Dr. Hira Quan adjusted her visor against the glare of the twin suns. She stood atop the Calcite Expanse, an endless desert of crystallized bone left behind by the extinct leviathans of Thalmaris-9. Her excavation team had uncovered something impossible—a fossil clutch of eggs still radiating weak bio-signatures.
She touched one, and it pulsed. The scientists had agreed to leave them undisturbed, but she hesitated. The calcite wasteland had never yielded life before. These creatures, whatever they were, could repopulate a dead world.
Her comm crackled. “Hira? Corporate says no interference. They want samples, not survivors.”
She exhaled. The last egg trembled under her hand. With a swift motion, she recalibrated her scanner, flooding the airwaves with false data. The research vessel would detect nothing.
As the sand shifted, she knew she’d altered the planet’s fate. Perhaps also her own.
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