Nobody said Rock Hauling would be easy. Throughout settled space, terraforming is the fuel that drives the interstellar economy. For some worlds, this is easy. For others, lacking resources, or on the periphery, this is an unattainable dream. Throug...
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CHAPTER V LIEM II
The desert stretched on for a thousand years, until, suddenly, it didn't.
Liem had known that the desert was big, of course. It was practically hammered into every duster's psyche, along with their perpetual routines of fertilizing the soil, fixing the machines and filtering the toxins out of the air. The ancient, sandy wasteland that had been his lifelong home had claimed the lives of many a Duster who didn't or couldn't respect it's patient, ancient power. The power to kill you simply without doing anything but being what it was. A great big hot pit of gale-force winds and choking sand.
The dunes had stretched on and on, the further their Caracal had rolled. There were no roads in the deserts of Tylo. There wasn't any need for them, when you could travel just as easily with wheels or jets.
And so, for nearly a week, they'd spent their nights sleeping in pressurized, hardened tents, and their days sitting in the tiny, cramped cabin of the refrigerated truck, crossing that vast stretch of equatorial sand. Their only solace had been the top-tier cuts of vat-grown beef and lamb that the overseer had given him as a going-away present. They'd passed through three sandstorms, each one rougher than the last, before they reached the Green Belt.
It was stranger than even Tylo's immense sandstorms.
Liem had been out in a particularly bad one when he'd been younger. Three months ago, right after that massive Corporate Alliance ship had left orbit, chugging onwards to the Asteroid Belt, he and a couple of boys from Filhab Seven had headed out across the wasteland to Filhab Three-Six. There had been an electrical failure in Seven, and several vital systems had crapped out on them. They didn't have the right parts, so the Filhab Overseer had called in to the nearest other one and earmarked some replacements from Three-Six's surplus.
On the way back, their old Caracal had broken down in the middle of the day, it's refrigeration systems refusing to work, simply unable to overcome the punishing power of the sunlight. It had been in the middle of a heat wave, and so close to the equator, it was death to step outside. But go outside they'd been forced to, to fix their little machine.
The winds had come up out of nowhere. Vast, mile-high walls of rushing sand, towering up the sky like moving mountain ranges. The winds buoyed the grains through the air fast enough to shred skin to the bone. They'd thrown on their heavy armored coolant robes and kept working through the storm, hammering, wrenching and fusing bits of the redundant transport's internals together in the zero-visibility of rushing sand until it's refrigeration system rebooted. They'd wasted a lot of water. Though it had threatened to break down more than once, and one of the dust storms had nearly buried them, covering the solar panels on top in a heap of silica that had taken a quarter of the day to clear off enough to get the damn thing working again. By the time they'd returned to Seven, they'd all been dangerously dehydrated.
This was stranger than even doing maintenance amid that immense, hazy cloud of lethal dust. This was the Green Belt. After eight and a half days of breakneck travel, their Caracal had finally gotten to the polar regions.
