by J. N. Chaney
This is going to be lovely. “Say it, Zedas.”
He grinds his teeth, suppressing his Dogan mirth with little success. “Sleeping one’s self to death in a small tent brings no honor to the clan.”
“I’m getting out! This is dumb!” Garin shouts.
I snort with laughter, and Garin wriggles like a caught fish, annoyed at his current situation.
Garin grouses, “Not funny!”
“It’s a little funny.” I shouldn’t antagonize the little guy, but this is what fathers, uncles, or big brothers do on camping trips.
“Let me out…” His words fade as the wind rises to a banshee wail. The tent flattens against us. Even the ground seems to ripple from the force of the gust.
I’m not laughing now, and neither are my friends. “Let’s get organized. Try to stretch the tent a bit. I sure as hell don’t want to brave that storm.”
“Actually, I’ve decided being crushed by a Dogan, a washed up Overlord pilot, and an Orphan who tells bad jokes is all right. For now,” Garin says.
“Glad to hear it, kid.” I press against the wall of the tent, then shift around to create a few inches of room here and there. One at a time, we get comfortable.
Which is good. Because even with the insulated, wind resistant fabric of the survival tent and our combined body heat, the night is deadly cold, and suddenly, we’re not laughing any more.
Sleep, when it comes, is glorious. I don’t even dream.
Shaina wakes up first, probably due to her soldier training. I listen to her rustle around and eventually find the exit. Zedas rolls over. For one second, I think Garin is a goner, but the Dogan scoops him up with one hand and moves them out of the way without either of them waking up.
I rub my eyes, pop my back, and follow Shaina outside.
The brightness of the morning brings tears to my eyes. I adjust the tint in my goggles and loosen my parka hood until I can feel sunlight and air on my skin. “It’s still pretty cold.”
“Feels good,” Shaina says.
“It really does.” I search for the Prothean scout ship and find four of them situated in a diamond shape around a needlelike antenna aimed at the sky. From this distance, they resemble figurines on an ivory tabletop. “This just keeps getting better and better.”
She crosses her arms and studies the situation. “It could be worse. They could already be here, but it looks like they’re searching for something or someone else.”
“I wouldn’t bet on that,” I say. “They followed us to the planet.”
“Then why aren’t they already breathing down our necks?”
“Weather,” I say. “They’re not immune to the environment.”
She shakes her head, clearly unconvinced. “I’m not taking any chances.” She starts checking the engine skids. Her brisk pace conveys urgency. Each movement is efficient. In minutes, she’s closely examined each of the skids and tightened straps holding the engine in place.
I mosey over to the tent, ponder the best way to wake up the rest of my team, and decide they need a shock to rouse them. After grabbing the reinforced zipper at one end, I run down the length of the tube tent, opening it wide. Sunlight and cold air flows over the sleeping figures.
Zedas awakens immediately, reaching one arm to protect Garin and raising the other to extend his sword blade. The kid, for his part, pops to his feet but hunches in a fighting stance, maximizing Zedas’s protection.
“Not cool, Mr. Murphy!”
“Time to rise and shine! How are we going to get off this planet with you two sleeping the day away?” I retreat when the kid comes after me, but it isn’t long before we’re all laughing.
Which is good. I don’t think there’s going to be a lot of that in our future. It’s the strangest thing. Since Jack left, I feel more like myself.
What does that mean? I don’t really know or care right now. We have an ice planet to survive and a ship to put back together, assuming the Prothean scouts don’t find us first.
“Do what you need to, eat a ration bar and drink some water, and let’s get moving,” I say. “The Protheans are looking for us, and the Heptagon isn’t going to fix itself.”
Zedas puts away his weapon and examines the tow straps Shaina is adjusting. Without a word, he hooks them around his waist and shoulders and leans forward. His first few steps are tentative, short, decisive movements that barely move the engine. Before long, the makeshift conveyance is sliding steadily across the icy tundra.
“Shaina, take point. Garin and I will look after the big guy and watch our rear in case the Protheans sneak up behind us,” I say.
“I’m on it, Murph,” she says.
“For your records, Doctor Hank Murphy, the engine weighs eight point seven times what I do,” Zedas says.
“Oddly specific,” I say.
He grunts. “My humor has failed.” He grinds out two more steps to build momentum.
“I’m laughing inside.”
Zedas doesn’t bother looking at me as he leans even harder into the straps. “That is a strange thing to say, Murph.”
We head straight for the ship, cutting across the flat landscape with purpose. Nothing seems to get closer for the first hour. I sense more than see movement near the Prothean ships, hazy in the glow of morning. There’s almost no wind now, but it still affects visibility near the horizon. And the glare from so much white hurts my eyes even with tinted goggles.
“We’ve got a problem,” Shaina reports over comms.
I press the outside of my hood hard enough to activate the ear mic inside. “Report.”
“One very ugly Prothean standing guard between us and our ship. He’s not moving, but he’s staring in our direction.”
“That doesn’t mean he sees us,” I say.
“Agreed, but it’s creeping me out. Crawl up here and see for yourself,” she says. “Tell Zedas to protect the engine and the kid.”
“On my way.”
6
Lying prone, Shaina and I watch the Prothean through binoculars. The stranger stands as motionless as Zedas when he’s meditating or one of the Prothean ships parked like a row of statues on the distant horizon.
“We have to split up.” I hate the idea, but we are out of options.
“No, Murph,” Shaina says. “That’s dangerous. If we have to fight, it will take all three… all four of us.”
“Agreed, but we can’t maneuver while dragging the engine, and we can’t abandon it,” I say.
“Think about it. I know you can come up with something better,” she says.
“No pressure,” I say.
“I’ll show you pressure.” She gestures back toward the others. “Zedas is quest sworn to you or something. Freaking Dogans make no sense. And that kid thinks we’re his family. We can survive about three more nights in that tent—that’s it. Our ship is busted to pieces. If that isn’t enough to get your creative juices flowing, an ancient alien race has returned to the Goliath Sector to kill us all.”
“We don’t know what they want,” I argue without much conviction. “Maybe he will let us pass.” Images of the black knight in the Monty Python skit threatened to make me laugh.
Shaina senses my mirth. “Now really isn’t the time.”
“None shall pass,” I mutter, then crack a smile.
“Yeah, that’s exactly what he will say, assuming he doesn’t just smash our brains out.” Shaina puts away her binoculars. “What’s the call, Murph?”
“Crawl back to the others and check our maps,” I say.
“Then what?”
“We’ll see what we see.” I’m stalling and she knows it.
“We don’t have much in the way of maps. A partial auto-scan taken by the Heptagon during our crash landing and what we’ve seen with our own eyes,” she says.
The moment we are back far enough to avoid being seen, we stand and hurry toward the others.
She gestures all around us. “There’s nothing but frozen tundra in every direction.�
��
She’s wrong, but how do I tell her? My Orphan enhanced mapping ability remembers everything from the auto-scan as well as our trek to find the engine. There’s a lot of flat, icy wasteland here, but the terrain has suffered millennia of hidden erosion. Storms like last night have been carving canyons into the surface for a long time.
Maybe we can find a place to hide.
“Is it time to fight?” Zedas asks the moment we return.
“It’s always time to fight, big guy,” I say without thinking.
Zedas deploys his sword and flail. “Wise words.” The second weapon looks more like the first time I saw it, a sturdy chain with a studded ball at the end.
“Uh, hold on just a second. We need to maneuver first,” I say.
“Of course,” he grumbles. “That makes sense. A direct assault is not always the best way.” He retracts his weapons.
“How about no assault?” Garin asks. “We can’t fight Protheans. Are you crazy?”
Zedas growls.
“Easy, big guy,” Shaina says, moving between the Dogan and the kid.
“Everyone chill. Gather around and pay attention,” I order.
No one moves for a second, but they eventually comply after exchanging confused looks.
“What?” I ask.
“You want us to chill? Haven’t we had enough of that?”
“Figure of speech,” I say, then extend the Orphan Gate tablet to use it for a sketch pad.
“Not my favorite figure of speech,” Zedas says, shivering from head to toe for a second.
“Zed is right. Your Hadrian needs work,” Garin says, then shifts his attention. “That’s a cool tablet. I mean, this is the first time you really let us see it.”
“Don’t get used to it. This thing is trouble. If anyone, especially the Dark Eye, comes for it, forget you ever saw it.” I draw our ship, the basic terrain, and where we found the engine. Next I add the Prothean ships. Finally, I overlay the auto-scan from our abrupt landing.
“That’s a perfect fit,” Shaina says in awe. “Your map is more precise than what the Heptagon generated.”
“Thanks. Now let’s get to work. You see this cross hatching in the map? That is terrain the ship computer couldn’t read well.” I sketch in additional details, most of them speculation.
“What do you think it is?” Shaina asks.
“Thin ice, or erosion from the night winds. Basically, those are canyons you can’t see until you are right on top of them. I bet plenty of them are subterranean. If we’d gone that way yesterday, we might have fallen in,” I say.
“And now you want to go there on purpose?” Shaina asks.
“It is the only way to move around the Prothean without being seen,” Zedas says. “But this engine is still too cumbersome for such a mission.”
Shaina checks a motion alert on the vambrace of her survival gear, then runs up the slight rise in elevation, walking hunched over then squatting to avoid being seen. Her comms activate in my ear. “He’s on the move.”
“How much time do we have?”
“Not much. By the stars, he can stride!”
Zedas picks up Garin, drops him on his back, and gives me a grave look. “Lead the way, Doctor Hank Murphy.”
He’s using my full name, always a sign he’s serious. “Let’s cover this with the tent.”
Shaina runs back, sees what we’re attempting, and shakes her head. “Bad idea.”
She’s right. The camouflage would be imperfect at best and we might need the tent. At this point, it’s looking like we might be permanent residents of this icicle.
I stuff the tent back in my pack and shoulder it as I walk toward the nearest canyon. Doubts assail me because there is no sign of the terrain changing. All I see is snow, ice, and gusts of wind blowing it around. Thoughts of another night of storms turns my gut into knots.
“Everyone keep up,” I say, then start to jog, aware of their limits from previous misadventures. It’s weird being the fastest runner in the group. Thanks to the Orphan Gate, I can run at a near sprint for as long as needed and still have gas in the tank.
No one talks. Zedas pounds the ice with his feet. Garin holds on with both arms, his fur lined hood and goggles barely visible over the Dogan’s shoulders.
“Shaina, you’re our rear guard,” I say.
“Got it.”
Two hundred meters, four hundred, and still no sign of the wind cut canyons.
“He’s not gaining,” Shaina says. “But I don’t like it. There are three others out there. He could be tracking us while they move around to block.”
I change course. “Agreed. Keep me updated. No concealment options yet.”
None of my Arctic missions went like this. We drove to each dig site in specialized vehicles and tried not to break a sweat. The retired Army Ranger never tired of saying, “You sweat, you die. Pace yourself. Respect this environment or else.”
“Is something wrong?” Zedas pants beside me.
“No. Just planning for another night. Hoping we don’t freeze to death,” I say.
Neither Zedas nor Garin have a comment.
“Shaina, give me an update.”
“He halved the distance,” she says. “We must be close because he’s racing us now—doesn’t want us to make it to safety is my guess.”
Or he’s done playing with us. I keep the thought to myself. What good would sharing it do now?
“I see something weird,” Garin says.
“Thanks for the warning.” I compare where I think we are to the map in my head. “We should already be above the tunnels, or in sight of canyons. Let’s slow down before we cause a collapse.”
No sooner have we slowed to a walk than the frozen surface beneath our feet splits apart. I jump left, Zedas jumps right. Shaina sees the gap spreading toward her too late and slides into it waist deep before scrambling out on my side.
I look over the edge. The fissure stretches downward into blackness.
“Wow!” Garin says, dragging out the word.
“That’s from more than wind,” I say, motioning everyone back. “Probably from seismic activity. This could be a more dangerous option than we planned.”
“Than you planned,” Shaina corrects me as she brushes snow and ice from her gear.
“We need to keep moving and get on the same side of this gap. Look for caves or canyons.” I search for the Prothean but can’t see him. The flat tundra rolls like the high plains of Montana rather than the perfectly flat surface of a frozen lake. Sometimes that helps us hide, if only briefly, but it also conceals the approach of our enemies.
“Is that still our plan?” Zedas asks.
“Yes. We will keep moving for as long as we can and take the first path we find back to our ship, and the engine.” I take point with no more looking back.
Half a mile farther along, I find the first entrance into the labyrinth. A tingle goes up my spine. Unpleasant images of getting lost and freezing to death rear up, vivid as reality. “This is it, team. One more step and we’re committed.”
“I can hear the Prothean behind us,” Shaina says. “It’s like he’s panting for air, or maybe cursing us.”
“It is the Prothean war song,” Zedas says. “I never thought to hear one.”
“So negotiating is out of the question?” I ask.
“How would I know, Murph man,” Zedas says, poorly imitating my casual speech. “I didn’t really believe in Protheans or their traditions until very recently.”
“Point taken.” I uncoil a rope from my survival pack and hook a carabiner to my belt. “Everyone clip in. This could get rough.”
Shaina gazes into the canyon as she fixes her belt. “That’s steep, Murph.”
“Yeah.” I point at Zedas. “Be ready to pull me up.”
“Of course,” he says, then grinds out a Dogan word I don’t know.
“Problem?” I ask.
“Hoogish is a Dogan word for luck,” he says. “And also a good way to order
breakfast at the grand lodge of my people, should you be invited to one.”
“I’ll try to remember.” I edge to the steep, tunnel-like entrance. It’s open on top, but not by much. In places there is a web of frost blocking out the sky. Prisms of color paint the inside of the passage.
Several minutes pass before I reach a level section. “Give me an update on our pursuit.” I shine my flashlight into a dark side passage. Many, but not all, of the alcoves are brightly lit from above.
Shaina and the others answer by slipping and sliding after me.
“Careful,” I warn. “Some of the side passages are so steep that one step into them and you’re gone for good.”
Zedas slips, grabs a wall, and pulls himself back to the center of the main corridor.
“I’m not sure I like it down here,” Garin says.
Far above, the Prothean roars.
“Let’s move,” I say, then take the lead. “Mind your ropes and stay in the center of the passage.”
A new sound echoes from above—human words spoken with the strangest, inhuman inflection imaginable. “Wait for Axu. Wait!”
“When he says it like that, it sounds like a threat,” Shaina complains. “And gives me shiver-bumps. Like I need that right now.”
“There has to be a reason he isn’t following us,” I say.
“Probably because he knows this place is dangerous,” Garin says with exaggerated calm bordering on sarcasm. “We’re probably dead already.”
“A good way to find glory, fighting the planet itself,” Zedas says.
“Don’t get me wrong. I like glory as much as the next kid, but maybe we can have both—rewards and survival,” Garin says.
“You are wise for such a small human,” Zedas says.
“He’s Hadrian, like me,” Shaina corrects. “He’s from Tamondran.”
“I think he is human,” Zedas says.
The conversation commands my attention, forcing me to listen when I should be planning our escape.
“Based on what evidence?” Shaina asks.
Zedas lifts his face toward the ceiling, then flares his nostrils. “His scent.”
“Whatever,” Garin says. “I don’t stink. And I don’t see there is any difference between humans like Mr. Murphy or Hadrians like Shaina and everyone else.”