It had been five days since Volistad had left. Since then, Barbas and I had begun an ambitious new construction. We had sent mining drones down into the depths of the glacier, seeking out both stone and ore that we might find beneath. They had found veins of several precious, rare elements, enough for us to begin to work on the only thing that might actually unfreeze Chalice. Its orbit and distance from both the parent planet, Tisiphone, when combined with its distance from the system's star should have put it into a sort of "Goldilocks zone" like the one that allowed life to exist on Earth. But for some reason, the moon was stuck in a tidally locked orbit around a planet that was, itself, tidally locked. There was no way that any machine we built could put Chalice into anything resembling that ideal orbit, but perhaps, with enough force applied in precisely the right way, we could destabilize the current position of the planet, and make it pull itself out of the tidal lock. Barbas and I pored over the problem for a particularly long and surprisingly interesting night in the dream library, examining all the records and data of applicable science and technology that he had brought with him. We hadn't figured out how to manipulate the orbital mechanics of a single celestial body in a single night, but we had found an experimental process by which the Pan-American Dominion back on Earth was trying to fight the problem of global warming and the greenhouse effect. Barbas posited that if we could reverse the aim of the process, we could incorporate some of its technology into our storm generator and Terraforming Engine, slowly changing the weather so that what little sunlight Chalice did get, was trapped down on the surface and held. Over time this might cause the lethal temperatures to rise to something semi-reasonable. Or at least the process might change the moon's climate into something that stubborn humans could live with, like the temperature in the Dakotas, or Siberia, or Finland.

So we had begun construction of a massive air intake apparatus around the tower, one that passed air over a gigantic geothermal energy spike that we would drive all the way down into the mantle of the moon. All we had to do was combine that with some greenhouse gasses we could manufacture, like methane. We could expand the size of our perpetual storm and begin to affect the weather across a significant portion of the globe. After all, humans had almost turned Earth into an unlivable hothouse hell, without really trying. If I set my mind to it (and more importantly, with the help of a certain sexy djinni), I was pretty sure I could do the same thing to a moon a fifth of the size of Earth.

Construction was proceeding apace, and I was just putting the finishing touches to another construction drone when I looked up to see someone stepping through my storm wall like it was a curtain of dangling of beads in a college student’s apartment. My first thought was that it was Volistad, but then I remembered the way he had belly-crawled through the first time. He couldn’t ignore a storm. The only people that could do that were… the Erin-Vulur Stormcallers. I stood quickly, stepping away from the drone. “Barbas!”

“Already there,” he replied, and I heard the whine of the great gauss rifle emplacement spinning up its acceleration chambers.

I swore under my breath. I had thought things were going well with Volistad. Surely his people couldn’t have disregarded all the progress we had made, could they? I stepped forward, fumbling my Erin-Vulur vocabulary amidst the sudden thundering of my heart. “Listen, I am not your enemy! We don’t have to fight! I don’t want to hurt anyone! We all just-” I stopped when I saw the Stormcaller’s expression. She was taller than the first one had been, of a height with Volistad. Her face would have been beautiful, filled with youth and vibrant life. But her face was twisted in a mask of fury and grief that was unmistakable, despite our differing species. Her eyes, completely black orbs, ran with tears that froze in long streams down her face and formed icicles from her chin. She was naked as she emerged from the storm wall, but the same icy plate armor I had seen before, was growing up to encase her slender body. “I’m a friend!” I couldn’t give up on this. I didn’t want a war, and though I had powerful technology at my disposal, the power demonstrated by the Stormcallers was something I wasn’t prepared to fight. “I’m a friend of Ranger Volistad!”

At the mention of the name, the Stormcaller threw back her head and roared, an animal sound like that of a great cat in pain. The sound was terrific, louder even than the storm, and I just stood there before her as she screamed. I was transfixed by something primal within me, something that knew that sound and was afraid. Barbas was shouting something about multiple targets, but I couldn't respond. I staggered before that roar, scrabbling at my waist for my gun. The Stormcaller made a flexing motion with her clawed hands, and black ice gathered about her fingertips, sheathing her own claws and growing into curved, six-inch talons. The gauss rifle chirped, but the enraged woman preparing to tear me to shreds seemed to be prepared for my weapons. She darted forward in the split instant before the rifle fired, lunged out of the shattering ice for me, claws extended toward my face. She hit me, hard, and I tripped over my newly minted mining drone, tumbling over backward and rolling to my feet too slow. The Stormcaller screamed and slashed one razor hand at my face. I barely interposed my arm between the claws and my quartz faceplate. There was a shriek as the strange, empowered ice clove great furrows in the surface of my armor. I managed to lift one foot and deliver a stomping kick to the Stormcaller's stomach, sending her tumbling back several meters across the ice. She got to her feet unsteadily, clearly dazed by the force of the blow. Even stunned, though, her reflexes bordered on precognition. She twitched hard to the side, just as the gauss rifle fired again with a muffled bark, and the ice a meter behind her exploded up from the ground in a mess of shards. A helm, crowned with icy spikes, was forming around her face, and all I could see of her were those empty, furious eyes, and a mouth lined with fangs.

“Why are you doing this?!” I pleaded in my broken, halting Erin-Vulur, finally managing to get my gun free of its holster and powering up its own acceleration chamber with a telltale whine. “I didn’t come here to fight you! I didn’t come here to hurt anyone! Ask Volistad!”

The beginnings of a growl crackled in the Stormcaller’s throat, and she flicked her fingers, sending the black claws skittering away. A monstrous black great hammer emerged from the ice a moment later, rising towards her waiting hand with an ominous creaking sound. “Don’t,” she seethed her voice raw, riven with obvious grief and rage. “Don’t speak his name.” She began to advance, slowly, a slight limp in her step. I noticed that her armor was webbed with white, glowing cracks where I had kicked her. “You who killed him. You who killed my brother." She raised the hammer over her head, spitting out her words like they were poison darts. "Keep your peace, false god. You stand before Stormcaller Nissikul of the Erin-Vulur, chosen of Palamun! Die in silence!”

Several things happened at once. My storm wall tore itself apart, with a cascading blast of sound that more resembled the detonation of a thermobaric bomb than anything resembling thunder. Hundreds of people became visible around the perimeter of my camp, all of them yelling with battle-rage, already hurling black spears towards me and my tower. At the same time, a solid barrier of metal and ice shot up from the ground on a tide of fabricator nanites, surrounding me in a thick, egg-shaped pod. Nissikul's hammer fell, glowing like a meteor, and, instead of striking me, it glanced off of my shield construct and continued down into the ice, discharging its terrible energy into the glacier beneath our feet. I never knew if the reactor exploding was something Barbas did, or if something the enraged tribes people had unleashed to destroy me, had destabilized the fusion core in its cradle under the ground. Either way, the whole world shook beneath my feet, and for a moment, everything bounced several meters into the air. Then we all fell back down, and there was no longer hard ice waiting to receive us. I fell, the Terraforming Engine fell, Nissikul and several of the most enthusiastic of the Erin-Vulur fell, all of us plummeting into darkness and smashing into each other and huge boulders of tumbling ice.

I crashed into something hard, so hard that I almost passed out. I slid along a tilted slope of ice, and I couldn't even see where I was, much less control my momentum, especially not with everything I had been working to build for the past month crashing down around me in a rain of shattered metal. I rolled and ground my armored feet into the ice, scrabbling frantically for purchase, anything that could stop me sliding down into certain death. My feet slid out from under me, and I frantically dug my hands into the ice, clawing desperately as my legs slid over a sharp ledge. Cracks in a glacier can descend for miles. If you go down into that darkness, you will never come out, a voice in my mind told me, and I knew it to be true. I was going to die on this shithole moon after all. “BARBAS!!!” I screamed frantically, tears running down my face only to be sponged away by my suit’s automatic environment maintenance system. There was no answer from the AI, from my Qarin. I was alone, and I was going to die.

I lost my grip suddenly, without warning, as the ice beneath my fingers cracked and gave in. I fell into the darkness, and the abyss reached up to swallow me whole.