Dempsie wasn’t a world so much as an industrial complex. The largest continent was entirely devoted to cendrillon ore refinement. Another smaller landmass served as a galaxy-wide ore market. Space traffic to that area was, as far as Elsa could see, a complex mess constantly on the verge of disaster. She didn’t envy the air traffic controllers responsible for organizing the perpetual stream of cendrillon buyers to and from the continent.
Fortunately, Elsa didn’t have to go near the tangle of air traffic. She disembarked from the transport at the cinder recruitment and training facilities, an aggregate of buildings that rivaled the size of Anser’s capital city in its heyday.
Elsa hated the place.
The whole planet made her itchy. The stark, industrial design of its buildings was the complete opposite of the homey, unassuming architecture on Anser, and the sky, while typically bright due to the work of the weather satellites, seemed much too high above her head. The planet’s sun felt harsh and brassy, and she felt exposed and vulnerable underneath it. Nothing smelled right: instead of the crisp, clean scent of snow or the reassuring odor of hunds, all she could smell was the vaguely burnt, metallic odor of cendrillon that permeated the entire world.
Finding a recruitment office was easy, at least. Demand for cinders was high, and signage loudly proclaimed the direction she needed to take to enlist.
Elsa walked inside the spacious office, still carrying her pack. Receptionists sat at oversized desks, ready to process would-be cinders and assign them to mining worlds spread across the galaxy.
Elsa stepped up to a desk at random and showed her ID on her commlink. The receptionist looked at it, narrowed her eyes at Elsa, then gestured at the palm vein scanner on the desk. Elsa placed her hand on it to verify her identity.
“Huh. You really are nineteen,” the receptionist said in mild surprise.
Elsa just barely managed not to roll her eyes.
The receptionist gave Elsa a shrewd look. “Parents okay with you joining a cinder crew?”
“Parents are dead,” Elsa replied flatly.
The receptionist glanced up at her with more compassion this time. “I’m sorry.” She looked back at her panel. “You do know what you’re getting into here, right? Cendrillon mining isn’t the plushest of careers. I know you’re Anser-born, so you’re probably tough, but still…”
Elsa nodded. “I’ve been informed.”
The receptionist scanned her file. “No direct experience, but you have a good academic record, and the extra studies in the sciences help.” She checked another monitor and made an entry in the file. “You’ll be assigned to Zolushka. It’s a good starter world.”
Elsa frowned. Starter world? She didn’t like the sound of that. “Is the pay the same on every world?” she asked.
The receptionist seemed taken aback by the question. “What? Well, no. The more dangerous the work, the higher the pay. Zolushka is fairly safe, relatively speaking. There’s been no piracy out that way, what with it being so close to Fleet action. Pirates,” she said in disgust, “have no problem hitting the ore barges, but they’re not stupid enough to tangle with a Fleet vessel.” She shook her head. “I’ve been saying it for years, we need more Fleet escorts for loaded barges—”
Elsa didn’t care. Her patience was in short supply these days. “Which world pays the most?” she interrupted.
The receptionist looked at her panel again. “Rhodophis. But I don’t think that’s a good world for a beginner cinder—”
“Sign me up for Rhodophis,” Elsa interrupted.
“A little thing like you? I don’t think that’s a good idea…”
Elsa’s icy stare stopped the receptionist from continuing with whatever she had intended to say. “I’m going to Rhodophis,” Elsa said, looking very much like her mother in that moment.
The receptionist paused for a moment, then shrugged. “It’s your funeral. Jerry!” she called over her shoulder. She turned back to Elsa. “Jerry here will get you fitted with a suit.” She eyed Elsa’s height or lack thereof one more time. “Well, Jerry’ll try.” She handed Elsa a data burn. “Information has been sent to your commlink, but you may need this to get on board the transport. Their commlink scanners have been wonky all week. Good luck, kiddo.”
Elsa rubbed the thin, biodegradable plastic slip between her fingers. She wasn’t used to seeing them used so cavalierly. Data printouts were used sparingly on Anser after the battle. “Thanks.”
She turned from the counter to come face to face with the tallest man she had ever seen. His head almost scraped the ceiling of the office. “Are you Jerry?” she asked.
He nodded and extended a hand that completely enveloped Elsa’s when she shook it. “Don’t know about you,” he said in a rumbling voice. “I don’t think we have anything small enough.”
Elsa sighed. “Story of my life.”
The giant cracked a smile. It was the first smile Elsa had seen on this dismal planet. “Follow me,” he said.
He led Elsa to a warehouse filled from floor to ceiling with cinder suits. Elsa sniffed the air unobtrusively. The place smelled faintly of brimstone. Jerry led her through the maze of shelves, apparently following a categorization system Elsa didn’t understand. He reached up to a high rack several feet above Elsa’s head and pulled down a helmet. “This is the smallest I have.” He put it over Elsa’s head, and she regarded him through the transparent faceplate.
“Well?” she asked.
He put a large hand on top of the helmet and waggled it back and forth on her head. Then he shook his own head. “Too much room.” He pulled the helmet off of Elsa with one hand and a measuring tape out of his pocket with the other. Setting the helmet back on its high shelf without looking, he inspected Elsa head to toe with a critical eye. Before Elsa even realized what he was doing, he had measured across her shoulders and was gesturing for her to raise her arms so he could measure around her waist.
“What…what are you doing?”
He shook his head abstractedly. “Have to make it custom for you. No way any of these suits will work.” He took several more measurements, recording them all on his commlink. He caught sight of the data burn clutched in Elsa’s hand, and his thick eyebrows rose. “You’re going to Rhodophis?”
Elsa nodded. A thought occurred to her. “Will waiting for a custom suit hold me up for shipping out?” she asked with concern. She didn’t want to stay on this world a moment longer than she had to.
He shook his head. “Nope. I can have the suit ready for you in a day or two. The helmet will take a little longer, but you’re still in training here, right?”
Elsa nodded. “For a week.”
“I’ll have it for you by then.” He shook his head more slowly. “Shouldn’t be going to Rhodophis,” he said. “Bad first assignment.”
“So I’ve heard.” Her tone brooked no further discussion. Elsa was ready to go, but she could almost hear her father’s voice: Mind your manners, little bird. “Thank you for your help,” she said. Her voice surprised her; it sounded more like her old self than it had in a long time. “I’m grateful to you for going to so much extra trouble for me.”
Elsa watched as her hand disappeared inside Jerry’s again. “No trouble,” he said. “You be careful.”
Liquid flame spurted on either side of Elsa. She blinked rapidly to clear the dark spots from her vision as she wrestled with the recalcitrant controls of her mining coach. She knew the coach’s shielding would protect her from the heat and radiation. She did. But no matter how often she reminded herself of that, she couldn’t shake the impression that the coach was getting hotter and hotter. A trickle of sweat made its way down her temple, but she didn’t dare take a hand from the controls to catch it. She hitched a shoulder up, ducking her head to wipe her face on her sleeve awkwardly.
The vista she watched through her coach’s forward viewscreen was something from a nightmare. The planet’s surface was riddled with lava pockets, seething and roiling, ready to explode a
t any moment and engulf an unwary cinder. Elsa’s coach hovered over the tumult, its collecting scoops ready to ladle up the precious cendrillon ore—as soon as Elsa could find it. Her eyes flicked back and forth from the controls—foreign to someone who had few chances to pilot small vessels during her growing-up years—to the lava-strewn terrain in front of her to her spectroscope, which was supposed to alert her when it found cendrillon.
Between the multi-tasking and the hellish glare from the lava, she was well on her way to a nasty headache, and her frustration was building moment by moment. So far, the spectroscope had only alerted her to minute amounts of cendrillon, not even worth deploying the collector scoops. She glared through her viewscreen at another coach off to her right. Somehow her colleague had managed to find a good vein, and she watched as the other cinder’s scoops retracted into the belly of the coach, filled to overflowing with the liquid ore.
Could she possibly draw from the same vein? Elsa maneuvered her coach closer to her colleague, skimming over a large patch of open lava at what she thought was a safe height. A heat alarm screamed at her inside the cockpit, and she wrenched the vehicle to the right just in time to avoid a burst of magma that shot up from the lava patch. Shields or no, a direct hit from that much superheated magma would have all but vaporized her coach. Her heart drummed hard enough in her chest to hurt, and not for the first time she wondered if she could cut it as a cinder.
She was used to being good at things, damn it. She was used to being the top of her class, she was used to being competent, she was used to being able to handle things. Life on Anser had, she thought, made her tough enough to face any challenge the galaxy could throw at her. But mining cendrillon was so alien to anything she had ever experienced, and the concentration required—
Another alarm sounded. Elsa looked around the cockpit frantically. Which one was that? She glanced up at the viewscreen.
A proximity alarm, evidently. The other cinder’s coach loomed large in front of her as Elsa’s inertia from her last-minute course change carried her into its path.
The other cinder activated a commline between the coaches. “Hey, watch it!” cried a surly female voice.
Elsa tried to twist her coach out of the way, but she wasn’t skilled enough with the controls to avoid a collision entirely. Her vehicle careened into the other coach with a nerve-jarring screech, hull sliding against hull. One of Elsa’s collector scoops snagged on the undercarriage of the other coach, and the tangled vehicles both rolled slowly with the impact.
Bubbling lava rotated into Elsa’s viewscreen as the coaches’ combined momentum took them into the patch. Heat alarms blared in the background of Elsa’s cockpit as her shields overloaded. Panic-stricken, Elsa could do nothing as the magma enveloped her coach entirely.
The cockpit went dark.
And then brightened again, this time with the neutral white lighting of the training facility instead of the infernal red glare of the mining planet. The simulator door opened to reveal the training instructor, a grizzled old cinder veteran.
“You just died,” the instructor said, exasperation turning her voice strident. She shook her head, making her grey hair, cut blunt and straight along her jaw, swish against her high collar. “On a real chthonian planet, your coach would never have survived a maneuver like that.”
Elsa sighed and pulled the headset off, its projections now deactivated. In a real mining coach, she would have been wearing a suit and helmet to protect her from excess heat. She rolled her shoulders to get the kinks out, trying to release some of the tension that had built up during her time clutching the simulator controls. “I know, I’m sorry.”
“Where is that little idiot?”
The angry shout echoed down the hallway, making both Elsa and the instructor turn their heads towards the sound, which came from a nearby simulator.
A middle-aged man barreled out of his simulator and made a beeline for Elsa. All bushy eyebrows and crags, his long face reminded Elsa of an enraged hound dog.
He jumped down the two steps from the hallway’s slight elevation into Elsa’s simulator, his heavy boots ringing on the deck plating. He pushed the instructor aside slightly to point a finger at Elsa. “You the one responsible for that craptastic bit of work just now?” he demanded.
Anger flared in her, surprising her with its intensity. She stood up from the simulator chair and lifted her chin. “I didn’t mean for this to happen—”
“I know exactly what you meant to happen,” he interrupted. His frame filled the doorway, and Elsa tried not to feel trapped in the small cockpit. “You meant to go after Anastasia’s cendrillon vein, and you never once thought about the danger that put her in! Do you realize you would have killed both yourself and her, if this had been real? You knew it was dangerous, but you didn’t care. Too greedy for a good ore haul,” he sneered. “What, Daddy refuses to pay the bills any longer? You think being a cinder will let you keep up your lifestyle of fast skiffs and expensive clothes?”
For a second she could only stare, shocked by the unexpected attack. Then fury took the place of surprise. Adrenaline, fueled in part by the simulation and in part by anger, was making her hands shake. She clenched them into fists so he wouldn’t notice. “Who are you to lecture me?” she demanded. “You’re not even an instructor! You don’t have the right to chew me out, and you do not know my motivations.”
“He’s Bruno Lorengel,” someone spoke up from the hall. Elsa leaned around the irate man in front of her to see past him.
A girl a few years older and almost a foot taller than Elsa stood in the hall. Elsa had observed that most of the female cinders favored short haircuts like that of the instructor, probably because it worked better with the helmets cinders wore when mining. Not this girl. A wild curtain of brown hair hung partially in her face. Far from hiding behind it, however, the girl wore it like a badge of honor, head up and defiant. She moved forward to join the conversation, looking at Elsa expectantly.
Elsa looked back, undaunted. “So? Doesn’t mean anything to me.” She bit the words out, just barely holding on to her temper.
“He’s the best cinder in the Company,” the girl said, as if this were obvious.
As if Elsa cared. “And who the hell are you?” she asked rudely, losing patience with this interchange. The older cinder was clearly still spoiling for a fight, and Elsa was happy to oblige him.
The girl raised her eyebrows, unimpressed. “Anastasia.”
“The cinder you just killed,” Bruno informed her, his tone icy.
Elsa’s anger flickered for a moment, replaced with contrition. “Sorry about that,” she told the girl. Her brusque tone masked her very real guilt over having caused the accident. Given time to reflect on the situation, she would’ve willingly taken the blame for her error, but the attack on all sides made her defensive. “If you two are both cinders already, what are you doing in a training session?”
“Weeding out weak trainees,” Bruno snapped. “Someone has to separate out the ones who can actually cut it from those who can’t.”
The instructor interrupted at last. “Not quite true. They’re both awaiting reassignment to a new mining world,” she told Elsa, “and I thought the trainees would benefit from learning what it’s like to mine with real cinders.” She turned accusing eyes on Bruno. “I didn’t expect you to attack my students.”
“I didn’t expect a student who would endanger the lives of her crew for a little extra money,” Bruno replied. He folded his arms to look down at Elsa from his considerably greater height. “Folks become cinders for one of two reasons: they’re either adrenaline junkies, or they’re desperate for cash.”
“And I don’t strike you as an adrenaline junkie?” Elsa interrupted, voice dripping with sarcasm.
He barked a laugh. “No, little girl, you don’t. You strike me as someone who’s never had to do a day of work in her life suddenly forced to fend for herself. Stings a bit when Mom and Dad finally cut you loose, doesn’t it?�
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Elsa’s tenuous control snapped altogether. “My mother and father are dead!” she snarled. Her gaze burned into Bruno, who now looked a little rattled. “I have nothing and no one left,” she gritted out, shaking with intensity. She took a step closer to him. He dropped his arms to his sides but didn’t retreat.
She stared him down, hands still fisted and stomach clenched in a knot. “Don’t you pretend to know what my life has been! You don’t know me.”
He tried to recover his equilibrium, shaken but still seeking the high ground in the conversation. “Maybe not,” he conceded. “But I know how dangerous someone can be when they let anything take precedence over the safety of their crew. If you survive long enough to be an old hand at this crap, you’ll know what I mean. In the meantime, try not to incinerate yourself and take us all with you.” He spun on his heel, took the two steps up to the hallway in one stride, and passed out of Elsa’s sight around the corner.
Anastasia laughed once with a huff. “Welcome to mining,” she told Elsa sarcastically. “Good job, by the way. It’s nice to see his sails collapse once in a while. He’s a cantankerous cuss, almost as bad as me.” She tossed her head and started to walk away, then turned around to face Elsa again. When she spoke, her voice was caustic. “But if we ever serve together, don’t do that again, sweetheart.” She didn’t use the term like an endearment. “Stay out of my way. I’ve got ore to haul.” She gave Elsa a tight smile and left.
Elsa exhaled a shaky breath. However hard her life had been on Anser, she was at least accustomed to being treated with respect. Her parents had been well-loved, and Elsa’s work helping her father rebuild the community after the battle had earned her a measure of her own consideration among her peers. Her ability and resolve had never been questioned.
Clearly, she couldn’t expect that anymore. But she was grateful to Bruno for something, she told herself as she brushed off the instructor’s apologies. He had made her decision about whether or not to stick with the training program very easy.
The Battle of Castle Nebula (The Cendrillon Cycle Book 1) Page 3
