“I am recording,” Auby responded in his own voice. That’s when she moved into view, a long, sinuous body with glittering golden scales. They were streaked with cobalt blue along her back, and that matched the vibrant color of her blue hair. She wore a simple black tunic that looked like it could be a military uniform. There were three curvy red lines on each shoulder that could have denoted her rank. Her hair was braided back neatly, the way I would if I were on duty.
Her face was like Levant’s in bone structure, but different too—delicate, with much more subtle nubs on her brows, and she had no horn on her chin either. Shedidhave a pair of very dainty little ones rising from her forehead, which caught me by surprise. “She must be a very distant ancestor of the Serqethos Clan; they are golden with black horns,” Levant murmured, his eyes huge and fascinated. He had horns himself, also black and twisted like those of an antelope, and I wondered if that meant he was related to these Serqethos Naga too. Were we looking at an ancestor of his as well?
“Good,” the woman said, and she crouched lower on her tail, filling up most of Auby’s projection and appearing to look us straight in the eye. “My name is Sisha Avrishalz, a second-class engineer in the Royal Navy’s command. My mission was to locate the impact site and disable the energy source that is affecting our planet’s EM field and caused the catastrophic axis shift. I have failed.” She drew in a deep breath as if considering what to say next, or perhaps because she was choked up with emotion.
Auby’s projection trembled, or perhaps it was the Auby from the past trembling as he recorded this. We were all silent as we watched, and a wave of guilt so thick and heavy I nearly choked on it began to swallow me. This was my fault. My ship had done this. I didn’t know how or why yet, but there was no denying that it was true. My arrival on this planet a thousand years ago had had devastating results.
“An enemy fighter has damaged the Digmaster, preventing the machine from fulfilling its purpose. I am going outside to fix it, and have programmed the Digmaster to continue searching for the energy source. If I do not make it back, the Digmaster willsend out a beacon once it has completed its task.” In Sisha’s eyes, I saw the certainty that what she was about to do was death, and she was prepared to face it anyway. To save her world.
“Oh God,” I moaned, nauseous to my core, my hand going up to muffle the sounds that wanted to escape. This was supposed to be a simple test flight, a trip around Mars and back. I didn’t need to hear her last, heartfelt goodbye to her friends and family. Didn’t need to know what happened next, because I could guess. She and Auby had gone outside, into those icy temperatures. She’d fixed the machine, and then the two of them had frozen in the ice until Levant had found Auby.
The Digmaster Sisha had pinned her hopes on had done as programmed; it had kept endlessly searching for my ship, somehow only finding it now, a thousand years too late to fix anything. I wanted to cry. I wanted to rage with anger at myself, at the universe, at something. Except what could I do? It was an accident; I’d never meant to harm anyone. I just needed to make sure I fixed what I could now, even if that meant destroying my one chance at going home.
“That’s enough, Auby. Thank you,” Levant said. He turned me in his arms, hugging me close, and said nothing. There were no words for a moment like this anyway, but he offered me something much better: silent, unconditional support. I burrowed my nose against his chest, closed my eyes, and wished very hard that I could forget what we’d just learned.
Chapter 11
Levant
Felicia was quiet and mute, her eyes still a little red and tear-streaked. I knew humans cried like that, but it had still caught me by surprise and briefly alarmed me when I’d felt the wetness of her tears on my scales. I hated how helpless I felt trying to cheer her up. For her, I’d do anything, but I couldn’t take away her sadness. The only thing I could do was make her comfortable and bring her food.
There was a nest-like area to one side of the control room that could unfold from the wall. I cleaned it and placed the furs from my backpack on it to make it soft and warm. Then I crumbled a ration bar into a cooking sack and heated that over my small portable stove, stirring in liquid and herbs to make it a flavorful stew. She ate, agreed to lie down to rest, and let me heal her with my healing device again. Too bad I could only address some of the lingering effects of stasis, not the pain in her heart.
“It’s not your fault,” I said to her. I’d made the decision to curl into the nest at her side rather than focus on studying the Revenant. I’d checked all the systems as far as I understood them and was certain we were indeed headed for Serqethos. At the pace we were going, that would take us at least two weeks. We had time.
“Not my fault?” she asked with such anger that I quickly pulled her back into my arms. Her face pressed against my chest, and her warm breath ghosted over my scales. “Don’t sugarcoat it, Levant. Tell me what happened. Clearly, a lot did. That womantalked of a planetary axis shift! That is major. That must have wrecked the ecosystem and then some…” She was not wrong; that was exactly what had happened.
“The shift was only by a few degrees,” I assured her, but we both seemed to be grimly aware of how devastating even a few degrees could be. It had been, in fact. At least I could assure her that much of what had befallen Serant had not been caused by her; my world had been in great distress before she’d ever crashed her ship into the pole.
“We call that period in our history the Calamities,” I said, because though I did not know what the word “sugarcoat” meant, I could figure it out based on context. She wanted the truth—real answers—and it was only fair that I give her those. There should be no lies between mates, even if it pained me to know that her unintended role in Serant’s history caused her such pain. She shuddered, her hands curling against my scales, her fingers finding the edge of one of the leather cords around my neck.
“It was a time of multiple problems, but it didn’t start with your arrival,” I told her firmly. “Our civilization was very advanced, but we had one major issue: the EM field that surrounds our planet. Anything flying higher than six hundred feet was affected by it. Then, by some miracle, we managed to create a ship that could escape our atmosphere and explore space. This triggered a civil war on a massive scale, and it was tearing our cities and continents apart long before you got here, my sweet mate.”
There was much our history did not manage to record; that was the nature of war. So we did not know exactly what had happened to the brave Naga who had escaped Serant on thosevery first spacecraft and gone into space. I did know that the shifting of the planet’s axis had put an end to the war in a matter of years and forced most of our people back to tribal living, with stone weapons and an often hunter-gatherer style of life.
“Sisha’s recording must be from near the end of the war, when much of our world was already changed irrevocably, and many were dead or lost.” That did not seem to cheer up Felicia much, but perhaps it eased some of her guilt. She tilted her chin back to look at me, and her tearful expression slowly began to ease. Good, I did not want her to stay so sad. I did not blame her for anything; nobody would.
“That’s still horrible, Levant. Have you been able to rebuild? A thousand years is a long time…” A long time that she’d spent sleeping under the ice, oblivious to the passage of time or the chaos on the surface. Now she touched a part of our history that was, in some ways, the sorest spot of all. No, even in a thousand years, we had not been able to restore our civilization to what it once was. It was all the Shamans could do to hang onto our history, train new scholars and healers, and maintain what technology still remained. We were dwindling, slowly eroding, not rebuilding at all.
“Despite much research on the matter, a change has fallen over our people since the Calamities that has prevented us from… rebuilding. It affects females much more than males, but it makes all of us more warlike and irrational. Barbaric. Only some of us seem immune to this change, or at least more resistant to it. In females, we call that a throwback, but they are extremely rare.”
She was calming, as if the history lessons also made it seem more distant. So I kept talking until she fell asleep, describing the many Clans I’d seen and visited—Serqethos, which was very distant from the North Pole, and her ship—my home. The Shaman and their ships, our fight to hold onto some of the past. Only once she was asleep did I slide from the nest to coil through the control room with an anxious energy I struggled to shake.
“Auby,” I asked the Revenant, who’d curled into a small ball in one corner. His lavender eyes were open, and he’d been avidly watching what was going on. “When I hooked you up to my datapad and accidentally booted you, how much data did you absorb?”
“All of it, Levant,” he responded innocently. I figured that was the case, because he’d been able to speak Felicia’s language flawlessly—a file Artek had compiled and sent to me when I’d first learned of the existence of humans. “Is there something I can assist you with?” he asked next, and I was pretty sure he was excited by the thought, tail wagging, ears flicking attentively my way. Auby liked to help; it was probably the core of his programming.
“I have a theory I’d like to work through with your data,” I said. He trotted over right away, allowed me to lift him onto the console, and together, we bent our heads and got to work. As a research assistant, Auby was the best: fast, intuitive, and endlessly excited. He was not as good a teacher, but I managed to work out some of the basic controls of the Burrowing Revenant eventually.
I had just managed to clear the outside sensors of all ice when my communicator indicated an incoming call. I fumbled thedevice because it caught me by surprise. It was a contact I did not recognize, but I answered because it had to be a fellow Shaman. Or perhaps it was simply a hunter somewhere on the planet who had found it and managed to activate it. “Hello, who is this? You’ve reached Shaman Levant,” I said.
The screen slowly began to resolve itself into an image, but it was broken up with static. “The Digmaster has gone underground,” Auby said. “It is interfering with the signal.” He was right; there was only darkness visible on the newly cleaned sensors. Our depth indicated we’d dropped significantly in the last hour. The Burrower was cutting a path through rock and dirt, not ice.
The image I could make out was of a Naga male with long black hair, pale grayish-blue scales, and glowing purple eyes. He was not a male whose appearance instantly told me which Clan he was from, but I knew him all the same. Much more intriguing, a human female was sitting at his side, and to my shock, she looked so much like Felicia they could be sisters. Pale hair, pale eyes, and spots dotting the bridge of her nose.
“I am Khawla of Thunder Rock. I need to reach Artek. Do you know Artek?” the Naga male said, proving I’d recognized him correctly. As a strange blend of Thunder Rock and Copper Tooth genetics, he was a case that stood out to all Shamans. Not only was he a color between blue and purple, but his scales were muted in a way that gave him exceptional camouflage.
The image flickered, and from the way they were squinting at me, I was certain the connection was much worse on their end than on mine. “The Digmaster is enhancing the incoming signal, but the outgoing signal booster must be broken,” Auby said, having seen the same thing I had. That made communicatingdifficult, but seeing a human with a Thunder Rock male had to be investigated. This pair looked like they were desperate for help.
