Perhaps she just wanted her ship with her for sentimental reasons. If we dug it out, she could take it with her when we left the Pole and decided where to settle and build our nest. Now I was thinking about nest building, and nest play, and the warm sands of Serqethos I missed so much. Not good, and very distracting. The readings that had alerted the perimeter sensors spread around my camp were getting stronger. My handheld scanner was warning me with strident beeps and vibrations.
“You are right, the Burrower might be able to get your ship out. That’s not now, though, and whatever your ship is doing, it’s getting stronger.” Now not just my handheld device was vibrating, but it felt like the ice beneath my coils was trembling too. A quake rocked and rumbled, increasing in intensity in a matter of seconds, so that a dusting of ice and snow began to fall from the rough tunnel ceiling.
Felicia wobbled, and I caught her by the waist to steady her. Auby was more secure on his six legs, but he was making urgent comments about vacating the premises. He wasn’t wrong, if the tremor got much worse, we were at risk of having the ice tunnel collapse right on top of us.
“No, I can’t leave! I need to find out why this is happening. Perhaps I can shut it off.” Felicia slipped from my grasp like quicksilver, leaving only handfuls of fur behind. She had thrown herself into the narrow hole I’d created to enter her ship before I could stop her. Either I’d haul her out by her foot, or follow her in. Frankly, the metal structure of the ship might protect us if the tunnel did collapse.
“Go,” I said to Auby, and I lifted him bodily into the hole. His metal hooves clattered on the ice as he hurried after her. I cast one look over my shoulder at the shaking tunnel the Burrower had created and followed them in. The passage was tight, squeezing around my chest, cracking and groaning as the ice shifted. For a moment, I feared I’d be crushed inside the passage and buried alive. Then I hauled myself through the metal gap and into the interior of Felicia’s ship.
It was cold inside, and I’d left the pack out in the bigger tunnel; it simply wouldn’t fit, so no heater. Thankfully, it appeared Felicia had pulled herself into the pilot seat and was running diagnostics on the ship. She did it with such focus that she wasn’t even aware of how her breath misted in the air in front of her. Auby was pushed into a back corner, which he accepted with a grumpy curl of his soft pink mouth. There was simply very little space for him, tiny as he was, and me in here. “You could have waited outside,” he offered.
“And risk getting crushed under ice? No thanks,” I responded, which made the little Revenant laugh as if I’d made a joke. Was he genuinely amused, or was that just his programming telling him to make the sound because it had been interpreted as funny? How was that any different from when something mademelaugh? That could simply be my programming, couldn’t it? Now Felicia had me thinking about how everything worked—not just the Burrower—and it made my head ache.
My mate was talking, and I rushed to tune in; I tried to figure out if what she said matched what my scanner indicated. “The experimental FTL drive is powering on. I think it’s trying to engage to follow its programmed path back home. Except…” She hummed as she pulled up another screen and flicked afew switches with delicate fingers. “I think it’s overheating and shutting down before it can engage. Probably because it can’t vent the heat when encased in ice.”
I lifted my head to look at the ship’s canopy. It was built to be partially transparent, but ice had covered it. With this much ice on top, no light came through, and it appeared black as night. Almost, you could imagine it was a night sky, and the ship could actually tilt its nose up and fly away. When I raised my lantern overhead, it became opaque white ice, and the illusion shattered.
“It is hard to imagine that something would overheat when trapped in ice,” I said. I could, however, vividly imagine that a powerful ship engine could cause the ice to rumble and shake, as it was doing right now. “Shut it down before we’re buried alive,” I told her. She gave me one soulful, bleak look over her shoulder—one that said she didn’t reallywantto shut down the engine, as if she thought she could fly home right this instant.
She did it with a sigh. “Doing it now. This should put the ship in standby mode until I can come back. It’s got a hull breach and is low on fuel anyway. We’d need to fix all of that first before I can go home.” Home, she said that casually, but it was like a knife through the heart. Home, as in not here with me, but back to her Earth, even though there was no one alive there she cared for, and no one who would care for her. She said we, though, did she mean she wanted to take me home with her? It was a bittersweet thought, but for her, I’d do it. I’d rather have my mate than Serant without her.
“Got it,” she said, and the trembling stopped. We all froze in place and listened as the ice settled back around the ship and the world ceased rocking. I didn’t know if we could trust thatkind of silence. Just because the quaking ended did not mean the ice was stable. It would not take very long for things to freeze back into place, but to be safe, I’d want to stay in the shelter of the ship for at least half an hour. Of course, my handheld scanner and datapad kept indicating things were still happening up there.
“It takes a while for the engine to fully power down and the energy to dissipate. I should monitor that.” Felicia drummed her fingers on the console, but it made only a muffled rustling noise because she still wore the crude mittens I’d sewn for her before I’d freed her from the stasis pod. “And I need to read the data on the black box so I can figure out what happened.” I immediately gazed around the narrow interior of the ship, searching for this black box.
Much of the ship had exposed parts, not neatly finished like the ships I knew from the Shaman Training Grounds. Those were all gleaming silver, white, or black inside, with smooth surfaces and rounded curves—sleek and sinuous forms our ancestors had appreciated, as they were represented in all their designs. Felicia’s people had not cared about aesthetics at all when building her ship. The pipes, wires; everything had been left exposed. Welds were crude, bolts still accessible. It was all very accessible for tampering, and unfinished.
I saw no sign of a black box shape in all that, though several objects did stand out. “I see no black box,” I told her, as I shifted coils around to make sure I’d peeked everywhere. Auby appeared to have been doing the same, because he chirped right on the heels of my words that he had looked but hadn’t found it either.
“Oh,” Felicia said, a smile breaking out on her face so beautiful it felt like the sun was dawning. My chest grew tight, and the sigils across the front of my body flared brighter. “It’s not actually black. Perhaps we should take it with us. It will probably require quite a bit of study.” She pointed with a dainty finger at a cylindrical object to her left, hooked up to the console with sturdy wires, painted a scorching orange with precise stripes. Not actually black? It was about as far from black as an object could be, and it wasn’t box-shaped either. I did not point that out, but lowered myself beside the object so I could carefully unhook it from the ship’s systems.
Once I had it free, it was not all that big—only as big as my hand—and I tucked it safely into one of the pouches on my belt. Felicia barely paid attention, but hunched over the screens of her ship as if she were trying to absorb the information through her forehead. It was cute, but she was frowning, which made me worry that whatever she was reading, it wasn’t good.
The beeping of my datapad, which had lessened after she began powering down the ship’s engines, suddenly became much more strident again. She stiffened and looked up, while I looked down to check what the sensor readings were telling me. “It’s the Burrower,” I said. “I’m afraid it’s still coming this way. It appears attracted to the diminishing energy signature of your ship.” Then I lifted my eyes to her face and gave her the bad news. “It only missed it by a hair’s breadth last time. We cannot stay here, because I fear it will destroy the ship if it reaches it this time.”
“No!” Felicia denied immediately, but she climbed out of the pilot’s seat the next moment. She didn’t even question whether I knew this for certain, but followed me out of her vessel through the narrow gap I’d created. We thumped onto the ice floorthe Burrower had created on its previous passage, then looked left and right. My scanner indicated it was coming from the direction it had previously departed, but I was certain it was still above the ice layer, not inside the tunnel.
With Auby in the lead, we hurried through the tunnel back toward my camp. I only paused long enough to pick up my backpack and secure it on my shoulders. The climb was going to be tough, because I feared the Burrower intended to go down the same hole it had created last time. If it did, we had to be out of there before it began its descent, or we’d be crushed.
There was no time to secure the harness properly. I just picked up Auby and pressed him into Felicia’s arms. “Hold on. Tightly!” I told her, and then I flung several loops of my tail around her and squeezed tight. With a shove, I leaped high enough to get a lead and grabbed hold of the ropes dangling from the winch system. Up we went, one hand over the other, as I pulled my precious cargo with me in my tail. Felicia was cursing, calling me mad and saying I’d never make it.
Auby, much to my surprise, was reassuring my mate. “A Naga male in his prime is very strong, Felicia,” he said. “And one in the grips of mating heat cannot be underestimated. He will haul us both safely to the surface, don’t worry.” So factual, so casual about the whole mating heat thing, but it made my mate snap her mouth shut. I had no energy to spare to look down, but I was certain she was watching very anxiously to make sure I did not slip up.
I didn’t. I wouldn’t. There was simply no other option but to go up, all three hundred feet. One hand after the next, the still-free tip of my tail assisting for balance. My shoulders ached, my armsfelt like they were on fire, and heat burned through my muscles. Along my spine, beneath the thick fur of my tunic, my scales shivered and lifted in an attempt to cool me down.
We reached the top, and it was a narrow call. I felt like I couldn’t possibly pull us another inch when I swung my tail up and threw both Felicia and Auby over the edge toward safety. I almost slipped myself once I was relieved of that precious burden. Then I felt her hand on my tunic, pulling, and I hauled myself the rest of the way, over the edge, and onto cool, hard ice and powdery snow.
Light was beginning to dawn, filtering over the horizon with slowly creeping fingers. It was a pale, purple shade blended with reds and pinks. Beautiful, and worth pausing to admire if the situation around us wasn’t rapidly developing into utter mayhem. The Burrower was coming; I could not hear it, but I saw it as a great shadow in the distance. Between us and the safety of my camp, another, much more surprising obstacle lay.
“Naga?” I said, shocked. “The climb is making me see things, surely…” My trembling arm struggled with the flap of the pouch holding my handheld scanner. When I pulled it free, the signatures it read were true and unmistakable. These were Naga, a whole horde of them, a Clan.
“Are those your people? Are they here to help us?” Felicia asked. My tail twitched against her legs, and I began shaking my head. No, I doubted they were here to help us at all. In fact, there shouldn’t be any Naga on the pole; there weren’t, as far as the Shaman Council knew. No, they weren’t here to help us, not at all. In fact, they looked very hostile to me.
Chapter 8
Felicia
I was still a little in shock from the rapid developments of the past hour, and impressed by Levant’s feat of strength just now. So, to say I was ready to roll with the next punch, no, I was not. I might have been trained to deal with extreme situations, but as a test pilot, it had been quite a while since I’d last seen anything as high-pressure as combat action. This felt like that, though, like I had just stepped into a combat zone and I’d forgotten my jet, so I was as naked as a newborn. Very unpleasant.
