[68549] ChaeyoungMu HerculisChaeyoung shivered in her poorly named HEAT BRACE as the crew of the SSV Jiuhe explored an alien wreck—it was unquestionably of non-human origin, leaving no doubts among the Jiuhe expedition. In the low light of the excavated ice tunnel, her spinel ceramic view ports were nearly useless. Instead, she relied on the false color sight of her infrared sensors to show her the white-cold contours of the frozen tunnel between her view ports on her HEAT BRACE’s faceplate display. Further along in the tunnel, Vis’s lumbering hardshell radiated heat from the back of the HEAT BRACE like a dark light beacon leading the rest of the excavation team in their forward trudge. Hardsuits had spacious interiors, which was usually a welcome alternative to clinging biosuits, but hiking through a cramped tunnel with gecko grip in microgravity turned relief into liability. With each step Chaeyoung jittered and bounced around inside her hardsuit. Ice had filled the hallways of the ruined non-human spacecraft, accumulating from the rings of the nearby gas giant the derelict orbited. Water ice had mixed with a brackish fluid and froze in inconvenient ways because of microgravity hydrodynamics, which spread the fluids evenly across every surface in every direction, leaving sheets of ice filled with briny microbes from some alien biome. Presumably, whatever had built and once piloted the craft brought this brine with them, but this was one of a multitude of unanswered questions for the Acheron Private Capital Group expedition.“We’ve been on a lot of these EVAs,” Vis said, breaking the eerie silence as they approached the temporary facility established near the heart of the derelict craft.“Tired already?” Chaeyoung asked. “Or are you just dreading microgravity recovery time when we get back onboard Jiuhe?” Vis sighed. “I don’t sleep very well when we’re on the ice.” “Bad dreams?” “Ye. Every night.”“It’s probably the infrasonic vibrations we absorb through our boots,” Dr. Flores, the third member of the HEAT BRACE expedition, explained. “It can create a sense of dread, like something is watching. Nothing to it, though.”Vis scoffed. “Knowing that doesn’t help me sleep any better, Flores.”Awkward silence returned as the three continued deeper into the alien craft. It was a sprawling, nearly four-hundred-meter-long ruin. The wreck appeared to have the shape of an oblong, flattened stone from the outside, but inside, it presented a chaotic maze of winding tunnels, with most of them filled with ice or blocked because of structural failure. When the expedition discovered the spacecraft, they were fortunate to find a prompt path that led deeper into the craft from the exterior. Within a few weeks, they established a forward field camp deep in the derelict’s core, beneath many meters of ice. Operating so far from spacecraft support, and so deep into the strange tunnels, hindered exploration and discovery, but it also gave researchers protection from the high radiation environment of the alien spacecraft’s orbit.Chaeyoung and the others reached an intersection as six tunnels met at wildly different angles. Trapped gases had formed a natural hollow bubble, but only one of the six tunnels did not end in a blockage, the correct path marked by the thick power cable and infrared strobes. Expectation’s tension built in her chest as they approached their field camp. She had been here many times, but it was still bewildering. It was beyond any expectation she had—she had been right! They had found alien life in Mu Herculis, and more than that, evidence of technological life, filled with biological samples. Ahead, the tunnel opened to a heavily iced over cistern-like cavern naturally formed in the ice. It contained a collection of emergency habitat tents which had three HEAT BRACEs attached to airlock columns. Each BRACE had their radiators and power systems flipped up and over the helmets of the empty hardsuits like a jacket being caught in the wind. Stacks of equipment, instruments, and autonomous probes littered the cave. Bright lights anchored into the ice forced out the shadows and illuminated every centimeter. Little flag poles with seal codes marked points of interest. Two large portions of ice had received particular attention, and featured thin filament grids suspended a few centimeters above the ice. It was messy, but they had extensive sterilization procedures for all the equipment to reduce terrestrial contamination of the site.“I’ll wake up the others,” Liam said.Chaeyoung waved at Vis. “Let’s get started.”Vis and Chaeyoung headed over to a little nook in the ice, past one of the large flat surfaces with a grid. This was the focus of the excavation. Wrapped in a clear aerogel blanket was a partially buried alien corpse. A rocky hot spring-like formation shaped the location of its entombment, and despite the frozen surface, an unseen heat source sustained the movement of most of the liquid beneath. Though tattered like sliced fiber cords, the twisted limbs of ragged gray-blue leathery skin protruded from the discolored frosty surface and glimmered in a panoply of colors like a diffraction grating. Most of the corpse was still under the ice and covered with what looked like grass with long leafy tendrils, almost like feathers. Beneath the flesh, inundated with the worm-like tendrils of the grass’s root bed, the body was a charcoal gray with wrinkled edges in a saturated indigo.Chaeyoung’s skin tingled with a frisson. This was the single most important astrobiological specimen ever collected, and she had played a pivotal role in its discovery. Vis gently removed the aerogel blanket and set it on a makeshift bench made from an overturned aluminum equipment crate. Chaeyoung patted her hand on the ice next to the exposed portion of the corpse, and the grass beneath released a burst of cerulean blue in reaction to the change in pressure.“Think we’re ready to crack the ice today?” Chaeyoung asked. “I would like to sample this glow grass.”Vis gently wiped the icy surface with her glove and took a position with her helmet angled toward Chaeyoung. “Oke, ready to record on your mark.”Chaeyoung nodded as she watched the phosphorescence diffuse across the root system. “Oke—ready?”“Ye, go!”Chaeyoung gave a nod and began narrating. “Oke, this is Digger One, expedition two, excursion uh….”Vis turned toward the camera. “Thirty.” “Ye. Thirty. Day one at the internal dig site. Dr. Flores is currently relieving excursion twenty-nine, and we’re about to sample what we’ve dubbed the burial urn, given its appearance of intentional burial. Remote sensing indicates a toxic brine under the ice—primarily lithium with traces of magnesium, boron, and some nasty organic and inorganic acids. As previously reported, the bottom of what we’re calling the urn appears to have some sort of heat source, which has prevented it from freezing completely—I still believe it may result from the glow grass metabolism.”“Laser is ready,” Vis announced as she handed the handheld device to Chaeyoung.“Thank you,” Chaeyoung positioned the laser and continued to narrate. “The so-called glow grass bed has neatly separated blade-like leaves, appearing to range in length from two to twelve centimeters—organic based life from spectral analysis. Each individual blade fans slightly and ranges in width from a knife-like tip at the top to a maximum width of several millimeters. The glow grass exhibits a pressure-sensitive light reaction, possibly like chromatophores. It is not clear if the grass is still alive and has survived the cold temperatures and lack of atmosphere, but I suspect the glow grass is digesting the carcass like a fungus. It may have played some cultural importance in burial rituals similarly to fungal recyclers in some human cultures, but it’s too early to tell.”“None of that is new information, eheen,” Vis noted.Chaeyoung smiled. “I am just being thorough. We’ve reached the limit of what we can determine remotely. We have some overall ratios of elements, some idea of the chemical structure, and so on. Organics embedded and frozen in the ice are making it difficult to get clear readings. We will begin breaking through the ice cover with the laser drill.”Chaeyoung waved her hand over her visor to deploy polarizers to protect her vision and turned to Vis, who did the same. Nervously, she gave a tug on the power cable of the laser cutter in her hand, testing its integrity. “Oke. Cutting the ice now,” she quickly sliced a square in the ice’s top, set the laser aside, and pushed a thin aluminum spatula into the gap. “Attempting to remove the ice layer with the spudger,” she said as she pried the block from the square cut. Below, the grass glowed. “I can see that the ice has trapped some of the grass-like substance. I will attempt to remove the ice sample with minimal damage to the grasses—can you hand me the cut knife?”Vis handed Chaeyoung a sheathed blade. Chaeyoung pulled it free and used the white-hot rhenium blade to sublimate the ice from around the blades of grass. She was slow and careful, and the blade quickly dimmed to a cool gray with most of the ice still in place.“Oke, that didn’t work…going to just cut the grass.” Chaeyoung used the cool, but sharp, edge of the cut knife and separated the grass from the block. A deep indigo fluid poured from the stalks and floated into the air like blood.“As you can see, there is some sort of violet, or maybe black, internal fluid. It appears to be the same color as the damaged edges of the grasses. Interesting,” Chaeyoung said as she lifted the ice block and set it on the workbench to inspect the cut grass. “What does our resident plant and physics expert think?”Vis walked over to look closely and put snippets of the grass into several sample vials. “I am not sure it’s even sensible to call it a plant.”Chaeyoung shrugged and moved in to get a closer look at the exposed grass. There was no wind, but the grass appeared to be waving back and forth. Like seaweed in the bays of Tiantang on Celosia.“It looks like it’s moving—”As Chaeyoung moved her hand to brush the grasses a mat of tendrils whipped up from the mummified body and wrapped over her hand. “Tsow![67][Di Lingua]: Fuck! ↑Fuck!”Plumes of black gas shot out from the contact point. Chaeyoung’s heart jumped into her throat. As the brine corroded the outer layer of her glove, Chaeyoung panicked. Tendrils of the grass wrapped violently around her digits. There was tension and heat. She shoved herself away from the ice, hard. The grass tendrils ripped from her hand.Her foot, gecko gripped to the ground, kept her anchored, but she had pushed too hard. Vis screamed something, but the sound drowned her voice out as the back radiators of her HEAT BRACE contacted the ice. Roaring streams of sublimated gases burst past her helmet, followed by the total silence of the vacuum. Vaporized gases pushed her forward. She whiplashed face-first toward the ice shelf and the glow grass. There was no time to get her hands in front, and her faceplate smashed into the ice ledge, followed by her face into her faceplate.Chaeyoung was stunned. Bubbles of blood collected on her eyebrows. More ice vaporized from the heat of the spinel ceramic, pushing her back from the ledge and obscuring her view, and she spun in microgravity. Her view of the world had fuzzed into an undifferentiated blur, and her thoughts were distant and slippery. Intense pressure in her hand became pain, though both seemed distant as if separated by a yawning void. Voices from the radio called for her attention but made no lasting impression.Did she speak? Did she answer the torrent of worried questions from Vis? Chaeyoung didn’t notice.A series of images, a soothing beep, and flashing lights appeared on her faceplate. Chaeyoung’s head still spun. She noticed the constant pressure of ice on her back. Warnings sounded in her HEAT BRACE. Brightly illuminated text screamed for attention all over her faceplate and EAR. As her radiators cooled, she depressed into the ice in a hole the HEAT BRACE had melted. It took less than a minute for the power systems of her HEAT BRACE to fail with the decreasing temperature—not even enough time for anyone besides Vis to know something was wrong. She was on battery power, and her suit was not happy about it.“Do you know where you are today?” the fluctuating autonomous voice from her HEAT BRACE diagnostics system asked.“Space.”“Who is on the EVA expedition with you?” the auto’s voice was soothing.“Uh…Vis.”“Where were you last week?”“Jiuhe.”“Where were you last year?”“Uh…Ahtash? Maybe somewhere in Ya Ke.”“Please move your thumb to the visual indicator.”An image appeared some distance away. Chaeyoung laughed as she held her left gloved hand out and moved it toward the indicator.“Nawa oh![68][Di Lingua]: Woah! ↑ This glove is fucked up.”“Please focus on the indicator,” the diagnostic tool said.“Oke.”“Please focus on the indicator.”“Fuck! I am!”Vis’s voice broke through the thick layer of aerogel that seemed to be wrapped over Chaeyoung’s mind. “Auto doc is saying she has a concussion—I’ll take her back.”***Chaeyoung yawned awake in Vis’s cabin on SSV Jiuhe. It still felt like a thick layer of aerogel wrapped over her brain. It had been a week since her accident with the glow grass, but there was still a vague discomfort in her skull, almost like she could feel the bone underneath, and the bones in her hand were stiff. Her head pounded, and she groggily searched for a can of water, then nearly jumped out of the bunk with alarm when an unfamiliar voice growled from the spacecraft’s intercom.“Say again, all spin deck personnel report to assigned core storm cellars by 19:22 local. That’s T-Minus fifteen minutes. Core storm cellars—not storm shelters! No exceptions!”Chaeyoung, now half-off the bunk and completely awake, pulled herself into her biosuit and put her hair into a messy bun. With a glance toward Vis’s empty bunk. Where was she? Her thoughts searched for the memory sluggishly. Vis had gone to the mess. She would go to the storm cellar first, not to their shared cabin. Satisfied, Chaeyoung stumbled through the curved hallway with the other expedition scientists as they shuffled to the elevators.“Dr. No! Dr. No!” Patel called out in the hallway. “Do you know what’s happening?”“Not really,” Chaeyoung shook her head. “It’s probably just a weather event.”Patel shrugged and settled into the crowded elevator next to Chaeyoung. With only a slight tremble, the elevator took the nervous group directly to the thickly shielded deck nestled between Jiuhe’s spin decks and the rings of superconductors that helped to keep the spin decks rotating smoothly.Vis, as expected, was in the storm cellar, in her flat, along with many others from the flight crew. Chaeyoung settled into the empty flat next to Vis, attached her biosuit’s helmet, and reached her hand out. Vis squeezed her hand.“You should do your acclimation exercises, eheen,” Vis smiled at Chaeyoung through her biosuit faceplate. “You wouldn’t want to get sick while we’re stuck here.”Chaeyoung, already feeling the nauseating effects from the transition between spin and microgravity, waved open the application on her EAR and moved her hand out to touch the translucent windows scattered across her field of view. Initially, Chaeyoung had difficulty accomplishing these simple tasks, feeling both nauseated and exhausted and as if an invisible force pressed at her limbs, but these feelings ebbed just as the thrust acceleration from the main engine burn began.Ullage thrusters jiggled propellant into turbo pumps, shaking the passengers back and forth chaotically for several moments. Without warning, there was a heavy kick as the high thrust fusion engine started. Chaeyoung had to grunt from the “eyeballs in” acceleration—like a heavy weight had slammed down on her chest. “Fuck,” Liam said. “This is max thrust!”Chaeyoung weakened as every part of her body suddenly carried extra weight, and she could not hold on to Vis’s hand.Vis looked over to her. “Eheen!”[69][Di Lingua]: Sweety! ↑ It took most of Chaeyoung’s energy to turn, and she gave a tepid smile. “I’m here. I’m oke.” They burned under the hard thrust for several minutes. Chaeyoung’s weight was increasing, steadily, as less and less propellant remained. Then the Acheron captain screamed over the intercom.“All hands! Brace for impact! Brace! Brace! Brace!”Acceleration snapped Chaeyoung’s neck to one side, then the other. She felt like she was flung against the ground at a steep angle, only she was still in her acceleration flat. The lights in the storm cellar flickered and died. Chaeyoung was blind in the dark, surrounded by murmurs and worried shouts. They were in free-fall, but Chaeyoung found no genuine relief from the end of thrust—instead, a completely dominating sense of imminent doom replaced it.There was a blinding flash in the storm cellar. Snap. Pop. It was agonizingly loud, like metal plates slamming into each other at orbital speeds. Sparks filled the volume of the storm cellar in a flash, flew in a straight line, and sparked as they died against the outer bulkheads. After images lingered in her eyes, but it was pitch black again. Instinctively, Chaeyoung covered her ears with her hands, but they just smacked against the side of her helmet. All she heard was a high-pitched ringing. Her head throbbed from a sharp pain in her forehead. Behind her, she sensed movement. Something kicked at the deck and bumped into her flat.All at once, her stomach lurched. Acceleration wrenched her flat free from its bolts with a terrible screech of rending metal, and it flew through the void of darkness of the storm cellar. Glints in the dark centimeters away from her faceplate were her only landmark. She blacked out as she slammed hard against a bulkhead.***Chaeyoung’s heart thumped violently in her chest. Dazed, she looked around in sweat-covered confusion. Painfully, slowly, she regained awareness. She was laying against a wall of the storm cellar on Jiuhe. The twisted remains of her acceleration flat remained strapped to her back. Her gaze fixed upon the battered metal frame. It tore from its mounting on the storm cellar floor, but she remained attached.The throbbing heartbeat in her head made it hard to concentrate, but Chaeyoung listened. There were no alarm klaxons. Emergency lights draped the storm cellar in pulsating yellow. She had expected to be in microgravity, but there was a weight on her chest from the mass of her biosuit. A light acceleration was holding her in place, pinned in the corner of the storm cellar’s ceiling. As she moved her head to look around, a sharp pain in her back greeted her, causing her to exclaim. “Ahh! Fuck!”Vis called out, and bolstered Chaeyoung with hope. “You’re awake!”Vis’s face was above her now, and arms squeezed Chaeyoung firmly, causing her back to twitch.“Anchuan shiyong!”[70][Di Lingua]: Safe handling! ↑ Chaeyoung said with a grimace.“Sorry!” Vis said, as she pulled away.“It’s oke…I’m fine.”Chaeyoung gritted her teeth as she carefully leaned herself up on her elbows to survey the situation, keeping her body right on the edge of a violent spasm. A dark splatter of blood covered Vis, appearing almost pink in the deep yellow of the emergency lights. At the edge of outright panic at the sight, Chaeyoung relaxed when she noticed there were no obvious cuts or damage to Vis’s biosuit, and the blood was on the exterior of her faceplate. Vis’s hair was messy, she had a fresh cut on her face, one of her eyes looked bruised, and there was a large scratch on her faceplate, but Vis was standing upright with nothing in her body language showing she was in pain. Chaeyoung shifted her weight to her left hand to brace herself as she tried to stand. Shooting pain in her ribs cut her short, and she laid back down.She gasped as she struggled to control the pain in her body and grabbed her ribs with her right hand. “How long …was I…out?”“Maybe an hour,” Vis said nervously.“Well…fuck.”Vis smiled tepidly. “You’re awake now—that’s what counts.”Chaeyoung, careful not to strain her back from her reclined position, surveilled their surroundings. They were pinned along the storm cellar wall. All but the spinning, flashing emergency lights were off. Along the wall, where the floor was usually under normal acceleration, there were a few flats still bolted in place. Where there had been the large central pillar in the middle of the storm cellar from the ERR–AL drive spine of Jiuhe, there was now a buckled gash around a massive hole through the thick radiation shielding. All the internal systems of Jiuhe, which are usually hidden from sight, spilled out and bled puffs of gases or froze with large liquid icicles from leaks through this hole. A sooty smoke was billowing through the gash from unseen fires.All that lay between this gaping hole in vacuum and Chaeyoung was a transparent surface of an emergency pressurization system that had automatically deployed. She was, for the moment, safe in a little pocket of air. Cocooned in a temporary, flash-deployed, material. Her elation and relief were short-lived. She recoiled, retracting her left hand rapidly from the large pool of blood and gore surrounding the lifeless Patel. She almost retched as she saw the massive hole in Patel’s back, where the shattered bones of her spine had forced their way through her rib cage.Chaeyoung cried out as heat rose in her throat. “Oh…fuck!”There was a desperate intensity to wipe her hand somewhere, to look anywhere else, but the frantic motion to her right pulled her attention. Next to the edge of the bubble, Liam was shouting and trying desperately to plug a hole in the emergency membrane.“Fuck,” her heart sank as the inescapable dilemma of their situation dawned on her. “I don’t think we can patch this hole with what we have.”“What else can we do?” Liam asked, annoyed, throwing the useless piece of plastic clattering back to the ground.“Flores,” Vis said reassuringly, but grimly. “Air in here is going to get stale. We need to get over there, to that emergency kit. Deploy a proper emergency hab.” Vis pointed past the twisted remains of acceleration flats still bolted in place above them. There, behind all the mess and chaos, was a large red box. An emergency kit. Chaeyoung was grateful it had remained bolted in place along the storm cellar walls. If they could get to it, there would be an emergency air tent, and hopefully an emergency biosuit for Liam.“How are we going to get there?” Liam asked. “You two have helmets, I don’t!”Vis’s voice was calm, reassuring, and did not waver. “You know what we have to do.”Liam screamed at Vis. “No. No! I won’t do it. I have seen what happens when people hit vacuum without a suit,” he visibly shuddered.Chaeyoung looked at the helmetless Liam, his own biosuit pulled down to his waist like usual. Vis was right. Whatever air they had in this emergency blister pack was limited, and it was leaking. They might wait, but Liam would suffocate to death as Vis and Chaeyoung watched, or they could take a risk now, pop the bubble deliberately while they were all still conscious, and get to that emergency kit.“Oh my god,” Liam said as he slumped to the ground. “There’s no choice, is there?”Chaeyoung grimaced through the pain in her ribs and stood up, walked over to console Liam. “Vis is right—we need to get to that kit before we’re in any worse shape.”“Oke…what do we do next?” Liam asked.“We have to pop the emergency bubble to get to those supplies,” Chaeyoung said matter-of-factly. “If you’re already hypoxic or passed out when we do that, your odds of pulling through are much worse.”“I know.”“When we pop this emergency bubble,” Vis said. “You can’t hold your breath. You need to exhale. Try to hold on to that air and your lungs are going to get shredded.”“Right,” Chaeyoung nodded. “You exhale, then we breach the seal and get the emergency kit, deploy the emergency hab inside, get you inside that, and get you on oxygen treatment as soon as possible. Oke?”[71][Di Lingua]: Okay? ↑Liam stumbled back to his feet. “Oke, oke…I have survived worse,” he smiled, though it did not touch his eyes, and it sounded hollow, as if he didn’t believe it himself.Vis looked at Chaeyoung. “Are you up for this?”She rubbed her aching back. Her ribs were already feeling a little better. “No choice.”With a gasp, she struggled to her feet with Vis’s aid, and then straightened her back and stretched. “Oke, oke, I can do this… are you ready?”Liam sighed, exasperated. “As ready as I can be.”After that, they silently prepared for what had to be done. The trio moved debris, trying to minimize the chances it became a dangerous projectile when they popped the membrane. Vis and Chaeyoung positioned themselves immediately below the emergency kit, which was just out of reach. Chaeyoung chewed her lip as she moved into position—her back and ribs screamed in protest at her movement.“I’ll stay with you. Vis can get the emergency kit,” she said to Liam. “Oke, before we try this, I just want to say…it’s been an honor working—”“Stop.” Liam said. “Don’t say it, let’s just get it fucking over with and I can thank you later.”Vis nodded at Chaeyoung. Liam exhaled. Chaeyoung easily pushed her fist through the hole, rapidly depressurizing their air pocket. The air hissed out slowly enough to reduce the risk of embolism for Liam, but quickly enough to make the air dangerously thin in a short amount of time.“Remember to exhale, oke? Now!” Vis leapt into the air and slashed the bubble open with a piece of twisted aluminum paneling.Chaeyoung grabbed Liam’s shoulders and closed her eyes as they braced each other. Whoosh. Liam wriggled in her grip like a fish, but she kept her eyes closed. A hand smacked against her faceplate repeatedly. Thump thump thump. Chaeyoung held on and kept her eyes tightly closed.Thud. Something bounced against the deck next to Chaeyoung. She opened her eyes. Vis had the emergency kit. Compacted, an emergency hab system was nothing but a large metal box with several attached canisters covered by a sandy tan material that was thin, flexible, and strong. Chaeyoung let go of Liam, tried not to see his purpling and swelling skin, or his darting fearful eyes. She helped Vis deploy the emergency hab.It was vaguely like setting up a makeshift tent, albeit the stakes were much higher. Working together, they moved the heavy metal box—nearly fifty kilograms—into position. Even in the low acceleration that pinned them to the ceiling of the storm cellar, the kit was clumsy to move.Once it was in position, they unfolded it into a long pill shape against the blood-stained ceiling, which was acting as their floor. Chaeyoung used her hands to feel around the metal box on the inside for a switch cover. She found it.With a flick, the hab opened. Immediately the pile of thin material had a visible structure—bars popped and bent and stretched out and organized themselves and pulled the membrane taught. Between Vis and Chaeyoung, an inflated cylinder popped out from the emerging structure of the emergency habitat system.They picked up Liam, readying him for the emergency tent. He was at the edge of consciousness, his bloodshot eyes rolling back into his head, and his face puffed up to nearly twice the size. The tent was nearly ready, so Chaeyoung lunged with Liam through the membrane flaps of the airlock system into the main volume of the emergency hab. They made it past the threshold. She rolled Liam further into the tent, then reached out to drag the other contents of the emergency kit into the airlock. Vis frantically sealed the flexible double membrane of the tent’s airlock. Then flicked on the manual switch for the life support system. Chaeyoung struggled to find and connect a usable emergency oxygen mask to the air tank.Liam was flailing his arms, grabbing at his throat, screaming without making a sound. The tent had pressure, but it was still below the Armstrong limit. It would feel like hard vacuum. Liam’s eyes closed, and he convulsed on the floor of the tent. Chaeyoung finally found the emergency mask from the supply kit. Sweat covered her brow and her hands trembled. She had to wait to administer the supplementary oxygen, however, or it might do long-term damage. As soon as the pressure gauge ticked above the Armstrong limit, Chaeyoung put the oxygen mask over Liam’s face, and wrapped a large auto-diagnoser over both of his biceps. With a wave, she turned on the auto doc’s EAR display. A series of instructions—medical instructions— appeared in front of her in a blue text with cartoon images to illustrate what Chaeyoung needed to do.She needed to administer an injection of some sort. The prescription included a specific name and number for the hypo. Chaeyoung rummaged through the bag of medical supplies, found the correct medication and a hypodermic injector. She glanced back over the instructions to double check and then inserted the vial into the injector into Liam’s purple and swollen neck and slammed it down. Hiss-click. As the interior pressure approached a standard atmosphere, the whir of the pump stopped. Chaeyoung and Vis took off their helmets. Over the next several hours, they watched over Liam. His face was red and splotchy, covered in burgeoning bruises, and his body remained swollen. There was little expectation of rescue, and no one in the tent had enough medical expertise to stabilize someone suffering from vacuum exposure.They were twenty light years away from the nearest inhabited star system. No rescue was on its way. For that matter, what had even happened to SSV Jiuhe? Stuck in the emergency tent, Chaeyoung had no way of knowing, and the uncertainty of that burned her, her head filled with looping thoughts of gloom like flickers of flame.Adrenaline wore off. Her back stiffened. The pain forced her to lie down, immobilizing her, but she was able to contort her body in just the right way to not feel any pain. Vis watched over her as she fell into an uneasy sleep.***Chaeyoung woke up with Vis tapping on her shoulder.“What?” Chaeyoung groaned.Vis silently put a finger to her mouth. There was a vibration of boots walking along the bulkhead outside. An unmistakable rhythmic thump thump thump. Hope of rescue swelled her heart. She turned to Vis, who looked terrified. Vis was looking at the airlock flap in confusion, and Chaeyoung followed her gaze just as someone entered the first flap of the double membraned airlock. It drowned out all other noises as it pressurized. Chaeyoung wondered who had survived as she kept trying to make contact over the local EAR network for the hab. “Hao fa? Who’s there?” Chaeyoung called out.“Shhh!” Vis cautioned.“What’s wrong?” Chaeyoung asked.“Something is off about this….”Chaeyoung shrugged off what seemed like irrational anxiety. “Hello? Can you hear us?”No response. As the pump stopped, there was a continued silence, save for the thump thump thump as someone else outside walked around in the hard vacuum. A glove popped through the inner airlock flap. Chaeyoung shuffled over to help whoever it was through, and then a dark, distorting, spinel ceramic faceplate painted in the grim face of a chattering skeleton burst through.This was not someone from Jiuhe. Vis screamed, lunged, and kicked at the skeletal visage. Chaeyoung fell over, landed in a protective position over Liam. An armored biosuit charged through the airlock flap. With a grunt, the intruder shrugged off the assault from Vis. A barrel of a weapon pointed at Chaeyoung’s face. As Vis attempted to stand up, the intruder knocked her down to the floor. Vis puffed out her chest a bit, and frowned stoically as she rested on the ground on her knees, having lost her balance.“Yu’ll gah tsow!”[72][Di Lingua]: Fuck you! ↑ Vis screamed.“Shut the fuck up,” with the barrel of their weapon, the skull faced intruder scanned the tent and then pointed it back toward Chaeyoung. “Where are you from? Planet? Star?”“Ahtash. Vega.”Satisfied, the weapon pointed at Vis. “And you?”“Mars,” Vis said. “Sol.”“And them? What planet?” the intruder asked.“Earth,” Vis replied. “Flores is from Earth.”“Back away from the Earther,” the hostile intruder growled.“No,” Chaeyoung said as she leaned over Liam. “We’re going with him.”Before she could react, the butt of the weapon smacked against her face. She fell to the ground. A trickle of blood ran down her forehead. Vis screamed and lunged. A silver dart of an electronic stun weapon shot out and stuck to Vis. Fizzt fizzt fizzt. Vis fell to the floor of the hab. Chaeyoung covered her head, expecting more attacks. There was a pinch on her arm, and something embedded into her skin. Fizzt fizzt fizzt. Her muscles tensed as electricity jolted through her body. She fell next to Vis and lost consciousness.