Half of us were screaming. Locked in, strapped down, helpless to control our direction or velocity… it’s understandable to scream. I might have done so myself.

We were coming in far too fast and feeling the building heat along with the horrifying vibrations that bucketed through everything that supported our fragile lives. Our fate was in one pair of hands: a pilot we had no reason to trust…

Then I was here: standing on too-green grass, under this too-blue sky, breathing this peculiar, spicy-smelling air you have here, staring at our ship buried deep in the muddy banks and clinging shrubs of this dark and tangled waterway.

It’s been a very long time ago. A lifetime, in a way. And in that time I have never been able to recall a single memory of my first few minutes on your world, of setting my foot to this soil for the first time. Apparently my mind just didn’t register what happened between the time of falling through burning, shrieking air and standing silent by the water in a light, scented breeze, surrounded by the rest of my people, no thought in my head but to stare at the rubble of the ship that brought us from our homes.

But at from that point my memories are clear, my senses keen as they have never been since. And I had an excellent view of the explosion.

Technically not an explosion, perhaps, but I don’t know what other word to use to describe an event that engulfed our ship in tangling, roaring flame so suddenly that a buffet of hot air slapped our faces and flattened our whiskers, shook our stances, dried our eyeballs.

Only an instant before the fire burst out I saw the ship through a wavery distortion, a shivery ripple in the air that even someone as technically innocent as I am knew to be uncontrolled metaflux and that whatever developed from that situation might be spectacular, but would certainly not be welcome.

And out of the weaving air flew a kit, hugging himself tight into a ball as he soared up from the top port like a ball in some odd game for youngers. He arced towards a group of kits who just stared at this little fellow descending on them like a comet. All but Tilde, who moved quickly for a female her size, catching the offspring in her hands and wide chest. The kit didn’t even cry out. He just stayed clenched up in a wad of tan fuzz, cushioned in the tawny down between Tilde’s upper breasts and staring with huge, wide eyes into the conflagration that consumed our ship.

Staring as I was. As we all were. Every one of us saw Greater Than pop out of the port in a single leap. He stood on the crumpled deck for mere fractions of a second before launching off towards us. I don’t know if he was propelled by the force of the explosion or if his jump was perfectly timed, but he flew out on the wings of the blue glycol flame, trailing the stench of burnt selenium and fused quartz. He landed hard, took three long strides and stopped right in front of me.

He had a large black composite box strapped to the back of his harness and a smoking bundle over his shoulder, which turned out to be Semi; the butter yellow fur on her thighs and buttocks singed into crinkly black carbon, her crest blackened, her whiskers literally glowing orange at the tips.

His brute face stared down at me without seeing anything as he dumped Semi to her feet. She fell up against me and I caught her by the shoulders, supporting her as she sagged, sobbing. Greater Than loomed over us, backlit by the fury of the yellow-white flames. I stood there in the teasing odors of a strange planet, watching everything that connected me to my home world turn into glassy cinders, feeling a young female clinging to me while heaving with emotion, hearing the horrified cries of females and kits. My first coherent thought was that I was too old for this sort of thing.

Too old to have even been on this voyage, as I told them over and over again for all the good it did. Ironically, I’m now much older and have lived through things that made that first day seem like a pleasant stroll through a cedar woods.

There was nothing for anyone to say. What remains of those moments seems obvious to state, but so many discussions of the Arrival never mention the enormous central facts that we came to understand when our nervous systems regained balance. We were here, wherever that might be. And we were alive.

Not that we fell into wild rejoicing at the time. What we fell into was the rude control of Greater Than. Before we’d recovered from the shock of the landing and the explosion so immediately afterwards, he was stalking through us, herding us. First he roughly crowded us away from the ship. And it’s true, at that point the possibilities of further activity from the ship could be seen as an ongoing hazardous opportunity.

But then he bullied us into a formation, like any other functionary herding a flock in his charge. I could tell from the way his eyes darted around as he shoved us around—even as he cupped a hand over the face of squalling kit to shut it up and drew a disgusted glare from Tilde–that he was taking a quick census.

The ship was still burning, though not as vehemently, when he had us formed up, and finished taking our roll. He muttered, “Two off the count,” in his usual flat tone.

I looked around but couldn’t identify anybody missing from the two dozen survivors. We didn’t really know each other at that point, had just been clumped together for export by arbitrary bureaucratic sorting.

He swung around at a voice from behind him. It was Point, his pilot’s helmet dented and his gaze seeming out of focus, as though looking at something far beyond the trees and vines that surrounded us there by the creek. He spoke so softly only a few of us heard him. “And my crew. All three of them.”

Greater Than shrugged. “Not my responsibility.”

Point nodded absently and squatted down, forearms on his knees, to watch the very end of his ship.

Later we come to understand that two missing were of the Ascension, younger males. I’ve tried to recall their names as best I can and will render them here as Swingside and Breezeway. Nobody knew them that well, actually. As Greater Than had put it: Two less on the roster. I only hoped they’d be the last.

I suppose I should take a moment here to explain the names I use to tell you about us. You are physiologically incapable of pronouncing our real names and there is no real way to render our whistles, clicks and chirrings into your letter system. I could try to transliterate them as I just did for those to unfortunate young. But so many of our names stem from shade meanings of Aloft words that have no equivalents for you: they’d all just end up being the same word in English. Or French or Japanese or whatever. Possibly a quarter of our names come from odors your people can’t even detect, much less name.

So I have chosen, in the account, to use the names applied to us when we were in captivity among you. For your ease in reading, and also as a reminder to you of our history together here. We came peacefully and by accident: refugees without friends or possessions. You treated us with a hospitality you thought of as scientific, but we thought of as worse than the troubles we left behind us.

Greater Than, Comma, Semi… they aren’t even really names, just keyboard strokes. But they’re the names you gave to us, so they are the names I will give to you.