As we await you,

Chafing in this cramped airlock,

Should we play pinochle?

Kaa winced at the lieutenant’s sarcasm. Hurriedly, he sent back pulsed waves.

Fortune smiles again,

On our weary band of knaves.

Welcome, friends, to Ifni’s Shore.

It might seem presumptuous to invoke the goddess of chance and destiny, capricious Ifni, who always seemed ready to plague Streaker’s company with one more surprise. Another unexpected calamity, or miraculous escape. But Kaa had always felt an affinity with the informal patron deity of spacers. There might be better pilots than himself in the Terragens Survey Service, but none with a deeper respect for fortuity. Hadn’t his own nickname been “Lucky”?

Until recently, that is.

From below, he heard the grumble of clamshell doors reopening. Soon Tsh’t and others would join him in this first examination of Jijo’s surface — a world they heretofore saw only briefly from orbit, then from the deepest, coldest pit in all its seas. Soon, his companions would arrive, but for a few moments more he had it to himself — silken water, tidal rhythms, fragrant air, the sky and clouds. …

His tail swished, lifting him higher as he peered. Those aren’t normal clouds, he realized, staring at a great mountain dominating the eastern horizon, whose peak wore shrouds of billowing white. The lens implanted in his right eye dialed through a spectral scan, sending readings to his optic nerve — revealing steam, carbon oxides, and a flicker of molten heat.

A volcano, Kaa realized, and the reminder sent his ebullience down a notch. This was a busy part of the planet, geologically speaking. The same forces that made it a useful hiding place also kept it dangerous.