Chapter One:
***
Norah rubbed her face on the sleeve of her t-shirt and sealed the last of her water samples in the plastic container.
She took one last glance at the rows of small glass vials that accounted for the last half-year of her life before firmly closing the top. Robert took the box and placed it into another, larger box filled with coolers they had leisurely packed up.
“That’s about it, those are the last samples I have of the local waterways.” She pulled the bottom of her shirt up and wiped the sweat that beaded on her face again.
She had turned off the ventilation less than an hour ago and already the heat from the outside had filled the room. It didn’t help that the doors were open.
Her lab was one of the last to be packed up into the shuttle. Not only because she had stalled but because water wasn’t as important as the bacteria, plant, and animal samples that they were bringing back to Earth.
The entire research facility was being vacated.
“Huh, thank god. All this just for water and soil samples. I can’t believe they’re shutting us down, Man, I hate theMan. But, damn, I can’t wait to get off this world.”
Norah humphed back. “Can you blame them? At least they let us stay for the rest of the season. This place just isn’t ready to be colonized.” But to her it was paradise, and she wanted to stay.
“It’s the Australia of the stars. Everything here wants to kill you, eat you, or inhabit your body. Could you imagine if normal people came to this place? It ain’t worth it. For fuck’s sake, stick to Earth, Tau-Ceti, and Gliese, or if you’re looking for adventure, settle on one of the lesser worlds.”
“I heard Earth was once like this place: wild, lush, and green.” She caught herself before she went off on a rant.
“Riiight, I also heard humans once didn’t know how to speak to each other.”
Norah held back her frustration. She wished Robert would take the final box of samples and leave, but instead, he grabbed a water canister and opened it.
“Colonization is not the only reason why we’re here. And I swear we’ll be back before the turn of the year,” she said.
“Not me. I’ll shoot myself in the foot the day they announce the return mission. I hate this jungle.”
Norah turned her back on him and began to power down her instruments. She purged the chromatograph and disconnected the pressurized lines to remove the silica column. There was no sense in letting it degrade.
Water science wasn’t the most glamorous thing in the building, so her equipment felt all the more precious for it.
She grabbed a rag and a bottle of acetone to wipe the glassware they were leaving behind. Norah looked at the beaker in her hand before she placed it into the cabinet.
We’ll be back.
It had taken her years to qualify for off-world colonization efforts.
She was still in shock six months later to be on Axone and in her own lab. It barely counted as a closet in the facility but it had been hers. All hers.
She wasn’t employed by the governmentper se, but for a private health corporation that was funded by the Earthian Planetary Exploration Division. Norah was part of a small team of scientists sent by EonMed to study the landscape, weather, and environmental shifts, as well as the plants and animals.
Robert, on the-other-hand, was a botanist. And one would think, being on an undiscovered jungle planet–filled with new, alien plants–the man would be thrilled. But he wasn’t. Not after his girlfriend got bit by an unknown creature and was now slowly going blind back on Earth.
The climate wasn’t great. It was hot. Humid. And every time you walked outside it was like being slapped by a big, wet blanket and it had only gotten worse with the encroaching storm.
Norah didn’t want to leave.
She didn’t care about the wildness of the jungle or the stuffy weather. It was everything she had hoped for and more. Axone was her Eden. It was a world that still had water, and not just the elemental substance–it existed as rivers, lakes, swamps, and even oceans that would have rivaled those of ancient Earth.
It has rain.
As a little girl raised in the shadows of giant skyscrapers, water was as unnatural amongst the old metal as it was natural on this world.
Axone had invited her the moment she saw the landscape appear outside the window in her quarters on the ship.
