From Every Opening Flower

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“Everything’s negative, Mike,” Nadine’s husky voice reported from the starship Jacqueline Cochran’s biological analysis station. “They’re just gone—and we can’t tell why from up here. There’s nothing left to do but go down.”

Commander Mike Tanner slapped the arm of his chair in frustration. After a month in orbit, the mystery remained. His screen was filled with the planet—a blue and white, green and brown work of art from here. They’d scoured the abandoned settlement with flying and crawling robots and flown through its buildings and forests in virtual reality. The colony’s starship was still waiting in orbit, fully functional—if they’d gone somewhere else, they’d gone in someone else’s spacecraft.

Mike’s older sister, Dena, had been its chief bioforming engineer, and had been down there when the colony fell silent. Gone. He remembered her, not so much as an executive engineer, but as a pixie-haired adventuress, always taking him to new and different places.

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