Cool air blew onto his face as the inspector drove through the bleak, sun scorched hellscape. Even with the protective coating on the windshield, the sun’s never ending assault right in his face was irritating. The inspector glanced at the thermometer. 126 C, below the lav-van’s max. With any luck, he’d make it to his destination before a solar flare drove the daylight side into the hundreds for days, if not weeks.
The radio dispatch hissed as it switched to the outlander’s satellite mode. Begrudgingly, he also switched the radio news off the local station with its limited area and to the vastly inferior satellite planetary news station. Inspector Gonzalez despised the surface level, tragedy focused nature of the planetary news station, but it couldn’t be helped. While Starsis only had a population in the few tens of millions, about 23.7 if memory served, creating a new program that covered all the twilight cities and the outlands let only the most sensational of stories make the waves. He didn’t have much of a choice out here.
Slight differences in the landscape made the lav-van ebb and flow as it maintained it’s exact 0.32 meter distance from the lifeless ground. The lav-van’s contents swayed and creaked in the main cabin as Gonzalez finally saw the tall sunshade.
His destination was a small abandoned mining town near the edge of the day-side outlands. Set up to mine some exotic ore, it had run dry some 15 years past. With no other reason to maintain the town, the inhabitants up and left for richer prospects taking anything of value with them. All that remained was the towering triangular sunshade that reflected most of the sun’s harsh rays back into space, the habi-dome and dock that maintained livable atmosphere and temperature, the dozen or so buildings to simulate life, and junk. At least, that’s what everyone thought.
Continue reading “Bandit’s Lair”
Magic Fable 