Chapter 3 #3
Pretty soon I had extra furred boots on over my own military-issue boots, and a hood and an extra scarf wrapped around my head.
He was fussing with a very crude kind of mittens, tying them around my wrists now.
They wouldn’t allow me to do much at all, but I was beginning to think the weather outside the Future was really bad.
That feeling only got worse when he started wrapping more things around his head, too.
“How bad is it?” I asked with a hint of trepidation. I was a bit too used to sunny weather and air conditioning. Even if I’d been trained for extreme weather conditions, that didn’t mean I liked it. This was an alien world, to boot; I didn’t know what to expect once we stepped outside.
“It’s…” he shuddered, “very cold. Very cold, but then, I am used to the Serqethos desert, not Serant’s North Pole.
” Hang on, North Pole? We were on a planet’s icecap?
I lifted my eyes to the domed ceiling over the pilot area.
It appeared fogged with white pressing against the thick glass.
My stomach clenched, not with the aching of stasis sickness, but with fear.
Was that ice? Was the Future buried beneath a thick sheet of ice somehow?
Levant unhooked a small device from above our heads that I hadn’t yet noticed.
He tucked it into one of the pouches on his belt, and instantly the temperature inside the ship began to drop.
It was very immediate and dramatic, and now I was extremely happy he’d made sure to bundle me up first. Whatever that object was, it had to be a very nifty space heater of some kind.
“We must hurry,” he said, and he leaned down to a panel in the wall just behind the pilot’s chair.
To my utter horror, he lifted it and began pulling furred things from the hole, crusted with ice.
A gap was revealed that couldn’t possibly be big enough for Levant to fit through, and beyond it, a dark cavern.
He’d cut a hole in the hull of my ship to get inside; I was beyond livid at the discovery.
Humming with fury, words rattled through my head, and I fought to keep them inside.
They wouldn’t help, and it was too late anyway.
The furred things he’d pulled from the hole turned out to be garments he could slide over his tail.
It took some doing to get each segment onto his long body and laced together so they couldn’t slide.
It was time I spent counting to ten over and over to rein in my temper.
It wouldn’t help, I kept saying to myself, and he might have had no choice.
Ice, remember, there might be ice pressing down onto the canopy of the ship. It couldn’t open if that was the case.
It turned out to be true. Levant slipped out of that hole first, and then he very carefully assisted me through the gap and down to the ground, which was shockingly far away after a slide through a narrow tunnel of ice.
Once I stood on solid ground—or rather, solid ice—I could see the true extent of what had happened to my ship.
Levant held out a light for me so it was properly illuminated, as if he knew I needed to see this.
My ship was stuck behind a three-foot-deep wall of ice, one I’d crawled and slid through via a narrow tunnel.
Levant must have carved that himself, but I did not believe he’d cut the circular tunnel we were now standing in.
It was very precise and very big, stretching on into the dark in either direction.
The Future was only visible as an outline of the ship, her bulky form strangely warped beneath the thick wall.
“How deep?” I asked, my voice hoarse. His tail tightened a little around my wrist, a sympathetic squeeze perhaps.
His eyes were kind as he tilted his head down toward me.
Then they flicked to the ice, along the tunnel, and then to the supplies piled on a sled he must have brought.
I didn’t think he knew the answer, but he surprised me by pulling another device from a pouch on his belt.
A scanner of some kind, this one I recognized, but only vaguely.
Lifting it above his head for a moment, he rotated it as if he were making sure he had all his data correct before he answered.
“At least a hundred feet. Does that measurement translate to something that makes sense to you? I haven’t studied the extent of our translating abilities between humans and Naga yet.
” What a scholarly thing to say; it caught me by surprise in such a way that I found myself smiling despite the horrible news.
A hundred feet? Thirty meters? That didn’t happen overnight…
“It did,” I said to him. I stomped my feet to encourage circulation, but the extreme temperatures were already beginning to get to me.
It was really freaking cold, and if we were on a pole, that made sense.
Wrapped up as I was, I still felt it, and I knew I wouldn’t last more than an hour or so if it stayed like this.
Levant flicked the scanner my way and hissed. “Humans are so fragile, you’re already too cold. We must hurry.” Fragile? Excuse me? I wanted to protest, but the fact was, without proper thermal gear, he was right. His furs weren’t enough to keep me warm out here.
He hurried me toward his sled, rushing to rearrange some of the supplies strapped to it.
He was making space for me, I realized. Part of me wanted to object, I could walk myself, and the movement would help me stay warm.
But even if I wasn’t nauseous or stiff anymore, I still felt weak and tired.
Once I was seated, he piled furs around me and strapped them down with thick, purple rope.
I was warm that way. Okay, I’d let him do his thing. I hoped his camp wasn’t far.