Life Signs

When field assessor Zuillda draws the short straw on a last-minute assignment to MEC-Catalogue 7-Theta-9, he expects a routine geological survey of an uninhabited world, a few weeks of collecting rock samples, filing numbers, and collecting a generous bonus from Meridian Extraction Consolidated before moving on to the next job. The planet has been sitting in MEC's acquisition portfolio for forty-one years, classified as sub-sentient, cleared for extraction, and ready for the kind of industrial transformation that makes shareholders very happy and geologists moderately wealthy.Nobody mentioned the billion people.Armed with a geological survey kit, a professional obligation that borders on the obsessive, and an exosuit so catastrophically wrong for the situation that the local law enforcement immediately starts shooting at him, Zuillda finds himself on the ground of a thriving civilization that nobody bothered to look for because looking carefully would have taken longer than flying past at warp six and writing three paragraphs about what you thought you saw.What follows is one very long day of dodging chemically-propelled ballistic projectiles, collecting extraordinary mineral data, being served a trespass notice by the bravest bureaucrat on the planet, and conducting increasingly heated debates with a ship crew who consider his predicament the most entertaining thing they have seen in years, all while the question of what Meridian Extraction Consolidated intends to do with a planet full of people quietly becomes the most important question anyone has asked in forty-one years.Life Signs is a story about what happens when the paperwork says one thing and the planet says another, and about the kind of professional who refuses to file a report that says anything other than exactly what he found.