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Stripekin
Survey work was never supposed to be the last world.
Mark flew the deep dark to decide if a planet could hold a human town... plants, water, wildlife, a signature that killed a site or let it live. Fourteen planets in five years. Three viable. He was tired. His team was older and meaner and already talking retirement. The Harrow-9 was just another dart, another paycheck, another stretch of jungle or desert or lava that would never be a village.
Then the atmosphere grabbed them.
Then something bigger than the ship grabbed them from above.
The mountain used the dart as a toy. Metal opened. The common deck became a throat full of vines. Two of his team stayed in the wreck. The third vanished into a green that had already learned the taste of their hull.
He is a wildlife man. Tracks. Sign. The chemistry of what a world leaves behind. This canopy is healthy. The layers are intact. Something large moves in the distance. The sky has hands. He does not know yet if the place is viable.
He knows it is not empty.
Above the wreck, in the high roads of a people who learned the ceiling when terraforming went feral, a red-furred outcast studies the un-furred who walked in like the ground was still a floor. Wrong color among her own. Alone long enough that alone has started to feel like a waste. She has seen what the jungle does to the unprepared. She has seen what walks on four and does not ask. Alliance could be a word. Or a mistake.
She intends to learn the difference from above, in the heat, with her stripes breaking her edges and her red eyes open.
Until someone finally does the unnatural thing…
…and looks up.
