After an all too short voyage of one more day, Kory and Zol soared again through the clouded wastes of their native skies. The dark, churning seas, gnarled topography, and even the dusty, metallic atmosphere became an iota more pleasant when bathed in the cool red glow of their dying sun. Yet fear was ever present, unceasing as the wind which bore it true. But at least for these two, at least for now, there was some strategic comfort in each other’s presence. On and on they flew, unimpeded by convention or any sort of electronic technology that might suffer for their presence. Out here, they were alone; each a ragged beam of lightning cutting the sky in half, joined occasionally by a stray bolt from a cloud. Was it a gift from their fathers long dead?

  At a place quite far from their landing zone, they set foot upon the frail ground and took stock of their surroundings. Zol walked forward immediately, while Kory followed at a cautious distance. Though he didn’t seem to mind, she was painfully aware of how out of place they would look to anyone they might encounter. In her view, everyone on this world was as disheveled, poorly dressed, and hostile as he had been when they first met. She had the feeling his new clean-cut appearance and more… modern style of dress would invite trouble. In truth, he wasn’t elaborately adorned by the standard of most places. He wore the same utilitarian, static-proof flight suit Kory did, only in a charcoal black instead of her signature dark red. Even so, she felt they’d be better suited in rags or dirty furs. Shame there wasn’t time to find any.

  After a while they came to the edge of a plateau she hadn’t realized they were on and looked down to the valley below. From it sprang the first wonder of the world. Magnificent pillars rose before them out of the dust. They were larger than anything Kory had ever seen, even in the developed world with all its fine engineering. The columns might have once been load-bearing, supporting an even greater structure long fallen. Inside the tangled ruin, Zol said there was a statue as tall as the hill they were descending; an ancient goddess carved from stone whom no one remembered how to worship.

  At the base of this former temple, laid a smattering of shabby little tents and shacks. They were the homes of those who took refuge from the bitter wind under the shelter of the monoliths. Such flimsy things couldn’t last out on the exposed plain. Campfires of the inhabitants illuminated the crude settlement, and in their light Kory’s assumptions were all but confirmed. Here were the disheveled, poorly dressed, and hostile people to whom she owed her very being. The sight of them made her want to scrub her skin with hot water until it bled.

  #

  Nash and Greg stayed with the ship to deploy the surveying drones and interpret their data as it arrived. Planetary geographic technology such as this wasn’t cheap, but the opportunity had long surpassed the cost. All ten of the cat-sized things emerged from their storage bay on the exterior hull and began transmitting back to the central console immediately. Before their eyes, millions of data points in three-dimensional space created a living map, expanding outward in every direction by the second. A world this size would take no more than twelve hours to plot completely with a resolution of one square foot. It didn’t get much better than that when satellites weren’t an option.

  Nash loved this sort of thing. Ferrying other people from planet to planet and coordinating the logistics for an excursion this size were only incidental to her real passion, surveying new worlds and finding out just what was on them. It wasn’t a skill many identified with these days. But some part of her felt connected to her civilization’s past when she saw the landscape spreading out upon the graphic display. It was this impulse, this desire, that had led Celhesru to greatness in the first place. She knew the drive to map every star, to adopt every world had ushered in a great age for civilized space, with her proud and gentle people at the forefront, walking hand in hand with all. Though not these particular ones here. She knew the reason, and her personal experience taught her things could be different between the Iolites and Toravai. She would not stumble where her ill-fated predecessors had before. This place could be included, cherished, and even profitable.

  In these pensive moments, she began to be grateful for Greg’s presence. When the time came to get serious and work, work he did. Even if his ex(t/p)ensive educational background did not exactly mirror hers, he was skilled in technical matters nonetheless and could easily pick up on what was required of him. At a minimum, it focused his boundless mental energy on a productive effort for a change.

  Kory tended to throw up her hands at these kinds of tasks and insist she couldn’t figure it out. Funnily enough, Nash and Kory had studied the same thing at one of Cinnfoara’s finest institutions. Yet it always seemed as if Nash was the only one who cared about the material with her friend just tagging along for the ride. In fact, as Nash recalled, Kory barely graduated. Or maybe, she technically didn’t graduate at all. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time she was placed on academic probation and uninvited back to the fencing team. It wasn’t as long ago as it felt, maybe just a few months now. “…but how long is a month anymore?” She wondered. “We’ve been bouncing around too long. I feel so out of sync. Once we get back we need to stay back for a while.”

  A tone on the map display alerted her to a new discovery by one of the drones. She had a program running which called her attention to high-infrared signatures in real time that indicated large gatherings of people, one could even call them towns. This was how she’d found where to put Sohrab all those short ages ago. And besides, if Kory wasn’t able to make sense of where Zol was leading her, or if his expedition proved unfruitful, here was a tried-and-true scientific option that was sure to yield at least a lead on where the Vercoden could be sampled, verified, and one day harvested. “Greg, come have a look at this,” she said. “It’s a population center of at least a thousand, maybe only a thirty-minute flight from here if we keep a low profile.”

  “Well, I’ll be…” His wide eyes darted around the screen. There was nothing he wanted more than to keep as far away from that hive of wasps as possible. But the thought was intriguing all the same. “What do you think its name is? The place, I mean.”

  “Never mind that,” she said. “They’re back.”

  Outside there was an intermittent breeze, with darkening clouds on the horizon. Zol and Kory landed about fifty feet from the ship. Kory kneeled down and touched her bare hands to the ground to discharge any remaining static electricity. Zol took notice and did the same. He was starting to remember these little gestures automatically. In truth it was a hollow action. The soil here was sandy, which meant the silica content was too high to ground stray static. But they didn’t know that, so they practiced the ritual all the same.

  ‘Safety procedures’ weren’t the only thing Zol was learning quickly. Just that morning, Greg had poured a cup of coffee and slid it across the table to him. Zol stared at the hot liquid and smelled its bitterness. Then he pushed the cup back to Greg, looked him square in the eye, and said “no.” Kory and Nash were thrilled, giggling and clapping for him as one would for a baby saying his first word. To this he responded by rising from the table, staring them all down, and repeating “no.” It was a watershed moment of the lowest degree.

  At present he walked confidently beside Kory back to the ship. They were both a little tired and a more than a little dirty, but none worse for wear considering where they’d been. Nash met them outside at the foot of the ramp. “Brush off your clothes before you go inside,” she said, gesturing back towards the vessel. “This whole thing was a stock model, so you know its floors don’t vacuum themselves.”

  “You won’t be bumping around in this ‘old stock model’ for long,” Kory grinned.

  “What do you mean?” Nash replied. The wind was starting to pick up again. She shielded her eyes as dust swirled around them. “Did you find something?”

  “This look like something to you?” Kory boasted as she unzipped a small pocket on her ankle. From it she produced a glowing blue shard of the very thing they were after.

  “Careful!” Cried Nash. “Put that down! It’s poison!”

  “Relax, we can touch it,” Kory pointed between herself and Zol. “The guy who led us there would touch it too. There’s a whole giant stash of it below that big place we went today.”

  “Which ‘big place’ are you referring to?” She asked, unsure if they’d found the ‘city’ on their own.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  #

  The worsening weather forced the conversation back inside. Lightning cracked just outside the thick windows, dancing across the workstation sink that served as a makeshift laboratory when it wasn’t also a kitchen. Here Nash prepared a test kit to judge the purity of the sample after securing a thick pair of gloves for herself. She had no idea what Kory was talking about back there. Nobody was supposed to be touching this stuff.

  After a few moments, the specimen proved true. This was really Vercoden, of a high quality not often found in the usual mines littering the galaxy. Nash suppressed her elation for the moment. She wondered if Greg’s connections to the industry would become a problem in the near future. Power in the immediate moment was of no concern, but eventually someone with real influence might wonder what he was up to.

  She dismissed the notion. The Earthling energy companies were at best, fledgling, compared to Celhesru’s, comparatively ancient trade in the mineral. Though nonetheless, she knew this discovery would excite him. There was only so much he could learn from his father’s people. What he didn’t know, and what hardly anyone knew in fact, was just what this deposit on the world of the Toravai represented. In her friendship with Kory, Nash’s uncle saw not only an opportunity for profit, but a chance at salvation as well, a hope for a new wave of prosperity, and a renewal of their waning power. He wasn’t the biggest player in the Roamgild, but a high-ranking scientist all the same. It was with high hopes and bated breath that he’d sent his niece out on this journey. The untapped planet was intended not only to supplement the old extraction points but replace them.

  The supply of Vercoden on other worlds was running dry. Some mines closed decades ago with barely a whisper and no one to tell their tales. This dwindling was only accelerated by the increase in demand for consumer exports from Earth and her imitators. On the surface, anyone on the settled worlds would say that life had never been better. The economic boom was in full swing and the only way to go was up, or else. But without the one element that made faster-than-light travel possible, all movement of goods and people would come to a grinding halt, plunging civilized space back into the pre-warp dark ages.

  Nash was brought up to believe this wasn’t an option anymore. Over six hundred years elapsed since her kind took to the stars. The passages would take years, decades even. People died on those ships, staring at the same six walls every day, dreaming of touching ground they were destined never to set foot upon. The invention of hydro-stasis had helped somewhat. It allowed travelers to be suspended in an electrolyte gel which when paired with simple life support equipment could preserve them for up to a year at a time. It wasn’t ideal, though. At best, it only saved the consciousness from the some of the effects of madness. The body aged regardless, and the time passed anyway. Life at home went on without you no matter where you were. Therein lay the crux of the issue.

  Space and time were two sides of the same equation. In order to shrink the vastness of the space between the stars to a manageable size, the same measure had to be subtracted from the side of time. Those first explorers didn’t have the advantage of nearly infinite time with which to reduce the space to almost zero. Vercoden changed all that. It wasn’t a fuel source, but a catalyst, that allowed the ships’ relatively simple engines to ‘step around time,’ effectively cancelling out most of the space. Ironically, after all of those long voyages to other dead worlds with little return, the Iolites found the substance right at home. At once the darkness of space lit up with a vast array of new partners. Reccorsha, Cuanerel, Sebarnka, Deju, and others still yet unnamed fell into line, joining the great march forward into the future, hand in hand with the ones who found exactly what they needed on almost every world they visited. Even a few moons and asteroids had it. Earth did not, but the Humans justified their place in the pantheon in other ways.

  In some ways, they had more in common with Iolites than anyone else. No other populated world had ascended to the same level of technology as Celhesru, few had even mastered basic flight. Humankind was trying their best, though. Some three hundred years ago an Iolite scouting mission detected a promising level of radiation coming from Earth’s vicinity. Just beyond its moon they found a primitive little ship, whose determined Human crew were trying to brute-force their way to the next planet over, just as the Iolites themselves had done so many centuries ago. The meeting couldn’t have gone smoother. At once Earth was accepted into the fold, and the rest was history.

  “Greg,” said Nash. She lifted the sample up with a pair of thick tongs and motioned for him to open the cannister for her.

  “Yep, send her home,” he replied as she placed the fragment inside. He twisted on the heavy lid, sealing their tiny fortune within.

  “Do your people ever talk about opening up that mine on Mars they’ve been pitching for years? Because it’s all mine ever do.” She asked as she took off her gloves and laid them carefully over the rim of the sink. The whole ‘workstation’ would have to be at least wiped down before they started preparing dinner.

  “You know, I remember as kid running around the floor of these parties my dad would host,” he started. “Sometimes I heard the word ‘Mars,’ whispered between the grownups in the room, but I think the discussion has been tabled for a few years now, too much red tape with it being a solar heritage site and all.”

  “But you don’t technically own Mars, everyone just acts like you do.”

  “I mean, we just feel that if it’s in our system we should weigh all the options of what to do with it,” he laughed, defensively.

  “You hadn’t even made it there when Iolites found you.” Nash teased.

  “We were on the way! We were totally going to do it that time.” He chided. “That’s why we named the spaceport in Atlanta after the mission captain.”

  “A fitting tribute,” she rolled her eyes. “He must have loved traffic.”

  “He was born in Sandy Springs, so yeah…” Greg muttered.

  Elsewhere in the ship, Kory made a little science project of her own. ‘Elsewhere,’ of course, meant ten feet away on a cargo bench on the opposite wall. Greg and Nash redirected their attention to their companion who aggressively stripped the rubber coating from an epee handle with a pair of pliers. The blunt electronic sensor from the tip of the blade was already gone, allowing the end to be sharpened into a splintery point. Protecting the handle sat the same dull, metal bell guard, damaged evenly by the blows of competitors past. It wouldn’t be collecting new dents anytime soon.

  Kory felt their eyes on her, but her focus remained unbroken. Sometimes it was easier to play dumb and charge ahead with the task at hand than stop to engage. They would get their explanation when they verbally asked for it. After all, she was no mind reader, why should they assume that of her? To their surprise, the silence was broken by Zol, who walked out from the small door separating the sleeping and common areas and said to date his second word ever. He pointed at the barbarized fencing implement and said: “Why?”

  “I’ll tell you why.” Kory looked up with an impish grin, knowing he wouldn’t understand most of what she’d say, but the rest of her audience would. “This thing won’t conduct unless I take the shielding off the pistol grip, exposing the metal that makes it up.”

  “Are you sure it’ll even hold a charge the way you want it to?” Said Greg. “It looks like it’s made of more titanium than you might realize.”

  “It’s low carbon steel, so it’ll be better than nothing at all.” Kory fired back.

  “Will you really need that tomorrow…or ever?” Nash asked more pointedly.

  “Of course, I will.” Kory insisted, slamming the epee back into her open fencing bag on the floor. The blade rattled against its equally worse-for-wear counterparts, bound for the same fate if the experiment succeeded. A few old socks cushioned the blow. “That big city you found on the map this morning is not the same spot me and Zol went, and if anything, it’ll be worse.”

  “Did you feel unsafe in the place you visited today?” Nash asked, feeling a bit guilty her friend felt the need to take all these protective measures.

  “We ran into this weird looking older guy there who acted like he was in charge. He had all this stuff dangling off of him, and he wouldn’t quit staring at me with this crazy look on his face. The longer I stood near him the more the inside of my nose burned.”

  “Ew,” Nash said flatly.

  “All that matters is that he showed us where the crystals are and let us take the one back,” Kory gestured at the cylinder. “But he kept on pushing his hands against them and trying to get me to do the same. I didn’t want to put my hand on anyplace he did because he was so gross… made me think the others who live there feel bad for him and believe the Vercoden has made him crazy. So, as for feeling unsafe? Possibly.” She stood and brandished the epee. “But nothing a good little tap on the head couldn’t fix if things got any weirder.”

  “Looks like our ‘new guide’ was full of great ideas,” Nash mumbled, hoping Zol still didn’t understand. Zol understood more than he said but kept even that to himself.

  “Never mind that now,” Kory said. She peered out the window at the swirling dust outside the craft, soon compacted and turned to mud by the pressing rain. “Even Zol hasn’t been to that new place you found, so tomorrow we should move the ship closer… out of sight still, but close enough.” The rest remained silent. They knew what ‘close enough’ implied. If they succeeded in finding an even larger Vercoden deposit as a result of visiting this city, they would make it farther than any off-world explorers had before. Even better if they could leave alive.