Behold a Dark Mirror Read Free

stop he had planned for his workday.  Light smells of oil and ozone exuded from the motor, the only scents in the sterile air of Doka.  Rook was setting, its reddish light waning fast.  The breeze from the cart's motion tousled Nero's salt-and-pepper hair;  Temperature would remain tolerable while the weaker light of Zochar lingered before its sunset.  With nightfall, a bone-chilling frost would take over.
    The road in front of him was flat, straight, and enormously wide.  Grasslands flanked it on both sides.  In the distance ahead he could see rock piles and the large hangar building.  As he drove away from the heap farm, his rear-view mirror showed a jagged profile of man-made mountains becoming smaller instant by instant.  Mining trucks, running in endless ant-like lines, had built the heaps of now-spent ore:  The immensity of this thoroughfare, once engineered for gigantic vehicles and busier times, now buried him.
    Approaching the hangar, Nero slowed down and then parked, stopping the cart exactly between faded lines traced on the tarmac.  He dismounted, stretched his legs, and scratched his back, running his gaze around an empty parking lot the size of an industrial farm.  The operations manual required frequent checks of the power plant even if no maintenance was needed.  Nero complied with the routine diligently:  His survival depended on the generator housed in the hangar;  he almost wished for it to fail, yet discipline required him to maintain it properly, so he did.
    The hangar was built behind the waste piles where miners had dumped worthless rock dug by necessity to reach the paying ore.  The hangar, enormous like everything else on Doka, was on a scale with the rest of the mine.  Yet the waste dumps managed to dwarf the building:  With the passing years, they had become big enough to look like natural hills.
    Nero remembered hordes of children sneaking through the security fences to brave the tops of the dumps.  Now everything was quiet.  Everyone else was gone;  only the hum of the buzzer defied the whisper of the wind.  He stopped the engine, and the wind became louder probing gently the uneven texture of the walls and roof of the building.  Nero listened for an instant, as if hoping to hear some familiar noise like another human voice, but of course there was none.  He entered through a small metal door, which swung on oiled hinges on its way to slamming open when caught in the wind, but Nero was prepared.  He held it firmly while letting himself in, keeping the door from hitting its stops.  After stepping through the threshold, he latched it with a clang that faded into diminishing echoes.
    Shade wrapped the interior of the hangar where unreclaimed remains of machinery stood cold and still.  Only the secondary reactor was engaged, powering an emergency backup now acting as a line generator.  A whiff of mist from the boiler hissed against the shadows and the silence.
    The hangar was too large for people.  Nero enjoyed the still lingering mood of past glory and decayed power:  He rolled its eerie flavor in his mouth, swished it through his teeth, coursed it in his nostrils appreciating its taste: exotic, bittersweet, it proved that disgrace was not for him only.  On a cosmic scale, the majestic landscapes of Doka remained unscathed except for this small blemish dug and built by mankind, which nature would soon consume leaving wilderness in charge once more.
    Zochar-the-pale-sun, lurking through tall windows, cast beams across the empty spaces.  Blades of light stabbed the void, bashing onto concrete blocks where now-missing equipment had once been bolted.  Metal refuse littered the floor.  Nero walked to the control room, the faint echoes of his footfalls vanishing into remote and dark corners.  And then, the hair on the nape of his neck began to tingle.
    It's coming , he thought, with a hint of apprehension.

    Years ago, just after Hi was established and Doka was becoming a