Chapter Three: Through the Looking Glass

Around the side of the lake, four twilighters huddled inside the dismembered fuselage of the v-lander. A cold dread grew amongst them; they felt unlucky to be alive. Their two friends lay dead in the cockpit, another suffered a fractured arm, and all attempts to contact their airship, high above the storm, had failed. Jakob and Jenny were helping Felix into a sling while Tanner wrestled with his link headset.

“Any luck at all?” Jakob asked.

“It’s not working,” Tanner concentrated to steady his voice.

“What? Why not? It… it’s supposed to work!” Jenny moaned.

Tanner shook his head, taking off his headset. “I don’t know. Maybe the relays all got fried when we got hit by lighting, or something.”

“They were shielded for that,” Felix pointed out between clenched teeth.

“Maybe there was power surge during the crash or something.” Tanner dropped into a seat and let the dead link fall beside him. Jakob looked around, feeling helpless. The cabin itself had remained intact, but the cockpit was smashed and all the communication links were inoperable. They managed to pry the hatch to the cargo area open, and discovered that the tail of the aircraft had been torn open. More than half of their survival gear was strewn down the rutted debris path that stretched back into the stormy darkness. The storm. How long will it last? The erratic weather patterns on night side were one of the reasons all the colonies and outposts there had been abandoned. The wind howled outside and seemed to penetrate the metal corpse of the v-lander.

“OK,” Jenny drew in a breath to brace herself, “I know we discussed a lot of possible emergencies when we started this trip, but tell me again, what our current… situation is…”

Jakob opened up his pad, which of course had no GPS or satellite uplink, and scrolled open the map, “Well, we were about 2600 kilometers off from our approved flight plan when we were struck by lightning, and we weren’t due back in Novgorad for another 160 hours. As far as we know, the airship is still on autopilot in a holding pattern above the storm, so that should be easy enough for a rescue party to find. But there’s no way for them to know exactly where the v-lander is. Hell, we don’t even know exactly where we are.”

“Except that we’re in the Kerguelen basin,” Tanner added, “which means without being able to relay a message to our airship, we’ve got no way to call for help.”

They numbly took stock of the gear and supplies they could get to within the cabin, and then went to work on what they could salvage from the cargo area. They managed to scrounge some cold weather gear, one tent with broken poles, and a heater. There was food and water, but not enough for more than two periods, 80 hours, at a stretch. Sealing themselves back inside the cabin, they tried to eat, and tried to sleep.

Though restless at first, they finally settled into the complete darkness of exhaustion. Swallowed into the dreamlessness that only an ordeal of mortal terror can give you. A few hours later, or maybe it was a dozen, banging on the hull wrenched them awake. They stared around for a few moments, numb and uncomprehending at first. Then Jakob realized he was hearing a voice.

Muffled by the hull and the wind outside, it came through, “..ello? ello?” Is anyone in there?”

“I…” Jakob’s voice cracked, too softly to be heard. “Hallo! We’re hear!” he finally managed.

They stirred and struggled. Jakob and Tanner started moving up the slanted deck toward the outer hatch. Felix made no sound as he woke, but clutched his arm and closed his eyes against more pain.

“Can a rescue party be here already? How long were we asleep?” Tanner asked, unbelieving.

“I don’t know, I guess they must be,” Jakob replied.

They had started to struggle with the hatch, when they heard the voice from outside again:

“We have you surrounded and we are armed. Open the hatch slowly and keep your hands out where I can see them.”

Jakob and Tanner looked at each other in disbelief.

“I don’t think that’s a rescue party,” said Jakob.

Tanner shook his head, “Did you notice that accent? What is that?”

Jakob raised his voice to the outsider, “We aren’t armed! We just crashed here! We have an injured man inside!” He waited, but heard no reply. “We’re going to open the hatch now!”

The two men heaved aside the hatch as slowly as they could, trying to raise their hands as they did so. They peered out into the night with unaccustomed eyes, trying to pick the stranger out of the lightly falling snow. The light from the cabin fell short of whomever stood out in the darkness. Caliban was rising behind the clouds, giving glimpses of its pale blue glow, but they squinted aimlessly into the dark landscape.

“How many of you are there?” the voice out the dark asked.

“There are si… four. There are four of us. There were six, but two of our friends were killed in the crash. Are you the rescue party?”

“You’re Twilighters?”

“What?” they gaped, looked at each other, and then back to the shape, slowly resolving out of the snow and darkness. There was a riffle barrel pointed at them.

“You’re from the Twilight Rim, correct? What are you doing here?” she asked. A strange female figure stepped out of the gloom and into small glow cast by the cabin lights, with a long hunting riffle pointed at them. She was wearing a long oiled leather coat, edged out in white fur, and a strange mask with eye-pieces that looked like a cross between a gas mask, and an Egyptian death mask. There were two huge shapes moving behind her, giant wolves moving silently through the snow.

“I asked what you’re doing here,” she repeated.

“We came,” Tanner stuttered in the cold, “to see the Terra-forming ruins… and the light of Caliban.” It sounded ridiculous under the circumstances, though it had once seemed like a romantic idea. They felt foolish under the gaze of that rifle, and the monstrous wolves.

The strange woman nodded her head toward the pale blue glow in the thinning clouds, without taking her eyes from them. “There it is.” She watched the two men with a cold stare. To her eyes, they were poorly dressed for the weather in their odd-looking parkas. Their pants and boots were far too slight to be effective. The taller, lankier one had pointed features, and grizzled black hair. The slightly shorter one had blonde hair and bright green eyes. Both of them had smooth, hairless faces. Even their necks, peeking through their half open parkas, were smooth. The woman blinked away her distraction at the strange sight.

They stood in uncomfortable silence, until another voice, deep and gravelly erupted beside the two shivering men. “I smell fear. Confusion.” Another huge wolf had circled around the wrecked vertical lander, to approach them from behind. They gasped and fell back toward the open hatch, hands still raised. “I do not think they lie,” the huge wolf said, “Easy to kill if they are.”

“What, wha… Did that wolf just talk?!” Tanner exclaimed.

The woman lowered the riffle and glanced toward the talking wolf, “Otters?” she asked the wolf simply.

“Not yet. Soon. Storm is lifting.”

The two men standing in the hatchway stared round-eyed at the talking animal.

“You’ve never seen a talking dog before?” the woman asked. The wolf simply stared at them. It was huge, almost shoulder height, and grizzled white. There was something about the shape of the face, a shorter snout, the set of the eyes and forehead. It was unlike any dog or wolf they had ever seen, in or out of wildlife preserves, books, vids, or imagination.

“Seen one!?” Jakob said. “No one’s seen one for hundreds of years! I thought they were extinct.” Jakob’s mind reeled. He’d read about talking pets in early colonial histories, but such biological oddities had been outlawed centuries ago. No one had seen one, to his knowledge, in all that time either. Or so he’d thought.

“Extinct. Not funny,” graveled the wolf.

Jenny’s voice came weakened by fear from the hatchway, “Guys? What’s going on? Felix is in a lot of pain. He needs help.”

The strange woman cocked her head at the new face in the hatchway. Jenny was hugging a parka around her small frame, her short red hair fluttering out the edges of the hood, and her pale features were bewildered and pinked by the cold. The armed woman didn’t seem to regard her as a threat. Her rifle barrel didn’t leave the two men.

“Who is that?” Jenny barked, catching sight of the stranger. “Are you with the rescue party?”

The woman said nothing. She just stared at them, examining them.

“Human as you,” the wolf said to his human companion. “Every bit.”

“I am the rescue party,” the woman said as she shouldered her rifle and strode up to the hatch.

Inside, she pulled off the mask, revealing long brown wavy hair, fair skin, and full lips. The four survivors gapped at her, not knowing what to make of her, fearful of the huge wolves that waited just outside.

“Your injured companion,” the woman said, “how bad is he? Can he walk?”

“Um, yeah, I think he can walk.” Jenny said. “His arm is broken. I’m not sure how bad it is.”

The stranger looked him over. Felix had dark skin, and shoulder-length dark hair, he looked reasonably well built, and otherwise healthy. He reclined in one of the vertical lander’s seats, clutching an arm in a field dressed sling.

“Hi,” Felix said weakly, looking her over. “That’s gotta be the strangest EMT getup I’ve ever seen.”

Jakob was relieved to hear that Felix’s sense of humor was still intact, but the newcomer ignored the comment.

“I need you to stand and walk,” she said. “We need to get weather gear on him, and the rest of you. Do you have anything better than those parkas? How about leggings?”

“Um, yeah,” said Tanner, moving over to their hastily gathered pile of supplies.

“We need to move quickly,” she said.

“Wait, I don’t understand,” Jakob looked at her suddenly. “You can’t be here to rescue us. We didn’t send out any distress signals, and we aren’t due back to Novgorad for another 4 periods. Were you already here?”

“You’ll have more time for questions later,” the woman said, helping Felix to his feet. “Right now, we need to get you away from here. The crash site won’t be safe once the storm lifts.”

“I don’t understand,” Jenny broke in, “What’s the danger?”

“Where will you be taking us? And who are you?” Tanner asked, and questions started to erupt from all of them.

“You don’t have time for all these questions,” the woman said forcefully. “The Imperial Guard has a patrol in this area, and they’ll kill Twilighters on sight, no questions asked. You have to get yourselves together and get out that door if you want me to get you out of here. I won’t wait around for the Harii myself.”

“Imperial guards? What Imperial guards?” they asked, looking at each other. Imperial guards. Empire, Jakob thought to himself, words out of ancient Earth. There weren’t any Empires on Twilight. But there weren’t supposed to be any more talking animals either.

“There is a cave, a little over a kilometer from here,” The stranger said. “I’ll explain everything to you there.”

“Talking wolves, strange Eskimo women, and murderous imperial guards,” Felix laughed a little. “Either we somehow ended up on another planet, or we’re dead.”

Outside, they strapped Felix onto the woman’s dog sled. The four bewildered Twilighters watched in awe as the huge talking wolves strapped themselves into the harnesses. Their strange hands looked like oddly distorted paws with short, padded fingers, a longish palm, and a long thin thumb. Once they returned to all-fours, the thumb barely touched the ground, and the fingers curled up to look like ordinary paws.

It unnerved the Twilighters, watching the strange wolf-like creatures at the work. But the dark alien landscape around them offered no more comforting a view. The dark blue sky was nearly obscured by black clouds, allowing only glimpses of the pale glow of Caliban. The clouds spread their shadows over the dimly illuminated landscape, leaving more myseries than vistas. The lightly falling snow made a haze of things, all the more frightening for being hard to see. There were outcroppings covered in strange, bush-like growths with thick stubby tubular branches. They were chalky white, or maybe just covered in snow and ice. Under the right circumstances, the sight might have filled them all with wonder. But now it seemed hostile, a living thing waiting to consume them.

As the stranger and her dogs led them away from their wrecked aircraft, Jakob had a sinking feeling, like the ground would come loose beneath his feet any moment, and he would be left freewheeling in cold space. They traveled downhill and a sulfurous fog grew about them as they descended. The snow faded, and the dim light of Caliban grew just a little. The fog felt warm somehow. A lake materialized from the mist and they turned to follow its edge. It steamed, brilliantly hued in blues and greens. The strange white clumps of bushes continued to grow up from the water here and there, with dark red feathery plumes waving from the ends of the stubby white branches.

“Where are we,” Jakob asked numbly.

Their strange guide spoke over her shoulder, “We are almost through the Looking Glass.”