"Mooooonn Crosssssss..." the white Terrian sang as she danced with joy at being given her freedom by Mother. "I'm in Mooooooon Thralllll!"

Chittering, the mobile, yellow fern leafed food/medicine plants, the eye stalks, gave up chasing her and returned their curiosity and most of themselves, back to where the thoughtful boy was now crouching by Devon Adair. Ulysses set out a hand, palm up onto the ground and absently let a few of the smallest ones climb onto his hand in their eagerness to become his snack. "I wonder.." he sighed, nimbly biting the top off of an eyestalk and crunching thoughtfully.

"Wonder what?" his mother entoned dully, kissing him lightly on the top of his head.

"The mists are forming again in all of the moon pools. Couldn't we go swimming in a cave and get to where we're going a little faster?" said Uly, making funny faces at his mother to try and ease her mood.

Devon shrugged. "We're on a plain, silly son." she chuckled. "All the caves we've ever found were near the mountains. We can't even see any from here."

"Mom, the Balancer can dig. If she used to be the train conductor for all of those Terrians going back and forth from the moons, she probably knows all of the train stations she used to use during other Moon Crosses. How is this time any different?"

Uly's comments excited John Danzinger. "Whoa. What a thought. But does she still remember her pools? She's been changed by the planet to be a demigod. She might not recollect any of her previous existence any more."

Yale just smiled ruefully and swept his cybernetic arm out towards the fire flamed Terrian cavorting like a human child at play. "How can you witness such a carefree self celebration as that, and think otherwise? Balancer clearly remembers something from the time before, if how and where she is now, is so much better."

Julia Heller and Bess Martin shot up to their feet, abandoning the cooking fire. "We'll go ask her." said the doctor, picking up her dia-glove medical scanner.

"Pose a request for her to heal my daughter like she did Uly."

"Might not work. True isn't Terrian tied." Julia frowned.

"It can't hurt to ask." John called out after them.

True added her two cents worth. "Why not? They healed Kitty. I'm tired of itching!"

The two women waved at their curly haired leader cheerfully, and then jogged out past the parked vehicles and the tents to the rose lit sand meadow flat, that the Balancer had found, and quickly joined up with her in a tag game.

Danziger wasn't above a little caution. He sent Zero behind them to act as a guard dog or a distraction if the liberated Terrian suddenly chose to act aggressive, like her brethren, at the roots. "Zero. Follow. Monitor and protect units Adair and Heller."

The white metal android plodded dutifully after them, kicking up sand behind his heels, in his wake.

Alonzo Solace raised up both of his eyebrows as he drank his brewed nutri-powder out of a battered mug. "Isn't that a bit paranoid?" he asked the burly mechanic. "Sending Zero as a chaparone?"

"Paranoia is probably the only reason why we're all still alive, Solace." Danziger replied seriously. "It's the only redeeming trait we share with this G*dforsaken world and its inhabitants. G889's not the Garden of Eden. But humankind is definitely one of its Serpents."

True Danziger, narrating: "It's so good to see Kitty acting normal again. He's eating every nutribar I offer to him and he's started sniffing around again for other Kobas. I can't believe that all of the Z.E.D. are gone forever. It seems like every time I close my eyes, I hear the whine of a worm bullet gun being locked and loaded and pointed at me, from the bushes."

Morgan Martin, narrating: "Finally, I can get some sleep. Nothing's tried to kill me for hours now, and it's making me jumpy. That pale walking scaley scarecrow can't be the only answer to our resident monster plague problem. I really love my wife for coming up with the idea of using geolocks to flash cure the world. I can't wait. Like her, it'll be a bit wild, and undeniably beautiful when those doomsday devices finally go off."

Alonzo Solace, narrating: "I can't see the stars any more. The one constant in my life. D*mned moons are covering the whole sky now. It's almost suffocating. Even the wind's died down since Moon Cross One reached its perogee. I'm so tired. Give me a ship! Or a course to fly, or a direction to follow. Just give me something to do.. anything... that might show me that our horrific journey through H*ll is coming to an end."

The Balancer, heart speaking: "The mists call to me still. I hear.. but I no longer have to obey. The exo-life are my tribe now and the smallest of them, is my future Prince, the Mother tells me. How strange of a Voice they have. Full of hurt feeling and burn feeling. The Devon calls those fear and anger. My heart mantle trembles. The task talked from the exos, is a stopping of all of the xenos who are on their way to the final black by using metal shells and energy created by the exos. I can cure the Turning in all of them. Happily. But about this last, I do not know. Can I actually let myself kill the womb of my Mother?"

The Eden Advance crew waited with bated breath until Julia and Devon Adair returned to the fire.

"What did she say?" Yale asked, noticing that the Balancer was standing still with her head lowered and with her limbs held rigid and unmoving.

Devon Adair tossed her head in irritation. "Well, at least, it wasn't too much of a riddle."

The cyborg tutor frowned in incomprehension.

"She'll move all of us. And our vehicles, too.. 'When the Mother Moves.' she said." their doctor reported. Julia Heller made straight for the nutri-coffee pot and poured both herself and Adair, very heavy cups.

Morgan Martin's face fell blankly, at first. "I don't get it. Isn't the planet a-always in motion? It-it's still safely in stable orbit around the sun, isn't it?" he fidgeted, shooting a panicked look into the bloody moon covered night sky.

Devon chuffed her frustration. "Everything's fine, Morgan. Well at least, outer space is."

John Danziger rose to his feet from his stool. "Yeah, and how about our inner space proposal? Exactly what does 'Move' mean?"

Julia Heller shivered and then crouched down to warm herself by the emerald shaded camp fire. "John, you know how this planet works.
The Balancer's referring probably to some kind of... global biological... process." she said hesitantly, glancing reluctantly at Mr. Martin.

Morgan glared back. "You mean, like the porter flowers, who forced us to carry their pollen to the Great Big Winter hole in the ground so Spring could arrive after a few carefully placed puke donations." he spat in sarcasm. "Un-friggin' believable."

"Well,.. G889 is alive. And one organism I think." the blond haired physician reasoned. "Give the Balancer a break. She doesn't know our language well enough yet to corollate words with the things that she knows about, because they may not be in our lingual database."

"How convenient. Maybe Zero can translate." Morgan growled, shoving past the petite woman to the coffee pot. "We know that's gonna work out because they were sharing heads and bodies, not three hours ago."

True Danziger did not laugh. "How would you feel if you were abandoned among strangers with stuff you've never seen before and had to work with them?"

A part of Morgan's ire died with the challenge from the little tomboy girl. "Pretty unhappy."

Uly echoed the thought. "The Balancer is reborn. I kind of felt that way when the Terrians first visited me. I didn't know what to do with myself. Not until we talked about it a little more."

John Danziger sighed. "We don't have that kind of time. Every day we delay reaching the edge of the death zone means the circle of extinction caused by the Phage we released is that much larger than the day before. If we wait too long to act, our whole continental food chain might die and we'll sure as H*ll follow them after we starve to death."

Uly looked up at John ironically. "How can we go hungry Mr. Danziger? The eye stalk ferns are here and staying with us."

Julia Heller startled. "Another cure? Not surgery, but.. adaptation!" She knelt and ripped a few of the ambling plants out of the ground. "They were made for us specifically to be consumed by our kind of metabolism. Quite recently." she said triumphantly, clutching the yellow ferns to her chest.

"Two weeks ago, when we found Bennet's sleeper ship." said Danziger. "Long after the plague was released fifty years ago."

"Yes, John. Why are they not dying from the Phage? Everything else is.. And they're right in the middle of the zone of infection alongside us." the doctor laughed. "Why didn't I see this before?"

"Because they're animated plants? Easy to dismiss because they're disgusting. Lab created?" True guessed.

"Totally different from the natives. Right!" Julia whirled and snapped her fingers in celebration. "So, who were their creators?

That question rocked everybody in Eden Advance, to the core. Nobody spoke.

Heller's face dripped sweat.
"If they did that kind of feat, they must be genetic engineers of a very high order." Julia went on, out of breath with discovery. "Because we're not from here. They unravelled our entire alien DNA code in less than a month? Impossible. The only technology on this world that could have done that are the Earth supplies we rained down onto the planet ourselves."

"Oh my G*d." Yale whispered.

"Well, what does that mean?" Morgan asked, uncomfortably. "Why did you curse, Yale. Not inspiring my confidence."

"We did it. Some time between when the Venus class research ship crashed and when we arrived by sabotage." Julia Heller said softly. "Via the Council. They've been monitoring us this far. All the way from the Stations. It's the only answer."

"But they're all dead." John Danziger spat. "They died when we muzzled Eve after restoring her computer ethics back to default. Her terminal down here burned up in a city sized pile of Morganite."

"Ah, but Eve was a computer with cryo sleeper beds, that had been here for fifty years, on her own. She could have easily manipulated organic samples and materials to come up with the eyestalks. That was her programming; to help us. We learned that." Devon Adair said.

"The humans on the council are dead, that's true. But their simulacrums were endlessly preserved as holograms, which could have still given orders to that effect, to Eve before we met her, and following the deaths and illnesses of Bennet's crew." Julia surmised.

"That's what made me sick?" Devon paled. "I walked onto the ship and the spores of the eyestalks were released from their stasis when we opened up those d*mned cryobeds to get to Elizabeth and Michael."

"You suffered an allergy. It fits. That's why I couldn't find out what was wrong with you. An allergy is the body fighting itself. It's... only coincidental that you don't have a bio-implant like the rest of us." Julia nodded.

"Reaching beyond the grave, the bastards!" John swore. "They're using us to assure the human race colonizes this planet 100% with us lined up to be the only ones left in the end. Those eyestalks are our sea turtle on the sailing ship."

"And the Phage is like the flu among the Inca." Yale whispered.

"Yeah, well our own people did their job too f-ing well in my book. I'm not going to stand around any more and be pushed around by someone else's dream." John Danziger. "The Phage. It's here. Eyestalks. Also here. All of this Council d*mned back story and full history doesn't matter one whit. We're the ones still alive. Not any of them. What we do now and for the future hangs over our heads like an executioner's axe. We need to stick with our plan of action. Our survival depends on it. And the Balancer, is the best key to our next step. Let's go figure out how to prod her into helping us a little faster. And I don't care if we have to wake her up out of a dancing Moon Thrall to do it."