2287 CE

Location: Constellation Cygnus

The Bone Gardener

"Dr. Sager?"

The shadow of Nikki Summers fell over the jawbone of the Langodont fossil I'd spent the better part of the last two days meticulously excavating. In accordance with the planet's geological time scale, Langodont, loosely translated as Long Tooth, once ruled Segan 9 some seventy-five million years ago. And remarkably the ancient remains of this carnivorous theropod were revealing that the animals of this planet evolved similarly to the dinosaurs of Earth.

"You're in the light, Nikki," I admonished absently. Nikki Summers, a grad student of twenty-two, was one of three students I'd taken with me on a distant world paleontological dig. A shocking number to say the least. Being a paleontologist wasn't the most lucrative or glamorous gig. Not after Xenomrophs became the dominant species of Earth, causing a mass extinction on a global scale and giving rise to the frantic exodus of 2157. Over a century of terraforming and seeding other worlds, the devastating loss still echoed in our bones, and hardly anyone cared about an alien planet's primal beginnings.

"Oh," she stepped to the side and the high noon sun threw the peaks of charcoal black bone in stark relief against the maroon earth. "My bad. Dr. Zwicky wanted me to tell you the s-storm's trajectory has changed."

"What?" I looked up sharply, my eyes tracking the startled jerk of her body. Willowy and thin, perhaps a bit too thin, Nikki's already impossible round eyes grew even wider behind her large circular gold-framed glasses. Fidgeting back and forth on her toes, she nervously tucked a lock of hair away when her brown eyes went to the scar on my upper lip and seemed to fixate on it.

I sighed and set aside my tools. Segan 9's host star wasn't that brilliant, only half as bright as the Sun back in the Sol system. But the girl was standing with her back to it, forcing me to look in its direction. Lifting myself off my belly, I swung my legs around and began to work the stiffness out of my shoulders as I squinted up at her.

"How long?" Hearing the snarl rising in my voice, I took a breath and softened my expression before meeting the fawnish girl's perpetually flighty, brown eyes. Miss Summers flushed and dodged my gaze. Seriously, why did I try? None of my efforts to be friendly with this girl ever seemed to make a difference. And apparently, they never would no matter how well I tempered my thorny nature. Dr. Zwicky informed me, in a rather puzzlingly amused tone, that it had more to do with my lack of hair and my tattoos than my demeanor. Segan 9 had a mild climate varying between 26-23 degrees Celcius during its hottest point of the day. And after six or seven consecutive hours of back-breaking digging and lying in uncomfortable positions, the last thing I cared about was my hair. Why bother trying to manage or style something that would get in the way? So I shaved it. Except when I had hair it must've diminished the severity of the scars on my neck and face. And recently, I've discovered there's an edge of perceived menace that having a shaved head comes with. This, of course, was a fallacious illusion; a fabrication of a sheltered and frankly, ignorant mind. Moreover, it appeared to be an intrinsic assumption. After all, Miss Summers wasn't the only person in our group of eleven who avoided me. If I cared, I would've told the girl to grow up, eat a cupcake, and get over it. Though, if given the choice, I would've sent her back to her family. However, distant world paleontology, or to be more precise xeno-paleontology, was a relatively new venture. And the odds of finding another batch of curious, budding scientists who didn't mind the bad pay or the hard, risky work was about the same as Weyland-Yutani domesticating a Xenomorph.

"Before full d-dark," she stammered.

Great. Full dark was in less than two hours, and with dusk light lasting a fraction of the twenty-seven-hour solar day, it made for long, unyielding blackened nights. The host star allotted us six hours before working without outdoor lamps became impossible, but the portables we had were finicky and older than the fossils in the bonebed. I ran a hand over the peach fuzz of my brownish-red hair, secretly loving the feel of it. "I appreciate the heads up, Nikki."

Hands clasped behind her back, Nikki bobbed her head then trotted off to join Dr. Zwicky, a burley paleobotanist in his late forties, and Scott Turow another grad student. Together they started laying out tarps to protect the dig sights. Nothing sucked more than spending weeks painstakingly sweeping away dirt and chipping away rock for a specimen to get buried under two feet of mud overnight.

Stretching my short legs back out, the ground warm against my belly, I started applying glue to the exposed bone. At its full height, the Long Tooth therapod stood 5 feet tall, was 11 feet from tail to snout, and weighed in around 77-99 kilos. In its prime, this had been a deadly predator, but now all that remained were bones so fragile a fixative had to be applied or I'd risk losing them as I exposed more and more of the skeleton.

The teeth of this creature were fascinating. Thrice the size of other carnivores with similar body mass and structure.

Like the large maxillary canines of a saber-toothed ca-

Shimmering in the outer rim of my periphery stalled my musings. Gaze rising from the bonebed, I stared straight ahead at the burbling falls feeding the narrow stream we used to bathe and wash our tools in. The glare of the host star glistened and danced across the waters' turbulent surface. And the sight brought on an unexpected flutter of joy as it did every day since our arrival three months ago. Barely audible over the continuous hush of the fall, the jungle warbled, chirped, and crooned the symphony of life. I was born in a shake n' bake colony on Titan, Saturn's largest moon. The few memories I had of Earth were ancient holovids. There was nothing green on Titan. No running water. No air. No indigenous life. Before Segan 9, I had two other digs: One on Mars in Hellas Planitia (after it had been terraformed), and the other on Proxima Centauri b. Neither of which supported an ecosystem so richly diverse, or as extraordinarily complex as Segan 9. And the evolutionary history of this planet was beneath my brush.

Sprays of water twinkled in the foaming plunge pool beneath the fall. The glare caught the airborne droplets and the air shimmered. I blinked, cocked my head. The air shimmered again. Or was it wavy? An unexplainable prickling of pins and needles marched from the base of my spine to my scalp. There seemed to be structural mass to it. Humanoid mass. It was like staring into the burn-in or ghost image of an old non-uniform pixelated screen. Leaning forward, my elbows digging into the churned dirt, I scanned the rest of the bank. No optical illusions. The strange shimmering only seemed to occur near the basin.

So it's a trick of the light then.

I stared hard at the plumes of water spraying up from the plunge pool. Something cold and wet touched the exposed skin of my calf. Tension strung my spine wire tight, tasting my heart at the back of my throat, I curbed the desire to yelp and leap to my feet. We were the invasive species here. And the scars on my back burned with the sensory memory of the last time I accidentally spooked an animal that had never smelled, much less seen a human before.

Slowly, I tilted my body, putting my weight on my left elbow. Head cocked back, my eyes traveled over the dirty black tank and down the grey-scaled fatigue knee-length cargos. A pair of gold but fiercely happy eyes stared back at me. Zeus, Dr. Zwicky's cloned Australian cattle dog, lapped at my calf with an excited, breathy yip.

"Zeus," I said, simultaneously exhaling a laugh and groan. My head dropped to my forearms, hiding a relieved smile. Zeus barked, bounced his forepaws off my ass in excitement, then attempted to tunnel his way under my armpit to get at my face. I wrapped an arm around his neck in a headlock and laughed, trying and failing to keep his eager, slobbery tongue away from my face.

Chuckling, the familiar deep rumble of Greer Hendricks got Zeus to pause long enough for me to take a breather without risking swapping spit with the dog. "Blink twice if you want me to put you out of your misery," Hendricks offered oh-so-helpfully instead of braving the 15 kilos of rambunctious K9 for my sake. This incident notwithstanding, Sgt. Greer Hendricks and his team of four were our Wey-Yu assigned protection detail. The peril of undocumented wildlife and alien disease was omnipresent. But in recent years, the threat of poachers and competitive companies has risen drastically.

"Some protective detail you turned out to be," I snorted good-naturedly.

Dimples popped at the crests of Greer's grin as he stooped down at the edge of the bonebed. Bands of failing light played across the Sergeant's ink-black skin, sharpening the high peaks of his cheekbones and exaggerating the firm swells of his chest and arms. Hard to believe this man was a synthetic human. And Sgt. Greer had to be the best one I'd ever seen. Unlike many other synthetics who attempted to blend in with the rest of humanity, Greer didn't, and I liked him better for it.

"Storms comin', Brynn." Neck stretching, the host star's light warmed Greer's cinnamon irises to butterscotch as they searched the area behind me. His eyes narrowed and I sat up straighter, remembering the strange shimmering in the fore of the plunge pool. Zeus nudged my elbow, whined. After a moment, his focus came back to me. "Need help with the tarp?"

I blinked at him, bewildered. How could his trained eyes have missed that? Maybe it really had been a trick of the light. Out of curiosity, I turned to scan the falls for myself, but as I did so, the first warning sprinkles of the oncoming storm hit the back of my neck. "Shit. The specimen." On my feet, I quickly rolled up my tools in their canvas sleeve. "Hey, Sgt. Dimples, grab the tarp folded behind your perfect vat-grown ass and spread it."

Drumming rumbles of laughter preluded the booming thunder rolling in our direction. Greer helped me spread the tarp over the sight and stake it down just in time. Rain fell from the sky by the bucket full, churning the hard topsoil to sticky putty in a matter of seconds. And without hair to act as a dam between my scalp and face, the water poured over me as if I was standing under a spigot.

Shouldering his M42b 10mm pulse action semi-auto, Greer hefted my tools beneath his arm. He said something to me as I bent to grab the jacketed fossil of fragmented eggs. The first bit of confirmation that we might have stumbled upon a nesting ground of some kind.

"What?" I hollered over the incessant rain, rising to my full height of 5'2" then standing on my tiptoes to not feel so small beside my 6'3" fellow baldy.

"I said you lost your charm."

"What?" My free hand flew to my breast bone, fingers running frantic circles around my neck in search of the rare deinonychus claw. But it was gone. Once again, the leather strap securing the fossil had come undone at the knot. I pulled at my salt ringed black tank in case the necklace had lodged itself between my breasts, which was typically where it ended up. It hadn't.

"Under the tarp?" Greer suggested. If it was there, it would be fine until things dried up, however, the thought of leaving it soured my stomach. What if it wasn't under the tarp? Then, the rain would either wash it away or bury it.

I slid my hands up and over the goose pocked flesh of my arms. I had to at least look for it. Getting on my hands and knees, the wet soil chilly against the bare skin of my calves, I slid my hands around the outer edge of the tarp.

A firm hand gripped my bicep. "Brynn, we need to get to the habitat. I'm sure it's under the tarp."

Greer was right. I couldn't search the sodden earth in this storm. Sighing in aggravation, I sank back on my folded legs and shielded my eyes with my forearm. On a whim, I glanced towards the falls, and it was there in the foreground of the plunge pool, crouched on the rocky bank a figure wrapped in undulating darkness stared back at me. The shock of seeing it was like a punch to the heart.

"Brynn?" Greer questioned, no doubt hearing the acceleration of my slamming pulse.

Without meaning to, I jerked forward towards the thing and streams of rainwater fell from my head right into my eyes. I shook myself like a dog. Wiped viciously at my face, but when I tried to find the anomalous shadowy mass again, it was gone...