The Ship of the Unforgotten

Chapter 23

Chapter 23

Biome Bay 4 - Sub-Arctic Tundra

UTS Rose Dawn

Jun. X, 2565 A.C.E.

When Lt. Cobb awoke next, he was stiff as a frozen rag, and quickly found that that was a reasonably accurate description of him. He was lying face down in what looked like a cave; he had no memory of finding it, or of anything that had occurred during the night save for a long nightmare of cold and snow and darkness. He lay there a while, disoriented and confused, and then the memory of the explosives flashed into his mind. With a groan, he forced himself to his knees. Right. He was going to teach them a lesson … whoever they were. Them. The other survivors, who had driven him to this hellish place. Of course. It was their fault he was in this position, frozen and half-dead. It would’ve been better if they’d just left him fully frozen in the first place, instead of driving him to this half measure.

He hung his head and just breathed a moment. It sounded like he was breathing twice as fast as he was, and it took him a moment to realize why—he was not alone in the cave. He turned his head slowly to see the mountain of white fur further back in the cave. His eyes widened in sudden fear; he couldn’t move fast enough to get away. But it didn’t move either, except for the steady rise and fall of its flanks as it breathed. He locked his mouth shut, making himself breathe slowly and shallowly.

Moving as quickly as he dared, he slowly crawled toward the mouth of the cave, where he was relieved to see that the snow had stopped and light had returned to the shockingly white landscape. As soon as he was outside of the cave mouth, he got to his feet and ran as hard and fast as he could away.

There was no way for him to judge where he’d entered the cave from; the snow had continued long enough to cover over the tracks he must have left. He quickly recognized the direction he’d been traveling in from the position of the artificial sun in the “sky” and, orienting himself to that, he moved on.

Frustration started to mount. The armories weren’t that far from the entrances; he must have missed what he was looking for somehow. Yet another misfortune that would never have come his way had it not been for … Chambers, that was it. Chambers, and the cold one, Jackson. He half-snarled, half-chuckled at that. He was the cold one now. And not to forget the coward, and the robot, Rose. They were all in league with … what was it that Pixton girl had said? A hijacking AI? He couldn’t see any reason Pixton couldn’t have set up an AI, so sure, whatever they wanted to call it.

A sudden rushing sensation broke him from his idle thoughts just in time see the steep drop-off he’d walked from before he crashed to the bottom of it in a tangle of hard, woody brush. All thought was washed from his mind by a bright splash of pain and heat in his leg. A deep gash cut down his calf, splashing bright red blood in the snow and sending waves of pain up his leg and through his body. He gritted his teeth and bit back a cry of rage. “You’re not going to stop me this easily,” he ground out between gritted teeth once the initial shock had worn off. He’d fallen almost three meters; he wasn’t going to get back up there the way he’d come down. When he turned to examine the embankment he’d fallen off of, he gasped with relief; there was a door there! It was one of the heavy latching doors that indicated a cryo-bay, not an armory, but just then he didn’t care one whit which it was. The cryo-bay would have clothes and food and medication, and he cared about that more than the explosives, at least for the moment.

He painfully dragged himself up and leaned into the lever, opening the bay door, all but collapsing inside once he had it open far enough. It was strange how the air inside, the same temperature as the bay he’d woken up in originally, felt so very warm now. Back when Rose had rescued him, he’d have sworn it was as cold in there as the winterscape he’d just left.