While Kira waited for her chip-lab to finish its analysis, she walked to the crest of the hill, took in the view of the rough-scraped rocks and the metallic ocean.
She frowned as she remembered how long it would be before they could stock the oceans with anything more than gene-spliced algae and plankton.
This is going to be our home. It was a sobering thought. But not depressing. Weyland wasn’t much friendlier, and Kira remembered the massive improvements she had seen on the planet over the course of her childhood: once-barren dirt converted to fertile soil, the spread of green growing things across the landscape, the ability to walk around outside for a limited time without supplemental oxygen. She had optimism. Adrasteia was more habitable than 99-some percent of the planets in the galaxy. By astronomical standards, it was an almost perfect analogue for Earth, more similar than a high-g planet like Shin-Zar, and even more similar than Venus, with its floating cloud cities.
Whatever the difficulties Adrasteia presented, she was willing to face them if it meant she and Alan could be together.
We’re getting married! Kira grinned and lifted her arms overhead, fingers splayed, and stared straight up, feeling as if she were about to burst. Nothing had ever felt so right.
A high-pitched beep sounded in her ear.
3.
The chip-lab had finished. She checked the readout. The bacteria was B. loomisii, as she’d thought.
Kira sighed and turned off the device. Mendoza had been right—it was their responsibility to check out the growth—but it was still a huge waste of time.
Whatever. Back to HQ and Alan, and then they could blast off for the Fidanza.
Kira started to leave the hill, and then, out of curiosity, she looked toward where the drone had crashed. Neghar had IDed and tagged the location during the shuttle’s descent.
There. A klick and a half from the coast, near the center of the island, she saw a yellow box outlining a patch of ground next to …
“Huh.”
A formation of jagged, pillar-shaped rocks stabbed out of the ground at a steep, sideways angle. In all the places Kira had visited on Adra—and they were many—she hadn’t seen anything quite like it.
“Petra: select visual target. Analyze.”
Her system responded. An outline flashed around the formation, and then a long list of elements scrolled next to it. Kira’s eyebrows rose. She wasn’t a geologist like Alan, but she knew enough to realize how unusual it was to have so many elements clustered together.
“Thermals up,” she muttered. Her visor darkened, and the world around her became an impressionistic painting of blues, blacks, and—where the ground had absorbed the warmth of the sun—muted reds. As expected, the formation perfectly matched the ambient temperature.
<Hey, check this out. – Kira> And she forwarded the readings to Alan.
Less than a minute later: <The hell! You sure your equipment is? – Alan>
<Pretty sure. What do you think it is? – Kira>
<Dunno. Might be a lava extrusion … Can you get a scan of it? Maybe pick up a few samples? Dirt, rock, whatever is convenient. – Alan>
<If you really want. It’s a bit of a hike, though. – Kira>
<I’ll make it worth your while. – Alan>
<Mmm. I like the sound of that, babe. – Kira>
<Hey now. – Alan>
She smirked and swapped out of the infrared as she started down the hill. “Neghar, do you read?”
A crackle of static and then: *What’s up?*
“I’m going to be another half hour or so. Sorry.”
*Dammit! Those rolls aren’t going to last more than—*
“I know. There’s something I have to investigate for Alan.”
*What?*
“Some rocks, farther inland.”
*You’re gonna give up Yugo’s cinnamon rolls for THAT?*
“Sorry, you know how it is. Besides, haven’t seen anything quite like this before.”
A moment of silence. *Fine. But you better haul ass, you hear me?*
“Roger that, hauling ass,” said Kira. She chuckled and quickened her pace.
Where the uneven ground allowed, she jogged, and ten minutes later, she arrived at the tilted outcropping. It was bigger than she’d realized.
The highest point was a full seven meters overhead, and the base of the formation was over twenty meters across: wider even than the shuttle was long. The broken cluster of columns, black and faceted, reminded her of basalt, but their surface had an oily sheen similar to that of coal or graphite.
There was something about the appearance of the rocks that Kira found off-putting. They were too dark, too stark and sharp-edged, too different from the rest of the landscape—a ruined spire alone amid the granite wasteland. And though she knew it was her imagination, an uneasy air seemed to surround the outcropping, like a low vibration just strong enough to annoy. Were she a cat, Kira felt sure her hair would be standing on end.
She frowned and scratched her forearms.
It sure didn’t look like there’d been a volcanic eruption in the area. Okay then, a meteor strike instead? But that didn’t make sense either. No blast wall or crater.
She walked around the base, scanning. Near the back, she spotted the remnants of the drone: a long strip of broken and melted components dashed against the ground.
Hell of a lightning strike, Kira thought. The drone must have been going pretty fast to spread it out like that.
She shifted in her suit, still feeling uneasy. Whatever the formation was, she decided she’d leave the mystery for Alan to figure out. It would give him something to do on the flight out of the system.
She took a soil sample and then searched until she found a small piece of the black rock that had flaked off. She held it up to the sun. It had a distinct crystalline structure: a fish-scale-like pattern that reminded her of woven carbon fiber. Impact crystals? Whatever it was, it was unusual.
She tucked the rock into a sample pouch and gave the formation one last look-over.
A silvery flash, several meters off the ground, caught her eye.
Kira paused, studying it.
A crack had split open one of the columns to reveal a jagged white seam within. She checked her overlays: the seam was too deep within the crack to get a good reading. The only thing the scanner could tell her for sure was that it wasn’t radioactive.
The comm crackled, and Neghar said, *How ya doing, Kira?*
“Almost done.”
*’K. Hurry up, would you?*
“Yeah, yeah,” Kira muttered to herself.
She eyed the crack, trying to decide if it was worth the effort to climb up and examine. She nearly contacted Alan to ask but then decided not to bother him. If she didn’t find out what the seam was, she knew the question would annoy him until they, hopefully, returned to Adra and he got a chance to examine it himself.
Kira couldn’t do that to him. She’d seen him stay up late far too many times, poring over blurred footage from a drone.
Besides, the crack wasn’t that hard to reach. If she started there and went over to that, then maybe … Kira smiled. The challenge appealed to her. The skinsuit didn’t have gecko pads installed, but it shouldn’t matter, not for an easy climb like this.