Louisa had not slept well.

Yes, it was incredibly enriching and satisfying that they were making a difference here. They were handing out supplies to anyone who said they needed some, even if that small Gak village they passed earlier today clearly did not need food supplies for 120 families. And it brought all the warmth to her heart to see the appreciation that the Gaks were showering the humans with. No doubt about it.

But that didn't make sleeping in tents on the cold, hard ground littered with rocks more comfortable. Ugh!

The main problem though was she was thinking about Gary the whole night. There were no rules against fraternization or relationships here, of course. This was the Red Cross, not the military. Some other crews even had spouses and relatives working side by side.

However, Louisa was a practical girl.

She didn't want to get attached to someone, just to go home and never see them again. Or worse, a long distance relationship. She'd tried that once with an Austrian exchange student who she'd met at college, and once was enough. She knew some other people who had it work out, but she just couldn't do that again.

And she wasn't even sure Gary felt the same way about her. What if Gary interpreted it differently? They'd held hands and watched the stars, and she was pretty sure that meant the same thing everywhere on Earth, probably in the galaxy judging by her Gak Local Customs pamphlet. But in her experience, boys can be pretty dense sometimes.

"Didn't sleep well?" Gary asked as he cooked pancakes for the Gak village they'd stayed at on a portable hot stove.

"It was the rocks under my tent."

They completed their full aid distribution of the entire Gophor sector, and called it in. Somewhere, 50 light years away, a small sector on a map in a conference room turned from purple to blue. CNN interrupted their regular programming for the breaking news update.

"Congrats on your work in Gophor, here's your next area of responsibility," Gideon said as he prepared to hand over a fresh new packet to the pair, then frowned as he looked at his tablet, "well shit never mind, it's the Galorboro sector. That's mostly under 50 feet of brown sludge and water by now. The aid distribution AI calculated last night that they aren't expecting survivors in the area."

"Hmm… looks like that's all the sectors we're responsible for around this spaceport. Go take a well earned break, there's a coffee machine outside the processing tent. We'll probably be flying out to somewhere else tomorrow. Some place even more rural than this, called… Gnorm."

"By spaceship?" Gary asked.

"Probably. Who knows? I heard they're sending a helicopter from Earth, but even if that's true, if it's not ready here by tomorrow, they better send it to another spaceport because we'd be out of here by then."

Gary and Louisa enjoyed some coffee and chatted with the dozen or so other volunteers who had gotten back. What they saw in Gophor was the norm, not the exception. Entire villages were decimated, or worse.

Several volunteers had arrived at town centers where the satellites had said there might be some survivors, and found them uninhabited.

For the towns that were rescued, it was hard to tell how many people they actually had left. Many Gak officials seemed to be falsely reporting an inflated number of survivors. You can't blame them, Louisa thought to herself, they're hoarding our aid because they don't know where their next crop is coming from.

"Is this confirmed?" Gideon asked, excitement rising in his gut.

"95% certainty," was the reply from the FTL comm, "the doors on the warehouse were moved manually, and there's a bigger pile of what appears to be a trash dump. No way the wind does that."

"Alright people, we got some good news and bad news," Gideon said after gathering all the returned volunteers in the main briefing tent. Without stopping to play the traditional game of asking which they'd like to hear first, he continued, "good news, there are confirmed Gak survivors in Galorboro. Our satellites found a warehouse near the levee control house that we think has survivors, as of this morning. Bad news is, given what we know from the Gak authorities, it might not be easy to get through."

"Here's the picture of the area," Gideon opened up a satellite picture of a heavily flooded area. There were two pieces of dry land: the one on the left was connected to a road. The one on the right had a large multi-story structure on it. They were separated by a river, forded by a raised drawbridge.

"It's quite a ways away, and there's some swampy areas we have to cross," he pointed to the left side of the road, "and another problem we'll have is the drawbridge controls are on the other side, in the warehouse."

"Can we get them to activate the drawbridge?" Amy asked the obvious question for everyone.

"It's possible. We don't know if they're in any condition to operate it. According to the Gak craftsmen we talked to, this bridge is literally older than human civilization itself and hasn't been operated in centuries," Gideon admitted, anticipating the question, "we'll only know when we get there."

"Based on the pictures, our models estimate there may be up to a thousand Gaks in the warehouse. We'll take five trucks. Double up, load up, and let's head out in 10 minutes."

They were making a lot of progress. The first half of the way, there was a stone paved road that would make the Romans proud. Far less bumpy than the roads they'd been riding on last night. This gave Louisa time to think, and not all of her thoughts were that pleasant.

Gary and Louisa were assigned to a truck with Amy and her partner Eileen. Eileen was a nurse, originally from Canada. They were one of those couples who were on the mission together.

They had met in school in Vancouver, and decided to join the Red Cross together. That was eight years ago. Since then, they've been sent all over the world, to disaster zones from Sri Lanka to Haiti.

Then they settled down in Melbourne, and started a life together, until Gakrek.

Louisa knew it was a different situation, obviously. They'd met in school, and probably had some time to get to know each other, but she started imagining herself in Amy's shoes, and Gary in Eileen's-

"Penny for your thoughts?" Gary interrupted her daydream with a goofy grin at her.

"What about my thoughts?" She hadn't heard the first part, her face turning red.

"Was denkst du?" Gary had turned on his universal translator to German, giving them some privacy.

"Ach, not much, just hoping the rest of the journey is this smooth," she replied in German as well, "was this trip what you expected when you signed up?"

"This planet stinks, literally, but I'm glad I'm here."

"I'm glad you're here too." What the hell, why did she just say that?

The going got tougher. Since they got off the main road, the wheels of their vehicles sank into the flooded mud roads. They've had to stop several times to lift the trucks up when the wheels got stuck.

Normally, this wouldn't be too difficult. Vehicles are heavy but a few people should be able to comfortably lift one off the ground; less easy when it was also carrying tons of rice, beans, and the sticky mud didn't want to let go.

One of the other trucks had broken down. It was a local one. That thing had been working for literal centuries and of course it chose today of all days to stop. As the Gak driver was now explaining to them, what they hadn't considered was that normal Gak vehicles don't get driven that often. Maybe once every few years. They were designed to be maintenance free… as long as you didn't drive them much.

Whenever you thought that the aliens were so similar to humans, they surprised you with something out of left field like that.

Gideon distributed the passengers from the broken down vehicle amongst the four remaining trucks, then called it in so someone could come pick it up.

Enrico, a young Italian teacher, had joined their truck from the broken down one. It would be nice to have an extra person to help drag the truck out of the mud the next time they got stuck again.

After a while of the swamp, they got back onto a major road again, which was good, because they were going faster now, and which was bad, because that thinking thing was coming back to Louisa again.

Amy and Eileen were leaning on each other and having a quiet conversation across from them. Enrico had sat down next to Gary and was chatting with the Gak driver.

Because Enrico was taking up some more space near the front, Louisa was pressed up close to Gary now. She hesitantly put her hand over his. He didn't move it, and then after a moment, he squeezed hers back.

Glancing over at Amy and Eileen, she found a momentary burst in courage, and said in a low voice in Gary's ears, almost whispering, "ich mag dich".

Gary's translator was an earpiece. He hadn't needed its translation anyway. On the other side of Gary, to Louisa's mounting horror as she realized this, Enrico had set his translator to broadcast mode when he was talking to the driver.

And it had no problem capturing Louisa's low voice, converting it into a loud Stephen Hawking impression, and blurted out for the entire truck to hear: "I LIKE YOU".

Louisa felt 3 new pairs of eyes on her, and turned beet red as they giggled and in unison shouted back, "we like you too".

At that moment, if she could dig a hole straight through the bag of rice she was sitting on, through the truck, and through the ground to the center of Gakrek, she would have done it.

Then, to her surprise, Gary turned around and planted a kiss on her left cheek to oohs, aahs, and some light teasing from the peanut gallery.

Worth it.

They had finally arrived at the drawbridge and dismounted. It was surprisingly a solidly built bridge. It would appear whoever created it long ago had done their jobs right. The vines draping over it and the rust over the metal showed its age, but unlike the rest of Gakrek, it didn't look like it was falling apart. Now they just had to lower it…

They yelled loudly at the warehouse they saw on the other side of the river, but nobody answered. They had to ford it.

Easier said than done. At its shallowest crossing they could find, it was not a deep river, only knee deep in places, but the water was moving faster than walking speed, which is a big red flag when trying to ford. But they didn't have much of a choice.

Gary's car volunteered to go. They placed their radios in sealed plastic bags in their backpacks, linked up with arms on each others' shoulders and waded slowly side-by-side into the stream. Foot by foot, inch by inch, they stepped through the water. Gary first, then Louisa, then Amy, Eileen, and finally Enrico at the rear.

It was slow, and took every bit of concentration to make sure everyone could follow the same pace.

A sudden surge of water knocked Amy off her footing into the water. Louisa and Eileen caught their arms on her, but Eileen too, lost her balance temporarily.

Enrico caught Eileen on the arm, and bracing himself on what he hoped was a steady rock beneath his boots, dragged them both back out from the river until they could both regain their balance.

Recovering, they nodded their thanks back towards Enrico, and trudged on.

Arriving on the other riverbank, they entered the structure.

The intelligence was right for once, Louisa thought.

There were hundreds upon hundreds of Gaks, packed together in the three story tall building. Judging by the way their eyes blinked at the sunlight when they had opened the doors to the warehouse, they'd been here for a while.

Talking to a tall skinny Gak, they learned that these people had set up camp here to protect themselves from the roving bands of cannibals in the area. They had a limited supply of food from the warehouse itself, so they rationed the food, prioritizing the weakest first.

No one was going to be eaten or left out. As a group, they collectively decided that they weren't going to compromise their values or sanity. They were going to live together, or they were going to die together.

They went all in, flipped a coin, and landed on the lucky side. Louisa tried not to think about all the other Gaks they were missing, with the horribly incomplete records about their own people the Gaks kept...

The mechanical room was locked, but nothing a big strong human like Enrico couldn't handle with a good hard kick to the keyhole mount.

The harder part was to navigate the controls. They called the spaceport on the radio, who got a Gak craftsman on the line to talk them through lowering the bridge manually. It took a bit of collective grit and a lot of pulling on a wheel, but they managed it after a couple hours.

It was another few grueling minutes slowly driving the trucks across the bridge… just in case… and hauling rations out of the trucks. But in the end, they'd done it.

Imagine that, Gideon thought to himself watching them recover, all eight hundred people. The line between living and dying was a lucky satellite that spotted three moved doors and the size of their garbage dump.

There was no time to celebrate. Plenty of Gaks were still hungry. Two days later, they were flown off to another sector that needed more manpower. Louisa was relieved that Gary and she were kept together. They made an effective team.

When they landed, they were assigned to a new truck, a Toyota this time, shipped straight in from Earth. Which was nice because they could sit in actual seats in front this time.

"You don't like sushi?" Louisa was asking.

"No, I liked my fish cooked, well done, to perfection," Gary said, "but I don't think I'll complain about having to go to sushi again with my family next time after this trip. Hell, I think I'll eat anything."

"True that," Louisa agreed. Then after a while, "my family is all animal doctors, vete-veterinarians."

"Oh yeah?" Gary asked noncommittally, "they must be really nice people."

"They are! Maybe you will meet them one day," she replied instinctively, and then immediately regretted saying that, face turning red.

Gary turned over to look at her for a second, then said, "maybe I will."

Gordorker saw a motor vehicle pass him on the road, gave them a wave, and watched them pass. He wasn't sure why he did it.

Then they stopped.

In the front cabin of the vehicle, there were two figures. They got out.

As he walked closer, he realized warily: they were not Gak. They weren't Olg either; he'd seen Olgs at the market before. His brain screamed at him to run, but he had no more energy to run, and their vehicle would easily chase him down anyway.

One of the strange aliens seemed to speak Gak though.

"Where are you going?" Asked the alien who had introduced himself as Gary. Gary was a good name. It could almost be a Gak name.

Gnorm Town Center, he'd replied, a bit relieved. If they were going to eat him here, they would not ask where he was going.

"Ah that's where we're going too," Gary said, "hop on board, we've got plenty of room in their back."

Gordorker didn't know these aliens, but they didn't look very desperate, and they certainly didn't look hungry. As they helped him aboard, he noticed that the back of their truck was full of food!

One of the humans, not Gary, handed him a bar of nuts.

"Your body is starving," she introduced herself as Louisa through Gary, "eat slowly and not too much. If you suddenly eat too much, your body will not be able to handle it."

Gordorker knew exactly what she was talking about. The Gak were used to dealing with starvation.

He ate a quarter of the bar, and stored the rest in his baggie. He will eat another quarter tomorrow, and his children will have a quarter each. They will survive at least another week. He thanked them both profusely.

That's when they handed him a loaf of bread. A can of tuna. A can of fruit. A box of food bars. Then, they filled his baggie with rice.

The Gak did have the concept of gifts. It was universal. But Gaks did not give gifts this generously.

As they drove, Gordorker sat in the back of the truck, and started crying and grieving for the first time he could. For his beloved wife, for his many children, and for his neighbors.

Zikzik had been flying the Earth-Gakrek relief route for hours now.

At first, it was just decent money. Earth to Gakrek did not consume that much fuel. He knew both spaceports well, and he could land in Livermore in his sleep. The operations were quick, the line moved fast, and nobody held up people in orbit on a pad because they were too stubborn to take credits.

Then, he got caught up in the excitement of the mission. The dozens of young humans who poured into and out of his spaceship were abandoning their comfortable lives to go help a species of people they'd never even seen in person before. And they were apparently all doing it as a gift!

Zikzik didn't believe it at first. He checked. He double checked. In fact, he asked every single crew. None of them were getting paid! One of them would have a card that he'd have them swipe, so he'd get paid his 200 GC fee for the run. He'd make sure to do it before they landed so they could run out faster.

The space traffic controllers operating the ports were all very efficient and professional, which Zikzik respected. Everyone liked to deal with experts who knew what they were doing.

At some point during the night, he realized that he had passed the fiftieth run mark a few trips ago. The humans had put up a leaderboard on the advertising billboard he could see as he came in to land.

Zikzik, number one, fifty three completed trips, thank you for your service. He was leading by a good ten or so points.

Zikzik wasn't tired though, and his ship had plenty of fuel. He could keep going for one more. His stomach felt an odd excitement every time he delivered another crew, and he wasn't about to stop now.

Zikzik got approval to prepare to land at Livermore. He hovered suborbital above the pad, waited until the previous shuttle cleared the minimum safety distance, and put his spacecraft down in record time. Unlock hatches. Extend ramp.

He heard 4 people thunder up his ramp. Then a loud chunk sound as a large human mechanical beast slided the exact right amount of cargo into his hold. Ka-chunk, ka-chunk. On his first trip, a human engineer had come in and hastily bolted on some kind of rail system into the floor of his hold. They told him it was non-optional for large relief ships, but hey, if the humans were going to do free upgrades on his cargo, Zikzik was not one to complain about gifts.

"READY!" He heard a human yell out below him. Zikzik's paws were already on the spaceship controls. Retract ramp. Lock hatches. Approved for take off. Launch.

"First time into space?" He shouted back at the passenger seats as a higher than normal amount of Gs pushed them back on the seats; faster acceleration equals faster trip.

"Yup! You?" A guy right below wheezed at him, "Haha, what am I asking, I'm sure you've been to space plenty."

"This is my 54th run to Gakrek today!"

"Oh shit, this guy's the pro on the leaderboard!" Another voice, a woman this time, as he felt a swell of pride, "any tips?"

He thought for a bit. "There's a heavy forklift by the door. One of my crews earlier today tried it. It was not faster than if they had just pushed, but it was less effort and only one person was needed to operate it. I think if one of you uses that, the rest of you can go help unload the other spacecrafts on their pads."

"Sick, dude," the first guy again. They started negotiating the logistics of the forklift amongst themselves.

A while later, after initiating the blink, Zikzik asked casually, "so, any of you getting paid to go to Gakrek?"

"No, we're volunteers!" Not the first time he heard a crew with that response. The woman continued, "it's all about paying it forward."

Paying it forward huh, he thought, never heard that business model before, and he'd heard about a whole lot of business models from the humans. It was impressive how they formalized what a lot of what businessbeings knew intuitively, which allowed them to optimize their business even more. "How much do you pay forward?"

"Hah. Naw, it's an expression," the woman explained, "we're doing this for Gaks, and someday maybe they'll do it for someone else."

"But what do you get out of the trade?" Asked Zikzik. It was not the first time he'd asked, but he wasn't sure he'd gotten a satisfactory answer yet.

"Someone already helped us out sometime in life! Now we're just paying that out. One day, someone will need help from them, and they'll answer the call!"

"Ah, so somebody brought you food when you had a famine," said Zikzik, nodding as he requested permission to land at Gakrek.

"N...no. We're privileged, you know? We live in a first world country because we got lucky... because of our parents and stuff. We could have been born starving Gaks!"

"So you're saying what you pay forward is your inheritance?" Offered Zikzik, ruminating on the concept himself as he comes in to land.

"In a way, I guess. And helping other people feels good, right?"

Zikzik couldn't disagree with that as he throttled down the main engines and thrusters, "ok, we're landing in 3… 2… 1... we're here."

Seatbelts off. Hatches open. Ramps out.

"UNLOAD YOUR CARGO AND STEP AWAY FROM THE ROCKETS! TWO MINUTES!"

Zikzik had inherited his ship from his father, who inherited it from his father, and so on. Like most other traders who landed at Livermore with large ships, he was at least a 10th generation space trader.

He was still thinking about the inheritance thing the human woman said when he got the green light to take off, exactly two minutes later.

Hm. He'd forgotten to ask the passengers to swipe their card again.

Oh well. He'll have to ask his next crew more about paying it forward.

At some point, the trader-trucker had started becoming something of a true believer.

On the first day, flight operations at Livermore Spaceport ran non-stop. More spacecraft flew out of the spaceport than planes flew out of SFO International Airport.

By day two, humans replaced Olgs as the second most populous species on Gakrek.

By day four, its spaceports had processed more food in a week than they had in all of their histories before that.

By the end of week one, billions of malnourished Gaks were being nursed back to health. Some news on Earth triumphantly declared the mission accomplished, though others knew better: without many farms left, the Gaks were in for a long winter.

Thousands of pilots from hundreds of species all around the galaxy participated in the Great Spacelift. They were the first non-humans to earn currency payment for labor.

The gathering spot for Gnorm Town Center was much less crowded than Gordorker remembered. The Gnorm area got hit hard by the dust storm, and many families that did not have a large reserve had many of their members starve to death weeks ago.

As the oldest Gak alive in Gnorm, Gordorker was the unofficial leader. He dutifully counted the number of Gaks left with the heads of households. Most of them were children; few were nearly as old as him. When he reported the numbers to Gary and Louisa, they unloaded enough dry food to last the winter and more. After they said their goodbyes and scheduled a future delivery time, they took off.

Going through a disaster zone can change someone. For some people, it breaks them. For others, it teaches them to live in the moment a little.

Louisa snuggled up against his sleeping figure in their warm tent, and gave him a light peck on the back of his neck.

Whatever challenges they'll meet tomorrow, they could face it together.

Gordorker made sure that supplies were distributed fairly to each Gak, depending on how many people were left in their households. Like most other Gak leaders, he had responsibly accounted for some extra Gaks who may still be alive and were not present. He would deliver their supplies to them himself later if they were found to be alive.

Gordorker noticed that there were many families without adults left, only younglings who could not care for themselves. He allowed them to follow him home. He couldn't refuse when they moved in. He needed the help for the coming year anyway.

Looking out at his 19 new children playing under the big tree behind his home, Gordorker noticed the tree had finished shedding its leaves for the year. Fall was turning quickly into winter.

That meant that his two original offsprings were two harvest seasons old, and they could be given names now.

He named one Gary and the other Glouisa, in honor of the strange humans who saved their lives.

As the sun set on Gakrek, for the first time since his wife had died, Gordorker found himself looking forward to its rising tomorrow.