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The jarring change in the environment immobilized Cho. Her senses reeled. They stood in a dark landscape with a pale yellow sky. Heavy snow showered them, whipped about by powerful gusts of wind.
A small village existed about four kilometers away, but with the storm she couldn’t make out anything beyond three meters, even though it was near midday on Nereus. All she could see were ugly gray snow drifts.
A loud pop behind Cho caused her to spin around. The thorneway frame stood empty.
“We have to go back.” Trini, wide-eyed, pushed past Cho toward the thorneway controls on one side of the large metallic frame.
“It’s just a snowstorm.” Cho guessed Trini had never been in one before. In Nagano, storms like this weren’t uncommon.
“That’s not snow. It’s ash,” Trini replied as she fumbled with the controls.
Cho frowned and surveyed the landscape again, blinking to activate her contacts. A stream of bright red text flooded her vision.
Danger! Danger! Massive volcanic eruption in effect. Seek immediate shelter. Danger! Danger!
Volcanic eruption? Where? Had they gone to the right place?
“Come on!” Trini yelled, slamming both fists against the thorneway frame.
“What’s wrong?” Cho asked.
“The thorneway’s dead.” Trini pressed both hands against her helmet, her expression shocked.
“What?” Cho joined Trini at the controls. “How do we get it going again?”
A few minutes ago, she’d been reluctant to take her first trip through a thorneway. Now she was desperate to take her second.
“We can’t.”
“Can’t? We have to. We can’t stay here with a volcano.” An edge of hysteria entered her voice as she tried to figure out what activated the thorneway.
Trini pointed at the space where the thorneway should be. “It’s got no power. I think it short-circuited. Maybe because of all the ash.”
Cho didn’t accept this. None of the buttons had clear labels, so she hit one after the other. Nothing happened. When she’d gone through all the buttons, she tried a second time. One of them had to work. They just needed the right combo.
“That won’t do any good,” Trini said, surveying the landscape once more. “We’re stuck. We need to find shelter.”
Danger. Danger. The warning repeated on Cho’s contacts as she tried the control panel again.
Trini slapped a hand over the controls, smacking Cho’s fingers. “Stop! We have to go. Now!” Fear replaced the shock on her face, but also determination.
Cho tried to steel herself, but her fear burst through it like a flood through a dam made of straw. She hadn’t bargained on a volcanic eruption when she signed up for Nereus. “Go where?”
Trini pointed east. “The Nuukimak village. From there, we figure out how to contact Space City.”
“What if they’re not there? What if they left because of the eruption?” Or worse? It wouldn’t be the first place wiped out by a volcano.
“It’s our best option.”
“Wouldn’t our best option be staying here? When we don’t check in, someone from Space City will come looking for us and this will be the first place they’ll check.”
“It could be days or a week before anyone realizes we should’ve returned. Or at least checked in. We need shelter now. The Nuukimak village is the closest place.”
“Could we fix the thorneway? I’ve got supplies for my 3D printer. We could make tools.” Cho wished she’d listened to her mother and gone to Tanarille.
Trini shook her head. “No way. The engineers who work on thorneways have years of experience. No way we figure it out in a couple of hours. We should get to the village, then figure out what’s next.”
Without waiting for her reply, Trini trudged into the storm. Cho hurried after her, not wanting to lose her, which could happen in seconds in these conditions. There were no roads or trails to follow. No signs pointing the way to the village. What if they missed it? That would be all too easy in this storm. They could pass within a few meters and not see it.
“Where’s the village?” she asked. “Are you sure you can find it?”
Trini pointed ahead without hesitation. “That way.”
“How can you be sure? It’s easy to get turned around in this.” She glanced behind her and could no longer see the thorneway, which made her skin crawl. She took a step closer to Trini, not wanting to get split up by accident.
“I downloaded an AR guide to my contacts.”
“AR guide?” Cho wondered why she’d never heard of such a thing.
“Augmented reality guide. Right now, an AR tour guide is leading me to the village. It provides information about the village and scenery, but I have the audio turned off. I’m not in the mood for fun facts.”
“Can you share it?” If she wasn’t so spooked, Cho would’ve found this revelation thrilling. Instead, she wanted the reassurance that it led them somewhere safe.
“Sure.”
Trini turned to her and blinked once. A tall droid, similar to the ones that tended the garden outside the spaceport, appeared a couple of meters ahead of Cho. It wore a silver explorer suit, but without a helmet.
“Greetings,” it said with a Latin accent, which was strange coming from a droid. “Where are you headed?”
“To the Nuukimak village.”
“Would you like a guide?”
“Yes.”
As the droid turned and headed east, it rattled off details about the place. “The Nuukimak live in small tribes. They are semi-nomadic, traveling based upon fish migrations at different times of the year.”
The droid’s legs glided through the ash-covered snow without disturbance, leaving no footsteps or parted snow in its wake. For a half second Cho puzzled over this, before remembering the droid was an image projected by her contacts. It wasn’t moving through the snow. How lucky for it. Her legs steadily tired from pushing through thigh-high, dirty gray snow drifts. This wasn’t the beautiful white landscape she’d hoped to explore.
“During the summer months, the Nuukimak move north to catch Patua from the rivers,” the droid said. “The Patua are larger whitefish with blue-gray scales. They serve as the primary food source in the Nuukimak diet.
“In the winter, they head south toward the poles. There they subsist off Aqak, a smaller silver fish they catch through the ice.”
Cho switched the commentary off, agreeing with Trini’s assessment. The guide comforted her; gave her confidence they’d find the village. But the info dump... not helpful. Not in these circumstances.
Instead, she pressed forward, trying to see past all the heavily falling ash. She remembered her contacts had a magnification feature.
Zoom in, she thought.
The ash rushed past her for a moment before resuming its normal fall. But the change made no difference. Still no sign of the village or anything else of interest.
“How much farther?” Cho asked.
The droid glanced back, but said nothing. Right, she’d turned its audio off.
She didn’t need the answer, anyway. She followed it, her legs complaining with each slogging step. Trini also hunched forward, fighting her way through the snow. Cho took solace that at least she wasn’t here alone. It kept her matching the older girl step for step. If Trini could do it, she would, too.
How cold was it out here?
Again, the droid turned back to her, but she ignored it. Instead, she thought about the thermostat function in her contacts. The temperature appeared off to the side of her vision.
13o F / -10.56o C.
Well within their explorer suits’ temperature range, though the helmet never kept her head as warm as the suit did her body. Her ears stung a bit from the chill.
The AR droid stopped and turned to her, waiting.
“What is it?” she asked, turning back on its audio.
“We have arrived at the Nuukimak village,” the droid said.
“No, we haven’t,” Cho said. “There’s no sign of a village. Was it possible the AR droid had taken them to the wrong location?
“Cho,” Trini said, taking slow, careful steps forward. “Look.”
More dirty piles of snow filled the area, but broken tools, abandoned sleds, and large, caved in mounds that could’ve been homes littered the place. Once more, her panic rose.
“This is the village?” she asked.
“What’s left of it,” Trini answered.
Tears welled up in Cho’s eyes. Where were they supposed to go now? Was there another village somewhere? Was it destroyed as well? Icy fingers crawled up her spine. They were alone, cut off, the two of them amid a disaster with no obvious path to safety.
“What do we do now?”
Trini pulled something small from her pockets. “I’ve got some scouts. I’ll send them out a couple and see if we can find signs of the Nuukimak.”
The scouts leapt into the air and flew off, disappearing from view. Trini raised her wrist-comp and Cho joined her. On the screen, a grid appeared. For several tense minutes, nothing happened. Would the scouts find nothing? Were they alone?
Then a massive red circle appeared on the grid to the northwest, too large to be an individual.
“What is that?” Cho asked.
“Fire, if I had to guess,” Trini answered. “I set the scouts to detect heat signatures. If we head there, I’m betting we’ll find the Nuukimak.”
Trini set the AR droid to lead them to the coordinates from the grid. They soon came across light filtering out from a single mound dug down into the ground. Voices and laughter drifted up from inside, cut short a moment later by warning barks. A dozen dogs surged out of the hole, bounding straight for them.
Cho tensed, unsure what to do as the growling dogs surrounded them. Large men in thick furs followed, shouting at the dogs. The entire pack dropped to their bellies, but continued to whine.
“Who are you?” one man asked, a harpoon in hand. The other three men also carried harpoons.
Trini raised both hands, palms open. “We got caught in the storm and need shelter. Please.”
“From where?” the man asked, face wary.
Trini tapped her chest. “I’m Trini Flores.” She motioned to Cho. “My friend is Cho Tamura. We come from Space City.”
The man studied them, his expression giving away nothing about their unexpected arrival.
“We didn’t know there was a volcanic eruption before we arrived. We got cut off,” Trini said, arms still outstretched. “Please help us.”
“Inksuuk, they are girls. Let them in.” An elderly woman stepped forward, past the man.
The man who’d spoken, Inksuuk, pursed his lips, but made no move to contradict the old woman.
“Please, come inside,” the woman said, gesturing to the caves. She had long, gray hair split into a pair of braids. “Would you like some tea?”