The Rhizoid Kill
On the sulfurous hellscape of Mercury's swamp belt, the rarest gems in the solar system lie buried in waters that can melt steel. They're called rhizoids, and men kill for them. George Mallard is a prospector with debts and dreams, heading into terrain where no one survives long. The prize is immense, but so is the competition: rival hunters, corporate mercenaries, and the planet itself, with its choking atmosphere and creatures that evolve too fast for human cataloguing. What begins as a desperate gamble becomes something darker when Mallard discovers he's not the only one willing to do anything to get what he wants. This is early 1950s pulp science fiction at its core, concerned with what frontier ambition does to the human soul when the stakes are literally out of this world. Bradley understood that the real monsters on any new world are the ones we bring with us.
