Empyrean Iris Story Collection Vol. 4

The Ice Vault

"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.