I work for InGenious Stellar Mapping as a Lieutenant under Captain Camden, and alongside my colleague Lieutenant Dashiko. Oh, and my name is Emma Emriks.
Our company is contracted to the Hoshii Stellar Observatory and carry out their close-range surveys such as when they call for us. We keep at least two shuttles on hold for their requests. Our shuttle just so happened to have been the longest in dock when the call came out for a close-range survey to a system on the eastern edge of the Milky Way, specifically the planet Rawlica II. We left our dock on the Moon with no issue and our journey there was equally uneventful. I think Lieutenant Dashiko has later said it was suspiciously quiet. So, we got to the Rawlica system well on schedule and approached Rawlica II. Immediately we could see why this survey had been requested; Rawlica II seemed an utterly barren planet, a dead husk much like a version of Earth's Moon that was some 12% larger than Earth, with no detectable atmosphere. Except for one irregular feature.
There was a tree growing on it. At first, we could not believe our own eyes. We recalibrated the sensors and Captain Camden called a day off after we had gotten the first few images, for we believed we had somehow all come down with stress. A tree couldn't grow like that, we all thought. But it was. The next day, when we were all fully rested, we had to admit we had not been wrong. The tree was enormous. The word 'Enormous' doesn't quite describe it. Awesome, in the old sense of the word. We were about as far out from the planet surface as the distance between Earth and the Moon, and you could see it, with the naked eye. You know how it was an old urban myth that you could see the Great Wall of China from space, back when it wasn't yet repurposed for apartment buildings? Well this was that but real. Horrifyingly real. I can understand why the researchers that found it wanted it examined more closely. This was abnormal in the extreme. Comparing to reference data from Earth, the tree would break atmosphere even before the canopy began. At first, we thought it might be some abstract sculpture left behind by some alien race but all data we could gather from our distance suggested the tree was fully organic and alive. It took us 3 days before we dared venturing closer to Rawlica II. The next surprise, which I suppose we had known already, was that the planet was indeed utterly dead. The surface was hard rock, with no discernible nutrients present for plant life, assuming of course it was carbon-based to begin with. It was not until a week after our arrival that we ventured anywhere near the tree. Firstly, we checked the soil. Surely the soil must be different under the tree, we thought, else how was it growing. After extensive soil sampling we determined that it was just as dead as the rest of Rawlica II. The tree, or Rawlica Two-One as we had taken to calling it, was growing in rock, with no oxygen or carbon dioxide or any other kind of nutrient, except light from its local star, though it was noticeably less scarred from meteorite strikes and the like than the rest of Rawlica II. We detected no atmospheric changes in its proximity either. We took a sample of wood that had fallen from it and cut a chunk out, for even a single fallen branch was twice the size of our landing shuttle. Our ship was not built for scientific quarantine, so we kept it in the airlock. Its composition was like a hardwood from Earth, but much denser. Storing as much of it away as we dared, we returned to the planet surface to continue surveying. We had resigned ourselves to the fact that even if we spent a year here it would still be a cursory examination at best, so we focused on the surface of the tree and would leave the inner workings to a team with better equipment and time. We considered scaling the tree with rock-climbing gear, but an immediate problem was the gravity; it was greater than on Earth and we could have to carry ourselves plus all our space-survival equipment with an increased weight of about 10%. A possible task, sure, but unnecessarily dangerous. So, we descended as much as we could with our larger craft and used our scanning and camera equipment to survey the trunk, branches and canopy, though the canopy was so utterly vast that we had to rest on the horizon to see beneath it. The canopy was as mind-boggling as the sheer size of the tree. We discovered why the ground beneath the tree was relatively undamaged; the canopy was so vast and dense that it absorbed the impacts. On our examination of it we would on occasion see piles of broken and blackened branches surrounding a large rock. The tree had leaves, for lack of a better word. Some were regular, like you'd find on a terrestrial oak. Others could probably double as the flotation-platform for some of the ocean towns out in the Atlantic, they were so big. Looking back at it I'm glad the tree had nothing living in it. Just imagining the scale of such lifeforms gives me goosebumps.
Then we went onto the trunk. Even after having seen the canopy and the root-net, it was so insanely wide. You can literally fit a small country in there, we did the measurements on-site. But whatever we were intending to examine around the trunk, we quickly put to the back of our minds. Because that was when we discovered the fruits. You know how they look, but I'll say it anyways. They were large and bulbous, like a vertically-ridged pear, if pears were as big as sedans. Yellow skin with some slight transparency, with some fluorescent elements inside. Dashiko remarked that it was incredible we hadn't seen them sooner when we were down at the roots, because now we knew what to look for, they were everywhere, almost a new starfield against the dark tree-trunk.