There's a reason why the world you're coming up on stands out, you realize. In a system of shattered planetary fragments, a system where every world is small, barren and open to the void, Psi Iambartiana Oluma 39(42)-61y is a gem, a jewel of stormy skies and sludgy seas with rocky continents covered in the yellow-green mottling of something that looks like life, like vegetation. Almost immediately, you put a mote-probe in the atmosphere, make some simple flybys of the surface, take readings, samples of the air.
Hydrogen, helium, nitrogen, trace amounts of oxygen and fluorocarbons– it's unbreatheable, at least to humans, but the closer you get to the ground, the more established the local flora seems to be. It's like moss, mold, crawls over everything, slimes every rock, comes right up to the jagged black shores of the gelatinous oceans. Life– and the moss-mold isn't the only thing thriving. Other forms rise out of the slime as you cruise low over one of the landmasses, focus feed lenses on loping, shaggy shapes– an entire ecosystem, hunters and prey, all supported by and living among Psi Iambartiana Oluma 39(42)-61y's dominant form of vegetation.
Inspired, you drift on heavy coastal breezes, observe the world's life until the sun sinks brown and dirty to the edge of the coal-black horizon. Notes go into the network, observations, video feeds, and as you set the probe on recall, you come back to your ship, your body, float a moment before spinning up the phasedrive, making the jump back to between-space.
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