No, I don’t think so. Something had happened, but not to Bill, to Michael Gabriel. All my thoughts, all of my memories as Michael were gone. From that point on, I was Bill Raby, marine geneticist, marooned on an alien world. It was as if Mick had never existed.

Okay, okay, so what happened then? Try to remember.

We were surrounded by darkness, still fumbling within the powerless cabin, when we heard scratching sounds outside the ship. Pressing my face to the viewport, I scanned the terrain, looking for the source.

The sun had set hours ago. Unable to see through the darkness, I located a pair of night-vision scanners and placed them over my eyes. The lenses cut through the night, turning everything olive green … revealing movement outside.

There were billions of them—huge beetles—a foot and a half in length, maybe twenty to forty pounds, God only knows what the gravity was like on this desolate world. They were scurrying up through the volcanic fissures by the hundreds of thousands, their grotesque black shell-encased bodies marked by occasional flashes of luminescence that set off the night like tiny strobe lights. My first thought after I swallowed back the bile of terror was communication … that the lights were a form of alien language, sort of like the fireflies back on Earth, only far more intelligent. But as they piled upon one another, rising up the viewport glass to test its thickness with their tripod-shaped horns and sickle claws, I knew these beings were more like the horrible hordes of army ants that devastate Africa, the ones that operate as a single collective, stripping away the flesh and bones and vegetation of everything that stands in their path.

We watched, helpless and frightened, as they scampered over the moss-covered terrain in ebony waves. They covered the ship, and for several terrifying hours, all of us feared they might eat through the steel plates.

After a tense night, the first rays of dawn sent them fleeing back to their underground dwellings.

When it became apparent that the swarm would not venture into the daylight, our shuttle leaders organized an exploratory team. Several men approached and asked me to join them outside.

Forty minutes later, a dozen of us, all dressed in space suits, stepped out from the shuttle’s airlock to join leaders and scientists from the other eleven vessels. Armed with measuring devices, we probed the land and air.

The more we learned, the more fearful we became.

The planet’s atmosphere contained high levels of carbon dioxide, along with smaller amounts of carbon monoxide, methane, and ammonia. Like Mars, the scarlet sky was devoid of an ozone layer, but unlike the Red Planet back in our end of the galaxy, there was no shelter on this desolate world other than our broken vessels, and no raw materials to access to gain a foothold.