“Raiders” — FWG Flash Fiction for 4/12/2025

This one is a bit of fan-fiction, though it’s copyright safe.

The prompt is:

https://pixabay.com/photos/mountains-clouds-fog-sun-sand-9504950

RAIDERS

The blazingly bright Companion had already set, leaving the scorched valley to throw its heat back up into the sky. The simmering ground made the thin air shimmer and rise, pulling up dust devils that danced across the barren ground. Soderil, the binary system’s yellow dwarf barely lit the landscape through the heat haze.

Moadi poked his head out of the access tunnel, feeling his scalp pucker in the oven-dry air.

“All clear,” he called to Paomi who hung on the ladder below.

She followed him through the hatch onto the surface. Her voice was muffled by the moisture collection veil. “Where are we headed?”

Moadi pulled the goggles down over his eyes. Their filters showed the landscape in sharp detail. He scanned the valley until an icon appeared in the display.

“There, behind that ridge.” He pointed to the north.

Paomi slid on her own goggles and saw the plume of a prospecting rig rising into the sky. She set off across the rocky ground. “Come on, before it cools enough for our heat signatures to be visible.”

Her words were unnecessary, of course, because her friend, lover, and partner in sabotage was already in motion. At the top of the ridge, Paomi pulled a detonator from a pocket of her drysuit, and Moadi dialed the magnification up higher. The mining rig crawled across hard baked ground, leaving an ugly scar across the tribe’s land.

“Now,” he said as the machine inched onto the blinking icon that marked the location of the mines.

The blast that lifted the massive machine and kilotons of rock beneath it into the air mimicked hitting a volatile meth pocket. The prospecting machine and its crew disappeared into the crater the blast left behind as the salvage crew boiled out of the access tunnel.

THE END