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Chapter One: A Rough Landing

Commander Bek Nan'Li awoke to the sound of cracking timber, the scent of blood, and a disorienting throb in the back of his neck. He could see only the musky blackness of the dead cockpit, and hear the groaning of wood against immense weight. His escape pod had smashed into the upper reaches of a tree, sitting perilously across a thin branch, waiting for the proper moment to snap.

With a hiss and a thud, the top of the escape pod shot clear from the metal hull and smashed through the canopy, cracking against branches as it careened to the forest floor, and the commander, disoriented, clambered over the lip of the pod to perch on a parallel branch.

The commander was a Kandu, large and feline-like, fur colored like rust, with slanted purple eyes and violet-tipped tail that swished back and forth within the canopy. He wore the typical regalia of a Union officer: a crimson steel-plated jumpsuit, a long black-cloth jacket that drooped below the back of the knees splitting into two tips just before the hips, a black and silver beret that fit between his ears, and the long-range tactical rifle of a seasoned marksman. He wore the expression of a serious soldier.

His eyes narrowed to slits, scanning the canopy. The leaves were translucent, yet an azure light seemed to dip and weave between the branches, caressing the leaves and with a violet shimmer, and a lace of aquamarine. Dropping to a crouch, the commander took a heaving breath and looked down towards the base of the tree, it dropped nearly two hundred feet to meet the ground, the crumbled lid of the pod laying against the roots.

Bek leapt against the trunk of the tree, digging his claws deep into the crimson bark and sending chunks flying to the ground with each shift of his steel boots against every foothold. He climbed expertly down the canopy, watching the thick forest unfold around him, then he dropped to the ground with a click, his rifle clanking against his armor. The ground sank slightly under his weight, like sponge, making no sound below his digitigrade feet.

The soil had an ethereal appearance, like a pond sheeted over in fog. Above, between the glittering tree-tops, rain-less storm-clouds whipped and raged in the sky, hiding only barely the menacing body of the planet Dark-Fog above, and the blue star Vesevius casting its gentle glow on the glazed plant-life. Oddly shaped shrubs and bushes surrounded him, and all the plant-life appeared to have the same translucent leaves turned violet by the star above. The trees, like the one he had climbed down, had a sappy crimson bark that bled nearly three hundred feet into the air, ending in a nearly impenetrable mass of glistening foliage.

The trees and foliage were thick, it would be impossible to navigate. It made the commander shudder.

"Now where's my damn ship." He said quietly.

Crack! Without warning the escape pod had come crashing to the ground, shooting plumes of gray soil into the air, and sending Bek sprawling to the dirt, scrambling for his rifle which he aimed stupidly at the empty hull. He stared for a moment, breathing wildly.

He chuckled.

"Baka'Unle" he swore in his native Kanduran, 'Stupid' in Galactic Standard. Bek re-shouldered his rifle, then approached the pod. He kicked the hull with a steel toe, sending a reverbing twang that bounced through the hoary air and ricocheted through the trees. As he turned away, a sudden hiss sent him spinning on his heels and overturned into the capsule, his legs sticking awkwardly out the pod.

"Reading! Repeat!" He pressed a small button on the control console and waited,

"Reading! Repeat!" He shouted again. "This is commander Bek Nan'Li of the Madcap Ranger, I am reading you, repeat, I am reading you!"

A fizzled growl emanated from the console; incoherent, Bek couldn't understand it.

"Coms unclear. Report CC immediately!" Bek waited, but there was no response.

"Damn!"

To be safe, he reached for the CC transfer, but a shrill beep and fading interior lights informed him that the pod had finally lost power. Bek shot back out of the pod, reaching for his thigh he recovered his locator and began tracing blinking symbols with his finger, mumbling to himself.

With nervous eyes, the Kandu shifted his rifle on his shoulder, glanced about himself, and started walking into the forest. It was no use staying there, and if there was any chance he could find his crew, he would take it.

16 miles away, Captain Madu, second-in-command of the Madcap Ranger, was retching over the side of her escape pod. Madu fell light-headed against the side of the pod. Her gray-blue figure, dressed also in Union Officer armor, bent sickly forward and shuddered as the contents of her stomach emptied onto the alien loam. Dehydrated, she wiped a webbed hand across her crusted-over lips and glared with blurry eyes across the glade in which she had crashed. Brown grasses and strange emerald ferns surrounded her, and her dish-like eyes could pick up no signs of her fellow crewmen, nor the ship.

"Guardians curse whoever smashed us into this bloody rock." She said, pulling her blaster from her hip and taking careful note of her surroundings. A long scar of disrupted soil trailed behind her pod, but otherwise, the empty glade seemed to stretch for three hundred yards in every direction, ending in forest on every side. The sky looked like a great storm was raging above, but the air was bone dry, giving her skin a prickly feeling.

Keeping her blaster poised at arm's length, the captain slowly edged away from her pod, glancing wearily about as she crept to the edge of the glade. Like a deer, she kept between the glade and the forest, ensuring easy escape if some unknown threat were to spot her. She peered into the forest, stepping along the outer edges of the field to look for landmarks of any kind. But the forest was too thick and she could see nothing.

Defeated, she turned back to the damaged pod and searched through the equipment scattered within it. The locator, communicator, and beacon were without power, and nearly everything else was broken. So much for Union Military-Grade equipment, she thought.

Sitting against the hull of the pod, Madu peered up at the looming planet above. It seemed to be plagued with the same eternal storm-clouds as its moon. A strange flying creature was circling above the pod, no doubt curious. It was reptilian with a thin membrane for wings, the blue light of Vesuvius shining right through the skin. It uttered a horrid cry, somewhere between the baying of a wolf and the screeching of a dying animal. It was the first sign of life that the captain had seen.

She wondered why such a place could exist, what terrible will had formed it. The ground was abject in texture, the sky terrible, and the air smelt distinctly of wood-rot and musk. It all seemed like a dream, like a nightmare that you can't wake from, or rather she had slipped into hell. I would probably deserve it, she thought. She pitied herself, growing less hopeful as her thoughts raged within an exhausted mind, and her eyes began to droop.

She had no doubts as to her importance in the Union, she WAS a captain after all, but she couldn't help doubting that perhaps it meant nothing after all. Besides, she wasn't likely to survive this place, much less rise to such a coveted station as the commander. She couldn't even remember why she had enlisted. Was it morbid curiosity? Some vain attempt at glory? Or perhaps she was simply bored? She couldn't remember, it seemed like so long ago.

Captain Madu pulled the blaster from her hip, feeling the weight in her palm. It was a Carthon 3750 Military Blaster, standard for non-combative officers like herself. She aimed down the sights, peering at the red bark of a tree, imagining the explosive green bolt ripping through the trunk. She had idolized it; combat, the feeling of power, the purpose, it was all so romanticized in her mind. Now she knew better. Six years of only boredom and blood.

Just ahead, a red flash shot through the forest. Instinctively, Madu fired her blaster, putting a smoking hole in the trunk of a distant tree, before sprinting into the forest.

"Goddamn it!"

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