Uncharted Mintakan Planet

A distant, uncharted world threaded with karst ridges and caverns where surface life registers as exclusively Mintakan. Remote scans flatten into puzzled readouts: biosignatures sputter, then vanish over thallium‑rich bedrock, suggesting sinkholes and cliff‑maw entrances that swallow sensors. The air tastes of cold stone and a faint metallic tang; echoes bounce off narrow shafts while shadows pool in mapped voids. For the crew this place functions as urgency incarnate — a search terrain that compresses medical desperation, the terror of cultural contamination, and the claustrophobic impossibility of reaching someone who may hide within the planet’s glassy, sensor‑masked guts.