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Dr.Sloane Carter, Pilot & Chief Engineer, Earth Year 2143
Nova Frontier Initiative Day 1,898: Star Designation HD 568342 F
Planet b - HZP (Habitable Zone Probable)
LCS score .79/1.00 (Life Compatibility Score)
The ship was dyingand I was going to die with it.
I knew it the way a scientist always knows — not with panic, but with cold, awful clarity backed by data analysis.The stabilizer coil shrieked.The atmospheric sensors screamed numbers that made no sense.
The deck lurched as the storm field surged up through the hull, a brutal clawing inward.Insane as it seemed, it was like a giant planetary fist snapping shut around something fragile, squeezing tighter and tighter until my breath caught and my ribs threatened to give.
"Come on."I yanked the manual override, both hands white-knuckled on the yoke."Comeon?—"
The shuttle answered with a sound like a dying animal.A roll threw me sideways against my harness, hard enough to knock the air from my lungs and leave a bruise I'd feel for days.My teeth snapped together.My vision went white at the edges.
Outside the viewport, the planet consumed everything.
This world had looked beautiful from orbit — a dark jewel striped with violet cloud systems, lightning threading through the atmosphere in patterns that had made my breath catch every time I'd watched the storm feeds.I'd spent three days cataloguing those patterns.Three days thinking the electrical activity was the most extraordinary thing I'd ever seen.
I wasn't thinking that anymore.I was thinking we were fucking idiots for coming here in the first place.But NFI—Nova Frontier Initiative—our militarized corporate overlords, wanted every ‘class b’ planet in this sector of space catalogued, sampled and explored for minerals, life, genetic data.Anything they could get their greedy hands on.
The altimeter spun.The jungle rushed up — dark canopy, jagged obsidian cliffs, a valley floor I was about to introduce my face to at a velocity that would reduce both me and the shuttle to something investigators would catalog with small, numbered flags.
I pulled up hard.
Not enough.It was never going to be enough.
The impact didn't feel like a crash.The ground surged upward with a sudden, deliberate force, closing the distance, wrapping me in its pull, and refusing to let go, almost as if the planet had decided, personally, to reach up andclaimme.
Stupid thought.But I was dying, so seemed like perfect timing.Then everything went black.
I came back to myself in the ringing silence.I wasn’t sure if it was minutes or hours later.
For a moment I just breathed.Counted the breaths.Let my nervous system run its checks — ribs aching but intact, a warm thread of blood tracking from my temple that I touched and assessed as shallow, not critical, just dramatic the way head wounds always were.I filed it undernot fataland made myself focus before my hands could start shaking.
The cockpit had held.Barely.The viewport was spiderwebbed across the lower left corner, and half the console had gone dark.But what hit me first — what stopped the methodical inventory cold — was the smell.
Hot metal and scorched polymer, yes.The expected chemical signatures of a crash.But underneath all of that, something clean and electric and wild.Ozone and rain-soaked stone.The charged sweetness of air after a lightning strike.Plant life.Soil that smelled shockingly similar to the forests back home.
Theplanetwas alive.
I could smell life pouring in through the hull breach, and it smelled like electricity given form, like something ancient and alive, and something in my chest responded to it in a way I had absolutely no framework for.
I ran ship diagnostics with hands that were steadier than they had any right to be.
Luckily, I had managed to steer the shuttle away from the village we’d been shocked to find once we entered the atmosphere.We thought we knew what we were getting into when we decided to land and grab some samples from the surface.Uninhabited planet.Strong storms, but navigable.Not dangerous.We’d thought our ship could handle the wind currents and dense atmosphere.
We’d been wrong.So damn wrong.
Every data point we had was inaccurate.Distorted by the electromagnetic fields surrounding the planet.The energy floating in the air.We didn’t actually have a clear reading on anything.Not the planet, the forests, not the ground formations.Especially not the fact that this planetwasinhabited by intelligent life.They had built cities.Fucking cities.And we hadn’t been able to see them until it was too late.
The only reliable data, coming to me about the status of my ship, was not good.
The stabilizer coil — responsible for managing the power core's interaction with external electromagnetic fields — was gone.Not damaged.Destroyed.The power core itself was currently stable, running on internal reserves, humming quietly in the belly of the ship like a heart that didn't yet know it was bleeding.