The carnage had been horrific, and not just in the quadrant where the screams – the shooting – had started. The others were dead or dying, bullet ridden or hacked apart, leaving only Kaelin and him untouched, their friends and comrades bleeding into the tundra, the dusting of snow their final blankets.

“It was over,” he told her.

“What was over?”

He shook off his reverie.

She repeated her question.

“The fight,” he told her, angry at her insistence. “The attack.”

“But they weren’t all killed?”

“No, not everyone, not yet,” he continued, voice choking with the memory. “Moloch and Dray were still alive – just – bleeding badly. Thule was missing, we never saw his body.”

“Did you look for him?” she wanted to know.

He stared at her in amazement. Hadn’t she been listening to him?

“Seven of us had just been killed,” he forced out. “The two left were bleeding to death. We were strecking busy keeping them alive!”

Kaelin and he struggled to keep Moloch and Dray breathing, staunching their wounds; providing what drugs they had to cut the pain, stop the bleeding. Comforting each other, pat on the shoulder, words of encouragement squeeze of the hand. However, in the moments of free thought, he was filling with a new, growing dread.

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Not Kaelin, she just seemed as determined as she always had been – frantic, definitely – angry, certainly.

“Did they kill each other?”

“At first I thought–” he began, “but no – they were shot, butchered – and there was nothing else around. There would have been at least some kind of sign, then. But neither of them were able to talk. Before–”

Before they died.

Althea moved back, sat back down gingerly on the chair that protested even her weight. She looked up at him.

“They weren't able to tell you anything?”

He sighed, sat back down heavily on the bench, rubbed his face and then looked back at her, matching her gaze. He was tired of talking, tired of remembering.

“Moloch and Dray,” he continued, “they were barely conscious, coughing up blood, bleeding out faster than we could staunch their wounds. We tried, but there wasn’t time. They were killed right in front of us.”

Metal arms, robotic grips – grasped them, from beneath the ground; cutting their bodies, blood spurting from them before they disappeared into the tundra. The ground vibrated underneath them, then started sliding, bucking. Kaelin grabbed his arm. He could still see that look on her face – couldn’t forget it –the first time he’d ever seen her afraid.

“No one picked up the underground activity?”

Traejan shook his head, there hadn’t been any, before… The next thing he remembered there was churned tundra everywhere. It looked like the results of explosives – until it shuddered, rolled like water.

He said that he would never leave her.

“Was it a Bot that did it?” Althea asked him. “A Flyer? Many?”

He shook his head.

“I think so– I don’t know!”

He hadn’t stayed to look. They ran – ran until they could find solid, frozen ground.

“Didn’t you look?”

“We were running away,” he confessed – looking ahead – not back. Even now, he wasn’t sure what he had seen in the roiling, churning ground. “I was running away.”

And he’d never even tried to go back, not once.