By Simon Petrie
Once, the geologists told us, the planet had likely been temperate enough to have polar ice-caps, but these had long since dissipated. Now its slow-dwindling seas simmered, driving huge quantities of water vapour into a thick atmosphere dominated by carbon dioxide and nitrogen and blanketed by permanent cloud.
Once, the palaeontologists surmised, life may have been abundant here: varied, complex, ubiquitous. Life still endured in a unicellular form, the simple metabolic processes of which were perfectly adapted to a steam-hot aqueous environment; but if there had at one point been indications of the diversity of former life on this world, those traces had not endured.
Some among our mission argued regarding the presence of many localised concentrations of exotic or unusual mineral deposits. Some held that these were remnants of long-eroded impact events, others that they had arisen in some unspecified seismic process; the world evidently remained tectonically active. One mission specialist argued unconvincingly that the deposits might signify undefined biological transformations which may have occurred within the world’s distant past. It was noted in this context that though these unorthodox outcrops were at altitudes uniformly well above the current sea level, there was geological evidence at several of the lowest such features of prolonged and substantial marine inundation.
We did not tarry long upon the wind-scoured terrain of this uninviting planet. Indeed, we spent rather longer exploring its sole large natural satellite, a body of rock orbiting at a distance approximately thirty times its primary’s diameter. Tantalisingly, we found a small number of objects of clearly artificial origin on its airless surface, suggesting we were not the first to have visited.
The origin of these constructs remains conjectural.
About the Author
Simon Petrie
Simon Petrie, born and educated in New Zealand, now lives in the Australian Capital Territory, where he is paid to be careful with words.
He's had a few stories published before, both in AntipodeanSF and elsewhere. He has been shortlisted several times for the Aurealis and Ditmar Awards, and is a three-time Sir Julius Vogel Award winner, most recently in 2018 for his SF/crime novella Matters Arising from the Identification of the Body.
Ion Newcombe is the editor and publisher of AntipodeanSF, Australia’s longest running online speculative fiction magazine, regularly issued since January 1998, and conceived back around November 2007. He has been a zealous reader and occasional writer of SF since his childhood in the 1960s, and even sold a few stories here and there back in the '90s.
Mark Webb's midlife crisis came in the form of attempting to write speculative fiction at a very slow pace. His wife maintains this is a good outcome considering the more expensive and cliched alternatives. Evidence of Mark's attempts to procrastinate in his writing, including general musings and reviews of books he has been reading, can be found at www.markwebb.name.
Natsumi Tanaka is a writer living in Kyoto, Japan. Her short fiction has appeared in numerous Japanese magazines such as Anima Solaris, Kotori no kyuden, and Tanpen.
Evan James Sheldon’s work has appeared recently in American Literary Review, the Cincinnati Review, and New Flash Fiction Review.
Jake Dean is a writer and waverider living on Kaurna land in South Australia.
Matthew R. Doherty currently resides in Leeds, England, where he spends most of his free time writing about military history, but his other consuming passion is for science fiction.
Joanna is a writer who lives in the bush near the Glasshouse Mountains in Queensland.
Geraldine Borella writes adult short stories and stories for children and has been published in anthologies for both. In 2018, one of her children’s short stories placed second in The Buzz Words Short Story Prize and she won an ASA Emerging Writer’s Mentorship. She currently works part-time as a hospital pharmacist and as an online creative writing tutor.
Andrew writes science-fiction and fantasy from the state of Maryland on the eastern coast of the United States, often drawing ideas from jogs through forest trails at sunrise or a tasty beer at sunset. 
Tim Borella has never lost his childhood passion for SF and writing in general and has been lucky enough to have worked most of his life as a pilot — in other words, he’s never properly grown up.
Old enough to just remember the first manned Moon landing, Kevin was so impressed he made science his life.
Sarah Pratt is an avid fiction writer and a Marketing Consultant.
Pixie is a voice actor, cabaret performer & slam poet From the Blue Mountains in NSW.
Although a writer of the baby boom persuasion, Ed has not boomed for quite a while.
Mark is an astrophysicist and space scientist who worked on the Cassini/Huygens mission to Saturn. Following this he worked in computer consultancy, engineering, and high energy research (with a stint at the JET Fusion Torus).
Margaret lives the good life on a small piece of rural New South Wales Australia, with an amazing man, a couple of pets, and several rambunctious wombats.
Laurie Bell lives in Melbourne, Australia. She was that girl you found with her nose always buried in a book. She has been writing ever since she was a little girl and first picked up a pen. From books to short stories, radio plays to snippets of ideas and reading them aloud to anyone who will listen.
Timothy Gwyn is a professional pilot in Canada, where he flies to remote communities. During a lull in his flying career, he was a radio announcer for three years, and he is also an author.
Alistair Lloyd is a Melbourne based writer and narrator who has been consuming good quality science fiction and fantasy most of his life.
