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By

Deep

Scout Ops never told me this hunk of a rock would have twice the mass of Earth's when they gave me the briefing of a planet with water. The place was cool; don't get me wrong. The rocky landscape was drastically varying in elevation. The highest peaks, which came up in clumps of four or five columns, were white, blending to red-orange towards the crevices. It was like revisiting Bryce Canyon. The problem was that the Roving Scooter's battery was draining faster than the five kilometers it was going. Annoyed by the drone of the scooter, I parked it and pressed a button on the console affixed to my left arm, lessening the pull of the fat planet's gravity on me. That's right. I had a Grav Suit. It sped up the atoms in the inner layer of the suit so that I could somewhat walk as if I were on Earth.

I started making my way towards the edge of the plateau I had landed my scout ship on. In the distance, I could see a pair of avian lifeforms flying across the dense atmosphere. Life, as was noted in the briefing. My job here was to identify any environmental or biological hazards and of course, locate a promising source of water. The air was humid, yet scant, and the filter attached to my mask couldn't provide me with ample oxygen, forcing me to take it off from time to time.

Upon reaching the edge, I stabilized my gravity and sat down, my forelegs dangling over the edge. Looking up, the red dwarf star covered a vast part of the sky, its radiance straying into the horizon. It seemed as if its immense heat could swallow me whole, yet I wasn't feeling my sweat within my skin-tight suit. Rather, there was moisture building up on its exterior as I hung over valley. I took a golf ball-sized pebble and thr—actually I kept that one. It reminded me of a marbled scoop of vanilla-orange ice cream. I took another golf ball-sized pebble and let it roll off of my hand down towards the foggy unknown. Seven seconds, and I heard it land. Yep, I could do it here.

I got up, my back facing the expanse and casually leaned backward. Unlike the pebble, I didn't fall. In free fall, the pressure pack on my back automatically activated, and with no wind here, I glided straight down, guided by jets of pressurized nitrogen on all directions.

Being all alone, an entire planet to call my own, it felt surreal. There was no noise, except that which I created. The sun slowly blurred from my view as the crimson fog surrounded me.

When I landed, I thought everything was still fo—I mean I immediately wiped the fog off my goggles. The rocks down here were vividly scarlet. No dirt. No water. Just a narrow ravine that partitioned the plateau I landed on from the neighboring one. Below me, the ground was scattered with slit-like fractures. I stabilized, got on my knees, and placed my hand along one, greeted by pleasant warmth.

Doubting the Traveler Drone had done anything but skim the surface, I took off my pack and started running tests on the air and terrain. I took samples and learned about the structure of the rocks that made up the terrain. Compared to Earth, the rocks here were much more brittle, and the air under the layer of fog was steamier.

About two hours passed before I noticed these mysterious, oblate domes on the walls. There were two, both twenty centimeters in radius and six meters apart, impressively blending in with the rocks. I placed my hand on one, feeling the roughness of the shape. The centers of the objects were much harder than the material lining the border. I took the sampling pick from my pack, walked back over to one, and hacked at the center. It glanced off, so I tried to pry the thing out by sticking the point under the edge. As soon as I got it into a good position, both domes pushed out from the walls, four legs whipping out from underneath each of them, and started racing away to my right.