"Alright everyone, visibility is low, keep close and cover each other, we don't want anyone getting lost."

Outside the shuttle the fog was heavy, and snow was coming down sideways in a blast of ultra-chilled wind. The ground in all directions was a vast plane of snow-covered ice that seemed to stretch on forever.

Yebb pressed her palms against the shuttle window, breath fogging up the glass. It had been..... years since she had stepped foot on her own planet. It was strange to think that she was the only Tricar who had ever left their homeworld. What had everyone thought of her absence? Perhaps they presumed her head, wandered off into the ice to be eaten by one of their many snowbound predators . Perhaps they thought she had been kidnapped by their strange alien visitors.

But who could have known, the Tricar council had determined they wanted nothing to do with the strange visitors from space, even after, those same visitors had arrived with the cure for a planet wide plague that had already wiped out a good forth of their population.

This planet had been in the latter stages of the apocalypse when humanity and the GA arrived to help, giving Yebb a way to synthesize and antidote, and return their planet to some level of functioning. But sometimes good things go unrewarded, and Yebb had been forced to make her own executive decision. Now, she hadn't seen her home in over two years.

She wondered if anyone had managed to survive.

She had gone to Adam after hearing of his experience on the kree homeworld. Back at her laboratory, a team of scientists and doctors were doing their best to keep what remained of the Kree population alive. There were about a hundred eggs together give or take, and each one of them was surprisingly small in comparison to the creature they grew into.

They weren't sure if any of them were going to make it.

If they did manage, than that would be at least 100 adults, which could, potentially be enough to begin restoring the kree population, but that was assuming there was an equal number of males to females, which, in such a small sample size, was unlikely to be the case.

Still there was hope.

But the destruction of the Kree homeworld had struck Yebb rather hard. She had grown comfortable in her new life, and rarely thought of her own home, where she had few friends and even fewer reasons to stay, but..... to be the last one of her species. The thought had been too much, and she had come to Adam begging for a welfare check mission to her own planet.

She hadn't needed to beg, the man was on board almost as soon as the words came from her mouth.

A team had been assembled by the evening, and they had been on their way an hour later.

"Opening shuttle doors." Someone said, and Yebb braced herself in preparation for the wind.

It came with the force of a hammer blow, and Yebb gasped in shock. She hadn't remembered her planet being so cold! For a moment she thought maybe the average temperature had gone down, but then realized....

She didn't have as much fur as she used to.

Oh.

In order to survive on alien planets and ships where the average temperature hovered somewhere around tropical, it had been prudent for yebb to shave most of her body, down to her underlayer of fur. She had grown used to this, and now wore her fur in varying shades of colored stripes down her back.

Her favorite color was bright green.

She was glad she had opted to borrow a winter coat from one of the shorter humans, and wore it now to make up for the fur that she was missing. Behind her, the humans, Drev, and their one Tesraki, Etium, all wore suits of armor. Yebb felt small and vulnerable surrounded by the machine clad giants behind her, but she was glad to have them on her side.

She took a tentative step out into the blinding snow and sniffed at the air. She forgot this smell, the smell of cold.

She missed it.

Yebb turned to look at the others who fanned out into a tight group behind her, like some sort of heavily armored hnor guard. Adam stood at the front, his black and green armor, already coated in a light dusting of snow. She couldn't tell where he was looking past the face plate, but she was able to hear him through the little comms set in her ear when he said, "Radio scan is..... picking up nothing."

Yebb felt her innards sink. That shouldn't have been possible, radio was one of their main sources of communication.

"Doesn't necessarily mean anything." Maverick said, "The storm is pretty bad, maybe we are just out of range. Maybe their communications are down."

Yebb turned to look at her and shook her head, "This storm isn't bad."

The blue and black armored figure seemed taken aback despite the helmet.

Adam raised a hand , big, armored gauntlet blocking the path of the snow, "Nah, this is meh even for the Midwest. I imagine on an ice planet, things could get a whole lot worse.

He turned to look at Yebb, "How do we find the tunnel entrances."

"Found them." Yebb turned to her right in surprise, to see the little Tesraki, Etium crouching on the ground both hands pressed into the snow. In comparison to the other hulking giants, he wasn't so impressive, but the gun he held next to him was absolutely massive, its weight lightened by a set of glowing blue gravity field generators. Yebb had wondered if that was overkill but Etium had insisted that he never left home without it.

"What do you mean?" Adam said.

Etium cocked his head as if he was listening, "Ground penetrating sonar. The tunnels are pretty shallow here, I think I know where we can find an entrance."

"You have ground penetrating sonar>" Yebb said rather incredulous, "You just happen to have that on you."

Etium shrugged and stood, "I knew we were coming to a planet where most of the population lives primarily underground in ice caves, I would be stupid not to have packed my ground penetrating sonar."

Behind them Adam and Maverick exchanged a look, "I didn't even know that attachment was available."

Maverick shrugged, "I've never looked at the non-combat attachments."

Etium pointed in a direction but allowed Yebb to take the lead. Even if she wasn't entirely sure where they were, she was comfortable in spotting the entrances and exits to the underground tunnels behind her Adam continued to monitor radio signals, but so far, he found nothing. They saw no signs of life o the surface, but in weather conditions like this that was normal. They spend their time primarily underground.

It wasn't difficult to find the entrance to the underground habitations. While ground penetrating sonar had easily detected the underground tunnels, visibility was so bad, they didn't see the buildings until they were practically right on top of them. One minute they were facing a wall of falling snow, and the next a black shape was looming out of the white.

They all pulled to a halt, and Yebb dropped back as the soldiers moved forward. Etium stayed back with her.

"No red mist, that's a good sign."

He did have a point.

Up ahead the building they looked at was a simple structure, made of hardened ice mixed with plant pulp. It rarely got warm enough on the Tricar planet to be above freezing, but when it was, the addition of the plant pulp kept the buildings stable. At this point in time, however, melting was an unlikely possibility edging towards improbable. The building was surrounded by a drift of snow taller than she was and didn't look like it had been touched in some time.

That made her nervous.

"The door is frozen shut, but one of these back windows has been shattered."

'Think you can make it inside?" Adam asked.

"No, too small, but Etium might manage."

Yebb would have offered to help, but she didn't have any military training, and it was unlikely they would let her go without clearing the room first. Etium left her side and handed off his large weapon to one of the other armored men before leaping up to disappear through the window. It always surprised her how high Tesraki could jump, higher than the average human for sure.

"Room clear, looks abandoned." She heard

"Can you get the door open?"

Yebb lifted her head to the sky. The clouds above were a mass of white, the snow that came down around her ears was white. The only natural sound over the vast plane was the whistling of wind, and the slow brushing of snow over snow, that was until Etium shouldered the door open. Ice popped and snaped, cracking like glass and exploding outward as Etium came tumbling into the snow.

The door gaped open behind him, a welling black maw of darkness.

"Well, that's one way to do it I suppose." Adam said

Etium retrieved his gun and the group of them headed towards the small building.

It was only a single room with a large control panel and a couple of chairs.

Snow rested in a large heap atop an inert control panel, and the two chairs lay on their sides against a gentle accumulation of ice stretching across a half of the room, blue snow light filtered I nthrough the broken window and onto the hatch in the floor. Yebb approached the hatch while the others crowded behind her. Judging by the building and the control panel, this tunnel had been privately owned, or belonged to some sort of cooperate conglomerate. Likely, it led down to the salt farms or had access to underground fish hatcheries.

Still it was better than staying up here, exposed.

In the open.

She turned and nodded to the others, who walked over and spun the wheel on the hatch door to the left.

It popped with a hiss, and the group of them waited with bated breath.

Yebb half expected tendrils of red mist to start leaking out into the air, but there was nothing. Two of the SE soldiers hauled the lid open while another two pointed their weapons down into the hole. A set of metal rungs led down into welling darkness.

"I do not like that, no sir." Adam commented

"The tunnel is pretty tight, will we even be able to fit?"

"Lets find out." Adam said turning and clambering down onto the first few rungs of the latter. He inched down a few steps, the back of his armor occasionally brushing against the opposite wall, but he seemed in no danger of getting stuck, "I think we're good. Noble team we go first, Slayer hang back and follow after Yebb, make sure to leave at least one man on the door.

"Roger."

When Adam's head vanished below the floor level, Maverick began her descent, until a whole team of soldiers could be heard clattering down the latter rungs.

Yebb waited until they hit the bottom.

"No lights down here everyone, so turn your helmet beams on."

Yebb swallowed, that wasn't a good sign. There were always lights on underground, there had to be.

"Looks..... abandoned. Hard to say what abandoned looks like, not like there's any dust but.... Just something bout it."

It was Yebb's turn onto the ladder, and she scampered down it with remembered ease. Landing at the base of the ladder, she couldn't help but agree with Adam. It did look abandoned. The tunnels were dark, and mots of frost or ice hung on the air in the beams of their flashlights. The light didn't manage to penetrate far, maybe a few hundred feet down the tunnel before darkness swallowed it up.

Yebb sniffed at the air.

Smelled stale.

How ice could smell stale was hard to describe, but it just was. As the others panned their lights around the tunnel wall, Maverick's light swept over a small plaque on the opposite wall, "Hold on."

Maverick froze, and Yebb hurried over, eyes scanning over the familiar symbols. She hadn't read a Tricar language in so long, she was almost worried she had forgotten.

She shouldn't have worried.

It came back to her easy.

"Caution, Energyplant, no authorized personnel beyond this point." Her fur stood on end, "I know where we are!" her enthusiasm was curved shortly after as the realization dawned on her, "She knew where they were. They were In the upper tunnels of the main power reservoir of the city. This was one of the most important tunnel systems in a hundred mile radius or so.

And it was silent.

There should have been Tricar bustling through here at all hours of the day, but tilting her head, she heard nothing.

"I don't like this." Maverick was saying.

Adam grunted an agreement, "Should we take bets?"

"Resurgence of plague?"

"Early void sickness?"

"Zombie outbreak?"

"Alien entities has taken over the power generator and are slowly feeding upon it while, its minions chase down and infect what remains of the tricar population to suck out their branes and enslave their bodies as mindless flesh robots." Everyone turned to look at Adam and he shrugged, "What, it was as good a guess as any.

Yebb swallowed hard and the entire group turned to her suddenly growing awkward.

Adam paused, "I'm sorry Yebb, we shouldn't be joking about this.'

She shook her head, "No, its ok, its either that or be scared, right?"

The group of them nodded, but still they kept the joking to a minimum as they headed deeper into the darkness.