Chapter 1: The Crushing Shadow from the Sky
The atmosphere was unbelievably crisp. Rex Nebula took his first breath of alien air – a cool, clean lungful that smelled vaguely of pine and wet stone – and felt a grin split his face so wide it hurt.Perfect pressure. Perfect mix. The habitation team back on the generation ship had nailed it. Kepler-186f wasn’t just Earth-like; for a guy who’d spent the last three years recycling his own sweat in a tin can, it was paradise.
He stood on the extended ramp of the lander, The Grasshopper, looking out. Rolling hills covered in a deep, blue-green moss stretched to a horizon where two small moons hung pale in a lavender sky. The primary sun, a dim red dwarf, bathed everything in a warm, perpetual sunset glow. It was quiet. Not silent-space quiet, but a living quiet, broken by the soft sigh of a breeze through tall, feathery fronds.
“Mission log, supplemental,” he said, his voice recorder picking up the hint of awe he couldn’t suppress. “Primary disembarkation successful. Environmental readings are nominal, even better than the probes indicated. Air is…” he took another deep breath, “incredible. I am about to conduct preliminary extra-vehicular reconnaissance.”
Protocol demanded a full suit, systematic sample collection, and a slow, cautious perimeter check. He’d done all the suit checks back in the airlock. Every system green.
He unsealed his helmet with a hiss, lifted it off, and clipped it to his belt. The air kissed his sweat-damp hair. He did the same with his gloves, stuffing them into a thigh compartment. The freedom was intoxicating. Next came the bulky torso unit, the clamshell armor that had been his home for so long. He shrugged it off, the servos whining softly, and let it thud onto the ramp. The flight suit beneath was thin, a second skin.
A childish, rebellious impulse, born from years of sterile confinement and recycled air, surged through him. He looked around. No one for light-years. No cameras. Just him and a brand-new world.
“Ah, to hell with it,” he muttered, his voice loud in the immense quiet.
He toed off his boots, peeled off the sweat-sticky flight suit, and finally, his shorts. The clothes made a small, sad pile on the alien soil. For the first time in over a thousand days, Rex Nebula was naked under an alien sun.
He stretched, groaning as his vertebrae popped. He raised his arms, turning his face up to the gentle warmth. It was glorious. The light on his eyelids was a deep, pleasant red. The breeze traced cool patterns across his skin, raising goosebumps on his arms and thighs. He walked forward, the moss springy and soft under his bare feet, like the most expensive memory foam. He headed for a particularly inviting, gently sloped hillock a few dozen yards from the lander.
“Gonna get the full experience,” he said to no one, his mood utterly cheery. He lowered himself onto the slope, sighing as the cool moss caressed his back. He wriggled, getting comfortable, letting his body sink in. He spread his arms wide, fingers splaying through the strange foliage. He bent one knee, letting the other leg stretch out long. This was it. The ultimate human experience. First contact… with himself. He chuckled, closing his eyes, letting the dual-moon light and the sun’s heat bleach his thoughts into blank, blissful whiteness.
The world ended with a noise like the sky tearing.
Zorp was halfway through harvesting a cap of glow-fungus when the shadow fell. It wasn’t a cloud shadow. It was immense, moving, and blotted out the light with a finality that stole the breath from his lungs. A thunderous, grinding roar descended from the heavens, a sound that vibrated in his teeth and made the very mycelium-mat beneath his feet tremble.
He looked up, and his mind simply broke.
A gargantuan silver shape, smoother than any stone, was settling in the great meadow beyond the ridge. It was a mountain that had fallen from the void. Wind from its descent flattened the stalk-forests at the meadow’s edge.
Then a piece of the silver mountain opened, and the Sky Beast emerged.
It was a column of pale, hairless flesh, encased in a second, form-fitting skin of strange material. Its head was a smooth dome, a single dark eye looking out from the front. It made sounds, deep rumbles that Zorp felt in his chest. It began to shed its outer skin, piece by terrifying piece, revealing more of the monstrous, pallid body beneath.
Panic was a living thing in the village of Rootwell. Screams, raw and sharp, cut through the air. Zorp’s father, Borp, was bellowing orders, his voice cracking with fear. “To the deep-runs!Now! Leave everything!”
But Zorp was frozen, staring. The Beast was naked now, a landscape of moving muscle and sinew. It was walking. Each step made the ground buck and heave, sending shockwaves that toppled the delicate spore-towers. Its foot, a vast, five-toed monstrosity, slammed down a mere hundred strides from the village commons, crushing an entire sector of the Old-Growth fungus into a sticky, unrecognizable pulp.
The Beast groaned, a sound of contentment that to Zorp was the voice of apocalypse. It turned and began to lower itself toward the very hillock where Zorp’s farm, and his home, were nestled.
“Zorp! Run!” His sister, Lina, grabbed his arm, yanking him back from his paralytic horror.
They scrambled, tiny figures in a torrent of fleeing villagers. Zorp looked back just as the colossal pale form settled onto the slope. The impact was cataclysmic. The carefully tended terraces of his fungal farm, generations of work, vanished instantly. The roof of his stone-cap home shattered like an eggshell as an impossible weight, the curve of the Beast’s lower back, settled onto it.
But Zorp wasn’t there. He was in the air, thrown by the seismic shock.
He tumbled, a scream ripped from his throat, landing not on soft moss, but on a surface that was warm, slightly damp, and alive. The smell was overwhelming: salty, musky, organic. He slid, scrabbling for purchase, his hands finding no purchase on the slick, smooth surface.
He was on the Beast.
He had landed in the vast, shadowed valley between two mountainous thighs. Above him, curving into the sky like a terrifying, fleshy moon, was one half of the Beast’s posterior. It was close enough to see the pores, like craters, and the faint, golden hairs that forested the slopes. A low tremor ran through the world-flesh, a seismic event of digestion or breath.
Below him, the slope fell away into a deep, dark crevasse. The heat radiating from it was intense, primal. The breeze, which up here was a gentle caress for the Beast, was a torrential, skin-scented gale for Zorp, threatening to pluck him from his precarious perch and send him falling into that terrible, warm darkness.
He clung on, his fingers finding a faint grip in the seam where two vast plates of muscle met. He was a mite on a giant. He had lost everything—his farm, his home, possibly his whole family. And he was stranded on the naked body of a god that didn't even know he existed.