text: A low, undulating ridge with jagged volcanic spires stretched in a straight line from west to east across a slightly sloped field of large, mottled rocks. The ridge seemed like the spiked spine of a long-dead monster, portions of it captured under a wholly inadequate net. It was late afternoon and the orange sky glowed with its own brilliant light, fueled by the intense violet sunlight. Heat haze distorted the light in every direction. Like ethereal fireflies, glowing mists sporadically materialized, swirled in the mixing heat currents, and disappeared again. Rokov’s mind clouded in the sway of the heat and his head bobbed slightly as he looked north toward the sparse netting draped over a huge black spire and the autominer beneath it. A flume stuck askew from the ridge and from it, a steady stream of brown and red gravel trickled onto the huge mound of tailings below. A few dozen meters east, a large metal door and several smaller service entrances pierced the scree and entered the heart of the ridge, like the portico of a heretical cathedral. Above the doors, a concrete tympanum dammed the scree from burying the entrance. Rokov wasn’t religious, but he worshipped at the iron altar of CinnaCo. The fog in his mind broke as Rokov moved his weight from one foot to the other trying to rouse his exhausted legs. His thick e-suit would have not been sufficient to keep out the heat were it not for the heavy cooling system on his back, but even he was getting too old for the burden, despite the mechanical assists. It also didn't help that the gravity was more than he liked. Rovok felt uncomfortable and hot. He gestured to wipe his sweaty brow, only to remember that he was still in his e-suit. He lowered his arm. As he did so, webs of thin metal formed in the long, shifting trace of his afternoon shadow and evaporated again when exposed to the sunlight once more. The metal vapor didn’t dissipate, though. It hung in the air, beginning to take on a swirling glow of its own. Regaining himself, Rokov turned his gaze toward the southern horizon, considering. *Do I have enough time before sunset?* To the south there was little to see. One half of his view was dominated by the angry orange glow of the atmosphere. Occasional violet rays sliced a low angle through the haze. The other half of his view was dominated by the slightly sloped sea of rocks with two tire ruts extending on toward the horizon. In the afternoon light, the lee of every rock glistened with thin metal webs, as if hundreds of thousands of strange, phantom spiders lived just out of sight. *It IS late if the lace is out*, Rokov thought. Where the two halves met, a blurry form of another spiked ridge waved into and out of his vision. Rokov's visor brought up the pending maintenance tasks. The next autominer repair was the last in his queue, but it was another 3 kilometers away, not counting the trip back to base. Eyeing the thin, silvery webs in his shadow, Rokov decided it would have to wait until tomorrow. It was late, and the webs promised a quick death once night fell. CinnaCo would be angry, but better to endure anger and docked pay than die. Masha, Pasha, and Vikhor didn’t eat if he died. They could go hungry one meal. Finally, Rokov glanced toward the east, where the violet sun was setting. It was *much* lower than he realized. He quickly raised his glove to shield his eyes against the approaching yellow twilight and looked at the time displayed in the corner of his visor. Startled, he thought aloud "God damn this chromometer. I took too long. Status!" The visor displayed the time more prominently and a calm voice replied "It is 356.7 hours. Sunset is in 16.4 minutes" "Distance to base?" Rokov already knew the answer and he was already shuffling toward his toolbox. "19.4 kilometers." "Time to return if I leave now?" "15.3 minutes." Fearful, Rokov stooped over as quickly as he dared and hoisted his toolbox and shuffled back toward the rover. The mechanical assists hissed. In plodding pirouettes, he danced through the sharp rocks, avoiding a fatal tear. After securing his tools, he rolled into the driver side of the open-top rover. Rokov slammed his boot on the accelerator and the huge black wheels protested, reluctantly groaning but gradually gaining speed. Twilight on this planet was dangerous and unpredictable, but nighttime was certain death. "Time to base?" Rokov demanded over the roar of rocks thrown by the tires. "At your current velocity and bearing, you will travel the remaining 18.4 kilometers in 11.1 minutes." "How long until sunset?" "8.23 minutes until sunset." Rokov didn't need to ask how he fared, of course. The numbers displayed on his visor were still visible, even though they were starting to become foggy from the condensation from his increased breathing. Gravel sprayed from the large black tires and dust billowed into the haze, mixing in sick swirls. It was a straight shot back to base, a drag race against death. Rokov felt his stomach drop, but he tightened his resolve and forced the panic back toward his spine. He needed to hear the voice, any voice. His transmitter was not powerful enough to reach any of the other mining bases - the only transmitter powerful enough for that was back at his own base. Not that calling them would help. Most were thousands of kilometers away, and the nearest one was still several hundred kilometers away. He thought of dying alone, then of Masha coldly staring at the screen notifying her of his death, unable to emote. “No!” he angrily shouted at his own thoughts. “Think about what I must do, and nothing more.” A dust cloud formed in the wake of the rover as Rokov raced north. In his peripheral vision, he could see the westward shadow of his rover and the thin metallic wisps blinking into existence and evaporating once more. The wisps seemed to be thickening slightly. “Shit” he muttered, once again forcing the panic back. When Rokov had first started his rotation in this forsaken Hell, the first thing his comrads warned him of was the quickrain. He thought back to early images he had seen of one of the miners at the Azumith 30 mine who had gotten caught out in the quickrain. The remains of the miner did not resemble anything human. It looked more like a grim slop of rancid pink and red gelatin pocked full of bone shards and empty craters oozing from a shredded white shroud that only vaguely resembled the e-suit it had once been. When CinnaCo came to send off her remains, they shoved the gravel and flesh into a crate and closed it without even bothering to sift between the two. Rokov was shocked, but the other quarrymen reassured him that she didn’t suffer long. The quickrain had probably killed her brain long before she bled out or asphyxiated from a crushed chest. Little consolation now. "4.0 minutes until sunset." The landscape all around Rokov was a testament to the furious destruction of quickrain, the nightly apocalypse. Everything exposed to the quickrain was smooth and pulverized. A thick layer of sand covered most of the surface of the planet, making mining operations in those marinas nearly impossible. But a few basins, such as this one, had seen volcanic residue and lava tubes in the last few decades, and the ground was still strewn with gravel and boulders. In fact, his own base was a lava tube that had probably formed not more than two hundred years ago. Maybe even during his lifetime. When humans had first explored this world, many died, despite knowing what the probes had told them. Suddenly, he realized his thoughts had been drifting once more and Rokov snapped his attention back to the road. The violet sun began to blend in with the haze that marked the horizon. The violent disc stretched and distorted sideways, forming an odd shade of purple-orange. "3.7 minutes until sunset." Rokov's thoughts were such a blur that he lost track of how far he had traveled. In the same instant that his eyes turned back toward the chromometer, the orange afterglow of the atmosphere extinguished, the energy of the sun no longer able to excite the vapor. The sky above turned black, and closer to the ground a gray, wispy fog illuminated the path of the violet rays emanating from the setting sun. The sun suddenly seemed like a distant and cold memory in the foggy twilight. Death had arrived. "Mierda, Mierda, Mierda, Mierda...!", chanted Rokov to no one. Rokov was tough and callous to danger had nearly lost his life several times in the autominer, but now he was no longer able to hold back the panic. His eyes darted to the temperature readout. He already knew that it had just dropped below 105 Celsius, since that is when the metal vapor stopped glowing. Now, moments later, the sensor read 80 degrees, and was falling quickly. As the atmosphere cooled, the pressure fell even further and his e-suit started to swell, making it hard to move. Rokov's mind raced. He didn't want to die, especially not by quickrain. Rokov's stomach tightened and twisted. He wanted to vomit. He kept his foot on the accelerator, trying to stay centered in the well-trodden tire ruts. Just then, a strong gust billowed across the road in front of him, briefly obscuring his view and coating the ground in metal crystals like a malicious snow drift. The rover slammed into the metal lattice with a loud crunch and slowed slightly before pulling through. The noise in the rover was starting to become deafening as the wheels cracked and snapped through the ever-thickening metal lace forming along the road. The cloud of metal vapor started to build higher and higher until even the black sky above appears silvery and ghostly with violet streaks barely able to pass through. The sun started to appear more like a distant purple spotlight than a star. Exposed to the sky, Rokov reached to deploy the emergency roof, little good that would do. The thick, inflated Kevlar would protect him for a minute or so before the quickrain found its way through. "2.2 minutes, until sunset." The temperature was falling fast, and the heat pump on his e-suit had just reversed to heat him. As the last rays of light from the sun touched the horizon, Rokov could just barely make out the base in the distance behind swirls and gusts of metal vapor. Suddenly, the gusting stopped and Rokov’s suit ballooned. In a great wave, the fog coalesced into trillions of suspended metal grains. In unison they fell, the sky literally falling. As they gathered speed, they also coalesced into larger and larger marbles. Rokov's eyes widened with terror as the first drops of quickrain slammed into the hood of his rover, violently shaking it. At first, it was a few loud ‘thuds’. It was quickly followed by several more. From a safe vantage point, the beginning of a quickrain might have sounded pleasant, like popcorn in a pan, or awesome, like the furious power of nature. Rokov remotely opened the rover bay and raced as the emergency roof rippled angrily, like the surface of an agitated pool viewed from below. Marbles began slamming into the road and leaping up onto his hood and into his partial windscreen, cracking it. Within seconds, the quickrain was a deafening roar, like gravel being poured from a massive bucket. A few seconds later, the deluge came and sound became meaningless. The sound wave hit Rokov so hard that he exhaled violently. He felt like every square centimeter of his body was punched at once. His ribs cracked and his visor split from ear to ear. "32 seconds until sunset." Rokov strained his whole body against his ballooned suit and the steering column while still racing at full speed, His helmet was still holding, thank god, even if it was leaking quickly, but he didn't know how much more he could take. Coughing, struggling to breathe, and unable to hear anything other than an omnipresent roar, he strained. His whole body seared in pain. ZIP, ZIP ZIP! In almost an instant, three quickrain drops tore through his lower left leg and back out the other side, and one through his right thigh, shattering his right femur. His body exploded in pain and Rokov screamed. The automatic tourniquets integrated into the e-suit immediately clamped just above the wounds, and he felt a sting as his life support pack stabbed him in the back with a small dose of morphine. He let go of the steering column and his overinflated suit threw his hands to the side of his body. The steering wheel twisted and the rover turned sharply and began to roll. ZIP ZIP! Two more quickrain drops sliced through an arm and his chest just before the rover began to roll out of control. Within seconds, the edges of Rokov’s vision yielded to the darkness. As Rokov’s limp body tumbled inside the rover, the last thing he saw before falling unconscious was the white lights of the rover bay spinning overhead.