John Danziger saw Morgan Martin immediately close his eyes and drop to his knees. His wife Bess hung onto his shoulders as he fell apart, true to his phobic nature, and followed him down.

The long haired, pony tailed, corporate worker began to hiss through his teeth, "She did NOT just do that. She did not just do that! Bess? What are we-"

"...going to do?" muttered John, finishing out the paranoid angle calmly. "We're going to wait right here, all." he said, meeting the group's collective gazes. "Balancer may have transferred all of our stuff and left us, but it won't be for long. Somebody had to tell the truth about us as a species. Her curiosity about us is a sure thing. And I decided to bank on it."

Alonzo nodded. "She would have found out about what we humans are, anyway. Those demigod like powers? And reading our thoughts? She probably would have put two and two together, just watching us roast our synth meat."

Yale dropped his head, still studying the dirt settling where the eyestalks had abandoned them by going underground." I believe the regular Terrians value the truth as well, John."

Julie snorted "Sharing that we are apex predators on our home planet up front is certainly bold. But I know we scared the h*ll and every bone out of her."

Devon Adair sighed. "The lesser Terrians know we kill. But when they found out that John ate Grendler, that's a little different than us eating a monkey or two back on Earth. Terrians are probably kissing cousins to the Grendlers genetically when you think about it. They're the only two bipeds species here."

"Kitty walks on two legs." True piped up. "And he's a Koba."

"So do dogs when they beg." Cameron shot back at the young girl cradling Kitty's sleeping form in the blanket bundle she was holding.

"Cannibalism is people eating... p-people." Baines said hesitantly, with a sympathetic look towards their mechanic.

"My Dad didn't know, Baines." True snapped at them. "That's why he gets so sick about it."

"Exactly. What makes a person, as opposed to an animal?" the cyber tutor asked the Eden Advance crew. "What sets each apart from the other?"

Ulysses Adair didn't drag his feet on an answer. "People care for other people. They share their values, their lives, and language in the same society. Humans are just kind of dumb thinking that our thumbs make us something really special." said the boy with the Terrian staff.

Devon fondled her son's hair affectionately. "Did the Terrians teach you that?'

"No." he replied. "It just sort of made sense. I think I finally got it after we crashed here."

"I can't apologize for the past about what I've done on this planet. I've been horrifically niave. That whole experience still makes me vomit if I think about it for too long." their mechanic admitted seriously.

"Don't torture yourself." Bess Martin said, looking up from cradling her husband's head where he lay curled against her lap. "We had no way of knowing that Balancer was going to react that way towards us today."

Devon spoke up. "They'll at least try to come back for Uly. He's their Prince."

"Ah, yes." Yale nodded, agreeing with Adair. "The Terrians will never take him away from his birth mother now. Not again. They've learned what he can do for them and they value that. For all of our flaws, I honestly believe that we've helped the Terrians evolve into a higher form of themselves."

Morgan opened his eyes as his panic attack began to ease, pulling out of his fetal cringe, and starting to pull himself back together. "You mean, before us, they couldn't do that terrifying dream talk trick?"

Heller, the group doctor, nodded. "Probably not. It would explain a lot." Julia said. "We don't use 92% of our brains. We're for sure latent telepaths, even if we can't yet mind talk with each other."

"So the Mother's interested in us enough to elevate Uly among her people, and cared enough to create the Balancer-" Bess realized.

"...to be a teacher and ambassador to us weird aliens, so Her planet can improve itself in the survival race." Yale finished.

"Well, that's a load off." Morgan sighed sarcastically.

"Huh." Cameron the cargo, grunted. "So we're too valuable to be left alone for too long?" he guessed.

"I'm counting on it." John Danziger said firmly. "That's why I spilled the beans about our tendencies." he grinned. "Honesty is the best policy in any co-operation."

"The clock's ticking." True Danziger glared, pointing up at the looming eclipse conjunction, setting itself up in the aqua colored afternoon sky. "Balancer has three days to come back before Moon Cross ends."

Alonzo Solace, narrating. "It's been so surreal. First, I found myself with a broken leg on a perfect planet. Now, my leg's healed on a heavily broken one. If that isn't karma, I don't know what is."

Uly Adair, narrating. "I wish I could understand Her a little better. Lately, what the Mother tells me through the Terrians doesn't make any sense. Am I having trouble listening again? I know I was that way when I had Station Syndrome. Maybe I should try eating all of my vegetables instead of sneak feeding them all to Kitty."

Julia Heller, narrating. "The latest scans show that our bio-implants at the base of our brains are stable. Well, except for Devon. She doesn't have one, which is probably a blessing in disguise. But who am I to know just what these things inside of our heads do anyway? Eve made my lack of knowledge in that area pretty clear. If I hadn't found Solace, I don't know where I'd be mentally. It was my ego that almost got me cast out of the group when I thought I was a double agent against my friends because of Eve's holo council's interface through mine. Are we truly free of Earth? Can we ever be?"

John Danziger, narrating. "I'm tired. But I can't show it. My daughter is only just over the bio-implant disease and regaining weight. If she ever caught on to how I'm really feeling these days about our chances on G889, she'd- Well, I'm not going to think about the worst case scenario. We've been living it for the last year and a half and we're still doing fine. I may be the new leader for the group. But everybody's voice counts. Well, at least the human ones anyway."

Kitty, Koba, narrating... "Trrruueee girl.. Warmmmm. Burrroowww kinddd Motherrr savedddd meeee. I willll seeee matesss soooonnnnn. I sleeepppp nowwwww. Andddd dreamm ...of biscuit!"

Devon Adair, narrating... "Why am I not worried? Balancer abandoned us in the middle of the death zone with no equipment at all, except for what's in all of our pockets. Is it because I'm enured to disaster now, that I'm no longer in charge of anybody? Switching to John was the best idea ever. I don't know what happened to me in stasis on Elizabeth Bennet's colony ship, but I'm calmer all across the board now, and so's my son. I guess I should be grateful to the Terrians for that. If we're going to be stuck on G889 for the rest of our lives, we might as well start making ourselves seem somewhat happy about it."

Morgan Martin, narrating... "I thought things were improving. Like a bear market on a good stock selling day. But as usual, everything's gone to sh*t and I'm being swept away on a rising tide of pure suck. If it weren't for my wife, I'd probably find myself taking the short dive into the nearest local acid lake. I can't wait until that milk skinned b*tch comes back. She owes us. She's no longer ferrying her Moon Pooling sick friend between worlds like Charon in the Underworld because of little old me. Once we fry the h*ll out of all of this Phage infected dirt with the geolocks, Balancer might go away and leave us in peace. She can dance around like a drunk banshee buck naked, sharing telepathic orgies with her Terrian kin, for all I care. But only afterwards!"

It had been only half an hour since Balancer closed her transit gate on the Eden Advance group, cutting them off from their critical supplies and vehicles. But the castaways were already calming down.

"How are we doing food wise?" Devon asked realistically. "We've got water covered. We can collect from the morning mists into our canteen filters."

Everybody pointed to their cargo pants' pockets, which were bulging.

John Danziger started laughing. "I guess we're all part pack rat this days."

Julia Heller raise a hand. "I'm our squirrel. We've still got some eye stalks."

The group sitting around the blue burning campfire cheered.

The young blond doctor smiled shyly. "I threw a shovelful of them in with some dirt, into my back pack yesterday, thinking ahead, that none of these would be on the moon where we were going to wait out the geolocking."

Danziger's amusement sobered. "And that's another thing." he said softly to the others. "G889 wants to be cured of the Phage and so we're needed to operate-"

"... the machina!" Uly added happily, cocking his head in a weird Terrian way.

Devon Adair startled. "Uly... was that you?"

Her curly haired petite son's eyes went blank, but his mouth smiled. "I think she's listening to us talk, Mom. My brain feels bigger."

Yale grinned. "Handy. Ulysses, perhaps we can cover a few school lessons now while you're feeling so smart."

"I said bigger, Yale. Not wiser." the boy groaned.

"None-the-less." said the cyber tutor. "No equipment here means no chores tonight. So we've ample time for lessons. Grab a rock." he said sternly, patting a couple campfire warmed ones next to him. "Both of you." he added, eyeballing True with his augmented gaze.

"Mom!" "Dad!" complained the kids.

"Ah, ah ah.." replied John. "You know Yale's in charge of school when it's not your free time. Go.." Danziger told them. "The sooner you start, the sooner you're-"

Zero, the android, spoke up. "Biped approaching. He does not have an Eden Advance bio-implant signature."

"Where?!" barked Cameron, the sentry on duty. He felt naked without his Mag Pro gun, but he looked formidable enough with the improvised club he had been carving in recent days.

"4-2-2 meters. 200 clicks north by north west." replied the robot, who was facing the direction of detection. "Registering as-"

"How fast?" John interrupted, quickly picking up a tree branch brand full of blue fire.

".25 meters every... sixty seconds." Zero answered.

That paused the group's preparations in anticipating any attack.

"Less than a two feet per minute?" Devon puzzled.

Julia's urgency suddenly grew from one of fear to a different kind, a new one of medical worry. "He's injured." Julie hurried, pulling on her diaglove that she had stored inside of her primary jacket pocket. "Someone crawling's about that slow."

"Or sick." Danziger suggested. "We're in the middle of a death zone full of the Phage. Even if our visitor's a Grendler, he won't be aggressive. They don't wig out when something goes wrong with themselves physically." The mechanic almost looked eager to right this wrong.

Morgan, oddly, wasn't frightened by the prospect of meeting a complete stranger. "Well, at least, he's not a Z.E.D.. They're all dead." he murmured. And then he started laughing nervously.

"I'll bring a blanket." Bess said, frowning at her husband's reaction.

A minute or two later, they found the mound of clothing, lying in the brush, that was visible on their visor feeds linked into Zero.
The android reported that his target was no longer moving.

"Lifesigns are weak." reported Zero. "No detectable movement."

John, Cameron and Baines shouted when they saw a very human looking young male lying face down under an overhang. It looked like his once struggling feet had created a deep puddle of water dew underneath the top half of his body. Eden Advance dragged him clear of it, fearing a near drowning. "Easy.." "Look for any weapons!" "Watch his spine.."

"He's unconscious." Zero added.

They rolled him over onto his muddy back. John Danziger opened the man's airway into a careful head tilt, while Julia began a quick head to toe scan using her diagnostic programs embedded in her bionic fingertips. "Oh my G*d." she blurted out at one particular finding.

"Is he breathing?" John asked, ready to render resusitation efforts.

"Yep. Lungs are clear. He's fine, vitals wise. He's just hypothermic. But look at this. He has no tattoos, John. None. Not anywhere."

"What?" the mechanic blurted, as he started to cut off their patient's soggy clothing in trade for Bess's heated blanket.

Devon's mouth flopped open wordlessly as she began wiping away some blood off of the man's forehead, and from around other places on his moderately scratched, and swollen face. "He's not a penal colonist?"

"No." Yale replied. "He looks far too young. The last prison ship landed here over seventy years ago."

"Is he one of their children?" Devon wondered.

"Impossible." Julia said. "All life termed penal inmates are surgically sterilized before being sent off Earth to serve their sentences."

"Then who is he?" asked True, helping Bess first dry, and wrap up the long red haired mannish youth. "He doesn't even look like he's an adult yet."

"We'll have to ask him that after he wakes up." Heller told the mechanic's frowning daughter. "D*mn." the doctor sighed. "He's also got the Phage. He's pretty far along. But an eyestalk juice rub down and an innoculation of even more should cure him as that did us."

"What caused these wounds?" Yale wondered.

"That's no mystery." said Uly, beginning to help Danziger build a new fire near their new visitor. He pointed a finger at the man's cloth rag boots. They were covered in Grendler slime.

"Now why were they dragging him by the feet?" asked Morgan.

"Maybe they wanted his shoes." Cameron spat, hating the memories he still had of seeing their cargo pods already ransacked and pilfered by the podgy, brown hided alien nomads.

John froze where he was, monitoring the man's pulse in his neck. "Julia. Can you do a genetic trace?"

"Sure. It'll take a few minutes." she shrugged, surprised, nodding to Bess who was already anticipating and preparing an eyestalk poltice and some eyestalk solution from a few she had grabbed out of the doctor's shoulder pouch. The yellow ferns with eyes resisted her grasp, struggling to get away in abeyance to the Balancer's left over influence, but those actions quickly gave way to the herbaceous food plants' primary living instincts to succor the humans.

True was glad when the eyestalks stopped their eager shrieking while waiting to fulfill their purpose. "Can't scream when you're mash." she told the ones getting ground up under Bess's mortar and pestle.

John grinned. "Yeah. It's kind of unnerving when your food and medicine talks back to you."

"Why were they even given voices?" the intelligent pixie of a little girl wondered, chewing on an eyestalk that was adequately beheaded enough for her.

That paused everybody. Even Uly had no answer ready from his internal side and understanding, of the Terrian's bio-engineering.

"Good question." Heller smirked at True."That can be something to ask Balancer when she returns, True. But I can offer a few educated guesses on that. Maybe the Terrians thought we hunt our food by sound and made the eyestalk ferns that way so we could find them. After all, they first heard us talking to each other with our mouths instead of through any dreams."

True shivered. "But these things argue back, or they pester us, like they care." she said.

"Don't anthropomorphize, Half Pint." said her father. "Those plant noises are just sounds. G889 has no vegetable sentience as far as we know."

"Oh, and the spring orchids weren't smart?" the sleepy True challenged back. "They had you guys puking up spores into a vent hole like mindless rats last year."

"That wasn't intelligence.. those were-" huffed the mechanic.

"Chemical side effects." Julia answered. "Like zombie ants and their brain fungi."

John silently waved there you go at their doctor.

"That's still horrifying no matter how you slice it." True told them, biting off the top half of her yellow food.

Morgan Martin agreed with Danziger's daughter. "No plant should control animals. It's unnatural."

Julia leaned into Yale. "Should we tell them about mitochondria?" she grinned at the tutor.

The big Jamaican cyborg chuckled. "The plant cell that moved into our cells a few hundred millions years ago? Not a chance."

"But the planet itself talks. Through the Terrians. And it's just a rockball with extreme weather." Morgan continued, locked into his current tangent. "The Mother is trying to exert control over us through the boy and through Balancer, right?"

The group sighed as Morgan voiced views that they had resolved far earlier than he had.

Yale interjected. "Every planet with life has a food chain, Morgan. These eyestalks are artificial. They aren't natural. They're just-"

"Fast food." Uly and True said at the same time. Then they started laughing out loud. "I'll take mine with ketchup." Ulysses crowed. "Extra pickles, please." giggled True.

The tension in the group suddenly popped at the joke, as the realization finally sank in, that there was no danger coming, beside the already known.

By the time their night camp was set up around the distressed stranger, the calmer everybody had become. Especially with the longer and longer stretching period of time, that Zero's proximity sensors remained dormant and dark.

A soft beep roused Julia from a drowse while she crouched over their mysterious visitor. The readout flashing on her glove made her do a double take. When she had pulled herself together, Heller moved over to John, who seemed to have anticipated her reaction and was grinning from ear to ear as he stroked his sleeping daughter's head absently.

"He's Gaal's son, isn't he?" he asked the doctor.

"Yes. How did you know?" Heller wondered.

"It made sense. Why else would Gaal try to nab my daughter out from under my nose? It's obvious Gaal considered himself a self made king trying to play f*ck*ng match maker for his heir to G889. This new idea really pisses me off." John growled softly.

Cameron was listening in, as usual. "We're not going to be anybody's b*tch. Not any time soon." he promised, swinging his club around at a few hapless bushes.

"Gaal never learned that." John sighed. "The planet made its Grendlers eat him first."

"We did that." True sighed. "By tearing off his Terrian bone necklace."

"And that was a most delightful side effect, True girl." John smiled. "Still is. Even a year after the fact." he chuckled.

"There's only one question left then, isn't there?" Julia surmised.

"What's that?" Devon Adair asked.

Uly piped up from his sleeping bag. "If everybody here was sterile when they arrived, who is Road Kill's mother?" And how was Gaal able to have a son?"

"Oh." Cameron dropped his head. "I really hate this planet's back story. G889 is probably screwing us humans over, even more than she let's on. Isn't Balancer's over panicked flight away from us our first clue?"

Yale was very somber and his eyes went dead. "No. It's always been about Eve. As much as I don't want to admit to that fact. I think it's time to re-establish contact with Eve's satellite."

"No way." Devon snapped. "W-We just got free of her."

"We have to." the tutor, her best friend, countered. "If humans have been successfully creating families and raising kids here, we can't just blindly stasis lock up a quarter of the continent without knowing whether they're safely out of the way or not. These potential new people are innocents."

"They're political fall out. Like Australia." Morgan retorted. "We don't own them any allegiance."

"Morgan!" hissed Bess. "All of America. Every person living there, where we're from, are refugees or conquerers. We're not elitist nor more privileged than anybody else. Especially not here. You may not have figured this out yet, but we are well and truly castaways now with no permanent home. All because of that council or holo council, that made Eve."

Yale nodded. "They exiled us from Earth most thoroughly. Yes.."

True Danziger was strong but her eyes were beginning to fill. "Shut up! Would everybody just shut up?! We should all be taking care of each other then. There's no war here. There never has been. Those penal colonists? They've served their time and they probably got the short end of the stick, too, due to the Phage, like our buddy here." she said, pointing down at the pale man in a coma. "If they're still alive and going through what we did this summer, we owe it to them to keep them safe from our geolocks." she sniffed.

John Danziger let out a very deep breath he had been holding. "That's my girl. Always thinking." He embraced her legs and kissed her dirty knees as only a doting father could. "I'm proud of you, True. You're seeing through all of this crap and staying focused on our original mission. To welcome the colonists from Earth when they arrive with their syndrome children. And now, with any new children already on Earth 2."

"Yes. All of them." True sobbed, nodding slowly.

"They are us. Us in the future, if we're not very very careful." Yale echoed. "We must end this Phage. Or nobody will get to see what we might become. I'll start setting up an isolated head set comm to Eve. I won't open up a channel until we're ready to talk as a whole group to her."

"Balancer needs to know about the computer program, too, John." said Devon sadly. "Eve's not alive. She hasn't seen her yet."

"Our Eve. The machina predator created by alien apex predators. Just great." Danziger coughed. "As if we ourselves weren't bad enough."

"That might put us into a whole new level of evil in this planet's eyes." Julia said.

"Confession is good for the soul." Yale shared. "The Terrians forgave us the Grendler incident, and the geolock incident which caught and almost killed one of their people."

"But is G889 capable of mercy? That might be a human or Terrian only trait." Julia offered. "The Mother is not Terrian. And what the planet needs first, takes priority. We're not important in Her eyes. That much is clear. We might even be just some of the latest play things, until She tires of us. And Balancer's Her product tester."

"Then it behooves us to get back into Balancer's good graces as soon as possible. Even if it means spinning the bottle again, like I did last night.
said John. "I don't ever want to lie to our Reviewer.

Yale agreed. "Death will be our reward if we ever do."

Uly began to trill softly to himself, and his eyes glowed briefly red, before he fell asleep.