FSE

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As the first rays of sun shine over us, we all get together just outside of what remains of the command module. Mud-caked, tired, hurt, and hungry we shuffle in from all directions. Pieces of tarp are passed around and turned into improvised clothes with the help of electrical wiring, some sharp pieces of metal, and lots of creativity.

Karan was happy to simply cut a slit on his piece and wear it like a poncho.

"Not so bad," he says turning and twisting in his new outfit, seeing to that his hands are completely free. "But I still feel a bit naked without a tool belt."

I have to help Nisha with her piece, doing my best to style it as I had noticed some of the other girls doing it. She is reluctant to accept my help at first, but with her hands still wounded, she wouldn't be able to do much by herself.

The three of us meld with the audience that had formed around the command unit's door. Aadit, a big, strong boy with burn scars covering half his chest, stands up in front of the door. He wears his tarp like a cloak and brandishes a piece of pipe like a scepter, he don't hide his scars, instead he shows them as a mark of pride. The result should have been almost comical, a parody of royalty, but we are so desperate for anyone to take charge that we listen to his words.

"Listen up, everyone," Aadit says, raising his hands. "If you'll please hold still, Myra is going to get a head count."

A fit girl comes forward and jabs the air with her long finger, she has sharp blue eyes. Her lips move with a count of the survivors. Aadit run his hands through his hair, then clasp tightly around his makeshift scepter. He looks out at us with a grim expression, his lips pressed thin.

"I'll not parse my words: We are in deep trouble," he says with a somber tone, "we have ahead of us a challenge bigger than anyone on Earth could have predicted. Arjuna has suffered extensive damage to its mainframe and structure, the fire has consumed the shelters and workshops that Arjuna had built for us. The good news is that the nuclear generator was buried deep into the ground as soon as Arjuna landed, and as far as we can tell it remains intact."

A murmur courses through the crowd, swelling to chattering.

Aadit hold his hands out. "We have two options here," he howls. "We can crumble and die, or we can fight back! Inch by inch, day by day! We can conquer this world, with our bare hands if needed! Who is with me?"

He raises his scepter and the crowd answers raising their hands, at first just a few here and there, but soon everyone is doing it. For once I'm not afraid of this world.

This is our manifest destiny. We have been born to conquer this world. Back on Earth, the Americans and the Europeans had proposed the construction of triple-sealed domes to protect their hypothetical colonists from the dangers presented by the virii, bacteria, and any other forms of pathogens on Artemis that could find a host in the human body, but our scientists had decided that no true colony could be formed when any minimal failure could threat the entire endeavor.

Arjuna had modified us for this purpose. Our immune system was suppressed at conception and replaced with a synthetic replacement that would make us resistant to any pathogen that it had detected and studied during years we had spent developing in the artificial wombs. Smaller alterations had been made to our lungs, stomachs, livers, and kidneys to give us a better chance for survival on this new world.

In many ways we were all aliens that only resembled humans.

"We were all trained for this mission, you know how this works. Our new home may not be what we expected, but we still can do it. I can promise you this, we will make it work."

"You are lying," one of the men blurts out, he is a strong young man with large chest and the strong arms of someone trained from birth to be a soldier. He turns toward the audience. "With Arjuna destroyed we can't survive for long! We are all going to die."

The grumblings return, several of the colonists shifting about uncomfortably, people talking and discussing among themselves. The group is shattering into smaller elements.

"Listen!" Aadit shouts, silencing the crowd. "I know it's easier to believe the worst, but we can do it! We need to stay strong and united through this."

Aadit hits his scepter against the metallic ground loudly, but the colonists are talking among themselves, creating a dull roar of impossible-to-follow discussions. I fell Nisha brush up against me and watch her step out between the audience and the command module.

"Listen up!" she yells, her voice booming above the conversations. Her tarp had come loose, exposing half of her chest. I find myself oddly fascinated by the sight of her body, her strong chest, her perky, small breasts, her strong arms. Karan is looking too.

She yells the crowd to attention; her voice resonates deep within all of us.

"We are better than that," Nisha says. She steps towards the command module and look at all of us. "If you think it's not worth to even try, then be my guest and walk away. The rest of us will be too busy trying our hardest to survive, so take your useless bickering elsewhere."

She looks at Aadit, giving him the word. The crowd looks from one to the other in silence now.

"This is our world, we were sent to conquer it and there never was any return trip," he points up towards the local sun, even though its rays barely filtered through the canopy overhead, "We are the first humans born under the light of another star, we already managed the impossible. I promise you, we will overcome our challenges, it will not be easy, but we can do it!"

He holds up one hand and ticks off four fingers with the other. "Food, Water, Shelter, and Fire," he said. "Those are our survival priorities. We need to start working on them immediately. Later we can even try to restore some of Arjuna's functions, but our first order is to survive."

Aadit nodded to Myra, who had rejoined the small leadership group by the module's door. "What did you come to?"

"Forty seven," she whispers, but we all hear it.

A moan slides through the crowd; I can feel myself contributing to it. Not that I had expected much more, but the harsh finality of the number squeezes my air out. Our hopes had been given mathematical limits.

"We will need three teams, at first I'll let it up to you to choose what you want to do. First team will gather food, we have enough water for now thanks to the rain, but we don't have any food. Second Team will be in charge of building shelter and fires; we need anyone with mechanical aptitude. The third team will scavenge the Arjuna and the colony ground for anything we could use, the fires seems to have died out, but there still are many hazards to be found."

I look at Nisha and Karan, wondering where they would go. The entire crowd erupts in chatter as they discuss their professions and training, debating where they should go. After last night this was incredible comforting, after all the tragedy and horrors that had first greeted us into this world we were at least taking control of our own destiny.

"I'll go over the second team," Karan says with a gentle touch on my arm and a broad smile. A part of me notices his broad chest, his strong arms. I stutter for a moment.

"I'm... I'm going for the first group," I say. "Find you later?"

He nods, and I give him a quick hug. The feeling of his strong arms makes me shiver for a moment, strange thoughts and implications come into my mind.

Luckily I'm soon joined by almost twenty colonists. We take turns introducing ourselves and our professions. Our group was formed mostly by farmers and stragglers that without advanced technology found themselves without a profession.

"I doubt we will be flying anything soon," Akane told us as she explained that she was trained to fly drones and planes that would have been used to transport people and material around the world.

With our group formed we wander deeper into the forest, looking for any signal of food. My training tells me that with so much green around us, we were bound to find at least a few edible things. Our enhanced metabolism would help us, but we would need to find large quantities of food if we expected to feed everyone.

"How we will even know what we can eat?" Sajala asks, she is a geologist, looking around the root of the big trees for anything that looks edible.

"It usually will look plump and colorful," I say. "Of course, many poisonous things will also look colorful... And that's using knowledge from Earth, it's hard to say if things around here followed the same paths..."

"There is a much easier solution," Gopal interrupts me, he is a farmer. "We need to find plentiful things, there is no need to go through the problems of finding if they are edible unless we can use them to feed the whole colony."

I look around trying to think logically.

Amidst the giant trees it will be hard for others vegetal life forms to survive, they block most of the sunlight. We can probably find some parasitic plants higher up, but the idea of climbing any of those behemoths is laughable in our state and worse yet, it isn't something we can do reliably to get food.

I try to picture the food chain in action around here. The first step on the chain is the giant trees absorbing the sunlight, after that you should have something feeding on them.

The probes sent to Artemis had revealed very little about their wildlife, but it was known that they had some strange kinds that resembled insects of big proportions. A few reptilian-looking predators had been found on the drier land to the north, but the strangest creatures certainly were the floaters. Several of the creatures on Artemis had evolved flotation sacs and different methods of propulsion that allowed them to thrive amidst the giant trees.

I look closely to the ground, the floating creatures would leave no trail, but there must be some kind of land dwelling creature that walks around. And these creatures must leave trails.

It's a shame that my education wasn't focused on more practical and rough elements of the biology. Sure, I know how to sequence DNA, but I really would have liked to spend more time learning how to forage and hunt.

It takes sometime for us to find the small depressions on the ground, no one in our group is a good tracker, but soon we can find other signs that something has passed around not long ago. There are scratch marks on the trees, probably left behind by claws or horns scratching against the surface. I can't help but to picture the way some big felines will use trees to mark their territory.

Had things gone according to plan, there should have a barrier of sonic pylons around the colony to ward off most of the creatures, but it was impossible to know if they were still working.

We make slow progress, many times having to backtrack and search for new tracks. As the sun begins to go down on the horizon, with our feet aching, and our hopes diminishing we find the fallen trees.

The sudden appearance of sunlight blinds us for a moment after the almost constant twilight. In front of us is a big clearing, several trees had been rooted out by the force of the storm last night and now these fallen behemoths are being picked apart by dozens of creatures that only where small in comparison. There were many of the large insects feasting on the fallen trees, eating large bites of the soft wood as other creatures drink from the sap that drips out of places where the wood had cracked. All around the tree a veritable swarm of living balloons floats around, using strange mandibles to drink the rich sap.

I almost instinctually begin to classify the creatures, looking for similar traits and characteristics amidst those creatures that would allow me to organize them. I could have stood there for hours on end watching the creatures going about their fascinating life cycle, but Gopal touches me on the shoulder and points towards what had been the top of the tree. Nested amidst the branches are colorful, sturdy looking yellow and purple fruits hanging from small, twisted branches of a smallish plant that had fixed itself to the bigger tree.

I nod in response, those certainly look edible.

We all approach carefully and as silently as we can manage, none of the insects seem much interested in flesh, but they still can attack if they perceive us as invaders in their territory. Their mandibles could easily hurt any of us.

Diminutive creatures feast upon the stiff fruits by the dozens. They are similar to rats, but with tripartite sharp beaks that they use to pierce the hardened skin of the fruits and a long tongue that drink the sweet-looking juices inside. Their long ear twitches and turns around as if waiting for danger at any moment.

"We need to get them away," Gopal says as we get closer. "Those beaks look sharp enough to cut out our fingers if we try to steal their food."

"I have an idea," I say. "Stay behind and ready to run away if they run towards me."

"What are you going to do?" Akane asks as she sees me take off my improvised tarp poncho.

"They are skittish," I say to them as much as to reassure me. "This must mean they are prey around here. If a big predator appears, then they will probably try to run away."

I grab the poncho with both hands and open it over my head; this should make me look bigger and threatening for them.

They are just rats. I can do it.

I run towards them screaming and growling, shaking my arms, and stomping the ground as hard as I can. The rats answer immediately sitting away with great speed.

All of them, except one. It just stands there on his two hind legs, his beak stretched open and a shivering whistle coming out of it. I flinch for only a moment as my mind rushes trough possible explanations for this strange behavior.

The call is answered quickly as a large maw devours the small animal. It's a predator, there is absolutely no doubt about it with the sharp eyes in the front of the head, the mouth is a vertically slit thresher with dozens of black teeth closing on themselves. The mouse disappears amidst the mandibles in just a moment, the bones crushed easily as the creature turns their three big, black eyes upon me.

It's amazing! The small creature stays behind as a form of sacrifice to attract a predator that would eliminate the threat to the group!

Fuck!

I run as fast as my legs can take me. The creature follows in sudden dash of speed. It has six strong legs covered in plaques of quitine, the flesh under it is pale, sickly looking. Probably a nocturnal predator.

I hate myself for thinking about those things even as I barely dodge the claws of the beast, rolling on the ground to avoid the lethal pounce. All my years of training seem to have hindered me for this kind of work; I was trained for laboratory work, to thrive in the peace and calm of a controlled environment.

The creature shrieks and jumps once again, this time I'm a moment too late and the claws dig deep into my leg. I scream and hug my leg as pain overwhelms my senses. I'm not a fighter, not a leader. This was never to be my place.

I see the creature lowering its body for the next and final pounce, drool dripping from that hideous mouth. I try to craw away as fast as I could, but there is nothing that could protect me from that creature.

Akane smashes it head open with a stone. The girl jumps over the creature holding a fragment of rock in both hands like an ancient goddess of hunting, she snarls in fury as she lowers the rock with all her strength. And again, and again.

Viscous, pale blood erupts, bathes her in it even as she keeps screaming and hitting the creature. The body collapse on the ground and with great effort Akane rises, she is covered in blood. For a moment I see Kali, the destroyer, coming towards me, the next I see a scared woman that is trembling, still clutching to her rock.

Gopal hugs her tightly and help her let go of the stone.

"Everything is ok," he says quickly to her. "Everything is ok."

If anything good came out of all that is that the clearing was quickly abandoned by all the animals, leaving us alone to collect as much as we could carry from the fruits, turning our tarps in improvised sacks so we could carry enough for everyone. The way back is painful for me, struggling with the help of the others to keep walking even as my left leg was still badly injured.

Seeing the tentative lights coming from the camp is... wonderful.

We are received with open arms and hungry bellies, spreading around the fruits among us and sitting around the small fires to talk and enjoy a night of rest after a long day.

"Hey, let me help you," Karan put one of my arms around his shoulders and almost carries me and my sack with him closer to the fire. The warmth of his strong body against mine is enticing. I avoid his eyes, look to my feet so he couldn't notice the blush in my face.

"I heard you got hurt," Nisha sits right next to me, with a first aid kit in her hands. "We found a few more of those, I guess they won't care about you using one since you are the hero of the hour."

Her smile is so soft, comforting after everything that has happened. She quickly clean and bandage my leg, her hands are still wounded, but she seems to be recovering rather quickly.

After that we partake in the fruits and some cold water under the light of the fire, we talk and tell our stories of our first day of life. I don't even notice when I fall asleep amidst them.