“This thing by the weathervane—it’s not a sludge. It’s… hell, I have no idea what this is.”

“Describe it,” Alessicka said.

“It’s… like… big. Maybe four times as large as I am. Black and lumpy, with red veins running all over its body.”

“Red veins?” Alessicka asked. “Not yellow, like a creeping Helen?”

“No, definitely red. They’re pulsing. And there are these… tendril things coming out at its base. Like roots. I think they’re moving, but very slowly.”

There was a pause, and Jen could hear Alessicka typing. “I haven’t heard of a creature like that,” she said, “and the system isn’t bringing up any matches. Should I call Perros, Jen?”

Calling Perros, their ward planet, essentially meant asking for backup. Technically, that was the correct protocol for when they found an unidentifiable alien lifeform, but hardly any station followed it.

“Aw, hell no,” Carly said. “It looks harmless. It’s actually managing to move less than a sludge. I’ll just inject it real quick, and then we can get back to our damn jobs.”

Alessicka’s voice was tight with anxiety when she replied, “Don’t proceed. You don’t have clearance.” She hesitated then added, “She… she doesn’t have clearance. Does she, Jen?”

Jen sighed. Calling Perros was a huge inconvenience for everyone involved. Support wouldn’t reach them for nearly twenty-eight hours, and if Carly was right and the lifeform was vegetation or low-risk, they wouldn’t be happy about having their time wasted.

“Stay where you are, Carly. I’ll come to you, and we can deal with it together.”

“Sure you don’t want me to get it now? It’s an ugly son of a—”

“No.” Jen unclipped the sludge from her belt. “Just stay put.”

“Fine,” Carly huffed, and Jen thought she heard a relieved sigh from Alessicka in the background.

Jen bounded across the moon’s surface, her boots kicking up puffs of dust with each step. Perros rose over the horizon to her left, and she could see one of their sister moons, 384, to the right. There wasn’t any proper day or night on 331, so the moon felt perpetually suspended in twilight; the atmosphere cast a red glow over the already-bronze landscape, dimming the sun’s light and casting strange, leaping shadows.

Jen was still a few minutes from the weathervane when she heard Carly inhale sharply.

“What happened?” she asked at the same moment Alessicka said, “Carly?”

Carly laughed. “Oh, wow. I didn’t expect that. I poked it, and it started moving.”

“Moving?”

“Yeah, these tendril vine-like things are stretching out and waving all over the place. Are you sure we have to kill it? It’s the most interesting thing we’ve had on this moon in months.”

Jen kicked against the ground to leap over a rocky ridge. “Damn it, Carly. Stay away from it until I get there. We don’t know how dangerous it is.”

“Relax,” Carly drawled. “It can’t reach me. I don’t even think it can see. It’s—” She gasped sharply.

Jen heard scraping and rustling, then Carly shrieked.