The storm falls as we climb along a rocky arm of the mountain. Soon we can see nothing beyond our party. Steel-gray snow gnaws into us. Blotting out the sky, the ice, the mountains inland. We duck our heads, squinting through the sealSkin balaclavas. Boots scrape the ice underfoot. Wind roars loud as a waterfall. I hunch against it, putting one boot after the other, connected with Mustang and Holiday by rope in the Obsidian way so we don’t lose one another in the blizzard. Ragnar scouts ahead. How he finds his way is beyond me.
He returns now, loping over the rocks with ease. He signals for us to follow.
Easier said than done. Our world is small and furious. Mountains lurk in the white. Their hulking shoulders the only shelter from the wind. We scramble over bitter black rock that slices at our gloves while the wind tries to hurl us down gulches and bottomless crevasses. The exertion keeps us alive. Neither Holiday nor Mustang slow, and after more than an hour of dreadful travel, Ragnar guides us into a mountain pass and the storm breathes. Beneath us, impaled upon a ridgeline, is the ship that shot us from the sky.
I feel a pang of sympathy for her. Sharklike lines and flared starburst tail indicate she was once a long, sleek racing vessel of the famed Ganymede shipyards. Painted proud and bold in crimson and silver by loving hands. Now she’s a cracked, blackened corpse impaled upside down on a stark ridgeline. Cassius, or whoever was inside, had a nasty time of it. The rear third of the ship sheaved off half a kilometer downhill from the main body. Both parts look deserted. Holiday scans the wreck with her rifle’s scope. No sign of life or movement outside.
“Something seems off,” Mustang says, crouched beside me. Her father’s visage watches me from the razor on her arm.
“The wind is against us,” Ragnar says. “I smell nothing.” His black eyes scan the peaks of the mountains around us, going rock to rock, looking for danger.
“We can’t risk getting pinned down by rifles,” I say, feeling the wind pick up again behind us. “We need to close the distance fastlike. Holiday, you lay cover.” Holiday digs a small trench in the snow and covers herself with the thermal blanket. We cover that with snow so only her rifle’s peeking out. Then Ragnar slips down the slope to investigate the rear half of the ship as Mustang and I press for the main wreck.
Mustang and I slink low over rocks, covered by the renewed vigor of the storm, unable to see the ship till we’re within fifteen meters. We close the rest of the distance on our bellies and find a jagged hole in the aft where the back half of the fuselage was shredded by Ragnar’s missile. Part of me expected a camp of warColors and Golds preparing to hunt us down. Instead, the ship’s an epileptic corpse, power flickering on and off. Inside, the ship is hollow and cavernous and almost too dark to see when the lights crackle off. Something drips in the darkness as we work our way toward the middle of the craft. I smell the blood before I see it. In the passenger compartment, nearly a dozen Grays lie dead, smashed into the floor above us by the rocks that speared the ship as it landed. Mustang kneels next to the body of a mangled Gray to examine his clothing.
There’s no sign of any life as we move forward, let alone Cassius. Just the wind moaning through the bones of the vessel. A strange feeling of vertigo walking along the ceiling and looking up at the floor. Seats and belt buckles hanging down like intestines. The ship convulses back to life, illuminating a sea of broken datapads and dishes and gum packages underfoot. Sewage leaks from a crack in the metal wall. The ship dies again. Mustang taps my arm and points out a shattered bulkhead window to what looks like drag marks in the snow. Smeared blood black in the dim light. She signs to me. Bear? I nod. A razorback must have found the wreckage and begun feasting on the corpses of the diplomatic mission. I shudder, thinking of noble Cassius suffering that fate.
