17th MARCH 7081, PLANET ONE, CAROLYN SYSTEM

Even with a suit full of warm air keeping her fur nice and toasty, Sorcha immediately felt the torrent of cold hit her as she traipsed out of the dropship with Nia. A howling wind battered her helmet and left her ears ringing. Up in the sky of this woebegone world, Carolyn M6's dim orb shimmered faintly. White and grey stretched out in all directions, the barest hint of topographical variety revealing itself through the icy gusts. Long-dead trees clawed hopelessly for a salvation that had never come.

Chesney had broken off ahead of them and gone to stand with Boland, and the two commenced looking miserable. Jillian was twiddling with her reprogrammed auto-mapper. "I've locked on to the energy source," she said over the suit link. "We'll find it. Nice job with this, Goodwin."

"No problem," Nia squeaked modestly.

Sorcha steered herself around Nia a little, keeping herself between Nia and Chesney. She shot the Goat a warning look, and the driller turned away to look out over the ice.

"Catterick, stay with the ship," Jillian was ordering Sylvester over the link. "Palmer, you all green out there?"

"Affirmative, Team Leader." Palmer's voice, sounding so saccharine and friendly that it could only have come from the mouth of a severely troubled individual, answered Jillian. "Area's secure. Planet's pretty dead from what we can see."

"Alright, we're heading out," Jillian replied. "We'll see you in a sec." She motioned to Sorcha and the others. "C'mon, you lot." The team moved out, leaving the dropship to vanish into the murk.

***

The heat inside Sorcha's suit quickly became room temperature as she trudged on through the wastes. If it got any colder, she'd be reliant on her fur. Visibility was terrible as well; luckily, Nia had programmed each helmet with a scanning system that formed an approximate wireframe of the terrain around each suit, showing slanted hills and ridges. Now and then it would fritz out as a strong gust smacked into the suit. Sorcha hoped it was reliable.

She peered up at Carolyn M6, trying not to reflect on the fact that she had landed slap in the middle of her nightmare. She glanced at a low, flat cliff nearby, trying not to see it as her local school; trying not to see a dead tree, poking out of what had once been soil, as one of the cherry blossoms that lined her street; trying not to see a large metallic cylinder as...

Wait, what?

Sorcha broke off from the group and hustled in the direction of the incongruous object, which was jutting out of a snow bank at the edge of the path. "What the hell is this...?" she wondered to herself.

A quick look at her suit's scans showed several other suits inbound fast, and Nia came up alongside her. "Sor, what are you...?" Nia asked, before obviously noticing what had brought Sorcha over here. "Woah."

Sorcha started forward and began brushing snow off of the object, revealing more of it. Wires, cantilevers, joints... Sorcha's confusion deepened as her scrabbling paws uncovered another large something. This one was flat, and its surface twinkled slightly in the faint light. What was left of its surface, at any rate.

"Is that...?" Nia chittered anxiously.

"A solar panel?" Sorcha breathed. "Looks like it, Ni-ni."

Jillian's voice entered the discussion. "It looks like a satellite to me."

Sorcha threw more snow off the solar panel. It was an odd design, certainly not Terran, but there was no mistaking it. This was a satellite.

Nia had joined in, burrowing into the snow with her paws like her biological ancestors. "I've found some writing!" she yapped.

Sorcha ceased in her efforts on the panel and joined her companion in staring at the satellite module. It was indeed stamped with text, but it was written in an angular, geometric script, with one huge letter – or number, it was hard to tell – standing out from the main body. It looked like a large, wide-based triangle standing on its lower corner, with several smaller triangles and a line of three squares set into it. The rest of the cylinder disappeared into the ground; this satellite had obviously impacted here.

Sorcha stepped back from the satellite wreckage, her head spinning.

"That's it," Chesney declared. "I'm going back to the dropship."

"Me too," Boland grumbled. "I ain't stepping on some alien landmine."

"It's completely dead," Nia said, obviously having examined the satellite with her suit scanner. "I wouldn't imagine anything else here would be live. I mean, the sun went out millions of years ago, right? Anything else here would have to be that old, or older."

"The OSA's Archaeology Division will have to take a look at this," Jillian remarked. "Since it's kaput, it's not our concern. Let's keep moving." She turned away and walked off.

Nia stood up, glancing at Sorcha. "We'd better go."

Sorcha nodded and took one last look at the satellite, half-expecting a telltale to blink on, but its steely casing stared blankly back at her. She finally turned away.

The path to the source of the mysterious disturbance took the team up the side of a lightly sloping hill. It was slippery, and after tripping over on it once, Sorcha could see that it was comprised of ice under a dusting of snow. The soles of her boots kept her fairly level after she resolved to be little more careful.

She hadn't reckoned with the wind, though; it became ferocious as the team traipsed up the hill, and Nia lost her footing, tumbling over backwards with a startled yelp. Sorcha reflexively reached out to grab her, catching her by the boot. Her descent slowed, Nia ground to a stop. She grizzled and stood up, scraping more snow off the ice. "You okay, Nia?" Sorcha called to her. "Just had to stop and make a snow angel."

Nia snorted. "Yeah, well..." Her eyes widened as she looked down at the ice beneath her feet. "Uh, Sor, I don't think this is ice."

"Why not?" Sorcha asked.

At least, that was what she meant to ask, but as Sorcha realized what Nia was talking about, the 'not' part trailed off halfway. She stooped and lowered a paw to the ice – no, not ice.

"Glass," Nia whispered. "It's glass."

Sorcha pressed her faceplate to the smooth surface of this glass and peered through it.

What she saw next turned her brain into a pretzel.

"I can see some kind of walkway!" Nia squealed. "Look, at the edge. It goes in a big circle – oh, my."

Sorcha gaped as she looked down. Far down. Down below, there was indeed some kind of platform running around the inside of what looked like an enormous cylindrical shaft. "I think we're on top of a... sort of... of dome."

"Ow!" Chesney bleated as she tripped over on something higher up the hill – or dome. "What the..."

Boland dusted snow off of what had got in her way. "It's a big strip of metal," he cried.

Jillian was working on her own patch nearby. She squinted through the glass. "Woah. There's something huge in the middle. Like a big crystal or sculpture or something."

Sorcha cleared more snow. She could see more of the walkway; what looked like banners or tapestries dangled from it at regular intervals. "We have to get inside. This place could be housing the source of that electrical thing."

"It would get us out of the wind," Jillian woofed. She turned to Chesney and Boland. "I need you two over here."

Nia and Sorcha cleared enough snow to discover that the dome was comprised of individual panes in a massive metal frame, and so one of those panes was designated as the team's entry point. Chesney and Boland brought their drills up, demolishing the section of glass. Shards of it plummeted into the gloom.

"Safety lines out," Jillian ordered, unspooling a length of veritium cord from the pack on her suit belt. She turned to the suited security guards, who had remained silent up to now. "Palmer, your team goes first. Get to the walkway and tell us if you see anything."

"Aye," the Timber Wolf grunted, her scar stark against her light grey fur. She clamped the end of her safety line to the metal frame and dropped through the hole. Joel, Travis and Blason went after her.

Minutes later, they gave the all-clear, and Sorcha was clamping her own line to the alien metal. "Tally-ho." She stepped off the edge of the hole and then she was falling, ready to engage her suit's repulsors for a soft landing.

It was after several seconds of falling that she jerked rather unceremoniously to a halt. She yelped indignantly and scrabbled with her line reel. "I think my line's jammed!" she groused.

"Hold on, I'm coming down," Nia called to her. "Hold on, Sor. I'll fix it."

Sorcha growled and flailed like a worm on a hook. "This isn't comfortable." She looked up to see Nia descending on her own rope. "Right, Ni-ni, I have no idea what happened, it just..."

There was a sudden, soft clank. It went unnoticed by Sorcha until she began falling again, and it was only then did she notice that the reel in her suit's belt was no longer there. Her head swam as terror engulfed her. She cried out as she went past the walkway, past the guards' grasping paws as they tried to catch her, and into the darkness far below.