“You’ll get used to it. Kinda pretty, right? In a deadly sort of way.” Tyler hit the down button, and the metal groaned as it lowered us slowly to the crusted over lava. We were at least fifty meters above the surface.

If I didn’t have to go out there, I might’ve agreed with Tyler about it being pretty. I’d been a little bummed out when I first got here that I didn’t get to see the planet, but now I wanted to run back inside. This wasn’t a place meant for humans or Aunare or anything alive.

A heavy coating of ash in the air blocked out the light from the two stars in the center of the Abaddon system, which meant the planet was as dark as night, but the lave lit it well enough for me to see off in the distance. I could make out a series of volcanos on the horizon, spewing bright orange, yellow, and red streams into the air and flowing down their sides.

The active lava flow stopped about a quarter of a mile from the base, forming a hard black crust. The base was like an island on a sea of lava. Around the edges, the red-orange ocean pressed against the black, pushing it up from underneath.

I turned back toward the base. Massive round pylons held up the building. I couldn’t see what was doing it, but there had to be some serious cooling in the space between the surface and the bottom of the base. Maybe there were cooling mechanisms inside the pylons?

Judging from how far up the base was from the surface—at least a good thirty meters—I figured there was plenty of room underneath in case some of that lava managed to break free of the blackened area, but I wasn’t sure how much flow the base could withstand if that happened. And what happened if a volcano formed underneath the base? How far below the surface did they drill the pylons?

I had a lot of questions, but I honestly didn’t really care about them. I just wanted to stay alive until I could escape this planet. It wasn’t my job to worry about the safety of the whole base. My only job was to survive.

It was silly for me to even worry about the stability of the base for a second. SpaceTech was a lot of things, but they weren’t stupid. Not when it came to money and profit margins. I was sure they were confident that the base was going to be fine.

I turned back to see the volcanoes. There were at least twenty small, nine medium, a handful of large, and two massive ones that I could see.