Dorian offered a thought.

Cryogenic damage?

She let another white breath out.

The suggestion wasn’t of practical help, although was likely accurate, and worrying. She didn’t want to have to try nanoscopic repair work in such conditions.

You could try the secondary controls.

Waste more time smashing ice? Althea shook her head, not wanting to entertain the idea, tried the activation sequence again. Nothing. She gave up.

“Fine, the secondaries.”

Shards and ice dust piled up around her feet, scattered on the floor, as she finished melting and smashing through to the secondary controls. She worked her commands again, waited – smiled. The glowing symbols transformed, shifted to green and blue. Satisfied, she brushed the dusty debris off the board then applied her requests.

Althea poked the interface controls lightly, tentatively – relieved by the positive responses, if not the system’s stuttering, freezing. More green and blue symbols lit up; details appeared. She conferred with Dorian, then provided the required sequence of trinary code through the manual interface. It took almost a two sixes to decrypt the control paths, but the result proved to be worth the effort.

The whole board brightened up, fields of data emerging, becoming clear; but the information they revealed was totally unexpected, and totally unacceptable.

“This cannot be possible – It has to be wrong!”

What’s wrong?

“The system says that we are on Makan! Dorian, Statis Delcia Tres! It says we’re not even in the right Century!”

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Her mind filled with knowledge of the world. Fun, exciting Makan, with third grade technology, unremarkable population and culture, economy centered on… tourism?! The Orealcean Century of cultures was galactic west, hundreds of light years from her intended destination.

Makan was not described as cold world.

“I know,” she choked out, still disbelieving. “We should be in a tropical zone, not a deep freeze!”

How could that have happened? How could she have ended up here?! Makan was so far away from Elysium. The probability of such a redirection was incredibly – unbearably – small. Yet… here they were.

There were hints in our records that the original settlers may have altered their world’s climate. Terraforming was very common in the Consortia.

“You think they would have been proud of that,” she replied angrily, “and maybe advertised the fact. That kind of climate work would be hard to control with just micronics.”

Perhaps the technology was provided by a higher-grade culture.

Orbital solar lenses, she decided. That would explain everything she saw.

Althea looked again around her at the thick ice, perhaps decades worth of deposit, coating the walls. The world was returning to its natural state. Not good for anyone, least of all her. She stared back at the confirmation report, accepted it. Portal Authority data didn’t lie. Gravity and air composition didn’t lie. They had to be on Makan.

“All right,” she agreed glumly, shivered again. A decision needed to be made, and soon.

Elysium might be worth risking her life, not this planet. It wouldn’t have anything she wanted or needed, and, even if it did, she wasn’t prepared at all for such a hostile environment.

“Then we’d better leave before we attract any attention. There’s nothing here of any use.” She glanced over the asymmetrical control layout, began pressing the sequence to reactivate the portal. In moments, the trilium columns along the walls began to glow again.

The symbols on fields, however, didn’t change, remained static; didn’t reveal any activation of the bridging fields.

“Damn.” She had entered the proper sequence, hadn’t she? Althea looked to the power columns; their light had turned dim, fading, dying. “The system isn’t reactivating.”

A light dust fell on the controls before her, glittering in the board’s glow. She brushed it away, clearing the panel. A vibration ran through it beneath her fingers, accompanied by a low, almost sub-sonic, rumbling.

She looked up.

What– what’s that sound?