Mura’s little emergency pod tumbled when it hit atmosphere. It was designed to pierce through the upper layers of a planet’s winds and bring her safely to ground. Instead, the heat ablating tore apart, the directional fins ripped free, and the rest of the pod burned to ash around her while she was still flying toward the ground at Mach nine.

The helpful HUD on her nanosuit chimed as she broke the speed record for a single person without an aircraft assist. Maybe the GSA would give her a posthumous medal after she splattered into the ground.

Her nanosuit was rated for vacuum, not re-entry, but the armor was smart. It could re-shape itself in different ways, flowing nano material into new forms. And as the heat of friction began to seep into her head and shoulders, the material responded. The suit narrowed her profile by sweeping her arms and legs back. Her head tipped downward but at least she wasn’t tumbling wildly anymore. A fore-edge formed just over her eyes and continued down her neck and over her shoulders, like a knife edge. Other valleys, like between her body and arms, filled with a lattice and grew a skin on the top, reducing her turbulence. She was suddenly falling much faster than before.

Mura scanned her attention across the HUD’s scrolling details. One measurement indicated her speed. Another the distance to land. Yet another scan provided a topology map as she screamed over the surface of the planet.

The deeper into atmosphere she moved, the blue-er it became. Mura punched through a fluffy cloud layer tinged with cyan and a jungle stretched below her in every variety of blue imaginable. Towering spiky trees in deep, dark navy cast indigo shadows over a forest of azure, lapis, and cobalt. She saw splashes of brighter blue flowers, like sapphires, that swayed in the wind.

She didn’t have a chance to see more detail. As the ground rushed up at her, the suit pulled at Mura’s body. She spread her arms out and she felt a thin membrane of nano stretch with her, from her fingers to her ankles. It caught the wind and tore instantly, but the suit repaired and reinforced with methodical progress.

Her acceleration slowed. The bright red number in her HUD ticked upward less rapidly. The distance to the ground kept shrinking.

Mura wasn’t an expert in re-entry physics, but this math wasn’t mathing. The nano membrane couldn’t withstand her speed and support her weight. There wasn’t enough time to reduce her velocity.

She was going to crash on an alien planet.

Mura let the suit do its work for as long as she could stand, trying to believe in the little bots that had saved her life so many times before. This power armor had taken bullets, lasers, and monster teeth like a champ.

But it wasn’t going to stand up to an emergency landing like this one.

When the tops of the first trees rushed up to her, Mura overrode the suit’s decisions. She curled herself into a tight ball, knees to chest, forehead to knees, arms overhead to protect her neck with hands flat on her back. The suit responded to her will, filling gaps and making her a marble that plunged through the trees, snapped every branch on the way down, rolled and skipped in the soft dirt until she came to an incredible heaving stop at the edge of a lake.

Mura’s HUD flashed red in all sectors. Broken arm, broken ankle, massive bruising along her legs, back, and arms. Concussion, if not from the impact then likely from the incredible spin of landing.

Mura felt the suit unlock and her legs fell, unresisting, to the dirt. She stared up at the under story of the alien trees and wondered why she hadn’t noticed them spinning before. Some scientist would love to know about spinning trees.

She felt the suit secure her left ankle. Her right arm. An injection for pain. Another for… something else. She wasn’t sure. The HUD didn’t want to come into focus so she couldn’t read the alert.

An error sounded in her ears. Near field communication network: Lost.

Yeah, no kidding. She’d managed to put a whole planet between herself and the rest of her team. They were all still up in space having a great time shooting pirates while she’d been knocked clear across the battle field and so far into the gravity well of this planet that her spacecraft had ejected her automatically to increase her survival odds.

The other HORNETs would have traced her re-entry path and once they cleaned up the firefight, someone would come down and get her. All she had to do was stay put and wait for a rescue.

Maybe she could take a nap. The forest started blurring at the edges and it was hard to concentrate. Yeah… a nap sounded great.

The suit shocked her. Right in the gut. Like a punch with a taser lance.

Mura lurched up to her knees with a roar. She panted for breath and clutched her stomach, her HUD suddenly as clear as day. The trees stopped spinning.

Please acknowledge. The suit said neutrally. It was blinking a message at her about staying alert until her concussion risk had passed.

“Fuck, that hurt!” Mura griped.

Acknowledged.

Mura thought she heard some smugness in the system’s tone. She was on her feet, though, mostly, and her HUD had stopped swimming. She swiped through the layers of warnings about her broken bones, the drugs, the concussion. Her suit had already calculated the most likely approach for rescue from the rest of the HORNETs and as Mura traced the digital line across the sky, her HUD highlighted a local plateau, greenish stone over the blue forest. That was her extraction point.

“Fine,” she grumbled, kicking her way free of the teal dirt trench her crash landing had created. A wave of soil had built up ahead of her and spilled into the shore of a lavender lake. Vines and bushes from the forest crowded up against the water—was it water? She dipped her fingers in and the suit confirmed it was H2O—making Mura’s landing the most clear approach. She stepped up out of the trench into ankle-deep dark blue vines and took an assessment.

Her HUD scanned and highlighted individual plants as she panned across them for the first time. There was a GSA policy about first contact, Mura remembered belatedly. It probably involved paperwork. That wasn’t her field. She was much better used as a sword than a pen. Still, the HUD didn’t try to give her the chemical makeup of things—and she wasn’t stupid enough to take off her helmet—so let the system catalog its flowers and trees. Some scientist would love it. Maybe they’d name a bug after her.

The problem with being the first human on a planet: no roads. Mura craned her neck up at the distant plateau with a sigh. There seemed to be nothing but teal jungle between her and her target.

Well. She shook her left arm and asked the power armor for a machete. The nano sprouted directly out of her armored palm, forming like clay in her hand and hardening precisely into a silver, nano-sharp blade about the length of her forearm. She gave it a test swing and nodded.

It was time to break a trail.

She took one step and a vine contracted around her broken ankle like a snare. It yanked her off her feet. Mura hit the ground face first and went sliding and dragging and crashing across the ground as the vine ran off with her. She was lurched into the air and twisted around in time to see one of the bigger dark-blue trees contract its branches into a shape not unlike a giant maw with a hundred thousand thorns for teeth. It was going to eat her.

Oh, fuck that.

Mura wildly slashed with the machete. She caught the vine pulling her ankle and cut it like tissue paper. The arc of her flight suddenly dropped and she crashed back down into the forest ass-over-teakettle with no regard for a safe landing.

A teal branch as thick around as her thigh caught her across the chest and she flipped around it, fell off, and landed flat on her back on the forest floor.

Mura wheezed as a new cascade of injuries blinked to life in her HUD.

“This is fine,” she breathed.

Her chest ached, it made breathing a bit tricky.

A sound like wood creaking encouraged Mura back to her feet. The suit’s drug management would handle her aches and pains. She dismissed all the warnings and focused on the waypoint for the plateau. With machete in hand, she burst into a jog away from the living tree. At the first sign of a blue vine, she chopped it to pieces before it could get any ideas, leaving nothing but coleslaw in her wake.

None of the other trees dared to make her a snack. She kept a suspicious eye on all the roots around her, though.

Which is why she missed the glimmering silver net of strings that tangled around her head and right arm. Her impact triggered a payload of hundreds of additional silver strings that launched from either side, completely entangling her in a sticky fabric. It tore easily when she swung her left arm to free the machete. She scowled and took a step back, then another, trying to rip the stuff free.

It abruptly hardened. Every string all at once became a polysteel cord and Mura was caught in it from head to toe.

“What the hell…?”

She tapped at the strings with her machete and they rang with discordant music. She applied the machete like a saw. Her nano-sharp blade managed to slice through one or two strings, freeing Mura’s head enough that she could look at the whole mess.

She stilled at the sight of a creature perched above her on the net.

It had way too many legs, first of all. Just… an impossible number of them all attached to a long central body that was mostly dark blue. Hot pink spots dotting its spine spread out to a wash of pink over its… head. Mura was going with head given the massaging mouth parts and cluster of black fangs. There didn’t seem to be any eyes. It quested toward her with two, smaller, forward legs that ended in dark points.

Mura’s whole body clenched.

“Oh, hell no.” She wrenched her machete back and brought it down the strings as hard as she could. The blow cut through several and sent the rest of the net ringing with the impact.

The bug flinched back, waving its little arms and scuttling with too many legs to another position higher up on the web and closer to an anchor in a nearby tree.

She didn’t give it a chance to reconsider. She brought the machete down again and again, carving her way out of the trap with brute force and a little application of fear. She had no desire to tango with a bug of any kind, especially one with that many legs.

She was reconsidering her desire to have one named after her. Better to go with something inert. Like the lake. Lakes were nice.

Yeah, they could name the lake after her. Mura’s Landing. Or something.

The creature decided Mura was too difficult of a meal and it twisted around to scuttle up higher into the tree. The machete eventually sliced through the last of the strings and Mura was able to break them off of her armor for the most part. There were some still stuck on her back, but she could roll her shoulders and squat without being bound up, so it was good enough.

She marched carefully through the hole she’d left in the net, machete up to block any parting shots from the bug. Nothing followed her, though.

She sliced up the next blue vine she saw just in case the big tree got any new ideas.

And she moved on, toward the marker in her HUD that said she’s managed to travel all of fifty yards toward her destination.

“I hate nature,” she grumbled.

Four hours of hacking her way through varying shades of navy and teal later, Mura had encountered two more of those multi-legged web bugs—both highlighted by her HUD so she could avoid their silver strings—and had been tripped twice by blue vines from the living tree.

Neither vine tried to wrap around her ankle again, but she was certain, now, that the tree was taunting her. Its vines seemed to be ubiquitous in the jungle, stretching for kilometers in every direction. Mura refused to grow complacent. She cut through any blue vine she saw on her inexorable march toward the plateau.

She was so focused on not becoming a meal, that she broke out of the jungle abruptly and stumbled onto another vine-covered bank of a lavender lake. Her HUD’s map indicated this was a finger of the same body of water she’d nearly landed in before. The plateau sat directly ahead, it’s greenish stone rising up over the treetops. It didn’t seem any closer than before, but distances were weird at this perspective. She trusted her HUD to keep her pointed in the right direction even in the depths of the jungle.

A flying creature about the size and shape of a yellow basketball buzzed past Mura’s head and circled at the edge of the water. It touched down briefly on spindly legs, then picked up again and bobbed its way down the shore.

Yeah, it was a little buggy, but a lake was nice on any world. She could even go for a swim in the power suit.

Mura marched forward into the water, her eyes on the far shore and the plateau beyond. She could work her way around but it would add hours to an already long trip and the suit was just at home under the water as it was in space.

She moved forward. Liquid sloshed up over her visor, casting everything in hazy purple. Her headlights flashed on, scattering a school of silver fish. The lake bed was a little mucky at shore, with all the bits of vine rotting in the water, but deeper in the gunk gave way to sand and some kind of red seagrass that swayed gently in the current.

Mura made better time under water than she did in the jungle. There were no tree-vines trying to snatch her up and no silver nets to catch her like prey. Just clear water, curious little fish the size of her fingers, and the swaying red grass that grew in clumps and lines following the current.

It was oddly soothing. Just the sound of her breath, the rhythmic pressure of the water, and a moody purple light over everything. Like twilight.

Then she fell into a hole.

The sand simply opened up under her into a gaping black void. Mura fell in slow motion, her feet slipping into nothing, the water picking up speed as it rushed to fill the gap. She swung her machete at the edge behind her and willed it to catch on something. The nano shifted at her command, forming a hook at the end that lodged into something spongy on the edge.

A squirt of dark liquid puffed into the water.

And the hole started to close with Mura hanging inside of it by one arm.

She kicked herself upward, grabbed the edge coming toward her—which still looked like a bunch of sand, but it was clearly moving—and managed to roll herself free before the hole crashed closed with an impact that rattled the water around her. Mura was pushed backward several yards. Then a fountain of filtered purple water streamed up out of the closed gap with enough velocity to splash across the surface of the lake far above.

Mura’s HUD finally traced the outline of the thing under the sand. It was massive. Nearly a kilometer across. And it’s mouth… or…. Body? The thing that opened under her formed an almost invisible line in the sandy bottom of the lake. There was so much silt resting on top that entire clusters of grass and colonies of fish were growing right on the surface.

Mura wondered if it had even been after her at all.

She shook her head and gave her power armor new instructions. Hand and foot fins, please. She kicked into the open water and continued toward the opposite shore, avoiding the bottom of the lake and the surface both.

She just needed to get to the other side.

She’d just rolled herself onto the vine-covered beach on the other side, when a monster tried to ambush her. Mura was almost used it. The creature sat under the blue vines, an identical blue itself, it’s long snout full of teeth and its body adapted for the water it waited beside. It lunged out of the vines at Mura, teeth ready to bite down, maybe even drag her back into the water, but she was done being attacked, eaten, and otherwise hunted. She swung her machete with brutal power and chopped the beast’s head off in a single, clean stroke without even sitting up.

Purple blood and chunky bits splattered her power armor.

She rolled back into the water to clean it off with a groan. She lay there for a while, face down in the muck.

Mura took it back. She didn’t want a lake named after her. In fact, she was starting to reconsider her opinion that lakes were a great vacation spot in general. This one, at least, was going on the bottom of her recommendation list.

They could name the plateau after her. It was flat rock. Barren. Not at all interesting in any way. No plants lived on it. No animals—probably. It was perfect. Rocks were great. Rocks were her new best friend.

The could name the rendezvous Mura’s Launch. Yeah, that would be nice.

She did a pushup out of the water, lumbered to her feet, and got moving again.

Some time later, just as the sun was starting to set, Mura reached the foot of the plateau.

It shot abruptly out of the jungle nearly vertical. There was no transtion from one to the other. No talus of crumbling stone or a sloped bed of forest. Just trees bunched up along the edge of it and the blue vines that covered everything snaking around the base. They made no attempt to climb the rock.

Mura took that as a good sign. Her machete slurped back into her armor. She punched her armored fingers into the green stone to make her own handhold, did the same with the toe of her boot, and began to climb.

Something slithered behind her only a a yard or so off the ground. Mura twisted to look over her shoulder and spotted several blue vines twining around and over themselves, like a braid, to match her height. They reared up like a snake. Mura had absolutely no curiosity about this behavior. The tree wanted to eat her and for some reason it didn’t want to climb the rocks itself. She lifted one hand off the stone, summoned her machete, and sliced it right through the vines. The tower fell back on itself and didn’t attempt to regrow.

Good riddance.

Mura dismissed her blade and worked her way up the face of the stone. Her HUD said it had been nine hours since her landing. Nine hours of stumbling through jungle, being hunted by too many things with too many teeth. She was grateful for the simple challenge of the plateau. Climb upward. Don’t fall. With her power armor the task with trivial.

As she neared the top, rock under her palms rumbled and shook. She hugged the stone, sending every scan she could think of out of her suit. Was it an earthquake? A rock fall?

The stone she clung to shifted downward and for a terrible moment, Mura thought she was falling along with an entire third of the plateau. But as her angle changed she saw the face of the rock split open. An entire cave revealed itself. Stalagtites and stalagmites clustered on the edge… a lot like teeth, in fact.

Then an eye twice Mura’s size opened to her left and she felt her soul leave her body.

She pointed at the stone eye and with all the ferocity of a playground monitor completely done with the kindergardeners’ shit, she barked, “NO!”

All movement in the stone slowed. The eye rolled toward her.

“Ahh, what did I say?” Mura warned. “NO.”

As if the creature—if it was even a creature, the HUD refused to scan it—understood, it stilled completely. Little pebbles clattered downward, dislodged from their resting places. Mura scowled as they plinked off her helmet and scattered into the forest below.

She grumbled to herself as she finished her ascent under the watchful, silent eye of the plateau itself. She scrambled over the lip, leaned over the edge to give the rolling eye a final naughty point, then turned and found the surface of the thing blissfully, gloriously empty. Yards of bare rock and nothing here to eat her.

Her coms crackled just then, static blurring into recognizable words and Paracitica Jin’s familiar voice. “…in Mura, do you read? We are en-route to the attached coordinates. Make your way there if able. We will coordinate further action when we’re on-planet. Repeat—“

Mura interrupted his message. “On site and ready for pickup, Sir.”

A chorus of cheers overwhelmed the coms for a moment, then Omori’s smug voice came through. “Pay up, Takata, she beat us there.”

“Takata, you should know better than to bet against me.” Mura smiled.

“It makes Omori happy to win, though.”

“Oh you little shit—“

“Anyway!” The Paracitica talked over what sounded like a sudden wrestling match, “We’ll land in about ten minutes. Sit tight. Maybe think about what you want to name the planet so I can fill out the paperwork.”

Mura frowned. “Name it?”

“You made first contact. You name it.”

Mura didn’t like that at all. “Name it: EverythingHasTeethAndWillEatYou. One word.”

There was a silent moment, then Izumi said, “A little unorthodox…”

“Well, you come land on this rock and find out.”

“ETA: eight minutes, twenty.” The Paracitica said. “We’re going to loose you on re-entry. Over.”

Static had started creeping in again. Mura took a deep, settling breath and sat in the center of the plateau. “Ready to receive you. Over and out.”

Her HUD blinked and indicated a small flash in the sky, far in the distance. Her rescue piercing through the sky on their way to pick her up. She smiled and wondered what Izumi would think of the giant face in the side of the rock.

She frowned, suddenly. Obviously plateaus were also off the list of places to name after her.

She did have to come up with a name for the planet. Maybe… Mura’s Test.