“To such an extent does nature delight and abound in variety that among her trees there is not one plant to be found which is exactly like another; and not only among the plants, but among the boughs, the leaves and the fruits, you will not find one which is exactly similar to another.”

Leonardo da Vinci

She was anxious for the meeting. Her boss had obviously some information for her, perhaps even a mission. But after her blunder six months ago, she was not sure she was still fit for the job.

When she went to Europa, she had no hesitation about whatsoever. She knew she was the righteous one, her mission was sacred, Blessed Be Her Holly Hooves, the Great Invisible wouldn’t let her down. She was so sure she would find the pirates over there. And she found them. But, somehow, she completely lost any chance to make her point.

After the incident and the fall under the ice crust of the Jovian Satellite, all went blurry in her recollection of the events. Did she really saw the pirates, their underground city? Was the man she met one of them? When the hazy memory came clearer, she found herself in a ward bed, stuck in the ship infirmary, on her way back to Earth. Mike Hollyster, the one she thought was a pirate, explained they had a mishap on her exploration to Europa’s surface and ended up being rescued by one of the mining operation. It took her longer to recover her senses, and she had been asleep for few days.

The girl had some issues to cope with it, but she accepted the explanation while she addressed her pleas and questions to Her Holly Pinkness.

She approached the Reverend’s office in the IPU Intelligence Services headquarters with hesitancy. She was still blessed by the Great Invisible Pink Unicorn, proof was one of her best sock was missing this morning. Nonetheless, her apprehension was building.

She entered the office unsure of the whole situation, though she had no say in it. She had been summoned, here she was.

Reverend Hollyster welcomed her with a gruff greeting. It wasn’t unheard of him as he was a man of few words and deep insight, however he tended usually to be more open and cheerful when she came to meet him. The situation had to be, if not critical, quite serious for him to act this way.

“Sir?” She inquired directly, feeling there were no need for lengthy salutations. “Reporting as you requested…” The girl was now impatient to know about the mission, or whatever it was the Reverend had called her in for.

“Girl, meet Mike,” the boss was pointing to a man standing on the side. It was this same man she wanted to forget about, the one linked to her failure on Europa.

“Oh, you know him already perhaps?” Reverend Hollyster was on a full mood this day, his irony was showing much.

“Sir?” She wanted to ask what all this was about, and overall, what this man was doing here.

“You got yourself a new mission, Girl. And this time, I will not ask you to be careful so you won’t interfere with any agent we already have on site. You will just go with said agent. Perhaps you won’t make any more mistake that way…” Her boss was decidedly cheery this morning.

The man, Mike, tried to hide his smile, hearing the older one’s blunt line. He decided to ease the tension a bit. “Don’t mind him. He had a visitation last night and can’t cope with the blessing he received.” There was laughter in his voice.

As she looked to her superior questioningly, she caught a glimpse of pink under his vest. It seemed his best shirt had turned pink. He, as she, were really blessed by the Great Invisible. There was some humour there…

“Can we go back to the mission, please?” Reverend Hollyster tried to take back the conversation. “I read through your last mission reports, Mike’s and yours, Girl. You have nothing to be ashamed of. You found what you were looking for, but there were other interests in play over there. So, just take it as a good learning experience and focus on your next adventure.” Her superior started to explain the objectives of their assignments. She and Mike would be sent to Venus where a pre-settlement team was missing.

Venus had been terraformed few decades ago, and a biosphere had been installed for the acclimation of humans. All seemed to have gone smoothly until a month ago. The current team had missed on a number of routine communication, and any attempt to contact them drew blank.

¤ ¤ ¤

“We must consider the distinctive characters and the general nature of plants from the point of view of their morphology, their behavior under external conditions, their mode of generation, and the whole course of their life.”

Theophrastus

It took them three days to travel to Venus. On a regular first generation antimatter starship, the trip would have lasted thrice the time, however, they had used one of the Flying Socks, the advanced vessels the IPU Intelligence Services used in their fight against the Space Pirates. Those pastafarians possessed some advanced light speed technology.

In the days before their trip, they researched more information about Venus and its terraformation process. Birch’s method had been used, which explained the presence of a considerable number of solar shades in orbit of the planet. Mars had benefited greatly of this initiative as it received the dry ice produced when the atmosphere had cooled enough. The trickiest part of the preparation of Venus for life had been to receive water. The disruption of one of Saturn’s icy moons had been a gamble that gave wondrous results.

Not wanting for life to develop by itself, the bioengineers had preformatted some plants to be introduced in this new environment. Not only the plants helped regulate and fix carbon dioxide, but they also consumed the potential alien protozoans that would have been found in the water. Regular and carnivorous plants were now covering a good part of the planet.

“We are almost there,” Mike was preparing the flying sock to enter Venus’ atmosphere. “Do you get a lock on the location, Magda?”

The girl had taken the same identity as during her last mission. Magda turned her gaze from the solar shades outside to verify the course set on the instruments, “we’re okay there.” She looked one last time at the immense panels before focusing on the planet below them.

¤ ¤ ¤

“Trees and plants always look like the people they live with, somehow.”

Zora Neale Hurston

The biosphere was empty, no sound, no trace of anyone. On the dinner table, a meal for three was set, though the food was rotten. In the quarters, it seemed life had been suspended. Vehicles were missing in the garage.

Magda was examining log entries in one of the labs console when Mike contacted her from the control room. “The control is receiving communication from the forest. A sort of a ping and coordinates…”

The girl and her companion headed toward signal’s origin. On their way they saw a variety of plants that could have come from a botanist’s dream, a weird dream, or a nightmare. All was gigantic and twisted, as in pain. Colourful and psychedelic, a definition for this strange forest. Magda and Mike were careful threading through the Venusian jungle. Ponds and wetlands blocked their routes at some points, though they finally found the source of the signal.

In the water, buried under some giant plant roots, a communicator was barely visible. The man bent to retrieve it then hesitate. The communicator was still within his former owner’s hand, the fingers tightly gripped around it. Having found one of the missing team members, the two agents pursued their investigation of the grounds. The rest of the team was buried in the same fashion, under the roots of giant exotic plants.

Mike decided to leave the corpse in place and to report immediately to headquarters. Magda was assimilating all the information. “It doesn’t seem the pirates are responsible,” she commented on the situation.

“It looks more like the plants got busy,” her companion retorted.

Back to the camp, the girl headed straight to the log entry she found earlier. There had been information there that could explain some of what had happened. It seemed that the plants grew erratically after their introduction on the terraformed soil of the planet. The carnivorous ones that shall have removed any life form from Saturn’s icy Moon water had been the first to behave strangely.

From the moment they got taller and bigger, the team had seemed to receive strange signals from the plants. Some were sure they heard voices, others saw things. A group hallucination had been at play in the biodome.

The two agents took some samples and checked the food and water supply to ensure nothing was poisoning or incapacitating, physically or neurologically. All seemed ok. The problem lied with the plants.

They found that the team was set to destroy some of them, the patch of carnivorous ones. They had prepared explosives and fire devices, but something got to them before they could execute their plan.

Mike wanted to complete the extermination, but Magda had mixed feeling. As the man was about to head outside, the control unit alarm went off. The two of them ran to the room and observed the main console.

“Are… Are these moving?” Magda was following tens of points moving on the radar screen.

“Seems like it…” Mike’s laconic voice didn’t hide his surprise much. “So, these are the plants… Hum…”

Looking at the control cameras feed, the forest was getting closer to the camp. Magda was strangely calm. “Is it hallucination?”

The girl and the man slowly reached the door and exited the room. Outside, the plants stopped, immobile. The air surrounding them was quiet, yet a buzzing reached their ears.

“Please! Don’t kill us! We don’t want to do you any harm!”

Mike looked at Magda. She wasn’t the one who talked, her mouth was closed, her eyes on the biggest, the tallest of the surrounding plants. “Looks like we found life here.”

The Plants of Venus were alive. They were communicating telepathically. The Venusian forest was sentient.