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 . . .’