Ashta was the blooming moon of late spring.

Drake did not know much else about her. Little more than a few crude drawings of her survived to his time; a girl that danced the sky in strokes of rust, she was a glimpse of beautiful terror. He did not think she looked much like the dappled orb in the sky, but he could not deny there was an elegance to both the drawing and the moon. The myth that created her alter ego was a piece of before, when words could wander freely. Whoever had held those artist’s tools was gone, and the craft itself was lost, with a thousand other pieces of history.

Ashta the Red had hung in the sky his entire childhood as a jewel that traveled lazily in the day and provided a dull glow on summer nights. It never had occurred to him, in those years, that one could stand upon her face, with a horizon that spread in all directions, just as it was on Craeta the Mother.

The little moon lost most of her elegance up close. She could no longer be likened to a dancing child, or a gemstone in a wash of dim starlight, or anything else so romantic. Only the phrase ‘beautiful terror’ remained. Her surface was dust and orange, with jagged, tall rocks that reached out into empty night. Underneath her placid face she was solid and cold as any other dead sphere of iron, and she stole the life from her visitors.

The mining platforms were unmanned. There were thousand on her surface, listed in a database by coordinate and depth, and little else. Each was a jumble of scaffolding, housing equipment that churned in eternal night. He could not hear the rumble without air, but could feel it through his boots as he walked. The machines drilled away at Ashta’s dusty face, and then into her metal heart. She would become ships and habitat shells, plundered for function and industry. But, she did not have so much value anyone thought to stand and guard her. The universe was full of identical iron rocks. This one merely had convenient proximity. Mining and smelting and transport were all programmed and automated, overseen by people too far away to stop him. They may not ever know that he had been there, depending on how well they kept vigil.

With no atmosphere, and thus no sky, there was a clear view of the stars in all directions. They were more brilliant and full of light and color than he had ever seen before. Drake made the mistake only once, prior to docking with the airlock, of looking straight up to the looming form of Craeta above. This gave him the immediate, inescapable feeling that he was falling from an immense height, head-first into the embrace of giant blue-green mothersphere. Then, something in his perception tried to correct itself, and gave him the sensation that the looming body of Cratea was falling to crush him instead.

The pressurized command deck was without ornament. Intended for occasional maintenance, it was a simple room, not a long term habitat. If there was once artificial gravity, it was no longer working, and while not weightless, his steps took him much further than he found normal. There was only one lit workstation, with a cracked screen and thick red dust covering the controls. He dismissed the stairway up to an observation blister, disinterested in repeating his moment of panic. In the opposite direction, the staircase would lead to what he wanted, deep into the ceaseless digging machine.

Most of these concepts—atmosphere, gravity, airlocks—were new to him. This was knowledge that had to be stolen, carefully, without the ability to ask questions or experiment.

In youthful ignorance, Drake had once imagined that knowledge was finite, and ‘growing up’ was the business of acquiring everything knowable, until one day he would arrive at the endpoint, the gates of ‘adulthood’, with every answer revealed and curiosity was put away.

This was not how things had worked out.

There were those who thought they knew everything, but he had realized that there was always a bit more. Nothing resolved as perfectly as he had expected. The unknown kept going, into bigger and smaller systems. He had become, over the last few years, very aware of his own mortality, and was beginning to realize that he likely did not have the time, much less the resources, to actually find a satisfactory end to every question imaginable to a small child. As with the drawing of the dancing girl, of the personified duckling Ashta, this was itself a realization of beautiful terror.

The mysticism and secrecy of the Artificers made more sense now. They were something beyond his complete comprehension, closer to what that lost lore would have called ‘demigods’ than they were to people, but they must have been mortal as anyone else, for they seemed to share that same fear of death that every other self-aware and living thing carried. They stretched out in all directions from the galactic core, gathering all knowledge and power they could, but refused to risk themselves in the quest for everything.

In the empty command deck, it was instinct more than thought to take a deep breath of the air. He had visual sensation beyond the ability of most subterfuge, but he still preferred tactile information over readouts. There was a hint of the iron dust, invading from Ashta’s bleeding face. There was a hint of worn parts and grease. There was almost no sign of people, and it was so decayed he could not tell anything beyond that they had passed through there long before.

One of the things that Drake newly understood, though not entirely, was ‘mass’. This came from the mercenaries, who had explained best they could, in the condescending way that told him they thought he was an imbecile for having asked. All worlds sat on a sheet of fabric, and a large beast like Craeta the Mother created such a deep impression that all else would fall towards her when they came near.

The Artificers had disliked this metaphor, found it simplistic and foolish, and were not shy to tell him so. They insisted on gathering all knowledge, but it became clear through their conversations that they intended to share as little of it as possible. They did not indulge his clarifying questions. They had no interest in building on what he already grasped, and in their best mood they would dictate to him and impatiently wait for him to understand.

They appeared to find him as frustrating as he did them.

Once, when he had pushed their patience too far in his doomed pleas for intervention, one of their light constructs had grasped at his face, and he was bestowed a glimpse of what they had. Information became a torrent that crowded the visual field of the Mask and caused its buffer to overload and crash. None of the data would be recoverable, which surely they knew.

When the Light released his face, it seemed to peer at him, looming, waiting for his eyes to refocus and the Mask to reinitialize.

“That is the closest to truth you will ever come,” it told him.

The data was gone, but mimetic memory was able to capture a sliver of their display of contempt. Craeta did not sit on a sheet, it sat in something far greater, and the influence of its size radiated in every direction through the medium. Ashta had her own influence as well, though much smaller. Craeta the Mother reached out, and nestled the moon in her grasp, as she did all her children, but Ashta the Daughter squirmed in the embrace. Her struggling displaced water and created tides, but he could see now that her influence was so strong it even pulled at Craeta’s very land.

Drake could not come up with a better idea. If the Saurians would not leave, despite his more subtle invitations, then what was left was to make it impossible for them to stay. He should not have gone to the pompous and ancient Light with the expectation that it would be benevolent. He should have known they would guard their power jealously, that their intervention would be either disinterested inadequacy, or a detached broad sterilization of their spiral arm to eliminate any threat an expanding Saurian Empire made to their own hoarding.

Satisfied that he was alone on the dead moon, he set to the stairway down into the workings on the platform, his bag both heavy and light on his shoulder. It would do very little to Ashta’s actual value to destroy her. The iron and everything else would still be there, and may even be easier to gather in small chunks than as one large rock. He didn’t care about that. It wasn’t about destroying a mine.

He couldn’t know the full extent of what it would do to remove Ashta. He knew it would be catastrophic, that was the point. If the universe was a chaotic balancing act of unbending forces that existed everywhere, surely the removal of a large concentration of weight and dispersing it suddenly in all directions would upset that balance.

The cataclysm of rock and fire would been seen on Craeta nearly instantly. The debris would pummel the surface in fire, and the stability Ashta brought to the seasons would vanish. It was an act of desperation and insanity, but he could think of nothing else. The Saurians would leave, or he would take everything he could from them, one piece at a time, even if he had to scour each of the nineteen worlds personally. Or farther. He thought, perhaps, that there was enough rage in him that he could chase them forever, if it meant that for one small moment they would know the existential terror he lived his entire life in.

There was no choice. The Saurians would leave, or they would all burn together in brilliant flames.