Lack of gravity has started to affect Maria Brähl's sleep cycle, she passed from sleeping six hours, to only four and lately about two or three hours per night; if you can call night to just turn off the lights of the metallic box you live in. Also, the Moon haves a month of day and month of night; and being in the "dark" side means that you never see earth, but you have a great view of Mars and Venus from the outer part of the lab, that had a big set of panoramic windows with four inches thick hardened crystals that allowed vision of eastern, western, and southern horizons. It was not a good place to sleep, besides, Maria had cat eyes and she could see in the dark like in the brightest day, which didn't help her sleep either. However, she had acquired a good degree of agility in that low gravity environment. She looked like a teenager, or even younger sometimes, although legally she was over thirty-five years old.
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Maria Brähl (Ekron)
Maria was there to develop a breed of trees that could survive without atmosphere, and create one by themselves, as subterranean cities on Earth had slowly gain surface presence, doing the same with colonies in other planets became a dream for some government authorities. She already had a small forest growing outside her lab and its atmosphere was comparable to that present nine to twelve miles high on Earth. A human without protection would die in a couple minutes there, but it would take more than in outer space. The trees emanated a dense gas, similar to Earth atmosphere but thick to almost the point of condensation, it spread in vacuum forming a thin bubble in its limits, from where it slowly dispersed into space. Inside the trees, bio-electronic circuitry connected to gross cables from an electric source, controlled part of the process and provided energy to heaters regularly distributed in the tree's trunk. Temperature inside the trees was kept constant to ninety degrees Celsius, so in the night month the trees would not freeze, and part of that temperature was transmitted to the generated atmosphere.
The base was constructed over the remains of a pre-human settlement found about a century before. In those ruins, two aquamarine gems of remarkable size, almost three feet of diameter, delighted chemist specialists for years before they were putted on display outside the base, without any known purpose or utility. They emanated a weak electromagnetic signal with a frequency of thirty-three Hertz, too low to for any practical usage that could justify a gem of that size, so they became just a curiosity.
Two dozen scientists composed Maria's group, where she worked directly with the forest and required tests and supplies from the rest of the team. Her sleeping problems were making hard for her to concentrate in the dangerous tasks involved in inoculate artificial trees outside the base. When Macsks started to be sent to that base, to protect them as well as keeping them away from human population, she was having memory problems and had started to hallucinate with a red eyed black dog. So, for a couple days she thought those animals were only a product of her imagination. The name Macsk is derived from the Hungarian word for cat, which is not an accurate description for them, because even if they have some feline reminiscence, they can be more precisely described as tarsiers with horns. Besides, cats were not the same anymore.
An entire separate unit was constructed to shelter the aliens, under military custody and the scientists were not allowed to enter it. Macsks home planet was, at first, treated as a reserve with only a few "ambassadors" to represent humanity there, then it became an administrative headquarter and finally a strategical military outpost. Direct contact with the Macsks was justifiably considered dangerous for humans, so it was decided to relocate them somewhere else, supposedly to be studied, but in reality, they were just stored where they could cause the less trouble possible.
María did not even know what was stored in the new wing of the base, as a month passed and there was no news about its content, no requirements of any kind were made to her, so she just kept her insomniac routine as usual. Suited up and carrying her titanium extra-sharp hoe along with her hardened chrome-vanadium diamond blade scythe, she went to the forest, trimmed some bad tree branches, and started planting a new line of trees at the edge of her jungle. That kind of labor in a stiff space suit is not an easy task, after a couple hours the visor in her helmet was starting to blur with her sweat and wet strands of her blonde hair were constantly falling to her eyes, so she stopped for some minutes and sat under a tree for a short rest. She fell asleep. When she woke up, as the sun appeared to be in the same place, she did not realize at first, but she had been sleeping for six hours out there, and her oxygen levels were dangerously low. She stood up and continued working, but something caught her attention a couple trees from her position. A pair of big eyes were fixed on her. She approached and they belonged to a creature unknown to her, a little bigger than a normal cat, covered in dark blue fur, big turquoise eyes with vertical black pupils, two thin and sharp black horns coming out of its head, clinching the tree like a monkey. It started whispering something that sounded like a spell, and for a second Maria got lost in those eyes, until the oxygen alarm in her helmet started to sound, she crossed herself and ran to her lab, both to get oxygen and from the creature that she immediately classified as a hallucination caused by insomnia. Once inside, she looked at her blue cat eyes in a mirror.
"Was I just seeing my own eyes?" she asked herself, "No, those were definitely green".
Days passed by and the Macsk was still on the same tree, so Maria touched it with the end of her hoe; it was apparently real, and its hands were fusing with the tree's cortex. Then she noticed that the tree was blooming more than the others and oxygen level was higher than expected in that area. The next day she brought an oscilloscope to measure the tree's internal circuitry and check for any changes that could explain the situation. The test was automated, and it took some time, so she sat by the next tree, and fell asleep. She woke up in a fright, the first thing that she saw was another Macsk face a couple inches from hers, then the creature raised one hand and one of those thin clawed fingers touched Maria's forehead. A moment of transcendental illumination was given to her, an ecstatic clarity followed by joy that made tears fall from her feline eyes, then she realized that her helmet had been removed from her suit and it was in the other hand of the Macsk. She took her helmet from the little beast's hand and put it on again, she stood up, disconnected the oscilloscope, and ran back to the station. When she was closing the lab's outer door, she saw that new Macsk at the edge of the forest, whispering to her, but then she understood every word that it was saying.
"I'll be waiting for you," said the little beast.
That night, she slept like a baby for the first time in months. The next day she looked for her mother's notes in some cardboard boxes under her bed; she found them, then contrasted those notes with the results from the oscilloscope test. The trees were fully functional, so she sent the data to the mainframes in Kish and Nineveh.
