Our car passed the twilight between meadows and woods. In the dimming light, the trees reminded me more of scarlet tulpa than of roses.

Crick ordered the car's AI to find a river. While the understory didn't seem that thick, driving through a forest without roads was still hard. Thus, we dwelled a while in the thin strip between the biomes.

Helix looked out of the window while Crick obsessed over their terminal. Finally, they put it in their pouch.

"Excellent scans, Doctor," Crick transmitted. "I analyzed them thoroughly and feel delighted to present the results."

"Just get to the point," Helix transmitted.

A flicker of light escaped Crick's skin. "Most important conclusion first. The biological sample is not from a human."

"You mean the finger?" I asked. Then, as an afterthought, I added a "Captain" to my transmission.

As if I had been a wall, Crick elaborated. "I analyzed its DNA and compared the base pairs to samples from our human. Whereas non-coding base pairs are virtually identical, coding pairs deviate by almost four percent."

Humans and chimps deviate in one point four percent of their DNA, though I don't remember if those were coding or non-coding strains.

"The deviations suggest complex irreducible biochemical pathways that Human does not possess. I strongly doubt that this level of deviation can be explained by intraspecific genetic variation."

"So, you're saying this finger isn't from a human, but someone posing as one, Captain?" I asked.

"No," Crick answered. "I am saying that this individual used to be human, but that the genetic code has been rewritten. Possibly, somebody inserted a retrovirus into its body. The virus then replicated until it had altered the genes in each of its host's cells."

"Why though?" Helix asked.

"Doctor, if I recall correctly, you described the skeletal anatomy of the alien we tied to the tree, did you not?" Crick asked.

"Sure."

"As you correctly noted, its skeleton is a mixture of the muscular columns we use to support our bodies and the calcified bones Human uses. This combination of bones and specialized muscles makes its skeleton extraordinarily resistant to bending and good at shock absorption. Despite this, its bones show several fractures."

"Yeah," Helix transmitted. "They're in my report. Likely blunt trauma."

"Indeed. I hypothesize that they were caused by the genetically modified human."

I underestimated her. Kira couldn't just outrun marathon champions, she also crippled aliens the size of bears with her bare hands.

Did the Starsnatchers carry out a super-soldier program on humans? If so, why did they exclude me?

"Our drones carried out an environmental DNA survey," Crick continued. "The owner of the finger is where Human claimed his AI stone was pointing him to, although it has moved closer to the mountain."

I was right about the link between Kira and my singularity stone. Who was this stone really made for? Me or her?

"Unfortunately, we have company," Crick elaborated.

The screen showed a red-and-black rover so edgy it might have been designed by a teenager. Spikes jutted out of its roof and flames decorated the doors.

"This vehicle belongs to the other ship that has a dropship stationed on this planet. We merely have long-distance shots as the vehicle uses electromagnetic pulse weapons to keep our drones away. Its known activities include capturing alien animals in a foam-like gel or diamondoid nets."

So, the crew from the Firefly was here, too. I wondered if AIs piloted the rover. If not, this was our chance to meet my abductors personally.

[-]

We entered the forest through a river, the sole road nature provided on an uncharted planet. Our car extended a lifebuoy. An engine stronger than the current propelled us upward. A rope tugged a boat behind the vehicle. It carried the nanofactory and our robots.

As far as I understood, our nanofactory printed nothing larger than itself. It printed pieces of a larger whole for our bushbot to assemble. With sufficient time and resources, it might have created anything. For now, a boat more than sufficed.

The gravel stopped roaring under our wheels. Calm splashes of water allowed me to sleep in the peace of the night.

My dreams were a muddy mess as fluid as the river.

I dreamed of Sye, the slaughtered Seizers, and what happened if we lost the war. If Shadowmoon had a population of roughly ten billion, how many died if we lost? Did the Starsnatchers fight an extermination war? Or were they happy with mere societal collapse? Neither option sounded pretty.

Had I been was of those Hollywood heroes, this Kira would have been my greatest concern. These guys always looked after individuals near to themselves first, even if the entire world was at stake.

I wasn't like them. I thought in terms of numbers, in abstract moral principles. She was a mere individual. If we found her, my greatest concern was the information she had.

A pungent feeling pulled me out of my sleep. An electric current ripped through my chest region where the singularity stone lay. I put it out.

It was midnight under a full moon thrice as big as back at home. The days were longer than on Earth, let alone Shadowmoon. Raindrops rolled off the windscreen, dense air amplified the sound of thunder.

Forest fires lit purple bushes left and right, disrupting the harmonious orchard of red palms. From what I remembered, Eden had much more oxygen than Earth, with a partial pressure of thirty percent compared to Earth's twenty. With so much oxygen, something always burned.

Hopefully, the plants had adaptations to prevent the fire from spreading. Now I understood why the understory was so thin. Whatever anti-fire adaptations the trees had, the bushes lacked them.

Thanks to the current, our pace was glacial. Not that I complained, as this allowed me to enjoy the scenery. Scenery such as the bipedal alien with a disc-shaped head and -tail enjoying a drink.

Unfortunately, the stone in my hand stung again.

"Where are we?" I asked.

"On the expired volcano," Crick answered. "Our target is here."

I clutched my stone again. Rather than giving me spots on a map, it highlighted a direction. When I looked around, the stone hacked into my visual cortex and tinted the regions where Kira waited in red. I transmitted what I saw.

Before Crick could command the drones, guns fired.

Their bullets dented the windscreen like in a high-tech mafia movie. We would have been dead had the windows not been made of the same diamondoid material as everything else.

Then, the airbag burst out.

Gusts of breath left my lungs as if they were popped balloons. If all times the Dragonfly's acceleration messed with me could be focused into a single point, this was it.

The Seizers had slammed into my back.

"Apologies," Helix transmitted. "It's programmed to do this whenever our car breaks, no matter how slow we are."

I had never hugged Crick or Helix that closely. It must have been more uncomfortable for them than for me. At least my suit was thick enough to separate my skin from these wobbling tentacles. Hopefully, their muscular columns were strong bones and I didn't just squish my only friends.

It took a while for the airbag to deflate and my head to clear before I realized what happened. The car lay on its right side at the left river bank; a harpoon stuck between the windscreen and the left window.

"Everyone stays in the car!" Crick transmitted. "This is an order! Do not move until I know what is going on!"

Our video feed was part of the windscreen and thus not pushed aside by the airbag, although it did have its dents. With a few sleights of their tentacles, Crick repurposed it into a radar screen showing the surrounding landscape.

Even with the forest fires outside, the sight was awful. We had an idea of where each tree was relative to each other, but that was about it. Who hid behind what tree was impossible to make out.

Radar was an option, but it suffered from the massive heat sink that was the forest fires.

Eventually, our screen showed video recordings. They were from combat robots that carried flashlights and followed the trail of the harpoon. The resolution wasn't too great and reminded me of those lost footage movies. However, they did find the weapon in the end.

The only problem was that its owner ran away.

However, something else was curious.

The corpse of a grey alien lay there, killed by a harpoon of the same type. If I wasn't mistaken, it was one of those tusked grazers I saw in the grasslands. Its reptilian skin covered two legs and a midsection from which two tails extended left and right. Each tail bifurcated into two tusks. Did it have two heads or was it just so that predators didn't know what was the head and what the tail?

"The people in the Firefly Rover kill animals, don't they?" I asked.

"No," Helix answered, "they merely catch them."

"Is there anyone else who has sent troops on Eden, besides us and the Firefly, I mean?"

"No, only the natives are left."

"Perhaps it wanted to eat it later before it saw us and tried to defend its territory?"

None of the Seizers volunteered an answer.

Maybe that's because they feared alternatives as much as I did. An alternative explanation was that it attacked for no reason at all.

Those aliens I called Starsnatchers apparently suffered from an irrational mind virus that made them ram their own planets and kill each other's ships. Was it that much of a stretch to assume that the mind virus even caught the natives? That one of them had shot those harpoons at us just because we moved?

Then, the screen changed again. It was an alien like the one we had tied to the tree before, only smaller, thinner, and motionless. It lacked blood or other visible injuries, but it also lacked life signs.

It lay against a tree, its limbs hanging.

A robot took a scan and showed X-ray pictures.

"A fractured skeleton despite no obvious external damage," Helix transmitted. "My diagnosis is blunt trauma, just like with the one before."

Did Kira do this?

Our robots and drones swarmed out, recording as much as possible.

"It has no accomplices that we know of," Crick transmitted. "We are safe. Human, where is our target?"

I grabbed my stone again. "A stinging pain" was too mild of a description of what I felt. My hand hurt so much, it might have tried giving birth.

"She's right here, I can feel it," I transmitted.

"Anything more specific?" Crick asked.

"No."

"Then our robots must continue-"

"Then our robots must continue the search"

"No," I transmitted. "We should see her in person, Captain. Then, she'll trust us more. It just works that way in our culture."

Crick thought about that. "Do you believe he is prepared for a fight?" they asked Helix.

"Based on his training, I believe he has a chance to survive," Helix transmitted, "as long as he stays out of the way while we do the fighting."

More as a statement than as an answer, Crick replied, "he requires a weapon."

We climbed out of the car. Truly incredible how the Seizers survived this claustrophobic situation for so long, given how even I panicked when my squiddy friends crept past me. Then again, they got drugs for this.

I wish I had anti-gravity drugs. I had felt it before, but trying to climb out was what brought it back to mind. Even with the airbag as support, this was the worst pull-up of my life.

Outside the car, the nanofactory greeted us.

Crick fished a gun out of it and gave it to me. Presumably, I wasn't deemed ready for the Gauss guns, as this one was more pedestrian. Its magazine was a flat cylinder of chestnut color. A tube protruded out of it which I took to be its barrel. Except for the barrel, all of it fit neatly into my palm.

"Thanks," I transmitted absent-mindedly.

How did I shoot this?

The gun's trigger rested against the ball of my trembling thumb. Its length equaled the cylinder's diameter. Speaking of the cylinder, it contained a belt with which I tied the whole thing to my hand. Like that, the risk of me accidentally pushing the trigger was lower.

"Just squeeze it to fire," Helix transmitted. "Otherwise, all learned during your training applies."

Good that this wasn't operated by thought. Just imagine the number of misfirings this could have caused!

Crick had geared up, too. Normally, they carried all they needed in those lab coat pouches, but not their black rifle. It seemed strapped around a barely visible belt, its barrel pointing downward and its holster containing various buttons.

"You are staring at my antimatter rifle," Crick transmitted. "It is called that way due to the nanograms of antimatter stored in each bullet. Do not even think of touching it! Only I carry permission to use a weapon of such destructive power."

I could imagine. A nanogram of antimatter had the raw potential energy to blow up an entire building. At close range, it vaporized any human.

"Don't worry, we have more in store for you," Helix transmitted. "Just to make sure you don't die too soon!"

The other thing the Seizers had printed for me was armor panels. It wasn't exactly Iron Man-style power armor because those panels were more like add-ons for my spacesuit.

A robot attached light, yet stiff panels over my chest, stomach, back, and most of my limbs, leaving only the joints free. Well, and the hands so that I could touch my stone and my neck for food tubes, of course.

The suit itself was already abnormally strong and flexible but prone to tearing, as those sharp things in the desert showed. There was nothing wrong with quick add-ons. My joints and hands were still largely unguarded, but none of those aliens had proven themselves to be a sharpshooter yet.

Finally, Helix took three ball-shaped flashlights out of the nanofactory. One was thrown to me. Like my pistol, it fit in my palm and had a belt.

I checked again and my stone indicated Kira was to the right of the river and up the mountain's slope. The bushbot walked ahead, disassembling the plants before us like a mowing machine.

Do you know what's worse than a planet whose gravity makes you feel like you're climbing slopes? Actually climbing slopes on such a planet.

It was even worse than those running exercises back in PE. We at least had fixed times or round numbers I could count for a rough sense when it was over.

Keep calm, steady breathing, slow pace, I told myself.

To be fair, my VR training did prepare me for such tasks. The only difference was that the simulations used even terrain.

Here, the ground was mushy and headwind slowed us down like a current.

"Are we coming closer?" Crick asked.

"She's right here," I transmitted and checked again. "She should be slightly to my left."

If I felt her presence, did she feel mine?

Ferns rustled. The forest fires left enough dense, shoulder-high thickets besides our thin, robot-mowed path. I forced my body past palm trees to discover a disc-head hidden behind a bush.

No danger.

Speaking of danger, were there still Starsnatchers left? Or the Firefly Rover? With the poor sight conditions and various ways to hide from radar, how safe were we really? Was Crick as much in control as they thought they were?

I reached a thicket so dense, it was as if it was steering me back on the path, steering me away from the dangers in the forest's dark heart.

It was just like during my last day on Earth. I went into the woods despite the danger. Because I wanted the singularity stone. Now, the stone wanted something from me.

Lightning illuminated a clearing, upslope. A fern-worm fled from the thunder, spiders hid between trampled shrubs, and, in the middle, I saw our target.

A humanoid figure stood at the clearing's center, clad in mechanical armor as black as the night. There were no eyes behind the opaque visor, only the glint of my flashlight.

I was sure this was Kira. Or Layla. Or a robot they put in a humanoid suit to trap us.

Now that I thought about it, I wasn't sure about anything. The barrel-shaped armor obscured any clues about its wearer's anatomy.

I shook my head.

This was still our target. Still the person I had been waiting for for so long. Why was I so nervous?

"Human!" Crick transmitted. "What are you doing?"

"I found our target, Captain! I'm not sure if it's what we are searching though."

"Attempt communication. Then, Helix and I will take the subject into custody."

"Okay."

How long had it been since I spoke a word in English? When my translator was new, I often verbalized my transmissions. However, these days were long over.

Now, my mouth opened, and waited for words.

"Hi," I spoke.

My voice sounded unnaturally deep in this thick atmosphere.

The humanoid figure didn't react.

Was it right to ask what the abduction was like from her point of view? Surely not pretty. She must have lost far more people than I did. It was better to win her trust before getting into unpleasant subject matter.

I considered giving back the finger, only to realize how creepy that would have been. I had better items to offer.

I reached into my pouch between the armor panels and took out the singularity stone. It shone brighter than lightning even and stung in my hand like it wanted me to drop it. All the pebbles, sticks, and blades of grass between our feet became visible.

The humanoid figure cringed.

"This stone, it seems connected to you," I said.

As if the stone's sheer presence had insulted it, the humanoid figure shot forward. It tackled me down the slope with the speed of a cheetah and the force of a rhino.

A tree stem stopped my fall and broke my back.

Then, guns fired.

"Human!" Crick transmitted. "Human! Can you perceive me?"

Never had I felt pain of such magnitude. It felt as if paper cuts covered each square inch of my body with an epicenter of pain around my back. Shards that were my bones stabbed the muscles I still noticed. Don't ask me what happened to those below my waist. I licked the blood off my cheeks.

Six Seizers came to my rescue. In reality, it was just Crick and Helix, but, my vision...

A tube blew my lungs open.

"Don't worry!" Helix transmitted. "I'm a nanophysician, nanobots replace bones and tissue within hours."

I expected a follow-up attack.

Helix took care of me while Crick stood as still as a statue. "The humanoid," Crick transmitted, "took your stone."