What Can go Wrong With Terraforming?

The crew of the spaceship Hope greeted their new world to the sound of groaning servos and the smell of over-baked plastic. For five centuries, their bodies had slept in gel-filled pods, dreams regulated by sluggish computers, while the ship made her deliberate crawl to the blue dot catalogued as Kepler-442b. Now, every muscle ached with reluctant renewal. Several of the crew had sworn—half as a joke, half in earnest—to spend their first day awake consuming ancient coffee and making sarcastic observations about the state of their hair. Kira, the biologist, was the first on her feet. She blinked the glue from her eyelashes and rolled her neck until her vertebrae made a sound like someone snapping a celery stalk. Around her, the reanimation chamber flickered with soft amber light, shadows pooling between the open pods. The Hope's crew was small, by necessity: eight humans, two cats, and a gene bank containing the compressed DNA of every mammal, fish, and fungus ever considered remotely interesting by the committee back on Earth. The cats, who had also enjoyed the privilege of stasis, watched the groggy humans with the disdain of animals who had been awake for the entire journey.