Page 16 of Crash Landing
I hoped I was right, but to test my theory, I decided to crouch down for a sample of the moss in hopes of knowing more about the plant’s environmental needs. Maybe everything relied on the volcanic setting.
Or maybe my ideas would lead nowhere and I was just reaching in the wrong direction.
With a tiny jar full of dark moss, I stood with my pack by my feet and took a slow turn around to look at the strange, alien, and yet gorgeous landscape. The fog sat low as far as the eye could see and those weird, giant umbrella trees were each tall enough to breach the surface of the heavy clouds. It made the terrain look like a white ocean with blackish-purple domes scattered throughout. From directly above, it was near impossible to know how much life thrived beneath the cloud cover and mist.
I peeled my eyes from the landscape to pop a cork on my little moss sample. As I crouched to put it in a safe compartment in my bag, I saw the captain emerging from the woods. Unlike the other crewmen, his suit wasn’t just a bodysuit. He had a jacket over the suit itself, which had a strange, asymmetrical hem to it that wrapped two-thirds of the way around. It was weirdly dashing on his long, athletic frame.
I was staring.
I told Thomas that Saleuk wasn’t attractive a thousand times. Truthfully, all of the valerians had the body of a god. It came with well-developed genetics and training I supposed. Humans were so damn content with their luxuries that most of them never paid any attention to their physique, but valerians were fresh from war and possibly heading into a new one. They hadto stay trained. Stay alert. They couldn’t afford to be a liability to their people and there was something very admirable about that.
Being a liability myself for most of my life, I felt like I could see things with a bit more clarity than I could before.
It wasn’t until the captain stopped at one of the landing legs of the ship that I realized he had caught me staring. I stared right back as he leaned up against the ship and crossed his arms. His head cocked and though I still couldn’t see his face, I could imagine a smirk behind that visor.
I slung my pack onto my back again and took a couple of daring steps toward him.
“I know you don’t need that helmet,” I said, calling him out on the lie. “I know you can breathe our air and you can probably breathe here.”
“Helmet’s a precaution,” he said.
“So you can’t breathe here?”
“I didn’t say that.”
I nodded, disbelieving. “This place is beautiful. Why isn’t your base here instead of Sylos?”
“The plant life is too aggressive. Anything we clear out to build grows back twice as fast and twice as thick.” He turned and pointed out toward the horizon. “There was a research colony built over there a long time ago. In Earth years, I’d estimate about fifty. The forest peeled apart the buildings like it was mad we’d settled there. And unlike humans, valerians learn fast.”
I narrowed my eyes at the cocky captain. “Do they? Because I thought you guys overharvested your first homeworld until it was almost uninhabitable.”
He cocked his head in the other direction. “Right… and welearnedthat’s bad and colonized other planets better. More efficiently. Valer is still habitable, by the way. Well, now it is.”
“Of course. But considering how old the human race is compared to valerians, I think we deserve a little slack.”
“We’ll see.”
Were there any valerians who didn’t want to push my buttons? The captain was reminding me too much of Saleuk. Too much. I pursed my lips and pivoted to head back into the woods, but my curiosity got the better of me. Annoying or not, I had questions.
“So, you know about this place, right?”
The captain stood up straight and rolled his shoulders like he was feeling a bit stiff.
“Of course, I do.”
“So, are there volcanos here?”
“Wouldn’t that information have been in the files you were all supposed to read?” I gave him a look like I really wasn’t in the mood to dance around answers. “Yes, this moon is full of volcanos. Most of which are dormant. But there was a time that they weren’t, which accounts for the black stone,” he said, tapping his foot on the ground beneath us.”
“Obsidian.”
“Sure.”
“That’s incredible.”
A low chuckle vibrated from the captain’s mask before he muttered something in his valerian tongue.
“What’d you just say?”
