Outcasts of Gideon

Kishan Saanvi : Part 2

"I thought he would have fired me by now," said Mihr. "But I keep getting the call. This one's big."

There was one advantage to working with a talker. They often revealed missing details. "Oh? I hadn't heard."

"Runar didn't say anything, if that's what you're wondering." Mihr removed a small package from the hover. He paused in front of Kishan, extending the package toward him. "I figured it out all by myself."

"Figured it out?"

Mihr raised his arm and swept it out toward the horizon. "This place. You know where we are, don't you? There's no reason to be on this rock except the metal. He must have found some of it and he wants us to make more."

Kishan didn't take that as confirmation. "There's nothing out here. No mines. Nothing."

Mihr shook his head. "It's never very deep. It's like dust. You find it close to the surface. We just have to check our location. Why else would he send us out here? Besides, he gave me about a thousand lights to mark boundary."

Kishan turned and walked toward his own hover.

"Where are you going?"

"To check our location again."

"Don't bother. I was heading in the right direction when I saw you. You're off by half a klick. It's this damned rock. It throws off geolocators. Let's jump in my hover. No need to separate now. Just bring the device."

Kishan settled into the passenger seat of Mihr's hover. Mihr ignited the engine. The geolocator on Mihr's panel confirmed that he'd been right. The ride would be short, but they were off the mark.

From where they stopped, Kishan could see light glinting off of his vehicle. Here the landscape looked no different. "I'm guessing we're a few meters off," said Mihr. "You head out that way. I'll go the opposite. When we've hit twenty meters, we'll start in a clockwise circle." He removed a small package and strung it over his neck by its strap.

The two men walked in opposite directions. Kishan scanned the ground around him. When he reached about twenty meters, he turned to his right and began to circle. At a distance, he saw Mihr do the same. "What's the power source?" asked Kishan.

"Some sort of dark matter, I think."

"Dark matter?"

"They explained it to me but might as well have told me it was magic. I never got past basic mathematics."

"I thought dark matter wasn't viable as a power source. It's not baryonic, right?"

Mihr laughed. "See, you told me something else I'm not gonna understand."

"It doesn't have nuclear properties." When Kishan spotted Mihr's footprints, he turned left. He went out another twenty meters. Turning right, he started the clockwise motion again.

"I think it has something to do with gravity. Like I said, it's all chatter to me. You could explain it and I wouldn't know any more than I already do."

Kishan stopped. The ground in front of him was different. Dust had hardened into larger clumps. These stretched off into the distance before him. "What does this metal look like?"

"I told you, it's like dust on the surface. Only bigger. Why, did you find something?"

"Maybe." Kishan lifted some of the clumps from the surface. He held them up to the dying light.

"The first miners said it didn't look like anything at all." Mihr walked toward him. "Except when the sun goes down. It has an eerie glow in the dark."

As Mihr approached Kishan, the trailing edge of the nearby star dipped below the horizon. The direct light dimmed. There appeared a faint luminescence stretching out before Kishan's feet. "What the hell?"

"Goddamned Runar knows his shit." Mihr picked up a handful of the dirt beneath him.

They were on the edge of a scattering of the glowing material. "So this is phaethonium." Kishan advanced further into the glowing metal. As he did, more appeared to emerge in the distance. He walked a few dozen meters forward, but the edge of the field moved ahead at the same pace. When he turned around, he found that the luminescence encircled him at a distance of a few meters. "I can only see it so far away."

"Yeah, the glow fades after a short distance. Makes it hard to spot. Can't see it from space. C'mon, we've got to mark the field so we can find the center of it."