CHAPTER 204: EXPEDITION INTO THE UNDERSTORY

In the early evening on Ri Ja, as the sun went down and the heat of the day began radiating away through the helium-rich atmosphere, temperatures dropped, and all the things that gas taken advantage of the thermal updrafts of the morning and afternoon, also began dropping. The seeds that had risen earlier now came down out of the sky, in some seasons lining the ground with their white down so heavy that it looked as if snow had fallen. The dew fell so heavily in the dropping temperatures that it felt like a light rain, flattening out the fluffy tufts of the airborne seeds against the ground, watering them in and starting their germination cycle.

Other things fell from skies as well during the early evening. The little flying things that soared up on those same thermal updrafts, their stomachs full of seeds they had grazed on in the sky, or of other animal-like flying things smaller than themselves, came down as the sun set and the very first part of the evening. When they touched down, many of them simply burrowed into the ground where they landed. Others scuttled around following pheromone trails that might lead them to mates. Other creatures roamed the surface, waking at dusk to feed on the descending bug like creatures as they fell out of the sky, literally catching them out of the air before they could burrow into the ground for safety.

Larger predators also came out at night to hunt the hunters on the plains. One such predator was named the invisible cat, by the colonists. About the size of a bobcat, it had very little in common with Earth cats, except a general shape and the way it moved when it ran or walked. It moved with very little wasted energy, the body barely moving up and down with its steps making it almost seem to glide across the terrain. The body looked smooth, but close inspection revealed that it was covered in broad flat, feather-like growths. These ’feathers’ interlocked and formed a king of woven blanket around the cat’s body trapping heat and moisture, locking both away from the air that tried to siphon them away from the animal’s skin. This was a very common adaptation among the animals of Ri Ja. Some, like the invisible cat, had muscles that control the position of the feathers and could cause the to flare out perpendicular to the cat’s skin giving it a temporary appearance of being much larger than it actually was. The light color of the feathers let the cat blend in with the pale sandy soil of the plains. As it hunted, it often leapt into the air to snatch a mouthful of some unlucky descending creature.

The invisible cat’s main prey were little creatures the colonists dubbed Snail Birds whose bodies were about the size of baseballs with large flat wing-like features that it pushed out each morning and retracted when it was on the ground at night. Its outer skin stretched and filled out into these wings as the muscles in its main body pushed fluid into the deflated wing sacks, filling them out again each morning as they emerged from their burrows. Once filled they would flap like wings to get themselves into the air to catch the thermals and spend the day soaring through the skies. They seemed to have a layer of photosynthetic cells on the outstretched wing extrusions that provided them with at least a portion of the energy they used to grow and moved.

It was the understory of the forests, however that held the most promise for the colonists, however. They had set up their large LITV units, doubling as main community structures just outside the forest and planned to place individual dwellings and smaller work stations under the actually canopy of the trees as they built out the colony. The trees acted almost like the feathers of the invisible cats. They grew up on thick straight trunks. The young trees were straight thick spears rising up toward the overhead canopy.

Once they touched the existing canopy or were exposed to the sunlight, their tops opened almost like umbrellas, long flat leaf-blades radiating outward from the center, finding and interlocking with the foliage of the other trees, creating a natural, multi-layered roof over the forest floor. They gathered sunlight for the mature trees but also transformed the ground and even the air below the forest canopy. They sealed the understory off from the moisture-hungry sky of Ri Ja, trapping moisture and heat. The ground and air temperature in the forest was therefore much more stable than that of the plains, varying only by perhaps 10-20 degrees Fahrenheit between day and night. It was also more humid in the understory as the layered canopy stopped the upwelling thermals of the warming plains from pulling moisture skyward each morning.

The trees seemed to keep their distance from one another as they grew, new trunks rose up from the underground roots of the existing trees. At a distance slightly outside the perimeter of the parent trunk. This gave the feeling of the area inside the forest the feeling of a large warehouse or mill building. A vast enclosed space with columns supporting the ceiling almost evenly spaced about forty feet apart.

It was in the protected environment of the forest’s understory that the colonists planned to live most of the time. They would construct their homes here and try to raise crops here, with artificial lighting augmenting the dim natural light that barely managed to shine through the green, slightly translucent forest ceiling. A great variety of Ri Jas plant and animal life also made their homes in the forest understory, taking advantage of the more stable environmental conditions.

While the distinctions didn’t match those of the corresponding life on Earth, large fungus- like growing things shared the space with many shrub-like plants, providing both food and cover for a huge percentage of the native animals of Ri Ja. It was among the things living in the understory that the colonists hoped to find compounds of interest to the varied people of the varied worlds of the galaxy.

One of the colony’s first projects, therefore, was to send an exploratory group into the understory to select the locations of the first buildings to be constructed entirely on Ri Ja, using atoms reconstructed by fabricators from material of the planet itself.

On the morning of the colony’s second day on Ri Ja, Rafael Camal de Leon, along with a team he had selected for the mission, made their first foray into the forest. They wore personal shields to protect them from the harsh atmospheric conditions of the plains and walked on foot. Three vehicles, produced on Earth and transported in their LITV cargo unit, moved with them. The vehicles had broad scraper blades like bulldozers along with industrial lasers to clear areas of the understory form existing vegetation, except for the large trunks that supported the canopy.

A small drone flew over Rafael’s head as he followed the three vehicles which were arrayed in a triangle formation. The lead vehicle cleared and flattened a narrow path and the other two followed behind and to the side just overlapping the edge of the lead vehicle’s path. Together they made a packed dirt road from the initial encampment to the forest. They cleared the tough thick bladed ’grasses’ of the plains, and the increasingly tall and dense plant-growth that grew along the forest edge, taking partial advantage of the moisture that leaked from the forest both in the soil and in the air.

As they approached the first of the tall forest trees, the broad leaves radiating away from the treetop hung down like a curtain, without other trees to support them, they simply drooped down toward the ground. Already new trunks were starting to spring up just outside their reach and these would eventually expand the canopy ever outward from the center. Out in the harsh environment, however, their growth was slow, and the forest took a long time to expand.

Rafael called a halt, the three vehicles responding to his voice commands. His team consisted of eight men and women who had been selected for this duty before the colonists left Earth. A botanist, a zoologist, a chemist, two grandmothers who had decades of experience gathering herbs and using them to enhance the flavor of the family meals, or to heal various ailments of the people in her village, and three able-bodied men with construction experience for any heavy lifting and to help plan the first buildings. A fabricator mech rolled along behind the group, laying down a two-foot-wide layer of carbon nano-tube rigid road surface int the center of the eighteen-foot- wide path cleared by the three bulldozers. Later it would make additional passes to fill out the road surface over the entire pathway.

The curtain of the foliage wall hung down in front of them, although it wasn’t a full interlocking barrier like the canopy, the relative darkness beyond it along with the thick undergrowth that lived on the margins of the two separate environments made it impossible to see into the forest. The team moved ahead of the bulldozers and approached the edge. The chemist and botanist took samples of the tree fronds while the others waited. Rafael pulled a machete from his holster on his belt and stepped up beside the other two.

"Try not to stand under it when you cut through the fronds, it looks like they have a significant internal fluid pressure that’s going to cause the sap to drip out at a good clip. Based on the small cuts we made for sampling, it’ll dry and clot pretty quickly. The tree shouldn’t be affected too badly." The botanist told Rafael, as he looked up from the hand-held analyzer that was showing him the composition of the samples he had fed into it moments before.

Rafael turned to the rest of the group. On Earth he would have used a deep authoritative and commanding voice to call out instructions, but here the shrillness of Rafael’s own voice sounded weak to him. He compensated by adding extra stress on some of the words in a way that might have made him sound angry on Earth. "Double-check your shield activations, zero solid and liquid penetration. We don’t know what’s going to fall on us from the canopy. Whatever does fall on you, make sure you get samples into the analyzers so we can tell if it’s going to be harmful for us or the equipment." He let his gaze sweep over the team, meeting everyone’s eyes in turn. "Nobody goes in until the spa stops falling from the cut fronds, and I give the okay. Understood?"

The replies were a mix of nods and words as the team agreed. Rafael smiled and nodded, "Good, safety first. I don’t want to lose anybody today." With the shields on, he knew, it would be almost impossible for anyone to get hurt, but he was trying to fortify his image as a leader protecting his followers. He turned back toward the green curtain wall of fronds. The two who had been taking the samples stepped back toward the bulldozers, leaving Rafael in front alone as he raised his machete to carve the first doorway to the area they hoped would be the colony’s new home.