Free Harry's Sacrifice by Bianca D'Arc Page B

pod was buried. It zigzagged through the more stable ice on one side of the crevasse and had been made using the half-dozen crawlers they’d used to get to the site in the first place. Skimmers could not rely on their instrumentation near the electromagnetic field put out by the pod, so travel had to be accomplished using more rudimentary vehicles that crawled over the surface.
    The massive, lumbering beasts—mechanical monstrosities—were coming in handy moving the ice and snow out of the way. Cormac 7 spent much of his time documenting the portal and its inscription. He’d directed Fergal 51 and his team to clear the ice as best they could to either side of the portal, but they’d been unable to find the outer edges of the pod in either direction.
    Cormac 7 was beginning to think the buried structure was more than just a simple pod. It could, in fact, be a much larger remnant of the original ship that brought the original exploration party here so many years ago from Alvia Prime.
    Nobody was really sure what had happened to Hara’s original team. None of the old records from Alvia Prime stated where he’d perished, or even from what planet he’d last reported. It was a big mystery that had just been solved. Hara and his team had ended their days here.
    Cormac 7 had been so engrossed in the project that he’d spent most of the day down in the crevasse, which the team had dug into to create something like an ice cave. There were engineers aplenty in the group now, to make sure nobody removed anything that might compromise the integrity of the space they were creating. Cormac 7 trusted his team to do their jobs to the best of their ability around him while he concentrated on the puzzle of the portal.
    Around the time scheduled for evening meal in their small bivouac, Cormac 7 heard a commotion as a new crawler roared into camp. He’d been expecting an emissary from the Council since making his report.
    What he hadn’t expected was the beautiful woman who stepped down out of the crawler draped in fur. Or the Breed.
    The native word had been adopted to describe the surviving inhabitants of the planet. Cormac also knew they called themselves humans, but for some reason, the scientists had taken to using the other word. Curious, and able to tap into certain databases without being detected, Cormac had seen enough data to surmise that the word Breed was a shortened version of the native term, half-breed.
    Translating that term into Alvian led him to wonder just what the other part of the human DNA code contained. They were half human and half…? Cormac had his suspicions. Especially when looking at the man coming out of the crawler toward him.
    It was quite obvious the man was a Breed, even if he did look more Alvian than most natives Cormac 7 had seen. He was solicitous of the woman and the crew. His manners were more Alvian than Breed, and from that observation Cormac 7 made an educated guess as to his identity.
    The deduction was confirmed when the young man approached and introduced himself. The soldiers who had accompanied him stood behind on either side, almost like an honor guard. The pose was not lost on Cormac 7. The soldiers respected this young man for some reason. Either that or they had been ordered to show respect in such a manner.
    The woman came with him, to his right and slightly behind. She seemed a shy young thing and her vulnerability appealed to Cormac 7’s protective instincts.
    “Greetings. I am called Hara.” The Breed man held out his hand in the manner of human greetings Cormac 7 had observed. He held no disgust for the natives of this planet. In fact, his studies of the remains of their culture had given him a respect for what they had accomplished with their more primitive power sources and materials.
    Cormac 7 clasped hands with the newcomer and received a smile in return. He didn’t quite understand the nuances of human expression, but he thought the smile was meant as some form of