Fire and ice…

Damianos hissed when he saw the burnt husk as he approached Zone 7. The remains were far too charred and mangled to identify, but they were most likely that of the Mission Therapist. His father had opted to send the red drakkon to deliver the news to the Prince of Drakkon about their impending departure. A necessary intervention, the Royal Overlord had told the only drakkon cleared to ignore the Prince’s solitude ban. Meanwhile, Damianos had planted a micro-bomb in his bag. Set to go off precisely twenty minutes after the drakkon landed in Zone 7.

The bomb should have killed them both. Conveniently framing the Mission Therapist as an operative for the spoiled king. The plan had been near fool proof, with little chance of escape for either drakkon.

Yet Damianos only found one body on the ice.

Again he hissed. He knew he should have come sooner. Two moons had been far too long to wait. But Blue Father had pointed out it would look less suspicious if Damianos waited until the day of the Rendezvous, and then was sent by the Royal Overlord to “check” what was keeping the Mission Therapist and the Prince. Otherwise, there might be questions as to why Damianos had gone against the Prince’s decree before the day of the rendezvous.

But it would seem his investigation had come too late. Where the Zone 7 station once stood, there was now only a mound of melted ice. Glittering, and glowing blue under the high sun. Perhaps the bomb had gone off inside the station, somehow throwing the Therapist’s body?

However, that small flame of hope died upon further study of the rubble. The mound was far too small to house a drakkon underneath its melted waste. Which meant while Xenon’s lab had been destroyed, Xenon himself might very well be alive. There was also the question of what had happened to the Group 7 wolves who, according to one of Xenon’s reports, had—against his wishes—set up their camp outside his glacier, and declared him their king.

Damianos downshifted his tail, pulling his body upright so he could stay aloft as he scanned the area.

No heat signatures to the south or the east…or the west. But wait…in the distance, to the north…he spotted a large patch of orange, six or seven wing beats away.

Damianos aimed himself in that direction, flapping hard as he bore down on his prey.

So it was etched. He would need to do this the difficult way. Kill the Prince himself, and figure out how to pin it on the red drakkon afterward. The glacier was long gone, and the cameras had not worked for over two solars. That meant there was no longer any way to track what happened in Zone 7. He could do whatever he wanted to Xenon. Kill him, and return to tell the tale of the turncoat healer with no one the wiser—

He stopped short once more, his triumph dying a quick death inside his stomach.

The orange flames belonged not to the Prince’s Far Traveler tribe, but to an even dumber herd. A pack of steppe bison.

With a growl of frustration, Damianos scoured the entire zone. There was specific protocol in place regarding which anthro and lupin groups should be allowed to see them or know of their existence. But in the hours during which he searched, Damianos cared not who saw him. These hominids would once again be deemed meat upon their return to Drakkon, in any case.

But they could not return to their home without the Prince. For without a body, he and his father would have no explanation for why they would leave a member of the royal court behind to return to Drakkon. No, Xenon’s corpse had to be found. There was no way around it.

However, his cousin was nowhere to be found. Damianos spent the next two days scouring the ice sheet for him, but alas…nothing.

And so he was forced to return to the remaining mission team, still gathered at the Zone 6 station. Upon landing, he found a camp of sorts. A collection of the small rovers the team had used to transport their equipment and few possessions to the Zone 6 Rendezvous point. These rovers should have already been loaded onto the shuttle. But the failure of the Prince to arrive on the assigned day had made it necessary to start living out of the small vehicles, since the shuttle was only meant for short transport, and had no living quarters. From what Damianos could see, many of the drakkon team had reshelled to fit more comfortably inside their small vehicles/less-than-ideal lodging.

Damianos’ solo return was greeted with much lament. Lament that turned to despair when Damianos told them of the Therapist—who had apparently been an anti-Royal agent—and the vanished prince. There was some chance, he told the drakkon (and himself), that the betrayer’s bomb had thrown the Prince into the sea, but they could not return to Drakkon without knowing for certain.

And so did the mission drakkon turn their efforts to search for the Prince across land and sea. They found him in neither place, however. And there was even worse news. Apparently, the Prince had not only disappeared but removed the trackers from Experiment Group 7. Which meant the Prince was hiding. Perhaps among the lupin.

“I do not understand,” one of the drakkon said when they gathered again nearly a moon of fruitless searching later. “Did he think we were all in on the Therapist’s plot? Is he hiding from all of us?”

“Perhaps,” Damianos allowed, intensely aware of his flame. The less he said, the less risk of exposure. “Which makes it even more important to find him. We must continue our search. Find him, and reassure him we are here to help.”

“But how?” another drakkon lamented. “The upright primates are few, but there are still too many to track without trackers available to help us. He could be any flame upon the planet floor!”

“True,” Damianos allowed, his flame burning red with an irritation easily attributed to frustration. “Yet still must we find him. We cannot leave without him.”

All understood this imperative. They would risk almost certain death, including the King’s uncle and cousin if they returned to Drakkon without the Prince.

“Perhaps, he has gone to the uninhabited lands,” one of the red drakkon suggested.

“But why would he go there?” another drakkon asked. “There are no animals of note there. Just a very few hominid groups, and grasslands of little use to us.”

“And gold. The original surveyors report the coastline of the uninhabited lands has enough gold to replace the entire conducting system in three of our rovers.”

“He’s an encoder. What would he need with that much gold?”

That was when the Royal Overlord, who had been silent up to this point, joined the conversation. “Yes, he is an encoder,” their leader pointed out to the mission team, his flame suddenly sparking brighter. “So then where is the Zone 7 fated system?”

Damianos turned to his father, only barely remembering to incline his head in patriarchal reverence before addressing him. “What fated system?” he demanded, not understanding why a fertility portal would be referenced in a conversation on this distant ice planet.

“Did you not read your cousin’s reports?” his father asked him, his flame flaring orange with vexation.

In truth, Damianos had not. He had been too busy training the hunting beasts to read anything as dull as his cousin’s chosen field of study.

“Is it possible he used the fated system, and then found some way to shut it down?” a black drakkon, one of the Technicals, asked. “He and I had a strange conversation once.”

“Once,” Damianos repeated. “When, exactly?”

A few moments later, they gathered around the Mission Geneticist’s rover to listen to his retelling of the conversation he had with the Prince two solar rotations ago. Damianos was so intent on discovering a possible clue that his flame radiated a dark blue of focus.

However, what followed was nothing more than a theoretical conversation. The kind young drakkon frequently had. Right up there with, “Are there drakkon-like civilizations on other planets?” and “Who designed our solar system?”

The kind of questions with many possible answers, none of which were conclusive.

Still, Damianos could not shake the flame of an idea that this conversation might somehow be more important than it at first seemed. Especially after combing through every report Xenon had uploaded to the mission server.

As it turned out, two things were true.

One: there had been a fated system in Zone 7, and now, for some reason, it was gone. Shut down or destroyed—with even less of a trace left behind than Glacier Lab 7.

Two: Though it was philosophical in nature, Xenon’s question about the fating portal was unusual, especially when one considered some of the other research his cousin had been performing. And so… as silly as the question had been, it continued to haunt Damianos as the days they could not find Xenon stretched into moons, and then into solar rotations. If his question had been so trivial, so beyond any provable point…

Why, then, had the Prince asked it?