An alarm beeped in Lieutenant Angers’ ear. He shook himself awake. Life-support’s last-ditch effort, a profusion of biotic fog, filled his cockpit. A muffled and unfamiliar voice came to him from beyond the canopy glass, but he could not make out the words.

Angers could hardly move. Life-support had injected a drug directly into his spine, which suppressed his biological processes to maximize the time available for a rescue crew to find him. It was extremely difficult for him to shake off these effects and regain control of his own body.

A bright light appeared on the edge of the viewscreen. The screen was in fact a holographic projection inside his helmet which gave him a view of the canopy superimposed under normal circumstances with computer-generated renders. Angers squinted against the external light source, but was grateful for the stimulus which helped push the effects of the drug out of his system.

He tried to raise his hand to wave at the light. If he put his hand between the source outside the canopy and his face, the viewscreen within his helmet would likewise adjust, but he couldn't quite muster the strength yet. Raising his head was all Angers could do.

The voice outside chattered something again. It was clearly the voice of a human, not an alien. That was good. It reminded Angers where he was on the small colony world. A sudden burst of terror filled his mind as he realized that, because of the life-support system, he might have sat here for months before his organs shut down if he had fallen into a place where no one could reach him. He had crashed, he remembered, into a place under the ground. He’d pierced the ice above to reach as close to the colony world’s terraformer as possible.

Well, someone had found him. Maybe it had been as much as a month, or even more. Angers’ body was filled with pain, but he didn't know whether that resulted from the trauma he had suffered upon entry or of the slow decay of his organs over time spent in emergency stasis.

He slowly regained the use of his fingers and hands. Angers half-consciously tried to key for a vitals scan, but the computer refused to draw enough power to perform this task. The Blue Shrike was running on emergency reserves, and those reserves were dedicated toward the basic act of keeping him alive, nothing more.

Angers heard the noise of an electrical engine, a hum a little louder than a quiet prayer, though it echoed gently against the walls of wherever he lay.

Suddenly, the Blue Shrike jolted. Angers quickly realized he was being pulled upward out of somewhere. He was surely being retrieved from whatever hole he had dug himself into.

There was a slam, and Angers impacted his dashboard again. He heard a vehicle door opening and slamming shut, and then scurrying, and then the activation of some kind of concussive power tool.

Angers didn’t think whatever tools these colonists had could damage the Blue Shrike, but he couldn't take that chance. He frantically hit the emergency evacuation button and his cockpit burst open, allowing the biotic vapor to escape.

Angers rose on legs shaky from disuse, grateful that his muscles didn’t seem to have degenerated during however long he was asleep. He saw through his helmet a malnourished creature of undoubtedly human descent standing before him, slack-jawed, holding a tool in his hands. There was a box next to the colonist which Angers assumed was a first aid kit, and the colonist wore some kind of yellow jumpsuit which hung loosely off his body, clearly not tailored to his form.

Angers raised a hand to his throat and released his mask, pulling it with what felt like disgusting suction from the clammy flesh of his neck and head.

Frigid air burned Angers’ neck, but he breathed in deeply of the fresh air, pure and infinitely more life-giving them the recycled atmosphere of the Blue Shrike.

The colonist’s features were heavier than Angers’ own, and its flesh was much pinker. He was a descendant of ancient human stock, clearly lacking the elegant bone structure the bluish-skinned strains of humanity had adapted over the last millennium. Angers had never seen a strain of human quite like this colonist’s in person, though he had read about them in his is xenology and anthropology training.

The colonist began speaking again, his tone full of disbelief and wonder. The dialect was so far removed from orthodox Paraea that Angers couldn’t even begin to interpret it, so he replaced his helmet and used its dedicated processor to run a bilateral translation. Within moments, the colonist’s words warped in Angers’ ears, and he began to understand the translation into Paraea.

Not that the words themselves made much sense. The colonist was babbling to himself, not at all to Angers. He was talking about doom and death, or about narrowly avoiding it, and something about an accident.

“Hey,” said Angers. He knew his words would be translated into the colonist’s own language through the speakers on either side of his helmet, though he knew likewise the sound would seem inhuman and distorted. This would unfortunately render Angers even more alien than the colonist would certainly already perceive him.

“My name is Lieutenant Angers of the Paraceum,” he said. “I'm a human, just like you. I don't know what you know of your planet's history, but settlers colonized you from a greater human civilization many years ago. You descend from those settlers, and I descend from the humans who stayed behind. I'm not an alien, even if I look different to you. I'm on an important mission and need whatever help your people can give me. I'm hurt and out of fuel. Do you understand?”

The colonist slowly sat on the ground. “A generation ago,” he said slowly, “our scientists… they tried to leave the planet. They failed, and there was an explosion that… that killed thousands of people. It turned this whole place above us to ice.” He made a vague gesture above his head. “All those people died for nothing. We came from the stars to begin with? How did we lose that?”

Angers threw a line over the side of the cockpit and, with great difficulty, slid down. He approached the colonist. Angers stood a head's height over him, and Angers was short for a human. He wondered just how different his physiology was to the humans of this world. He extended his hand in what he knew was a nearly universal human gesture of greeting.

The colonist took Angers’ hand hesitantly and shook it. “My name is Carrick,” he said. “I… I…” He seemed very uncertain of himself. “I’m a convicted prisoner,” he finally blurted out. “The Accident I mentioned left a gigantic facility that sunk under the ground. It was filled with technology that's far more advanced than what we have nowadays. The government set up a prison on the edge of the Wasteland and sends prisoners into it to retrieve technology for them.”

He shrugged. “Last night you crashed. They told us prisoners it was just a power system blowing up somewhere. We were told to ignore the event because it could be dangerous to our equipment. I knew they weren’t telling us the whole story, so I investigated.” The colonist, Carrick, scratched his head. “I suppose they’re assembling a task force to look for themselves, one with much better equipment than they gave me.”

Yet Carrick had been the one to find Angers. Had he not, had his life-support system continued to suppress his consciousness until the government of this world found him, Angers might have woke under the vivisecting scalpels of unscrupulous surgeons while his precious Blue Shrike was ripped apart for components that would make no sense to the scientists of this world.

“I think,” said Angers, “I owe you my life.”

Carrick seems to come to that same realization. “What now?” He asked. “I know something of bureaucracy, enough to know it will probably be two days before they get clearance to commandeer the staff and equipment they’ll use to get out here.”

Angers stepped back and took stock of his surroundings. He stood in a vast chamber a hundred yards both long and wide. He was surrounded by the crumbled ruins of buildings that could only have been terraformed, for they were seamless things of marble that melted into granite below. From cracks in the stone below sprouted tufts of gently wafting, glowing grass. It wafted, in fact, in a breeze that he couldn’t feel at all on his skin. The air down here was almost entirely still.

Beside Angers, or rather, beside the Blue Shrike, huge shards of ice and soil and carpets of that glowing grass loomed in piles, the debris from when Angers had punched through the ground above.

And there, in the center of the chamber, hovering twenty feet off the ground and eighty feet below the roof of the cavern, was a terraformer.

Angers stared at it in wonder. He had not seen many of the devices in his lifetime. Only, in fact, when he had visited old colony worlds during the early years of his career. Terraformers were objects of living and intelligent metal, four-dimensional organs capable of transmuting end reimagining matter in a way only the children of the Paraceum could. They were the physical fruit of intelligence incarnate. They were technology that could no longer be produced, for the Paraceum no longer allowed humans to interface with anything that resembled it.

The terraformer was an echo of a bygone age, an age when humans were masters over their own machinery, were sorcerers of space and time, were alchemists of the stuff that had given birth to the stars.

This terraformer was weak, nearly dead. Any one of the space-faring strain of humanity could feel its resonance from this proximity. The pressure inside his head, Angers now realized, had been a part of why he had felt so dull upon waking. Now, looking at it as it gently shivered in midair in a way nearly imperceptible to the eye, Angers felt that resonance in even his own heartbeat.

Angers pointed to the terraformer. “Your scientists were experimenting upon that,” he said. “When your ancestors came to this world, it was more than likely inhospitable toward human life. Terraformers are programmed to change a planet of an appropriate size to one very similar to our common ancestors’ home world, into a planet where humans can thrive.”

Carrick looked at the terraformer as though seeing it for the first time. Surely he hadn't failed to notice it when he’d first entered the chamber. “That's the cause of all of this,” he whispered. “If it can transform a planet into something livable, it can also transform it into something deadly.”

Angers nodded. “The terraformer isn’t a simple machine that can be comprehended by ordinary physicists and engineers,” he said. “It's like a human. It has a soul. It can feel pain. It can feel love. If your scientists experimented upon it, they were torturing it, and it had no way of telling them this. Eventually, its mind must have broken, and it couldn’t help itself from obliterating and transforming the surrounding land, the only way it knows how to communicate.”

He turned back to Carrick, well aware that he must appear an alien, bug-like monster with the artificial voice coming from his mask and the impenetrable black eyes gleaming in the soft glow of the terraformer above. “It’s a miracle,” said Angers, “that it could restrain itself and not annihilate your entire planet.”

This was way too much, clearly. Carrick couldn’t process it. It was clear by his face. Carrick toyed with the tool in his hands, turning it around between his fingers. He idly flicked a switch on its side on and off, watching a plasma jet appear and disappear at its tip. “And my government wants to get their hands on it again,” he said. “They'll do the same thing all over again. It won't be possible to escape another Accident, will it?”

“No,” said Angers. “The bare minimum is that the same thing will happen. I’d bank on it, though, that this time the entire planet will be destroyed. Or, rather, transformed into something different. It's a strange thing with terraformers and technology like them. When they get weak, close to death, as this one is, their potency and power don't reduce or diminish. Only their controllability. They draw from a power source so vast it's unimaginable, one that makes a sun look like a candle.”

“Then what are we going to do?” Carrick asked. He wasn't really asking Angers. His tone was one of quiet and personal horror.

“We use it to repair my ship,” said Angers. “Then we perform one more task, one which may or may not be impossible. I need to tell you about the idealogue virus, and how we're going to encapsulate it.”