Jump Point magazine Issue 01.01 (n°01), December 2012 | Page 20

Kherium was a hot commodity. One of the core minerals the Xi’An used
to armor their spacecraft, it was exceedingly rare in UEE territory.
If these prospectors were on the level, they were talking about a tidy
little fortune. Certainly enough to patch up the Beacon, maybe even
install some upgrades.

until there was a sizeable gap in the flow of traffic before veering off
toward Hades II.
She passed a barrier of dead satellites and descended into Hades II’s
churning atmosphere. The Beacon jolted when it hit the clouds. Visual went to nil and suddenly the ship was bathed in noise, screaming
air, and pressure. Tonya kept an eye on her scopes and expanded the
range on her proximity alerts to make sure she didn’t ram a mountain.

Even better, they obviously didn’t know how to find it. Kherium doesn’t
show up on a standard metal or rad scan. It takes a specialist to find,
much less extract without corrupting it. Fortunately for Tonya, she
knew how to do both.

Suddenly the clouds gave way. The Beacon swooped into the light
gravity above a pitch black ocean. Tonya quickly recalibrated her
thrusters for atmospheric flight and took a long look at the planet
around her.

“You’ve got that look,” Carl said and refilled her glass. “Good news?”
“I hope so, Carl, for both of us.”

As was expected, it was a husk. There were signs of intelligent civilization all around, but all of it was crumbling, charred, or destroyed. She
passed over vast curved cities built atop sweeping arches meant to
keep the buildings from ever touching the planet itself.

* * *

Carl offloaded her haul at a discount so she could set out as quickly as
possible. Last time she checked, the prospectors were still at the Express, but from the sound of it, they would leave in hours maybe a day.

Tonya maintained a cruising altitude. The roar of her engines echoed
through the vast empty landscape. The sun was another casualty of
this system’s execution. The cloud systems never abated, so the surface never saw sunlight. It was always bathed in a dark greyish green
haze.

Tonya disengaged the Beacon from the dock and was back in her
beloved solitude. The engines hummed as they pushed her deeper into
space, pushed her toward a lifeline.
The Hades System was a tomb, the final monument of an ancient civil
war that obliterated an entire system and the race that inhabited
it. Tonya had it on her list of places to study, but every year Hades
was besieged by fresh batches of young scientists exploring it for
their dissertation or treasure hunters looking for whatever weapon
cracked Hades IV in half. So the system had become more noise to
avoid.

Tonya studied the topography to plot out a course and set the scanners to look for the unique Kherium signature she had programmed.
She engaged the auto-pilot and just looked out the window.
Being here now, she kicked herself for not coming sooner. It didn’t matter that this was one of the most scientifically scrutinized locales in the
UEE. Seeing the vastness of the devastation with her own eyes, Tonya
felt the tug that a good mystery has on the intellect. Who were they?
How did they manage to so effectively wipe themselves out? How do
we know that they actually wiped themselves out?

Tonya had to admit that passing Hades IV was always a thrill. It wasn’t
every day you get to see the guts of a planet killed in its prime.
Then there were the whispers that the system was haunted. There
was always some pilot who knew a guy who knew someone who had
seen something while passing through the system. The stories ranged
from unexplained technical malfunctions to full-on sightings of ghost
cruisers. It was all nonsense.

A few hours passed with no luck. Tonya had a quick snack and ran
through her exercise routine. She double-checked the settings on her
scans for any errors on the initial input. A couple months ago, she was
surveying a planet [