My ankle buckles and I slip on a stone, its surface covered in something not unlike lichen. I stumble, but regain my footing quickly. Panting. Every molecule of this festering moon seems to want me dead. The air thick with a soup of toxins, the bizarre flora that towers above me, splaying outwards like some grotesque mocking sea creature. A stench manages to make its way inside my suit somehow. The beacon had pointed me in the direction of an old manufacturing facility, parts of it possibly still in tact. Now, the structure is ahead of me, half a klick down this ridge. I tense as my eye catches movement in the twisted vines. I wait. Nothing.

I descend, but stop again as I’m almost at the prefab. The doors to the place stand ajar, no light coming from inside. Broken electronics spark around the entrance. No movement. Cautiously, I step up the ramp and through the busted hole in the wall. The stench grows stronger. Thumbing the suit’s controls,my headlamp shines on to reveal the wall, floor and ceiling covered with a glistening growth obviously native to this rock. It’s completely still inside. Any machinery that was here has been long stripped. A sudden flicker of movement to my right. Inching round the doorframe, I take a look, struggling to parse what I see. A hand. Part of a pressure suit. A mandible. There was someone under that growth. Maybe more than one someone. I crane my neck toward the ceiling, only to find an eye staring back at me from underneath the viscous stuff. It blinks.