New Elysium: Weapons of War (Book 2)

Moving Mountains - Part 15

"We're approaching the landing zone, ma'am, "a voice announced over the shuttle's intercom system. "ETA in fifteen minutes."

"Thank you, Adam," Amy replied.

From a backrow seat of her small shuttle, Nico watched her unbuckle and get up. She had not piloted the small spacecraft herself, instead, it had been remote-controlled by what he assumed must have been an AI. Nonetheless, it left him with a queasy feeling to see the helm of the ship abandoned as she walked up to them.

At the other side of the ship across from him, the man known as Red had sunk back in his own seat and had spent the last fifteen minutes staring out of the window in brooding silence. Red had grilled him intensely on everything he knew about the virus, Ticotan Station, Atlas and his undercover mission with them. He had willingly shared anything else that came to his mind that Red might have found useful. Red did not seem pleased with what he had told him, but at least he didn't take that out on him.

Nico had a hard time believing that this silent brooding man was the same as the one being pushed up as some sort of terrorist or rebel leader. As far as he could tell Amy Larsson was running this show and Red was only along for the ride. He wasn't sure what to make of the man.

"Gear up, kid. Unless you wanna stay aboard and wait here," Amy said and threw something in his direction. He caught it before his face. As he turned it over in his hands he realized that it was a breathing mask, intended to cover the lower half of the face.

"What do we need these for?" he asked.

"You don't wanna breathe the kind of dust that gets kicked up in these parts," she replied.

Nico clenched the breathing mask tightly as he remembered that Six had been a mining colony once. And as dangerous as the Backside of the Coin and its renegade patrons might be, the wastes were about a hundred times more noxious. He turned to look out of the window, just as the shuttle dipped down its nose and began its descent.

The sky was blue and the sun was bathing the wastelands in its scorching glow. Down below, the desolate landscape was littered with the wrecked remains of old mining stations and outposts. The mining company that had operated here had packed up anything that was still of use, but they had left behind anything else, so the landscape was dotted with derelict old mining machinery. Most buildings and machines had been stripped down to their bare scaffolds by looters. Their weathered and broken remains now poked out of the scorched earth like dark and dented skeletons of enormous creatures from a mechanical nightmare.

Further, in the distance, there was a forest of tall, naked spires of what might have been a wind farm once. Most of the roads that had once connected the outposts were long since buried underneath the sand, but here and there, he caught a glimpse of a network of dark lines, probably cable shafts for power lines, poking out from underneath the sand wherever gusts of strong wind buffeted the land.

Where the landscape wasn't covered with the dismantled remains of man-made infrastructure, the ground had, for the most part, collapsed in on itself and giant sinkholes had swallowed anything in their reach. Some of them were shallow craters, others were chasms so deep that their bottoms disappeared in the utter darkness below.

All in all, the planet's surface looked like old and weathered skin, scarred and tarnished from decades of abuse. And up ahead, the ragged wastelands gave way to an oddly shaped mountain range. As they approached their goal, Nico realized that enormous caverns had been torn into the face of the earth. Combined with decades of erosion, what was left of the once tall mountain range was more like a stony scaffold. The remaining rocks came together at such odd angles that it seemed like a miracle that they could still support their own weight.