by Mingus Casey
They swam through the darkness with hyperdrive, to a strange new world. It was barren and dry, and it's atmosphere was carbon dioxide, the world spun fast and close to the sun so it was hot, but it was room to live.
The terraformers had arrived hundreds of years before, massive automated star ships designed to heal and create life giving worlds.
The lichen was starting to survive now, it was too early to colonise; they had been rushed for over-population and war were always threats to survival.
It was a new world, not a friendly world initially but it too could be turned, as humanity had changed the shape of so many other aspects of it's environment.
They orbited in sleep for a hundred years, before the world was showered with gene seeds and nano seeds, laying the foundation for oxygen and human life further down the track.
They continued to sleep until the world was no longer too hot, merely temperate, survivable at the poles where ice would form.
As the gene seeds created life, the nano seeds created the requirements for human survival, shelter and production facilities, unravelled from the tiniest code stored inside them into entire buildings and worlds.
Over many hundreds of years, the transport ship had slowed enough and the world became habitable; they were woken, the ship plunged to the surface, re-entering successfully and hitting the outskirts of a city made by nanites.
Now they would wake, they would survive.