[h3]Mark A. Lopez[/h3]
[hr]

Mark had kept mostly quiet after John’s little warning about the [i]Kestrel[/i].

The words sat in his mind even as they had boarded the ship to head down to the planet, Mark repeated the same words lowly as he sat down.

[i]"You ain't touching my bird..."[/i]

Followed by a mutter low enough that only someone nearby might catch it.

“Yeah? Then don’t expect a helping hand with that fucking attitude.”

After that, he did what he usually did when people annoyed him. He shut up and let them talk.

The ride down was uneventful enough, at least by recent standards. No alarms screaming, no bugs tearing through the hull, no reactor deciding to turn itself into a sun. Mark sat strapped in with his service carbine besides his lap, one earbud tucked in under the headset. The other dangled loose so he could still hear if something important was said, it wasn't.

The music came from an old handheld player he had managed to salvage during the escape from Eden. Ancient thing, scratched to hell, loaded with music so old it predated half the stories people told about Earth. Right now, Creedence Clearwater Revival played low in his ear, [i]Have You Ever Seen the Rain?[/i] crackling through the tiny speaker like somber music from a time long forgotten. 

When the [i]Kestrel[/i] touched down and the ramp dropped, Mark was one of the first to step out behind the others. The sun hit hard with heat simmering across the concrete landing pad, and the place opened up around them in a way that made his grip tighten around the carbine.

It was empty.

The spaceport was clean, painted and maintained. Ships were still docked in neat little rows, and the buildings looked like someone had swept the place that morning, then vanished before lunch. No bodies or burned-out wrecks nor panicked debris trail.

That bothered him more than a ruin would have.

Mark raised his carbine slightly, not aiming at anything in particular, just keeping it ready as his eyes moved from the parked craft to the terminal buildings, then out toward the town in the distance.

“This place is too well-kept to be abandoned,” he said, voice low. “If people left, they left orderly. If they didn’t leave, then something moved them without making a mess.”

He glanced at the jungle, then back to the spaceport offices.

“I wouldn’t head straight into the city blind. We should check the port first. See if there's any local maps, power grid data, port logs, flight records, anything that tells us who was here and where they went.”

His gaze shifted toward the docked ships.

“And someone should keep eyes on the Kestrel. I don’t care if it’s from inside the cockpit or right here on the pad, but if this turns ugly, I want a fast exfil and no surprises waiting at the ramp.”

He paused, then looked toward John.

“Don’t worry, Cap'n. I still won’t touch your bird unless it’s on fire.”

Mark brought the carbine up a little higher and nodded toward the port buildings.

“Let’s find a terminal before we go sightseeing.”