Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
The emergency seal on hatch three was failing. Jaz pressed her shoulder against the interior panel, focusing on the immediate problem rather than whatever the hell had just happened beneath her claim. Survival first, then the mysterious explosion that had dropped… something onto the ice field.
“Come on, you stubborn piece of—”
The seal engaged with a click, and the pressure warning lights dimmed. One small victory. The air quality in the habitat was still compromised, but the recyclers would get it breathable again in a few minutes.
She turned towards the viewport just as the world exploded again, knocking her to the ground. This explosion was different. Closer. The sound was sharper, more metallic, and it came from the direction of—
The rig.
“No. No, no, no—”
The rig was everything. Without it, she couldn’t work her claim.
Couldn’t earn her stake. Couldn’t afford the supplies she’d need to survive another season, much less repair the damage to her habitat.
Insurance didn’t cover acts of mysterious subterranean explosion, and even if it did, the payout would take months to process.
She scrambled back to her feet, peering through the foggy viewport.
The break in the storm continued, the air clear enough to reveal a scene of devastation.
Her carefully mapped drilling grid was unrecognizable, the ice shattered into jagged fragments.
Steam or some other gas still rose from the massive crater created by the first explosion, fifty meters across and glowing with residual heat.
And a smaller crater where the Core-7 had been reduced to twisted metal and shattered components scattered across the ice.
She needed to see how bad it was. She had to see if there was anything that could be salvaged and start making plans. The lull in the storm was just that—a temporary respite rather than a cessation. She needed to assess the damage while she still could.
She sealed her helmet and checked the readouts.
Green across the board. As green as anything got during a polar storm, anyway.
She grabbed her tool belt on the way out the airlock, even though she knew she was looking at the kind of damage she couldn’t fix.
The outer door groaned as it slid open, the damage to the habitat’s structure already evident in the way it jammed halfway and required a solid kick to open completely.
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.
I can’t lift it. I can barely move it.
She hurried over to the supply shed and grabbed her rescue sled, designed for dragging injured miners to safety, and placed it beside the creature. Getting him onto the sled was the hardest thing she’d ever done.
She rolled him first, using his own body weight to help shift position. The scales were cold and smooth under her gloves, and up close she could smell something strange—spice and copper and something else, something that made her think of lightning storms over open water.
The wings were the real problem. They kept getting in the way, tangling with the debris field, and catching on ice outcroppings. She had to fold them carefully against the creature’s back, trying not to cause more damage to the already-injured one.
“Come on. Work with me here,” she muttered.
She finally got his torso onto the sled, and part of his legs. He was simply too big for his entire body to fit. The lower part of his legs and his tail—he had an actual tail, covered in flexible spines—dragged behind, but it was the best she could do.
She grabbed the tow strap and started walking as the storm descended.
It was like dragging a small vehicle. The icy surface helped, but it couldn’t eliminate all the resistance, and every gust of wind threatened to tear the sled from her grip.
Her muscles burned. Her lungs burned. The thermal suit couldn’t keep up with the energy she was expending, and she felt sweat freezing against her skin despite the heating elements.
Fifty meters to the habitat. I can do this.
The creature stirred, and her heart nearly stopped. She tightened her grip on the tow strap and kept moving, her eyes fixed on the distant shape of her habitat through the swirling ice. If he woke up now… If he decided she was a threat…
He didn’t wake. The movement must have been reflexive, maybe a response to being jostled. But his breathing had changed, become slightly more regular, slightly deeper. Somewhere in his unconscious mind, he knew he was being helped.
Or he’s dreaming about eating me.
Forty meters. Thirty. The wind was howling now, gusting hard enough to lift ice particles and fling them like projectiles. One struck her faceplate hard enough to leave a scratch.
Twenty meters. Fifteen.
The outer door was still open, and the airlock beyond was lit by red emergency lighting. She could see her boot prints in the ice leading towards it, already filling with new snow.
Ten meters. Five.
She hauled the sled through the outer door and slammed it shut behind her. The wind cut off mid-howl, leaving only the sound of her own ragged breathing and the creature’s shallow respiration.
I’m probably an absolute idiot, but I made it.
She managed to wedge her way past him and open the inner door.
The frame complained about the additional mass as she dragged the sled through the inner door, the damaged structure protesting this new indignity, but she got it into the main living space and then collapsed against the wall as the door hissed closed.
Every muscle ached. Her hands were shaking from cold and exhaustion. Her helmet display was flashing warnings about thermal efficiency and oxygen reserves. But she was alive. And so was the creature.
The storm hit full force maybe thirty seconds later. She could hear it through the walls—a roaring fury that made the earlier winds seem gentle by comparison. The habitat shuddered and groaned, its damaged structure protesting the assault, but the seals held and everything else could wait.
She looked at the unconscious creature on her floor and tried to figure out what the hell she was supposed to do next.
Treat the injuries. Stabilize the patient. Then worry about everything else.
She started pulling off her suit, her hands moving automatically through the familiar motions while her mind raced.
She had a basic medical kit, but it was designed for human injuries.
She had no idea how to treat a wound on something that had scales instead of skin, let alone wings and blood that ran almost black.
Figure it out. Improvise. Adapt.
The fragment in its side was the most pressing concern. She’d have to extract it, stop the bleeding, and hope to hell that his biology was similar enough to human that her medical supplies would actually work.
She grabbed her kit and knelt beside the creature.
Up close, in proper lighting, he was even more impossible than he had seemed outside.
The scales weren’t just decorative—they were arranged in overlapping patterns that clearly served as armor, thicker over vital areas and thinner at the joints for mobility.
The wings, now that she could see them properly, were structured like enormous bat wings, with thin membranes stretched between elongated bones.
His face was almost human with a strong jaw, prominent brow, and high cheekbones, but the features were too angular and the proportions subtly wrong. And there were small horns sweeping back from his temples.
Dragon.
The word sprang to mind from some childhood memory, some story her mother had told her about the old myths of Earth.
“You can’t be real,” she said to the unconscious creature.
He didn’t respond. Just kept breathing, shallow and labored, while the storm raged outside and her habitat slowly fell apart around her.
She sighed, then reached for the medkit and started working.