"There's no one," Dreamer's voice sounded over our mental link. I decided to go back to bed while he managed our SOS signal. "Complete radio silence, not even old Golden Age signals."

"That's not surprising. We may not even be in the Milky Way anymore. We were in FtL travel for a while," Sighing, I got out of bed. Damn, I did not want to get out of bed. "I'll miss you, comfort and warmth."

"Stop complaining and get to the Pilot's seat. I want out of this ship," Dreamer's tone started to take an increasingly irritated quality to it, so I figured I should get a move on. I sighed, as I like to do, and made my way through the Minerva's corridors.

The fine leather of the seat stretched around my arse as I sat, "Y'know, this chair is just about as nice as my bed in the sleeping quarters. I might just continue my nap," I could practically feel the way Dreamer's singular eye sharpened and glared at me. If I didn't stop playing around, I thought he might shoot me out of the ship, turn the weapons on me, disintegrate me, then finally revive back in the ship. Truly a pain in the ass, or rather, the body and mind.

"Whatever, we're descending now."

I gazed at the planet that very well could become my new home for the next few hundred years. I'm sure I'll be fine for the first hundred or so years, but solitude gets to people, even the Risen. A ghost can only help the mental state so much. My eyes crossed over a massive mountain equator of the planet. The planet is actually nearly identical to Earth in it's geographical processes, so that at least made it easier to catalogue and navigate it. "Dreamer, let's take a visit to that mountain. I think I'd like to go there first."

"If we're going to be alone, may as well do it the right way and do it on top a mountain," Dreamer retorted, and I laughed in response.

"It's not like we're going to stay there forever. I'd like to go explore the rest of this planet while we're waiting, it'll probably be one of the few forms of entertainment we can do here," Dreamer silently nodded at my logic. We stayed quiet the rest of the ride down.

The summit was certainly interesting. It was incredibly flat, with the customary mountain bowl shape surrounding it. The hole itself was both deep and steep. The walls of the bowl were slightly less than a kilometer in height, and the diameter twice that. We flew around it for several minutes, surveying the land for a nice landing spot. Center of the crater would do just nicely. It was a light landing, hardly disturbing the ample lichen coating the ground. So many species that evolved on Earth have evolved here as well. Not particularly surprising, as trees and lichen are very effective strategies for survival and reproduction. The mountain itself seemed like a long since inactive volcano, but the energy source that Dreamer had scanned from below the rocks was clearly not from magma. Wait, energy source from below the ground that isn't magma? "Dreamer, how long would it take to fabricate a drill?"

"At least two hours, but here's something to help you get started while you wait," controlling the glimmer on the ship, his blue light shined, and an old style mining pickaxe formed.

"Better than my fists, I suppose. Please make it quick, Dreamer," I begged him.

I relocated from the ship landed in the middle of the summit, to one of the walls of the bowl. "Not much better than any other place to get started," both light and dark energy flowed through me and into the pickaxe, reinforcing it. Most Guardian's had to use purely light to reinforce their armaments, but what Clovis did on Europa gave me a few bits of experience that other's didn't have. All kept hidden from the Vanguard, of course. All a story for another time. The pick flew above my head and then came soaring down once more. Rinse and repeat until I find something interesting.

And something interesting I did find. After quite some time digging, I brought the pick down for a particularly hard swing, an then boom. Literally. Had I been a regular person, that blast would have killed me. Still hurt like getting slugged by the blasted devil. No pun intended. Red, shiny particles floated in the air, and I looked down at the ground to see a metal floor revealed by the explosion.

"First concern, what ordinance did you use just now? It wasn't paracausal, and I don't remember you having any conventional explosives on you," Dreamer's low voice approached me from behind.

"It wasn't intentional, though it was definitely caused by myself. I just struck the ground with the pick, and then boom," Dreamer's eye grew more and more concerned as I went on. "My first thought is a that I struck a large naturally formed pocket of an explosive element, but it doesn't show any properties of said elements. Perhaps it is just some strange phenomenon on this planet. Wouldn't be the weirdest thing ever found on a new planet."

"No matter, its not like we're pressed for time at all," Dreamer said, "I'll continue work on the drill in a moment." A beam of blue light once more shone through Dreamer's eye as several more simple tools were fabricated and transmatted in front of me. A mallet and chisel. Fun. "Be careful from here on out. I'm going to scan the ground more thoroughly."

"I think we should scrap the drill idea. If a simple pickaxe swing was enough to trigger a blast like that, I don't want to find out what it does when its grinded against," This was no time for laughs or jokes. Depending on how many more pockets of what exploded there are, even trying to launch the ship could be deadly.

"Good news or Bad?"

Well shit. Dreamer only says that when he has barely any good news and a fuck ton of bad news. "I'm going to go with bad news this time."

"Well, there are hundreds of those little pockets in this summit," Dreamer said in an eerily cheerful voice. Damn it all to hell. Are all of the "volcanoes" on this planet massive bombs? "Aaannnd," Damn it all to hell, "Their atomic composition doesn't match any of our known elements. It seems more like a mutated light, but it's not quite powerful enough to be paracausal. Like it wasn't created by the Traveler."

"Like the old man always said, 'Light can be found in all things.' Never really took his words seriously, as much as I respected the man," we didn't get much time to think of the passed Speaker, as we had more pressing issues at hand. At least, I seemed to think so more than Dreamer. "You had better have some damn good news for me then."

It's not often that a guardian can feel an emotion from their ghost through their mental link. And yet, I could feel the childish joy rolling off of my partner. Like he had just successfully pulled his latest prank on me, "The good news is that you found the one closest to the surface. The rest are at least four meters deep. Our thrusters won't affect this new volatile element. But wait! There's more! The shiny stone that looks metal, it's an alloy. A fucked up one, that's for sure."

Huh? all that build up? All the suspense? For that? "I'm gonna murder you! You fucking brat! Fucken hell, I'll do that later. What's in the alloy?"

"Mostly titanium. The rest is iron, tungsten, and what seems like what ever that new element is. What should we call that?" This could be great depending on how the new element reacts with the rest of the metal, and how it reacts to being shaped with heat. A single pickaxe swing barely scratched the surface of the alloy.

"We'll decide that later, we first need to find a way to actually get this metal to a usable state," I said, heating my sword's blade. Reaching nearly six thousand degrees, the alloy was slowly cut away from the ground. "Nightfall is nearing, and since we have such an abundance of time, I think I want to try a regular human's sleep schedule."

"I will get our outdoor forge set up," Dreamer added. Our indoor is undoubtedly nice, but it is far to cramped for real experimentation. Dreamer and I used this during the first two months of the Red War. We were set up alongside Banshee, and boy did we make a lot of guns. That was the largest amount of time I had ever spent in a forge. No point dwelling on the past. Right now, I just want to see my bed. The trip was short, and as soon I was under the covers, I expelled solar energy to warm the blankets to a comfortable level.