Mist Transect Flora, Dawn-Bough

Job: charter a Rank-4 hull for a rim xenoflora survey on a world the charts still mark vacant — Dawn-Bough, two hops past Ee'la, mist-basin ecology, soil cores, spectral transects, the dull catalog work that keeps Concord biomed archives honest. Soft board pitch. Enormous fee. Because rim worlds eat instruments, patience, and crews who treat chain-of-custody like law. If you need fireworks, pick a different posting.

Briefing: Catalog Liaison Harven Coldcatalog'Kai assigns Principal Investigator Liora Fenchart'Tel to ride your ramp. You land on a cold grey plateau above the mist line — field camp, transect stakes, augers, samplers — and run seven north–south lines the charter wants on file. Zero the rigs. Log serials. Pull cores in order. Line seven drops into a basin ecotone where the dense air turns warm and wet and the spectral rig starts chirping like it found a garden on a dead rock. Harven wants a packet he can file without flinching. Liora wants honest data. Someone below the rim may want you to never file at all.

Clock: seven-day survey window — missed calibration or broken chain voids the run. Terms: ₡52,500 gross, 10% desk fee, Rank 4 minimum. Top-of-board pay for catalog work that stops being catalog work the moment transect seven reads wrong. A crew that publishes could break a monopoly. A crew that maps it for the wrong desk could salt a basin. A crew that keeps quiet might be the only friends a hidden colony ever gets. This is the survey that finds what a living consignment was trying to found — and what you do with the packet is the capstone.