Something on my Mind

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Mid-morning, early summer. A stiff, dry breeze blew across the exposed face of the hill. The movement of the air neatly counterbalanced the rising heat.

Behind me was a broad, round-bottomed, glacial valley, filled with the local equivalent of trees—almost exactly like trees, except for an internal skeleton of something about the consistency of cartilage. Before me, written in the naked rock, was a tale of unimaginable power and violence. The country rock had been rent by the salt-and-pepper glitter of intrusive dikes of a fine-grained pegmatite. Long, forking lines reached across the barren side of the hill like lightning etched on a gray stony sky.

Ascendance was the ninth habitable planet discovered by humans. I and my co-workers were an advance team, here to explore prospective sites for settlements and to get some rudimentary infrastructure in place before the colonists arrived.

My contribution consisted of identifying the gross geologic features and trying to find any obvious, easily accessible deposits of minerals. So far, I had found traces of iron, no more. Pegmatites often yield other riches, such as radioactives, so I was still hopeful.

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