Page 15 of Crash Landing
I was so deep in thought that I didn’t see Mr. Hemburg stop in front of me. I bumped right into his back and bounced back a step, embarrassed.
“Shit. I’m sorry, Mr. Hemburg.”
He turned to look down at me, casting a kind smile across his lips. “Please. Call me Michael. Mr. Hemburg is a mouthful, I know.”
“Sure.”
Looking around, I noticed we’d arrived at the base camp. It was well organized with three long tables covered in some kind of protective lining, a large tent made of some white, plastic-like material shaped into a dome, and washing stations. Everyone else was already exploring and I’d gotten distracted. Not a good start.
I stepped around Mr. Hemburg… er… Michael and started to look around at the base camp, seeing what we had at our disposal. There were some scientific instruments set out, which I was sure the valerians took as a nice gesture, but I doubted anyone knew how to use any of them.
I set my bag down on one of the tables and dug through the contents to find my data pad. I turned it on, signed into my notes, and logged the day and location to start. Then I slung my bag onto my back again and glanced up to see what everyone else was doing only to seehim. The captain was looking at me again. Or so it seemed. He was leaning up against a thick tree trunk, arms crossed over his chest. I would have kept staring at him were I not instantly distracted by the trunk he was leaning on.
The tree was thick with vines that seemed fused into the bark in a vertical pattern. Higher up, beds of what looked like bright-white fungus grew in layers, swirling like a spiral staircase toward the top. The top itself was so much higher than I thought. My head craned back to see it only to realize the giant, black umbrellas we saw while we were descending to the clearing were the tree canopies.
And they were huge. The trunk’s thickness was slight in comparison to the massive top spread out above. And it touched the next tree a hundred feet away.
“Low light,” I muttered to myself. The dwarf star Sylos orbited was small with a reddish light that made day look like a sunset. Less light meant plants needed to be more efficient in absorbing it. “Amazing.”
The umbrellas certainly took up a lot of space like giant natural solar panels. That had to be it.
I almost tripped over my own feet trying to get a good look at the strange roof of the forest.
“Amazing, isn’t it?” a voice said.
Mr. Hemburg. He was right there again and when I almost tripped, his hands gripped my shoulders and stayed there. I tensed at his touch and sidestepped away.
“Yeah, it is,” I said.
“I’ve studied this moon quite a bit. I’ve never been here, but of course, I was digging for all the information I could find before we came. The valerians call the trees ‘yanuhe.’ If you look down,” he said, pointing at the forest floor. “You can see that as selfish as they might seem, taking up all the light, the roots go very far and it filters the energy into plants low to the ground.”
“Wow,” I breathed, immediately kneeling down on the soil to wipe my gloved hand through the moist dirt.
Just as he said, I found a spiderweb of roots tangled just underneath us.
“They attach to thicker roots which attach to massive roots,” he kept explaining. “Incredible, isn’t it?”
“That is incredible,” I smiled, looking up to see his face only inches from mine. Stunned, I sat up straight and cleared my throat. “I should record that.”
Picking up my data pad, I took a quick photo of the webby roots and logged it. Pretending to be far too distracted by the discovery, I turned away from Mr. Hemburg and went to take a photo of the tree itself. I snapped the photo before even realizing that the captain was still leaning against it. So, I’d snapped a photo of the captainandthe tree. I gulped when he noticed me lowering my data pad. Shit, did he think I was trying to take a picture of him?
“Come on,” Mr. Hemburg said, placing a hand on my lower back. “Let’s get more work done before it gets dark. I’d be happy to help you.”
Awkwardly, I followed him into the woods where many of the other interns were headed, all being closely watched by our valerian escorts. I wasn’t keen on working with Mr. Hemburg. Not with the way he was acting. I was better at working solo, but I supposed he knew better than I did. He’d studied the moon intensely he said. And he knew what to look for and how to take proper samples. Learning from him would be incredibly beneficial.
But I was the only one he was offering his knowledge to. I passed Professor Fost and two other interns as we walked and the old woman gave me a look that swept straight to Mr. Hemburg’s hand on my back. I hated that. When we passed Candice, I smiled and she just crossed her arms and narrowed her eyes like she thought the worst of our pairing. I wanted to speak up and say something, but what would I say? What were they even thinking? That I was being favored in some way? I wanted to believe he was going to show everyone a bit of specialattention on our trip. We all looked up to him enough. We all wanted to learn.
According to the readings in my helmet, we’d been on Phesah for a little over an hour and just like the captain said, the doctor was working her way around to take everyone’s vitals. So far so good. No one was reacting badly to the environment and everyone seemed to be consumed with their work. Heavy conversation echoed all around as people bounced theories and ideas off each other and squealed about seeing new things. Sample jars were being filled left and right and people were jotting notes on their data pads faster than I’d ever seen anyone do at the university.
Mr. Hemburg was never more than a few steps away and every time he spoke to me, I’d catch someone tossing me a judgmental look like I was the class slut. Girls all looked at me the same like I was stealing something from them. And men usually looked at me like I wasgivingthem something. Which was why I didn’t have friends.
Except for Innifer.
And Thomas.
I huffed outwardly at my inner frustrations and continued working. While I roamed, I found a few strange plants I really wanted to study. Mainly the moss growing on the rocks. It was almost black, like everything else on that moon, but I noticed it was only growing in the grooves of the stone and not in the soil. I followed a vein of it all the way back to the edge of the stone cliff overlooking the river and found myself peering over into a sparkling body of moving water. Droplets peppered my mask and cool gusts of humid air rushed up toward me, blowing stray strands of hair around my head.
The way the light was on Phesah, all reddish and soft, made the water look like fire. Glancing back down at the black stoneunder my feet and then at the sparse bits of fog sitting low against the banks of the river, I put the pieces together. The moon was volcanic. The very rock we were standing on had to be something like obsidian, which explained how slick and dark it was.
