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My stomach was still rumbling. It looked like I had actually caught something from Brubacker. Sleepy and with a stomach ache, I staggered through the corridor of the Starlancer from the quarters to the mess hall. It was eerily quiet. Only the ventilation system hummed softly. The others seemed to still be asleep. In the mess hall, I took a Blue Bilva and a Rust. Vitamins and disinfection from the inside, that would definitely help. I put both on the table, sat down on the bench, and fell right back asleep.

“Zero. Zero!”

Pike’s voice woke me from my sleep. He was sitting across from me, the Blue Bilva and the Rust still on the table in front of me.

“Good morning. I think I fell asleep.”

Suddenly, the rumbling of the elevator echoed through the ship. Then the door hissed open. Hermieoth, Friedrich, and Alaska came in. All three were wearing space suits and helmets.

“We’d better keep our helmets on,” said Friedrich. “Who knows what pathogens are still floating around in the air. And my stomach is a little upset too.”

“I’m not feeling great either. Brubacker is still in the Medic Piscis. He’s been hit pretty hard. He claimed to have seen crawling creatures. He’s asleep at the moment,” added Alaska.

“I seem to be the only one who doesn’t have any problems,” replied Pike.

“Months in Pyro and eating rats and maggots toughens you up,” Hermieoth explained, taking the can of Rust from the table.

“Hey, that’s my breakfast,” I snapped at him.

“Sorry, I just wanted to tidy up.”

Hermieoth put the can back on the table and I washed down the Blue Bilva with the strong alcohol.

Meanwhile, Friedrich divided us into two teams. He and Alaska took care of Brubacker. Hermieoth and Pike set off to find rocks we could mine. I retrieved the GEO mining mech from Alaska’s spaceship, loaded it into the Starlancer, and flew after Hermieoth and Pike, who were already several kilometers away on the hoverbike and ROC mining vehicle.

When I caught up with them, I switched to their radio frequency.

“Zero here. I’m here to support you. Friedrich and Alaska are treating Bru.”

“All right, Zero,” Hermieoth replied. “I found some small stones here that I can mine with the hand laser. There’s a field with larger ones 500 meters away. Pike is mining those with the ROC.”

“OK. I’ll land the Starlancer a little ways away to be outside the blast radius. Just in case something goes wrong again.”

After landing, I trudged with the GEO to the field with the stones. Pike and I kept as much distance between us as possible. Then we both activated the mining lasers, each on our own stone.

The yellow laser beams penetrated the stones. The hum of the lasers vibrated in the air. I was tense to the tips of my hair and couldn’t enjoy the breathtaking view of the trench and the high mountains. Too much had happened on our expedition so far. Too often, the Prophet of Pyro seemed to have something against mining. Fate had not been kind to us so far.

The stone being worked on by my laser began to glow orange. The energy in the stone increased. I carefully reduced the power of the laser. A rumbling like that of a volcano emanated from the stone. It rumbled and hummed, then I heard a bang to my left.

Startled, I looked over my shoulder. Pike’s stone had broken without exploding or causing any damage. Then there was a crash in front of me. My stone also broke into small pieces, exposing the minerals. We collected the minerals with the tractor beam and moved on to the next stones.

A smile flitted across my lips. It was working. Finally, luck seemed to be on our side. We dismantled one stone after another. It didn’t take long before the cargo box in my GEO was full.

“Pike, you have the larger cargo container. I’ll break down the rocks and you collect the stuff. That way we’ll be more efficient,” I suggested enthusiastically.

Hermieoth had joined us in the meantime and was examining the minerals.

“This is glacosit. According to the database, it’s a very light insulator.”

Then Pike spoke up, sounding a little desperate.

“Zero, I’ve collected what I can. The rest that’s still lying here isn’t being sucked up by the tractor beam. I have no idea what’s going on.”

I looked around. Amber-colored mineral clumps were lying everywhere. The ground was littered with them. It was crazy that even the GEO’s tractor beam couldn’t grab them.

“Then we’ll do it by hand,” said Pike and started collecting the lumps.

I got out of the GEO and started working by hand too.

At that moment, the hum of spaceships could be heard. Friedrich and Brubacker arrived with the Zeus, Alaska with his Golem. They landed and we reported on our success and the problem with the tractor beams. Alaska tried to collect the minerals with the Golem’s tractor beam, but he was also unsuccessful.

Suddenly, Friedrich shouted.

“Damn it! What was that? A chunk just flew past me and slammed into the Starlancer’s engine.”

“Wow, one of those things just flew past my head too,” said Brubacker, who was back on his feet.

All of a sudden, the world went crazy. Again and again, individual crystals flew through the air like bullets. I took cover behind the GEO. There was a bang! Bang! as chunks crashed into the GEO’s arm and stuck there. They hung there like grapes.

“This is crazy,” I heard Pike shout. “The stuff is flying onto the ROC’s arm and sticking there.”

What the hell was going on here? What kind of haunting was this? We were on the road to success just a moment ago, and now? Our mission was truly cursed.

“Watch out!” Friedrich suddenly shouted. “There’s an electric arc coming out of the ground. Keep your distance!”

It was crazy. A red beam came out of the ground 1.5 meters away, bending and twisting and dancing like lightning on the spot. I had seen a lot, but this was not normal.

“So if you still don’t believe in something like the prophecy, what else has to happen…,” I stated.

Alaska, however, had some scientific explanations that I didn’t understand. I thought it was a haunting, something unnatural. But we all agreed on one thing. We all wanted only one thing. To get out of there.

After we had loaded the vehicles into the Starlancer, Brubacker and I stood in front of the ROC and looked in disbelief at the large lump of crystals hanging from the ROC’s arm. The lump moved, wafting back and forth.

“That looks organic,” Brubacker observed.

“Yes, as if it were alive,” I added.

“Let’s get back to base camp,” Friedrich ordered.

“Let me out of this ship first. I’m not flying with that thing on the ROC,” Brubacker said.

“Great. Now I get to fly alone with this anomaly,” I grumbled, annoyed.

“I’ll stay on board and fly with you,” Pike said.

“At least one person I can rely on,” I replied.

Night had fallen in the meantime. We flew back to base camp through the darkness. Our joy at our mining success was somewhat dampened by the anomalies.

“It’s noticeable,” Pike and I agreed. “Everything was going smoothly until the others showed up.”

Then we heard Alaska’s panicked voice on the radio.

“Damn it. No. Ahh. I’m losing control. I’m crashing…”

Then the connection was lost. Misfortune had caught up with us again.

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)