First Impression of a new world

August 03, 2024, 06:10:11 AM

The soil squished under Major Vetara's boots, the pale grey sand and stone squelching and shifting slightly, a bit of moisture leaching up from underfoot. The sound of the footstep was right, even if this particular sound had been heard quite some time ago. There was something intangible about knowing that you had finally set foot on the soil once again, no more hard deck plating or artificial turf that simulated various terrains. Having real dirt underfoot, there was a feel to it that she recognized on an instinctual level going back to the furthest lineage of the hominid family tree. And here she was, a new world, a new life, a new star above her, and somewhere deep in her bones, she knew that this would, perhaps, be a new home, instinctually from that first step.

In the distance were massive thunderheads, towering dozens of kilometers into the atmosphere, blocking out everything to the north past a few kilometers. She knew that a range of mountains was out there, with peaks so high they nearly penetrated into the stratosphere. These mountains reached a dizzying height of thirty kilometers, far higher than even the venerable Mauna Kea, a mountain that dwarfed even the mighty Sagarmatha. Of course, she'd seen them from orbit; how couldn't she? There were some things even the most jaded of explorers took awe at, and a volcano, even a dead one that made Olympus Mons look small, still managed to take her breath away.

The storm itself was massive, hiding all but the foothills of the gargantuan Volcano from her vantage point. The stormfront was thick enough that Zeus would have been proud of it. Clouds so thick and black that it was as if a wall of anthracite coal was suspended in the air. She watched lightning fork through the clouds, making them roil and burn with the incandescent and ultraviolet flashes of light from bolts of lightning that rippled all along the clouds. The storm seemed to burn along its visible edges. Just as oppressive as the wall of clouds were the blasts of thunder, forming a pulsating echoing wall of sound that bowled her over in an unceasing auditory assault that she felt deep in her bones.

The storm and mountain were on scales she'd never seen on any habitable world, as this was supposed to be. She looked down at her wrist, taking slow and steady breaths as she waited for the atmospheric analysis to complete; the few minutes she needed to wait felt interminable, made all the worse by the way the soil squelched underfoot. It was a secondary check anyway, but safety procedures existed for a reason, so her helmet stayed sealed as she looked upon her surroundings.

Her ship had touched down on the far foothills of the Volcano, where the shield volcano's slopes had graded town to be almost flat and had turned to thick, loamy soil, the kind that squelched underfoot after a torrential downpour, which had to have come from the storm that was now in the distance. It wasn't grass that he trod underfoot, but something more resilient, something that handled moisture well and a large flow of water; whatever it was, it looked like it might be fungal? She'd have to run tests on it later. It had scorched where her ship had landed; the exhaust and thrusters had burned it away, leaving the pale grey soil underneath.

Walking on the fungal mats provided a springy experience that left water seeping up and soaking the exterior of her boots; it had a soft feel that would be interesting barefoot. She imagined walking on foam bedding instead of anything alive. However, the fungal mat that the ship had landed on wasn't the only life in the area. Further away was a tall something with what looked like golden stalks and large red bulbs. From her vantage point, they looked like plants, wheat of some kind, but instead of the golden foxtails that covered the great plains of the agriculture centers of the Earth and the vast stations of humanity, the heads of grain were a brilliant crimson that reminded her of blood. At the base of the stalks were broad green leaves, thick and low to the ground.

Past the field of 'grain' were what had to be trees, a mix of lower trees with an almost umbrella shape, dense with leaves, that moved on thin willowy branches and swayed in time with the swift breeze that blew across the plain. The trees reminded her of the willows back home more than anything. Past them were trees that stretched nearly sixty meters into the sky, their trunks spaced widely apart as the branches stretched and covered the gap between them; the forest they made was dark and impenetrable. Something wasn't right, though, an odd tickle in the back of Major Vetara's head; there was something not quite right about this to her. Nothing caught her eye as she continued to look around the alien field, but just as it nearly came to her, the arm unit finished the analysis, and the results showed on the inside of her suit faceplate. The oxygen levels in this world were indeed three percent higher than on Earth, nearly twenty-five percent, instead of almost twenty-one back home. The air pressure was slightly higher than sea level, but that made sense. This world was more extensive and had higher gravity, well within tolerances for what any human could endure, but still different enough from Earth that it was notable.

With a smile on her face and a final scan of the horizon with eyes like the most brilliant of emeralds, Major Vetara unsealed her helmet, the rich air of this new world rushing in with a swift hiss, and the aromas of this world hit her for the first time. There was the sharp tang of ozone from the thunderstorm in the distance that she noticed first, followed quickly by the unmistakable scent of rain that she'd remembered from her childhood in the southwestern part of North America. Her eyes closed as she breathed in the first breath of natural air in years., tasting this world on her tongue for the first time. It felt like it had been standing near her Grandfather's fields in a rain storm, her... Grandfather's... fields...

Her eyes shot open with a start, the breath of air caught in her throat as she looked towards the fields of strange plants. The Fields of strange plants! She saw it now, the regular rows and the even spacing of the crops. No plant in nature kept such spacing between themselves. The spacing was always much tighter or far more widespread. These plants were a meter apart in even rows. The swollen red bulges at the end were probably a type of cultivated fruit or vegetable. And the fungal mat that her ship had landed on was far too, even where it hadn't burned away; maybe that was cultivated too? It had to be; nothing was this regular, nothing natural, and it looked like a well-tended field.

Her eyes scanned the fields for any sign of movement other than the wind. Slowly, she brought her wrist unit up to her mouth and spoke softly, her voice carrying a hint of excitement. "Major Vetara to the Green Hills, we're not alone here."