Random Story :
The Unexamined Life
Author : D.J. Rozell Jordan didn’t flirt with Alex until …
The Death of Dui Al
Author: Kiley M. Campbell
“Less than twenty percent is still intact,” said Rehwa.
“For the entire precinct?” Komaer boggled.
Rehwa nodded grimly. “I’d guess the whole province is roughly the same. Nothing’s left of the city. The last of the outer expansions are collapsing. By next week,” he shook his head, “the precinct will be done for.”
Komaer sighed heavily. “Sulfur dioxide spreading through the air from the West, temperature increasing six percent each week…” he began packing up his emitter, “deterioration’s progressing faster than anticipated.”
Rehwa stared up at the pewter sky and the charcoal clouds. The Sun was concealed behind the atmospheric muck– light feebly seeped through in a sickly yellow haze.
He picked each of his four legs up one at a time and let them settle back on the craggly rubble that used to be Qurtha–to Mountain.
Somewhere down there, Rehwa thought to himself, underneath that sea of rock and dust… He did not like to think of the dead, but they haunted him nevertheless, especially during surface trips like this, and the thought of standing on top of it all… At rest, crushed miles underground… Their bones would rest in the planet’s broken layers for all eternity.
He became conscious of the heat– the wind carried hot wafts and the suit was becoming uncomfortable. Even with the tri-visor– invented before the quake and therefore designed for full-strength light– Rehwa was squinting his three eyes tight, almost shut. Even after a year, he still felt pangs of longing for the old life. Taking all things into account, he thought, the salvaging of the species had gone as well as could be hoped for– the last of the evacuations were scheduled to depart in three days from the remains of Xulwaq down in the far South. All the citizens were gone; the only ones left on the planet were administrators, military leaders, scientists like him. The government and the military men would leave soon enough; he and the rest of this group and all the other Analysis crews scattered across the ghostly continents would remain. Week after week, they would still descend, gather samples and readings, keeping close watch as the planet entered its death throes and then, only when it was truly dead, they would leave it behind. Forever. The alliance between the two political coalitions was tenuous, but they had managed to make certain agreements quickly. There was zero further travel permitted to Dui Al– once the Analysis teams left, that would be it. Rehwa pictured the engineers planting surveillance drones and mine clusters in the planet’s outer atmosphere. Anyone who survived would be spotted and hauled away. And that would be the fate of Dui Al: languishing as a molten, broken, choked former world with nothing left behind to let the universe know life had once flourished there.
“Okay, everyone,” Komaer patched into the radio, “back to the shuttle.”
The seven members of the Qurtha–to team made their wobbly way across the wreckage of the mountain, back to their shuttle, which cut through the poison clouds like a knife and floated back up to the orbiting habitation vessel.
Five days until the next trip down. From his quarters, through his personal viewport, Rehwa could see the massive fields of lava that spread across the molten remains of the Zhelho–to Range, the borders of the roiling seas as more and more coastline plummeted into its depths, the grimy storms that choked the skies.
It wouldn’t be long before Dui Al was completely dead.