Ice Dragon’s Heart (Dragons on Mars #2)

Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE

Stuck again. She sighed and pushed back from the control console, her boots scraping against the metal floor of the operator cabin.

“That’s the third jam this week,” she muttered to no one. Talking to herself had become habit out here. Not a sign of madness, she’d decided long ago, but rather a necessary maintenance routine for her sanity. The polar wastes didn’t offer much in the way of conversation partners.

She pulled up the drill’s diagnostic feed on the display.

Thermal fluctuation in the cutting head—the cold was playing havoc with the lubricant viscosity again.

She’d need to swap out the fluid reservoir before the next bore attempt, which meant another trip to the supply shed, which meant trudging through three hundred meters of ice field in rapidly deteriorating weather.

The storm warning had been flashing on her wrist display for the past two hours.

She’d been ignoring it, as she ignored most things that threatened to interrupt her work, but the wind had picked up in the last thirty minutes, carrying fine particles of rust-colored dust mixed with ice crystals that would sting any exposed skin.

“Shit.” She grabbed her heavy thermal coat from the hook by the door and yanked on her breathing mask.

The outer door groaned in protest as she forced it open against the growing wind.

Mars didn’t do gentle breezes in the polar regions—it either lay still as death or tried to scrape the flesh from your bones.

Today was definitely the latter. As she stepped onto the rig’s metal platform, the wind immediately whipped her hair free from her braid and lashed it across her face.

The massive structure of the Core-7 rose behind her, a steel monolith against the endless expanse of the polar ice cap.

The craggy ice-covered mountains to the north were barely visible through the gathering storm.

As she made her way across the platform, a faint glow deep in the bore hole, caught her eye and she paused, frowning.

The thermal scanner had shown nothing unusual, just the expected heat signature from the drill’s contact point.

But there was definitely light down there, a subtle luminescence that seemed to pulse with a rhythm that wasn’t quite mechanical.

“Probably just a mineral deposit,” she told herself, but made a note to investigate later.

In the meantime, the barometric pressure was dropping fast. The temperature was already down to minus forty-seven and falling.

The blizzard would hit within the hour, maybe less. The fluid reservoir would have to wait.

Time to button up.

She secured the drill platform first, lowering the protective cowling over the bore hole and activating the thermal shields that would keep the equipment from freezing solid during the storm.

The rig was her lifeline out here—three years of savings, two years of payments still owed, and the only thing standing between her and a return to the corporate mining outfit that had chewed up her twenties and spat out what remained.

The wind tugged at her as she moved quickly across the platform, checking anchor points and seal integrity. She’d weathered forty-three storms on this claim over the past five years. She’d survive the forty-fourth.

Her habitat nestled against an ice ridge two hundred meters east, its curved walls designed to deflect the worst of the Martian polar winds. It wasn’t pretty, but it was hers. Forty square meters of pressurized space where she answered to no one.

She grabbed her tool pack and started the walk back.

The ice field stretched around her in every direction, broken only by the distant silhouettes of her auxiliary equipment sheds and the dark bulk of her snow crawler parked near the habitat.

Beyond that, nothing but white for a hundred kilometers in every direction.

Most people found it oppressive. She found it peaceful.

She’d grown up on Earth in one of the cramped ring developments on the outskirts of the northeastern metro area, where you couldn’t sneeze without three neighbors commenting on it and privacy was a luxury measured in centimeters.

Her parents had run a small equipment repair shop out of the front room of their two room apartment, always surrounded by customers and suppliers and the endless noise of the lower market district.

They’d loved the community and the connections.

She’d built a tiny, private area out of a single mattress and two reclaimed crates by the time she was eight and sound-proofed it by the time she was ten, determined to have a space that belonged only to her.

She’d loved her parents, but she’d never understood them. Two years after the accident, she’d sold the shop to finance her mining license and her trip to Mars and never looked back.

The solitude of the polar wastes suited her in ways that urban life never had. Out here, she could think. She could work. She could exist without the constant pressure of other people’s expectations pressing against her like atmosphere she hadn’t asked to breathe.

A gust of wind staggered her, and she leaned into it, adjusting her stride.

The sky had darkened noticeably in the past few minutes, the pale sun now hidden behind a wall of approaching clouds.

Ice crystals peppered her helmet visor, and she had to wipe it clear every few steps.

The habitat was a dark shape against the growing murk, its running lights already activated by the automated weather protocols.

The wind howled as she approached the habitat, whipping up waves of ice crystals that created the illusion of movement across the otherwise featureless landscape.

She entered the airlock and cycled through, relief washing over her as the inner door slid open to reveal the blessed warmth of her living space.

Relative warmth, anyway—she kept the habitat at a brisk fifteen degrees to conserve power—but after the polar wind, it felt like a sauna.

She hung her coat and mask by the door, stripped off her gloves and boots, and stretched muscles that had been working against the cold for the past six hours.

Made it.

Her reflection caught her eye in the small mirror.

Wind-burned cheeks, amber eyes bloodshot from dust exposure, dark hair escaping from her braid in a dozen different directions.

She looked tired. She looked exactly like what she was—a woman who’d been working too hard for too long in conditions that weren’t meant for human habitation.

Nothing new there.

The habitat’s central space served as kitchen, living area, and command center all in one.

A built-in bunk was tucked into the far wall next to the door to the tiny sanitation facility.

The back wall was dominated by her work console—three screens, a holographic projection unit, and enough processing power to run her small mining operation.

Another desk ran beneath the window on the front wall, covered with spare parts and pieces of disassembled equipment, and framed by two small hydroponic gardens.

She headed for the console to check the storm status. The storm had accelerated faster than predicted. Wind speeds were already hitting one-twenty, with gusts up to one-eighty. The visibility was down to less than twenty meters. Not the worst she’d seen, but nothing to take lightly either.

She ran through her shutdown checklist automatically—auxiliary power systems engaged, exterior sensors secured, emergency rations stocked. The rig was as protected as it could be. The rest would be up to engineering and luck.

The full force of the storm hit while she was working.

One moment the wind was a steady howl; the next, it became a roar.

The habitat shuddered, its foundation anchors groaning against the assault.

She glanced up briefly, confirmed that all systems were in the green, and started examining the day’s data.

Let it blow. I’ve got work to do.

The drill might have jammed, but the deep-core sensors had been running continuously for the past week, building a comprehensive picture of the substrate below her claim.

The rare-earth deposits were down there somewhere.

One good strike could set her up for years.

One bad investment of time and resources could bankrupt her.

The seismic returns told a story if you knew how to read them.

Layers of ancient ice, some of it billions of years old, compressed into strata as hard as stone.

Below that, the actual stone—basalt and granite and the peculiar iron-rich formations that made Martian polar mining both challenging and profitable.

And somewhere down there, if her surveys were accurate, a vein of rare-earth minerals that would justify every credit she’d invested in this frozen nowhere.

She frowned and leaned closer to the screen. The seismic return showed an anomaly—a pocket of unusual density far below the mineral band she’d been studying. Much farther below, actually. Nearly four kilometers down, in strata that should have been solid and undifferentiated.

She ran the data through a filter, checking for instrument error. The anomaly persisted.

That’s odd.

The reading suggested a void—a hollow space in the substrate where no hollow space should exist. Not at that depth, not in rock that had been under crushing pressure for billions of years.

Natural caverns didn’t form under those conditions.

Neither did anything else that her geological training could account for.

She pulled up the raw sensor logs and studied them more carefully. The anomaly had first appeared in the data three days ago, faint but consistent. It had grown more pronounced with each subsequent scan, as if the sensors were gradually resolving a feature that had always been there.

Or as if something is changing down there.