The Snarric didn't have a name yet.

  Deke had been thinking about that. Standing outside the habitat viewport, arms crossed, watching the creature pace the far edge of its enclosure, he thought about how Maddie had named the floofs within about thirty seconds of seeing them. Poppy and Cirrus. Just like that, like it was obvious.

  This one didn't feel like it had a name yet. Or maybe it did and just wasn't sharing. Maybe wild animals don’t have names they share with the rest of us.

  The habitat was impressive, he had to admit. Orryx had built it to approximate Pyros Tertius as closely as the ship's systems allowed ... dark basalt formations, a faint amber glow simulating the volcanic light, the air inside kept at a temperature that would have dropped a human in thirty seconds. Through the viewport, it looked like a painting of the end of the world. Somehow peaceful from this side of the glass.

  The Snarric moved like something that had never once in its life considered the concept of being watched. Low to the ground, that heavy alligator-dog body rolling with each step, dark scales catching the amber light. It favored its left side slightly. Deke had noticed that on Pyros Tertius, too, before everything went sideways. Old injury, maybe. Something it had lived with long enough that it had just become the way it moved.

  "Yeah," Deke said quietly. To no one. To the Snarric. "Me too."

  The creature stopped. Turned its head with that slow, ancient deliberateness and looked directly at the viewport. Deke didn't move. Didn't step back. He wasn't sure if it could actually see him through the glass or if it was reacting to something else... vibration, heat signature, some sense he didn't have a name for. But it looked at him. For a long moment it just looked at him, and Deke looked back, and neither of them did anything at all.

  Then it turned away and resumed its pacing.

  Deke uncrossed his arms. He stood there another few minutes, not really thinking about anything, before he finally pushed off the wall and headed toward the lounge.

  *  *  *

  The synthesizer had been their great collective project for about three weeks now. Oryyx’s adjustments had made the food edible, but it was a far cry from being tasty, so they all took turns changing things trying to get it just right.

  Everyone had opinions. Maddie believed strongly that the key was in the seasoning ratios. Trent... back when Trent was still Trent and not whatever he was now on the other side of whatever was happening... had insisted it was a temperature calibration issue. Jessica had approached it like a technical problem, methodically, adjusting one variable at a time, and had gotten the closest to something that actually tasted like food.

  Today it tasted like chalk.

  Specifically, it tasted like someone had taken a reasonable approximation of scrambled eggs, achieved through genuine effort and incremental improvement, and then stirred a handful of classroom chalk into it at the last moment.

  Deke ate it anyway. He was hungry. It was still fuel, and he'd eaten worse. He'd eaten MREs for two weeks straight during a training exercise that washed him out anyway, so chalk-eggs weren't going to break him.

  He was halfway through the bowl when Vorrin came in, glanced at what he was eating, and went directly to the synthesizer with the expression of a man who had already diagnosed the problem before he'd entered the room.

  "Stabilizer chemical," Vorrin said, pulling the maintenance panel open with practiced efficiency. "Running low." He examined something inside that Deke couldn't see from the table, then closed the panel with a soft click. "It affects the molecular cohesion of the output. Everything will taste slightly mineralized until resupply."

  "Mineralized," Deke said. "That's a word for it."

  "I have others." Vorrin raised an eyebrow in what Deke could almost convince himself was a playful manner, had he not known the man well enough.

  "I'll stick with chalk."

  Vorrin almost smiled. It was hard to tell with him ... his face did this thing where it got slightly less severe instead of actually forming an expression ... but Deke had been around him long enough to recognize the near-miss. Vorrin moved to the other side of the synthesizer and put in a request for something, presumably something he'd calculated would be least affected by the stabilizer issue, and waited with his arms folded and his eyes on the middle distance.He was doing that thing he did sometimes, where he was clearly thinking about four things at once and had just temporarily set Deke aside in the queue.

  Deke ate his chalk-eggs.

  Jessica came in a few minutes later, got one look at what Deke was eating, and made a face. "Still?"

  "Chalk," Deke confirmed.

  "I thought we fixed the temperature thing."

  "Stabilizer chemical," Vorrin said, not looking up from whatever he was thinking about. "Resupply."

  Jessica poured herself something to drink and sat down across from Deke, wrapping both hands around the cup. She looked tired in the way she'd been looking tired lately... not sleepy, but like she was carrying a low-grade weight behind her eyes. She'd been quieter since Pyros Tertius. They all had, probably. It just looked different on each of them.

  She glanced at his hands. At the bandaging still wrapped around his arm where the bite had been.

  He didn't say anything. She didn't ask. That was one of the things about Jessica... she noticed everything and asked about almost none of it, which was either very respectful or slightly unnerving depending on how you wanted to interpret things.

  The door slid open again, and Maddie came in with a tablet tucked under her arm and her hair doing something complicated that suggested she'd been resting and then gotten excited about something mid-rest. She was already typing before she fully sat down, thumbs moving fast, occasionally pushing her hair out of the way with her wrist because her hands were occupied.

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  "Okay," she said, to all of them and none of them. "How do you spell Flooficatus."

  "F-L-O-O-F," Deke said.

  "I know that part."

  "You asked."

  Maddie looked up long enough to give him a look, then went back to the tablet. "Khamm spelled it for me, but I want to make sure I've got it right. Flooficatus prismaticus." She said it carefully, enunciating each syllable. "That's the official name. I want to use it at least once and then call them ‘the floofs’ because honestly, Flooficatus prismaticus is a lot to ask of anyone."

  "What are you doing?" Jessica asked.

  "Writing it down." Maddie set the tablet flat on the table so they could see the screen, though neither of them leaned in far enough to actually read it. "All of it. Everything. Someone should be doing this, and nobody was doing it, so I'm doing it." She pulled the tablet back. "I started from the beginning. The storm, waking up on the ship, the floofs. I'm going to write down every mission. Everything that happens." She paused, thumbs hovering. "Someone should know. Even if it's just... I don't know. Even if it's just us, eventually. Someone should make some sort of record."

  The lounge was quiet for a moment.

  "That's a good idea," Jessica said.

  Maddie looked slightly surprised to hear it said out loud, like she'd been prepared to defend the project and didn't need to. "Yeah?"

  "Yeah."

  Deke looked at the tablet. At Maddie's careful, slightly-too-fast typing. He thought about what she'd said, someone should know, and felt something shift in his chest, small and unidentifiable.

  "Don't write the chalk-eggs thing," he said.

  "I'm absolutely writing the chalk-eggs thing."

  It was Vorrin who changed the shape of the room.

  He'd finished whatever the synthesizer had produced for him... something that looked significantly more structurally sound than Deke's eggs... and set the bowl aside, and then he looked at the three of them with that particular quality of attention that meant he'd been waiting for the right moment and had decided this was it.

  "Since you're all here," he said.

  Jessica straightened slightly. Maddie's thumbs stopped.

  "We have an opportunity." He pulled out his own tablet... sleeker than Maddie's, everything about Vorrin was sleeker... and brought up what looked like a planetary scan. Massive cityscapes dotted the surface, but the tablet zoomed in closer to an area just outside one of the metropolises. Rust-colored terrain, dense with something that registered as vegetation on the overlay, though it didn't look like any plant life Deke would have called a plant. More like the ground itself had decided to start growing sideways. "This came through the archive system this morning. Survey data from a planet called Vethara Nol. Automated geological team was relocating a section of the surface fauna" ... he tilted the tablet so they could see better ... "and found remains beneath it."

  "Remains," Jessica said.

  "A species. Entirely unknown. Based on the decomposition state and the soil composition, they predate the surface fauna by somewhere between two and four thousand years, likely near the very beginning of the surface’s development. The current theory is that they were providing nutrients to the soil that allowed the surface fauna to develop as it did." He set the tablet down so they could all see it. "The surface fauna exists, in part, because this species died."

  Nobody said anything for a moment.

  "So they're already extinct," Deke said.

  "They were already extinct before anyone knew they existed, yes."

  Deke looked at the scan. At the rust-colored terrain and the strange sideways-growing whatever-it-was and the overlay data that represented bones or whatever equivalent this species had. Something left behind. Something that had fed the ground it died in and grown something else up through itself.

  "We can go back," Vorrin said. "The archive data gives us enough for a temporal fix within the probable extinction window. We go in, we assess, we determine if rescue is viable." He paused. "We know almost nothing about them. That's the reality of this mission. We'd be operating with significantly less information than usual."

  "How much less?" Jessica asked.

  "We know they were small. We know they processed organic matter. We know they were present in large enough numbers to meaningfully affect the soil composition across a region of roughly forty square kilometers." He picked up his tablet. "That's everything."

  Maddie had started typing again, quietly, like she didn't want to interrupt by stopping.

  Jessica was looking at the scan with that expression she got when she was turning something over in her mind and hadn't gotten to the end of it yet. "A species that nobody knew existed," she said, almost to herself. "That nobody would even know to look for."

  "If we don't go," Vorrin said, "no one does."

  It wasn't a speech. Vorrin didn't do speeches. It was just a fact, delivered in the same tone as stabilizer chemical and resupply, and somehow that made it land harder.

  Deke pushed his bowl to the side. The chalk-eggs were gone, or as gone as he was going to make them.

  He thought about the Snarric, pacing its enclosure. The way it had looked at him through the viewport. The way it had looked at him and then simply turned away and kept going, because the pacing was what there was and stopping wasn't an option.

  He thought about the female. The way it had happened so fast that he still sometimes woke up and had to work through the sequence again just to confirm it had actually happened the way it happened. That he hadn't made a different choice somewhere that would have changed it.

  He hadn't. He'd gone through it enough times to know. But knowing didn't stop the going-through.

  An unknown species. Extinct before anyone found them. Not enough information, Vorrin said. Higher uncertainty than usual.

  Deke looked at the rust-colored planet on the tablet screen.

  "Okay," he said.

  Vorrin looked at him.

  "I said okay." Deke leaned back in his chair. "Unknown species, minimal intel, sure. Why not."

  It wasn't enthusiasm. It wasn't the kind of thing Maddie would chronicle as a stirring moment of commitment. But Jessica glanced at him from across the table with something in her expression that wasn't quite relief and wasn't quite gratitude and was maybe just acknowledgment ... I see you deciding that ... and Deke figured that was enough.

  Maddie was already typing.

  *  *  *

  Later, after Vorrin had walked them through the preliminary scan data and assigned prep tasks and left with the quiet efficiency of someone who considered a meeting concluded when the information had been transferred, Deke found himself back at the habitat viewport.

  The Snarric was in the same corner as before. Or a different corner. Hard to tell ... the basalt formations looked alike and the creature moved through them without marking territory in any way Deke could track. It was eating something, or doing something with its mouth that approximated eating. Not looking at the viewport.

  Deke stood there anyway.

  "We're going on another one," he said quietly. His voice didn't carry through the viewport glass. He wasn't sure why he was talking. "Unknown species this time. Even less idea what we're walking into."

  The Snarric didn't react.

  "Just so you know," Deke said. And then, after a moment: "I'll be back."

  He meant it as a statement of intent. A practical thing ... I will return to this spot, I will continue this routine. But it came out sounding like something else. Like a promise made to something that had no reason to hold him to it and wouldn't, and that was somehow exactly why it mattered.

  He pushed off the wall and went to go find his gear.

  *  *  *

  From the Chronicle of the Last Kindness, as recorded by Maddie:

  Day 47. The synthesizer is doing the chalk thing again. Vorrin says it's the stabilizer chemical, and they'll fix it at resupply. Deke ate it anyway without complaining, which I am choosing to find impressive.

  We have a new mission. A species no one knew existed, on a planet called Vethara Nol. Vorrin showed us the scans.

  They died a long time ago and helped grow something else in the process, which I keep thinking about.

  Everyone agreed to go. Even Deke, who didn't say much about it but said okay, and that was enough.

  I'm going to write all of this down. I don't know who it's for yet. Maybe just us. Maybe for someone after we’re gone. A record of who we were when we’ve gone the way of those we try to save.