No one had seen an ecosystem as reactive as the one that covered the southern hemisphere of Huvona Prime. The ground was soft, the dirt loose. Water ran from mountain peaks in great gushing streams that waved across the landscape, changing their course in a matter of months or weeks. The plant life had deep roots that intertwined with each other creating a web that gave structure to the earth. The roots evaded every human attempt to find their bottom, sinking miles down into the soft dirt. The trees constantly slid across the landscape from place to place, their enormous leaves catching the high winds like sails to move their thick trunks along the forest floor.
When the first colony was established, expectations were high. The soil was rich in nitrogen and nutrients, and the flora was lush and multicolored. Earth crops could grow there, and many of Huvona’s own plants could be eaten by humans. The first colony was no more than a small outpost: a few farm houses, a garrison, and a common house where the cooking, eating, repairing, and politics of the colony were centered.
The colony was set up with everything it needed to succeed, benefiting from the wisdom of a thousand colonies before it. It was gone within a week.
Wiped away by one of the rivers, which at the colony’s founding was several kilometers to its west. Over the course of a week, it had traversed the forest, collecting within itself the power of other rivers and streams along the way until it became a roaring dragon of crystal clear, pure, healthy water that crashed into the colony and wiped it away completely.
The destruction of the colony was devastating news when the rest of the systems heard. A supply ship wasn’t due for another month, and interstellar communications at that time were too slow to call for aid. The fact that only a few ruins were found led most to believe that all the colonists had been killed.
Scientists soon flocked to Huvona Prime to study the event. The river that destroyed the colony left a swath of soil disturbance and nutrient deposits much larger than anything previously seen on the planet, which is the only reason the colony’s fate could be ascertained at all. Where the colony once stood there remained a depression in the soil. Some scientists believed that the weight of the colony caused the soil to depress and drew the river to it like a funnel. Others blamed the trees of the forest, citing their extensive and interconnected root system. They said that the presence of the colony suffocated the land upon which it sat, and the trees moved away in unconscious search of moister soil. Without the support of the root system, the soil sank and the funnel effect was achieved.
The next colony learned from the first. It was set up the lightest materials, designed to disturb the soil as little as possible. Already the prospect of a colony on Huvona Prime was becoming more of a financial liability than an asset in and of itself, but the scientific value to be gleaned from understanding the ecology of the southern forests was promising.
The second colony lasted much longer and grew very slowly out of caution. To avoid buildup of weight in the warehouse, they harvested very little other than what was needed to survive and sent back shipments to Earth that were practically empty. The Huvona colony was out of the news after a year, but investors were unsatisfied with the high operating cost and low returns. The colony was pressured to harvest more resources: timber from the walking trees, mostly, but also the deep soil that was practically like fertilizer as well as various syrups and saps generated from the trees and their giant, flat, green-and-blue-and-orange leaves.
The investors made a final push and even spent hundreds of trillions of dollars on prototype suspension tech to send to the colony so that they could store their goods without putting pressure on the soil. When the suspensors arrived along with a new colonial administrator, a thousand more colonists, and the necessary tools, the harvesting began.
At first, the investors were elated. Supply ships were returning to Earth full of Huvonan plants, timber, soil, and even mineral water. The colonists self-reported high rates of satisfaction, and the Huvona Prime colony was gearing up to become the investors’ best work yet. In addition to the colony now turning a healthy profit, the patents for the suspension tech had just been fully approved and they were ready to be produced for commercial and industrial use. Each member on the board of investors woke up early every morning as the markets opened just to check on their ever-soaring stock prices.
Plans were being drawn up for three more colonies in the southern forest when the second colony was destroyed. Once again, Huvona Prime was in the news, and in an even bigger way. The original colony disaster claimed three hundred lives. After expansion, the second colony was home to three thousand.
Over the year-long timespan from the expansion of second the colony to its destruction, the new administrator had made the investors quite pleased. He provided materials and profits, and the price of the company stock was all the evidence they needed that the colony was officially a success. They were satisfied, and the administrator – with the promise of a luxurious early retirement back on Earth – was also satisfied. One thing he did not provide, however, was a regular report on the landscape of the forest surrounding the colony.
Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
Indeed, the suspensors and light, breatheable materials had prevented soil depression and a repeat of the river disaster, but the tree cover around the colony was growing sparser by the day. Initially, the new administrator had increased the quota of trees that were to be cut down and lowered the requisite density that had to be maintained. He had been quite pleased with this decision, as it put him in a good light compared to the last administrator, who had kept the quota low and the density high. He accused the previous administrator of cowardice and disloyalty to the project, then sent him back with the next supply ship.
It was three months after sending home the old administrator when the new administrator reversed his decision. Growing crops in between trees that moved through the soil had always meant a certain amount of crop loss was to be expected, but it was never a problem because the richness of the soil allowed for crops to grow quickly and produce more calories than on Earth. As the number of trees in the immediate vicinity of the colony dropped, the administrator had expected to producing such a surplus as to be able to send home large quantities of food. And he did, for a while. Without as many trees plowing through the land, gardens turned into real crop fields. In one week, the colony harvested enough food to last a year, they estimated.
Without as many trees plowing through the land, however, the forest floor was increasingly unprotected from the high winds. As the leaves that once caught the wind like sails and the trunks that halted it like a shield were hauled away and sent off in spaceships, the high winds became the low winds. The buildings of the colony were now subject to frequent gusts of powerful wind, the metal-plastic structured groaning as their strength was tested.
With the winds came topsoil erosion. The new administrator tried to pass it off as a blessing after he reversed his decision. The colony was now mostly clear of trees in its vicinity, but they could travel further into the forest for timber easily enough. In the meantime, the topsoil had eroded, making it easier to access the deep, rich soil that was like fertilizer. Food, timber and soil flowed off-planet in equal quantities, and the colonists all looked forward to luxurious early retirements on Earth.
At first, the root system of the forest was largely exposed by the erosion. The roots stood naked like structures for children to climb over at a playground. The plants that could drifted away to other lands, the ones that couldn’t withered and died over the next few months. Rivers began to more frequently cut paths through the colony, washing over their fields in muddy sloughs, unable to pick up destructive power in the thick soil. The crops were mostly fine, protected from the impact by simple plastic cones. As the months ticked by, however, the tree density in the forest surrounding the colony’s immediate vicinity also began to decline, and the high-winds-turned-low-winds became ever more powerful.
The colony did its best to withstand: a lone spot of persistence in a landscape defined by its ever-changing nature. To look at it from above would be to see a near-perfect circle of brown and gray surrounded by a writhing, tangled mess of green, blue, and orange that grew thicker the farther away from the circle one looked.
Though they would have no way of knowing for another two weeks, the investors found out that it was the very moment they signed the approval for the new colony plans that the first roof blew off a house in the Huvona Prime colony. The winds on that day were particularly fierce, owing to a regular change of season in the planet’s southern hemisphere that until that day had not been experienced by humans. On the very first day of the windy season, the colony was torn to shreds. Shards of metal structures littered the edge forest where it met the bare circle left by the colony. Cut logs, crates of food, barrels of water and sap all were tossed around, emptied, and reclaimed by the forest. As for the bodies of the three thousand colonists: only two hundred and sixty were found.
The scientists once again flocked to Huvona Prime. The winds at the disaster site had destroyed the old landing pad and made it too rough to land in any case. They landed deeper in the forest and trekked to the remains of the colony. All that was left was a dark, circular scar in the middle of the forest. A photographer accompanied one such expedition and catalogued the destruction for the public imagination. The most famous photo he took was the first in the series: a snap of the planet as his ship entered the atmosphere. It was a neatly composed shot. A field of writhing, multicolored mess marked in the dead center by a dark circle where no life existed. When the photographer returned to Earth, he sold the picture to a magazine who included it in a front-page article titled, “The Vengeful Planet.” For his pictures, the photographer received interplanetary fame and sold many copies of his photo album. He enjoyed a luxurious early retirement on Earth.
The investors, when they heard the news, were crestfallen and immediately canceled the plans for the new colonies. The next morning as the markets opened, twelve of them killed themselves. The public imagination was captured for months. A few rescue missions were launched, but never brought anyone back. With no firsthand accounts, conspiracy theories and debates about the disaster abounded. News reporters ran updates on the story constantly, and a year later there was a blockbuster movie made. The running of this film (and all others) was canceled in Mumbai when a heat wave and subsequent snowballing crisis killed ten percent of the state of Maharashtra was killed and the theaters couldn’t fill the job vacancies.
On Huvona Prime, the windy season reached its peak. Many of the sensors left behind by scientists in the wake of the colony disaster were ripped out of the ground. In this early part of the windy season, the sensors with the most tree cover were registering wind speeds of over 200 miles per hour. The last readings of the sensors in the colony scar before they were ripped apart were more than five times that. First, the loose soil of the forest flew about, traveling hundreds of miles at a time during a wind storm and was reintroduced to the bare spot. Next, the biggest trees – carried at a rapid pace by the powerful winds in their leaves – brought back even more of the loose soil in giant piles carried along by their powerful roots. With a layer of loose soil, the smaller trees and bushes could glide in and join them. The swaying rivers watered the land, and grasses returned. The season lasted for two Earth years in total, but in only a few months the dark circle visible from low atmosphere was gone.
Further north, at about the hemisphere of Huvona, the forest ended and gave way to dry grasslands and rocky tundra. The terrain was uneven and jagged, the soil not as fertile. At the end of the two Earth year windy season, a face emerged from the dark of a cave in that region. A human face. The human had not heard nor seen evidence of a wind storm in a week. They emerged from the cave, pale and lithe. As they looked around them at the land of Huvona Prime, their eyes scanned the terrain for danger. There were no animals of any kind, other than them. There was no sign of ships in the sky. When they followed their compass back to where it said the colony should be, they found nothing but more forest.
The human collected some fruits and roots, as well as some other plants that defied categorization. They brought it back to the cave and spread it out before their companions, who waited hungrily in the dark. They wore the tattered remains of uniforms and sat on empty food crates. After two Earth years, the humans emerged from the cave, and went once again into the forest.