Red faced and fatigued Taylor paused to catch his breath halfway up a snow draped ridge. He sniffled, exhaling a cold vaporous cloud as Liz waved him on.

  “Come on we’re close,” she gestured. Taylor dragged his leaden feet through the knee-deep snow and forced himself forward. While she waited Liz surveyed the vast snow-covered surface of Altaire IV through makeshift snow goggles. They had belonged to Greg Anson, fashioned by Agra’s adoptive father who’d crudely cut two slits into a strip of metal. Though dim, the white glow of the noon day sun sparkled in the ice with blinding intensity. How Agra went without them was just another quirk of Syn biology.

  “I made it,” Taylor gasped as he staggered up beside her.

  “Look at that,” Liz said pointed up at the sky. Removing his snow goggles Taylor looked up with weary squinted eyes. Faint flashing lights and vague flitting shapes peppered the blue-black sky beyond the wispy high-altitude clouds.

  “They’re still fighting?” Taylor frowned. “How much longer do you think they can keep this up?”

  “I don’t know,” Liz said as she scrutinized the space battle silently playing out high above them. There must have been thousands of ships up there she thought. It had been three days since the first Syncline warship had appeared and the battle showed no sign of winding down anytime soon. All of them were here for Agra, the enigmatic alien castaway who fancied herself human. Whatever she was had possessed large numbers of her aggressively territorial kind into orbit around an otherwise unknown and forsaken planet. Fighting was in their nature, bloodlust their flaw. Though unified by a common cause the Syncline fleets in orbit still fought amongst themselves for the right to make the planetary landing. That’s what Quintek thought anyway. The crafty Syn knew his people very well.

  “Hey is that it?” Taylor said. He was staring at an orange cylindrical shape jutting from the snow carpeted valley floor.

  “Yep, that’s the pod. Come on.” Liz beckoned. Taylor ran after her. It took them half an hour to hike down to the half-buried escape pod. It lay on its side, its rumpled parachutes flapping in the breeze. The word Orion was emblazoned on its side. Liz lingered on the name in somber silence. Taylor offered a comforting pat on her shoulder.

  “It was a good ship full of good people. At least You, Jakob and I still have each other.”

  Liz mumbled something and climbed up into the open hatch. Taylor followed. They slid down a windblown snow drift into an interior encrusted in frost. Shivering, Taylor and Liz proceeded to an open locker. A half full pack lay in the ice.

  “Jakob left this here day one,” Liz said as she pried it from the frozen ground. She bowed her head and sighed.

  “I’m sure he’ll make it,” Taylor assured her. Neither wanted to admit their friend was dying. They wordlessly began stuffing Jakob’s pack with medical supplies.

  “I feel like shit Agra.”

  Weak and feverish Jakob groaned as Agra wiped the sweat off his brow with a cloth. He lay swaddled in a makeshift hammock within the warm glow of a small crackling fire. A wooden spoon full of foul metallic smelling liquid pushed at his lips. Agra had once again wrapped much of her body in strips of white parachute cloth though she now let tuffs of red feathery down sprout up around her neck and arms at Quintek’s insistence. The same fabric bandaged much of Jakob’s upper torso, the white cloth stained by black blood and pus. Daily replacement of the soiled wrapping was about the only thing anybody could do for him besides offering comfort. His infection was getting worse. Their reasons to get off world had only gotten more dire.

  “You need to eat,” Agra insisted. “You’re weak.”

  “Didn’t Liz tell you that this stuff is literal poison?” Jakob croaked as the warm stew dribbled down his front. Agra withdrew the spoon and slurped up some herself with the flailing mandibles tucked beneath the plates of her flat beaked face.

  “But it’s so good,” she enticed. Jakob groaned, clutching his festering wound on his shoulder as he tried to roll over. Agra quickly tore his hand away. “Don’t do that,” she hissed.

  “Spare me,” Jakob grumbled. “Can you at least tell me what’s going on.”

  “My kind continues to slaughter each other in space,” Agra spat with disdain.

  “Still?” Jakob winced. “Why can’t the bastards get serious and get it over with?”

  “Language,” Agra snapped. Jakob stared back at her with a weary look of resignation. Shaking her head Agra answered his question with a frustrated sigh.

  “My people are aggressive and fiercely territorial. Though unified by a common goal they can’t help but fight each other. Attracting every Queen to this planet has snowballed into the bloodiest battle ever fought by my people.”

  “They’re more a threat to each other than you are to them,” Jakob scoffed, “why are they even bothering with you?”

  “You think I know why their acting this way?” Agra vented with a hiss. “I challenged their authority. So what? What threat do I alone pose to them?”

  “Who knew you Syn where so complicated?” Jakob said with a fading voice. He shut his eyes and sighed. “Can you let me rest now please?”

  Though hesitant Agra respected his choice and left him be. She glanced back at him with one final look of concern and slipped through the curtained entryway into a gently sloping rocky passage.

  Quintek was waiting for her in the main chamber stoking the embers of a dying fire. The other Syn she’d welcomed into her fold didn’t even acknowledge her as she entered. They used too, but Agra had compelled them to stop with a simple command. Do whatever you want. One watched a piece of wood burst into flames with childlike curiosity. Another scratched at the wall with a rock. The others aimlessly meandered about the room sniffing at the air. Plucking the hatred and fear from the minds had released them from feral savagery imposed on them by the Queens. Docile they had begun to learn. Quintek tossed a piece of wood at the kin beside him.

  “You throw it in,” he encouraged. The Syn picked it up, scrutinized it in its clawed hands, and began to gnaw at it.

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  “At least he isn’t sticking his hand in the fire anymore,” Quintek told Agra as she crouched next to him. The two Syn considered each other awkwardly.

  “Were you like that?”

  “No.”

  “That’s hard to believe,” she actually laughed desperate for some levity.

  Quintek scratched at the metal sheet under him as he felt Agra in his mind. Her curious thoughts probed and picked at his memories. Quintek selected one for her, allowing her to experience a cruel second of his dark and bloody upbringing in the hold of a Syncline warship. Agra flinched, quickly retreating from his mind with an apology.

  “Quintek I’m so sorry.”

  The necessary union forged between their minds had unlocked Agra’s potential and elevated Quintek as her equal. However, neither had been fully prepared for the consequences of a ritual neither had really understood. They had inadvertently shared what neither had been willing to give nor wanted.

  “My memories make your life on this frozen ball of ice seem quaint, don’t they?” Quintek said with a hint of spite.

  Agra felt frustration and anger alien to her well up inside her. It was the part Quintek had left in her, a taste of the pure savageness that defined her kind. The potent impulse resonated inside her as something best left alone, and yet she couldn’t stop herself from reaching out and accepting it as her own. With it the vague loathing for her kind twisted and transformed into an alluring resolve for revenge that felt wrong but satisfied some desire she had long pushed away. So far removed from her kind Agra could not recognize the innate lust for power and conquest that had driven her predecessors to the far corners of the galaxy.

  “We’ve both suffered because of the Queens. All of our people have,” Agra found herself hissing vindictively. Quintek glanced up at the rocky ceiling of their cave. Through Agra he sensed the presence of the other Queens somewhere high above them. It was a disconcerting vibration. The unnerved Syn rubbed at the wound on his neck. When they were done slaughtering each other in a pointless demonstration of their power one of the victorious Queens would direct their forces at Agra. He could sense their desperation and horror.

  “You really don’t know why they fear you?” Quintek asked. Agra gave him a frustrated glance.

  “I’m surprised you don’t,” Agra said, “You seemed to know me so well before.”

  “I recognized your potential as a Queen,” Quintek said staring back into her eyes. Her sad golden gaze glowed with a cognizance which still eluded him. “I now realize that you are not what you seem. You wear the feathers of a Queen, possess their power, and yet there is something else.”

  “But I’m nothing special. The Queens give birth to thousands of children like me. The females lacking qualities they deem impure are killed at birth without issue,” Agra said thinking to what little she knew of her mother and what she would have done to her. Her teacher had been forthcoming about what she was. The Syn Queens valued their idea of purity more than anything else and carefully cultivated the eggs containing their descendants. Those born without the desired traits were not allowed to survive. Agra’s red feathery down bristled at the thought of her mother emotionlessly culling her and her impure sisters with a swipe of her claws. Only her mother’s sudden death had spared her life. Her teacher told her that without a hint of sympathy. He had tolerated her with discomfort and dismay reminding her that she had to earn the right to live on as an impure shadow of her mother’s divine glory. Quintek responded to her thoughts with a baffled expression as he stared back at her with his blood red eyes.

  “No not that. It’s something unique, like your golden eyes,” Quintek said. “My red feathered teacher, my brothers and sisters, even the Queens all share my eyes. You are different. I wonder if you really are one of us. I know you’re not”

  Agra knowingly watched as Quintek drew a clawed finger through the soft gap in the exoskeleton on his wrist. Beads of blue blood wept from the wound. His mind hummed as he expected her to follow his example and reveal one of the few secrets which eluded him. She did not.

  “If I’m not like you then what am I?” Agra frowned.

  “I don’t know, but whatever you are is something the Queens fear more than each other.”

  Agra considered his words in stunned dismay. The Queens were more or less rival gods and yet they feared what she was. What was she if not Syn, nor human? Was there anywhere in the infinite swarm of twinkling stars where she was wanted beside her loathsome existence alone on an icy ball of rock. She felt Quintek’s intrusive thoughts juxtaposed with her own.

  “I was never welcome amongst our kind either. At least now we have each other,” Quintek offered with a shrug. Agra sensed that even he was unoptimistic about their futures. They sat in silence, feeding wordlessly off the uncertainties drifting through each other’s minds as the fire crackled pitifully. Waiting was all they could do now, for Taylor and Liz to come back with medicine, or for the Queens in orbit to destroy them. The Syn lying across from them finally tossed the gnawed piece of wood in the fire where the saliva crackled and smoked. The other Syn sniffing about the room suddenly bolted upright with wide eyed alertness. They growled at Taylor and Liz as they pushed through the curtain with nervous looks on their faces. There reddened faces and hoarse breathless voices meant that they had been running.

  “There’s a ship, we saw it,” Taylor exclaimed hoarsely as he collapsed beside the fire gasping for breath.

  “It was small whatever it was, like an arrowhead. I’ve never seen a Syn ship like it,” Liz added with a worried look. She fell on her knees and began digging through her bag. “Where’s Jakob. Is he ok?”

  “Did it see you?” Quintek demanded as he shot to his feet.

  “I don’t know. It was going the other way. I think it noticed the wreckage,” Taylor panted. He was the one to notice that Agra was gone.

  The Navigator descended through the clouds grateful that the others hadn’t noticed him. The countless multitudes of his peoples ships in orbit were too busy fighting each other to have noticed the appearance of his small insignificant craft. As they fought desperately to prevent each other’s landings the Navigator had plotted a course through the debris falling towards the planet’s surface. He’d so far eluded detection and now raced against time to find the Matriarch’s prize somewhere on the planets barren icy surface. The navigator nervously looked upward as his ships sensors scanned the horizon. The chaotic battle overhead was inching closer to the surface with each passing minute. It was like nothing the Navigator had ever seen. Warships from every corner of the galaxy were present, and more kept appearing at the behest of the Divine Ones now drawn to this world. They rarely risked their own safety and yet something had compelled them to join in the chaotic maelstrom of destruction raging in orbit.

  The Navigator pushed aside his doubts and fears as something flashed on his holographic viewport. His sensors had detected something on the featureless planes blurred beneath him. A magnetic and gravitational anomaly brightened on his monotone display. He slowed his speed to circle back around. It was a sprawling wreck, the shattered remnants of a home ship like his home. The Navigator couldn’t believe it. A data ping indicated that the ship had been commissioned by the Matriarch. It could only be his Divine Mother’s missing ship. What was it doing way out here alone and why had it crashed? Another flashing sensor display tore his attention from the dead hulk of his mother’s ship to a faint life signature in the snowy wastes. The faint pulse of life divided into two figures running in the snow as the Navigator swooped down to investigate. The running figures noticed him as he made another low pass. The Navigator got a good look at their round fleshy faces as he shot back up into the air. Just another impure race he dismissed with a disappointed shake of his head. They weren’t why he was here, just another distraction. Besides, his craft possessed no weapons. He banked back towards the wreckage and began another scan. There were still lots of organics, but no other life signatures consistent with his race. He had to accept that the wreckage was a dead end. He’d have no choice but to meticulously scour the planet until he found what he was looking for. She was here, and he had to find her. The Navigator looked upon the wreck with one last solemn moment of contemplation before turning around to begin a slow sensor sweep of the planet.

  Once again he detected the presence of the impure race. This time curiosity got the better of him. He studied the zoomed in exterior feed and watched as they vanished into the earth. The Navigator lingered there for a moment before turning his attention back to his sensors. There was still nothing. That is when a burst of light filled his holographic viewport. Analytics reconstructed the trajectory of the rocket burst from the surface. The Navigator turned back towards where he had last seen the figures running in the snow. His sensors flashed and chirped. The Navigator enhanced his optics. A different figure stood in the snow. She wore the crown of his people. The Navigator couldn’t believe it. He had found her.