Madlands

8. Lost Worlds

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Grey finally heard the slow and pained progression of Mando making his way up the ladder and into the cockpit.

You know how to pick a moon, I'll give you that.

She was in the pilot's seat and addressed the front viewport, its entire span filled with an unbroken, inky black. When he lumbered up beside her, she gave up the chair for him to ease into. He took stock of the unnatural, flat darkness of their surroundings. No ground below them, no horizon, no tints and shades, no distant light reflecting off the ice, not even any stars.

Are we underneath something?

No, we're on a blackout moon. There are about twenty in the sector, two in orbit around this planet of six moons, and you picked one of them. Looked normal on the way in, right?

It looked almost white on the way in. What's wrong with it?

She smiled at the question.

The moon itself is fine. Those who land on one though, not so much. The best-guess science is that it's ice particles suspended in the upper atmosphere, so small you can't see them, but locked into a lattice-like pattern and charged with ions from back when the nebula stretched out this way. The particles act as if they're linked, like a tight grid. But, like a lot of things in the Madlands, best-guess is still just a guess. The effect is more important than the cause, anyway. You can't see or get a reading through them from land-side, so the ship's nav. won't work, and you can't break through the grid unless you can find a weak spot.

At the mention of a lattice-like pattern, Mando's mind had been pulled to the alcove, to Grey's shifted cloak, to the mysterious glowing dots across her neck and shoulders. But "ship's nav. won't work" successfully yanked him back.

What?

Take a look.

Mando ignored the throbbing pain in his back and arm, and leaned over to toggle through the settings on the Crest's navigation system. Nothing. When ship navigations went down, the pilot next relied on sight and secondary, more general reference-points against local system and star-charts. Those were useless here too. He imagined that this might be what being inside "the void" was like.

I can get us out of here—know how to find the weak spots. I've got something that will help. I'll show you in a bit. We should stay here for now, though... hear me out.

She was pre-emptively countering the resistance that she knew would come.

You need more time. You're healing—faster than you'd expected, I'm going to guess—but still, your body could use a day. Meanwhile, I want to do my own digging into what's going on with the Empire. They're up to something and we shouldn't be blindly flying around, perhaps right into the middle of it. Those were Trooper speeders, down on the settlement, weren't they?

Scout Troopers by the looks of it.

Kriffin' Cyrin! I understand withholding certain information at certain times, we all do it, but that was pretty brazen. They were there!

Mando watched her ruminate.

Hmm. He did say that the settlement's been on edge the past couple of days, when we were catching up, so that probably gives us a sense of the timeline; the Scouts had arrived well before we did, which is a good thing (for us), as it means it's less likely to be connected. But still, worth a day of analysis while you get back to full... you. And lastly, this moon is essentially a refuge—no one else would dare land here.