Our putative goal was to gather fuel. The moon itself was airless, lifeless, and monochromatic. It seemed that the captain had been there before: there were a number of tunnels already excavated, leading to empty caverns that had once held reservoirs of liquid erchius.

I wasn’t interested in exploring. I had asked the captain for a teleporter fob, but he didn’t seem to understand what I was talking about (no surprise there). He didn’t even seem to use a fob to initiate teleportation. Maybe Glitch can have them surgically implanted. But this meant I was completely reliant on him for transport to and from the moon.

In addition to the EPP, which was not as heavy as it looked, I had brought the strange gun I found in the belly of the ship. I knew it was ridiculous to carry around a sidearm on an uninhabited moon, but it made me feel better. I kept my hand on it as we descended into the darkness of the mines. And when I say “darkness,” I mean complete and total. I regretted not bringing any of those glow injections. I ran my hands along the wall and tried to keep as close to my guide as possible, but he moved quickly and silently. The only sign of him was the tiny red light on the back of his EPP that bobbed up and down as he walked.

“Do you have a flashlight or something?” I said after I tripped over my second or third rock.

“Don’t need one,” he muttered. With a sound like a whip cracking, an arc of electricity illuminated the tunnel, and water poured from it as if from a hose. It became a little stream beside us as we walked, and continued to glow ahead of us, almost as brightly as the arc itself.

The water was mysterious and beautiful enough, but I was truly in awe of the source: a U-shaped metal appliance the captain was holding at arm’s length. “Is that a matter manipulator?” I whispered.

The Glitch clutched it to his chest protectively and glared over his shoulder. “Yeah. So?”

“I’ve just never seen one before. They’re illegal where I’m from. I thought they were incredibly dangerous.”

He snorted and kicked his foot into the stream. “Healing water. Super dangerous. Let’s keep moving.”

The captain came to an abrupt stop where the tunnel opened into a large cavern. By the light of the water pooling at our feet, I could see a small underground lake as dark and glassy as a mirror. This was what we’d come for. We walked into the cavern until we reached the shoreline.

The matter manipulator’s arc stretched out across the lake and then touched down on its surface. The water level lowered slowly as the erchius disappeared. Then the matter manipulator suddenly made a noise like a clogged sump pump and let off a shower of sparks. The arc discharged a few gallons of liquid erchius into the air and I jumped back to avoid the splash.

The captain recalled the arc with an air of frustration. “Welp. Got too much stuff. Need to make some room.” He tapped the side of his head thoughtfully, then turned and extended the matter manipulator’s reach past the lake to the shore on the other side of the cavern. “Going back to Zeta Tau eventually, so … not gonna need this sand.”

I watched for a long time as he summoned several tons of sand onto the far bank, making castles and sculptures, though whether they were for my amusement or his was a mystery.

“Where is all the sand coming from?” I asked.

“Uh, the sand room.”

He resumed molding a tower into a lumpy, Humanlike shape.

I guess I didn’t really know where matter manipulators took things, so it seemed like a reasonable answer. Eventually, he had displaced enough sand that he resumed siphoning up the erchius once more. I felt a little useless just watching, so I decided to walk around the edge of the lake.

I found another tunnel close to the chamber floor, but it looked too small to crawl through, especially wearing an EPP. As the matter manipulator depleted the lake, I got the captain’s attention and told him about what I’d found.

“No problem,” he said, and without even crossing the room he used the manipulator’s arc to carve out the entrance to the tunnel as easily as carving out a pumpkin. The rock crumbled away into nothingness and disappeared somewhere. Maybe a rock room.

With the tunnel’s entrance excavated, we looked down into an even larger chamber, with a ceiling so high that the manipulator’s arc was unable to reach the surface of the reservoir below us. This didn’t phase the captain, though. He took aim at the chamber wall and drew up a perfect staircase in stone. To ancient people, I thought, this would have seemed a godlike ability, shaping the world with handheld lightning.

The stairs felt every bit as solid as the cave floor beneath my feet, but I descended them cautiously. The gravity difference made me feel buoyant but uncoordinated, and I wasn’t keen on taking a swim in rocket fuel. By the time I’d reached the bottom, the captain had nearly finished draining the reservoir. I looked around, hoping maybe I could prove my usefulness by finding another tunnel, and a glint of light above us caught my eye. Something dark and reflective was lodged in the cave ceiling.

I pointed up at it and asked, “What’s that?”

The captain snapped his fingers. “Oh, hey, lost that grappling hook last time. Hold on a sec.”

He climbed halfway up the staircase and raised the arc to the ceiling, but the grappling hook wouldn’t budge. It held fast even as the matter manipulator hummed and the arc’s power intensified. I felt a tremor in the stone beneath my feet, then a crack. The ceiling above us rumbled and sand rained down on our heads as the grappling hook shot from the ceiling and clattered onto the cave floor in front of us. The captain scrambled to conjure up the remaining stone he’d excavated from the tunnel to stop the avalanche, but it was too late. The mountains of sand in the first chamber had collapsed into the tunnel and sealed it completely.