Project Prometheus Ch. 82 - Teaser (Patreon)

The Dead Snows never truly rested. Even in daylight, when the weak sun cast long silver light across the shattered graveyard of ships, there was something uneasy about the place. Too many broken hulls jutted from the ice at odd angles. Too many shadows lay where no shadows should have been. Too many old deaths had settled into the place and never quite left it.

Chief Hahrdok sat inside a reinforced command shelter that had been assembled from scavenged plating, crystal sheeting, and a few Perseus-built support systems, its walls creaking softly whenever the wind outside rose high enough to scrape loose frost against them. The structure was sturdy, warm enough, and placed well above the main excavation lanes so he could see most of the work below through the long forward viewport.

He had not moved from his seat in some time. Spread out before him were reports, patrol logs, rotation rosters, and tally sheets of salvage recovered and salvage lost. Incident notices from Artucian warriors, Perseus-trained work crews, and even a few uneasy notes from the newer mixed teams who had begun learning how to function side by side in the Dead Snows without getting themselves killed.

Most of it was routine. Work stoppages due to Tashkuun sightings, a pair of Sahr’coun hound packs driven off from the lower ice trenches, and a cargo lift freezing over and needing to be reset. Two workers nearly coming to blows over a misread order until one of his captains cuffed them both and sent them back to work with bruised pride.

Most of it was normal enough, but then there were the other incidents. Hahrdok frowned and picked one up again, even though he had already read it three times.

Tool racks and been overturned in sealed work zones. A grav sled was found balanced atop a wreck where no one had left it. Voices were being heard in empty corridors beneath the ice. A sentry drone returned with corrupted recordings that showed only static with bursts of pale distortion, and once, briefly, the shape of something tall and rag-wrapped at the edge of the feed.

He set that one down and reached for another. A work lamp had shattered from the inside.Ration crates were opened and strewn about, but with nothing taken. A watchfire was extinguished all at once despite there being no wind in the enclosed camp trench. Two of his warriors swearing they saw an old man standing atop a wrecked carrier spine at dusk, only for him to be gone the moment they looked again.

Hahrdok leaned back slowly and rubbed his face, as he hated this. Not the work, the weather, or even the predators, though there were days he would gladly have seen every Sahr’coun hound on Talemkha choke on their own tongues.

No, what he hated was uncertainty.

He was a chief, and a practical one at that. Ahl’kanin by land and loyalty, even if his clan holdings sat farther afield than most. Valessa trusted him because he was steady, did not scare easily, and because he believed in what she was trying to build. A unified Artucian people, and not merely words spoken over ceremony fires, but something real that could hold.

That was why she had left him in charge here. Hahrdok managed the excavations, patrols, ship rotation, work discipline, worker morale, beast suppression, and salvage accounting. A dozen little moving parts that could turn into a disaster if handled by someone with less sense and more ego. He could handle all of that.

But this nonsense of shadows and whispers and things moved where no hands had touched them? It made him feel like a fool, and he hated feeling like a fool. One of his officers had muttered, very quietly, that it was almost as if the Ghost of Ages had decided he was not done with the Dead Snows after all. Hahrdok had nearly snapped at the man for even suggesting it, but the words had lodged in his skull and refused to leave.

The Ghost of Ages was dead.

He knew that, and so did everyone else, and yet… his eyes slid back to the report with the corrupted drone image. Tall, wrapped in rags and old blankets, holding a crude staff, with eyes like sickly green fire.