Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

if he had to. Hella was smaller, thin, morose and anxious, but
possibly the smartest of the three. Jul looked a little overweight;
maybe she had been skimping physical exercise. Of course the fact
that the lower half of her body was a clunky prosthetic didn’t
help.
    And then there was Hex - the youngest, she uncomfortably reminded
herself.
    Borno groused, ’We’re interstellar warriors and we’re reduced to
this. Stuck in a cave like animals. You can’t even tell if it’s
morning or night.’
    ’It’s always day here, dummy,’ Hella said. She sounded tired,
drained; she chewed on her food tablets without enthusiasm.
    ’Lethe, you know what I mean. It’s morning somewhere…’
    Restless, Hex made her way to the wall of her suit-tent. They were
in the northern hemisphere, but the cave was oriented south, so she
could see the twin suns, a glum red blur with that spark of bright
blue crawling over its face. It was strange to think that the double
star never moved from its station in the sky, as if nailed there. The
ground was worn, a thin soil lying over the melted bedrock that was
all that had survived a supernova torching. The air was less than a
fifth Earth’s pressure: too thin for them to breathe, but enough to
transport sufficient heat around the planet to keep all the water,
and indeed the air itself, from freezing out on the dark side.
    And on this small world, in this thin air, there was life.
    Hex made out gaunt silhouettes standing on a low ridge. They
looked like antennae, with dishes turned up to the sun. They were
plants, something like trees - but they were colony organisms, with
the leaves independent creatures, roosting on the branches like
birds. The pool of shadow behind that ridge hadn’t been touched by
sunlight for a million years.
    ’We’ve got company,’ Hella murmured.
    A puddle of slime, glistening in the low sunlight, flowed in over
the cave floor. It gathered itself up into a rough pillar and let
fall a belt stocked with tools of stone and metal. Unstable and
oozing, it seemed to warm itself by the fire, and pseudo-pods
extended to hurl a little more fuel onto the flames. Then it
collapsed again and came slithering over the floor of the cave
towards the humans’ shelter. It dumped organic produce by the
translucent wall: what looked like seaweed, and even a fish, a
triumph of convergent evolution.
    This was the crew’s only ally on this strange world.
    His name for himself had translated as Swimmer-with-Somethings,
the ’somethings’ being an aquatic creature they hadn’t been able to
identify. Close to, he looked disturbingly like a flayed human,
immersed in a kind of gummy soup within which smaller creatures swam.
The ’he’, of course, was for the crew’s convenience, though there
might have been genders among the myriad creatures that made up this
composite animal.
    The motile puddle pushed a membrane above its oily meniscus, and
Hex heard soft gurgling sounds.
    Hella studied her suit’s translator box. ’He says - ’
    ’Let me guess,’ said Hex. ’ >More food.< Tell him thanks.’
She meant it. The humans couldn’t eat the native life, but the
biochemistry was carbon-based, and their suits’ backpacks were able
to use this raw material to manufacture edible food and to extract
water.
    Hella murmured into her unit, and the membrane pulsed in response.
They had been surprised how easy it had been to find a translation.
Swimmer’s speech pattern was similar to some variants of the Ghost
languages which humans had been studying for centuries, an odd fact
which Hex had filed away as one of the many puzzles to be resolved
about this place.
    Engineer Jul was fascinated by the creature’s biological
organisation. ’Look at that thing. He’s obviously a colonial
organism. Every so often all the components go swimming.’ She
pointed. ’Those little blobs look like algal cooperatives. Powered by
capillary action, probably. But these >algae< are jet black -
probably something to do with the photosynthetic chemicals used in
the local ecology. I’m not sure what those little swimming
shrimp-like creatures are for…’
    Swimmer had a skeleton of something like cartilage, and ’muscles’,
pink and sinewy, adhered to it. But the cartilage itself was
independently mobile. And now a ’muscle’ detached itself from its
anchor, swam to the surface of the slimy pool into which Swimmer had
deliquesced, and opened a mouth to breathe the air.
    Borno’s face