No. Stay conscious. Stay aware. The threat?—
The threat was gone. Where the predator had stood, there was only a crater, still glowing with residual heat. Fragments of debris were scattered across the ice in every direction, some of them embedded in the frozen surface, others still tumbling through the air in lazy arcs.
He tried to rise, but his arms gave out beneath him, and he collapsed face-first into the ice. The cold was everywhere now—not just around him but inside him, spreading from his wounds, seeping into his bones. His wings lay crumpled against his back, one of them bent at an angle that suggested serious damage. Fragments of debris were lodged in the spines along his tail.
Wounded. Badly wounded. Need shelter.
No. He didn’t need shelter. What he needed was time—time to heal, time to recover, and time to understand what had happened to his world. But time required survival, and survival required consciousness, and consciousness was slipping away from him like water through cupped fingers.
He tried again to rise. His right arm supported him for a moment, long enough to lift his head and survey the devastation around him. The crater from his emergence. The debris scattered between them like offerings on a frozen altar.
And beyond that, another structure, smaller than the first, damaged, tucked against a ridge of ice that had survived the upheaval.Artificial. Wrong. Threat.
But he couldn’t reach it. He couldn’t even stand, much less cross the hundred meters of broken ice that separated him from this new potential enemy. The fragment in his side had pierced something vital enough that he could feel the strength draining from his body.
His vision narrowed. The grey at the edges crept inward.
Not like this. I didn’t survive the Long Sleep to die on the ice like a wounded animal.
The thought gave him enough strength to fold his damaged wing against his back where it wouldn’t drag. But it wasn’t enough to stand. It wasn’t enough to move. He lay on the ice, bleeding, watching the strange sky and trying to find familiar constellations. He couldn’t. Too much time had passed. Everything had shifted. Everything had changed.
Where are the others?
He knew there were supposed to be more. Had they awakened too? Were they out there somewhere, emerging from the ice, finding the same empty sky? Or had the cold and the pressure and the weight of ages finally claimed them?
I might be the last.
The thought should have been devastating. Instead, it felt distant, muffled by the growing haze that clouded his mind. He was going into shock. His body, pushed beyond its limits by emergence and combat and injury, was shutting down to preserve itself.
Stay awake. The threat. The second structure. I need to?—
The grey became black.
The cold became nothing.
And he slipped into unconsciousness on the frozen surface of a world that no longer remembered his kind while the stars wheeled above him in unfamiliar patterns.
CHAPTER THREE
The emergency seal on hatch three was failing. Jaz pressed her shoulder against the interior panel, focusing on the immediate problem rather than whatever the hell had just happened beneath her claim. Survival first, then the mysterious explosion that had dropped… something onto the ice field.
“Come on, you stubborn piece of?—”
The seal engaged with a click, and the pressure warning lights dimmed. One small victory. The air quality in the habitat was still compromised, but the recyclers would get it breathable again in a few minutes.
She turned towards the viewport just as the world exploded again, knocking her to the ground. This explosion was different. Closer. The sound was sharper, more metallic, and it came from the direction of?—
The rig.
“No. No, no, no?—”
The rig was everything. Without it, she couldn’t work her claim. Couldn’t earn her stake. Couldn’t afford the supplies she’d need to survive another season, much less repair the damage to her habitat. Insurance didn’t cover acts of mysterious subterranean explosion, and even if it did, the payout would take months to process.
She scrambled back to her feet, peering through the foggy viewport. The break in the storm continued, the air clear enough to reveal a scene of devastation. Her carefully mapped drilling grid was unrecognizable, the ice shattered into jagged fragments. Steam or some other gas still rose from the massive crater created by the first explosion, fifty meters across and glowing with residual heat. And a smaller crater where the Core-7 had been reduced to twisted metal and shattered components scattered across the ice.
She needed to see how bad it was. She had to see if there was anything that could be salvaged and start making plans. The lull in the storm was just that—a temporary respite rather than a cessation. She needed to assess the damage while she still could.
She sealed her helmet and checked the readouts. Green across the board. As green as anything got during a polar storm, anyway. She grabbed her tool belt on the way out the airlock, even though she knew she was looking at the kind of damage she couldn’t fix. The outer door groaned as it slid open, the damage to the habitat’s structure already evident in the way it jammed halfway and required a solid kick to open completely.