Far Horizons: Tales of Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Horror. Issue #13 April 2015 | Page 161

normal etiquette and sat on the back row beside a
porthole. Vaclav sat beside her. The other twenty-odd
mourners comprising Raoul’s mother, sister and
mining crew trickled in and filled the shuttle from the
back. The last on board, Priest Kylone, popped his
head back out of the plasma door for a few seconds,
before coming back in and turning an airlock switch.
A solid door slid inside of the plasma shield, closing
off the outside with a physical barrier. The light above
the door turned from red to green. Almost as one, they
removed their helmets.
Stashing his straightened staff in a locker above the
seats, Priest Kylone asked “Are we ready to go back?”
Drying her face of the remnant tears, she nodded and
said “Would you fly us along the Hero’s Path please,
for Raoul’s sake?”
A murmur of approval rose from the miners. Raoul’s
mother, Emma, frowned at her from across the aisle.
Her husband, having died in the surface avalanche
at Helsingborg Crater, had been refused burial in the
Hero’s Gallery. Her envy was plain to see on her face.
Raoul deserved the honour of the fly past. He had died
in a mining accident saving the lives of miners.
Priest Kylone bowed his shaven head.
“I would deem it a privilege to do so, Wife Alva.”
He disappeared into the cockpit.
Lights dulled and seatbelts fastened themselves
around the passengers. The shuttle rose momentarily
pushing her down into her seat. It turned to bring the
three-quarters full Uranus into her view.
The planet’s upper atmosphere was divided into
turquoise, cerulean and aquamarine horizontal cloud
bands. They churned round the planet, tearing at
each other’s edges to curl slivers off into interlocking
cyclones. A giant darkened vortex, its centre like a
dull empty void, was being dragged round the planet’s
upper rim. Above all this turmoil floated a few serene streaks of white cloud. Lit strands of atmosphere
clawed and faded their way into Uranus’s night crescent. Its blackness was deepened by the lack of stars.
Only the brightest of stars burned through the blue-

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green halo surrounding the planet. The further out,
the more numerous and more densely packed the stars
became.
Below her stretched out a plain of ice, tilled into frozen gravel over the eons by showers of small meteorites. Paler craters haphazardly broke its evenness.
Sprays of cyan and electric blue glints streaked across
the ice as they flew along a level path.
The shuttle turned up a gentle slope. In the distance, a pockmarked steel-grey slope rose out of the
plain. Looking left to right, the slope morphed into a
bunched-up set of level lines, which then separated to
form slender triangles like a partly unfolded fan. They
looked so small, yet she knew these fan blades were
the tiers of the high cliffs of the Inverness Coronae.
The shuttle turned again. A silver cliff, the lowest and
outermost one of the Arden Coronae, loomed up before her. At its foot were ice graves like her husband’s,
except a layer of planetary dust had settled to encase
the bodies from sight.
The screens on the bulkhead and behind seats began
the roll call of the names and photos of each of the
Heroes. The first and oldest was Helmut Schmidt, an
ice-miner who had torched into an ice-fault, which
exploded on him ripping his suit to shreds. That was
over a century ago. Ever since, miners had been careful to measure fault stresses before torching or mining
through them.
The passengers remained silent while the shuttle flew
slowly past the graves, zigzagging its way down the
slope. The roll call continued as the graves became
gradually paler until the next to last row, when all 50
graves had the sheen of new ice. A quick glance on her
screen showed the oldest of these had died less than
three years ago. Horrified, she stared at the graves of
all the lives lost to recent mining accidents. They had
th