But What Will The Gods Eat Tomorrow?

My foot caught on a rock, and I toppled to the ground. Metallic laughter accompanied my pained grunt.

I climbed to my feet and started off again, this time more warily. Once I had adapted a little I started running again.

This time I did much better. Until I tried to stop. The lighter gravity made it harder to slow my forward momentum. My skidding, panicked slide took me several meters past the edge of the forest and left me standing like a fool in the middle of the Cult’s complex. Frightened, I scrambled back to the edge of the trees and studied the base.

There didn’t seem to be a lot of motion. I dropped to my hands and knees, made a dash to the nearest bush, and hid beneath the sharp, thorny branches. I stayed there for a few minutes, then made another dash. I was now about an eighth of the way across the field. This was going to take forever.

I still had seen no motion from the camp. "Where is everyone?"

"Rhetorical?" crackled Tempest’s voice in my ear.

"No, I really want to know where everyone is."

"It seems we’re having a bit of good luck." That worried me. If we were having good luck now it was bound to run out before we got home. "I think we arrived at worship time. There’s an inordinate number of people climbing the hill to the Temple of Timay."

"Hmmm…" I squinted my eyes and looked up the hill. I saw a few shapes moving around and the silhouettes of a few cargo shuttles flying up to the trix freighters, but that was all.

"Now might be a good time to explore the base," Tempest told me. "Unless you’d rather wait there until it’s more likely you’ll be caught."

Still wary, I crept through the complex, with Tempest guiding me to the most likely building. It was huge, a giant cube made of a drab, slate grey material. A line of smokestacks on top spewed a yellow-brown gas. I didn’t see any doors, so I circled the building carefully while Tempest reviewed the scanner logs. "Looks like a few people exited the far side of the building."

"Figures," I muttered as I increased my pace.

The doorway was unguarded, which made me happy, but there was a scary, bass chanting drifting down from the temple that I didn’t like so much. I couldn’t make out the words, but it gave me the creeps. "See if you can get a recording of that song."

"You going into the music business?" Tempest asked. "Starting your own label? You can’t actually like that noise, can you?"

"No, I hate it," I told him flatly, pushing open the door to the warehouse. "But there might be something worthwhile in it."

"Whatever you say, Jonny."

The building was devoid of life, but I could tell that this was the place we wanted. Large machines formed conveyored lines up and down the warehouse, with chemical testing stations scattered here and there. "Can you get a reading in here?" I asked. "Are there any listening devices or motion sensors?"

There was a momentary pause. "Nothing’s coming up on the scans, Jonny," Tempest assured me. "But whatever that building’s made of, it’s garbling my signals. Can you get me a boost?"

I unhooked the mini-scanner and set it on my shoulder. It whirred to life. "I can see what you see now," Tempest told me, "but the scans aren’t any clearer than before. That’s an interesting trix-polymer. I wonder how hard it would be to get a sample…"

There was another pause.