After the storm had passed they gathered around their portable grill to eat a shoddy meal of reheated rice and beans and discuss their plans for the morning in despondent, sullen half sentences. The heat relented a little after the sun set but the air was still and sultry and if anything more humid than during the day. Eating was exhausting and their conversation uninspiring, and even the short slog to the shuttle to use its bathroom facilities was draining and unpleasant in the night air. They laid a small trail of lamps to the rear door of the ship, so that it looked like a fairy trail to a mystical grotto, but the insect exclusion fields around their camp stopped working halfway across the beach and in the short distance between the edge of the field and the small cargo hold door they were attacked by myriad small blood-sucking and stinging creatures. Their situation worsened further when Olivia pointed out that night in the jungle meant predators, and since they did not know what they might encounter here they should probably set a watch. Al Hamra picked up on the suggestion and assigned everyone to shifts over their desultory objections, finally relenting and giving himself and Olivia the first shift as punishment for their diligence. Complaining and grumbling, everyone else retired to their tents, leaving Al Hamra and Olivia to sit in the camp chairs with carbines ready, staring into the vast emptiness of the Kuan jungle and listening to the calls and cries of strange beasts in the darkness.

  Once Dr. Delecta and Adam had ceased their bedtime gossip and the camp had fallen silent they could immerse themselves in the sounds and scents of the nocturnal jungle. Soon the clouds cleared, revealing a sky swarming with stars that glittered like diamond dust on the placid surface of the lake. Beyond the indistinct shoreline of the star-speckled waters the jungle loomed, a wall of perfect darkness that stretched as far as the horizon, punctuated only by the faint glimmer of the outcrop of rock where Lavim’s fateful dig crew were buried. From that shroud of dense trees they heard the gentle rhythmic ululations of small amphibians, croaked and burped against a background orchestra of singing insects. Occasional brighter, purer calls of birds and larger animals pierced the insects’ song, and once or twice they heard deeper, more aggressive sounds of predators and larger animals. As Olivia drifted off on her watch the scream of a prey animal’s last desperate struggles reverberated across the lake, waking everyone from their fitful sleep with its urgent death cries. Olivia started awake with her own small squeaking gasp, but nothing ventured through the insect-repellent perimeter of their camp.

  As time stretched out on their watch they sat silent and attentive in the camp chairs, Olivia with her face to the star-scattered lake lest some horrific aquatic predator shamble from the water to take one of their crew and Al Hamra watching the distant swamp, occasionally directing a torchlight into the darkness to check for lurking beasts. At some point deep into their watch Olivia heard a small sound behind her, like an object dropping, and the scuffling sound of someone moving on bare ground. Turning to look she saw Al Hamra was gone, and the ragged line of trees separating the beach from the swamp was lit up by strange drifting lights, small flickering globes of blue and white that moved languidly in the air just beyond the trees. They pulsed and glowed, dancing impossibly on the perfectly still air of the jungle, sometimes almost guttering out before flaring back to life in a different shade of blue, violet or green. Against the backdrop of those faerie fires the cold, hard light from Al Hamra’s discarded flashlight looked like a scar cut into the night.

  Olivia stood up and grabbed the flashlight, pointing it in the direction of the swamp. She thought she saw movement near the treeline, the Mystic flailing through the scrub and brush beyond their perimeter as he struggled towards the lights. Olivia called him, but there was no response, the figure ignoring him as it thrashed through the undergrowth.

  “Adam! Banu!” Olivia called, yelling the names of the next two people to take the watch. “Help!” Without waiting for their response she seized her carbine and dashed towards the trees, the flashlight cutting confused arcs of brilliant white through the darkness beyond their camp as she ran after their captain. Ahead of her in the gloom the flickering, wavering globes of light began to move with more purpose, as if it were their intention to swarm Al Hamra. She called the Mystic’s name as she ran forward, but received no response.

  Behind her she could hear movement in the camp, and had a vague sense of the darkness lifting slightly as someone activated the camp’s perimeter lights. She heard Adam and Siladan calling to each other, and a beam of light cut through the dark to her left. Ahead the Mystic stumbled and dragged himself back to his feet, onto the firmer ground among the trees, and with a stumbling, half-conscious gait began to move faster towards the swamp. Olivia crashed through bushes in his wake, trying to find her way.

  Then Saqr fired up their shuttle’s landing lights, and a spotlight of blue-white brilliance cleft the air in front of her. The battered grasses and shrubs were suddenly clearly visible and the trees ahead cut sharp dark lines through the radiance. Al Hamra’s jerking shadow cast huge, erratic shapes across the misty air over the swamp, and all the floating lights disappeared at once, as if the spotlight had destroyed them all with its false sun. Al Hamra tripped and stumbled at the edge of the swamp and Olivia, emerging at a run from the undergrowth on the bank, saw him fall forward, mouth wide in shock, as he regained consciousness and lost his footing at the edge of the swamp. One foot sank into the mud at the edge of a long stretch of dank, stagnant water, and his hands splashed into the pond, disturbing duckweed and riverwort that shone in the bright light. As he fell two shapes surged from the water, lizard-like beasts of some kind that were easily as large as the Mystic himself, and although he rolled sideways in reaction one of them managed to bite onto Al Hamra’s arm.

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  Blood spurted, Al Hamra screamed, a flock of birds erupted in raucous anger from the trees above him, and Olivia opened fire on the monsters with her carbine. Bullets exploded on the water and the bank, and the creature released its grip on Al Hamra with a blood-curdling hiss, retreating rapidly into the water as one of the Vulcan bullets blew a part of its back and side away in a cloud of blood and gore. Al Hamra staggered back from the edge of the water, blood streaming down his injured right hand, and fell backwards with his foot caught in the sucking mud. Olivia fired her carbine again over his flailing body, hitting the other creature in its flank and splattering bone and flesh over the rocks by the swamp’s edge. That beast too slid back into the water, one green-yellow eye focused balefully on Olivia as it retreated, and Olivia dashed forward to grab the Mystic, slinging her carbine and grabbing Al Hamra by his good arm. As they struggled backwards out of the mud Siladan and Adam appeared at the swamp’s edge, the searchlight’s beam throwing their shadows huge and distorted over the still, slimy water.

  “Are you okay?” Siladan demanded, moving as close to the swamp as he dared with his sword held in both hands. On Olivia’s other side Adam was scanning the water’s surface with his carbine, its torch attachment picking out insects and small moving things on the surface of the water beyond the reach of the ship’s light. The reeking water was still and smooth, the creatures gone. They retreated to the campsite, Al Hamra cursing and shivering as he leaned on Olivia’s shoulder and Adam taking the rear, scanning regularly with his gun.

  “What was that?” Dr. Delecta asked as they returned to the relative safety of their compound. Saqr was crouched at the table in her sleeping gown, fiddling with the tabula she used to control the ship remotely. As they returned and Al Hamra sank down next to her on the table she flicked off the searchlight and darkness again cloaked the land outside their camp. Dr. Delecta already had her medkit open and began disinfecting and dressing Al Hamra’s injury as soon as he sat down.

  “I don’t know,” Al Hamra whispered. “I dreamt of songs and voices and then I woke up in the swamp.”

  “Djanna,” Olivia guessed. “I’ve heard of them. Mystic spirits that feed on fear and death. They lured you to the swamp to be eaten, so that they could feast on your last emotions.”

  “How do you know that?” Saqr demanded, already typing on her tabula to search for records on the creatures.

  “I was a colonist, remember?” Olivia reminded her. “Gotta know what’s going to eat you as soon as you land.” She gestured to the picture Saqr had pulled up on her tabula. “They seem to exist in almost every planet that has widespread forest, so there’s a general theory that they’re creatures from the Dark Between the Stars. Some people say they come through the Portals with spaceships. Who knows?”

  “Maybe that’s why they went for Al Hamra,” Dr. Delecta muttered as she dressed the grimacing man’s wound. “The Accursed are an extra tasty feast for them.”

  “Don’t … Call me that!” Al Hamra snarled at her between gasps. His arm was badly gashed, a line of six stab wounds from the beast’s teeth that had turned into slashes when it lost its grip and fled. The table around his arm was already slick with his blood and his eyes were wide and shocked, but Dr. Delecta had cleaned the wound quickly and expertly and now wrapped it rapidly with wound-adaptive bandages from her kit.

  “Sorry,” she almost snapped back at him as she finished the wrapping. “There. It should stop bleeding and knit quickly. But your arm is going to be pretty useless for a few days.”

  “There, we should call this off,” Lavim whispered from behind them, staring at the blood all over the table as if it were his own. “I warned you this was –“

  “No!” Al Hamra growled. “I can still see and I can still shoot. We continue our mission.” He leaned back with a sigh of relief as Dr. Delecta injected him with something, the hiss of a dispenser gun signaling almost immediate relief from the pain. A second hiss and he was dosed up with vaccines and broad-acting antibiotics. “That was just nature,” he said, his tone more relaxed. “We aren’t stopping for a few local crocodiles.”

  “Those creatures from the Dark are here for a reason!” Lavim told them, his voicing rising in tone. “They’re gathered around the place for a reason!” Then, seeing no sign that Al Hamra would relent, he stomped back into his tent.

  “He could be right,” Siladan said in a low voice, watching the scared young man retreat. “It’s a bad sign. Maybe they’re drawn to whatever finished off his team.”

  “So what?” Adam said in a low, level voice from behind Al Hamra. “We already knew the Dark was here. It can’t kill us if we kill it first.” He looked back into the silent swamp. “It’s only the Dark.”

  “It’s only the Dark,” Al Hamra echoed, staring with unfocused eyes at his ruined arm. “Just only the Dark.”