“And so here we are,” he continued in a bitter tone, “sent out into deep space to follow-up on the disasters of others. It seems like I’m always stuck with a crew of cleanup men. Space-going janitors, that’s what we are. Men like you and me, Starn—we deserve better. It’s disgusting.”

  I blinked a few times, not seeing any manner by which Blackwood and I could be found comparable. But I was smart enough to keep that opinion to myself.

  “Anyway, I wanted to see if I can enlist your personal support. I’m talking about the kind of support you’ve given Captain Hansen upon occasion—or that girl Carter back at the bar. I need a good man to back me if things become… unpleasant.”

  I frowned at him and shook my head. “I don’t understand, sir.”

  “That isn’t the correct response. Rather, you should be asking: how much?”

  “What? I’m still not getting your meaning—”

  “Oh, I think you do, but I shall spell it out, regardless. Your sole concern should be the amount I’m willing to pay for your loyalty at some point in the not-so-distant future.” Here he reached out a long, stick-like finger and tapped at the green dot, which was Eris. “According to my estimates, we’re something less than ten days out from this dismal rock.”

  “I’m assigned to Red Company, sir,” I told him. “I will defend this ship and everyone aboard her. That’s my job—and I’m good at it, as you said.”

  “Yes, yes, that’s all well and good. But maybe you’d like to become a corporal?”

  I looked startled for the first time. It was only a Private Second Class, and to reach Private First Class normally took something like a year in the service. By the end of this journey out to Eris and back, I privately hoped to reach that rank. In fact, I figured I’d earned it by then.

  But Corporal? That’s not how things worked aboard this ship. Someone else had to pretty much quit in order for me to move up. Quite probably, after we returned to Mars and everyone on this crew disembarked. A few of Red Company’s members might opt out of their contracts, deciding they’d had enough at that point. Promotions were possible, but at this time, it just didn’t seem likely to happen.

  “I doubt it, sir,” I said. “Men like Sergeant Cox, Corporal Tench. They’ve got years of service on me.”

  Blackwood laughed. “Service isn’t the only thing that gains rank. Or maybe you haven’t figured that out yet? Remember when I was talking about prices?”

  I knew what he was talking about. I’d dealt with bribes and corruption before—and I didn’t want any part of it. But then again, it couldn’t hurt to have this man, an important person aboard the ship, at least believing that I was on his side.

  “I understand what you’re saying, sir,” I told him, which was true. “I will take your offer under consideration. If some terrible conditions were to arise, I will think of it.”

  Blackwood nodded. “No commitment…?”

  “As you said, sir, there are recording devices everywhere aboard this ship.”

  “Ah, I see. Suddenly, you think I’m trying to entrap you. I get it. Good thinking. In my books, your estimated IQ has gone up three points just from this single interaction.”

  “Well, um, sir...” I started to say.

  “All right, Devin Starn. I accept your statements for what I believe they are. Let’s hope we land out there on this rock and all goes well.”

  “On that point, sir, we’re in complete agreement,” I said, and then I turned on my heel again to continue my patrol route.

  By the next time I passed that same spot in the passages, Blackwood was gone.

  This left me in a questioning frame of mind. Why had he been standing around idly, gazing at that map? He had to have known this was a very rare, lonely spot on the mid-decks. Further, he had to have been aware I was going to pass by equally alone.

  Everything had been staged, planned, and carefully worked out. This seemed like odd behavior to me. Blackwood had never done anything but sneer at me in the past. Maybe he really was worried about whatever we were about to run into out there on Eris.

  On my third time around, I stopped and gazed at the astronomical chart. It seemed to me that Borag had moved a pixel closer to that round, green circle on the map.

  What the hell was out there? After gazing at it and getting no answers, I moved on. I shrugged. I supposed that whatever it was, we would learn the truth soon enough.

  Chapter 23: Arrival

  After the strange encounter with Accountant Blackwood, I spent a lot of time thinking about it. I considered telling some of the other marines, like Sergeant Cox or Commander Kaine, but I realized that they all despised Blackwood. They were also somewhat afraid of him, in my judgement.

  If I shared any private discussions I’d had with him, I would only become a source of suspicion to everyone. So, I abandoned the idea.

  I also considered speaking to the captain herself, but I couldn’t figure out how to approach her. She hadn’t invited me for any bodyguard duties lately since she didn’t need them. We’d been staying aboard Borag for months, and the riots and food fights in the bar had never escalated to anything serious.

  The captain spent most of her time on the bridge, in her quarters, or on a few of the highest decks. I rarely saw her except when she passed by with an entourage in the top-level passages of the ship, and there was no time for a private conversation.

  Who else could I turn to? Freya Carter? No, I decided against it. She didn’t have the connections. I wasn’t going to tell someone who couldn’t do anything about it. That would only worry her and serve no purpose.

  Naturally, I had no intention of following through with anything Blackwood had suggested. I wasn’t going to be his private henchman. A few compliments were all he had given me, and that wasn’t enough to buy Devin Starn.

  Cash wouldn’t have been enough, either. After all, Captain Hansen had supported me more than once, and I’d supported her a few times as well. None of those instances had been a cash transaction. I preferred that kind of arrangement. Sometimes, a private alliance between two individuals that was based on honor and honesty was better than making a purely money-based deal. It made you feel like you could trust the person more.

  So, I did nothing about it, except to avoid Blackwood as much as possible. I thought about him every time I passed the lonely outpost where he had been standing, gazing at the astronomical maps that now showed we were almost merged with the green dot that was Eris. But I never saw him there again.

  As the last week in the final month passed, we got closer and closer to Eris. We were now close enough to see it with the naked eye, and so I stopped worrying about Blackwood. I started wondering what we were going to encounter on this rock we were fast approaching.

  We had been decelerating for weeks by now, using our jets to decrease our speed instead of increasing it. After all, we couldn’t afford to slam into the rock or whip right past it, blazing deep off into the Oort Cloud.

  Everyone aboard became fascinated with the new world. As Borag drew closer to Eris, the dwarf planet loomed larger and larger in our viewport. The planet’s color was predominantly a deep, reddish-brown hue, with faint wisps of gas and dust emanating from fissures. The surface was covered by a patchwork of craters, ridges, and valleys, with massive boulders and rocky outcroppings jutting out here and there.

  But what truly caught our attention was the planet’s sheer size. Eris was larger than Pluto, and it showed. At one time, it had been considered the tenth planet in the Solar System. Then they’d decided to shrink Pluto down to a non-planet and call both of them dwarf planets. Its surface was a vast expanse of rugged terrain that stretched out as far as the eye could see. Mountains towered over the landscape, casting long shadows across the rocky ground below. Orbiting nearby, we could see the faint outline of Eris’ single moon, Dasomia, hanging in the starry void.

  Once Borag was close enough, we slid into orbit. We began scanning, but due to the dwarf planet’s significant size, it took quite a while to learn everything there was to know about this planet from space. Periodically, the captain came on the public address system and made announcements about the progress of the scientific team conducting the survey.

  “Looks like we have discovered some nice mineral deposits,” she said.

  The planet was composed largely of rocky materials and was denser than its sister dwarf planet, Pluto, which had a much higher content of things like ice and methane.

  The captain paused for a moment while sweeping through various charts and deciding what was worth talking about. “We’re getting significant internal heating measurements and radioactive decay, in addition to some venting... I’m thinking we could have an internal ocean of liquid water near the mantle. That’s very interesting,” she said. “One wouldn’t think there’d be a lot of heat this far out from the sun. After all, we’re now about twice as far from the sun as Neptune, about sixty times as far from the sun as Earth.”

  That was a sobering thought, talking about being deep in the middle of nowhere. If ever there was something called nowhere, Borag had found it.

  Eventually, the bridge crew decided to land Borag near a fountaining vent that was releasing heat from the internal zone of the planet. This came in the form of steam, hot white geysers that blew off into space. It was a reasonable spot to look for mineral deposits since whatever we were seeing here had originally come from deep within the planet.

  As we began our descent toward the planet’s surface, we could make out the details of the terrain with greater clarity. The craters were deep and jagged, their edges etched in shadow. The ridges and valleys were sharp and dramatic, carving deep furrows into the rocky surface. All around us, we could see the swirling mists of gas and dust, lit up by the distant sun.

  Despite its harsh and unforgiving appearance, there was a strange beauty to Eris that was hard to deny. It was a world of contrasts, where the rugged terrain and stark landscapes were tempered by the gentle glow of distant stars and the soft, swirling mists of gas and dust.

  As our ship touched down on the planet’s surface, I watched from the upper decks. Dozens of rock-rat miners wandered out onto the surface of Eris for the first time. They bounced around just as men walked on Earth’s moon back home.

  They hauled their drill-bots behind them, urged forward by eager foremen. The mining teams, after all, hadn’t had many opportunities to make money. For many months, they’d been sealed up inside the ship, hoping for a big strike once they were let loose on Eris.

  The drill-bots trundled, wobbled, and bounced over the surface. I was surprised to see that the various crewmen cheered them on. Everyone was watching them, and the crew seemed to view the D-Class contracts in a more favorable manner than I’d ever realized. We had always thought they hated us, but it didn’t really seem that way. They watched us the way a group of farmers might watch oxen working a field, betting on one to be stronger than the rest.

  I couldn’t help but wonder if Charley was out there among them. I sincerely hoped that he wasn’t. If anything went wrong, if one of those massive geyser puffs of steam shot up and hit him or anyone else, they were as good as boiled in their spacesuits.

  The geysers erupted at random with tremendous force, heat, and pressure. They fired up great plumes of vapor from the bowels of the dwarf planet. If someone took a direct hit, they’d be blasted straight up into orbit.

  The glow of the drill-bots cut through the darkness, illuminating the rocky terrain. Although the sun was up, it was dim and feeble, making the star look more like a huge, bright planet than a glowing ball of fire. It was depressing to think how far we were from home, with nothing but the vast expanse of space surrounding us.

  Suddenly, gasps filled the air.

  “Oh no!” one of the female officers exclaimed. My eyes darted downward, away from the distant sun, and I saw that something had gone wrong. One of the drill-bots had stopped moving, and its operator had vanished.

  “What happened?” the woman asked in alarm.

  One of the ensigns shrugged and pointed across the field. “You see that big geyser over there? When one of those things goes off, one of those big gushers like that, well… The planet has to inhale once in a while too, right? In order for that much pressure to go out?”

  The female officer gasped in horror. “Are you saying that man was just sucked down into the guts of the planet?”

  The ensign nodded solemnly. “Yeah, probably. It’s a dangerous job.”

  As they stared out the window, I couldn’t help but feel horrified. I hoped it wasn’t Charley, or anyone else I knew.

  I dared to hope that the miner had only fallen into one of these vents and would soon crawl back out, but it never happened. Eventually, a foreman wandered to the spot and wheeled the drill-bot away. I knew then that the miner was dead.

  As the days passed, we gathered a significant amount of good ore and radioactives from the field. The mood aboard the ship lifted, and a lot of people were quite happy. Most of the surface-level veins of ore in the Solar System had already been mined out. But out here, at the very limits of our Solar System, the rules were different. No one had ever mined these spots before, and we were rewarded with the easiest, richest veins of ore we’d found in years.

  Still, the knowledge of the dangers lurking beneath the surface of Eris weighed heavily on my mind. How many more miners might perish before we left this wild and unforgiving place?

  While we were mining, Captain Hansen had wisely released a fleet of drones. They were busy searching, surveying, and scanning the rest of the strange little world. Some of them were tiny satellites in space, beeping and scanning every inch of the surface, while others were flying, buzzing, or even walking. Robots trotted over the surface from our landing location outward, seeking anything of value.

  On the third day, reports came in that something had been found. I happened to be posted in the uppermost passageways on the command deck itself. I saw a pair of sensor ops rushing past me, almost crowding past me as if I wasn’t there. I took no offense and let them pass, turning my shoulders, so they were able to go by on either side of me.

  They were in the middle of an intense conversation. “What is it?” the first man demanded. “What could it be?”

  “What do you think it is?”

  “Well… it’s metal. We know that much… and it’s big. Really big.”

  I frowned at this and looked after them. What were they talking about?

  “What kind of percentage of metal are we talking about?”

  “We’re talking about pure, man. We’re talking about pure titanium.”

  Titanium, I thought to myself. That was a find. A large amount of pure titanium had real value… but it shouldn’t be found naturally.

  The second guy agreed with me. “Pure titanium? What kind of naturally occurring surface object is that?”

  The first sensor op stopped and stared at the other. “What? Are you trying to be dumb? It’s got to be a crashed ship or something. That’s the whole damned point.”

  They hustled on, and they were soon out of earshot. They rushed through the doors onto the bridge itself and disappeared.

  I stood there in the passageway, thinking about what I had just overheard. A big chunk of titanium had been discovered by one of the drones. They weren’t clear on whether it was one of the flying ones on the satellites or one of those walking around on the surface, but it really didn’t matter. They’d found something big and solid. They’d found a ship. There just wasn’t any other explanation.

  But what ship?

  To me, there was only one answer that made sense. It was one of the ships that had come out here earlier to explore this place.

  Maybe it had crashed. Or maybe the crew had gone mad, like ours nearly had during the long, long flight out from Mars.

  Whatever the case, I knew in my heart that Borag now had a new goal, something important to investigate.

  Chapter 24: The Ice Cave

  The next day, Borag summoned all the miners back into the hold and lifted off. We drifted over the surface of the tiny world, heading west. Eventually, we went over the terminator line and kept going. Night closed over us, and the dark, frozen little world seemed even darker and colder than before.

  After about an hour of slowly poking around, we crossed a small mountain range or two, then nestled in a rocky valley. I spent this time in the ready room, suited-up and prepared just in case we were needed for some emergency, although I didn’t see why anyone would need a marine while landing on a dwarf planet in the middle of nowhere.

  But the captain was thinking differently.

  “Red Company,” she said, coming over the PA system and speaking to us directly. “This landing is going to be different. I want you fully suited-up, fully geared, and armed. Make sure you have full charges in your carbines, and set your suit heaters to high. You’re going out on the surface ahead of everyone else. Lt. Quinn will lead the first group, while the second will stay behind aboard ship. Hansen out.”

  Corporal Tench, Leadbetter, and I exchanged glances. Of course, we rushed to get our gear together, snapped down our helmets, checked our charges, and topped off our oxygen tanks. But we were also throwing odd glances toward Sergeant Cox.

  He too, looked befuddled. “Why the hell was I left out of this?” he asked of no one, and no one answered. “Quinn…” he muttered to himself.

  He said this as if we couldn’t hear him, which we almost couldn’t. None of us responded.

  We gathered our gear and hustled down the ramps that led to the surface from the cargo hold. A few minutes later, Quinn led us out onto the surface of a brand new world.

  I truly felt like an explorer at that moment. It was kind of exciting, actually. Sure, it was clear that I wasn’t the first human to have walked on this planet, but I was probably one of the first to have walked in this particular location.