Showing results for "The Trail" in Hard Science Fiction

Captain Tee de Klerk, Space Guard, is headed to Europa—It’s a five-year sleep. Someone has already tried to kill him. He’s trying to figure out how splyme is getting from its home, under the ice to the black market on Earth. The market is worth trillions, and why wouldn’t it be? The splyme organism unlocks vestigial senses in humans unused in eons. Chief among them is the ability to see emotions represented as colors and patterns on living skin.

Things are never so bad they can’t get worse. For the Brightstars, they just did. Dirck Brightstar knows his family is in serious trouble. If his father doesn’t finish building the heat exchanger before Opposition’s heat sets in, they’ll all perish. Then what little money they had will be confiscated and his father hauled off to prison in a midnight raid. And it all started because his missing sister, Creena, couldn’t follow the rules.

It's May, 1978, and a UFO requests permission to land. A human girl in her early teens and a robot exit the craft, and a strange botanical lifeform is found onboard later that night by a USAF landing party. The vehicle, robot, and the strange plant are impounded and subsequently sent to Area 51. NASA astrobiologist Gabriel Greenley is called in to study this new lifeform that at first appears similar to a botanical species known as oxalis. As a psi-sensitive, Greenley quickly learns the specimen is highly intelligent and potentially dangerous when he attempts to take a leaf sample.