Phase II Seventeen Suns

Lyrudia was the first true test because it was familiar enough to be dangerous. There were plains. There were upright producer forms. There were small flying things. There were animals that ran when approached. Every one of those sentences invited a Terran word that Marissa was trying not to use.

The dominant lowland producer grew in groves of blue-black columns three to five meters high. Each column ended in dozens of thin translucent vanes. Urshila smiled before they had even landed and said, "Quoisol." They were both wrong. The vanes were not primarily collecting photons. They were creating electrostatic gradients that pulled living aerosol into digestive chambers. The organism used light only to power the trapping apparatus. Its principal biological intake was filtered life.

Bethany did not say "I told you so." She wrote it on the back of Marissa's field slate and left it beside her lunch.

Eos-7 was the first survey conducted around substantial industrial activity rather than an almost purely biological destination. The mining authority required an armed-security liaison for access to an abandoned extraction zone. Rick spent an entire morning looking pleased with himself. Eduardo spent the same morning checking whether the liaison's credentials were genuine. They were.

The interesting life on Eos-7 lived around disturbance. Excavation exposes mineral layers, warm machinery creates thermal islands, and discarded water produces temporary habitats. The most common organism was a palm-sized creature Quincy called a shovel crab despite possessing neither a shovel nor any relationship to a crab.

Gweneth's problem arrived the next day. A flying organism landed on the back of her pressure hood. It had eight articulated limbs. She froze so completely that Patrick asked whether she had suffered neurological damage. Bethany removed it. Gweneth then watched two hours of a 20th-century black-and-white detective film through her HEILO and refused to discuss the incident.

By late March, the crew had developed rituals. Bethany and Jules watched zero-G football whenever ACS delay permitted it. Quincy continued his campaign to make everyone watch the first season of Survivor. Gweneth's black-and-white film nights became unexpectedly popular. Patrick supplied commentary until someone threw something soft at him.

GIORODVA attended without needing a screen, which Marissa found unsettling only because GIORODVA laughed a fraction of a second before the rest of them when the media file had already been buffered into the ship's systems. GIORODVA promised to delay future laughter. This somehow made it worse.

"Pleasant enough to make you forget someone is awake while everyone else sleeps." Marissa's first private note about GIORODVA.