired a sticky tongue at the unfortunate creature below and dragged it into its mouth. Madeline saw a flash of a black exoskeleton and mammalian eyes before it vanished into the lizard’s maw with a crunch.
With that, it completely ignored her, having decided if Madeline were not going to attack now, she never would.
Turning away from the animal Madeline kept walking. She wondered how many others were doing what she was; few would be qualified to make the first journey. Although she desperately hoped that she was not the only one, there were over 100 passengers aboard that cruise ship, and if the life pod had been correct, they would not live long enough for her to reach them all.
Madeline knew that some of them had died in the pirate raid; she had seen their corpses, quite the horrifying experience. Nevertheless, she thought she had been rather brave, all things considered, helping fellow passengers and even some crew to safety.
Still, it was odd that pirates would attack them. Not only were all cruise vessels heavily armed and armoured, with a complement of armed marines. There was also an old spacer superstition that attacking anyone over a Death World was terrible luck. Considering what had happened, they had been correct.
You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.
She wondered if this made Earth untouchable, it would certainly explain why no aliens had ever made contact with them before humanity had invented FTL.
Robert pinged, and she looked at her PDA; the life pod was just one hundred meters ahead. Madeline picked up the pace, deftly jumping over the obstacles that got in her way.
Finally, there it was; another spherical white pod, only this one was six-meter wide; life pods needed different sizes for different species. Fortunately, the parachute and thrusters were still stored, which meant the grave chute had functioned perfectly.
Madeline felt a pang of jealousy; it meant they hadn’t felt their stomach try to leap from their mouth.
“Not their fault,” Madeline told herself.
She approached the pod’s door and knocked on it. There was no response, so Madeline knocked again.
“Is there anyone in there? My name is Madeline,” said Madeline, pressing her ear against the wall, it was warm to the touch, and the texture was pleasant.
She could hear some mumbling from inside the pod, but it was too quiet for her to make out what they were saying or for the cheap translator installed on her P.D.A to pick it up.
Eventually, there was a response. It took a couple of seconds for Madeline’s translator to get working. “You’re from the ship, correct; my son says he saw to help some of the other passengers.”
“How do you know? How can you see me?” asked Madeline as she looked at the solid walls of the lifepod.
“There is a camera on the pod’s hull,” the occupant explained. Madeline looked around and found a small black lens staring at her.
“Oh, Yes, that’s me; I’m the human on board”, replied Madeline.
There was a brief pause, and the door opened. Stepping out from the sphere was an almost three-meter-tall behemoth of an alien, standing on four pillar-erect and trunk-like legs. Its skin was a faded purple and leathery. A simple set of cloth ornamentation on its back served as its clothes.
Its face was long, with three ivory tusks protruding from its mouth, two in the lower jaw and one in the upper. Its eye was small, but they had a distinct iris and sclera.
The aliens’ lips began moving, and they said, “We are glad that the video was correct.”
“Thank you for coming for us, Madeline; my name is Tarit; this is my wife, Tarin and our son Tazil” explained Tarit.
Tarit was a Numiteru; if Madeline’s memory was correct, from what she recalled, their species was from a Class 6 habitable world orbiting a gas giant. She could not remember the name.
She also knew that Numiteru took a new name when they bonded with a partner to signify their new life together; the names started the same, hence the Ta. Though they kept the old one, it became akin to a middle name.
Tarin and Tazil emerged from the pod; Tarin was of a similar faded purple, though Tazail, who stood at the same height as Madeline, was a duller brown colour, indicating he had not gone through puberty yet.
Tazil also possessed small stubby tusks rather than the large elephant-like ones of his parents.
Madeline’s PDA pinged again, and Roger said, “Next life pod location added, 5 kilometres away.”
“5 kilometres in this gravity, we’ll be dead within the hour,” said Tarin, despondent.
Tarit tried to comfort her, but she was having none of it.
“Look, I get you’re scared, and this is more than you signed up for, but let me tell you something, survival is an act of sheer will. There are stories from all over the galaxy of people being stuck in situations just like this, with no knowledge or training, and they endured. If they can do it, we can do it too,” said Madeline, standing as tall as she could, looking as confident as possible.
Madeline had no idea if it was true, but it had been damn inspirational in that movie she watched a few weeks back; though the swelling music had helped, it seemed to have a similar effect on the Numiteru family.
“You truly think we can?” asked Tarin.
“Yes”, replied Madeline with a nod.
“So, what do we do?” asked Tarit.
“We make for the next life pod; the system is designed to draw us all together, so we will never be sent to an empty one”, explained Tazil.
The other three looked at him.
“I memorised the survival plan during quarantine”, explained Tazil.
“Smart kid,” said Madeline, with a smile
The young man beamed with pride; what Madeline assumed was pride anyway.
“Five kilometres, gather the supplies and let’s get going,” said Madeline.
***
They had only been walking for five minutes before Tarin insisted they take a break. Though it frustrated Madeline, it was not the Numiterus’ fault. To make up for the lack of oxygen in the atmosphere, they need to wear their respirators, which also filtered out pathogens and pollen, which could cause serious problems.
This had the unfortunate side effect of causing the Numiteru family to overheat as they cooled themselves down by panting.
Madeline acquiesced and busied herself by clearing the immediate path forward and inspecting their surroundings.
Tarit was astounded by what he saw; not only was the little sapient not tired, but she was positively hyperactive; she was also twitchy, constantly changing her line of sight, examining her surroundings with a frightening intensity.
Madeline moved with a grace he thought impossible, each movement flowing seamlessly into the next, and she was quiet, real quiet.
“What are you doing?” asked Tazil between pants.
“Keeping an eye out in case anything tries to jump us”, explained Madeline.
“Seems rather pointless; we can barely see ten metres ahead,” said Tarin. “We’d be best saving our energy for if something does… “jump us”, she added.
Madeline frowned. Sure the canopy did block out much of the light, but there was still plenty to see by. Madeline was confident if it were not for the trees; she could see a good two, three hundred metres in all directions.
“You really can’t see further than that?” asked Madeline, looking the man straight in the eye.
“No”, answered Tarin, confused. Eventually, it clicked in the Numiteru’s mind, and she said, “Wait, you can actually see in this pitiful light?”
“Yeah, this kind of light is what you would expect before dawn or dusk; only someone with sight problems would be unable to navigate in it”, explained Madeline.
“I told you she was incredible,” stated Tazil.
Madeline chuckled; if the boy kept this up, she was liable to get a big head.
Determining they were indeed safe for the moment, Madeline also took a moment to rest.
“So, what brought you to S-41234,” asked Madeline, hoping the conversation would distract the family as they recovered.
Raising his left arm, Tarit extended a dainty finger that had been tucked tight to his arm and pointed at his son.
“Tazil has always been interested in xenobiology, and Death Worlds fascinated him more than anything”, explained Tarit.
“So, we promised him that if he did well enough on his end-of-year exam, we would take him anywhere he wanted”, added Tarin, finishing her husband’s sentence. “We’re just lucky he chose a cruise; that meant there was plenty for us to do as well”, she added.
“Luck had nothing to do with”, stated Tazil. “I’m just more considerate than you give me credit for”, he added.
Personally, Madeline would have been annoyed at being interrupted like that, but Tarit seemed utterly fine with what had occurred.
“What about you?” asked Tarin.
“Bored, just wanted two weeks of luxury and a bit of excitement; imagine my shock when I discovered that they would be no landing party that will teach me to read the fine print”, Madeline answered.
“You mean you actually wanted to land here?” asked Tarit, the disbelief in his voice able to easily cross species barriers.
“Yes, even asked the captain about it, but he insisted that even if he were willing to land a shuttle, they would never get authorisation anyway”, explained Madeline, purposefully choosing to ignore his tone. “He was very polite about it”, she added with a wave of her hand.
A little more small talk occurred. Though Madeline intentionally refused to tell them about her profession, she felt that telling them their lives were in the hands of a waitress would not do much for morale. Something about trusting someone who busted tables for overpaid pretentious yuppies to fight super predators did not seem right to Madeline.
Madeline chuckled humourlessly, they could fly her through the stars at one million times light speed, but they still needed her to wait tables.
As the Numiteru regained control of their breathing, they drank from their water bottles and consumed one of their nutrient blocks. Madeline had given hers to the family, as she was confident she could eat most things on this planet without suffering too many deleterious effects.
Still, the supplies would not last long, and then the other survivors would need to source food from the planet.
“We are going to have to find a solution to our food shortage. I don’t suppose you three have any ideas?” Madeline asked.
Tazil’s eyes closed tightly, which Madeline believed was the Numiteru’s equivalent of smiling. “We’re way ahead of you on that one,” he said, pointing to the P.D.A. strapped to his arm.
“Most species from non-Death Worlds carry portable scanners that can sample items to determine if they are dangerous or not”, he explained.
“Does it only work for your species?” asked Madeline.
“No, I can set it to scan for any toxic substance for any United Galaxy race”, answered Tazil.
“Good, that way, you can scan things before I eat them, too,” said Madeline.
There was silence before Tarin asked, “Why do you need to scan anything? You’re from Earth; the air itself is toxic where you’re from.”
“Perhaps, but there are still things I cannot eat, wood, for example, that will shatter my teeth, and there are numerous things that are toxic to me”, explained Madeline.
Once more, silence rained until Tazil said, “I had read that humans could not consume woody material, but I thought it was a mistake.”
“Opportunistic omnivore, eating wood is something a specialised herbivore like yourselves does”, replied Madeline.
“Well, we would be more than willing to share our food scanners with you, Madeline,” said Tarit.
“Thank you”, replied Madeline
*
After The Numiteru were rested, they continued on their journey. It was monstrously slow, and by the time the light was dying, they had not covered half the required distance.
With night the temperature had begun to drop, and the Numiteru started to panic. Climates on habitable worlds were famous for being stable, temperatures rarely rose or fell by more than five degrees, and biomes were almost homogenous on a planet.
This left them unprepared for any world with things like seasons. Putting them at serious risk of freezing to death in the night, even though the temperature would not fall below fifteen Celsius.
Madeline acted quickly, fashioning a simple shelter made from branches and leaves and creating a fire. However, they were crude things and would be unlikely to last more than a couple of days before breaking. She was careful enough to position it at such a point as not to roast them alive but still stop them from developing hypothermia.
“I’m so sorry, dad; I promise I will never complain about you making me go to scouts again,” Madeline said to herself as she tightened the final knot on her shelter.
Madeline spent her last waking moments using Tazil’s PDA to analyse the different plants they had collected. He, his mother and his father were exhausted, so Madeline had volunteered to do it for them.
The PDA’s scanner was a mass spectrometer that took a small sample of an object, broke it down to its fundamental parts, and determined whether it was toxic. What was more, it could do all this in under five seconds, “The miracle of quantum computing”, mumbled Madeline
She suspected that the aliens would have a rough night. It must feel like they were being crushed all the time. Madeline felt a little bad that she would most likely have a pleasant time; she had slept in lower gravity before; it was like being on a cloud.
Then again, that had been on a big soft bed and had been at the same level as the moon, so perhaps the experiences were not conflatable.
After several duds, Madeline finally landed on a small leafy plant that contained nothing that would kill the Numiteru.
“Well, that’s something at least, though we will still need to cook it to ensure any bacteria or parasites are killed,” said Tarit.
“A problem for tomorrow,” said Madeline.
With the last bit of light, Madeline changed the setting to Human and scanned everything again. To no one’s surprise, Madeline could eat all of it.
“The agony of choice,” said Madeline as she looked down at the endless row of identical leaves. “Nothin but kale for three months”, she added glumly to herself.
*
Tazil was not usually the first to awaken; as with most teenagers, he preferred to sleep late. The sounds of the nighttime wildlife, however, kept his sleep light.
He glanced to his left and saw his mother quietly dozing; to his right, his father did the same. Tazil forced air from his nostril; the gravity was punishing; he had no idea how the Human could stand it.
Or rather, Tazil knew, he had taken their biology as an elective, but still, it was one thing to read about it and another entirely to see it.
The fire still burned, though it was getting a little weak; the young man stared into the small dancing flames; he felt secure in its glow. Tazil always wanted to go camping, be careful what you wish for and all that.
He carefully stood up, making sure not to disturb his parents. Before sunset, Madeline had been gracious enough to gather plenty of firewood, and it was not too difficult to feed it. The young Numiteru selected only the smallest branches.
A part of him felt rather pathetic that they needed to rely so heavily on this small sapient, even though he knew that she could fight a whole platoon of Numiteru troopers and come out on top. Tazil paused for a moment and then thought, “maybe that was a bit of an exaggeration.”
Still, this day had been a rather humbling experience.
Glancing over to Madeline’s sleeping form, she looked astoundingly peaceful, as though he had not a care in the galaxy.
“Too peaceful,” thought Tazil. She was not moving at all.
“Is she dead” he mumbled, the terror slowly welling inside him. What the hell could slip into camp, kill her without a mark, and then leave again without a trace?
Nervously he glanced around but could see nothing beyond the light of the fire, and the shadows it cast were terrifying. A trace of ancestral memory of the Watuluk, the native predator that once haunted his ancestors, now relegated to a few biological reserves, resurfaced.
The forest seemed alive with noise, and Tazil found himself paralysed with fear. Only the heat of the fire forced him to move, his desire not to cook overcoming his prey instincts.
Tazil backed into his spot and gently nudged his parents; they were quick to awaken.
“Tazil, what is it?” asked Tarin, using the same voice she had used when he was just a boy first learning to use his hands.
He raised his trembling hand and pointed at Madeline.
It took a moment for Tarit and Tarin to realise the problem, but then it hit them like a ton of bricks. They sat in place, trembling for what felt like hours but was most likely less than a minute.
All the tension was lifted instantly when Madeline stirred, her face twitching. The three of them screamed.
Faster than the Numiteru could blink, Madeline was on her feet, ripping half of her shelter to pieces in the process.
Madeline was scanning the environment for what could have caused it, grabbing one of the fallen poles as a weapon.
Her eyes scanned every inch of her surrounding but could see nothing. Eventually, it dawned on her that the quickest solution would be simply asking.
“What is it?” she asked, never once taking her eyes off the tree line.
After a minute of receiving no reply, Madeline finally looked at her charges. They were staring wide-eyed at her with a mixture of fear and wonder.
“What?” Madeline asked, creeped out by the attention.
“You were dead”, whispered Tazil.
Madeline’s face had never been so lopsided in her life. If she had a mirror, Madeline might have been worried that she had suffered a stroke.
“I’m quite certain that I was not dead, nor am I dead”, stated Madeline.
There was silence before Tarit said, “you weren’t moving.”
“I know; I was asleep; that’s what happens when you are asleep. I was having a wonderful dream as well,” replied Madeline.
“Yeah, but not like that, until you twitched, you were not moving at all”, stated Tarin. It seemed they were starting to believe Madeline was not a walking corpse, at least.
“Wait, are you saying you do?” asked Madeline.
As it turned out, most species frequently moved in their sleep, far more regularly than the occasional tossing and turning that a human did. In truth, the more Madeline learned about it, the less it seemed like sleep.
It seemed that the intense REM that humans experienced was unique to them, as were dreams. All other races lightly dozed, more akin to intense mediation than the prolonged paralysis Madeline needed.
Madeline wondered why this had never been taught in school, it seemed like a fascinating fact, and it also confused her that Tazil seemed to be just as surprised as his parents.
“Has no one ever thought to compare sleep patterns before?” thought Madeline, which seemed like a significant oversite by the scientific community.
“So, you’re fine?” asked Tarit.
“Yes, I’ve done this every night, every day of my life”, reiterated Madeline.
Madeline did her best to rebuild her shelter and fed the fire with the logs Tazil could not lift.
As she lay down again, she asked, “So, will I be able to get my full eight hours?”
“Yes,” said Tarin rather meekly, feeling rather foolish about her outburst.
“I’m not mad; all in all, I’m more puzzled than anything else”, stated Madeline; they had a hard enough time resting as it was; she did not need to pile guilt on top of that.