With the awkward days of rest and re-fitting behind them, the group, now totaling five, boarded the ship together. Today, Mia joined them for the first time. The past few trips had been tough, so experience notwithstanding, three Toravai were better than two. A short, two-day journey would deliver them to a small moon in a system not far from Cuanerel, on which lay the empty husk of a mining operation that many believed had been deserted too early, mineral wealth notwithstanding.

  As the ship hung in orbit, Greg hovered similarly over Nash’s shoulder as the data poured in from the swarm of surveying drones. “Everything looks good so far… but why is it showing the atmosphere as breathable if it’s not giving us any sign of organic life? Is it an error?”

  “You’d be right to think so. Typically, the presence of oxygen is contingent upon biological lifeforms.” She answered.

  “Not even algae in the sea on this one though.” He puzzled.

  “Despite the state this place is in, power still flows from passive geothermal generators beneath the surface. That’s what’s keeping the atmospheric manifold on.” Nash explained. “All of the old plans of this place show the manifold as being almost as big as the mining station itself. It once supplied air to hundreds of workers, but now that no one is left to breathe it up, it’s all ours.”

  “Huh. A moon with geothermal. Wish we had one of those.” Greg pondered.

  “What would you even do with it?” Nash mocked.

  “I don’t know,” he shrugged. “Hot springs resort?”

  Their droll exchange was soon interrupted by the muffled clanging of metal, heralding a mess yet to be made. Kory arrived from the rear of the ship with her long-suffering fencing bag. The bell guards on each epee rang against each other as she let it fall.

  “Why do you still have that?” Mia, scoffed from a seat by the window.

  “Because it costs nothing.” Was Kory’s indignant rebuttal as she crouched to examine the bag’s contents.

  “I can tell… dirty old sack of junk,” Mia sneered, twisting her long black hair into braids. She wore a magenta pink jumpsuit in contrast to Kory’s burgundy red, Zol’s charcoal black, Nash’s silvery lavender, and Greg’s navy blue.

  “No, it costs nothing to mind your own business,” Kory snarked as she pulled a sharpened blade from the bag and offered it, handle first, to her sister. “Do you want one or not?”

  “Hell no, Zol doesn’t even want one of those jury-rigged toothpicks,” Mia argued.

  “That’s because he’s got his own thing now. Only one person here thinks she’s too good for modifiers.” Kory jeered.

  “Zol, what do you have there?” Nash said, eager to cut through the petty squabbling. He sat quietly in his seat, wrapping his wrists and knuckles with a metallic-sheened tape.

  “Oh, that’s a little something I’ve been prototyping,” Greg answered for him. “He’s helping me test these early versions and if it all works out I’d like to make some for everybody.”

  “But what, specifically, are they for?” Nash asked again.

  “Conductivity,” Zol said, belaboring every syllable.

  “And I’ll be with you every step of the way.” Greg beamed. “I’m excited to see how the material holds up. If it works well I can make some gloves –”

  “What do you mean, ‘every step of the way?’” Nash interrupted.

  “Yeah,” Mia chimed in, shooting an accusing glare in his direction. She was inclined to a certain level of performative resistance in front of the others.

  “Come on,” he moaned. “This thing flies itself; you don’t need me up here. And aren’t we landing right next to the place anyway?”

  “Sure,” Nash sighed, secretly interested in his observations, though there were often too many of them. If there was one thing Greg was good for, it was connecting the dots. But if there was one thing he wasn’t good for, it was any kind of extra ability that could protect him from harm, so she gave him one half-hearted warning. “Try to stay out of trouble.”

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  #

  The Stardust descended to the surface of the moon, kicking up clouds of detritus as it touched down on the shore of one of the aforementioned biologically dead oceans. A pale, weak sun barely scratched through the expanse of the black sky. Its tepid light coated the forgotten structures in a bluish-gray patina. When the five emerged on the dark beach, they paused for a moment, to hear the gentle lapping of the water, and the faint wind rattling through the old buildings. The place seemed well and truly deserted, and so each in turn breathed a sigh of relief as they left the ship together.

  It wasn’t until they neared the complex that they grasped the scope of what they were dealing with. The facility was once a dual-purpose extraction point and refinery all in one, taking raw Vercoden from beneath the ground, finishing it on site, and shipping it straight to its destinations around the galaxy. Beyond it lay the almost equally massive atmospheric manifold, still humming along as if nothing had happened. At its peak the entire place must have been a sight to behold, yet it had been unoccupied for at least sixty years now. In the course of her private research, Nash learned an exploratory crew from her own world tried to uncover the reason for the sudden vacancy thirty-five years ago but ceased transmitting data back to Celhesru shortly after landing. She kept this inconvenient fact from the rest of the group, deeming it bad for morale in light of their recent challenges.

  “I thought it would be darker,” Kory whispered, gazing into the defunct labyrinth. A few lights still flickered. Something about the randomness of their sparkle was comforting after the targeted presence lights of the Reccorshan eel pit. This was the first place of similar size they’d seen since then.

  As they ventured further into the complex’s outer structures, Zol stopped suddenly and said: “Look. Up there.” He pointed to the shadows undulating among the girders and overhangs above.

  “It’s just the wind,” said Nash. “Blowing those old safety information banners around.”

  “What do they say?” asked Mia, squinting hard at the faded text printed on the ragged cloth.

  “Probably just something generic about keeping your protective equipment on,” Nash surmised. “But we won’t see the wind blowing them around anymore soon. We have to go deeper.” She forced her voice to keep steady as she took one last glance at the flailing pennants.

  The only person who hadn’t spoken since landing was Greg; unusual for him, but by design. Like every place they’d visited thus far, the Iolite Roamgild was interested in this facility for a reason. Yet the very text on the waving canvases betrayed the truth of its origin. He was sure only Nash perceived it, so like her he kept quiet for the sake of the moment’s discretion. The safety warnings were indeed generic in terms of content but printed in multiple languages. English was the most prominent, followed by a few other major dialects of Earth.

  Past the ominous pennants and the wind that moved them, laid the shipping and receiving bays. Empty conveyer belts that once carried hundreds of containers of finished Vercoden rods per day to awaiting freighters now sat lifeless and covered in debris. Greg hung to the rear of the group, preferring to walk behind the others by virtue of being the tallest. Today his position gave him a greater vantage point to observe the area without everyone else seeing right away how vexed he was at the sight of it all. Whether they hadn’t noticed yet, or were polite enough not to mention it, there was no doubt this was once a Human-owned facility.

  He couldn’t wrap his head around how or why this place had been left to ruin and he wasn’t even sure which company had once owned it, as all of his silent searches for familiar symbols and signage were proving fruitless. The notion grew in his mind that the factory had been stripped of corporate identity before abandonment intentionally. But that was a pet theory for now, no need to worry the group with conspiracies just yet. His thoughts were cut short when a window high above them shattered, raining shards of glass upon the ground. The sudden sound froze them in their tracks. It was Nash who first approached the pile of glass, cautiously looking at the remaining windows overhead to see if they would break too. She took a piece from the heap, letting it float before her, suspended in a gentle glow.

  “It’s more brittle than you’d think,” She called, allowing the shard to fall to the ground. “Probably why it broke so easily.”

  “The wind again?” Kory posited, raising an eyebrow her friend chose not to see.

  “Had to be.” Nash affirmed, unwilling to meet her friend’s accusing stare. “We need to see what’s ahead. The entrance to the old mine should be just a little further.”

  Greg didn’t agree with her assessment, but he concealed his doubt for the time being, knowing any line of inquiry would leave him vulnerable too, as the only representative in attendance of the disorganized and oft-maligned Earth-based energy industry.

  It wasn’t until they left the light of the feeble sun behind, relying solely on the intermittent fluorescents, that the creaking began. What began as a mild, almost ignorable, whine of the wind passing through old architecture had advanced to an all-encompassing groan of shifting foundations the further they descended. Now below the surface, the five made it past the refinery area, and entered the top of the mine from which the Vercoden would have been extracted. Unlike on Reccorsha, this mine was not one large pit, but a series of tunnels with smaller passages branching off in every direction, generally downward. Raw, unpolished rock bolstered by steel supports comprised the walls, and minute by minute, the group’s faith in them dwindled.

  Referencing the sound, Greg spoke at last. “Do you think it’s cosmetic or structural?” He looked to Nash, knowing she’d be the only one present with even half an answer.

  “It’s got to be superficial, no way its load bearing, just like… resonance through whatever pre-existing cave structure this was built over,” she said. Her response didn’t sit well with him. It meant she knew as little as he did. Greg chose to keep his mouth shut when Kory spoke for him.

  “Plate tectonics.” She muttered, earning uncertain looks from all in attendance. Zol wasn’t fond of that that term, seeing as he’d only heard it once before. Though his initial suspicion was soon supplanted by another. He stopped and spun to catch a glimpse of a shadowy form darting just around the corner in the tunnel behind them. This time there was no wind to blame.