"Who was first?" asked Hernandez.

"What do you mean?" said Caroline.

"Who actually touched the surface first? It was supposed to be this big moment, with quotes and all that. But I can't seem to remember any of it happening."

"Well, if memory serves, the people on the first shuttles were a few technicians and scientists. I could pull up a list of their names, but I still wouldn't know who actually stepped out first."

"You could try asking one of them, maybe they saw."

"You know what? I don't think I will. Every other big first landing in history always began with some pretentious little sound bite and a boatload of significance. It's nice that this one just was."

"That doesn't seem right..."

"I'm the admiral. My word is law." Caroline grinned at the Lieutenant. Hernandez tried to reciprocate, but couldn't help but let some concern leak into his smile.

At first, the sample seemed to be dead. It stopped breathing and James could almost see it deflate. He sighed in relief. Nadya slumped and looked over at him.

"See, I told you. No big deal."

"Fair. But now we'll have to get a new sample and keep testing. This time, without the unscheduled feedings."

Nadya laughed and left the observation room to call in another sample from the starship. James stayed behind and turned up his inner symphony. Feeling in a good mood, he decided to play around with his chip, something he rarely ever allowed himself to do. The observation room turned blue, and fronds of coral grew from the walls to form a veritable city of organic fronds. Not usually to his taste, but he found the shapes pleasing at this happy moment.

He almost didn't notice when Nadya returned. She blended well with the false reality, in her blue hazard suit. When she turned to him and said something, the program fuzzed out the sound into a mash of bubbles. She spoke again, louder this time.

Then she began to approach him, her movements much too fast to fit this slow, liquid world of his, and he snapped out of the program.

"The thing's alive again."

James felt his stomach sinking, his spirits suddenly falling from the giddy heights. He had the chip feed him Shostakovich and asked Nadya what she meant.

"The sample is breathing as normal," she elaborated. "It's actually pulsing a little now. And, uh, the pressure inside the containment vessel is hiking up."

"I don't know," said Hernandez. "This operation has been the largest undertaking in all human history. It should have some reasonable degree of ceremony. At the very least we could try to write down who actually touched the ground first."

"Listen, Hernandez," said Caroline. "Your insistence on this point is starting to wear my patience thin. If you want to go interview every soul on this rock to find out who was the first, be my guest. Just don't make me listen to you talking about it."

"Understood, Admiral," Hernandez sighed.

"There are more important things to be worrying about. Is David still reporting all green?"

"Yes, he's waiting for your permission to deorbit and come back home."

"Tell him to hold up there. We might need boots in the sky if this plan doesn't work."

"He's not going to take that well."

"Tell him anyway."

The city of Eridu bustled loudly outside of the field tent, as buildings were constructed and crops were harvested. Haphazard shelters clustered around the hill. Between them, a few partially completed structures stood. Metal frames reached out of the ground, like twigs adorned with black spider webs. On the borders of the town, a large, blocky building was being constructed, its plastic walls taking shape in the afternoon sun. It was the fabricator, an astonishingly complicated piece of machinery that would, when completed, form the backbone of all future industrial capacity in the colony. It could use the silicates that made up the soil could be used to make everything from construction materials to electronics. The fabricator could literally build a city from sand.

James rushed to his screen and confirmed what Nadya told him. His finger hovered over the sterilization trigger. It was a very enticing button, big and red.

"Not yet," said Nadya behind him. "There's still no danger of a containment breach."

"But you said..."

"Yeah, the vessel can take a pressure differential of twenty megapascals. At this rate, it won't come close to breaking in the next year. We're safe."

James looked longingly at the trigger before resigning himself to watching the sample expand and contract in the video feed. For a time, it twitched, like a dying heart, cut from the chest.

It came almost without warning. James was watching the read out from the pressure sensors. He watched the line as it gradually moved up, then spike off the chart almost vertically. His head snapped up in time to catch the vessel bulging, then splitting apart down the middle.

The two halves slammed into opposite walls, shaking the observation room and nearly throwing James off his feet. He stood still for what seemed to be eternity, watching wide-eyed as the purple thing inside began to slide sickeningly off its pedestal and onto the floor.

James was almost blinded when the world turned to fire.

He turned away, his eyes watering, and saw Nadya, a blurry outline, leaning into her screen. The incinerators roared over the soft tones of the orchestra, a deep, guttural sound that shook his teeth.

The sterilization continued for several minutes, during which both Nadya and James watched the flames twisting through the thick pane of glass, only slightly shielded from the light by their visors. When it finally ended, everything was reduced to a thick carbon slag, black gel slowly dripping down the walls. The incinerator vents stuck out of the melted ceiling untouched and gleaming in the faint light from the observation room. James reached out to touch the glass. He thought he could feel the heat through the rubber of his suit.

They retreated to the changing room and removed their suits wordlessly. James was shocked, face stuck in an expression of surprise, while Nadya had her jaw set in a grim line. Angry that the sample was truly gone? No, thought James through the haze of his mind, it was being wrong. Being a fool.

Beyond the observation room, there was no sound. Only the smell of melted plastic and singed air. The purple something blended in well with the pure carbon. When it moved, it did so with unsure, pained motions, twitching in the gelatinous slime before it settled and began to grow, feeding on the hydrocarbon chains it found in that slime.

Over the course of the next few hours, long after Nadya and James had climbed out from under the hill, the sample was the size of a building and pulsing wetly in the darkness. It began filling the room with air, more air than the glass of the observation room was ever meant to handle. It bowed out, then shattered under the pressure.

Caroline looked at the array of computer monitors. One of them was showing the rainbow swirls of a weather map. It took her a moment, but she read it and saw that a bank of heavy clouds was scudding toward the tiny dot of Eridu, ominous and red. Reading the scale in the corner of the screen, she realized the clouds covered an area the size of a small continent.

"Hey, Hernandez," said Caroline, now staring out of the waving tent flap and at the growing city.

"Admiral?"

"Do you remember the Opes?" she asked.

"As if it all happened yesterday. What about it?"

"There weren't any windows on the ship. I just realized that. It wasn't really something I ever cared about at the time, but it struck me as odd."

"Why's that, Caroline?"

"I don't know, it just seemed like something worth installing. Even a screen or something would have been good for morale."

Hernandez was silent for a time. "You were born in New Hong Kong, right?"

"Yeah..."

"So, you've never really gotten a good look at the stars, have you? Under all the smog and the city lights. Outside of your time in the Navy, you might've seen maybe a few glimpses of the brightest planets. Let me tell you now, that view is not something you want waiting for you everywhere."

"Why do you think that?" she asked, only slightly hurt by the jab.

"Well, if you're ever on Mars or somewhere else empty and dark, and look up. You'll see too many stars to process. So many that it feels like their crushing you and sucking you up at the same time. It's like a hole without a bottom. It's unsettling. I couldn't imagine having that view to look at every dinner. I'd prefer the raw metal."

"Good point," said Caroline. "Makes you wonder why they sent us out here instead of a bot, knowing all the psychological problems."

"They could have sent a robot if they wanted to find out what's here. But I don't think that's why they sent us."

"It's called the Facem, right? A torch to light the great unknown."

Hernandez chuckled. "I always hated that name. Really the whole naming convention they've got for ships. Why Latin? A dead language for more than a millennium, why do they insist on using it? Hell, it's not even a good name. Torch? Doesn't describe what we're here for. Contingency Plan would be more accurate."

The sample stopped trying to grow for a time; it had gained enough mass to carry out the next part of its procedure. It began to harvest the frightening substances it found all around it, not understanding that they had been meant to destroy it, and worked to eat through the top of the facility.

The wind began to howl, lifting clouds of dust from the desert. A huge mass of storm began to crawl out from behind the mountain range.

"Hey," said Hernandez. "I just received a beam from the rover."

"What rover?" said Caroline.

"That big prospecting rover we sent out a while ago."

"Oh, right. What's it say?"

"The biologist hasn't found anything of any importance, she says the planet's dead and wants us to call in the terraformers."

"I'll keep that in mind," said Caroline.

"So you think all this is in case the rest of the solar system gets zapped?" asked Caroline, smirking.

"Well, when you put it like that, it sounds absurd, but that's more or less what I think."

"Maybe. Who am I to know what the greatest human project was truly for? It was a hell of a ride, I know that."

Hernandez smiled. "That it was."

But Caroline did know. As the overseer of the mission she was aware that there was something else going on. The cargo inventory just didn't add up: there was too much concrete, too much hazmat handling gear. Something sinister was happening under her nose. She naturally had the authority to dig deeper, but had long since decided it wasn't worth the trouble. It would be a hassle, and would take her attention away from the more pressing matters of colonial management. It was probably nothing anyway.

James did not sleep well that night, but he had grown accustomed to operating with very little rest. He suspected that everyone in Eridu was living the same way, forever kept awake by unfamiliarity and the ever-present light.

When finally he gave up, it was about four in the morning. It didn't really matter, but the rest of the colony seemed to think it did. The usual noises of trucks carrying all manner of food and building material throughout the city, of technicians hammering away at the fragmentary machines, of scientists drilling into the ground or building up instruments for peering into the sky, the sound of a city building itself from nothing, was gone. The wind was the only musician playing this morning.

James had noticed that over the past weeks. There was always wind. He knew it was an artifact of the dynamic equilibrium between hot and cold that was reality on this world, but it struck a dissonant chord with him as time progressed. It was always there, not a danger or even a nuisance, but a displeasure nonetheless. At first, he had liked the soothing tones it played, but as the time wore on, he wasn't so sure.

James prepared for himself a small breakfast, just packaged bread and beans. He was trying to drag out the stores from the Facem, religiously avoiding the newly grown vegetables. He didn't trust anything grown in this alien soil, even if it was technically Earth's soil.

As he bit into the old bread and tasted it beginning to go stale, he was startled by the sound of shuffling feet behind him.

It was Costanza, of course. Already awake and moving about, eyes wide and puffy with recent sleep. James smiled a tired smile and moved to embrace her. Before he could, she spoke.

"Why did we go here?"

"What?" he said, caught off guard.

"It was easier in the ship. I think we should have stayed there."

He crouched to speak to her directly. "Costanza, it was never supposed to be easier. We came here to find new things."

She frowned and shuffled to the tent flap, undulating in the breeze. She popped her head outside and yelled, "There's nothing here to find, Dad. Just rocks and dust."

She turned back to him, blinking from the flash of unexpectedly bright light. "I read some of books last night. They were about Earth, the place that we left. It was much more colorful than here. Why couldn't we stay there?"

"We were chosen, Costanza. I didn't want to come either. But we had to."

"To do what?" she asked, her face stern.

"To find new things."

"You know that's not why."

"How about you tell me what you think?"

Costanza was quiet, thinking. Then she said, "We came here to get far away, because we had everything we needed back home, but it was too crowded."

"But why did we want to get far away, Costanza?" James was speaking quietly, cautiously.

"You always come back from work worried. Why would you be worried if you were just making medicine?"

James didn't try to answer.

"I think the thing you're so worried about is what brought us here. It's why we had to go far away. Far away from everyone who could get hurt by it. But we aren't safe here, are we?"

James was torn between unfamiliar pride and all-too-familiar terror. Costanza had somehow deduced the true purpose of the mission. It was an insane notion.

"Where did you get that from?"

Costanza's face relaxed and she whispered to him.

"The wind tells me."

James decided to leave it at that, already tired and all too willing to retire to his bed. He neglected even to change. His last few moments of wakefulness were spent watching the blue fabric of the tent ripple in the breeze.