Niah

Outside, the sky is still as black as coal and filled with a murk that sticks to our skin as we move. Despite the darkness, the air is increasingly scorching with a drenching humidity that makes it hard to breathe.

Wish hooks up a transport tray to a mini-zip. I eye the death trap of chromium and glass with its own small hydro thruster and hover-jets. She straddles it, leaning forward over the handlebars as it shimmies down the platform to the surface of the planet. She reaches a hand behind her and taps on the seat. "Are we doing this?"

I glance at Hart. He mounts himself on a grid of the transport tray beside the drill platform. The transport beam locks him into place.

I swallow, nod, then swing my leg over the back of the mini-zip and clutch Wish's waist as she revs the engine. I put my feet on the pedals and we roar off. The wind whips my face and murky air fills my lungs. I tip my face down against Wish's back and just hold on tight. Zip-gliding was never my thing. Which is an odd thing to think because I've obviously never done it before, so I imagine the feeling is a remnant from the genetic memories of Bellamy.

A beam of light splits the darkness in front of us and Wish uses it to guide the mini-zip through the dunes and crevices of the shadowed lands beyond the lights of the ship. A map overlay displays the blinking sources of orkrane, guiding her.

We've travelled barely a furlong when, from the corner of my eye, I glimpse a slinking shape. Its form is just visible in the outer edges of the light. My jaw drops as I realise it's a boy riding a giant tiolf. I tap Wish on the shoulder and she glances at the boy, then draws up the mini-zip. We gaze at him together.

The boy and his creature ride toward us. His chin is lifted and his broad shoulders are back, but his whole body flows with the movement of the animal beneath him. It's almost as if boy and beast are one. The slinky striped fur of the animal is smudged with dirt, and so is the boy. They look wild, and wilder still to imagine that the boy must have tamed a beast notorious for its unbreakable spirit. As we watch, the animal tilts back its head. Its howl echoes from the dunes around us.

"Am I seeing things?" I whisper to Wish.

She shakes her head. "If you are, then I am too. Is that boy riding a tiolf?"

"Looks like it."

I hold my breath as they come closer. The air around us is still and silent. The boy raises a hand as if in greeting and I start to mirror his action, then startle and reach my hands to cover my ears as a screeching alert sounds from behind us. Lights flash on the ship and a siren blares over and over again. In an instant, the animal, boy clinging to its back, bounds away and pelts off in the opposite direction. They disappear from sight in ticks.

I spin around, glaring at the ship and the droid behind me. "What in Chortessa's guts, Hart?"

The alert dies down and the lights return to normal as the droid splutters with a startled beep.

"What was that?" Wish asks.

"Elixr reports that the xenon has reached critical levels in the ion thruster reserves."

"All that noise was because the ion thrusters are out of juice?"

He nods. "It's a critical system. After your episode in the engine room, I scheduled a subroutine to filter the xenon into secondary storage until the thrusters can be repaired."

"Okay," I say, "so we still have plenty of xenon. We'll get the ion thrusters back up and running eventually. Right now we're getting orkrane so we can dispense the cure. Let's go."

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I wrap my arms around Wish again and she jets the engines into gear. We zip off toward the nearest deposit which is several furlongs south. I watch for life signs on my tablet as we glide through the rise and fall of the land around us. On the screen I can see the boy and tiolf continue heading farther and farther away. Eventually, they disappear from the edge of the scanner's range. There are other lifeforms in the distance too, but nothing heading toward us and no immediate danger or threat.

It's eerie zipping through the shadows. Rising up out of the murk and dirt are glimpses of what Nar must have been before. Light from the mini-zip hits the edges of derelict buildings that reach up into the sky. At one point we glide through a forest of damaged and destroyed solar arrays. They rise out of the ground like trees, searching for twin solars they can no longer find through the murk.

When we reach the orkrane deposit, the three of us position the drill platform. As chunks of ore are drawn up from beneath the surface of the planet, we haul the chunks up onto the tray. They get caught up in the transport beams. I set the system to defabricate the ore and each large chunk is broken down into its molecular structure and stored in ticks.

Even with the advanced tech in the drilling platform, it takes a quite a few factors to extract enough ore. Eventually, we have enough raw material based on the calculations I ran for the correct ratio of plasma conduction.

Wish leans back against the transport tray as the drill winds down with a final spinning hum. She wipes a hand across her forehead which is now filthy, not just with the dark murk of these lands but the black ink of the orkrane ore.

"Job's done?" She asks.

I smile at her and nod my head. "Now to get it all back to the ship and get this party started."

We mount up and begin heading back toward the ship.

"Wait," Wish calls back to me. Her voice is almost whipped away in the wind as the mini-zip glides along.

"What is it?" I shout back.

She pulls up and I lean over her shoulder as she points to the holo-display. "I think there's a settlement over there." She points to a cluster of lifeforms that pulse with energy. There's dozens of them.

I bite my lip. "It could be a nest of eagrims for all we know."

"We should check it out. The boy had to come from someplace and if there are people there they might be willing to help us fix Elixr. We need more hands to extract enough chromium to do all the repairs she needs. Maybe they would trade with us?"

She's right, but I feel a nervous tension about approaching populated areas. "You're right." I sigh and nod. "Okay, let's go check it out."

We zip over the dunes, heading closer to the blur of lifeforms on the tablet. Beneath us, the ground whizzes by so fast that I wonder how Wish can see to keep us on solid ground. The furlongs pass beneath us but there are still several to cover before we reach the settlement. Even so, as we get closer, we see a wall of orbs rising up out of the blackness. Light shines off their metallic surfaces. Above each, long rods spear upward to the sky. Beneath, long columns thrust into the ground below. I watch with awe as we move closer and closer.

Wish lifts her head, thrusting her chin at the display. I gaze over her shoulder at it to see what she's indicating. With a finger she points at the small blurry dot that's keeping pace alongside us. Because of the cargo, the transport tray attached to our rear, and the pitch black of the land around us, we're not moving at anything like the mini-zip's top speed so it's not impossible for a wild animal to be keeping pace. But even so, it's a sight to see and something very much to be wary of.

Wish and I glance in that direction but I see nothing but the blinding ink of the shadows around us. Suddenly the mini-zip stalls out. Its engines splutter, flicker, and then fade to black. Around us, the darkness is complete.

"Chortessa's guts!" Wish swears. I feel the muscles in her shoulders clench as she uses all her strength to control the mini-zip beneath us. It slams into the dirt hard, sending a scatter of stone, rock, and earth flying in all directions. We're both thrown forward and my weight propels hers through the air. Together, we crash hard against the ground which gives way beneath us. We tumble, falling.

I reach out to grasp the crumbling soil in my hands. I scramble as the walls of dirt rise up around us but can't stop myself falling. We slam into the hard-packed earth at the bottom of the pit. My breath bursts from my lungs. I lay stunned as a flurry of grit tumbles down over us.

Beside me, Wish splutters, coughing back the dust.

Then, over our heads, we hear a heavy crunch of metal and a whirling whizz and plink. I lift my hands up to cover my face and curl myself into as small a ball as possible as the hunk of chromium slams into the dirt walls above us, bouncing back and forth slightly before landing in a heap just inches from my head.

"Ouch!" Hart says, his blue orbs blinking as if he's stunned.

"What are you talking about you hunk of scrap? You didn't feel a thing. You're made of metal." Wish pushes herself upright with a groan.

Hart blinks at her. "I have been programmed with empathic sensors that can anticipate painful events and replicate the appropriate response."

"Anticipate? You didn't anticipate us getting thrown from the mini-zip. THAT would have been helpful."

I lay back and close my eyes, wishing my head would stop spinning and that they would stop shouting.

Beside me, Wish thumps against the high dirt walls of the pit. "Eagrim's beak. I think we're stuck in here. How are we going to get out?" I cough, feeling the ache through every inch of my body. Wish kneels down beside me. "Niah, you okay?"

I nod but it's probably not very convincing. "I'll live." I glance up above us and feel an odd comfort to see light. It creates a soft haze through the shadows of murk. I feel less comfort when I realise it's the steaming hunk of mini-zip which ultimately put us in this predicament. It rests just inches from the drop above our heads.

I groan as I sit up. In the dark pit, Hart's hover stream creates a soft glow of blue light. That and his eyes serve as a means of illumination in our little hole.

"We appear to be in a predicament." The droid states. I can't help but laugh at the understatement of it all. Then cough at the dirt in the air.

Wish sighs. "How are we going to get out of this mess?"