Xi Beecham Bissell 6b (Hyphomonii)

When your ship's integrated intelligence kicks you back into normal space-time, you find yourself in orbit of a fiery world swimming with oceans of liquid magma. It's an incredible sight, holds you mesmerized for a moment as you watch towering geysers of red-orange flame rise, collapse like waves in the boiling, sulfurous atmosphere. A world in natus, embryonic– not a single inch of it has begun to cool, and it will be eons before anything solid coalesces on the surface, if ever it does.

You make a note in the database, forward your observations to the network. Another virgin world, and your eyes are the first human eyes to see it. They may also be the last– beyond the possibility of exploiting it through expensive orbital magma mining, the world has no use in the grand scheme of human expansion into the universe. No one is likely to be interested in it, and certainly not any time soon.

From orbit, your scans tell you that the magma below is still very much in flux. There aren't any metallic signatures down there concentrated enough to make even magma mining cost effective. Better to leave this planet to set, to brew for a while, come back in a few million years, if you're still alive.

Taking one last look at it, at the fountains of fiery, liquid rock spewing from the surface, you spin up the phasedrive in silence, prepare for a jump back into between-space.

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