The air outside was cold enough to make her eyes water despite the suit’s thermal regulation. She blinked and tried to focus on the destruction around her. The ice field was unrecognizable.
Where there had been relatively smooth glacier surface, now there were ridges and crevasses and scattered debris. The explosion from below had reshaped the terrain, throwing up blocks of ancient ice that jutted skyward like monuments to chaos. The orange glow from her destroyed rig was brighter out here, vivid against the darkness.
The ice beneath her boots was still settling, tiny shifts that made her feel as if she was walking on the back of some waking giant. But the wreckage of the rig drew her forward, her steps quickening despite the treacherous surface. The closer she got, the worse it looked. The central platform was completely gone, reduced to a crater rimmed with molten metal. The support towers had been torn from their foundations and thrown dozens of meters away. The drill assembly was scattered in pieces, some still glowing with heat.
The core sampler. The spectral analyzer. The automated drill array. Two years of calibration data. All of it gone.
She approached as close as she dared, trying to identify anything worth recovering. The core sampler housing had been blown thirty meters to the west, but it was clearly destroyed—a crumpled shell of what it had been. The control console was in pieces, scattered across the ice like confetti.
Her claim was finished.
The knowledge almost brought her to her knees. Every polar miner knew they were one disaster away from ruin, but knowing it and feeling it were two different things.
Don’t panic. Don’t break down. There will be time for that later. Right now, survival.
She needed to get back to the habitat before the storm resumed. She needed to focus on keeping herself alive through the storm, and worry about the future when she actually had one. She turned to retrace her steps and saw the body.
“What the actual fuck?”
She stared, her mind refusing to process what her eyes were showing her. The creature lay on its side, curled around what looked like a wound. For a moment, she thought she was seeing some kind of bizarre geological formation, an illusion created by the way the starlight and the glow from the explosions hit the shattered ice and debris. Then it moved, shifting slightly on the frozen ground, and she realized it was real.
Impossible. Nothing like that should exist on Mars. Nothing like that should exist anywhere.
A huge body covered with silvery-white skin that gleamed even in the dim light and two massive wings, one of them bent at an unnatural angle. Her mind refused to process what she was seeing. It was too big. Too alien.
Keep moving. Get back to the habitat. Whatever that is, it’s not your problem.
Sound advice. Rational advice. The kind of thinking that had kept her alive this long.
Her feet carried her towards the body anyway.
Up close, it was even more impossible. The being—she couldn’t call it a man, even though the general shape was humanoid—was easily two and a half meters tall, maybe more. The wings that lay crumpled against its back would have spanned five or six meters fully extended. Its skin wasn’t skin at all but scales, silvery-white and reflecting the light from her helmet lamp in iridescent patterns.
And it was bleeding.
Dark fluid, almost black against the white scales, pooled beneath its side, steaming faintly where it met the ice. Something metal protruded from the wound, a jagged fragment that looked like it had come from her rig.
It attacked my equipment. That’s what caused the second explosion.
The realization should have made her angry. This thing had destroyed her livelihood, ruined her claim, and probably doomed her to eventual starvation when she couldn’t afford to resupply. She should hate it. She should leave it here to freeze, a fitting punishment for what it had done.
The creature’s chest rose and fell, its breath shallow and labored but unmistakably alive.
“Damn it.”
She knelt beside the body and tried to assess the damage. The wound was bad—deep and ragged, still bleeding despite the cold—and the wing on that side was definitely broken. Burns covered parts of its torso, probably from the explosion. Its eyes were closed, and its face was still and pale beneath a coating of ice crystals.
She should leave it. Every rational part of her brain was screaming that this was insane, that bringing an unknown creature into her damaged habitat was the worst possible decision she could make. For all she knew, it had been sent to kill her. For all she knew, it would wake up and finish what it started.
But she couldn’t.
For all her talk of self-reliance and independence, for all her carefully maintained distance from other people, she had never been able to walk away from suffering. Not when she could do something about it.
“If you eat me,” she said to the unconscious being, “I’m going to be really annoyed.”
The storm was picking up again. She could feel it in the wind’s increasing intensity and see it in the way the visibility was dropping. She had maybe ten minutes before being outside became truly suicidal.
The creature had to weigh over one hundred kilograms. Maybe more.
