Andrus woke up, face in the sand, gasping for air. His helmet had been knocked loose and lay in a dune a few meters away. His body lay end at the end of a contrail bored through the landscape by pressure and force. He coughed once, tried to inhale, and found only dust instead of oxygen.

Andrus hacked and gasped, spit and sputtered. But, there was air here, wherever here was. It was just hidden behind all the dust and soot of this alien atmosphere. He looked up and saw the strangest place he'd ever seen.

The desert landscape was dotted with the remains of a hundred different shipwrecks. Hulls of various sizes and origins stabbed skyward out of the sand and above the horizon like skeleton fingers escaping a grave. The atmosphere was green and speckled with intermittent clouds, like a Miss...

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