Snow fell from the night sky over St. Ekaterina, dancing in the bone-chilling wind that discouraged the human and animal population from venturing outside into the night.

In the city of Bryansk, the lights from the buildings offered the only sign of life in the storm. On rare occasions the beams of a ground vehicle’s headlights scuttled along the snow-covered streets between the buildings. Pedestrians were nowhere to be seen.

The roar of a ship’s engines grew above the howl of the wind. A large, roughly triangular silhouette with navigational running lights descended rapidly through the falling snow toward the auxiliary landing pad at the station on the edge of town. The silhouette touched down on the pad with an unusually heavy thump, the high-pitched roar of the engines fading to nothing within seconds.

From a guard shack at the edge of the landing pad, two guards watched as the cargo hatch of the newly-landed ship, which bore the name Nordic Troll, opened slowly into the darkness of the snowstorm, flooding the landing pad with light from the ship’s cargo bay lights.

The growl of an internal combustion engine erupted from inside the open cargo bay, barely audible over the loud hiss of the swirling wind. Twin tail and backup light beams leapt forward into the night as a small wide truck slowly backed down the ramp leading from the ship’s cargo bay. The driver of the truck was not visible, but two people could be seen sitting in the truck’s bed, each holding on to something straddling the bed. The truck reached the bottom of the ramp, turned and moved forward toward the closed gate beside the security shack.

The two guards in the shack looked at each other. “Who gets to go out there?” the one closest to the door asked.

“Your turn, I did it last time”, his partner answered.

“Yeah, figures”, the first man hissed as he pulled his hat tighter over his head and buttoned the top button of his coat. Open