“Werner? Werner?”
Werner groaned softly. He felt dizzy. “Hello?” he asked. His vision cleared, and he recognized Menken kneeling over him, concerned.
“You’re alive!” Menken helped get him to a sitting position. “We had to break the door down,” he said, pointing his thumb at the entrance between the cockpit and the passenger bay. “It was like puncturing a vacuum when we did.”
Werner smiled weakly. “Is everyone safe?”
“There were no deaths in the landing. Injuries, but most everyone is okay.”
Werner tried to get to his feet but his head started pounding. He lay back down. “Is there any sign of Hans’ ship?”
Menken shook his head. “We were wondering about that. Did it..?”
“I don’t know.” Werner tried to move his arms to rub his forehead, but he didn’t have the strength. “My head hurts.”
Menken handed him a cup of water. “Drink this. There’s water here.”
Werner drank his first glass of water in days. It was an incredible feeling. “That did it.” He slowly got to his feet. “Let’s go outside. I want to see where we’ve landed.”
With Menken’s help, Werner staggered out of the ship.
Most of the passengers were sitting or laying outside the ship. Several of them cheered when they saw Werner. “He’s alive! Our leader is alive!”
Werner made a quick head count. “We’re missing five people.”
“Brut took a scouting party to try and find more food and water sources.”
Werner tested the ground. The atmosphere was thinner than Gaman, and gravity was lighter. It would be easier to walk, but also easier to fall down. He would have to be careful.
“Where did the water you gave me come from?”
Menken grabbed a handful of the black sand from the ground and squeezed it in his hand. Water dripped out. “The soil is extremely moist. We’ve found cases of plants, mostly moss or fern-based.”
“Are they edible?”
“Sure hope so; we’ve eaten everything we’ve found.”
“I can’t blame you.” Werner looked around. All he could see was black sand stretching to the horizon, primarily dunes. There was no wind, and Werner could see all the footprints peppering the surrounding area.
“How far out have you gone?”
“Never out of sight of the ship. Brut’s team has gone farther than anyone else has.” Menken started squeezing himself a cup of water. “We’ve been debating what exactly we’re landed on. I say it’s a planet, but Kixoo is sure it’s a star.”
“You can’t land on a star,” said Werner, “but it’s neither. This is a moon.”
Menken looked up. “Of Gaman?”
“Gaman had a moon,” nodded Werner, “that’s taken up natural orbit since Gaman’s destruction.”
He turned to the group at large. “Excuse me? If everyone could listen up…” Once he had the group’s attention he continued. “First, I’d like to congratulate all of you on keeping your hopes up, and sacrificing so much on the voyage here. Without all the foodless days and motionless hours that each of you endured, we would never have reached our new home.”
This was met with cheers and applause from the collective group. The excitement from just reaching solid ground had not yet subsided.
“The worst part of our ordeal is over. We’ve found a home. But now we’ll have to sustain ourselves, and there doesn’t appear to be much to live on here. From what I’ve heard, scouting parties have already collected all the food available in this area. We’ll have to move.”
This decision was met with a more subdued response.
“Not right now, of course. No, we need a decent night’s rest, and this desert will work perfectly for that. Hopefully, Brut will find a food source or a better place to stay. But for now, relax and try and make yourself comfortable. You’ve all earned a break.”
The settlers gratefully laid their heads on the ground or went back to what they were doing.
Werner walked back into the ship. Menken followed him. “What are you doing?”
“I’m going to try and use the data from our landing to estimate the direction Hans’ ship may have gone. If there’s a chance they landed safely, I want to know about it, and rescue them.”
“What should we do in the meantime?” asked Menken.
“You’ve earned a rest too. Just relax for a while.”
Werner started scribbling calculations and trajectories on a piece of cloth.
“You know,” said Menken, “if anyone’s earned a right to rest, it’s you.”
“I can’t just relax while Hans is still out there. And our troubles aren’t over yet. We still need to find a place to stay, and survive one season until crops start growing.”
“I know that,” said Menken. “And that’ll all be happening in the next few days. But it’s not happening now, and everyone needs to rest eventually. I just think you should take the chances to recover while they existó“ he broke off when commotion sounded from outside.
“Brut’s back! And he’s got food!”
Werner and Menken ran outside. Brut and his men were hiking back into camp from the north, and they were all carrying large handfuls of fern leaves and other greens.
“It’s every plant we came across from here to the rock cropping,” explained Brut, smiling, as the people tore into the plants ravenously. “But that’s not the best part. “He drew his hand out of his pocket and held about a dozen seeds. “These are scattered on the ground around the rocks.”
“So there are rocks somewhere north of here?” asked Werner, looking in that direction.
“Hell of a walk, but yeah,” answered Brut. “It’s why we took so long. We took a nap in the shadows, away from the sun.”
“What do these seeds grow?”
“We aren’t sure. There weren’t any plants but some yellow ferns and the seeds.”
Werner looked at them. “That’s odd. But we won’t worry about it. Get some rest, and tomorrow we’ll set out for that outcropping.”
The night was peacefully warm, but the ground remained wet. Werner was afraid he’d have to draw lots to see who gets to sleep in the shuttle, but to his surprise nobody volunteered. Everybody preferred the uncomfortable dampness over spending another night in the passenger bay. Werner ended up sleeping there to keep an eye on the Sapaar guards, who had not regained consciousness in the cockpit.
The next day, they salvaged everything they could carry from the ship and set out. It was easy hiking, but many of the settlers were in no condition to be walking, so the pace was slow. Werner made sure they took frequent water breaks. The two Sapaar, the weakest of them all, were carried on stretchers, to several settlers’ chagrin. Thankfully nobody pressed the issue.
Following Brut’s old footsteps, they reached the rocks later that day. As Brut had reported, there were seeds scattered on the ground.
“I’ve never seen seeds do this,” frowned Werner, picking one up. “There should be plants around to have dropped the seeds.”
“Maybe they belong to the ferns,” suggested Seska.
“Ferns don’t grow from seeds; they have spores.”
“On Gaman,” noted Brut. “This is another planet. Who knows what life is like here?”
“I actually haven’t seen any animal life since we landed,” noted Werner. “We’re going to have a primarily vegetarian diet until we find sources of meat.”
They were fully settled down by around noon, which turned out o be unbearably hot. The sun baked the black sand, the water in the soil dried up and cracks appeared, and the shade under the rocks became the only real place to rest. Werner couldn’t imagine what they’ve have done if they had remained in the desert.
Once things had cooled down after a few hours, Werner started sending groups of sending parties, much like last time, to pick up food from the surrounding areas. This area proved to be much more plentiful than the desert, and after everyone had eaten their fill of plants for dinner that night, there was a sizeable amount still left over.
“So what if these are poisonous?” asked Brut through a mouthful of fern.
“I don’t think they are,” said Werner. “Poison is an evolutionary response to predation, and there doesn’t appear to be anything around here to eat them.”
“What if the plants are just naturally uneatable?” proposed Menken.
“Well, we ate them yesterday, and still woke up this morning,” pointed out Werner. He put down the rest of his food. “We’ll wrap all of this in cloth and cover it in moist sand for insulation. But pick out the plants that look like reeds. I want to try weaving a roof for protection from the sun tomorrow.”
After this was done, it was completely dark, and everyone went to sleep. It was the first time they’d felt full in weeks, as Werner drifted off, he reflected happily on the fact that morale was higher than it had ever been before.
When they woke up the next morning, they found that their food had been stolen.
