The ISV Maolan Bui hadn't made it. Only the escape pod.

When the ship had reentered realspace, it had landed on top of a patch of floating hydrogen gas, being blown idly on the solar winds. Unfortunately, a sparking circuit had been exposed to space through an open panel knocked ajar by micrometeorites, and that spark crossed through the hydrogen and ignited it in a furious explosion that had ripped the port bay in half and nearly the entire ship itself. Storage and the garrison were lost immediately as they cracked off the main hull, separated from the fusion plant and doomed without functioning power for their escape pods, if they even survived the explosive decompression that emergency-close bulkheads couldn't save them from. Death came to them, still in cryosleep. That at least was gentle.

The agent on board, quarters closest to the cockpit, was luckier. The chaining detonations, as hydrogen collided with the oxygen atmosphere and ignited, moved slowly enough that the onboard AI could react in time and draw power from nonessential systems. The circuits quit charging energy to engines already severed from the main body of the ship, and instead diverted to the emergency pod the agent had already been stored in during her own hypersleep session. A fragmentary VI leapt into the onboard console even as the AI Core was consumed in fire, and the pod was ejected as soon as its engines had been lit, already blasting away from the ship before even fully decoupling from it. The superficial charring and damaging of the docking brace was inconsequential compared to the hydrogen inferno that consumed it less than a second later, as tidal forces rippling up the frame of the ship from catastrophic explosions flexed it too far and sheared it into pieces, shards of plasteel flinging in every direction.

But the escape pod had made it. At least something had survived.

And now the VI indexed local planets, found only one inhabitable, and fired retrorockets to aim the pod at it before igniting the main engines: Zohar III, colloquially known as the Spice Den.

~*~

The VI did its best to land in a clear spot, but the nature of Zohar III was overwhelming and tenacious life. The entire planet was forested and jungled, bar the savannahs of the far side of the tidally locked planet, and it didn't have enough fuel to do an orbit and still land safely.

Zohar III was infamous for addictive biology. The entire planet had a high water vapor level, and creatures communicated at least as much through scent and pheromone as they did sight and hearing. Chemical weapons and defenses stood more prevalent than claws and fangs, already clumsy and prone to overheat thanks to the high gravity coefficient and choking humidity. The packed oxygen, nitrogen, and water made for wildly dominant plants that the animals crept between and over, scraping out a living as the vast arboreal entities battled for sunlight and survival. A uniquely crystalline atmosphere, clear quartz stripped of color and borne aloft by raging winds, refracted the tidal sunlight and spread it over the planet evenly, so that there was no day or night, only a sort of sullen evening. These clear sandstorms raged high overhead the plant layer, making local flight impossible and colonization, as a result, had been deemed impractical. Life would have to exist at the terrestrial level here, and without airlift or supplies, it looked unlikely. Life here was voracious and competitive.

It was into this eternal fracas that the lifepod delivered itself.

The quartz jetstreams battered it, but the lifepod gladly sacrificed hull armor to make it through before deploying retrothrusters to make as soft a landing as it could. As it turned out, that wasn't soft at all, and the pod buried itself into the trunk of a rubber tree twenty meters wide. The internal sap helped cushion the impact, though, and prevented the death of the agent inside, still frozen in hypersleep. The VI survived as well, though the power of the pod would finish draining by the time the agent awakened. It had time to send off a burst transmission and and SOS, then write some instructions for the agent before the core failed. It started the rousing protocol, warming the agent up from cryo, as it printed off the survival guide published by the finest pioneers and scouts of the ADA.

~*~
- ZOHAR III
- THREAT LEVEL BETA GARDEN WORLD
- BREATHABLE ATMOSPHERE, SUPPORTIVE OF CARBON-BASED LIFE
- LOCAL LIFE FORMS PARTIAL TO CHEMICAL EXCHANGE
- FRIENDLY SAPIENTS SSW OF CURRENT LOCATION
- INIMICAL PROTEIN CHAINS NOT PRESENT, PURIFY FOOD SOURCES WITH A SLURRY CANISTER
- PERSONAL ADDENDA: DO NOT STOP TO SMELL THE ROSES (added CC 1227 PNR. HAILIE RAVANGE)
~*~

It wasn't much, but it was the recommended data, and that was all the VI cared about. Satisfied, it burnt the information into the pod data screen and its photoreceptors as its circuits began to die, and then surrendered to the closing dark.

Now it was up to the agent to survive.

The immediate surroundings were the rubber tree, essentially - the pod had landed some twenty feet up off the detritus floor, burying into the diagonally-leaning trunk until the elastic sap had absorbed its momentum. The enormous tree was bleeding sap heavily, the thick, plastic scent driving predators away - the locales knew that a mouthful of rubber was death, sooner or later, as it gummed up food in their mouths and constricted breathing in an already heavy atmosphere. The pod's door is still safe to open, and there's an easy trail down the side of the tree towards the ground.

On the other hand, by the time the cryopod has warmed up and begun defrosting the agent, smaller wildlife has congregated around the pod, only to be driven away as a powerful six-legged form skitters up the side of the tree in jerky, blindingly fast bursts. It's some kind of beetle, but the exoskeleton has been hollowed out and replaced by a thick black goo that puppets the skeleton left behind as a sort of armor and vehicle both. It skirrs up the side of the tree and pauses over the escape pod, checking it over.

It recognizes the material, and wonders why the skywalkers have come here again, and so alone at that. There's only one of them he can smell within.

Whether visitor or prey, it's worth finding out what happened.

The beetle retreats to a safe distance from the creeping sap, and waits in the shade as the coolant hisses out form the warming pod and the cryosleep ends.

In all practicality, Taimi might eventually wonder why she ever agreed to this mission. She had to leave her heaviest gear at base. She ranged across multiple systems outside of normal operations range. For some kind of meetup. So many layers of deniability, a poorly designed older-model ship to show for it ("It's more deniable." They said. Again with that word.), and then... Just, a routine hop to Zohar to engage the drive again...

What the hell even happened?

That was, roughly, the thought that most firmly buzzed into the brunette's brain as she started to thaw out. Thaw out. The sheer fact that they had to do coldsleep with an FTL-capable ship spoke volumes of how old and/or cheap its tech was. She complained so much, and now she wasn't even awake when... whatever the hell it was happened. No ship? Escape pod. ...Waking up... Okay, messages, read read read.

"Mn...? Oh no. C-can we seriously be..." She muttered, as she was warmed enough up to talk, if only to herself. Poke, poke. She poked at the screen, before remembering it was a terminal screen, oldschool even by normal Earth-tech standards. Touchscreens are expensive and failure-prone in delicate situations, after all; Military logic, a bit. But she was still used to somewhat fancier UIs so it left the poor thing just prodding the screen once or twice awkwardly until she understood.

"What does 'partial to chemical exchange' even mean here? They like it? 'Boy, I'd love me some bromine, do you got some bromine? I can spot a sister some ~hydrocarbons~' or something?" She muttered to herself, though she had to assume it probably meant... uh. Pheremones, maybe. And if it's a warning, they might be biocompatible with humans.

Aren't they always.

Still, she was glad to have even minimal gear in the pod with her. Sidearm - custom T-Force weapon in roughly 'pistol' size that was arguably great to have, since while it didn't shoot projectiles or radiant energy (which, actually have their uses for being such), the ability to project those cutting, perforating shapes of telekinetic energy from her so-so psi abilities? Handy. Subtle, even. Could be adapted for crude heavy-lifting, to a point. Good too, for how much she was not rated for more than basic fieldwork qualifications, when it came to athletics...

Ahem. Either way, the... less than great selection of other gear - no portable computers or signal tech, a knife, a few flares, a simple multitool (of, uh, the entirely unpowered, swiss-army-knife sort)... and basically nothing else (Not even that damn slurry can the notes recommended! Useless field guide.) would. That gear would have to suffice. With a deep breath of what might be the last, stale but un-drugged, air that Taimi would breathe? She activated the hatch release lever. By activated, we mean worked for a good half-minute with the stubborn manual release, before the hatch popped open.

"Captain's log, what time is it? ...Status: In a tree." She muttered to herself, maybe still having a bit of attachment to the shows she knew from Earth that described roughly exactly her current lifestyle? As she began to peek cautiously out of the pod, before making a quick scramble out of there - being stuck in functionally a broken can with a hard-to-close door isn't her idea of a good anti-predator shelter.

The sun is high and hot overhead, burning down on Taimi's fair skin. Thunderous croaks and distant, shrill caws are Zohar's pulse here; the rainforest is never silent, and the leaves shiver from one distant echo or another constantly. The tree that the agent stands on is a tremendous titan - she could walk three steps before she started to fall off the side, all of that wide and flattened against the sun, the bark itself mossy and green to absorb light like chlorophyll. The surface is springy and soft, releasing a faint green powder as she steps on it, with a harder layer of cellulose underneath. Sap oozes from the wound the pod made crashing into the tree, but the sap itself insulated the tree well - even now, vibrations rattle up and down the length of the branch Taimi stands on, reverberations from the impact absorbed so adeptly. The air is humid and thick, and the pull of gravity constant; all the plants in sight, save for the mighty titans that form the canopy layer, sag down towards the ground, lazy. The ground layer is thick with a sort of light green smog, faint contrails of purple around the base of the tree she stands upon.

The cawing grows louder, now; attracted by the crashlanding, no doubt. There'd been a smattering of small, raccoon-like mammals peering around the branches at her, their fur alight with phosphorescence where symbiotic moss has grown in, but they dart into heavier cover in an instant at the sound. Heartbeats after, the reason descends.

From atop a nearby tree, a heavy, birdlike beast crashes into the branch Taimi stands on, having launched itself into a clumsy glide. It stands almost seven feet at the shoulder of its wings, bent over the weight of them like an airborne gorrila; the middle joint of the wing has thick clasping spurs that it digs into the bark to halt its momentum. The eyeless head swings round to face Taimi, featureless of sensory organs but a long row of narrow pits around the beak; and then that beak splits open and a split tongue comes out to taste the air, each prong over a foot long and rippling at the edges as it presents the maximum amount of surface area to the atmosphere. Those dextrous organs ripple, and the blind beast shuffles down the branch in an awkward hop, its wing-claws pulling it forward as it shuffles on its legs. For all the clumsiness of its gait, the feathers are thick and heavy, and the claws sharp and long enough to dig through the moss and hold up the weight of what has to be almost a half-ton of horrifying bird-creature. Luckily, it's tasting its way towards the pod, not Taimi.

There are two ways to go: the edges of the rubber tree's branches link into a heavy system of vines that trail between the trees, stout and heavy, but too narrow for the aviant's claws to grasp and climb effectively - and it doesn't seem able to fly, if its clumsy landing was any indication. The vines twist around halfway into a luminous set of blossoms, wide and thick in a starburst cluster halfway across the gap to the next tree, where nectar glistens in open invitation to pollinators. A thick pitcher also hangs from the vine close to her side, its belly deep enough to hide her entirely.

Taimi could also make a break for the ground and try to lose the aviant in the thick ground foliage, trusting it to be too clumsy and distracted to follow. The pollen hangs low and thick, but it would be good cover against flying predators, and nothing too large would be down in the thick, tangled moss mats and reeds of the detritus, where the ruined and dead remains of all the plant life above falls down to gather. There also lies the promise of abundant prey life to hunt; even now, she can spot shivers in the foliage and the remains, where something unseen ghosts through the underbrush, intent on survival at any cost.

Finally, she could confront the aviant itself and challenge it for dominance - a contest which, if won, would scare off all the local wildlife for a bit, if she desires a breather.