A star system is an enormous place. From the outside, you can usually make out some pretty good details; how many planets it has. Rough composition. If any of them were sending out radio signals in the past.

  But the little details? Space stations, colonies, starships, the sort of irregularities that might indicate something alive? You needed to get pretty close, or have a big array of scanners.

  The Sapper, both the first one and the new one… were built for a little bit of both. Long-range scans using a few dozen sensor drones picked out 62 star systems with planets, and six more with significant debris that used to be planets at some point.

  When she emerged from darkspace a few light-hours away from the first one; listed as Beta Cluster - 1 on their chart; she’d activated her stealth paneling, displaying a picture of the stars outside the system from anything watching on the inside; and launched a buoy on a course that would pass her through the system in three days and two hours.

  There were five planets, three of them gas giants, and an asteroid belt that was almost as sparse as the original Solar one. Definitely a poor candidate.

  They hopped out, expecting nothing… and kept going over the course of the day, dropping off drone after drone.

  Not all of the systems were quite so boring. BC-7 actually had a BSE colony ship, and a world that could be called ‘vaguely’ habitable…. It appeared as if it was below freezing for over ninety percent of its 800-day-long revolutions, but that meant there’d be a couple of months every few years where you could walk outside, and there was always a bit of liquid water. That buoy was adjusted; it would drop back into Darkspace no matter what it found, with a report of whatever communications it overheard.

  For some kinds of augments, that was actually perfectly comfortable. Highly unlikely that was the only kind there, though.

  BC-15 had at least one old comm signature, something had been there years before; as well as only a single planet, and enormous debris fields that appeared to be the remnants of at least seven rocky worlds which had been broken into pieces. Rather than just the single buoy, they’d actually launched a dozen smaller sensor drones on different arcs; knowing they’d be coming back in-person, they didn’t bother with anything FTL-capable; just set them to gather together in three different pickup spots in a few days.

  Not only was it exactly the sort of system a mining company would love, making it easy to find valuable deposits, but the dragons would like it too. That comm signal was likely from a miner who’d staked a claim at some point, though it was so faded the equipment was undoubtedly damaged.

  Overall, by the time they reached the 25th stop, they’d found dozens of possible candidates that might have something, and two systems with actual active operations of some sort. More importantly…

  Sherry was studying the console in the middle of her own shift; everyone else was running combat sims; and they were simply waiting for the first signal to come pick up a buoy.

  The display had a set of 26 count-downs for when the expected pickup time would be for BC-1 through BC-26; and none of them had reached zero yet, so they had no idea if anything had been found… though they already knew BC-15 would be one of their stops regardless.

  She was reviewing all of the telescope footage; 26 sets of images, from different perspectives on this side of the cluster; and noticed something odd.

  Depending on how far apart they were, sometimes binary or trinary stars might have worlds. It was rare, but it happened. Most surveyors skipped them; the galaxy had over a hundred and fifty billion star systems, and the ones more likely to be useful were prioritized.

  She’d spotted several such cases out of the hundreds they’d surveyed here. Tiny, barren, rocky, and useless. But one of them…

  She added it to the list as ‘BC-A’. The binary pair had two gas-giants… and one moon that appeared to actually have liquid water on its surface, orbiting the closer of the two. It was interesting. However unlikely it was, there might actually be life there.

  She grinned. They had plenty of time before the first pickup. Might as well take a look.

  Sherry sent Kyle a quick message about what she’d spotted, and asking if he’d mind a side-trip… and the immediate response.

  ~Go ahead! Let me know if you see anything cool.~

  She nodded… and ran the numbers. She wasn’t exactly an expert pilot… but this didn’t call for precision.

  After less than half an hour of transit in Darkspace, the Sapper would shift back into reality… about three light-hours away from the target world. Close enough to get a much, much better picture of the target.

  As she checked the scopes, watching an image of the gas giant and its moons slowly resolve into more detail…

  “Yesssssssss!” She smacked her console. And sent a message to the others.

  “You guys should either come to the bridge, or open this up in the sim. This is gonna be awesome.”

  ***

  As the group gathered on the bridge; aside from Posseux, of course, who was watching from the emitter; Sherry brought up the picture of the moon.

  “Okay, so. I’m gonna call this place Sherry’s World, obviously, since I found it. Buuut….”

  As the picture zoomed in… it became clear why she was interested. The mostly-blue sphere had a thick ring of purple and green around its surface.

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  “So. Sherry’s World is tidally locked with the gas giant its orbiting. The way the days and seasons work is gonna be kinda fucked up, but its got a 42-hour day-night cycle, with the outside going from hot to frigid, and the inside going from cold to… just cold, it actually stays within a few degrees of freezing pretty much always.”

  She looked around at them. “And this purple-green ring? Some sort of life form. We won’t know more without taking a closer look, but it seems pretty clear we’ve got an ecosystem that manages to survive juust above freezing. Not sure if we can breathe the air, but there’s gonna be about a six-hour span every morning that people could comfortably walk on the beach before it gets too hot.”

  Kyle gave a slow nod, and looked at the others. “I think we should stop and take a look. Take a few samples. Any objections?”

  Poisseux’s emitter buzzed. “Honestly, while taking a closer look wouldn’t be a bad idea… we have no idea if there’s any dangerous wildlife. We should setup some sensors to observe, leave a piece of bait where they can watch, and then go collect the drones. See what happens to a bit of fake meat if its left out.”

  He blinked. “That…. Is actually an excellent idea. I’ll load up in my armor, we can get a closer look, and then leave it be for now. If the world is safe for humans, great; we can take a walk on an alien beach before any other person. If not, its still a valuable find worth looking at.”

  Poisseux buzzed again. “Seriously. You have no idea whats down there, and are gonna go down in armor? There have been… seventeen… worlds I know of that had a major aquatic predator that could be a threat to an armored human, unless you’re talking full, real, power armor, not that half-assed garbage you looted from the Imps.”

  “...So what, just drop a drone and leave cameras and bait on the beach?”

  “Exactly. Don’t be an idiot.”

  ***

  Rather than walking down in person, or even landing a shuttle, they did the most expedient possible thing… and simply loaded down Poisseux’s fighter with sensors rather than missiles.

  They all got to watch, from her fighter’s perspective, as it slowly dropped down; the narrow green-purple band swelling as it dropped, showing a massive sheet of ice on the left, an ocean dotted with small islands to the right…

  And in the center, a chain of islands… connected by that green-purple band. As she got lower, it became clear that a dense mass of roughly hex-shaped plants in colors ranging from a emerald to violet blanketed both land and sea along that band… there was no visible beach, nowhere to walk without stepping on whatever it was.

  At least, not for the first fifty miles. Finally, they found a spot where a larger island extended out from that bar, leaving strips of exposed, rocky beach… and she lowered the fighter down, pulling into a hover just a few meters above the beach; and only about forty from the mass of vegetation.

  It looked like a solid wall of the stuff, with no apparent pattern to the colors.

  “....That’s… weird. You’d expect to see at least some scattered further away.”

  The fighter slowly adjusted its orientation… and started dropping the sensors. Each was a solid cylinder about a meter long, with a camera and a variety of other tools build into it; and the final one… opened, to reveal a mass of fake meat.

  The fighter slowly tilted, observing the carpet of oddly colored hexes… and the way they slowly moved and rippled, whether pushed by the wind, or on their own… and then angled itself up, and started to rise.

  Kyle looked at the imagery. “...It almost seems artificial.”

  Sherry nodded. “Like someone planted a garden on a single specific row. The weird bit is that it holds to the same shape across the ocean’s surface, too. Is it floating, or supported by some vines running from island to island?”

  Thor zoomed in on the picture of the plants; their contact with the ground, if they had one, was hidden by their ‘leaves’. “The ocean might be shallow. Could be growing up from the floor there… passing water through the network. It might even all be a single massive organism.”

  Kyle glanced at him. One of those rare moments that reminded him that none of these people were fools; Thor might have been wasting time learning to swing an axe in some fantasy game, but there was still a brilliant mind behind that handsome facade.

  “Definitely possible. Or each hex is its own living thing. Though the uniformity… is odd. We should definitely take samples when we come back. I’m gonna drop a sensor buoy here, and have it relay sensor data once a day so we can keep an eye on what happens to the bait… and to that stuff.”

  They all spent the next few minutes watching the sensor feed. The waves rippling across the shore. The odd movement of the hexes.

  Thor blinked. “Oh, hell. Can we breathe there? Is there an atmosphere tester on that thing?”

  Sherry chuckled. “Yes, actually. There’s some particulates in the air, so a breath-mask would be good until we know if its safe. But there’s enough O2 in the atmosphere that you can walk with just a breath-mask. Waaay too much CO2 though. You take off the mask, you’ll be out cold in minutes, dead within the hour. Maybe some nose plugs if we can trust you to breathe through your nose instead of the mouth.”

  When the Poisseux started to slide back into the cargo bay, they took one last look… and then turned back to the timers.

  Three of them had expired. When they re-entered Darkspace, they’d either have buoys waiting, transmitting data about the system they just entered…

  Or know there was something worth looking at.

  ***

  In the void, they were disappointed, at first.

  BC-1, 2, and 4 were the first three that were supposed to report… and all of them did, without fail. Reports of uninhabited systems, no signs or indicators that something might be alive, no heat sources…. And a map of the two thousand asteroids big enough to hide a dragon, if they wanted to be thorough.

  On the plus side, there were a few dozen clearly visible patches of potentially valuable raw materials. On the downside? They were heavy metals which, if there were a dragon in the system, from what they knew, would already have attracted the creature’s voracious appetites.

  The first one Kyle had slain was, after all, attracted by exactly such deposits exposed by mining operations.

  As they moved to collect them, one by one; the new sensor package proving surprisingly adept; BC-3 passed the time it was supposed to have emerged…. And still hadn’t.

  When BC-5 and BC-6 buoys both reported in, half an hour later, but BC-3 still hadn’t…

  Kyle grinned. “Alright then. So. Either we lost the buoy… it spotted something interesting…or it got captured. Regardless. This might be dangerous. So. Everybody on-shift for this one. I want drones ready to launch, and we’re doing a last-minute check of all weapons and the stealth coating. I want visible confirmation the panels are working properly before we pass through; if there’s a dragon, there might also be an Empire watchdog lurking.”

  Everyone knew the ship was ready. That there shouldn’t be a single thing wrong. But still; this was a possibly extremely dangerous situation. Everyone checked each wire. The maintenance drones swept the stealth panels, picking off tiny bits of debris, and polishing one of them.

  Finally, the check-list was complete. They pulled through darkspace, lining up with the spot that should be a light-hour away from the buoy; far enough to spot it on telescopes and signal it with a laser, but not close enough for an ambusher to kill them.

  He took a deep breath. There might just be another dragon on the other side, waiting for them. But if there was? He was ready.