Chapter 14
A Tomb in the Rocks
Chapter 14
In the darkness beyond the lights of the colony, the boys walked through the crater and out the other side. They passed the ruined foreman outpost, and Joey understood the horror of the Trojans in the crater was only a fraction of it. Shattered machinery littered a field that looked scraped by a million pickaxes.
“Did the foremen out here die?” Joey asked.
“No, they were evacuated,” Stan said.
“Why didn’t they evacuate the crater?”
“The computers were wrong about the size of the Trojan cloud. They thought the outpost might get light damage, at worst.”
The boys fell into silence as they weaved their way around the debris. The Angel’s work lights only lit the ground about thirty paces in front of them. Beyond that was black. Joey had the urge to draw the carnage, and the light from the unseen sun streaking through the clouds of ejecta. Stars twinkled through the dust from a million lifetimes away. So much destruction and so much beauty to capture in grease pencil, but they had a lot of walking to do.
He picked up the occasional rock, inspected it for interesting colors, then threw it along the ground. The rocks skipped along and vanished into the blackness. In the low gravity, some launched off the uneven surface high above the ground. Joey chuckled. Stan watched him with curiosity.
Joey found one fist-sized rock with the blue sparkles. He turned it over in his hand, watching the work lights play over its surface. Some ore they missed.
“You remind me of our geologists,” Stan said. “They’d look at boring gray rocks like Oscar himself was hidden in them.”
“Who did?”
“Geologists,” Stan said. “They’re the people who study the rocks. They direct where we dig.”
“Oh,” said Joey. He held the rock up to Stan. “Do they know about the blue sparkles?”
“I would imagine they do. I’m sure they even told me about it once. But my mind is usually somewhere else.”
“When we get back, can you ask them about it? See, I saw when there’s a lot of blue sparkles, the number on the ore machines is bigger. We dig a lot of rocks that don’t have any ore at all. And then we leave all these chunks out here.”
Stan stared at Joey like he was the alien artifact. After a moment, he snapped out of it.
“Who says I’m going back,” Stan said.
“What?”
Stan snatched the rock from Joey’s hand.
“Do you think I can throw it off the asteroid?”
“No,” Joey said.
“Just like that. Just no?”
“Yeah. Just no. Me and Dad was just talking about that at supper the other day. He said on big asteroids the rock always comes back down. But it can take hours.”
“You and your dad eat together all the time?”
“Every night,” said Joey.
Stan threw the rock. It flew high before arcing back to the ground.
“You call that a throw?” Joey laughed.
“I barely tried. I’ll show you.”
“No. It’s my turn. I’ll show you.”
Joey ran for the rock, and Stan chased him.
“No way. I bet I get to it first.”
They chased each other around, dodging and grabbing for the rock. Joey managed to get it first and threw it.
“That was way higher.”
“Not a chance. Anyway, I barely tried. So my next one is going all the way to Mars.”
They laughed and chased after the rock again. Running toward the edge of the void.