Johns looked out the open hatch at the back of the puddlejumper at the sprawling green forest in the morning sun below. Being that Kazi was smaller than Osara, the horizon was much closer to them than it would have been on their home planet.

He looked around the cabin. Twenty members of their security team sat packed into a puddlejumper that was meant for no more than fifteen. They fidgeted. He had briefed them in full about what was happening. They were about to land and weren’t exactly sure what would be waiting for them, given the fact that they had just discovered some kind of creatures were hatching at the crash sites.

On one hand, it seemed like a good idea to leave them in the dark. He didn’t want this information getting out into the station, and now that he had told a handful of people it certainly would. But he couldn’t send them out there in good conscience without accurately conveying the risk.

Still, the regular drone flybys hadn’t picked up any noticeable activities, aside from a few raised areas that appeared to be similar to the mounds they have found at the communications station.

Sara had tried everything to be allowed to come. She said that she wanted to help with the burn. No. Then she said she had to go because there might be new research opportunities. She could come after they had cleared the area, Johns said. He could make sure anything interesting was left untouched. Then she just tried to say that she was coming whether he liked it or not. “Good luck scheduling your own puddlejumper then,” he had said and she stormed off.

She was smart and feisty and Johns was glad to have her on Kazi for this shitshow. She reminded him so much of Anna. Or at least, the way he imagined that she would be now.

Strangely, the discovery of the eggs had only excited Johns. He could feel his heart pounding, but not with the nervousness that you would expect, but with anticipation. But then again, maybe it wasn’t so strange. This was his first taste of the real thing since he had been unceremoniously dumped on this godforsaken research station. He didn’t expect anything too difficult when they got to the site. Those creatures didn’t look like they were anywhere near ready to hatch back at Kazi Depot. In all likelihood, they would still be gestating and they could burn down the site just like they had the first.

Still, he didn’t want his team to go in unprepared. Johns lifted himself from his seat, grabbed hold of a handle near the back of the plane, and cleared his throat into the coms channel. The heads of the 20 Kazi Security team members snapped to him and he felt a warmness in his belly.

“As we all know, we’re about to drop into a situation that none of us have ever been in before. I won’t lie to you and say there is nothing to worry about. I don’t know that, and you know that I don’t know that. We don’t know what’s waiting for us there. Now, in all likelihood it’s going to be just like the first site, for those of you that were there. All have you have been briefed and trained on how to deal with this growth. The only difference is that this time, we’re carrying gauss rifles.”

They had found a crate of working gauss rifles in the storage facility. They were beasts. The electromagnetic pull sent bullets flying at 2,000 meters per second and could tear a hole through a ship hull.

“Now, when we land, play it safe. I know we weren’t trained for this sort of thing. If there is something there that needs to be dealt with, trust that man next to you. Hold your gas, deliver fire, down it. Call it out. If shit gets too hairy, remember we have this puddlejumper circling and they’ll come down and extract at the same point we dropped in at. It’s a clearing just a few hundred meters to the West of the growth site,” Johns said before giving the team a nod, which they returned. We’ll drop a beacon that will be accessible in your HUD.”

That felt good. His speech had needed a little bit of work. It had been more than ten years since he had given one of those. He was rusty.

“You ready for this?” Johns asked Rick.

“Of course,” he said nodding, as he pulled his gauss rifle up to his shoulder. “I can’t wait to fuck one of these little rats up if they dared to come out of those eggs already.”

Johns smiled and rolled his eyes. He had known men like Rick before. He had commanded them. They were good, most of them. Most of them were even up for the bullshit that spewed out of their mouth. He had never been in a battle of any kind with Rick, but he suspected that he really did believe his own bullshit too.

A few minutes later the puddlejumper was descending over a small opening in the forest floor. The team sat waiting for the rope to be hooked to the ship and then to take the plunge. In the distance, Johns could see the growth site, shining blue through the tiny openings in the treeline at the edge of the clearing.

The drones had shown them that this growth site had seen its growth rate continue to grow exponentially. With each passing minute, the Goo was spreading more quickly. The site was now three times the size of the first site, which meant that they were going to be cutting things close to get done by sunset, even with a larger team this time.

The ship came to a halt and the rope was lowered. Johns went down first. He was happy that this time he didn’t have to worry about Sara on the way down. He landed, raised his rifle, and spun a quick circle to check his perimeter. When he didn’t see anything out of the ordinary, he dropped to one knee and pointed his rifle toward the trees with the blue lighting shining through them.

He held that position as members of the team dropped from the ship. As each one landed, they ran to the side and they too assumed the position.

“At ease,” Rick said when all twenty had landed. “We’ve got a few hundred yards of clearing and forest before we get to the growth site. The forest is our biggest hurdle. If anything is going to get to us, it’s going to be in there. Keep your eyes peeled, and call anything out before you fire a single round. When we get to the growth site, ten people start burning and ten people watch the perimeter. I don’t want anything sneaking up on us. We’ll have a few more start burning once we have a lay of the land, Understood?”

“Yes sir,” several people replied over the coms.

They took off across the clearing, staying low to the ground as they ran. All security personnel go through a basic boot camp. Some of them were ex-military. Others were just young kids. Boot didn’t compare to the real thing, but they did know the basics and that made Johns a little more comfortable.

When they reached the trees, Johns signaled with his hand for them to slow down. The few hundred meters through the forest were going to go by at a snail's pace. They didn’t want to make a lot of noise on their way to the growth site. Each man watched different areas of the perimeter as they walked, checking for the unknown.

They were only about a hundred meters into the forest when Johns saw something move through the foliage just a few dozen meters in front of him. He signaled everyone down and they hit the deck behind him, hiding among fern-like plants. He turned around with a grimace on his face, and pointed both of his fingers at his eyes, and then pointed toward the area where he had seen the movement.

They watched in silence for a few moments. Johns’ finger hugged the trigger as he aimed toward where he had seen movement. Gauss rifles took quite a bit of pull to start unloading but once they did, anything in their way wasn’t going to be in the way much longer. They pumped out over a thousand rounds per minute if you had them set that high.

Johns heard deep scratches and thuds and thought he saw a slight movement deep in the bushes. It sounded like something was digging. A few branches on one of the deep purple bushes ruffled. He felt his heart rate rising and he pulled yet tighter on the trigger, a fraction of an inch away from dumping gauss rounds in the area. A leg protruded from the foliage.

It jumped out, taking Johns by surprise. Somewhere behind him, someone let out a blast of his gauss rifle, dumping bullets in the direction of the beast. It looked in their direction then bounded off into the forest. Johns could feel his heart pounding. A small snicker started from somewhere behind Johns, who couldn’t help but crack a smile himself. It was just a Dinnu, the equivalent to a deer on Kazi. It looked more like an overgrown dog with long fur but had a similar set of horns and diet to the deer. Kazi was littered with them.

“Who shot that?” Johns said.

“That would be Briggs, sir.”

Johns turned around and made eye contact with Briggs through their visors.

“Sorry, sir.”

Johns hung his head and started laughing quietly to himself and as soon as the others realized that he wasn’t angry they joined in with him.

The group continued to slip their way through the forest, ever-vigilant against threats that never came. The closer they got to the growth site, the bluer their surroundings became. Many of the plants in the Kazi forests had a waxy finish, causing the shimmer from the growing Goo to glow throughout the forest areas surrounding it. As they got close, it became clear that the Goo had made its way well into the forest. That would make burning it down a bit of a hassle, as Johns didn’t want to start a forest fire. They were going to have to be smart about how they did things.

The team set up a line at the edge of the Goo. Johns delivered instructions for the burn and instructed two of the members with guns to do a perimeter check on either side of their line to look for obstacles or any issues. The shimmering of the Goo made it hard to see much. Their eyes weren’t accustomed to constantly having a blue light shining in them. Johns was thankful for the environment suit, its visor providing protection.

Still, the armed security personnel took off on either side and returned a few minutes later with nothing interesting to say. The burn team spread out along the edges of the growth and waited. Johns gave the signal. Instantly, the forest lit up with orange reflections as the flamethrowers started to dump their fiery tubes into the Goo.

As the Goo burned, you could hear bubbling and wheezing, almost as if the Goo itself was screaming out in pain. They made quick work, tearing through the new growth and pushing it back several hundred yards within the first hour of the burn.

For the first time, Johns noticed that the Goo had a weird reaction. The areas of the Goo surrounded the burned areas seemed to bubble or wave, like a small wave in a body of water, as if it was reacting to the burn. Given what they know about the Goo, it could be communicating what was happening further into the growth. That gave him some pause, but so far everything had been clear.

Within a few short hours, they had made significant progress. Johns had hoped that they would be able to finish in one full day, but as the evening sun began to sink in the sky it was clear that they were going to need more time.

“We goin’ back or campin’ out tonight?” Rick asked as he eyed the horizon after it had become clear that they wouldn’t be able to burn it all back that day.

“We’re going back,” Johns said after considering it for a moment. “Can’t risk it. We’ll come back in the morning at first light.”

“Or we could just go through the night,” Rick suggested.

“Not enough visibility. I don’t want to put these guys in that position.”

“Sure. But we’ve been out here all afternoon and we haven’t seen anything yet.”

“They could be nocturnal. We don’t know anything about these things.”

Suddenly Johns realized that things were quiet. The natural hum of the Kazian forest came to a halt. No birds sang.

“INCOMING,” a shout came over the coms “EAST ONE-SIX-SEVEN AND MOVING QUICKLY,” the voice that Johns recognized as Porter’s said.

Johns immediately grabbed his weapon and he and Rick took off in a full sprint toward Porter’s end of the line. Over the course of the day, as things had relaxed, they had spaced out around the edges of the growth. In the distance, Johns could hear shots being fired over near a patch of trees. Soon, several of the closer members of the team reached him and started firing too, although he could not see exactly what they were firing at.

“Holy shit!” Rick yelled through the coms as they approached the scene and drew close enough to see what was going on. Closing in on the group that was now seven strong, all firing their gauss rifles, was a group of hundreds of small creatures that were closing ground quickly across the Blue Goo toward them, mucous splashing around them as they ran.

“Evac now!” Johns yelled into his coms as he pulled the gauss rifle out and started spraying shots into the oncoming cloud of two-foot-high bipedal lizards that were flying across an open field. There were hundreds of them. They were so small, Rick knew that they had no chance to kill them all.

“GET TO THE DROP POINT!” Rick screamed into the coms, loud enough to be heard over the hail of gunfire being launched.

Several members of the group took off running outright, others ran a few feet back, then would turn around and launch some more bullets before taking off. Johns sent the signal to the pilot and immediately saw the puddlejumper turn around in the distance.

“RUN!” Johns screamed and took off toward the forest at the other end of the field behind him.

“Give me all relevant video feeds,” Johns heaved to his A.I. while at a dead sprint. He watched as a picture-in-picture screen appeared at the top right of his visor. Running was taking the bulk of his attention, but he occasionally glanced at the small screen as he ran. It was showing the helmet feed from Guard Aaron Sanders, a young recruit that was making his way across the field but at the back of their line. Every few seconds he would turn behind him to get a look at the cloud of creatures that were turning up Goo as they ran, cutting through the mist that hung above it. Each time he turned his head around, they were noticeably closer.

He had put these men in a terrible position. With the very little training that the Kazi Security required, these men were a far fling away from where they needed to be to deal with what was happening. They were undermanned and completely out of their depth.

The last few times Aaron Sanders turned around, the creatures were right up behind him. His looks behind became more frequent as he felt their impending arrival. Finally, the view from his helmet cam turned around one time to show that one of the creatures had latched onto the back of his leg and was biting away at his environment suit while digging away with the extra two appendages that were located on its back. Aaron grabbed him, flung him off, then stopped, turned around, and dumped his gauss rifle into the cloud of creatures just as they arrived.

Aaron screamed over the coms for the entire team to hear. The cloud engulfed him. Johns stopped and turned around just in time to see Aaron’s detached arm floating above the creatures as they dug into his body. Aaron let out a few more gut-wrenching screams, his mouth filling with blood, as Johns saw mists of red dissipating into the air above him, mixing with the blue-hued mist.

He turned and ran, knowing that there was nothing that could be done for him. As they entered the forest, Johns could see that the puddlejumper ship was hovering a few meters off of the ground with its back open. As Johns entered the clearing where they had first been dropped off, the first few members of the team started to make it to the ship. As they did, each assumed the position with their rifles pointing out toward where the creatures would be coming from.

Johns was at the back of the line, slowed by his decision to stop and see if there was anything that he could do for Aaron. Behind him, he could hear that the creatures had moved on from Aaron and were now tearing their way quickly through the forest.

As the last members of the team made it to the ship, only Johns was left as he sprinted across the field. He could feel the creatures gaining on him behind him. Ahead of him, the puddlejumper started to lift ever-so-slightly off of the ground. The pilot was engaging the boosters, hoping to make a quick getaway. That meant that Johns was going to have to jump up into the ship.

The creatures let out some type of scream that sounded not unlike the sounds that you hear out in the Kazi forest at night.

They were so close, Johns almost felt like they were nipping at his heels as he closed on the puddlejumper, which was now a solid five feet off the ground. Johns wondered if he would make it. Those that were on the ship all began simultaneously dumping rounds on all sides of Johns, tearing into the cloud of small creatures that were stalking behind.

Johns jumped as high as he possibly could. He sailed through the air toward the slowly rising ship. He knew from the moment he left his feet that he wasn’t going to make it. No chance.

His arms were caught several members of the team and he was quickly hoisted inside. Behind him, the creatures which were now attempting to leap into the ship unsuccessfully. They let out dying screams as a cloud of bullets started to rip into their flock, before scattering off into the forest. The pilot engaged the boosters and the ship lifted quickly above the jungle canopy.