If someone had looked at the galaxy at the start of year five B.I., gone into a coma, and woke up at the end of three B.I., he would have guessed he was out for a decade or more.
In a little less than three years, the state of the galaxy had changed significantly.
This is what is now termed the Linchpin Theory.
One seemingly small action — like an insignificant vassal of a large stellar empire, itself part of a greater galactic federation, rebels. Nothing even remotely new, since the Batract had one rebellion or another every week. And two years later, whole systems were left derelict.
Empires lie dying, and the Federation gears up for war for the first time in millennia.
— Excerpt from Memories, by Admiral (Retired) Cassidy Sanders, 65 P.I.
The Sleipnir shuddered slightly — for Pedgre, a very new and unnerving feeling. He wasn't used to going from space onto a planetary surface. The scientists around him, all human, didn't even look up from their dataslates.
The head of Burrow's biology department, Dr. Stein, slept. How someone could sleep while traveling at hypersonic speeds was a mystery to Pedgre.
"Sorry, guys, that was just a bit of bumpy air. We're roughly 3,000 kilometers away from our target and should reach it in about 15 minutes."
Air, by definition, should not be bumpy — at least in Pedgre's world.
Pedgre did a quick calculation in his head — that distance in 15 minutes. Pedgre swallowed, and his tail tucked itself between his legs. They were racing at about Mach 10 through the sky of Burrow. The hull must already be reaching 1,300°C…
And these maniacs sleep or read.
Sure, Shraphen usually also traveled quite fast, but Pedgre was always rather groundbound.
With his first space travel being the evacuation of Burrow, he was an outlier among his fellow Shraphen.
But Shraphen equipment was tried and tested, and it certainly didn't make such infernal sounds.
Shraphen equipment was close to noiseless. In contrast, when asked about it, one of the human mechanics once said, "I think humans don't trust silent things. If the engine is loud, we know it works."
Pedgre didn't even know what to say. The logic was undeniable, but it didn't feel right.
He tried to focus on their mission.
Find the oxygen source and determine if it's the Hunter's cursed lichen again.
He could not stomach looking out of the window; he didn't even want to go.
Seeing his beloved home burned and dead like it was now… it physically hurt.
He also didn't share his human colleagues' optimism that they could Burrowform it. That's the word they used — Burrowform. He had to ask Zeus what they meant.
It's a concept borrowed from humans — terraforming — but adapted to recreate Burrow.
The fact that they created a new word for it. It showed Pedgre how serious the humans were when they said they would make Burrow a paradise again.
The sheer audacity.
But to do so, they had to make sure nothing of the lichen remained.
It was almost a weekly mission for the science team, and it was his first. Until now, he had always managed to wiggle out of it.
But now, now he was forced to face it. The devastation.
Yes, it hurt, but it was also cathartic — like in the ancient movies his human colleagues showed him. When heroes were wounded, they treated the wounds with fire to sterilize them or stop the bleeding.
Humans were odd that way. Shraphen had movies and such, but they were comedies, art, and nature documentaries. Maybe the odd true crime show.
But humans almost tortured themselves with war movies and adventures. And when the real historical events weren't enough, they invented even more brutal new ones. And then there were horror movies.
Pedgre avoided them after watching a certain one with werewolves. The mental and biological divergences shown by the surprisingly Shraphen-looking monster reminded him of the very real Shraphen disorder called "Moon Sickness."
Humans had recreated a much-feared Shraphen illness before even leaving their planet.
He was almost certain that the psychological scarring of an adolescent human was the same as that of a Shraphen war veteran. Their whole society was trimmed to prepare for hardship.
Lucky for us…
He turned around, looked out of the window, and even without remembering the flight path, he knew this place.
The Iliac Bay. He went here for holidays, often with his parents.
There it was, the pain.
Where once forests grew on the soft, rolling hills, now brown, burned, and oxidized rocks remained. The only thing breaking the brown and red was meter-thick black veins.
They were everywhere.
Carbonized remains of the lichen infestation that had turned Burrow into what it was.
They looked like rotten, dead veins on a dead body.
"We're landing in two."
The pilot's words dragged Pedgre out of his self-inflicted pain. Time to suit up.
With surprise, he saw Stein waking up. The doctor had snored seconds ago and was now wide awake. Human sleep was something on its own. Almost as if they kept guard even while sleeping.
But his tai was the same. They woke up when the neighbors on the other side of the street came home late.
Funny how similar they were.
The suiting-up process had been a nightmare the first few flights. But then someone asked why the scientists didn't simply use Mobile Infantry battle armor. It was hermetically sealed and protected the wearer even if caught under a mudslide.
Plus, you could use plasma to sterilize it without harming the person inside.
So now the scientists made their excursions in adapted battle armor.
The engineers on Level 6 had already started work on a science variation of it.
The Magellan expedition team could use them. They had almost a full moon of volume to explore.
Pedgre would have loved to join that mission.
"Thirty seconds."
Pedgre stepped into the open battle armor from behind, and it closed immediately. He loved that humans had adapted it to even protect the bushy Shraphen tail — an indispensable appendage for maintaining balance.
The helmet's HUD was linked to the Sleipnir's sensors, and as soon as the systems had synced, the walls of the transporter became transparent.
On one hand, the view, the feeling… it was amazing.
On the other hand, now there was no place to hide from the truth.
Burrow was a dead rock. A hot, dead rock.
The high CO2 concentration had started a massive climate shift. The area they were in would now have winter, with temperatures slightly below freezing.
But now, 42°C in the early morning.
Their landing spot was close to the shore today, as the scientists had found nothing on land that could explain the rise in oxygen. By process of elimination, the source had to be underwater.
The Sleipnir dropped in altitude from ten kilometers, almost horizontally, to five meters, then turned 180°, caught its descent meters before hitting the rocks, and continued its flight for a few hundred meters before it reached the coast of the now-acidic sea.
The maneuver was a so-called drop-land maneuver to conceal its true landing position from the enemy. Why the military still demanded its use was a mystery to the scientists. But they had to accept it.
Pedgre's stomach was of a different opinion.
Luckily, he could prevent any unfortunate incidents involving his stomach fluids and his helmet.
One by one, the scientists stepped through the biohermetic airlock.
The rocks were brittle, obviously an effect of the acidic sea. Calculations predicted that whole coastlines would be dissolved by the sulfuric and carbonic acids in the water.
Pedgre looked out over the coastline to the once-clear blue sea. It was now a steaming, bubbling, yellowish-brown soup.
"Renthai Pedgre, can you start a drone flight while Doctor Kim and I prepare the subs?"
Stein had given him time to adapt—
Accept?
— The situation. But now they had to act. Their scientific equipment was stored on the Sleipnir's exterior in cargo pods.
Among it, a bigger submarine version of the Navy's googly eyes.
Capable of staying underwater for weeks and equipped with every chemical and biological sensor and analysis suite the Navy engineers could fit into it, it would be the main exploration tool for the short-term future.
The long-term plan was to, maybe, build a manned submarine, but that was out of reach for now.
The human technicians called the submarine versions Whiskers. This one was labeled "Mother." Two more were prepared onboard Burrow One, one called "Loner" and the other "Junior."
Pedgre remembered Dr. Stein rolling his eyes when he heard the names. They were chosen after some ancient movie or TV show, as far as he understood.
Stein had just murmured, "The day an engineer can't name something after a sci-fi show will be a cold day in hell."
Humans were odd that way, but to Pedgre, the idea was ingenious. Who cares if it was stolen from a long-forgotten show?
He unloaded the small surveillance drones; their plan was to race them close above the surface, looking for higher oxygen levels, and then send Mother there to survey underwater.
While he unpacked them, something on the beach caught his eye. It looked like a small puddle or pool inside the water.
The waves broke differently around it, and the water was clearer, less oily.
His curiosity was piqued. What was that puddle?
Remembering the warnings that the acidic water could damage the armor's seals, he stayed away from the waterline but sent the first small drone, called "Sleepy," to the anomaly's position.
From the drone's bird's-eye view, he could immediately see what had created the odd visual effect.
An almost perfectly round wall of slimy rock — seemingly a calcium mix of some sort — had created a larger basin of water. Occasionally, a wave splashed water in, but in general, it kept the inside of the basin separate from the outside.
The drone's oxygen sensor peaked.
Stein's head snapped around. "You already found the source?"
"I don't know, I'm going closer."
He directed the drone to fly closer to the anomaly.
He had seen something like this in simulations, but he couldn't believe he was seeing it here, now, in reality.
As the drone was only a few meters away, he began panting from excitement.
"Dr. Stein, Dr. Stein!"
As he turned around, he almost collided with the human doctor, who had already been standing behind him.
Stein had a dataslate showing the exact same pictures Pedgre had seen before.
Biomats inside the pool of calmer water.
The ring of rocks — that wasn't really rocks, but a version of biomats.
Some extremophile algae or bacteria had created a colony here. The "wall" was a ring of biomats that protected a slightly less extreme water pool from the harsh sea.
At the center, in the more alkaline water, the most important event happened.
Photosynthesis.
That's the origin of the oxygen measured.
The ring itself resembled a primordial theory of bacteria growing, amassing minerals, and dying — like in biomats, but in this case in ring form.
This all resembled the computer simulations the Burrow Scientific Institute had created of Burrow's most primordial life.
To see it in reality…
The question now was — was this lifeform a version of the Hyphae lichen, or was it a surviving Burrow organism?
Stein looked up.
"Stromatolites."
Pedgre didn't understand him at first, but the helpful armor VI projected a scientific explanation into the visor.
"Yes, we've never seen anything like this on Burrow, but we made simulations and—"
"Pedgre, they are somewhat common on Earth, but what are they doing here?"
Pedgre was stunned. Common on Earth? How young an ecosystem did the humans evolve in?
Burrow's life was about 6.5 billion years old.
"I don't know. One question — how old is life on Earth?"
Stein looked up from his slate. "The earliest undisputed evidence is about 4.28 billion years old. Why?"
"Burrow's oldest relics end at about 6.5 billion years, but no fossils that resemble this… stromatolites."
Now it was Stein's turn to be stunned.
"That's… old."
Stein seemed to catch himself.
"We need to get a sample of the lifeform."
Pedgre concurred. He steered the drone carefully closer and lowered the sampling hook. He scratched the surface of the ring carefully with support from the armor VI, and they returned the drone to their position.
Stein took the sample and ran over to the Sleipnir, where Kim had already prepared the genetic sampler.
The other two scientists, Dr. Mustafa and Dr. Reinhard, had launched more drones to fly along the coastline.
Pedgre was amazed by Stein's competence.
In less than a minute, the quiet and almost shy scientist had turned the objectives of their mission on their head and had rightfully deduced that it would be an immensely big coincidence if they landed at the only colony by chance.
There must be more along the coast.
How many was the question.
Pedgre followed Stein.
The time of truth. Burrow survivor, or Hyphae monster.
The outcome would probably decide Burrow's future.
The genetic sequence was displayed. Pedgre couldn't see what the analysis said; Stein's head was in front of that part of the display.
"What? That's impossible!"
Stein stepped away. Pedgre couldn't see the human's face, but by the way he walked, he seemed deeply shocked.
A second later, Pedgre shared that feeling.
On the gene sequencer's display, in blue, thick letters, he could see the outcome of the analysis.
Samples Identified
Sample Organism 1 — Acidithiobacillus — Match 98.91% — Origin: Earth
Sample Organism 2 — Synechococcus — Match 99.231% — Origin: Earth
Sample Organism 3 — Gloeocapsa — Match 97.654% — Origin: Earth