"Oh, wow," she breathed as they took their first steps outside the wrecked command pod. Everything was green, so green she could barely see the tiny ribbon of blue that made up the sky. "This is—"

"Astounding," Ty said, finishing her thought.

"Have you ever seen this much flora?" she asked. "And what's all that noise?" It was a symphony of buzzes, clicks, chirps, and twitters.

He looked to the made-from-scrap comp in his hands and then the M.U.L.E. main display. They'd found the M.U.L.E. — a six-legged autonomous bot — lying dormant in it's storage container just behind the engine. It was in perfect condition, despite the crash, and a valuable asset. Primarily a load carrier, it doubled as a sensor array for exploratory landing teams. It would help them navigate and survive.

"Life forms, but no significant heat signatures. Smaller than us," Ty answered. He shook his head in awe, looking from his cold data to the warm world around him. "I've never seen this level of biodiversity. There must be thousands if not millions of unique species on this planet."

"How many of those species want to eat us?" she asked, always the skeptic.

He looked at her and smirked. "Probably most of them. The good news is, if they do eat us, they don't have nanotechnology protecting them from our germs and bacteria. They'll most likely die."

"Revenge is sweet," she said, tearing her eyes away from the lignorum, frutex, filix, and immaculate flos all around them to trace the side of the ship. "Maybe we should go that way," she said, pointing to the cleared swath of ground where their crash landing had ripped through the dense vegetation.

Ty nodded. "It will take hours to cut a path in any other direction." His brows pulled together as he looked skyward. "We need a line of sight."

"On it," she said, already dropping her bag to the ground as she stepped toward a particularly large arboribus.

She punched a few commands into her exosuit's control module over her left forearm. Tiny spikes emerged from the parts of the suit rimming her boots at the same time as a thin wire slid from the brace covering her right forearm. She tossed the wire around the arbor and caught it with her left hand, hooking it into a hold on her left wrist as she jabbed her left toe into the arbor's side. Slowly, she speared alternating toe hooks into the flora's flesh before using the wire as a gripper. Vertical progress was slow, but the exosuit more than compensated for her oxygen drunk muscles. Even still, she was winded and drenched in sweat by the time she broke free of the canopy.

She was rewarded with a view that almost brought tears to her eyes. Life everywhere. Flora, liquid water ... the silhouettes of massive winged creatures careening through the clouds in the far distance. Sunshine draping over everything like a warm blanket.

Her own planet was very different, though there were myths about how it too had once been lush and full of life. She remembered hearing the stories as a child. Even then, she thought it was all ridiculous nonsense. It was hard to believe those wild fantasies having never stepped foot outside the elaborate interconnected caves her ancestors constructed thousands of years before her birth. Now she wondered if those legends were indeed fact — not about her home, but stories brought back by space travelers after visiting this oasis.

"What do you see?" Ty shouted from the ground.

Mostly, the terrain was flat, but in the far distance she spotted a towering shimmer of light. A mountain plateau with liquid water pouring over one side. To a lowly spizwik hailing from a desert planet, it looked like a dream.

"Water!" she shouted down to the ground. "Falling water!"

She pulled the compass from her pocket and prayed this planet's magnetic poles functioned similar to her own. The needle wavered for a moment, then aligned, and held steady. After noting the bearing of the plateau, she scurried down to the ground.

"We need to head zorth by zorthgest," she said, grabbing her ruck from the ground. "And we lucked out. Our high spot and water source are one in the same."