Starbound Cold Protection Novels & Stories

​The air on the bridge of the Weaver was a thin, freezing mist. With the primary shielding tattered by the Consolidator-Spine, the stars above looked less like distant lights and more like a thousand cold, watching eyes. The Boarding-Husks lay scattered across the floor, their white-steel armor dulling as their internal power cells bled out into the basalt. ​Kael wiped a smear of hydraulic fluid from his cheek. His breath came in ragged, silver plumes. "Mara, get the seal-teams to the upper fracture. We need to patch the hull with the heavy-density moss or we’ll all be ice by midnight."

Instead, she raised her left hand, her small, cool fingers wrapping firmly over his massive knuckles, tracing the rough, scarred contours of his glove with an absolute, unyielding calmness that instantly grounded his rising feral energy. ​"The deep-water port relies entirely on the sub-core foundry's automated cooling surfactants to keep the sea ice from crushing the docks," Vivian whispered, a cold, victorious smile finally touching her pale features. "They believe they are holding a asset. They are actually holding a block of ice."

"I can't move them. But I can protect them." She closed her eyes, and a wave of pure frost erupted from her. It didn't freeze us, but it coated every pod in a layer of ice so thick it looked like diamond. "It’s a heat shield," I realized. "Leo, get to the vents! If you can't stop the purge, redirect the fuel lines!" "On it!" Leo disappeared into the maintenance crawlspace. I turned back to Astra. She was pale, the effort of the frost-wall draining her. "The Cleaners are here, Rose," she whispered. "I can hear their boots on the ice."

The silver hull, once so pristine it seemed to repel the very idea of dirt, was being pitted and scarred by the acidic sap of our world. ​"Thermal signatures are dropping," Leo said, his voice tight as he adjusted the lenses of his bio-mechanical goggles. "The crash didn't kill them, Elara. They’ve gone into stasis. The ship is venting a localized cryogenic gas to keep the Grove from breaching the inner sanctum." ​"Let them freeze," Harl growled, hefting a heavy industrial cutter that hummed with the power of a captured lightning bolt. "It just makes the silver more brittle."

Selam said. “I found some heated armor in a storage room and had them wear it. What about you guys? Are you okay? Aren’t you cold? Or are you wearing heated armor too?” I asked them in quick succession. They glanced at each other. “No, heated armor is uncomfortable—we only use it in emergencies. You must’ve found the old storage,” Cygnus replied. “We were surprised when the ship turned cold, but we weren’t affected. It’s like our bodies adjusted automatically.”

The warning from the system was still ringing in my head as I locked the door to my private master bedroom. Negative sixty degrees. At that temperature, steel becomes brittle enough to shatter like glass, and exposed skin freezes solid in under sixty seconds. The *Crimson Blaze Tomatoes* wouldn't be enough to keep my people alive through that. I needed something much stronger. Sitting cross-legged on my bed, I closed my eyes and focused on the burning core in my chest. *‘Enter Sovereign Space.’*

The Moonfall bunker was experiencing the winter season. The Dead Zone surface froze after the explosion, which brought chilling temperatures that spread through Sector Two's large opening. The warm underground air which had been present for weeks turned into a harsh freezing wind. I stood at the Sector Two chokepoint while two heavy wool blankets wrapped around my body over my sweater.

She looked exhausted, her fingers blue from the cold. "How long?" Baraka asked. Eliana didn't need to ask what he meant. She checked her heavy mechanical wristwatch. "They've been burning for forty minutes," Eliana shouted over the gale. "The thermal Actives out on the wings are taking the brunt of it. They are exposed to minus-twenty-degree wind chill while simultaneously generating two-thousand-degree plasma from their hands. The Caloric Debt is going to hit them all at once. If we don't swap them out soon, they will fall into hypothermic shock and drop out of the cowlings."

The sky above the Zenith City was no longer a mystery, it was a fortress, the "Starlight Winter" had retreated, leaving behind a world that felt scrubbed raw and dangerously visible, high above the atmosphere, the thirteen new stars, the Sentinels, sat in a perfect, geometric ring, pulsing with a rhythmic, cold blue light that mocked our newfound peace.

Resisting thoughts of heresy, Bjorn determined these minor vapors an extended outreach of Cloud. The storms were limited to the south and presented no local problems. The overhead sun remained a moisture-sucking globe of light, heat, and radiation held at bay by the reflective surface of the Rand Solar shielding system. Everywhere the horizontal viewpoint remained unhindered by the minor accumulations of moisture, the sky displayed an array of bluish tones overwhelmed by the natural light prism.