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Pike and I were returning from Sunset Mesa, where we had repaired the ROC and the Starlancer, and were approaching the base camp on the moon Ignis. On the camp’s radio frequency, we heard a wild commotion. Excited voices were talking frantically. Something terrible must have happened. When we were only a few hundred meters from the landing site, I saw it. The Silver Arrow, Friedrich’s 600i, was completely destroyed and broken into two pieces. As soon as we landed, Hermieoth called out.

“Friedrich changed the energy settings. Then the ship exploded. We don’t know if he’s still in the wreckage or if he was thrown out. Help us search.”

We spread out and searched everywhere, but found no trace of Friedrich.

“This moon is cursed,” I heard someone say on the radio.

“Not just this moon, the whole mission,” I replied.

“There must be a scientific explanation for everything that has happened,” Alaska emphasized.

“For the individual events, perhaps,” I replied. “But for the sum of the events? I tell you…”

“Don’t say it,” Brubacker interrupted me.

“It’s true,” I began to explain. “Legends are not facts, but they are not just figments of the imagination either; they have a grain of truth. You don’t have to believe in the prophet’s prophecy, but you would do well to see the signs. We have found nothing but destruction and near death. One of us saw fire, and the Valakaar revealed himself to us. Pyro doesn’t want us to dig here.”

Silence. No one said anything. Suddenly there was a crackle on the radio. Then a voice. Quiet, as if it were far away.

“Hello? Hello! Can you hear me? This is Friedrich. I survived the explosion. But I’m still trapped. I just need to open this one door, then I’ll be free.”

Relief spread through the group.

“Then we can save what can still be saved,” I said with a groan and began to remove the weapons from the wreckage of the 600i.

To my surprise, Pike came to my aid and the others didn’t call me a corpse looter. With a smile, I watched as Pike loaded the weapons into the Starlancer and secured them expertly. I was impressed. Pike seemed to respect the rules of the desert. The desert takes. The desert gives. And when it gives you something, you shouldn’t ignore it. I had to keep in touch with Pike. He might be a suitable partner for raiding expeditions.

After Friedrich was free and we had given him medical attention, we decided to fly to the moon Adir. While the others flew directly to Prophet’s Peak on Adir, Pike and I made a detour to Kabir’s Post to get food. Brubacker had told us that there was a shop there.

Once we had everything we needed, we also flew to Prophet’s Peak. The settlement was located on the night side of the moon. It was pitch black. Not a single shade of gray was visible, only absolute darkness. I stared tensely into the colorless void. Eventually, a red position light became visible. Lonely and alone, a small fixed star showing the way.

I sent a ping. The scanner wave ran across the moon’s surface and briefly showed the contours of the surface. I opened my eyes in alarm.

“Damn! There’s another mountain ridge between us and the settlement.”

At the same time, I pulled back on the control wheel and applied full thrust to the VTOL engines. The Starlancer slowly slowed its descent and scraped just over the mountain ridge. Then the lights of the settlement came into view.

It was small and nestled on a mountainside. Brubacker’s Zeus stood on the only landing pad. The landscape was rugged, crisscrossed by slopes, rocks, and ledges. In the light of the landing lights, I found a place to land slightly elevated on a ledge.

No sooner had we landed and gotten up from the pilot seats than we heard Brubacker shouting over the radio.

“That idiot is shooting at my Zeus. He won’t stop shooting.”

“That’s a golem. Unbelievable. That little mining ship is firing its mining laser at the Zeus. Does she know what she’s doing?” said Hermieoth.

Pike and I glanced at each other briefly and jumped into the two seats behind the pilot and co-pilot seats. As soon as I sat down, I activated the screen of the remote-controlled turret. Pike did the same.

On the screen, I saw the night sky streaked with stars and brown gas nebulae. The targeting computer had marked the golem in red. Laser salvos chased after the enemy ship. Hermieoth drove them away with his Asgard.

This couldn’t be true. We just had no luck. Rocks with minerals and spaceships exploded, we lost equipment, and now we were being attacked. This mission was truly cursed. Pyro didn’t want us to dig.

“Guys, it’s too dangerous here. Let’s set up a new base camp far away from the settlement. Then we can come back here again,” I suggested.

The others agreed, and Friedrich recommended a spot at the bottom of a long, deep trench that stretched across the moon. We made our way into orbit to fly to our new destination from there.

The trench was also on the night side. Once again, I flew toward a black void. I couldn’t see anything at all. No trench, no terrain contours, just formless blackness. Hermieoth and Friedrich took the lead in Hermieoth’s Asgard. However, I couldn’t see Hermieoth’s spaceship either. I just followed the radar signal. It was a flight into the unknown. Perhaps a flight into the next catastrophe.

It felt like an eternity before we entered the moon’s thin atmosphere and the on-board computer displayed the altimeter. It was a frightening feeling. The numbers on the altimeter were running backwards so fast that I couldn’t make them out, and all I could see through the narrow viewing slit of the Starlancer was blackness. It felt like falling into infinity, like falling into a black hole. Only this wasn’t a hole, it was a moon, and the invisible ground was approaching at incredible speed. Beads of sweat formed on my forehead, my hands clenched the steering wheel tighter and tighter. Neither Pike nor I said anything.

“Turn slightly north, right toward the trench,” I heard Friedrich’s calm voice on the radio.

“I don’t see a trench. I see absolutely nothing,” I replied, emphasizing my calmness and hoping that no one noticed my rising panic.

The marker for Hermieoth’s ship moved up and to the left in my field of vision. I pulled and turned the Starlancer’s steering wheel. Slowly, the Asgard’s marker moved back into the center of my field of vision. Then I suddenly saw it.

Two black ridges stood out against the dark night sky, stretching far to the north. There was nothing between them; that must be where the trench was. Everything else remained hidden behind an opaque black wall. We followed the supposed trench and went deeper and deeper. I nervously glanced at the altitude indicator.

1,000 m, 500 m, 300 m, 200 m.

I still couldn’t see anything.

100 m, 50 m, 10 m, 0 m, -50 m, -100 m.

The radar signal from Hermieoth’s spaceship was still quite a distance ahead of me. It was confusing. Finally, I saw the landing lights from Hermieoth’s ship illuminating the ground. Then, in the beam of my landing lights, a dark ground appeared, swallowing up most of the light. We had made it and touched down safely. All the tension escaped from my lungs in one fell swoop.

We had arrived in a shadow world. Dark gray dust and black obsidian rocks covered the ground. Outside the cone of light from the landing lights, it was pitch black. Only behind the mountains was a flaming orange glow visible on the horizon.

“The sun is about to rise. Let’s go up the hill and watch the spectacle from there,” suggested Hermieoth.

We hurried up the hill. Already on the way up, the play of colors—orange, green, and yellow—became more and more intense. The obsidian rocks and mountain peaks greeted the new day with an orange-red glow. Finally, the star Pyros rose majestically behind the mountains, revealing with its light the breathtakingly beautiful landscape we found ourselves in. Captivated by this spectacle, we stood on the hill and forgot all our worries. Night was driven away by day, and with it the terrors of darkness. Hope sprouted that with the light came new happiness.

Finally, we returned to the Starlancer to plan our next steps. No sooner were we on board than Brubacker complained of severe stomach pains and nausea. He suspected that the cause was a soup he had eaten at Kabir’s Post, where Pike and I had gone to get food.

“Guys, I need a bathroom, fast,” he said, cramped.

“I’ll take you to one,” I said, leading Brubacker to one of the quarters.

“But not quarter four,” Pike called after us.

Brubacker was suddenly very weak on his feet. I supported him, took him to the bathroom in one of the quarters, and closed the door. Despite the closed door, the unpleasant noises from the bathroom were clearly audible. Brubacker groaned. I opened the door a crack, poked my head in, and asked.

“Do you need help?”

“No, I’m fine. Let’s go back to the others.”

In the mess hall, we encountered an intense discussion about how to proceed. I listened disinterestedly for a while, then said:

“Treat Brubacker on the Medic Piscis first. And I’m going to lie down in bed for a while. I feel really strange and my stomach is rumbling strangely. I’m sure it will pass quickly.”

Everyone except Pike left the mess hall.

“Interesting. From what I’ve noticed, most of the expedition’s problems seem to be related to Brubacker,” he said, leaving the mess hall as well.

I didn’t have the energy to think about it, so I went to bed and fell into a restless sleep.

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)