Chanting in sacred Dragonish, she circled then reversed and completed another rotation, spiraling closer to the flame.
Unworthy. Why had the Eternal Fyre exalted her?
Was she doing the right thing? The more the vog on Draco cleared, the foggier clarity had become. Her insight had blurred. Visions came less often and were murkier when they did. Was that an omen she’d lost the favor of the Eternal Fyre? Or was she supposed to be patient and wait for guidance? It wasn’t only the acolytes who’d been questioning when they would move to Elementa; she had been wondering, too.
What if all the guidance she was supposed to receive had already been given? What was the point in waiting for signs that may never come?
Wait…or proceed?
As she approached the Eternal Fyre, it floated up to the dome, and she stepped under it. She raised her arms, tilted her head, and beckoned. It spun in a blazing roar, rotating faster and faster, condensing to a small swirling mass.
The fireball dropped.
Chapter Three
Hot gas spewed from a mile-wide fumarole bed as foot-long lava worms scuttled across craggy black rock into nests hidden in the fissures.
Nasty. Everything on this planet is nasty. Grimacing, Biggs swiveled away from the camera one feed, skipped over the volcanic eruption on the adjacent screen, and focused on the vids in another sector.
The control room door slid open to admit Parson Hicks.
“Another building has gone up.” Biggs jutted a finger at the feed of a massive white coliseum-like structure with a domed roof supported by twelve smooth pillars. “What do you think it is?” he asked the ops manager.
Hicks squinted. “Can you zoom in?”
He enlarged the image until the picture started to blur. “This is the best I can do. The camera location isn’t the best.” They had to hide surveillance devices where sharp beady lizard eyes wouldn’t spot them.
“Another palace?” Hicks guessed.
“Don’t think so.”
In a matter of months, an entire city of ash-white stone structures had sprung up across hundreds of square miles. Unoccupied, except by the worker drones building it, the city resembled a ghost town of the future, a metropolis already abandoned. If only. His gut tightened with the knowledge Elementa soon would be swarming with filthy flying space lizards.
They had toiled day and night to construct the opulent castles, bandstand theaters, statuary, towers, and monuments, many of them inlaid with vibrant, glittering jewels. As much as the lizards filled him with revulsion, he grudgingly credited them with being master architects and builders.
Besides its location—atop a hill quite a distance from Dragon Town—the newest white structure stood out because of its starkness. There were no self-aggrandizing motifs or statues, no intricate carvings, no jeweled mosaics, no adornments of any kind.
“I wonder how they’ll keep the white stone clean?” Hicks mused. “They should have used the black lava rock.”
“Space lizards aren’t too concerned with cleanliness,” Biggs said.
Ash and soot coated everything. There wasn’t a sector on the roiling planet where volcanos didn’t spew shit into the atmosphere. The omnipresent thick vog was corrosive, too. The buildings erected by his company and the Earth government had required constant, exhaustive maintenance.
They were gone now. Not eaten away by the Elemental atmosphere but dismantled rivet by rivet, beam by beam, panel by panel, and shipped back to Earth, along with the colonists themselves.
In a game of chicken, Earth had blinked and caved to the dragons. After fucking King K’rah’s eldest spawn, the president’s daughter had convinced her father to hand the Draconians what they wanted. The idiots had no idea the wealth of natural resources they’d thrown away—a grandmother lode of precious metals and diamonds and the largest deposit of petroleum anywhere in the galaxy. They’d walked away and metaphorically quitclaimed the deed.
However, Biggs, who’d all but invented contingency planning, had seen the writing on the wall, and, even before the dismantling had begun, had relocated his company to the ancient, defunct lava tunnels crisscrossing the planet. Being underground allowed him to operate undetected and avoid many of the irritations and inconveniences of being topside. Traveling around the planet via the subterranean highways was a cinch. He could go anywhere and keep tabs on everything. He didn’t have to worry about dragon attacks, volcanic eruptions setting buildings on fire, or being gassed to death by a toxic atmosphere.
And due to Earth’s stupidity, he now faced no competition from government or private industry.
If not for the dragons, everything would be perfect. He focused on Hicks again. “What do you have to report?” He knew the ops manager hadn’t dropped in for a chat.
“Two items.” Hicks mistook the question as an invitation to sit and sank into a chair. “First—the workers were drilling for palladium and discovered another massive reservoir of petroleum.”
“Figures. Do what you have to do to work around it,” he said.
A woke Earth had been weaning itself from fossil fuels, shifting to “renewable” energy sources, but on Elementa, fossil fuels were a renewable source, due to the abundance and proliferation of lava worms. All it took to convert the decaying organic matter to petroleum was heat, pressure, and a little time. Elementa had all three. The geology so inhospitable to human life and favorable to dragons accelerated oil production. The planet was a wildcatter’s paradise.
Alas, environmentalist extremists eschewed all petroleum products—even though not a single blade of Earth’s grassy surface would need to be disturbed to drill on Elementa.
If Biggs had been on Earth, he could have manipulated the markets and recreated a need for petroleum. Unfortunately, he’d become persona non
