The factory lander impacted the greenery at crash speed.  Straight down, with all the power off, save the computer that had triggered the safety field on for an instant at the point of impact.

They'd wasted a great deal of time attempting to swoop and dive at the green land, but it had dodged every effort.  Perhaps it was unfounded, paranoid, but an insistent inner voice told Vuim-Captain that the moment the lander settled on bare rock the soil and vegetation would rise up and bury them under a crushing blanket of green.

They'd retreated to the edge of space and slyly attempted to sneak down in a spiral pattern, a dozen risky darting attempts as the night over the continent had rolled on towards dawn.  Finally, the Captain lost patience and reverted to his first plan - the crash dive.  Now, it seemed he had gambled and won.  The crew were bruised and battered but no one had ruptured a shell, or died suddenly from shock-induced acceleration of the disease they all potentially carried within themselves.  The pilot's estimate had been pessimistic.  It was a common failing among the vuim.

He pressed the door controls, and the lights came on as the computer started to power up the non-emergency functions.  The light that came in from outside was pearly, only one step up from dark.  On the planet's other side, where the Bonaventure's human traders had gone to make contact with the locals, it would be early evening, but here morning was just brightening.

He motioned that a team should follow.  The gangway looked like black iron in a trick of the early light and the sound of his metal-shod feet striking it echoed eerily.  The still visible moon was larger than the biggest of the three that circled his home, and maybe two-thirds the size of the monstrous planetoid that orbited Earth.  It was no wonder humans linked their moon to madness.  Just seeing Earth's bloated moon was enough to imagine it failling.

The trees the factory lander had fallen through were pushed out and down like the flattened patterns of a bomb.  The vuim had fought wars once, back before their medical needs had quietly absorbed their economy's ability to fund such extravagances.  Vuim-Captain had killed - years ago.  Now he even felt sympathy for trees.

Even if they weren't really trees at all.  He could see that by the mixture of faint dawn light and the outspilling radiance from the ship.  These tree-shaped things were moving away, gradually, slowly, their surfaces rippling and tugging - none of the swift apocalyptic motion of the land that he had seen from the sky, but some form of group activity nevertheless.  This is the same sort of earth-insect mind humans believe we have, Vuim-Captain thought.  Or perhaps what he observed was merely instinct.  Could a thing evolve that lived by mimicking everything?  There were creatures that looked like a leaf or a shard of crystal on his world.  Some hid themselves through fear, others to lure prey.  As he watched the vegetation crawl away like wounded animals, Vuim-Captain imagined entire continents closing up like hinge-leafed plants, the parasite-filled cities on their surfaces crushed within into nutritious gloop.  Or some kind of vast continent eater, happily devouring the bare rock of the cosmos, being repulsed by a thin mimetic layer of pseudo-life plating the silicon mind beneath.  Though scientifically intriguing, neither thought was reassuring when you were standing in the midst of the speculation.