[68823] ChaeyoungTritonis Prime“We need to stop this project. Now,” Mimo said for the twenty-ninth day in a row as Ali and Chaeyoung woke up.Chaeyoung was on the top bunk, scooted over to the edge, and set herself down slowly in sub-Lunar gravity.“Hao fa,”[108][Di Lingua]: Good morning. ↑ she tiredly greeted Mimo with a polite bow of her head but ignored his statement.Ali sat on his middle bunk, rubbing sleep from his eyes. “They know we’re stalling already, Mimo. What more can we do?”“Stalling isn’t enough,” Mimo said and pounded his hand on the work desk where he was sitting. “We’re reaching a point of no-return!”Ali shook his head. “Chaeyoung, how long has Grayson known about this place? The aliens and everything.”Chaeyoung yawned as she popped open a doshirak and grabbed a can of coffee. “Records on the exocortex go back fifteen Solar years.”“Shit, see? Mimo?” Ali sounded exasperated from the daily argument. “They had a five-year head start, couldn’t figure out what the xenoliths were in five years—we wrote our paper in what year?”“Twenty-three sixty-six Earth reckoning,” Mimo said.“Right, in the sixty-five nine-hundreds, Sol universal?”Mimo crossed his arms, fiddled with his Martian shawl. “If I remember correctly, ye.”Chaeyoung yawned. “I don’t think they knew about your ideas right away—there’s not any mention of closed time-like curves in the exocortex until sixty-five-nine-three-six.”Mimo looked livid, almost ill. Chaeyoung looked over at him, concerned. He gave a stellah steh hand signal to show he was oke.“Oke¸ Mimo, let’s be conservative and say she’s right,” Ali said with a gesture toward Chaeyoung. “That means they had almost eight Solar years to get as far as they did before we got involved! Eight! And only after we came up with the idea. Without us, they basically had nothing. They made almost no progress.”Mimo gestured excitedly at Ali. “Exactly! We’re accelerating them by decades! We have to stop working. Now. Every additional day we work they get months—if not years—ahead.”“Exactly? Exactly for my point, you mean. We could stop an hour before we finish our modifications to that sample we’ve been working on, and they’d take years to finish our work!”Mimo popped up to his feet, slammed his hand on the desk. Ali slid down from his bunk, landed with a thud, and paced around the hab, fuming.“These bastards have a closed culture,” Ali said. “They have a culture of secrecy and suspicion! They are not actual scientists, and they’ll never cross those gaps without us!”“That’s naïve,” Mimo said with an eye-roll. “That slowed them down, but they’re motivated and light years closer to the final product! They’re going to destroy the universe with that technology, Ali. And we’ll have been responsible! That blood will be on your hands, Ali.”Ali lurched toward Mimo. Chaeyoung darted between the two scientists, immediately de-escalating the conflict before it became physical. “Oke wait. Hold on. Calm down. You both agree there is a point of no-return, right? And that this is a real and a serious problem if we cross it?”Ali backed away, sat on the edge of Mimo’s bunk. “Yes.”“And you agree too?”Mimo glared at Ali, then shook his head. “Ye. Yes. If we haven’t passed it already.”“Oke, good,” Chaeyoung said. “And we all agree this project needs to be stopped, shey?”“Yes, of course. They cannot have a CTCC,” Ali said, almost derisively.“Ye. By any means necessary,” Mimo nodded, his whole body shaking in agreement.“Oke, so how are we going to accomplish that? Assuming—” she put her hands up to quiet Mimo’s solution to their problem. “Assuming that we do not all want to die.”Ali sighed, laid his back onto Mimo’s bed. “I don’t fucking know, Chae. I don’t fucking know.”“Any ideas, Mimo? Ones that do not get us all killed?”“Sabotage is the clearest path. Especially in the high oxygen environment of the core lab.”“But is it guaranteed?”Mimo sat back down, looked away from Chaeyoung’s gaze. “No. It’s not guaranteed.”“Look, oke. You know I have been poking around in the exocortex. I think there’s a handful of unsecured radio systems that are part of the distributed network, not just hallucinated but still connected. I think I can still access them directly through the exocortex, but it’s been tricky,” Chaeyoung explained. “If we can sabotage our work without drawing suspicion, I think we can get a signal out. We can be rescued.”“How long would that take?” Mimo asked flatly.“It’s not a guarantee, within a week—maybe two.”“That’s too long,” Mimo said.Ali scoffed. “I have to agree with Mimo on that, Chae. That’s way too long to wait for a maybe, possibly, soon.”“Oke, but we have a few days left? At the very least?”“I think so,” Ali said, but Chaeyoung thought he sounded far less certain than he had a moment ago.“Just a few more days and I think we can plan some effective sabotage. So, please can we wait until we figure out what would be effective before we do anything drastic? Then we can see about getting a radio signal out?” Chaeyoung asked. “Please, we have to all work together, oke?”Mimo said nothing but gave her a nod. Ali stood up and walked over to the water closet, shaking his head. “I will agree that we need a concrete plan—above all, that’s the most important goal at this stage.”“Then let’s work on a plan.”They abandoned her in the shared hab as they went to do their daily work in the core lab, as expected. Chaeyoung, however, spent her time these days in the exocortex. Pressing against its limits, poking into the handful of radio systems that seemed forgotten and disused but possibly not fully disconnected from the exocortex. Slowly trying to tease out whether the data she was seeing was real or hallucinated. When she tired of that, she would churn through the logs of data and research and accidents, looking for any scrap of information that would help them all.The next morning, Mimo said nothing as Chaeyoung woke up. He simply sat and ate his doshirak in a gloomy silence.Instead, Ali asked. “Do we have a concrete plan yet?”For the next few days, her answer was the same. “Not yet, but I am close, just one—maybe two—more days.”Ali would offer an idea, then almost immediately reject it as implausible or too likely to fail, and then get ready to head down to the core lab. On the fifth morning, even Ali had fallen silent, and Chaeyoung was the first to speak in the morning.“I actually have the start of an idea,” she said, though she really had no clue. “I just need today to get things in order.”Ali morosely shook his head. “I don’t know, Chae. Things are dire down there.”“What do you mean?”“The Grayson scientists,” Ali sighed. “They’re finishing some tasks before we even tell them they need to—they’re catching on, Chae.”“Look, anchuan shiyong![109][Di Lingua]: Safe handling! ↑ I really have an idea this time.”“Oke. Sure,” Ali gave her a grim smile and followed Mimo to the core lab.When they were gone, she paced around the hab. “Oke…oke…think…think. This isn’t working…gotta go back.”She sat down in the exocortex flat, connected.“Please give a list of questions I have marked as unanswered.”EAR windows of all her research dead-ends appeared.“Order. Reverse chronological.”There. That was her idea. Glow grass was an iron-eater. The xenolith technology was a closed time-like curve computer, but it was based on self-assembling circuits in ferrofluids according to Ali and Mimo. And there it was. She had an idea, but she needed to go down to the core lab to see if it would work.***“Chaeyoung!” Ty said with exuberance, yet a completely flat and disinterested expression was visible through his faceplate. “It’s been a while—what brings you down here?”“I’ve been thinking about Ferrilumina mycoides and the xenoliths again.”“The what?”“The glow grass. Ferrilumina mycoides. That’s the name I gave the glow grass.”Ty rolled his eyes at her. “Oke. And? I have a lot of actual work to do.” Ty turned and walked across the core lab over toward a workbench on the front side of the xenolith tent. Chaeyoung followed, frustrated by how aggravating it was to interact with Ty. He never seemed to listen, obfuscated her plans, and was so arrogant about it all. She sometimes imagined that Grayson Services Group genetically engineered him in a lab to keep captive scientists in line by making him intolerably stubborn. Frustrating their scientific curiosity so they would turn their anger on him, rather than on the people using threats of lethal violence to keep the scientists in captivity. At least she had the slimmest amount of leverage left.She scowled at him. “I can speak to Garcia directly, if you would prefer.”“Fine,” Ty smirked. “But you can’t play that card forever. What do you need now?”“I want to directly monitor the interactions of Ferrilumina—the glow grass—both reproductive spores and live samples, with the xenolith ferrofluids.”Ty groaned. “Ugh. Didn’t we talk about this a few weeks ago? I don’t think there’s anything useful we can learn from that—and it could interfere with the other projects.”Guards rushed into the tent with the four xenoliths, which distracted Chaeyoung. That was where Ali and Mimo spent most of their time working. She wondered what could happen in the xenolith tent.“Are you even paying attention?” Ty whined.Chaeyoung stared at him, flipped the Earther a rude gesture, and muttered. “Yu’ll tsow.”[110][Di Lingua]: Fuck you. ↑ Ty turned his back to Chaeyoung and picked up an ink display. “You know you shouldn’t be so rude—”Pop. Pop. Chaeyoung froze at the sound of weapons fire from the tent. Her heart pounding, sweat on her brow. More people ran into the xenolith tent. Ty left his workbench and followed. Fear paralyzed her.Ty had just reached the hatch to the tent. There was a flash of light that was so bright, and fast, that Chaeyoung’s eyes stung before her faceplate polarized into an obsidian sheet. The tent burst in a flash of light. Ty’s figure swallowed up in the flash.Thwomp. The pressure wave slammed into her chest. She fell over. Her head bounced, hitting the metal O-ring around her neck with the back of her head, then her chin. She had a muddled mind, filled with fuzzy thoughts. Ringing hummed in her ears. She rolled over to her knees. “Pol tsow.[111][Di Lingua]: Shit fuck. ↑ Fuck fuck fuck,” she felt along her environmental suit frantically searching for holes, breaches, or any sign of potentially lethal contamination.Dust and thin metallic flakes from the tent structure covered her environmental suit, mixed with red splotches she did not want to think about. Her heart slammed into her chest, her breathing was ragged and uneven, and her hands were shaking. But she was fine. Her suit remained intact. Then the extent of the destruction dawned on her.A cloud of ash billowed up from gouges along the floor—like dust storms on Ahtash—and steam boiled out of large gashes ripped open in the core lab’s dome. Shredded ceramics flapped in the breeze produced by the undulations of heat and outgassing created by the explosion. The xenolith tent itself was nothing but twisted and burned scaffolding, only five prone environmental suits and a single xenolith were visible through the thinning smoke and ash. Two of the environmental suits appeared to be moving. Gray ash from an oxygen fire covered all of them.“Mimo! Ali!”Chaeyoung ran toward the wreckage, hopped over the twisted remnants, past the last standing xenolith. There was a buzz in her ears, a tingle in her teeth, and pressure behind her eyes as she passed within half a meter of the xenolith. She flinched, suddenly aware of movement coming from her peripheral vision. The xenolith next to her still had alien instruments covering it, but now they shook—almost danced—and it appeared to be in rhythm with the buzz in her head. She frowned, feeling unease but sure it resulted from the explosion and the continued smoldering embers of human scientific instruments scattered around the wreckage. She ignored it and pushed toward the nearest environmental suit. It was a guard. The faceplate had a crack, exposing a badly burned face with part of the skull visible. Nearly vomiting, she tasted bitter bile and copper in her mouth. To get the horror out of sight, she rolled the dead guard back over. There was a medical kit—still intact near the guard’s back. She took it. The kit was gecko gripped, its release melted shut from the fire. She kept pulling until its zipper seal gave way, and the contents spilled out.“Kpata-kpata bin tsow.[112][Di Lingua]: Utterly fucked. ↑ Fuck!” She left the medical equipment and moved ahead to the next nearest prone environmental suit.“Mimo!” Soot covered his faceplate, obscuring his face. Layers of destroyed flaky aerogel sloughed off from the melted outer layers of his suit. The flakes caught in thermals and drifted into the air like fist-sized snowflakes. His eyes were rolling back in his head, but his faceplate was fogging up with his breath.Worst of all, there was a vantablack xenolith pinecone segment lodge into the neck of his suit. Black fluids dripped out of the scale-like surface, flowed up to the faceplate instead of down in the weak natural gravity. On the faceplate, the liquid would solidify, then flow and bubble back down to the piece embedded in Mimo’s neck like a video of fluid flow played in reverse. These fluids never completely left the surfaces of the pinecone, but instead, boiled without really boiling.She shook his shoulders when she saw him, tried to get him to focus on her. “Mimo! Mimo! Fuck!”She stared at the ferrofluids, filled with strange metal complexes, bubbling like it was alive itself, breathing in sync with Mimo. Ferrofluids. Anaphylactic shock. The memories came to her, and she had a plan to save her friend.With a jolt, she ran back to the spilled medical kit on the back of the dead guard. Riffling through the pile, she eventually found what she was looking for: epinephrine, iodine, medical weaves that could act as pressure seals. She grabbed the rad-shielded epinephrine hypo, a pressurized bottle of iodine, and as many weaves as she could hold, then ran back to Mimo.Sliding to her knees, she spilled the medical equipment on his chest and grabbed the hypo, preparing it. Now, she just needed to find the medical administration port on his biosuit. But there was nothing to see—the layers on his chest had completely melted and fused together. There was nowhere she could safely administer the epinephrine without breaking the environmental suit seal.“Think, comot, you can solve this,” she said to herself.She looked at his arms and legs for any kind of opening and found a rip through his environmental suit. The skin of his elbow was burnt, bleeding, and puckered, but it was her opening. She readied the hypo and leaned over Mimo.Chaeyoung’s hand shook. She took a deep breath and held it until her hand was steady, then jabbed the epinephrine hypo into Mimo’s arm. She threw the empty hypo away, grabbed weaves and the iodine, and sprayed Mimo’s exposed skin with a spurt of pressurized iodine before slapping a self-sealing weave down on top.“Halt!” a vicious voice screamed at her over her radio.She froze in place, slowly lifted her arms up. “If you want to save him, you need to help me!”A Grayson Services Group soldier in a puffy, but skeleton faced, environmental suit walked around Mimo, gun pointed at Chaeyoung’s face.“Get that thing out of my fucking face and help me! He’s not going to survive if we sit on our asses!”The soldier lowered their weapon slightly but did not fully relax.“Help me get him to a medic!” Chaeyoung couldn’t see the soldier’s face through the skeleton faceplate, couldn’t see if her arguments were getting through.“That’s Dr. Jakande, and if you don’t help me save him, Sato is going to be pissed off!” she shouted with authority. “Now, help me lift him up and get him to the medic.”“Fine,” they snarled.“Get his shoulders. I got his legs.”The lanky Martian, even in an environmental suit, was light in the sub-Lunar gravity, but Chaeyoung’s pulse was rapid, and she grunted and strained as she held his legs.“Oke, go!” the soldier ordered when they had lifted Mimo off the ground.When she was up to her feet, she realized she could not go the way she came, but had to go back through where the door had been. “This way!”She turned Mimo’s legs as they carried him through the wreckage. She almost dropped Mimo’s legs when she found Ali. Sprawled out to the left of the door frame fragments, with two obvious bullet holes through his faceplate. His hair was still smoldering, and his skin deeply scorched from the fire.“Agggh!” she screamed with her teeth clenched.“What’s wrong?” the guard asked.But Chaeyoung pressed forward, over her dead friend, and delicately through the twisted metal frame. She had to step around the remnants of the door, and the pools of blood forming around Ty’s environmental suit pressed flat underneath. She tried not to think about it and moved forward. By now, others had joined their efforts. Grayson scientists were on their knees over bodies in the wreckage. Soldiers patrolled, pointing their weapons, and taking combat stances as if their vigilance was necessary now. But all it did was create more obstacles on Chaeyoung’s way to the medical tent. They had to wind around the bench where she and Ty had been arguing minutes earlier. Chaeyoung heard more buzzing in her ears, in her teeth, and behind her eyes. It was like a cicada buzz in summer in Tiantang, back home on Celosia. In the corner of her eye, she saw the remaining xenolith with the purple alien protrusions dancing to an unheard rhythm.She did not know how she made it all the way to the medical tent. Even though it was only twenty meters from end-to-end in the core lab dome, every part of her body seemed to betray her. Yet, she made it. “We have a medical emergency here! Open the airlock hatch!” Chaeyoung demanded as they got within half a meter of the medical tent.Without further protest, the hatch opened, the medic waved them into an airlock. “Slow is smooth and smooth is fast,” the medic in a white and red environmental suit advised. When they got Mimo into the hatch, the medic closed it behind them. “We have to do the full decontamination cycle.”“There’s no time!” Chaeyoung insisted. “Just open the inner hatch.”“Protocol,” the soldier holding Mimo’s torso noted.Before Chaeyoung could object further, a hatch closed. She was blocked. Immense columns of disinfectant spray washed over everything. Sshpuff. Sshpuff. Then a tremendous gust of hot air, drying them off. Whoosh. Then, as the disinfecting ultraviolet bombarded them, her faceplate polarized. Her heads-up display showed the air outside her suit was now safely breathable.“Oke, get the patient inside,” the medic said calmly.Despite the partial polarization of Chaeyoung’s faceplate from the disinfectant cycle, sshe had enough visibility through her faceplate to get Mimo to the nearest medical flat. She helped slide his body onto a medical table and jumped back as autonomous surgical arms unfolded from the ceiling above his torso. She stumbled back from the flat and collapsed against the wall. “Oh, fuck!” she yelped as she struggled to suck down air.Her hands and legs trembled, and tears in her eyes blurred her vision.“What happened out there?” the soldier asked her over the noise of the autonomous systems as they removed Mimo’s environmental suit with surgical precision.“I…I don’t know,” Chaeyoung gasped for more air, and her heart rate slowed down as her panic eased. “I…must have been…a…oxygen fire.”“I told Garcia the oxygen was too high,” the soldier said with a click of their tongue.Chaeyoung nodded, then focused on her breathing. Slowly, her body returned to normal, and the adrenaline wore thin. “Oh, fuck,” she groaned as her stomach ached.Her abdomen cramped violently like someone was stabbing her repeatedly. Sharp, blinding pain. Then she remembered Ali was dead.“Oh. Fuck!” Neither the medic nor the soldier paid her any more attention.In minutes, Chaeyoung had regained some semblance of composure. When she stood up to check on Mimo, she discovered that someone had already stripped the tattered remains of his environmental suit. She could now see the full extent of the damage. She grimaced, balled her hands into fists, and took a deep breath to remain calm.Debris from the explosion filled Mimo’s lacerations. The xenolith shard in his neck pulsated. There was a vicious, third-degree burn on his left shoulder and down his left arm. His skin was so irritated and inflamed that it was difficult to see his red Martian tattoos. The medic was busy finding more lacerations, spraying them with a murky liquid.“What the fuck is that?” asked the guard, pointing to the shard in Mimo’s neck. “Is it…boiling?”“It’s near his artery,” the medic dispassionately announced.“Not quite, though,” the guard mumbled.There was a bright flash as the Grayson guard unsheathed a cut knife. “We should cut that fucking thing out. Cauterize the wound.”“Wait!” Chaeyoung yelled. “You’ll kill him!”“Stand down,” the medic said dispassionately.“I am technically above you on the org chart, ‘doc” the soldier said.“Not during a medical emergency,” the medic cocked their head up to look at the cut knife, then at the soldier’s faceplate. “Until I get word from the commander or Garcia, this patient’s care is in my hands—I have medical override authority. So put that away, please.”They sheathed the cut knife. “Fine. We should probably get them down here, anyway. Situation is beyond fucked.”***Chaeyoung had slumped over in a corner, her knees pulled up and tightly hugged by her arms into her chest in the central cavity of her environmental suit. Her escort—the Grayson guard—had left her, Mimo, and his medic alone nearly an hour ago. Chaeyoung did her best not to look over at Mimo, but her discipline lost out to anxiety, fear, and curiosity.Mimo had deep maroon Martian tattoos all over his body. Dots of the colored material started near his wrist, formed a gradient up to his elbow where the negative space of the ink became the positive space, and then above his elbow they evoked lines of waves and bits of flotsam dragged along with the currents of the ocean. Along his neck, this sea gave way to simple shapes that ended several centimeters under his jawline.Mimo’s cool Martian basalt skin provided little contrast against his tattoo’s coloring, but it was enough to see plainly now that his skin was less inflamed than it had been. Chaeyoung could even see some bumps of scar tissue that covered his body. The lines of the tattoo followed the patterns of scarring closely, with some artistic license. Like all Martians who left their home, Mimo had medical implants to make his body more robust against the rigors of near-Earth accelerations, and these scars were the result—those tattoos were a celebration of this most Martian necessity. Stellah steh born in Sol, but not on Mars or Earth, would sometimes require these medical alterations, but not so universally as the Martians. Even so, the Martian art form had been adapted to all the inhabited worlds of the Solar system, except Earth, with each planetesimal and moon creating distinct traditions around their shared Martian origin.Each time Chaeyoung would glance in Mimo’s direction the tattoos seemed to change. Radiating out from the ferrofluid infiltration lodged in his neck, tendrils of purple seemed to expand along the network defined by his medical implants, almost like something was replacing the ink in the tattoos with bread mold. Near the wound in his neck, it had turned the negative space of his tattoos into a pallid and sickly blue gray. It was deeply disturbing, and all Chaeyoung could do was watch the unfolding horror and hope it all worked out in the end. “There’s not a lot we can do for him now, except wait. In the meantime, are you hurt at all?” the medic asked.“No, I don’t think so.”“Alright. I will let you know if anything changes.”“Fine.”Chaeyoung could hear movement at the airlock, and then a chathunk chathunk as it cycled through the disinfectant phases. She nervously stood up and approached the surgical flat protectively. Sato stormed in, wearing his obsidian demon armor accompanied by one soldier in a skeleton-faced environmental suit.The medic turned and saluted sharply. “Commander Sato!”“At ease,” Sato said coolly as he approached the medical flat.Sato, demon claws clasped behind his back, loomed over Mimo and the medical flat. His demon face surveying Chaeyoung’s injured friend intently. He then stepped away, saw her slouched against the wall, and tilted his helmet so the grimacing demonic visage appeared to smile at her with its sharp teeth.“What is your medical opinion here?”“I…I,” the medic stammered. “To be honest, Commander, if he’s like any other exposure case, the odds are low he will live.”Sato nodded slowly. “Yet, if it was like other exposure cases, he should be dead by now, correct?”“Yes. However, he has not regained consciousness since the…incident. His body is running a temperature, and as you can see there’s this strange inflammation at the injury site,” the medic pointed out the xenolith pinecone. “If we don’t remove that, he will probably worsen and die. However, it’s lodged too close to his jugular, and I believe removal will also kill him.”Sato walked over to the medical flat and leaned in, and inspected the xenolith fragment in Mimo’s neck. “Can you remove the fragment and keep it intact?”“Yes. Absolutely.”“In that case,” Sato pointed at the xenolith fragment. “Cut it out, but keep it intact.” The guard pulled out a cut knife and approached the operating table. “Aye aye!” “No, wait!” Chaeyoung tried to position herself between the guard and Mimo.“Dr. No! Get out of the way,” Sato said.“Why are you risking his life to recover that fragment?” she asked.“Your friend is already dead,” Sato said with as much chill as the deepest parts of space. “The only way his death was not for nothing is if we can salvage that fragment with all the modifications Dr. Jakande and Dr. Peyton made to it before this disaster.”She pressed herself closer to Mimo, spread her arms out wider. “No.”She thought she sensed Mimo stir behind her. There were glimpses of movement in the corner of her eyes, flashes of the strange black and blue and gray molds that had visibly covered his entire upper torso. She glared at Sato and his soldier crony. “You’re not killing my friend.”Sato grabbed Chaeyoung’s environmental suit by the chin and threw her out of the way with unexpected strength. She slammed into the metal bulkhead as she fell backwards. Sato pointed at Mimo. “Do it! Now!” Sato’s soldier approached with the white-hot blade and leaned over Mimo, pressed it gently and slowly toward the xenolith fragment. As the heat of the blade touched the strange black fluids, tendrils snapped out in all directions, knocking the cut knife away.“What the fuck?” the soldier stumbled back and pulled out their coilgun.Tendrils ripped through Mimo’s body. Purple and black sickly slime burst through his skin like fruiting bodies. Winding ferrofluid tendrils, twisted, and laid themselves flat against his body like a fibrous, black, armor. All in the blink of an eye.Mimo’s eyes popped open, his head jerked. In a single, smooth motion, Mimo kicked the soldier’s weapon into the air, jumped up off the medical flat, grabbed the weapon in midair, and positioned it right at the soldier’s eye level.Snap.Thump. Mimo, his skin transformed into a purple-black weave, was now covered in blood. A startled medic backed away. Sato was already reacting, throwing himself backwards, pulling a hypersonic weapon to bear. An obsidian blur of motion.Snap. Snap. Mimo’s left arm burst open like a bag of liquid stabbed with a cut knife. An errant tracer burst through the medic’s faceplate, removing the jaw. Terrified burbling, but no mouth to scream. Blood was everywhere. Thick black tendrils whipped back and forth from Mimo’s elbow. The gun that had been in Mimo’s hand clattered to Chaeyoung’s feet. Black filaments sprayed in a wide arc as Mimo flailed. Several droplets spilled over the wounded medic and seemed to crawl into his body through the wound. The dying medic turned pale then purple, then the black fluid seemed to enter their blood, swallowing the dying medic’s pupils in pools of darkness as they fell to the ground writhing in paroxysms.Sato retreated to the airlock, Mimo released a mind melting, inhuman yowl and leapt off the medical flat, tackling Sato. Snap snap. More black blood splatter.A stowage locker next to Chaeyoung exploded. She flinched and screamed. A hurricane of debris fluttered around, and her ears rang. She grabbed the gun, fell forward, onto her knees, and crawled.Viscera was all over the floor—some human, some inhuman. She peaked around the corner. The medic was violently spasming, black tendrils exploding out of the hole in the medic’s faceplate. The airlock was in pieces. A thick red blood streak went through the exit hatch. There was no sign of either Mimo or Sato. The guard lay slumped under the medical flat, headless and motionless. She stood up and ran for the exit.The core lab was chaos. The eviscerated body of Sato lay prone just outside of the medical tent’s entrance, but his body was rocking with tremors and black wiggling tendrils. Two other bodies lay prone, and Mimo, with both arms missing and now replaced by violent, thick, black tentacles, was chasing down the rest of the Grayson Services Group personnel.Garcia ran past, with a weapon drawn. A skeleton guard in an armored biosuit, not an environmental suit, approached Chaeyoung with their weapon pointed at her face. She dropped the coilgun she was holding. They relaxed, then tilted their helmets to survey the rest of the scene.Garcia advanced toward Mimo. Red tracers reached out from his weapon. Snap snap snap. Founts of black ichor burst from Mimo’s body, but he did not even flinch, let alone slow his pursuit. Something knocked Chaeyoung over. A white blur. It was the medic.The medic ignored Chaeyoung, left her on the ground where she fell, and lunged toward Garcia. A black tendril swung out from the medic’s faceplate, attacking Garcia from behind. The top of his helmet rolled away, leaving a thick red trail of blood in its wake. He fell limp to the ground.Chaeyoung stood up. The soldier who had aimed a gun at her remained immobile. Their weapon loosely held in their non-environmental suit gloves. She braced herself on their shoulders to get their attention, slamming her fist down on one of their armored plates. They twitched, didn’t push her away, and the skeleton faceplate turned its attention to her.“Run. Fucking run! Get out of here!” Chaeoung said.Flee. Leave the abomination behind. Survive. Escape. These were her only thoughts. She turned toward the core lab’s only entrance and made a mad dash out into the alien cavern, through the winding paths that lead through the glow grass. The soldier she had screamed at followed close behind.She was half-way up the path when the soldier behind her fell into her, knocking her over. She spun around as she fell, landing hard on her rear. There, on top of the Grayson soldier with the armored biosuit, was Sato, only he had changed like Mimo. His abdomen split down the center, transforming into a purple mass of bulbous, grotesque flesh with intermittent tendrils of black ropes. Chaeyoung backed away. Sato leapt high into the cavern from the back of the soldier.Ferrofluid. Iron-eaters. The thoughts flashed through her mind as Sato fell toward her. Blindly, she reached out, grabbed the glow grass by its fronds, and threw it in the air. Sato screeched. She rolled. Sato landed where she had been. Tendrils of glow grass wrapped themselves over Sato’s face as they had once wrapped violently around her hand, and he rocked back-and-forth wrestling with the leafy thing. Black smoke rose from where the glow grass had made contact.The iron-eater was eating the iron of Sato’s blood. She kicked him with everything she had. He rolled off the path into the knee-high glow grass. There was more terrible screaming, but she turned and fled. She made it to the ladder, climbed up into the environmental suit airlock, found her hatch, and backed into it like usual. Her heads-up display splashed with warnings that all meant one thing: the airlock hatch was closed and sealed from the other side. Someone had activated a quarantine procedure. She turned around and slammed her fist against the hatch, screaming as tears poured down her face.Someone was on the ladder behind her. Her eyes went wide, and she slowly turned around. It was the soldier Sato had knocked over. She backed away, putting her hands up ready to defend herself.“I’m still human,” the soldier said.She relaxed. “They locked us in here.”“Fuck that shit,” they pushed Chaeyoung aside, took a few steps back, rushed the hatch, and kicked it. “Huuuha!” With the exoskeleton enhanced strength, the hatch burst out of its frame. Without waiting for her, the Grayson soldier jumped through the hole to the relative safety of the staging ground cavern beyond. Yellow warning lights flashed as there was an airlock breach between the alien structure and the human-habitable cavern. Wind ripped from the cavern because of the negative pressure. It was like a gentle push backwards. She scrambled to her feet, bent over, and wriggled through the broken-open hatch.It was barely larger than her environmental suit, but she made it. When she flopped onto the stone floor of the cavern, a Grayson soldier slapped an emergency seal along the frame. It tensed up with a pfft as pressure straps snapped tight with a press of a button. The warning alarms silenced as the Grayson soldier sealed the breach to the environmental suit airlock. The Grayson soldier turned and offered her a hand. She shook her head and stood up on her own. Smashed pieces of glow grass fronds covered the soldier’s armor. They both had just escaped from the core lab.“What now?” Chaeyoung asked when she caught her breath again.“Now? We seal this place behind us, grab everything we can, and head to the surface.”Chaeyoung nodded, turned to go to her shared hab and grab what she could of the exocortex interface. She did not even make it three full strides when other Grayson soldiers and personnel rushed the two of them. Soldiers and personnel pointed weapons. There was shouting and chaos.“We need to get back to the surface and lock this fucking place down,” the guard she had helped now helped her argue with the rest of their comrades.“Where’s the commander?” One asked.“Where’s Garcia?” Another added.“Dead! Sato’s dead! Garcia’s dead! They’re all dead down there. If we stay here, we’re going to be dead, too. So, let’s get the fuck out of here! Evacuate! Seal it up tight behind us and shoot anything that comes out of that fucking airlock. Nothing left behind is human anymore!”One of the armed guards pointed a weapon at Chaeyoung. She stood still and closed her eyes from total exhaustion. As if burned into her retinas, all she saw was the image of Ali’s blood-drained and burned face, blown open by a bullet, and Mimo’s transformed monstrousness. She shivered, but she was not cold.“And what do we do with her?” A soldier’s tinny voice wondered.