I went to the exit hatch and hiked up the OPEN lever. That got me into the airlock, which had a peep-monitor showing the world outside the pod. I could see a stretch of water so muddy it looked like creamed coffee… but the shore was only a stone’s throw away, a low dirt bank supporting a scraggly line of trees. The trees looked shining wet, as if they’d just got doused with rain. Considering how blue clear the sky was, I figured all that drip-off had actually come from my module smacking the water. Escape pods make relatively gentle landings — they don’t come in like fireballs, and they always aim for water to avoid smushing houses or people — but even a soft landing splashes down like a kid doing a cannonball. A good slap. Much spillage.
Too bad I missed seeing it. I bet it would have been great.
When I looked again at those trees on shore, I noticed their leaves weren’t the nice chlorophyll green of New Earth and Troyen. Their colors ran a lot more funereal. Purply black. Bluish black. Orangey black. Yellow with black spottles. Gloss black on matte black with ebony accents.
But it’d take more than dark leaves to make me feel gloomy. After twenty years of living inside a lunar dome, never seeing a tree except in VR sims, I was kiss-the-ground happy to be this close to the real thing. I pushed the EXIT button; the interior airlock door closed, the door to the outside opened… and I jumped into the muddy water, doing a cannonball of my own. Okay. Maybe the water was bone-shaking cold. And I’d swum halfway to shore before it occurred to me Celestia might have its own types of piranha or anacondas, not to mention swarms of alien germs. But nothing sank its teeth into my leg, and a short swim was exactly what I needed to wash the venom off my face. I even considered taking a glug of water to rinse the venom out of my mouth; but there was all that mud, and maybe the water did have germs, and anyway, some of the venom must have already gone down my throat. Keeping my eyes and mouth closed, treading water, I ducked my head under a few times, then wiped off my face with my hands. At least that rinsed the venom from my skin… and it made me feel cleaner in general, even if I could still taste the stuff I’d swallowed.
When I clambered onto the bank, I was muddy, wet, and cold. It felt good. I found a spot where the sun shone through a gap in the trees and sat down to wring the damp from my uniform. While I squeezed out water, I looked around to take stock of my situation.
Escape pods try not to put you down in a desert or an icecap or the middle of an ocean. They pick a spot with nice weather and plenty of plant life, preferably with signs of intelligent civilization.
Me, I’d landed in a thirty-meter-wide canal. You could tell it wasn’t a natural river by how straight it ran, a perfect line in both directions. The water showed almost no current: the escape pod was floating free, but it’d barely budged since I’d left it. I wouldn’t have to worry about it drifting out of sight downstream anytime soon.
If need be, I could swim back out and ask the pod’s computer for food rations when I got hungry — I hadn’t noticed any storage bins, but it’d be a pathetic excuse for an evac module if it didn’t carry basic supplies. On the other hand, I didn’t think I’d have to settle for bland protein bars and squeeze tubes of fiber paste… because behind me were fields full of vegetables as far as the eye could see.
The canal ran along one edge of a valley whose soil was almost jet-black. That meant the dirt was as rich as gravy… and it was covered with crops planted in neat rows forming neat squares — a checkerboard in shades of green stretching from the canal all the way to some distant hills. The plants looked young, like this was only late spring or early summer, but I could already recognize onions and lettuce and carrots in the fields closest to me. Honest-to-goodness Earth food growing in a big gorgeous garden that smelled of humus and greenery.
A paved road ran close in front of me, parallel to the canal and separated from the water by the scrawny trees growing on the bank. Here and there along the road stood little environment domes in clusters of two or three — living spaces for the families who worked these farms. At the moment, I couldn’t see anyone out in the fields… but the strong orange sun was straight overhead, and toasty hot even with my clothes soaked to the skin, so I guessed everybody had gone inside for siesta.
I got up, brushed the worst-caked mud off my uniform, and started down the road toward the nearest domes. No one would want me showing up unannounced in the middle of lunch; but I’d wait till people went back out to work, and I’d say hello then. On a day like this, there was no need to hurry. It was heaven just to breathe real air, away from the nanites and the black ship and Troyen…
A doorway dilated in the side of the closest dome. Out stepped a Mandasar-warrior caste, big and red. The instant he caught sight of me, he screamed a battle cry and charged.
Mandasar warriors are only half as big as queens, but they’re still the size of Brahma bulls. They’ve got the basic lobsterish look, but bulked-up and stocky, from their flat wide faces to their strong blunt tails. If a warrior props his tail good and solid on the ground behind him, you can hit him with a truck and he won’t be knocked backward; in fact, once he gets his eight legs on solid footing, he can push that truck back the other way, over rough terrain, for hour after hour. Put a bunch of warriors together and you get a line of foot soldiers who can steamroll over anything in their path… except another line of Mandasars driving the opposite way.
Don’t get the idea warriors are slow-moving hulks; they can storm forward on those eight strong legs as fast as horse cavalry. When they’re running they look like old Greek centaurs, because the front part of their body is angled up vertically as tall as a human. Upright front, lobstery behind.
Like queens, every warrior has pincer claws, but only two of them, on stubby arms down at the waist. The claws are sharp and nasty enough to lop clean through a human’s leg, bones and all, if you’re careless enough to let your ankle come within reach. At shoulder level, warriors have another set of arms, called the Cheejreth or "clever twigs": spindly six-fingered things used for fine manipulation. Cheejreth are nearly as long as human arms, but skinny and fragile — so weak, a human five-year-old could wrist-wrestle a warrior ten wins out of ten. During a serious fight, the Cheejreth stay folded against the chest, tucked into arm-sized niches in the warrior’s carapace; those niches evolved to keep Cheejreth safely out of the way, rather than flopping around and getting snapped off.
Topping the body is a head like a cannonball, its carapace armor twice as thick as any other part of the warrior’s shell. The head has a few delicate parts — huge feathery ears like moth antennas, and cat-style whiskers around the snout to serve as extra scent receptors, waving about to catch odor molecules from the air — but the flimsy bits aren’t at all vital. If they break or get mangled during a fight, it scarcely hurts a bit. The warrior just can’t hear or smell as well for a few days, until the damaged part grows back.
The one indispensable part of a warrior’s face is the spike on his pointy snout. It’s sharp and bony, only as big as a human thumb, but perfect for use as a bayonet — in an emergency, the warrior can use his spike to stab an enemy in the eye. Of course, it has to be a big emergency. All Mandasar castes have a finicky sense of smell, and they absolutely hate the stink of someone’s blood gucking up the tip of their noses.
The warrior charging toward me had a shell so fiery red, I knew he had to be young, in his twenties — the color fades as warriors get older, not to mention that they learn not to attack people at first sight. You never know when you’ll meet someone who spent years on the Mandasar home-world, learning all kinds of tricks to show overeager youngsters that humans aren’t as soft as they look.