She smiled ruefully. “My first attempts at mining were laughable. It took me a while to get a sense of where to find ore, and all the while I was fretting over not being able to make payments on my debt. I had two friends who looked out for me, and I can’t tell you how many times they saved me from my own stupid mistakes.”
“Have I met these friends?” Karl asked with a smile.
“Yes and no. One of them was Bruno. The other was a cantankerous girl named Anastasia.” She glanced at Godfrey. “You two would’ve got on well,” she commented, unable to help herself.
He quirked one side of his mouth. She knew that expression from their childhood: his bad mood was abating.
She continued her story. “Bruno and Anastasia taught me everything I knew about mining. I mean, yeah, I had training, but the only way to really learn mining on Rhodophis was to mine on Rhodophis.”
“What made it so tough?” Godfrey asked, grudgingly joining the conversation.
“The weather, for one thing. All chthonian worlds are hot, obviously, but Rhodophis had particularly hot spots that actually caused the rock to vaporize sometimes. As the vaporized rock rose, it began to condense into droplets that eventually fell back to the planet’s surface. Sometimes it cooled enough to solidify again into rock particles called magma rain.”
Karl blinked. “Seriously? That’s a real phenomenon?”
Elsa made a face and nodded. “Yep. And as Cilla knows, you can’t mine during magma rain.”
Cilla nodded. “I never had to deal with it personally, but that’s what I’ve heard.”
Elsa eyed her for a moment before continuing. “The problem is that it always seemed to be raining magma on Rhodophis. All that wonderful ore—and three days out of five, you couldn’t even get to it. Sometimes we would just set out in the coaches, only to be called back a few minutes later because the magma rain was starting.”
She became more animated as she warmed to her story, remembering those days. “Of course, those miners who could dodge in and find ore quickly, in between storms, made the most money, and I was still very slow. I barely earned anything my first month, and I was getting desperate.”
She took a deep breath. Here came the embarrassing part. “One day I finally detected a nice, juicy pocket of cendrillon in the lava. I was so excited! This was it! I carefully deployed the collector scoops and flew in to retrieve the ore…just as the alert came in to abort and return to the station. A magma rainstorm was forming in my area.”
“What did you do?” asked Cilla.
“I ignored it and went after that darned cendrillon!” Elsa declared. “I dove in there and scooped up as much cendrillon as my coach could hold, and just as I was preparing to take off and return to the station—the rain fell.”
The terror of that moment still felt very fresh, even after nine years. Elsa swallowed, her throat suddenly dry. “I could hear the rock hammering on the roof of my coach, battering me back and forth. The force of the rock pushed my coach down into the lava flow. Not far—magma rain isn’t like getting caught in an avalanche—but just enough to set off heat alarms and mess with sensors. You can’t see anything in magma rain, and without accurate sensor readings, it’s very easy to blunder into deeper lava than you intend.”
“Aren’t the mining coaches built to handle deep lava?” Karl asked, tilting his head to one side.
Elsa nodded. “To a point, yes. I wasn’t worried about that. I was worried about what lurked beneath the deep lava.”
She looked at each person at the table. “Fireworms live on Rhodophis.”
Cilla shuddered like a kid listening to a ghost story and scooted closer. “I never encountered them before. What are they like?”
“They’re slim—only three or four feet in diameter—but they can easily be one hundred feet long. They coil and writhe through the deep lava, and they’re very territorial. If they catch a mining coach, they’ll pull it under, and if a coach is submerged for long enough, it will melt.”
She remembered thinking she could still make it out, no big deal, right up to the moment the fire worm got her. “Within seconds, a fire worm had thrown a loop of its body around one of my collector scoops and was drawing me downward. I fired my thrusters to rise into the air, but the worms anchor themselves to each other. Their combined weight was too much for my little coach.”
That was when the panic had hit. “I called for help right away, of course, but most of the miners had gone back to the station. Not Bruno. He was waiting for me outside the station doors, stalling his arrival time because he knew I wasn’t there yet.” He had also been scolding her soundly the whole time via commline, but she didn’t mention that part. “He flew back to me, but what could he do? The undercarriage of my coach was already submerged, and mining coaches have no weapons.”
By now her audience was fully immersed in the story. Karl leaned his elbows on the table.
“Mining coaches don’t have weapons, true—but some of them have drills. Bruno dove in next to me and drilled that fire worm as if it were a chunk of rock, even though he could hardly see. I was afraid he was going to drill a hole in my coach,” she admitted. She still didn’t know how he had managed it, but she remembered him swearing up a storm and promising he wouldn’t leave her, no matter what. A lump formed in her throat at the memory.
“The worm thrashed, pulling me deeper for a moment before finally releasing me. It whistled in rage—”
Godfrey raised a hand skeptically. “Whistled?”
Elsa shrugged. “I don’t know how else to describe it. It was so loud that I could hear it inside the coach. It let go of me—and it snagged Bruno by coiling around his drill. He told me to go, of course. There was nothing I could do.”
Godfrey nodded.
“But I couldn’t go. The rain was still falling, and I battled my way upward against it to keep from getting too close to the lava. Could I attack the worm with my collector scoops? I couldn’t. I was in the hottest part of the lava for too long, and the ends of the scoops had been melted to slag. I didn’t have a drill on my older model coach. The rain was still falling. I could barely see. I had nothing, except for a load of useless ore that would be no good to me at all if my friend died trying to save me. Then I had an idea.”
She smiled at her listeners. “I told Bruno to fly just a bit lower, deeper into the lava. You can imagine what his reaction was. When he was done yelling at me, I explained my idea, and he went for it. Probably less because he trusted me and more because he was out of options,” she realized in retrospect. “He dunked the drill lower into the lava, hoping to weaken it with the intense heat. After a few moments, I flew in next to him. The thing about fire worms is that they don’t have eyes to speak of. They rely on vibrations to detect intruders. My ore wasn’t entirely useless. I hovered close enough to the lava to get the worm’s attention, and then I dumped my entire cargo right over the nest. At the same time, Bruno gunned his thrusters at full power, jerking himself away from the surface of the lava. The weakened drill broke, and the worm cast its body over the ore cascading down instead of over his coach. Bruno and I hightailed it out of there.”
She picked up her fork and speared her last piece of salad. “And that is how I almost killed myself and my best friend on the same day I lost the biggest ore haul I’d had to date,” she finished, popping the salad into her mouth.
Karl leaned back in his chair. “That was fantastic.” He frowned. “Wait, how did you get that piece of worm you have in your cabin?”
She swallowed her salad. “Oh, the carapace. It was stuck in Bruno’s drill, and he gave it to me as a souvenir.”
Karl chuckled. “I guarantee no one else in this neck of the galaxy has a souvenir like that at home.” He raised his water glass to her. “Great job saving the day.”
She rolled her eyes. “After I lost it.”
He shook his head. “But you went back for your friend. That was the important part. You didn’t abandon a teammate in trouble.”
Godfrey held out a hand. “Whoa whoa whoa. That was the stupid part.” He looked at Elsa. “Your friend was willing to sacrifice himself for you, and you almost made that sacrifice mean nothing. What if your plan hadn’t worked? You’d both be dead. You should’ve gone back to the station when he told you to.”
Karl raised an eyebrow. “A little self-serving, don’t you think? She couldn’t abandon her teammate.”
Godfrey rolled his eyes. “Here we go. Does it get old, spouting spacescout values all the time? Don’t you live in the real worlds at all? Outside of your perfect little bubble, we have to watch out for ourselves to survive.”
Elsa sighed and wiped her mouth with her napkin.
Oh yeah. Dinner had definitely been a mistake.
Elsa breathed a sigh of relief when she departed the Strelka. She hadn’t attempted any further group socials, but just being around Godfrey put her teeth on edge. He seemed perpetually offended by one thing or another, and viewed her new dedication to the Fleet to be a mild variety of treason against her kind. Elsa was glad to board the skiff for Anser, and not just because it put her closer to discovering the truth about her father.
The Strelka had business elsewhere in the Avis system, so the long skiff ride to Anser was necessary, albeit unwelcome. Elsa was so, so close to her goal, and the nearly twenty-hour ride aboard the much slower skiff was torture.
Spending so long in a skiff with Karl could’ve been romantic, a chance to get to know one another better in close proximity without many distractions and have long, meaningful conversations. But Elsa was too distracted by the thought of what she might find on her home planet to take full advantage of the opportunity, and with Cilla also aboard the small vehicle, private conversation was difficult.
Elsa enjoyed the fellow cinder’s company, and even though Cilla was the older of the two women, she looked to Elsa for encouragement and guidance throughout the trip. She grew more nervous and restless the closer they grew to Anser, and Elsa couldn’t help but wonder what awaited Cilla on the surface. Cilla told them that her family lived in Atticora, a settlement that had sprung up after the Battle of Castle Nebula, but she had been tight-lipped when pressed for more details.
“Does this look infected to you?” Cilla asked, displaying a skinned knuckle. “I think it looks infected.”
Elsa glanced at the skinned knuckle and felt a strange sense of déjà vu that she couldn’t pin down. Now what did that comment remind her of? “I think you’ll survive,” she commented. “Might be close, though.”
“Rude,” Cilla said, keeping her laugh quiet. Karl was napping on the pallet in the rear of the skiff after relinquishing the controls to Elsa. The two had taken turns piloting the skiff from the edge of the Avis system, where the Strelka’s business took her, and Anser, the fourth planet of the system. Elsa had suggested to Karl that Cilla take a turn at the pilot’s station too, but he had been reluctant to accept that idea. Elsa wanted to ask him why, but couldn’t very well do so with Cilla right there next to them.
Anticipation wound tighter and tighter inside Elsa as they drew near Anser. She hadn’t set foot on her homeworld in nine years, and she had half-expected never to return. The planet was visible now through the viewscreen and growing larger by the moment. She glanced over her shoulder at Karl, asleep in the back of the skiff. Should she wake him? She wanted him to see her world, but she hated to disturb his rest.
Cilla made the decision for her by sitting down in the seat next to the pilot’s station and gasping at the sight of the ice planet. “It looks so beautiful!”
Karl rose quickly enough that Elsa suspected he hadn’t been asleep in the first place. He came over to lean on the back of Elsa’s seat, and she sneaked a glance up at him. His hair stuck up in tufts on the left side of his head, and the folded blanket he had used as a pillow had left an imprint on his face. In spite of her nerves, Elsa found herself grinning.
“It is beautiful,” Karl murmured. “Can we see it up close?”
Elsa magnified the view, and Anser leapt closer, vivid enough now to see the snowfields covering the planet’s surface. Anser’s sun lit the port side of the planet, reflecting off of the ice with a brilliance that was blinding if looked at directly. The starboard side of the planet was mostly dark, but lights sprinkled here and there betrayed the existence of a few cities.
“I’ve never been to Anser,” Karl said, “but I’m glad of the chance to see it now.”
Elsa could only nod; the lump in her throat didn’t permit speech. Her eyes were so full of tears, she could barely see to pilot the skiff. She didn’t know what she had thought her reaction would be to her homecoming. She’d not left under the best of circumstances, and memories of Anser were tied up with memories of loss. But she found herself shocked by the intensity of her emotions—and chief among those emotions was joy, not sorrow.
Karl put a hand on her shoulder and kissed the top of her head, so lightly she could’ve almost thought she imagined it if not for seeing his reflection in the viewscreen as he did it. Believing himself unobserved, he smiled down at her with an affection both overwhelming and thrilling. She blinked furiously to clear the tears and made a small course correction to send them on a more direct path for Gahmuret, her old hometown.
The plan was for her to get off at Gahmuret while Karl took Cilla to her family in Atticora.
“If we can’t make contact with Cilla’s family within a few hours,” Karl said to Elsa, “I’ll bring her back with me to Gahmuret to meet up with you. We can get accommodations for the night there and try again in the morning.”
Elsa cleared her throat to get rid of the last of the lump. “Yes. Good plan. Oh, but communications signal is notoriously bad on Anser—we may not be able to reach each other via commlink. Let’s plan to meet at the school in Gahmuret; it’s a fairly recognizable landmark from the air. Or it was, anyway,” she amended. She wondered again just how much had changed in her absence.
Karl shook his head as he gazed at the planet. They no longer needed magnification to see the planet clearly, and the scattered lights of civilization seemed even more isolated from one another now that topographical landmarks could be picked out. “I’ve never seen a colonized world that was so sparsely populated.”
“They say Anser never recovered from the war,” Cilla chimed in for the first time in a while, startling the others.
Elsa nodded. “You know the old joke, Cilla. The question is…” She looked at Cilla expectantly.
Cilla looked back. “What?”
Elsa glanced away from the controls. “Oh, you know it. Everyone who ever lived on this hunk of ice has heard that clichéd saying.”
Cilla smiled. “Not everyone, evidently. What saying?”
Elsa blinked at her before finishing the joke. “ ‘The question is, who wants Anser?’ You must’ve heard that growing up.”
Cilla shook her head. “Nope. Must be because we grew up in different areas.”
Before Elsa could respond, the old commlink sitting on the console in front of her chimed.
Karl looked at her in surprise. “Someone from Anser calling you already?”
Elsa picked up the commlink, fingers hovering over the screen. “It’s my father’s. It’s syncing with his storage account.” Her breathing quickened. She might have answers to her questions very soon.
Cilla raised an eyebrow. “Is that significant?”
“Possibly,” Elsa murmured. The sync had nearly finished, but she found she didn’t want to open the files with the others present. She needed to be alone for this.
“Karl, would you mind taking the controls?” she asked. They were entering the atmosphere now, and she wanted to drink in the sights of home without having to worry about piloting the skiff—and without having to worry about her eyes being too tear-filled to fly effectively. For someone who hated crying, she sure had been doing a lot of it lately.
“No problem,” he said, slipping into the seat as she moved out of it. She
stood behind him. She was close enough now to catch a glimpse of a mammut herd out on the snowfields, and then Gahmuret lay spread out before them, looking smaller than she remembered. Of course, at the time she’d left the place, she hadn’t seen many cities that were bigger.
Karl flew the skiff low over the colorful, domed houses of Gahmuret, letting the vehicle linger in the air for a few moments longer than was strictly necessary. Probably to allow Elsa to gaze with hungry eyes at the town, seeking familiar sights and determining what was new since her departure. Very little had changed about Gahmuret, really, at least from the air. Elsa even thought she had caught a glimpse of their old house, but she couldn’t be sure. She wasn’t sure she wanted to see it. Some memories were best left untouched, wounds that had finally scabbed over and needed to be left alone to heal completely.
Elsa was notorious for picking at scabs.
Karl set the skiff down on a rudimentary landing zone on the north side of the town. The landing zone looked to be little more than a flat patch of snow outlined by markers stuck into the ice. Elsa knew that was deceptive. Ship landing areas had to be on very firm ice without any fissures; not just any patch of snow would do. When Elsa had left, no one had ever launched from Gahmuret; Atticora’s site was chosen for its solid, glacial ice, and it was the closest place to rent a skiff. It hadn’t been worth the trouble to build a proper, permanent launch pad in Gahmuret in Elsa’s day. Apparently not much had changed.
She shook herself out of her thoughts. “We better suit up,” she said. “It’s going to be cold out there.”
The three of them donned the winter gear they had borrowed from the Strelka. Elsa slid her arms into her parka, a nondescript white affair that would be deemed terribly frumpy by Anser’s inhabitants; but then, they were rather connoisseurs of parkas, given that parkas were the only way to make a sartorial statement most of the time.
The Star Bell (The Cendrillon Cycle Book 3) Page 18
