The Perfect Planet
Nature can be fickle. Alien nature can be seductive. And deadly.
After generations between the stars, eighteen thousand colonists have found their new home.
Ómorfi Katrina offers clean water, fertile soil and forests sweeping down to an unspoilt sea. For Commander Mara Venn, it promises a future worth every sacrifice of the long voyage.
Then the men begin to disappear.
Some speak of familiar voices beyond the settlement. Others grow secretive, slipping away from the people who know them best. Along the shoreline, there are glimpses of a beautiful woman no passenger manifest can account for.
Mara tightens security and sends teams to search the forest. But with each disappearance, fear spreads and families turn against one another.
Somewhere beyond the perimeter lies an explanation.
And every night, someone else wants to go looking.
Ómorfi Katrina
A glimpse beside the water. A soft laugh among the trees. A beautiful stranger where no one should be.
Captain Channis followed her invitation. He never returned to tell anyone why.
Now the colonists have arrived, and beyond the lights of their new settlement, a beguiling presence waits. Some hear her in the surf. Others catch sight of dark hair disappearing into the forest.
Perhaps she will come closer tomorrow.
Perhaps it would be wiser not to wait.
Captain Jaeyvus Channis
Forty-three years hauling dead machinery between stars have taught Jaeyvus Channis to trust his instruments and respect a warning.
Then he discovers a world beautiful enough to make him hesitate.
There is humming on an empty bridge. A glimpse of a woman on his screens. An invitation no sensible captain would accept.
Jaeyvus names his discovery Ómorfi Katrina and sends word to humanity.
What happens after he descends will become a story told aboard ships for generations. But no one has heard his side of it.
Commander Mara Venn
Mara Venn has brought her people across the stars to a world where they can finally breathe beneath an open sky.
The water is clean. The soil is fertile. For the first time, survival promises to become living.
But Mara notices details that do not belong in any survey report. Familiar scents far from home. Paths where none existed. A landscape disturbingly close to dreams her passengers recorded years before arrival.
Her people need somewhere to belong.
She needs to know whether it is safe.
Lin Sato
Lin Sato trusts measurements. Clean water, breathable air and fertile soil are findings she can test, repeat and put her name to.
Ómorfi Katrina gives her every reason to celebrate.
Then the forest edge shifts between surveys. Plants grow where they should not. Instruments record changes that leave her checking the equipment, then checking it again.
While the colonists settle into paradise, Lin keeps working.
Their safety depends on answers, and the most reassuring results are becoming the hardest to explain.
Lt. Commander Elias Rooke
Elias Rooke has no objection to paradise. He would simply prefer to check the perimeter before everyone makes themselves at home.
Broad-shouldered, dry-witted and difficult to impress, he brings a necessary caution to Mara Venn’s command. Clean water and beautiful scenery offer little reassurance when a survey team stops answering.
There may be an innocent explanation for the voices beyond the settlement.
Until someone finds it, Elias wants his people inside the fence.
Doctor Ilya Sen
Before landfall, Ilya Sen asked the colonists to imagine somewhere they would feel safe. Their answers helped him understand the hopes and anxieties they carried towards a new world.
Now familiar details are appearing beyond the settlement, and those old assessments make uncomfortable reading.
Ilya listens as patients describe voices, dreams and a growing reluctance to discuss either.
He knows grief can make an impossible promise difficult to resist.
What troubles him is how precisely these promises seem to fit.
Amadi Nwosu
Amadi Nwosu can keep a watch, organise a security detail and tell when someone is giving her half an answer.
As Elias Rooke’s deputy, she has plenty to do without worrying about voices in the forest.
Then Dev, her partner, starts speaking of someone he lost long before they met.
Amadi knows she cannot mend every hurt he carries. But when his strange new comfort draws him away from her, she has no intention of simply watching him go.
Dev Arlen
Dev Arlen understands broken machinery. Give him a failing pump, worn seals or a stubborn valve and he knows where to start.
The loss of his son is something he has never known how to mend.
He has work, a new world and Amadi beside him. There is much in his life worth keeping.
Then, somewhere beyond the settlement, he hears a voice he thought he would never hear again.
For Dev, going to listen hardly feels like a choice.
Nessa Vale
After losing her parents aboard Providence, Nessa Vale imagined safety as a doorway covered in yellow flowers, with a bell that sounded when the wind changed.
Now yellow vines are climbing her new home.
She wants to welcome the coincidence. But her brother Taren is changing, finding comfort in experiences he will no longer share with her.
Nessa knows the boy he was and the grief they have carried together.
She is beginning to fear that whatever makes him happy here may leave no room for her.
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Publishing October 2026
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