Chapter 4

INCONSTANT LOCATION; ARAE ORBIS

            “Where is this again? Clara?” asked Captain Grant, staring out the window at a wall of white.

            “It’s the big city close to the pole,” replied Kendric Moreno from where he sat on the other side of the room. “Good spot for a research center.”

            “Is it always like this here?” asked Kallie. “Even this high up?”

            It was Caden who answered. “Yes.”

            Kallie leaned back in the deep recliner she was sitting in. The team of police that were assigned to the Clara task was smaller than she’d expected, around 20 men and women. The main force was in the main seating area of the EL, and only Caden Kreine, Grant, Moreno and herself were in the extra room at the back. She could feel the massive EL dropping altitude and losing speed. They were close. She glanced out the back window. Nothing was visible through the blizzard.

            “All occupants of the back room please move to the front of the vessel,” said a robotic voice over the intercom.

            Kallie started to stand, trying to shake off her drowsiness. She’d gotten about 3 hours of sleep in the past 30 and had been trying not to fall asleep throughout the entire, nearly silent 20-minute trip.

            As soon as she moved, the EL shuddered violently and Kallie was thrown to the ground, too surprised to land properly. She could hear furniture scraping across the floor behind her and lay flat on the bottom of the vehicle for a moment, feeling slightly annoyed through a haze of confusion. “Get up!” shouted Grant’s voice somewhere near her, and Kallie finally realized that she was laid out on the floor.

What just happened? she wondered asshe rolled to her feet, her shoulder stinging from the fall. Bad luck had plagued her for the past two days, and she didn’t think she was prepared for any more.

            “The hell was that?” shouted Moreno as he tried to regain his balance, the craft still bucking gently.

            A siren went off near the front. “S**t,” muttered Kallie, running toward the door.

            The craft was still lurching as she found her way into the cabin, the others right behind her. The room was filled to the brim with people trying to find out what the problem was, but Kallie pushed though the mob and headed for the huge plexiglass window at the front. Nothing was visible through the blizzard, but the vehicle had almost stopped lurching in the storm. Almost.

            “What’s the deal?” shouted Moreno as the EL shook.

            “Everyone, please stay calm and leave the pilot’s cabin. It is recommended that you remain in the larger seating room. Thank you,” blared the automated voice over the intercom.

            The pilot turned toward Moreno momentarily. “The safety fields around the EL are malfunctioning, so we’re being tossed around by the storm more than we should be. I’m trying to diagnose the problem right now and hopefully it will be fixed before long.”

            The fields allowed for a more comfortable journey for the passengers and an easier one for the pilot, but coping without them was possible, even in a blizzard.

            None of them left the now nearly empty cabin, holding onto grips on the wall and watching the massive window for any sign of the city or at least a gap in the storm.

            The blowing snow seemed to thin slightly around the EL, and Kallie realized that she could see a little farther ahead of them. “Almost out,” said the pilot in a strained voice, checking their nav coordinates on the console with a frown. “I don’t recognize the coordinates here,” he muttered, just loud enough for Kallie, standing almost directly behind him, to hear.

            Suddenly she saw a triangular silhouette looming ahead of them. The pilots reacted before she did. “That thing isn’t supposed to be there!” shouted the copilot in terror. There was no way that they could avoid it. “Think that the navigation was shot when the fields went down?” he called across to the pilot, who simply nodded, his face ghost-pale as he saw what was happening.

            “On a collision course with Mt. Clara,” stated the console blandly. “Due to safety field issues, bailing is not an option.”

            Kallie stared at the mountain they were approaching rapidly, unable to move or think. “Everyone get in the back!” shouted Grant and Kallie shook herself out of her trance. The pilots didn’t move.

            “Come on,” ordered Moreno. “That back room is the safest place to be right now, with the craft headed at that…thing the way it is.”

            The copilot hesitated, but the pilot shook his head firmly and motioned for the younger man beside him to stay put. Moreno shrugged and turned away.

            Kallie remained where she was, facing the door and looking over her shoulder, somehow managing to stay on her feet. The shadowy figure of the mountain grew, grayish through the storm. “We need to go,” said Grant, grabbing Caden’s arm and leading him toward the door. Caden seemed terrified out of his wits, his pupils dilated and staring blankly ahead. He’s never been through anything like this before, realized Kallie. Neither had she; ELs usually didn’t just…malfunction. Something had happened in the blizzard�"the high winds and pressure had just forced the vehicle to give in. This is great timing, she thought dryly as she started to mentally prepare herself for the impact.

            They nearly ran through the short hallway toward the back room they had been in just moments earlier. The craft was eerily silent and the jerking and shaking motions had ceased. They were coming out of the storm�"and straight into a wall of rock.

            Kallie paused in the doorway of the main seating room as the others ran by her. A dozen or so people�"the investigations team that had been assigned to finding the base�"looked at her. “Everything all right?” asked the man nearest the door.

            She shook her head slowly. “We’re going to hit a mountain.” Kallie was surprised, even amused that her own voice was so calm, so nonchalant.

            The expression on her face, however, must have been dead serious because the people in front of her seemed to believe it. They turned to each other for conformation, hoping to see that the news was false, and Kallie knew that the relief and laughter would never come. “Buckle in,” said Kallie, before turning away from the door. It all felt like some sick joke.

            She ran in the doorway of the back room and saw that the other occupants were by the back wall. Kallie started toward them just before a deafening boom reached her ears and she flew back the way she had come. Kallie heard the screams and grunts coming from the main room as she hit the wall, hard, sliding down toward the ground, or the surface that had become the ground in the upside-down craft. Unbearable heat washed over her, and she thought she heard either Grant or Moreno groan softly nearby.

She closed her eyes, praying for everything to be done, sure that she’d never felt pain so intense before in her life. It was all over�"it felt like she’d been dropped into a cauldron of boiling oil, fallen into the deepest pit of hell.

Finally, the heat, noise and pain seemed to fade away, and Kallie wondered if it was because she was dying or because the temperature had finally gone down. She heard the sounds of the blizzard blowing against the walls of the EL, if it still existed. Everything else seemed quiet, abnormally quiet.

            She could hear her own breathing. Something in the back of her head told her that something was wrong, something was badly wrong with her, but she couldn’t figure it out, didn’t have the strength to try. Kallie opened her eyes and stared out into the pitch-blackness. No noise. Nothing. It occurred to her that she wasn’t even in pain. None at all.

            After what seemed like eternities but was more likely just a few seconds, Kallie felt her neck relax slightly. The blackness around her seemed darker, scarier, and the last thing she felt was the rough carpet beneath her.

 

TAMAYA II [CAP], EQUATORIA; ARAE ORBIS

            Eridan Heidrich had never felt comfortable wandering around the suburbs, since the crowds and police officers had always made him feel trapped. Now, responsible for the disappearance of the most famous woman on the planet, he felt like he was suffocating slowly as he walked down the streets of Arae O.’s capital.

            It was the largest city on Arae, and, naturally, also possessed the largest slum on Arae. Eridan walked between rows of towering gray skyscrapers with dingy windows and rotting foundations, looking for someone. He had run into delay after delay as soon as the Empress had arrived. He’d had to beef up on security, and it had been difficult getting more guards since what he was doing with them was highly illegal. In Tamaya…he knew someone that could help, but it was a last resort.

            After an hour of wandering around the slum to no avail, he saw a flicker of movement between two buildings. Eridan stiffened, looking for the culprit. The person he was looking for was…scary, to say the least, and he’d known that he wouldn’t have any luck until the thug wanted to be found. “I’ll be in Tamaya,” was the only message that had been sent to Eridan’s waveband. “The bad part of town.” Eridan hadn’t received any more information, but he expected that he wouldn’t need it.

            His hand tightened on the pocket-sized laser that had been dangling on a chain at his side as he squinted into the dark, dirty alley. People�"no, one person�"an old man, unshaven and filthy. He was leaning against the wall, and as soon as he saw Eridan, he turned, ambling into the crevice as if he were afraid. Nothing there. It was nothing, thought Eridan as he started to turn back into the light.

            A hand gripped his shoulder and he jumped, wheeling to face a dark, hooded figure behind him. Okay, okay, he thought, heart pounding. I’m okay.

            “Jumpy?” laughed a voice, a woman’s voice, emanating from the hood, and the dark figure didn’t bother to take it off. Eridan chuckled back, shakily, and looked down at his assailant’s belt. She was practically a walking arsenal�"guns, knives, a high-powered military issue particle-beam pistol�"it went on.

This was a bad idea.

“Okay, Heidrich, I’m here. I owe you a favor, and now I’ll decide whether or not I’m going to keep my promise.” She laughed again, a dry, cruel chortle that was, somehow, the worst thing Eridan had ever heard.

            “Look, Eazie, I know it’s been a while, but�"”

          “Heidrich, whaddaya want?” asked Eazie impatiently, her chain smoker’s rasp cracking with every vowel.

             Cut to the chase. Okay, thought Eridan frantically. “I’m behind on my, uh, current…ah, project,” he said quickly.

            Eazie chuckled again. “Tell me about this project.”

            Eridan didn’t know what to say for a second. “Ah…” he stammered, blinking. “I can’t really talk about it.” He winced, waiting for her reaction. Everyone who knew her called Eazie “moody”, but Eridan seriously suspected, sometimes, that she had something bordering bipolar disorder.

            “One of those,” she replied nodding as if she knew exactly what he was talking about. Eridan let out his breath and blinked again, twice, before trying to look nonchalant.

            “Sure. Yeah, whatever. This is what I meant when I told you that you owe me, something like this. I need to toughen up security around the place and I can’t use registered guards ‘cause they don’t take illegal cases like this one.” Eridan swallowed nervously and waited for her response. Eazie was the most wanted person in Tamaya, and there were many wanted people in Tamaya. With Eazie though…everyone knew where she was, but nobody did anything about it. The tough, unbreakable woman practically ran the slums, and she loved it. Eridan had met her 7 years prior, helped her get started in the capital since Eazie’s previous city had run her out, and then…Eridan had left. She’ll keep her word, he thought. She has to.

“There’s plenty of guys and gals hanging around this place that’ll take it if you pay good. Like, decent,” replied Eazie, and Eridan relaxed slightly.

            “Right. Okay. I’ll take them off your hands. Where are they?”

  

EIRA, NORTHERN TERRITORIES; ARAE ORBIS

            There were voices around him. Quiet voices.

            It was like he was swimming toward the surface of some body of water, almost there, but not quite.

            Something touched his leg and he realized that it hurt. The surface got closer. “Hasn’t stopped bleeding,” murmured a soft, female voice.

            “Going to have to eventually,” said someone else. “Or not.”

            He tried desperately to rise faster. More voices. More pain. It all faded into the background, all into the pattern of light dancing on the surface of that water he could almost see. Water? What water?

            Dusten Grant awoke suddenly and almost violently, then sank back into the soft surface of whatever he was lying on with a groan. The pain he had felt in his previous, semiconscious state had been nothing compared to this. His head was throbbing like hell, and his left leg felt like it had been torn in half. Everything was freezing cold.

            A woman was looking down at him. She gasped and spun around, yelled something to someone behind her.

            “Cyrus!”

            Another face looked down at him. “Who are you?” mumbled Dusten, wondering why he felt so weak. It felt like he hadn’t used his voice for a long time.

            “You’re safe,” said the man named Cyrus. Dusten wished he could move without injuring himself further.

            “Who are you?” Why do I sound like a whining kid? he wondered, trying to remember what he’d done to end up in this situation. Clara. He remembered that he’d been going to Clara…because…because the Empress was missing. The EL had been having problems. Did we really crash?

            And why is it so cold? He was working on the assumption that he’d ended up in Clara, but something didn’t feel right.

            “I’m Cyrus Blanco.” The bearded man looked at him, expecting a response.

            No, I meant who are you? thought Dusten. Does your organization have a name? “Cyrus Blanco” meant nothing to him, but it was plain that Dusten wasn’t going to get a good answer from the guy. He was probably just a worker at the hospital in Clara…at least, Dusten hoped that he was at a hospital in Clara.

“Where are…” Dusten paused, realizing that his voice was hoarse. “Where are the other people?” Where am I? There had been other people, people he’d hardly known, in the EL…or so he remembered. Dusten couldn’t think of any faces, but he was almost sure of it.

            The two people staring down at him exchanged glances. “They are safe,” said Blanco, uncertainly, and the lie was written clearly on his face. Dusten sighed and fell back against the bed. He wasn’t getting anything out of these two, and he could feel the darkness pressing against the edges of his vision again. He needed to rest.

*** 

            It felt like days had passed by the time Dusten woke up again, and this time he was alone. It was still freezing.

            This…this is crazy. It has to be around freezing in here. Dusten moved slightly, and the covers shifted strangely. They were very heavy, for blankets, and Dusten looked down. He almost jumped as he saw them, saw that they were made of some kind of…fur. Where the hell am I? He’d had a feeling that he wasn’t in Clara, but now…it was more than a feeling.

            By the time Cyrus Blanco came in to check on Dusten, he’d managed to sit up and inspect the rest of the room. It was made of rock�"rock, with a hole for a door�"and empty except for the fur that was surrounding him.

            “You’re awake,” said Blanco as he stepped inside, stating the obvious.

            Dusten would have nodded if he had trusted himself to do so without dislodging his head; it was still pounding. He didn’t even want to think about his leg, hoping irrationally that if he ignored it the constant burn would disappear.

            “Where am I?” he asked, trying to sound gentle about it.

            Blanco fiddled with his coat, which, not surprisingly, was made of the same material as the blankets. “Let’s not get into that,” he said. “It’s not good for you.”

            Before Dusten could respond, the woman who had been present in the room before pushed past Blanco into the room�"if it could be called a room. She was fairly tall, with straight black hair that reached her chin and she looked like she was mid or late twenties; about Dusten’s age. He noticed for the first time that both of them were wearing baggy clothing of a material similar to that of his blankets. These aren’t good signs…

The woman smiled hurriedly, obviously trying to comfort him. “Hi. I don’t think I told you my name. I’m Shania Boreas and�"”

“Where the hell am I?” demanded Dusten, trying to sound neutral but aware of the childish frustration that had once again leaked into his voice.

Shania blinked. “I…I don’t know if you want to hear�"”

“Will one of you just tell me?”

She sighed before replying, obviously annoyed by his pushiness. “Eira. You’re in Eira."

***

The cold air blew over her angrily, but Kallie sat perfectly still in the main shaft room. “So you live here? Like…moles or something?” she asked carefully.

             “Yes.” The middle-aged woman named Eloise Milano, who had volunteered to be, essentially, Kallie’s caretaker, was standing by the door. “How do you feel?”

            “Fine.” In truth, Kallie’s back still hurt. She had injured it in the crash, leaving her lower body temporarily paralyzed. It had taken her a little more than a month to be able to finally complete the walk to the main room, the apparent gathering place for the villagers. She knew that she had been lucky, that most of the people in the EL had died, that the four people in the back room had lived through the experience since they had been farthest from the impact. As it was, Caden and Kendric were going to have months more of recovery.

            Especially out in…Eira.

            “You can walk well?” asked Milano.

            “Yes.”

            “Can you feel anything below your waist?”

            “No.”

            There was silence for a few seconds.

            “How exactly did you end up out here?” Kallie didn’t know the entire story; she only knew that the people living in Eira had been stranded there for nine years and had managed to live off the land�"even in the cold, snowy climate. They had been lucky enough to find a way into the network of caves that riddled the top half of Arae, and had been there ever since, with very little in terms of modern utilities. The only trace of real civilization that Kallie could find were the old heat cubes placed in every corner. It was no wonder that the things had lasted almost a decade in Eira�"the almost completely heatproof isoprenic hydrocarbon shells released only tightly controlled amounts of heat into the air. The heat itself was generated through the fusion of atmospheric nitrogen to silicon, and the subsequent fission of silicon to nitrogen in an adjacent chamber. The things were incredibly tough, since the reaction had been started, years ago, through an intense heating process, and they seemed to be the only remnants of the equipment that the Eirans had brought with them to the north.

There was one entrance to Eira, and they were sitting directly under it. Past that, the caves stretched for kilometers, branching off into side corridors and small rooms, past Eira and into the unknown. Even the wavebands didn’t work so far away from civilization�"there were no transmitters for hundreds of kilometers from the crude settlement.

         Milano sighed. “We…we were tourists…of a sort. It used to be somewhat …fashionable to hunt up here, which is where we get all of the, ah, fur. It apparently isn’t anymore, because we haven’t seen another human soul for the nine years we’ve been here until you arrived…” She barked a laugh. “Our party came up here late in the year, and you know the rest�"the storms came early, we got lost, our nav equipment and communications failed, and we were stranded out here. We still are. Hell, I’ll probably die out here.” Eloise stopped speaking at that and Kallie didn’t say a word, deciding that it was better not to irritate the woman at that point.

            Eventually Milano spoke again. “Look, we need to get back. This is bad for you. Just a few minutes of moving around, but more than that and your back is going to get worse.” Kallie didn’t protest, feeling the nagging ache of her spine starting up again as she got to her feet. The two women walked back down the gray hallway, leaving nothing in the front room except the sound of the wind blowing gently outside.

 

NEAR NORTH POLE; ARAE ORBIS

            The blue-green energy fields seemed to hiss in anger and Miara was acutely aware of the surge cuffs around her wrists. “You know where it is,” said the man before  her. She was standing in a cylindrical cell made of translucent energy fields, and a desk sat squarely in front of the cell. At it sat the man who’d introduced himself as Eridan Heidrich and proceeded to make her life a living hell.

            “I…don’t,” replied Miara, but her voice had no conviction. She wished desperately that she didn’t have the information he was looking for.

            He laughed. “I don’t need any interrogation machines or surge cuffs to see through those lies of yours, Kreine.”

            Miara shivered, even though the air inside the fields had grown very warm.

            “You can’t get away with this,” she said weakly.

            He tilted his head to one side. “Oh yeah? You gonna fight me or something, lady?” Miara thought back to the call she had made to Caden, and wished that it had been successful. It had been a month�"a month of sitting, waiting, and then torture�"and…nothing. “You’re out of luck, Empress.”

            Miara didn’t reply to him, looking at the glossy white floor beneath her instead.

            “Where is it?”

            Miara forced herself not to respond. The parts of her skin in contact with the surge cuffs seemed to grow warmer. She hoped it was just her imagination.

            “Take a good, long look at those metal bands around your wrist,” instructed Heidrich. “Think about how much you don’t want me to use them.”

            She remained silent, unable to think of anything else to do. Her heart was beating so fast that she thought he could hear it. Heidrich said something to the interrogation machine.

            The searing pain began at her wrists and spread to her entire body. Miara’s eyes widened in fear and surprise, and then the pain took over. She screamed.

  

EIRA

Captain Grant had been the first on his feet after the crash, and Kallie wasn’t surprised to see him standing alone in one of the dimly lit corridors, staring at the heat cube in front of him and kicking gently at the rough stone beneath his feet.

He looked up as he heard her almost-steady footsteps approaching and nodded slightly in her direction. “You’re doing well,” he observed, but his voice was angry, as if he’d been interrupted from something.

Kallie hesitated, unsure what to say. “Well,” she ventured cautiously. “It’s been two months. About time.”

Grant looked up at the roof of the tunnel, almost laughing. “Aptly put, Hayward.” He didn’t sound happy.

“Captain, I�" ”

He turned suddenly. “Don’t,” he almost yelled. “Don’t call me that. Not here, where everything I’ve ever done amounts to nothing. We aren’t who we were. How can you have any hope, any at all, that we won’t end up here for the rest of our lives?”

He didn’t wait for an answer, and started to walk down the hallway instead. Kallie stared after him for a second, stunned, before breaking into a shaky jog, following him. “Dusten!” He didn’t turn, but stopped in his tracks. “Dusten.” The word felt strange on her tongue, but she ignored the peculiar feeling and continued, hoping that he was listening. “You’re losing it. We’re stuck out here for god knows how long, but you can’t forget. You lose your memories, you forget who you are, and everything’s gone. You understand?” She had walked around him so they faced each other, and he just stared at her, amazed. Kallie knew how he felt�"and he was probably right, they’d probably never make it back if the…tribe of villagers hadn’t for nine years. She just didn’t think she could handle giving in so easily. Kallie looked up at him, almost glaring, as she challenged him to say something to contradict her, challenged him to take back what he’d just said about who he was.

Dusten Grant took a step back, looking uncomfortable and flustered. “Just…just go,” he muttered finally, still angry.

Kallie let out her breath, shaking her head, and obeyed him unthinkingly by turning away without another word. He was still staring at the wall when she left.

 

NEAR NORTH POLE

            “It’s in a mine,” sobbed the voice in the recording. “I don’t know what mine, I don’t! It’s on the southern hemisphere, near where the diamond veins were found a few hundred years ago.”

            Eridan heard his own voice mumble something. Give me more, he thought, remembering.

            “The mine is abandoned, it’s on the southernmost continent, that’s all I know!” pleaded the voice of the Empress. He’d finally gotten her to crack�"it hadn’t taken very long, what with the surge cuffs and the lie-detecting interrogation machine, but it had taken him two entire months to find more guards and he was behind.

            “That’s all she gave me,” he said as the recording clicked and the Empress’s terrified face vanished from the wall that doubled as a screen.

            Another face replaced it. “So it was the mine after all…” it said slowly, thoughtfully. Then it turned, focused, snapped to attention. “She must know more than that, though.”

            “No. Nothing,” replied Eridan, not sure why there had been such familiarity at the mention of a diamond mine.

            “Well. The mine she’s talking about is massive, and older than the goddamn hills. There was a cave-in some 25 years ago, and it might take you a while to find what you’re looking for. I’ll send you approximate the coordinates of this mine over the secure line,” interrupted the screen.

            “Sounds good…” said Eridan slowly, confused about the sudden outpouring of information. Where did this come from? How does he know all this? Coordinates, history…as soon as he heard the word “mine” he suddenly knew everything that there is to know…

            The screen went blank and Eridan stared at it for a second before standing up. Finding what he was looking for in the mine would be like finding a needle in a haystack, that much he knew already just from the vague description he’d received. He couldn’t use a detector since he had no idea what to detect…in fact, he hadn’t, for some no doubt vapid reason, even been allowed a small sample of the material.

            No, there were no shortcuts, none in the slightest. Eridan sighed.

            He was going to have to do the entire job the old-fashioned way, and there was no telling how long that would take.

 

EIRA

A clump of slightly tangled, dry auburn locks fell to the cold, hard floor where Kallie sat cross-legged, trying to slice off the majority of her hair with an old, rusty but viciously sharp knife. It fell in front of her face, which meant, she knew, that the resulting appearance would be uneven and sloppy, but she didn’t care. It fell to just below her chin, in the longest places, and her cheekbones in the shortest. I don’t remember the last time I saw a hairbrush, she thought, shaking out what remained of her hair.

“You were part of LEAD, weren’t you?” asked a voice from the doorway, surprising her, and she turned.

“Yes. Of course,” she replied after a second went by.

Dusten Grant nodded. “You seem like it.”

She knew what he meant. Mentally capable, physically capable, and young�"too young, it seemed, to possess such an undoubtedly prestigious rank. Dusten was referring to a program practiced by the Thalian military in wartime that took 12-year-olds from the general population that were not opposed to joining the military and ran tests on them. Kallie could remember what they had been: a few physical assessments, a few diagnostic assessments, and then what had seemed like an overwhelming amount of mental tests. She had been one of the very few to pass�"barely, according to the examiners�"much to the great surprise of everyone she knew, including herself. Like the rest of the group that had gone through, Kallie had received heavy epigenetic treatment, hormonal treatment, and six years of intensive training to become an officer at age 18.

  He nodded. “I was in the fifth batch…four years before you, I think.” Kallie nodded. She had been in the last “batch”, and, subsequently, the 15-year-long civil war between the government and six of the Thalian provinces had ended just before she finished training.

“Wasn't fun, was it?” she asked, leaning against the wall.

Dusten gave her a wry grin, and she realized that she’d never seen the man smile before. “No, but I thought it was worth it�"until we ended up out here.” He paused. “How did you get started?”

“My cousin got me to apply for LEAD�"I didn’t think I’d make it, of course, but once I found out that I had…” She shrugged. “No choice.”

“Same thing happened to me, actually.” Dusten didn’t look surprised. “One of my old friends talked me into it. I think that’s the story for most people who apply.”

“Nobody with much aptitude for the exams actually wants to be in the military,” agreed Kallie, still sitting cross-legged on the ground.

There was a moment of silence as they both struggled to remember life before LEAD. Dusten shook his head. “So what province are you from?” he asked.

Kallie looked up, startled that she was actually having a sane conversation with someone. “Four. Province four.” There were 24 provinces on the Republic of Thalia, not including Arae. The Republic, in the grand scheme of things, was a country just as much as China or France back on Earth. But in recent years, Thalia had been rife with uprisings from within, and its LEAD program had been resurrected from the dusty government drawer where it had sat in abandonment for at least five decades since its creation. “I was never going to be anything, really,” she said, almost wishing that it had been so. “I don’t know…nobody expected me to get into the program.”

Dusten nodded slowly, and after a second of waiting for him to tell her which province he was from, she remembered who she was talking to.

            He was still standing in the doorway�"if the gap in the rock could be called that�"with one arm resting against the wall inside the room. “I just…I just can’t stand to be here,” he said finally, seeming to have forgotten what she’d just said. “I’ve never been this frustrated before, and I’ve seen a lot.”

            Kallie turned her head sharply, realizing what he was referring to. She had never had to deal with the war that she had heard no end of. Dusten had fought for three years, and as a LEAD graduate, probably on the front lines. Kallie knew, to some extent, what it had been like at the closing stages�"six hundred years of military technology thrown aside and replaced with something not unlike a glorified, more intense sort of trench warfare. Once the rebels had begun to run low on funds and once the Thalian government had begun to mismanage theirs…everything had gone south for the armed forces.

            Dusten glanced at her, and seemed to see that she knew, that she had read between the lines and could see what he meant. His expression seemed vacant, haunted, for a moment before returning to normal.

            He had seemed quiet to her before�"not spitefully so, like Kendric Moreno was�"just…taciturn unless something called for him to be otherwise. She hadn’t noticed his pain, the burden he carried with him. It made sense to her now, why he hadn’t exchanged regular conversation with her about where they’d grown up�"he’d asked her questions because he’d wanted to analyze her, to read her, but hadn’t thought to offer her any information about himself.

            Kallie had never been close to the more experienced officers she’d been around, and for some reason she hadn’t thought of them as being any different from her. He’s been through hell, she realized, and it still chases him. Dusten seemed to have even forgotten the human urge to socialize, to communicate with others.

            That would have been me, someday, if we hadn’t landed here, Kallie reminded herself.

She stood up and turned toward Dusten. “It’s weird to talk to someone you can relate with out here,” she said, pretending not to have noticed his slipup, even though they both knew she had.

He looked at her oddly, thoughtfully. “Yeah, it…it is strange.”

Kallie sighed as they stood there. “Maybe we’ll even get out someday.”

  

SEWARD CORP. MINE 2349D, MERIDIONA; ARAE ORBIS

            The guards trampled through the meter deep powder before him, and Eridan walked through the trail they’d created. The opening of the mine loomed before them, a hole in the side of the snow-covered bluff.

            Eridan stared into the gaping maw for a second before one of the guards flicked on a light. “Should we go in?” asked the man.

            Eridan considered it for a second. Then he shook his head. “No. We set up camp here, outside the entrance.”

            The three burly guards, made even bigger by their therm-gear, glanced at each other in something close to exasperation. They obviously weren’t looking forward to the night ahead, out in the drifts, but Eridan knew that, as tempting as the mine looked, he didn’t want to risk a cave-in like the one that had been mentioned to him earlier. “Yes, sir,” mumbled one of the men finally, shuffling through the snow to a position a few meters from the mouth and dumping his pack in the snow. They had enough supplies to last them for a couple weeks, and when they needed more, Eridan would just return to Desmond, the tiny gated town they’d just left.

            What bothered Eridan was that the only search tools they had were ice picks, shovels, brushes, a few cutting lasers, and microscopes. They were all that he could think of�"he had some idea of what he was looking for, but the mine stretched for almost a third of a square kilometer under the black, frozen Araen soil. We could be here for months, he thought glumly as the guards started to erect one of the poly-fiber storm shelters.

            A cold shiver of fear trickled down his spine at the thought of the entire search being fruitless.

       The ingress of the mine gaped open, revealing nothing but deep, threatening blackness, and the more Eridan stared at it, the more it looked like a tomb.

            He turned back to his guards, trying to shake the uneasy feelings building up in his stomach. The wind blew across the icy ground behind him, tracing patterns in the blindingly white snow. The craggy mountains stretched into the distance, still and silent.