Wasteland of flint

Severs the birthcord of the Sun, plunging all

Into darkness, where the people will

Be cut to pieces and scattered.

This is the time of the Sixth Sun…

Contents

The Great Eastern Basin, Ephesus III, in the Hittite Sector

Ctesiphon Station, the Edge of Imperial Mйxica Space

Aboard the Cornuelle, Outbound from Ctesiphon Station

Geosync Orbit Over Ephesus III

Aboard the Cornuelle

The 'Observatory' Base Camp, the Edge of the Western Desert, Ephesus III

Aboard the Palenque

The Cornuelle

The Western Badlands, Ephesus III

The Palenque

The Cornuelle

The Palenque

The Cornuelle, Outbound from Ephesus III Orbit

In Geosync Over Ephesus

The Cornuelle, Outbound

The Edge of the Ephesian Atmosphere

The Cornuelle

Near the Stonespike Massif, Northern Hemisphere, Ephesus III

The Cornuelle

The Shuttle Wreck, Northern Hemisphere, Ephesus III

The Asteroid Belt, Ephesus System

The Shuttle Wreck, Northern Hemisphere, Ephesus III

Mons Prion, Northern Hemisphere, Ephesus III

Among the Broken Mountains

Outbound from Ephesus III

Mons Prion, Northern Hemisphere, Ephesus III

Aboard the Cornuelle

Southeast of Mons Prion

The Palenque

Slot Canyon Twelve

Deck Six Starboard, the Cornuelle

Near Slot Canyon Twelve, the Escarpment

The Cornuelle

Slot Canyon Twelve

Aboard the Palenque

In the Wasteland

The Cornuelle

The Palenque

The 'Observatory' Base Camp

Among the Broken Mountains

The Palenquem, Inbound

The 'Observatory' Base Camp

Aboard the Turan

Base Camp One

Aboard the Turan

Above Ephesus III

Aboard the Cornuelle

Ctesiphon Station, Just Within Imperial Mйxica Space

Appendix

The Great Eastern Basin, Ephesus III, in the Hittite Sector

The Gagarin sped out of the east, engines running hot, heavy night air hissing under thirty-meter wings. Though the sky behind the little ultralight was still pitch-black, the dawn wind was already beginning to rise, stirring the air. It was very cold, worse for the wind whipping through the airframe. Russovsky's goggles were rimmed with frost and her suit's rebreather left a white smear of CO₂ ice across a cargo bag stowed behind the seat. Kilometers of sand blurred past beneath the Gagarin. Ahead, hidden in night but standing out sharply on her vid-eye, the Escarpment shut off the horizon. Tiny green glyphs bobbed at the corner of her vision as a micro-radar taped to the forward wing surface measured and remeasured the height of the cliffs. The mechanism was resetting every second, unable to resolve the summit.

Down on the deck, where a vast soda-pipe field slept among night-shrouded dunes, a haze of fine dust was beginning to lift, stirred by the wind's invisible fingers. The Gagarin droned on, long silver wings glowing softly in the darkness, engines chuckling as they burned hydrogen and spat out fine trailing corkscrews of ice crystal. Russovsky's vid-eye flashed, alerting her to a break in the horizon. An annotation flipped up, showing a snatch of recorded video – flinty cliffs in harsh white sunlight. Blinking in annoyance, her face grim, Russovsky banished the note. She drifted the stick left and the Gagarin heeled over. The ultralight banked, sweeping over a knife blade of red sand rising three hundred meters from the nominal bottom of the basin. As Gagarin rose over the dune, she goosed the engines, wary of treacherous winds coiling close to the mountains.

Now she could feel the enormous mass of the Escarpment, looming darkness against a sky riotous with stars. The mountain range rose up endlessly and ran left and right to the edge of sight. She could feel the ocean of air around the ultralight changing, the quiet stillness of deep night falling away, disturbed by currents, eddies and whirlpools tugging and pressing at the wings. The mouth of the Slot loomed up, a hundred meters wide, an abrupt fissure cut into the mountain. Sweat beaded on her neck and along her spine, but the moisture wicked away into the skinsuit so quickly Russovsky did not chill. The radar threw back a confused jumble of images, trying to resolve the jagged cliffs and boulders at the mouth of the Slot.

She blinked twice and the radar image folded up and away. She clucked her tongue once, then twice. Her goggles gleamed and light-amp faded back for a second. She flew blind, the Gagarin winging into the slot, her hands light on the stick, keeping the ultralight centered between the cliffs. Another tongue cluck. Along the tips of the wings, phosphors woke to life, throwing a diffuse, soft white light over the flinty walls rushing past.

The goggles adjusted automatically and Russovsky could see again. A rumpled floor of broken scree, cockeyed temple-sized boulders and blown sand whipped past below her boots. Walls hemmed her in to either side, kilometers high and relentless, all jagged surfaces and overhangs. The whine of the engines rose, reverberating in the thickening air. A low hissing sound began to grow behind her in the east.

The planet's air was thin, though a human could stand outside without a z-suit. She would need a compressor and a filter to breathe, but it was possible. Such thin air exacerbated the planetary weather, making the wind and