I proceeded like that for what seemed like days, but what might only have been a couple hours. Passages wound about through the ice, sometimes crossing each other, sometimes coming to a dead end. I would climb what seemed like dozens of meters, only to find myself struggling down a shaft so steep it was practically vertical. Twice I found little pocket caverns like the one I had fallen into, and I searched what wreckage had gathered there. I found only twisted scrap and shattered ice, the remains of a month’s hard work. Once, I even found a crumpled, ice-white humanoid body, battered into a pulp. I couldn’t tell if it was the Stormwalker or someone else. Hell, I couldn’t tell if the corpse had been male or female, it had been so thoroughly destroyed. I passed it by and continued my search of the cavern, and then, finding nothing, I moved on. Time passed by and I grew more and more tired as the nitrogen balance in my suit dropped lower and lower. The despair I had felt trapped beneath the chunk of ice began to trickle back into my chest as the old familiar anger that had saved me, began to gutter and flicker with inaction. I had just begun to think I was going to die again when I saw it. In a narrow hole, a ‘room’ barely wider than the passage I was following, there sat the Fabricator, wedged at an angle into the frozen floor, practically framed in a shaft of dim light.

I dashed forward and seized the hefty little machine, checking it over for damage as if I was a child that had just tripped and fallen to the floor. It was blessedly intact, barely even scratched, and for a moment I just stood there, cradling it to my chest and wondering what the hell they had made the little indestructible box out of. The machine’s internal power source was still good, and as soon as I touched it, my wireless network finished negotiating its formidable firewall and connected. The machine immediately began chattering loudly, little slots opening up in its impervious shell and spewing forth a cloud of nanites like strangely animate wisps of black smoke. I followed the path of the nanite cloud with my eyes, watching them rise up toward the wreckage, trapped in a crush of ice shards in the ceiling. This had apparently been a crevasse like the one I had fallen into, and a similar situation had occurred here.

Part of a standing work lamp jutted from the ceiling, one of its bulbs miraculously intact. There must still have been some charge on its capacitors because it was giving off an inconsistent, crackling blue light- the shaft of illumination I had seen when I first spotted the blessed Fabricator. The nanites swirled across the wreckage, and some of the metal and plastic dissolved where they touched. Then they shot back towards me and began to whirl and circle about my armor, erasing scratches and tears in the metal, patching the hole in my hermetic seals in a bare instant. A moment later, the buzzing and chattering sounds stopped, and my suit’s monitors told me that once more I was completely protected from the atmosphere of Chalice. I smiled grimly. At least something was going right in this whole mess. With the Fabricator, I could do almost anything. Sure, I would have to program it myself since Barbas was somehow missing, but I could do that. I knew how. The tigress didn’t need anyone.

I reached over one shoulder and slid the Fabricator into place, feeling a groove open in the little box just large enough to fit the retaining pins jutting from my suit for such a purpose. With a click, the device secured itself to my armor, and I was ready for what came next. I could do this. I could absolutely survive whatever Chalice threw at me. I was ready, and I was going to teach that frozen, shitty moon who the boss was here. A loud rattling, clicking sound from behind me startled me out of my self-congratulation and I whirled quickly, my hand falling to the butt of my gun.

Filling the passage I had just come from, there was something that seemed to have come out of a nightmare. It was hideous and segmented, plated with glossy black chitin that seemed to glisten in a manner that seemed… unclean somehow. Its head was that of an ant, though it had entirely too many mandibles where its mouth was. I couldn’t really see much of its body past its first segment, but even the little I saw was large and insectoid, armored in chitin, and possessed too many legs. “Hi,” I said weakly. “You must be a burug.” Volistad had told me about them. Barbas had shot one of the big ones with the Tower’s gun, but I hadn’t been able to go see the body.

According to Volistad, they were Chalice’s consummate predators, strange insects that tunneled through solid ice with disturbing ease, feasting on whatever kinds of life existed deep within the ice. This one seemed ready to feast on me. My armor, apparently, meant little to its ravenous insectoid brain. It made that clicking sound again, and I watched its mandibles ripple and twitch as its wide jaws worked, dribbling greenish fluid onto the ice beneath it. The viscous drool smoked and sizzled away into vapor, and when it was gone, the ice was pitted and scarred, as if it were flesh scarred by acid. I opened my mouth to curse, but the burug suddenly shot forward, propelled by its many legs, gnashing its jaws in anticipation.

I didn’t even think about it. I turned on my boot heel and ran, scrambling for the passage on the other side of the room, down into further unknown and darkness. I couldn’t fight something like that, not in quarters like this. My choices were run or die. It seemed that Chalice wasn’t done trying to kill me. But I wasn’t finished either. I was going to give that damned creature and its stupid moon a run for its money. I put up my hands to protect myself from whatever I might run into in the dark and sprinted. Damn whoever decided to send me here, I thought. Damn them directly to hell.