The wind across the flats smelled of hot iron and old lightning. I killed the shuttle's thrusters at the edge of the mineralized ridge, let the dust settle, and stepped down into a night that wasn't night. Three moons hung low—silver, pearl, and bruised violet—turning the hoodoos into black paper cutouts against a sky still bleeding sunset orange.

I slung the field kit over my shoulder and walked the first hundred meters on foot, boots crunching gravel the color of dried blood. That's when I saw them.

Specimen-1 squatted in a shallow basin like a green fist wrapped in wool. Specimen-2 rose out of the scree like a green mine. Specimen-3 and Specimen-4 grew side by side in the lee of a toppled boulder, both Haworthia rosettes but night-and-day different. The last one, Specimen-5, waited in the mouth of a shallow cave where mist pooled like breath.

I set the compute core down on the gravel between the Superwhite and the largest Dragon. For three heartbeats nothing happened. Then the core lit up from the inside, soft green, the same color as the plants themselves.

"Welcome to the crew," I whispered.

The Superwhite's leaves shivered once, as if it had heard.