Still, the absence of more developed forms of life was a plus when it came to terraforming: it left the moon a lump of raw clay, suitable for remolding however the company, and the settlers, saw fit. Unlike on Eidolon—beautiful, deadly Eidolon—they wouldn’t have to be constantly fighting the native flora and fauna.

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.