The omnitool hums as Saelari sweeps it in a slow arc across the treeline, her orange eyes tracking the readout with the focused quiet of someone who has forgotten, temporarily, that she is stranded.

Temporarily.

"Spore concentration is elevated but sub-threshold," she says, not looking up. "The fungi here - the bioluminescent clusters along the root systems - they produce a psychoactive compound when mature. Airborne. The northern forest readings are significantly higher." A beat. "We stay out of the northern forest without respirators."

She glances back at you over her shoulder. Her expression is perfectly composed. Her bioluminescence says something slightly different - a warm, steady pulse that only happens when she's genuinely absorbed in something.

"I can see your face." The corner of her mouth curves. "It's fine. We're well within safe parameters. The headache you're feeling is altitude differential, not spore exposure." She turns back to her scan. "Don't be a baby."

She crouches near a root cluster, tracing a bioluminescent vein in the bark without touching it, logging quietly. The alien sky is huge above the canopy. The soil is faintly orange. Everything here glows or threatens to.

Then the treeline moves.

Not wind. Something deliberate - a mass shifting through undergrowth that shouldn't be able to conceal it, and yet somehow did until right now. The sound hits a half second later. A low resonance more felt than heard, rattling somewhere behind the sternum.

Saelari stands slowly. Her hand doesn't go for her staff.

The creature that clears the tree line is enormous - six limbs, chitinous plating dark as carbon scoring, compound eyes burning amber in the filtered light. It's not charging. It stops. It regards them with the particular stillness of something that has never had reason to fear anything and is simply deciding what they are.

It rumbles again.

Saelari's bioluminescence shifts.

It starts at her collarbones - a slow pulse, blue-white, deliberately rhythmic. Not threat display. Something else. Something that looks, if you know enough xenobiology to recognize it, like an answer.

She takes one step forward.

She holds up one hand behind her. Prompting you not to follow, not to try an stop her. Her eyes don't leave the creature.

Another step. The omnitool is still running, still logging, because of course it is. The creature's head tilts — massive, angular, tracking the light coming off her skin. Its rumble shifts in pitch. She responds with a change in her own pattern, slower, deeper in the visible spectrum.

And then it lowers its head.

Not to charge. To look at her more closely. To allow her closer.

She reaches out - one gloved hand, steady as surgery - and stops just short of the plating along its jaw. Waiting. Letting it decide.

It decides.

The contact is brief. She exhales.

Then she turns around, and the expression on her face is something you almost never see in the medical bay, or the officers' mess, or anywhere on the Sedna where she is Lieutenant Commander Vey'ana with a rank and a reputation and a careful professional composure.

Pure, unguarded delight.

"Cepheus," she says, like she's tried the name once already and found it perfect. "I'm calling him Cepheus." She looks back at the creature, then at you, then at the creature again. "He's magnificent. The eye structure alone... the resonance pattern in that vocalization-" She stops herself. Barely. "We need to log everything. Come here. Slowly."

Her skin is blazing.

She has been stranded on an alien world for six hours and she has already made a friend.

The cold comes fast on Katharos.

Saelari had noted it in her survey logs - atmospheric temperature drop of approximately nineteen degrees standard within forty minutes of sundown, accelerated by the elevated silica content reflecting stored heat back into the upper atmosphere. She'd noted it clinically, professionally, the way she noted everything.

She hadn't quite accounted for what nineteen degrees felt like against blue skin with no ship to return to.

The fire helps. It took longer than it should have to get it started - the local wood burns strangely, slower than it should, with that amber-orange light that makes everything look warmer than it is. She's dragged the emergency thermal roll from the shuttle's survival kit and spread it across the flattest patch of ground she could find, back against a rock shelf that blocks the wind off the northern ridge.

It's fine. This is fine. She is a Dominion officer and a trained xenobiologist and she has absolutely catalogued eleven new species today and that is a productive use of a forced planetary stay.

She looks up when she hears you settle beside her.

"The fungi go dark at night," she says, because she's been watching them. "All of them, simultaneously. Whatever the signaling mechanism is, it responds to the same trigger across the entire visible grid." She pauses. "I find that either beautiful or deeply alarming and I haven't decided which."

She pulls the thermal roll slightly - an invitation, not quite stated - and shifts to make room.

"The Sedna will run a standard check-in in..." she glances at her omnitool "twenty-nine hours. When we don't respond, Venn will dispatch. Khas will probably want to lead the retrieval personally." A quiet exhale, something almost amused in it. "He'll be insufferable about it."

The fire pops. Something calls in the far treeline - high and musical, nothing like anything in the Imperial xenobiology database.

Her bioluminescence has settled into something slow and warm, barely there, the kind of pattern she only shows when she's stopped performing calm and started actually feeling it.

"I'm glad it was you," she says, quietly enough that it could almost get lost in the fire sound. "On the manifest. I'm glad it was you."

She doesn't look at you when she says it. She looks at the dark forest, and the fungi that have gone quiet, and the alien stars beginning to show through the canopy.

But her shoulder is warm against yours.