1 In a museum

There was a tree in a museum. Koelreuteria Paniculata was engraved on a sober white steel plate. A crowd was amassing along a transparent dome, their eyes glued on the Savonnier. Yellow. Radiant. Solar. The only Earthian tree in the city.

Bouquets of long green indented leaves suddenly swayed in the artificial wind of the cell; garlands of butter flowers started a slow dance. The view was breathtaking for the exoplanetary kin. They never saw Earth, after all. Greenery was not a thing in Shariq-247a... a planet so brutal it was named Ares.

Forests here were wine red, white, and pink. It had its charm when it was not trying to kill you. In comparison, the yellow-green combination of the lantern tree was something refreshing and alien. It shone like a sphene in an ocean of Château Margaux. A sphene inserted in a matte platinum ring, the piece of jewelry being a metaphor for the city itself.

The diamond-shaped metropolis was a work of ingenuity and perennity. It was not beautiful, even cold sometimes. But it had a mission and committed to it very well. The city was ironclad, military greyish, industry-scented. It was brut and monotone but efficient and very mathematical.

Lineous. Sharp. Authoritative. By necessity.

The colonists liked and hated their new home all the same. They cherished the precious warmness they found in the darkest times, cherished the sharing, and advocated mutual aid. They were brave and united pioneers against the bloodthirsty slaughtering planet called Ares. They build their home in it, against all odds. The city slowly started to strive and soar. But they persisted. Since it was their beginning, their cradle, their nest...

They called it Solace.

And in Solace, there was now a tree. Yellow and green to their eyes, but emerald and gold to their souls. That expensive space-traveling earthian vegetal was the symbol of their new prosperity. Solace was no longer struggling in infancy; Solace was growing up! It stopped crawling and did not even walk anymore! Two hundred years was all it took. Solace was running to greatness. And what greatness could it achieve? A woman was wondering as she patted her round belly.

She was sweating from the journey. Her caramel skin was marked by dust, and her dark, curly hair stuck to her forehead. She was exhausted yet exalted and in peace. Yes, she made it. She did well! Finally! After the pain, the flee, the long road… she found it. Her Solace.

Others were not as lucky as her, though. Her path was paved with corpses, and her mind was full of fresh breaches. How many relatives, friends, and comrades did she lose to protect her unborn child? Many were like her, lost in thoughts in the middle of Westshield Spaceport, their eyes glued on a dozen holes in the spaceship's center hull.

They will be marked for life with the vision of the Gloriana, named the colossal masterpiece vessel they rode to Ares, being nearly eaten alive by some living nightmares crawling their mystic and devilish bodies through the infinity of the universe. The mother shuddered as she remembered what she lived through while trapped in the gun decks.

An interlayer split open thunderously. The gravity changed; the suction pressure grabbed the woman's body like a hungry monster. Fortunately, she wore a suit and did not suffocate to death like so many underequipped emigrants.

When they embarked three years ago, a lottery was drawn, and she was one of the few safety suit recipients. The unlucky majority had to patiently wait on other people's misshape to get the opportunity to pillage their own. A lot happened in a thousand days. And the suits were passed from one spacer to another, always cherished, never traded.

Saved by the suit, hanging from a fixed bench, she was sweating profusely as she felt her arm muscles stretch and rip under effort. She was numb to pain, adrenaline injected. She endured for ten intense seconds she believed were forever before collapsing on the floor once the system automatically sealed the spaceship wound. But during this lapse of time, she saw it, the thing.

Yes, the thing. She shuddered only at the thought of it. Humans were not the only ones in space, it seems. She would have never believed it in the past. It was, in fact, a first even for humanity. The first time pioneers meet predators in the vastitude. Solace was perplexed at the Gloriana's state, but the investigation made things even more obscure. This news needed to be shared with the rest of the species.

Leaders and influential people started getting informed, but slowly: information was traveling fast through the communication nodes; however, even at maximum speed, it would take months before it reached Earth. Meanwhile, a strange event occurred in the museum Koelreuteria Paniculata section. A shadow cast itself on the tree, even though nothing else should be standing on that side of the glass.

It was attached to a long, thin, straight body. The wire-like anthropomorph did not possess a face, at least not by human standards. The part where the neck should have been had a pointy protuberance. It looked like a jellyfish, and tendrils seemed to come out from rows of gills around. The creature made no sound and climbed the tree in a weird spider way while its "skin" transformed to match the tree bark. It stopped moving and vanished from sight completely, only his strange tendrils still perceptible as they slowly advanced, reaching for the yellow flowers. It probed a bit before plugging one for a taste, then another one.

…It seemed to its liking.