Return to Eden

by RJGlynn

Torn circuitry, scattered pieces of orange polymer, and glistening gore. Of the body parts strewn over moss- and fog-blanketed mud, only half belonged to the landing team's EL-50 exploration rovers. The other half... 

Evie Da'Kapo drew hard on her enviro-suit's respiratory supplies. Her stomach lurched at the sight of dismembered human bodies, remains dressed in the same technical, yellow gear as she wore. Heavy-duty, hermetically sealed, microbicidal fabric had been torn apart, and gloves, boots, and helmets had been ripped off to expose flesh to threats more swiftly terminal than the alien planet's atmosphere and pathogens.

Ten-centimeter-long black talons.

Hooked oral skull protrusions—'beaks'—the length of her forearm.

The weapons of a fifty-strong mob of scaly, winged nightmares.

Bhandari, the team's xenobiologist, and Stovic, their tech guy, hadn't stood a chance.

An eerie chuckling cry overhead, high in the gray haze. Then responding cackles—stuttering, inhuman.

Hunting.

"They're still circling." A whisper over her helmet's comms. Its source, a lean submerged body, lay in the mud to her right. Adan Talib, the team's data archeologist, someone used to exploring old binary code and tech archives, not alien worlds. A patch of yellow above his grimy face shield hinted at the intact enviro-suit hidden beneath slime and sludge. Within his helmet, eyes a lighter brown than her own and a face shades darker expressed the same emotions as her pounding heart. "They attacked when the visibility was better, but deserted when the fog rolled in. We need to move now. Mission Control's orders are to get back to the landing zone ASAP."

Breath shallow in her helmet, Da'Kapo looked over her shoulder, staying low in mud and water. Ninety meters back to Alpha Site and the shuttle—each meter offering virtually zero cover, just a few moss-covered cellulose corpses Talib had called 'stumps' and 'logs.' Otherwise, there was only gray wet air, moss, and bog—ground that mercilessly sucked in boots and legs. Ground that would slow any retreat.

Da'Kapo mouthed an oath. After fifteen years of flying exploration missions for the First Fleet, searching for a viable colony world, she'd never believed she'd find a planet with too much water and too much life. Frozen, dry rock and deadly gases; that's what she was used to. This waterlogged, life-filled planet was like nothing she'd seen before. In theory, it was everything the fleet had searched for. Abundant water, but with large land masses. A magnetosphere-protected atmosphere, its gas mix mostly non-toxic and potentially even favorable. Gamma-radiation analysis had confirmed all chemical elements needed to support a colony were present and in abundance on the planet. For an overcrowded fleet with thousands of cryo-banked embryos reaching storage expiry, this world had promised salvation, even paradise.

More inhuman cackles—mere meters overhead.

Da'Kapo's skin crawled within the cool, dry confines of her enviro-suit. This wasn't paradise; it was a sodden, gray hellscape. Stovic lay ten meters away, dismantled more thoroughly than his precious EL-50 rovers—the creatures' first victims. Not thirty minutes ago, the tech and Bhandari had left the landing site to investigate the robo units' sudden signal loss. A few minutes later...

Screams. Of the like she'd never forget.

Da'Kapo closed her eyes. She and Talib had run to help and found a nightmare: Stovic and Bhandari outnumbered and overwhelmed; lost under a mass of flailing black wings and thrashing scaled bodies. She and Talib had hit the ground; sunk themselves into the mud to hide. There'd been too many of the creatures to fight. And Bhandari and Stovic...

It'd already been too late.

Pulling in cool 'canned' air from the tank on her back, Da'Kapo willed herself to forget the sounds that'd carried over comms as she'd made that useless dash to help. She couldn't think about that now; she needed to get her head straight and deal. This wasn't her first 'dirt walk.' She'd lost friends and colleagues on ground missions before, the hazards of alien worlds incalculable. But those deaths had been due to accident and equipment failure. Never to—holy stars, how had Talib termed it?—'predation.' Stovic's eyes, half his face, and his internals had been eaten. Bhandari's head was missing, flown away in the taloned grip of—

"Da'Kapo." Talib's hoarse voice on comms jolted her, snapping her gaze back to his wide, frightened eyes. "We have to move. The radiant temp is increasing with local sunrise. This fog is going to burn off."

"Understood." She groped for the mag pistol she'd dropped when she'd hit the boggy ground—what felt like a lifetime ago. "Straight-line it to the lander. Time to ditch this planet." Her stomach twisted at her words, a grim stew of emotions replacing the excitement that'd driven her for weeks. She'd done everything short of selling her soul to get onto the first landing team for this mission. From orbit, the planet had gleamed white, blue, and green under the light of its local star, the colors of water and photosynthesizing life. Her heart had skipped a beat at the sight. Her breath had caught. The idea of walking through a world teeming with life had felt like a heady dream.

But she'd woken up.

The dull beat of wings overhead. More throaty cackles.

Gripping her pistol, Da'Kapo pushed up into a low crouch; readied herself for a white-knuckled retreat. Her location data burned her retinas where it glowed ominously on her helmet's heads-up-display. Eighty-nine meters of mud between her and safety—the landing shuttle. She prayed Talib was right about the fog providing cover, because, shit, her mag pistol had a full charge, but only ten projectiles loaded and ready for magnetic acceleration. The ground team had packed for low-level, low-intelligence threats, but hadn't expected them to mob.

Overhead, shadows shifted in the fog, silhouettes backlit by the local star's strengthening light—at least a dozen of them.

Eyes on those dark forms, Da'Kapo crawled backwards on one hand, weapon gripped in the other. "Any guess what their dermal armor is made of?" Formed from small, interconnected, black scales, the creatures' skin looked flexible but hard. In their feeding frenzy, they'd only hurt Bhandari and Stovic, despite fighting one another for every bloody scrap.

Talib kept low beside her, his long body staying mostly submerged in saturated sediment and earth. "Most likely keratin. Maybe some collagen- and calcium-based bone." He flicked a tense glance to the weapon in her hand. "I don't think that'll generate the kinetic energy needed for rounds to penetrate. That model's spaceship safe—velocity restricted."

"Shit." Da'Kapo eyed the shadows above; clenched her pistol's grip, in no way ready to write-off her only weapon as useless. "How certain are you?" The team had been on the surface less than an hour; not enough time to collect and analyze detailed information on local life forms. Certainly not enough time to confirm Talib's theories about the planet and its inhabitants, many of them controversial—if not outright fantastical.

"Only about ninety-eight percent certain." Talib's low, dry words told her he knew exactly what path her thoughts had taken. "Despite what you and others believe, this isn't like other missions. The fleet database has over four hundred zettabytes of data about this planet."

"Ten-thousand-year-old data, and that's a conservative number." The challenge to his assumption was automatic—and a distraction from fear and panic for them both. "And it's only a theory that this mud ball is the origin of those zettabytes of fragged info, not a certainty." Nothing extracted from the Exodus Files was reliable. Catastrophic environmental and societal instability had inspired the fabled First Exodus of humanity; people's priority had been finding a new home planet, not preserving their old one literally or electronically. Much information had been lost to old tech and indeterminate centuries of AI-shepherded cryo–life-suspension, when the human species had been nothing more than stored strands of DNA.

Talib tilted his head to eye the fog overhead as they backed past a fungi-layered 'log.' "We might not have seen many native life forms yet, but the ones flapping above us roughly match ones described in Exodus records. Heads with visual, aural, nasal, and oral structures. Bodies with four limbs—two winged and the lower ones with clear phalanges. If this planet is Old Terra like I believe it is, these creatures likely belong to an avian genus. Around sixty percent of their DNA could be the same as ours."

More screeches—directly overhead.

Da'Kapo dropped low, her heart a drum as she turned to hunt for a glimpse of the landing shuttle in the haze. "You know you sound insane, right?" The idea she had anything in common with the ugly, murderous creatures completely turned her stomach.

But there was no escaping the evidence of her own 'visual structures.' On other missions, the life forms she'd observed had been diverse but usually microscopic. The ones circling overhead in the planet's strengthening light, while undeniably foreign, were unsettlingly familiar.

Her gorge rose. Was it possible that, right that second, pieces of her dead colleagues were being broken down in digestive tracts similar to her own? In junior school, she'd learned about primitive humans, how they'd hunted and consumed other large life forms before the advent of protein printing.

Only now did she understand the violence behind that historical fact.

The rhythmic beat of wings—still too close.

Heart hammering, she 'swam-crawled' forward as she hit a stretch of oversaturated ground. Talib wormed ahead of her, his longer limbs rapidly increasing his lead.

Seventy-nine meters to the shuttle. Seventy-eight—

A flicker of darkness—a shadow sweeping over watery mud right beside her.

Da'Kapo froze. An actual shadow? The fog; it'd lost density. "Talib, were losing our cov—"

Two black bodies plunged from the sky to fall upon Talib, driving him under the bog's mud. His fearful curses spluttered over comms.

Recalling Bhandari and Stovic's bloody fate, Da'Kapo jerked up her pistol and fired.

A brutal clack: metal striking sleek, black scales.

The creature she'd hit tumbled backwards, screeching. With thrashing wings, it launched itself back up into the thinning fog. Equally startled, the second creature followed.

"Talib!" Da'Kapo fought her way to him; reached him just as his helmet resurfaced. There was no time to check him for damage. She could hear more wings. "Run!"

Seventy-two meters to the shuttle—mostly waterlogged, unstable ground. But there was a tract of solid earth. Talib found it, scrambled onto it, and hit full sprint.

Da'Kapo dove after him, boots striking what felt like rock.

Whooshing wing beats.

Heart jolting in her chest, Da'Kapo swung about, weapon up—faced a clawed, diving silhouette. She fired another round, sent the creature tumbling away, but another burst from the haze, followed by another—dark wings folded back, talons extended.

She threw herself sideways; rolled; scrambled to regain her feet.

A violent whirl of mist—black wings flashing past within centimeters.

Terror a scream in her skull, she ducked and zig-zagged. Sodden ground pitched her off balance; sent her down to hands and knees again and again as she tried to match Talib's long-legged sprint.

Fifty meters to safety.

The shuttle's ghost-gray shape emerged from the fog, surrounded by piles of equipment and supplies.

Relief surged. With gasped commands, she activated remote piloting via her helmet's linked systems: "Lander 8! Start pre-launch checks! Unseal airlock outer hatch—"

Movement ahead of her: dark shapes arrowing out of the gloom right above the shuttle.

"Talib!" The warning tore from her throat, hoarse—useless.

A startled oath over comms.

Talib went down under four of the creatures. Rolling, he tried to dislodge them; tumbled himself and his attackers into deep, liquid mud.

Da'Kapo dove forward to help—got a single step.

Something—multiple somethings—slammed into her back, toppling her. She crashed down into foul water, claws snatching at her suit and the respiratory equipment strapped to her spine. She tried to buck her attackers off, but their savagery shoved her under. Swirling black murk swallowed everything beyond her HUD-lit face shield. She felt slashing pain as talons breached her suit, then cold wet—an alien planet's potentially toxic water. A HUD alert flashed in the drowning dark: air-pressure warning; enviro-suit compromised—including at the neck seal. Her helmet started to flood. She fought with renewed strength to get out from under scrabbling claws and stabbing beaks—only to feel a wrench as something gave way on her equipment. Something that released a loud, bubbling fizz.

The alert on her HUD went from a glowing warning to a high-pitched alarm: air tank disconnected.

Panic seized her lungs. Without the respiratory tank feed, her helmet would fully flood. Dying by suffocation was no new threat, her home a starship, her work on alien worlds, but this was different; she was going to drown.

She clawed at mud and organic debris, trying to get her head to the surface. Water, alarms, and garbled comms—Talib's own struggle—overwhelmed her. Alien talons and beaks stabbed her flesh. The memory of Stovic's and Bhandari's last cries rose to turn fear into utter desperation. As water threatened to fill her mouth, her HUD faded to a murky, jaundice glow. Yellow: the engine-status color for prelaunch; the shuttle primed to escape the mud and violence of the planet—without its crew; without the naïve dreams of paradise they'd brought with them to the surface.

Broken curses on crackling comms; Talib still fighting—still breathing.

A second of hope reviving for the archeologist alone, Da'Kapo opened her mouth—sacrificed the last of her air. "Lander 8! Test fire for ground launch!"

Water filled her mouth, foul and gritty. Terror filled her soul: no air; only cold darkness and stabbing pain. As Talib's oaths fell silent, lost to shorting comms, she fought the scream in her throat.

A roar of sound—felt more than heard. Then a body blow of force. Everything tumbled. Swirling chaos engulfed her, tearing away claws. She found herself free, but disoriented, blind—and utterly desperate for air.

She flailed to the surface; yanked off her helmet. Rejecting choking water, she gulped in air—only to remember too late exactly where she was.

A deadly, alien planet. Foreign soil. Foreign atmosphere.

She held her first breath of it; eyes locked on the dozen smoldering corpses around the shuttle's rumbling structure. As smoke and steam drifted up into dissipating fog, she waited for alien gases to eat away her lungs or starve them further.

They did neither.

She took another breath, helpless to do otherwise; felt her head go light—in disbelief. Oxygenated air; she was inhaling a viable atmosphere. Thick and pungent, it tasted of stagnant water and burnt organic matter, everything caught in the shuttle's test fire either steamed or charred. But nothing in that wretched mix seemed immediately hazardous.

She slumped to her knees, her mind spinning. The mission's briefing docs reeled back: a note predicting that the planet's atmospheric gas mix and density at lower altitudes would be compatible with human respiration, barring pathological threats and localized pollutants like geothermal gases. She'd read that information, taken it onboard, but not understood its implications.

Until now.

She could breathe, for hours, maybe days—indefinitely. A planet's worth of air hers to use—multiple quadrillion metric tons of it. The idea threatened to break her brain.

Splashing sounds and a groan some meters away. Then a gasping call: "Da'Kapo! Where are you? Can you hear me?" From a steaming pool, a filthy body emerged helmet first to beach itself amongst winged corpses, singed moss, and flame-kissed landing supplies.

"Talib!" She scrambled to him on all fours. "What's your status? Injuries?" His enviro-suit looked as torn and bloody as hers, but his helmet and air tank appeared to be still attached and functional. The lack of heat scorching told her he'd been submerged when the engines had test fired, as she'd prayed he would be.

Talib lifted his head. "I'd say your status is more interesting. So, current and historic atmosphere readings were right about breathability then. And going by the carnage you just caused, they were also correct about the percentage of oxygen being right for combustion."

"This isn't the time to be smug." Da'Kapo helped him to his feet; dragged him towards the shuttle. "We need to run a full hazard screen on water samples, the air, and our wounds. We could be dead in minutes if there's a fast-acting toxin or pathogen." But even as she snatched up first aid tech from the landing site's scorched supplies, she could only appreciate the archeologist's satisfaction at seeing her helmetless and alive. Not only did that fact back up his theories about the planet, it had huge ramifications for the fleet. A planet with a breathable atmosphere? What would that mean to the thousands in cryo-storage currently unborn? "Talib, what was the colony size on Old Terra pre-Exodus?"

The archeologist shook mud off a hand-held analyzer; started running air and blood samples. "Destabilized global politics, an anti-science movement, and climate change dramatically reduced the population, but at its peak, it reached ten point four billion."

"Ten billion?" She sat down hard on an overturned supply crate, her brain wanting to glitch over that number. "Are you trolling me or do you have a head injury?" That many humans alive at one time? Every single embryo in cryo storage could be unfrozen and brought to life a thousand times over and still not achieve anything close to that population.

"You're going to have to start trusting my research. Have I been wrong yet?" Talib jammed a chunk of carbonized flesh into the analyzer. "Hundred credits says I'm right about the DNA of these crispy fried critters."

"Shit, Talib. Don't say 'fried.' You're on tank air. You don't know what those things smell like."

"Going by these results, I'm guessing therm-baked c-protein." Talib's smugness returned with a half-smile as he eyed the data. "Prepare to pay up. Genetic comparison against the Exodus records indicates they evolved from Gallus gallus domesticus, an Old Terran bird species utilized as a protein source before nutrient printing. The 'c' protein type was named after a common term for their flesh—'chicken.'"

Da'Kapo stared at him, breathless, but not because of a lack of oxygen. She knew what his words meant. Proof of more than just his bird theory. But their literal meaning? "Hang on. Are you saying pre-Exodus humans ate the ancestors of these things?" Her gut recoiled, but as saliva unnervingly pooled at the roasted scent, a grimly practical idea rose—along with an ironic sense of justice. The winged bastards had eaten Bhandari and Stovic. "These 'birds' still a viable source of amino acids?"

"Prelim results suggest their tissues match human biological nutrient requirements. As does the burnt fungi I just analyzed."

"So, to be clear..." Heart quickening, she stood and watched the fog, smoke, and steam fade around her, revealing more wet earth; kilometers and kilometers of it, dotted with vegetation and patrolled by many, many circling winged life forms—hundreds of them, each as potentially nutritious as the next. "You're saying this planet not only has an abundance of water and a breathable atmosphere, it has directly ingestible organic matter?" Enough to feed thousands—maybe eventually billions.

Talib met her stare, not flinching from the primitive savagery behind the question and her widening smile. "Whether my critics like it or not, there's no more debate about where we are in the universe." He shifted his gaze to the wild, raw landscape turning gold under the rising light of the local star. "We've come home."

---

Author note: In the spirit of 'killing two birdies with one stone,' this story was written for both Tevun-Krus's 2023 Animal SF issue and '99 Stories About Chickens: An Anthology,' a collection of chook tales curated by Wuckster. Thanks to the TK team and Wuckster for the fun inspiration. ❤️😊 Copyright remains with the author.