I woke up in complete darkness; the only thing I could see was the flashing red indicator on my Heads Up Display. It took me a moment to focus on the flashing holographic marker. My head hurt like someone had hit me with a sledgehammer, and my body felt leaden, drained of strength. I squinted and forced the letters into sharp clarity with more effort than the act should have required. Did I have a concussion or something? Could I even get a concussion? Cybernetics or not, that was a question for another time. The message on my HUD. That’s what was important. I focused again. “WARNING”, it said. “ENVIRONMENTAL ENVELOPE BREACHED.” Through my muddled confusion, I felt my blood run cold. The ‘environment envelope’ was the layer of hermetic sealing underneath the plates of my armor. It kept me isolated from the murderous environment of Chalice, and if it had been breached, I could be exposed to poisonous air, virulent microbes, or worse. I lay there in the dark for a panicked moment, trying to determine if I felt sick. It occurred to me that my suit’s oxygen cycling system was probably still working fine, so poisonous air would only really be a problem if it could kill me through my skin. I was more or less breathing directly from my power armor’s enclosed tanks of air, and those were evidently fine. Microbes, on the other hand… the surface of Chalice was so cold that there were no terrestrial species I could introduce to the environment. I had brought samples, and they had had to stay where they were in the tower. You could practically cryogenically freeze someone in this environment. I had a hard time believing any microbe could exist. Though, as I thought about it, Volistad and the Erin-Vulur lived here, and they were carnivores. Carnivores required a complete ecosystem and a full food chain to survive, and that suggested a livable biome somewhere on this frozen rock. So microbes could be a threat...

Eventually, as my head cleared, I realized that lying there contemplating the possible existence of microbes was as likely to end in my death as any alien pathogen or parasite, so I got up. Well, I tried. My legs were pinned under something heavy- something I wasn’t able to squirm out from under. Besides some soreness, I didn’t feel like I had been hurt. My armor, even if it had somehow been punctured, was still very difficult to destroy, and there was a good chance that even if I was trapped, I wasn’t badly injured. I wriggled my fingers, and they responded. So did my toes. Okay, so I didn’t think I was paralyzed. I was just trapped, and I couldn’t see a thing. I tried to move my arms, and found them mostly free- though several things seemed to have fallen on top of me, and I had to sweep them aside blindly. Once my arms were free, I fumbled for one of the switches hidden behind a panel on the inside of my bracer. I flicked it, and my headlamp burst to life, so bright at first that I had to squint against the glare. I looked around and got my bearings.

My legs were pinned by a sizeable boulder of ice. The heavy chunk hadn’t crushed my legs because it had been partially caught by a twisted metal spar- probably a piece of my tower, my Terraforming Engine. I remembered then what had happened, and my heart immediately started to beat faster as a jolt of adrenaline shot through me in reaction to those memories. I remembered the Stormcaller, monstrous in her grief and fury, bringing down that crackling black hammer. I remembered the blast as the fusion core beneath the ice detonated, shattering the ground beneath my feet and sending everything falling into the darkness. I remembered screaming for Barbas and getting no answer. I called his name then, heedless of who or what else might be listening, screaming it into the dark. “BARBAS!” No one answered me except for the echoes of my own voice.

I was alone. I was truly alone. No one was coming to help me. I was trapped God-knows-how deep beneath a glacier on a shitty moon in the back-ass corner of nowhere, in a leaking suit of damaged armor. I didn’t even have my imaginary friend to keep me company until I inevitably froze to death. I was going to die here, a complete failure, and in ten years, those colonists following in my wake, were going to die. They would die cursing my name, and I would deserve it. I fumbled about at my waist and found the butt of the gauss pistol where I had left it. I gripped it tight in my armored hand and caressed the trigger with my finger. I thought about it then, how easy it would be to be done with all this. I had barely been on this planet a month, and already everything had gone sideway. What had the Foundation been thinking, sending us out like this? Pan-America’s finest? I laughed. We were the bottom of the barrel, and they knew it. They sent us out like this because it didn’t matter if we died. And it would be the same with those colonists. They would be the poor, the war refugees, the extra mouths to feed. “Just get in this cryo-pod,” they would say. “There will be a new life on this new world.” And then no one would think twice when all of those thousands of people died. “Acceptable casualties”, they would say. “The price for stepping into the future,” they would say, and they would call us heroes. They would call us pioneers. And they would forget most of our names. The gun felt so light in my hand. It would be so easy. The barrel clicked against the quartz of my faceplate. It would go through, wouldn’t it? Would it really be that easy?

The rage hit me all at once, like a shot of adrenaline right in the center of my chest. It boiled out of the dark places inside me, crawling through the cracks in the mask of bored acceptance I had worn for so many years. I had been quiet for so long. I had gone the way they had wanted for so long. I had been who they wanted me to for so long; since that day, since the first time I had ever held a gun. I had buried it, the anger, the loss, all the fire that had kept me alive through the dark times. That kind of thing wasn’t suitable for the civilized world. That practically feral little girl didn’t fit in the new, sanitized, reconstructed, hopeful tomorrow that El Presidente was making. I didn’t make it through the war by being soft. I didn’t crawl out of the nuclear wreckage of my home and make it through all those years by being a ‘lady’, whatever that meant anyways. I had been who the state wanted, but they weren’t here anymore. I was completely alone, and though I might have made myself forget it, I was better this way. Stronger this way. Tigers didn’t live in packs.

Galvanized by the fury coursing through my muscles, I dropped the gun at my side and sat up, shedding scraps of rubble and chunks of ice that had been piled on my armored chest. Though my trapped position robbed my fists of the full power I might have put into the blows, I used the substantially augmented strength of my armor and slammed steel-clad knuckles into the boulder that trapped my legs. The blows did nothing at first. That much ice had quite a bit of mass, and strength to match. But ice was always somewhat brittle, and there were cracks somewhere. I just had to hit it and keep doing it until I won. I pounded the ice over and over, keeping my rhythm even as my muscles started to burn; each blow drove straight forward like a hammer, each strike like the repeating action of a jackhammer. I did this for a quarter of an hour before I heard the first crack. Another quarter-hour and the crack was wide enough for me to wriggle my armored fingers into. I stopped my metronomic assault and forced both hands into the little space I had opened. I strained my already burning shoulders and I began to tear it open wider. It didn’t want to give in, I wasn’t stopping, and I had the enhanced strength of my armor on my side. I forced that crack wider, and wider, until the ice started giving off sounds like a firecracker. I screamed and pushed as hard as I could, and without warning, the boulder let out a violent BANG and came apart, splitting neatly into two jagged pieces. No longer balanced in its place atop my legs, the two halves of the massive chunk of ice shifted, and I was able to pull one of my legs free with a screech of grinding metal. With one leg free, getting the other one out was a simpler effort, and within a few minutes, I was standing in a low cavern, peering about at the wreckage around me for somewhere I could start putting things back together.

I bent and picked up the gun from where I had dropped it, and I shook my head. I couldn’t believe I was about to… I shook the thought from my brain and holstered the weapon quickly, letting go of the grips like I had been holding onto the tail of a venomous snake. It was time for me to figure out where I could go from here. Like it or not, I still had a mission on this hateful planet, and it wasn’t getting done while I just sat in the darkness feeling sorry for myself.

I picked through the wreckage, shifting aside chunks of ice. The real trick of things would be to find my Fabricator. That piece of equipment had been designed to survive anything short of a direct shot from a Pan-American gunship, and even that might only crack the case. If I could find the rugged little box, I could start again. I didn’t know what had happened to Barbas, but I didn’t think he would be there when I got into that damned Bullet back in terrestrial orbit. I knew what I needed to do, was to rebuild my Terraformer Engine, though the trick with the storm generator Barbas had rigged up, might be a little beyond me. I would have to start small, this time thinking about defenses, about concealment. Maybe I could start here, below the ice.

I ran a self-diagnostic on my suit, along with a medical scan. The suit was mostly fine. The breach my HUD had warned me about was an inch-long puncture in the durable Environmental Envelope, most likely by a chunk of ice or a shard of metal during my fall into the glacier. The suit was using negative pressure to keep the outside atmosphere at bay, but I was leaking my suit’s excess nitrogen doing so, and before long, I wouldn’t have any. If I had the Fabricator, I could both patch my suit and replenish my nitrogen supply from the surrounding atmosphere. Barbas hadn’t said much about the air on Chalice, mainly because breathable or not, it was cold enough to turn my lungs into popsicles. I had read a chemical breakdown at some point in those few weeks while working on the tower, but I had let the AI handle most of the technical details, assuming he would be around to help me for the next decade. Rookie mistake, that had been, relying on someone else. Joanna Angeles, ward of the state, might have needed other people, but who I had been before I had been given that name… well, that bedraggled, vicious little cub had grown up, and the tigress needed no one. I had to remember that.

I picked my way through the wreckage, finding almost nothing of value. My suit’s diagnostic told me that the nutrient stores in my suit’s tanks were still fairly full, and I wouldn’t run out of synthetic sustenance for quite some time. It would be a little bit of a strain, not having the wonderful dream-meals that Barbas constructed, but the truth was, I hadn’t actually physically eaten since I had left the Earth. The suit handled all of that, very efficiently, and I was happy to say those systems were still working fine. Even as those thoughts crossed my mind, I felt the subtle pulse of cool relief spread from a place in my neck down through my body, as my armor injected a burst of saline solution into my big veins. I was going to be fine. I was going to survive, and, if need be, I would deal with the natives. I had tried being nice. I had tried diplomacy. But they had killed the messenger, and then they had tried to kill me. The tigress didn’t do diplomacy much, either. Maybe I should have been the one born with fucking fangs.

I looked up, shining my headlamp at the way I had fallen, trying to determine if climbing back up was a possibility. It didn’t look like it was. The cavern I was standing in was actually more of a narrow, pipe-like crevasse, extending nearly straight up into the darkness. Blocking most of the upper limits of that twisting, uneven shaft was a truly massive piece of glacial ice. I was incredibly lucky it had wedged where it did. If that had landed on me, I would never have gotten out from under it. I would have been ground into paste, armor or not, and no one would ever have found my body. I wondered how far down I had really gone. My suit’s communication network wasn’t picking up signals from any of my equipment, but that could be for a couple of different reasons. Either I was so far down that nothing was reachable, or everything I had built had fallen and smashed into pieces. Neither scenario would help me much. I needed another way out.

I spent the next half an hour examining the little cavern, searching the walls for any signs of weakness, any inkling that there was a way out of this pit. I didn’t find anything on the first pass, but when I activated my suit’s sonar array and started pinging the walls at random intervals, an exit presented itself. One wall was reading as covering a hollow place. Hopefully, it wasn’t just another small cavern with no exits. Taking a deep breath, I set myself and then, yelling like some kind of Kung Fu fighter in a movie, I drove my shoulder against the ice. This time, with the full weight of my armor and the full leverage of my augmented legs and abs, I smashed straight through the ice, sending shards flying everywhere.

I stood in a crooked, downward sloping passage, leading down into unknown darkness. Likely it was little more than a random crack in the ice, or a tunnel bored by one of this moon’s strange, sub-surface creatures. It was a strange thing, standing inside a glacier and knowing that somehow, against all terrestrial logic, there was life all around her. How did it all survive? How did it get here? Before I could get caught up in the ‘deep questions’, I sighed and trudged into the darkness. There was only going to be one way out of this mess, and that meant moving forward. Even if the way forward was also the way down.