Excerpt: Aphelion

Finn threw the throttle of the J-13 shuttle he was piloting hard to the wall, jockeying through a wall of turbulence that raged around the terminator sweeping an igneous path across the plateau. Driving a hard path north through the occlusion of the eternal Daystorm, he knew he had but a few metres between extremes. Veering too far west and the fuel in his pod would hypercool and send him stalling towards the searing ground at five times the speed of sound, if the eyes in the sky didn't lock on to his FFI and beam-net him into solitary confinement. Drift east, and the combined rays of the twin suns over Perih would ignite the air in his lungs in under three seconds. Now Finn valued both his freedom and his lungs, so he struggled to maintain the middle ground through the winds and away from Official Disappearance.

In a momentary lull, he released his grip on the yoke and patted the bandoleer he wore for the seventeenth time during his journey, checking to make sure that the stolen records from the Nick Zeff incident with the Circle had entrusted him were still safe and secure. A trail of dank dives and cavern-dwelling nomads had passed on vagueries and rumors of rumors, as he delicately pieced together the series of suspicions and legend which in his mind had grown into an unavoidable conclusion and unanswerable question.

Perihelion?

A name everyone in the galaxy knew as well as their own, but beyond a name, so little was known. A violent updraft snapped his concentration back to piloting, and he stared through the deeply polarized material of the viewing window at the seething terrain below. Trapped in a singular tidal pole at the first Lagrange point between twin suns, Perih was a planet of extreme significance and great stretches of barrens. To either pole lay the sole consistently habitable areas of the planet. Temporary workcamps or nomadic supply caravans set up brief-lived settlements which may last hours or days before the overlapping rays of Mimis and Yfr drove them on before scorching their tracks out of the land and memory.

Static suddenly leapt out of the PeriCorp c310 stellar-comm, followed by a digitized voice: "Criminal craft, reduce your velocity and wait for escort. You are in violation of corp-law 3 Sigma 4763.12 Tau Isahz and must immediately turn yourself in for holding and processing. Repeat. Criminal craft." The remainder of the announcement was drowned out by as a solar flare roared through the atmosphere driving his ship into a sharp dive, instruments sputtering and blinkenlights flashing in mute horror at the onrushing scenery. Finn was a man who ejoyed scenery as much as the next man, but not when it impacted his face at 6000 kilometers an hour, so he swore and jostled at the controls in a frenzied attempt to level out before his mission ended in a smear of failure, 20 meters across and 10 klicks long. Seventeen meters from the ground, he pulled back onto a steady course, moving forward shakily as his systems slowly cycled back on-line. However now Finn found himself flying nearly blind, as scorch marks occluded his one visual port to the outside. Murmuring prayers, he throttled down to minimize his chances of explosive disassembly, and stared hard at the charts projected in front of the control sticks. Between the flare, and the shelter of the Daystorm, he had no uplink to the nav-sats in orbit, which, was actually the point. Self-imposed Luddism for the sake of staying out of corporate penitentiaries held some merits in his mind, but damned if some connection to the outside world might come in handy right about n--

The rest of his thought blew out of his head with much the same vector as the aileron on his left wing separating from the shuttle in agony which he felt through his restraints more than heard or saw. Finn stopped praying for long enough to blow the air out of his lungs and slam his boot into the separation bolts on the floor. Given the choice between following his crippled ship down to certain doom or ejecting the pilot pod into the tempest for quite probably death, he hedged his bets and blasted out.

The first thing he saw was the remains of the J-13 glinting in sunlight too brilliant to see as more than an afterimage, evaporating into a fiery wreck. This burning revelation was followed a moment later by the realization that since his ship was exploding in the sunlight, that he must be drifting the opposite way-- into the dawn.