[68828] ChaeyoungTritonis Prime“We should cut loose the dead weight.”“No! She saved my life.” Chaeyoung opened her eyes. The guard next to her—the one she had saved in the core lab—took a step forward, put hands up and got between Chaeyoung and the weapon pointed at her chest. “She’s coming with us to the surface.”“You’re not in charge, Operator,” the soldier pointing a weapon at Chaeyoung said. “Popovich is the most senior staff left.”“Well then, get him on the horn!”“Comms are down. And we don’t have time to babysit some dipshit scientist.”“How are comms down? Since when?”“About five minutes ago—”There was a loud thud thud thud that came from the makeshift airlock membrane. Everyone turned their attention away from her and the ensuing argument, and then they all tensed up. Her eyes opened wide in fear. Just fucking great, she thought to herself. That thin airlock membrane was the only separation between her and the twisted horrors the xenolith had unleashed. Thud thud thud. She saw what looked like a handprint bulging out the airlock membrane three times, banging the emergency seal like it was the surface of a drum. Soldiers around her made hand signals, brought weapons to bear, and fanned out in a crescent formation. Chaeyoung began walking backwards, away from the airlock, as did other unarmed Grayson personnel. There was a hiss over her radio, a low pop, then someone was breathing heavily over an open channel.“Permission to exit?” Sato’s voice drawled sarcastically from the radio.“Commander Sato?”“I thought you said he was dead. Stand down! Stand down!” One soldier—not Chaeyoung’s fellow traveler—walked up to the emergency membrane. Most of the rest of the soldiers lowered their weapons, coalesced into smaller groups of two or three, chatted loudly over radio and exterior speakers about what was happening. Chaeyoung’s fellow traveler walked up to her.“Call me Devi,” they held out their right hand vertically. “But we should leave. Now.”“I want to get the exocortex—”Sato popped through the airlock, aided by Grayson soldiers. Chaeyoung gasped, choking her sentence short.“His…face,” she stammered.He was in his demon armor, only it looked dimmer somehow, turned into a dark gray rather than obsidian black. There were also fractal patterns from glow grass veins eating away at the armor. His helmet, partially destroyed, revealed half his face. Red blood filled his visible eye, while his skin took on a purple, red, and splotchy appearance, resembling exposure to vacuum and cold. A cut ran along his forehead, but someone had patched it up with sloppy obsidian staples, which had caused an infection that turned the wound purple. Then she noticed obsidian armor covered the large wound along his chest—last time she had seen him, his guts were nearly falling out of the hole.“Pol tsow zloy-zloy.”[121][Di Lingua]: Shit fucking madness. ↑ she cursed with the escaping air of her gasp.Abject terror gripped her body, and her veins were cold. A fear she had not even thought was possible. She was at once cold and hot. Her stomach rumbled, and her sphincter tightened. Fear filled her from her toes to the tip of her head. Every cell in her body was screaming in alarm.Sato’s soldiers, all save Devi, fell in toward Sato—their gravely wounded Commander—shouting offers of aid. One gripped Sato’s hand. His chest armor melted away under the gloved touch, transmogrified into a mass of tendrils faster than human reaction time. This mass struck out through the faceplates of the four nearest soldiers.Chaeyoung fell over as she instinctively pushed away with her feet, causing her to stumble in the light gravity of Tritonis Prime. All she could do was watch in terror. The impaled soldiers did not fall. They stood, supported by the black tendrils. They jerked and burbled over the radio.Shouts and screams and curses filled the cavern, too loud to be damped by her environmental suit’s thick body. Weapons lifted. People screamed warnings. It was too late. Behind Sato, another figure appeared. Garcia. He was even worse than Sato. He was so bad Chaeyoung had to close her eyes and turn her head. His visage had already etched into her memory. The top of his head, previously sliced clean off, was now reattached. Gray and pale, splotched with purple and red, with black undulating staples reattaching the two portions of a dead man’s head. She opened her eyes with a gasp.Belligerents exchanged a sea of tracers, filling the cavern with a red glow. Bodies, habitat tents, equipment boxes, the environmental airlock—all of them cratered or exploded. Lethal red pebbles skittered and ricocheted everywhere she looked, painfully slowly compared to their beam-of-light counterparts that streamed between the transformed victims and the scared survivors.A rough metal glove grabbed her armpit, hard enough to pinch up her environmental suit and cause pressure alarms to splash across her heads-up display on her faceplate. “Time to go,” Devi said. Her legs were jelly, but she kept her balance, kept her feet going forward. She had to concentrate, blink away the cold sweat, and think consciously about how she placed each foot, one in front of the other. The two of them made a mad dash to the only exit, along with a dozen others. Bodies kept falling around them, being struck by tracers or black tendrils.The Grayson Guards positioned themselves behind crates at the exit. They fired wildly over their shoulders. Red light passed so close the hypersonic rounds made deafening whip snaps, their light burning afterimages into her eyes. Devi and Chaeyoung made it to the only airlock hatch out of the cavern, through the thick iron airlock doors. Chaeyoung, with shaking hands, stumbled toward the double membrane airlock. “No! Stand back!” Devi said. “Get away from the outer airlock.”She flinched away, stumbled back to the thick iron door behind her. Fist-sized dents were blossoming across the industrial size barrier’s surface. Others like her, in biosuits or armored skull-faced soldiers, rushed into the airlock after them. People were attaching helmets and gloves, frantically. They tossed in and piled up equipment. A dozen people crammed into the interstitial space.Snap snap snap. Red fingers reached out from the barrel of Devi’s coilgun and shredded the airlock membrane intentionally. A sizeable push hit Chaeyoung from behind as the cavern’s air tried to escape out of the only hole. Many around her fell over, and every piece of unsecured equipment launched toward the exit in the depressurization wind.People, including Chaeyoung, scrambled to their feet. There was a strong, continuous wind, but in two seconds it was half as strong. In four seconds, it was half-of-half, in six it was not even noticeable. Chaeyoung helped people to their feet—people who had been her dedicated captors—with almost no second thoughts. She scooped up a moderately heavy equipment box and ran through the hole toward the mine tunnels.Already, soldiers who had not been in the cavern had established a makeshift barricade of sorts. Large blocks of ice, about hip high, were being pulled out from the sides of the tunnels with cut knives, then stacked in a zig-zag maze. A handful of soldiers were already bracing their weapons on the barrier, aiming down at the exit from the cavern. There was no sound in the vacuum, only the undisciplined shouting of dozens of people over an open radio and her own thunderous breathing. Following Devi, she wove her way around the barricade, still being constructed even as more soldiers got in position to aim weapons at the blown-open airlock. On the other side of the burgeoning ice blockade, she stumbled, fell, and dropped the box in her hands. She rolled to her back, pushed herself out of the way of the people behind her, and scooted on her backside until she came to rest against the ice wall of the tunnel, just out of sight of the large industrial airlock she had fled. She was out of breath, exhausted, and not alone. Visibly panting, others fell alongside her, with a few of their faceplates fogged up with condensation. Soldiers and others with weapons kept their focus back toward the danger—toward the iron airlock, the cavern, and the alien complex. The others, like her, were looking anywhere but toward danger. Some were prone, panting, others were resting like Chaeyoung in squats, or on their rear-end, or their back rested against the ice. No one, not even Devi, was paying her any attention. She cut the radio connection with a chin control and began a breathing exercise. This was her chance.“Breathe,” she commanded herself, her pulse steadying quickly. “Breathe.”She gritted her teeth, willing her body to focus, to obey her. Then she screamed with her jaw still clenched and leapt to her feet with whatever strength she could muster. In sublunar gravity, against a solid structure like the ice behind her, she shot ahead into the mining tunnel—away from the cavern and Grayson Services Group. She was ballistic. Simply an object in free-fall. She had no control over where she was going. She slammed hard into the bend of the ice tunnel a few meters away, bounced at a forward angle, hit the other edge of the tunnel a few more meters away. From there on, she bounced, tumbled, and slid. Each impact against the ice wall kicked up loose debris that filled the otherwise empty tunnel. Anytime she got her feet under her, she launched ahead again. Her head rattled around, her jaw ached from multiple strikes against the O-ring of her environmental suit, but like a lone water molecule she bounced around in a stochastic dance, biased forward. Each bump taking her further and further from her captors as fast as possible.Eventually, she rolled to a stop, well out of sight of the cavern airlock. Her head was so light from being smacked around inside her suit that she giggled, drunkenly got to her feet, and trotted in the dark, abandoned tunnels off the main path. A few meters into the abandoned side tunnels, and a few turns around the bend, and the abject and total darkness had an instantly sobering effect. She was sharp, focused, and afraid. Ahead of her was a darker night than she had ever experienced in her entire life. A tunnel, far from any light source, deep beneath the surface of a world that, at noon, was about as bright as a singly backlit ink display. And here, in the abandoned sections, there was no human source of light, except for the small lights in her suit.She shivered as she strained to recall the layout of the mines. She had spent days exploring Grayson’s exocortical network, and they had extensive maps of the abandoned mines. White light flooded her dark world. She spun around to see its source, threw a gloved hand to block the actinic light that greeted her.“There you are,” Devi said. “You thought because you saved me you could just run off?”Chaeyoung was walking backwards and stumbled. She got caught again. She chinned her radio back on.“Just fucking kill me this time,” she groaned.“I’m not going to kill you—”Three red strobes blinked at the pair, completely silent in the vacuum.Devi lowered their weapon, giving relief from the light for Chaeyoung’s eyes. Chaeyoung lowered her hand. Devi half-turned, looked over their shoulder down the dark tunnel. More red strobes.“Oh. Fuck,” Chaeyoung said.White lights joined the strobes. They bobbed and dipped and shook and got brighter. People were running to join them, and there was weapons fire nipping at their heels. Vibrations from boots stomping around. Closer, heavier, and a lot of them.Once again, she lifted herself up from the ice. Her chest hurt from her heartbeat, her throat was sore, and her joints and muscles burned with sharp pain. Before she could turn to run, people surrounded Devi and Chaeyoung. The throng of retreating Grayson personnel did not stop. They rushed past.“What the fuck is going on?” Devi asked.“They’re right behind us.”More red strobes. Chaeyoung and Devi ran with the crowd. They did not get far when a tremor shook the tunnel. A quake. Ice shook free. Chaeyoung abruptly paused, trying to keep her footing. Then another tremor. A cloud of billowing ice filled the tunnel like fog, coating everything and everyone. She couldn’t see anything through her faceplate besides a few bright grey shimmers between orbs of diffuse white light from the soldier’s weapons.Soldiers squabbled over the radio, non-armed personnel bickered and pleaded and cursed. She had had enough.“Oke,” she said with trepidation over the radio. “Oke!” She said again when the chaos did not stop. “What the fuck is going on? What just happened?”“Tunnels…,” an unfamiliar voice panted. “They were coming for the tunnels.”“One of the…,” another voice panted. “One of the…operators…buried that fucking place with a short fork.”“Whole place collapsed over those fucking monsters. Collapsed just behind us,” the first voice said notably less out-of-breath.“Why did you pick this tunnel?” Devi demanded.“We followed you!” someone accused.“Anyone got surface comms still?”“No, not here.”“Not here either.”“Surface comms are still down. No EARs from anyone in the tunnels, elevators, no way to get Capacious Coati on the horn.”As the fog receded, Chaeyoung’s faceplate frosted over as the fog refroze. She cleared it with her glove and inspected the glittering white shapes around her. Without their grim skeleton faceplates visible, Grayson Services Group looked like a sad band of astronauts. She ignored their continuing discussions of just how many ways they could fail to communicate with anyone outside of this one ice tunnel.“Oke,” Chaeyoung said with a surge of authority. “If all your comms are down and that tunnel is collapsed, then we have no choice but to use this way as our only route back to the surface. Further down these tunnels.”“Down the tunnels?” someone whined.“Yes, down the tunnels. About halfway to the rail launch system, there’s an old, abandoned radio station. High powered. Used to have some permanent maintenance staff. We can find shelter there. It’s maybe an hour and a half walk,” she explained. “You can contact whoever you need to once we get there.”“How do you know that?”“It’s all in your exocortex.”“Wait… is that…are we taking directions from one of those fucking Martian scientists? Didn’t they cause this?”“You have a better idea?” she asked.In the stunned silence that followed, Devi came up to Chaeyoung, pressed their faceplate against hers, and screamed. It sounded quiet and distant, but the stress of Devi’s voice from shouting was obvious. The vibrations of faceplate against faceplate carried the sound.“I will back your play, but don’t forget who’s in charge, and who has the guns,” Devi stepped away and yelled on the radio. “You heard her! Let’s get moving, you apes! You want to live down here forever?”***By any normal standards, it was not a long hike to the old radio station. It was only a kilometer or two away. Even at the slow low-gravity shuffle, it was less than an hour. Reduced gravity made lugging the weight of an environmental suit almost trivial. But Chaeyoung felt all the abuse her body had sustained as the adrenaline wore off. She was shivering, but not cold. She experienced an almost continuous cramping in her stomach. But these were not the worst of her problems. The worst were the images of all the terror she had seen in the core lab, followed closely by how sore she was. Every muscle, every bone, every tendon throbbed. She could feel every place on her body that had sustained a hard collision, places she had not even realized she had injured. Her left elbow, now swollen to double its size, radiated pain like someone had stabbed her in the joint. She had painful bruises all over her jaw. One of her teeth had cracked, causing her gum to become irritated and swollen. Her right knee experienced the whole gamut of pain no matter how little weight she put on it.She had no choice but to continue, and so she did, until they made it to a freight elevator built into the tunnels to service the radio station. It was a simple twelve meter by twelve meter square, all metal, but covered in a white aerogel for thermal protection, with a wire mesh guard rail that was dented and worn. She knew from her dives into the exocortex that the mechanism was a simple vacuum driven machine-room-less design, and so was likely still functional, if the elevator shaft had not shifted too much from Tritonis Prime’s active geology. It was an uneventful ride up, though it took considerably more time than the way down in the propcan-turned-elevator, taking almost as long as the hike itself. By the time they had reached the surface, she had almost fallen asleep, but the pain in her body kept her just barely awake. Foggy and tired, she led the others into the radio station complex.The site of the radio station was unusual. They built the site of the radio station half-way between the worker access shafts and the rail launch system. Engineers chose the unusual location for the radio station because it was one of the few impact craters on Tritonis Prime. They constructed a parabolic antenna spanning the twenty-four-meter diameter crater using a thin metal mesh instead of solid paneling to save on mass and cost.The freight elevator reached the surface at the edge of the crater, underneath the parabolic dish. Light dimly filtered through the mesh above, with a few places where there were obvious micrometeor impact holes. Around them were empty and abandoned equipment crates, scattered around in various states of ice cover and damage. Chaeyoung led them to the left, where the entrance to the maintenance and control habs were located, snug beneath a few meters of ice, built into the edge of the crater. There was a simple passageway cut into the ice. The passageway lacked clear markings and could be mistaken for just another part of the crater’s wall from a distance. However, Chaeyoung, who was aware of its presence, guided the group through the ice maze to the hab’s hatch. This was a radiation hard design, preventing any direct line of sight from space to any part of the habitat structure that did not first go through meters of ice. At the end there was a simple, frosted, hab airlock hatch. Mechanical, low maintenance, and no exterior EAR interfaces. They likely used metals mined out of Tritonis Prime to construct it.“Few of the systems are going to work,” Chaeyoung explained as she opened the hatch. “Not until we get the power up and running and check them one-by-one. Then we can re-pressurize the hab.”“We’ll see,” Devi said. “Bring the equipment in, sort it, and then before we pressurize the hab, I want anyone who thinks they came in contact with contamination to leave your spacesuits in the airlock, until we figure something else out.”Inside the hab there was nothing special. A simple airlock, a simple hab layout, a simple mess, and on the far wall an access hatch to the radio controls and power systems, and whatever maintenance spaces were necessary for a hab this size. Once they arrived, Grayson Services Group had tasks to complete. Devi took a position of de facto leadership, directing various task groups. Find the power systems, find the air systems, collect our supplies, organize the space, get the radio working again. It was all made easier because a large, but simple, nuclear thermal electric generator had powered the site. Its power supply had diminished over time, but it was more than enough to provide a few kilowatts for all the life support systems and the radio, with some wattage left over. Essentially, all that was necessary was to flip a switch and wait as waste heat slowly re-heated the frigid habitat until it was a human-safe temperature. In the wake of the radio station’s abandonment, nothing of considerable value remained. No lithium hydroxide emergency scrubbers, first aid kits, replacement parts, fuel cells, batteries, or water filters—everything worth its launch costs. Everything left behind was either imminently replaceable, common, or heavy like the nuclear electric generator.Life support systems were valuable, but the system had been fine-tuned for Tritonis Prime, and was very heavy—apparently, that had not been worth the cost. The hydrolysis systems replenished the air from melted ice, feeding the hydrogen gas into the Sabatier system to remove carbon dioxide. Afterwards, it combusted the methane via pyrolysis by utilizing waste heat from the reactor instead of wasting it. Its simple computers said the system was working, so Chaeyoung, Devi, and a few others waited in the airlock as the hab re-pressurized. “I don’t think this is a very effective quarantine measure,” Chaeyoung said over the cathunk cathunk of the air pumps.“Better than nothing,” Devi replied with obvious irritation.She didn’t press further. When the air pressure was high enough, she popped open the back hatch, crawled out, and stretched for the first time all day. “Nawa oh!”[122][Di Lingua]: Woah! ↑ she exclaimed at the smell. The airlock was pungent with sweat, blood, grease, and volatile organics. She pulled at her own grey and white fatigues and smelled them. Her nose wrinkled.“Ugh.” She was contributing to the stench.“Let’s get the water closet working,” someone said.A few of the Grayson personnel laughed. Something in that moment struck her about the bodies in various stages of undress around her. She did not feel particularly short among the unarmored Grayson soldiers and the partially naked personnel stripping out of biosuits. They all moved awkwardly, like they were undressing instead of elegantly slipping free from a second skin. These were all things she recognized in herself. She was not a stellah steh, and had not grown up slipping in and out of a biosuit. Neither a lifetime of EVAs nor less than standard gravity had made her tall. But this all applied to every single person in the airlock with her. “Is there a problem?” Devi asked. As they pulled off their chest plate armor, they stripped down the biosuit underlayer to their hips. Chaeyoung turned, looked at Devi for the first time without the skull helmet and armored biosuit on. They were butch, and incredibly muscular, wearing pata that covered their chest. Devi had a closely shaved head except for a black, few centimeters high, strip down the middle of their head with flame red tips, and multiple scars across the scalp. Plentiful ear piercings and a smattering of chaotic, violently themed tattoos completed their aesthetic. Devi was looking at Chaeyoung grimly, their face twisted into a mean scowl.“Let me ask again,” they bristled. “Is there a problem?”“You’re all well steh.”Everyone except for Devi laughed.“No,” Devi shook their head. “We’re all Earthers.”*** Curled up, naked, in the corner of the small water closet space, Chaeyoung let an exorbitant amount of warm water wash over her and into the recycling system drain. Her hands and feet were wrinkling, but she didn’t care as long as no one else in the hab paid attention to her. She had been the last person allowed to use the water closet, but at least water and heat were of little concern, besides the fact the water smelled like organic solvents. She hoped there would be no trouble if she took as long as she wanted. In the shower, she felt better, although she also wanted to sob uncontrollably. Her aching muscles relaxed, her joints were not so stiff and painful as before. She was alone, and she was away from the rest of them. Warmth filled not just her tired physical body, but also lifted her spirit.There was a knock at the hatch. “You almost done in there?”She sighed, turned off the water, toweled dry, pulled on a clean, albeit astringently scented, emergency biosuit. She let it tighten against her, conform to her body, and pulled at the loose military fatigue outer layer, put on her boots, and left the small water closet.“Ye, I’m done.” She pressed past the waiting Grayson soldier, found a mostly empty bunk to sit on, away in the corner. Since they re-pressurized the hab, they had powered up more systems. The lights were brighter, and the air was warmer. Whenever there was a moment of quiet, she heard the buzz and hum and click of various systems around her, autonomously working on their decades-old tasks.As her body cooled down to the ambient temperature of the hab, her thoughts were becoming darker. She looked down at the wrists of the blue and black biosuit—a Grayson Services Group biosuit. With a rub at her left wrist, she noticed where her seal bracelet would have been snug against the O-ring latch. Instead, there was nothing except a simple metal ring adapter. She had no seal bracelet, and thus she had no identity—not according to the wider world. She sighed and there was a spark in her fingers. No, not a spark, a tingle from haptic feedback. Her eyes went wide, and she looked around nervously. No one else seemed to notice what was happening. There was a tickle in her optic nerve, and then a shimmer. More tingling in her fingers. Someone had accidentally powered up an EAR network. It surprised her it still worked, but she was thankful no one had removed the network interfaces alongside the rest of the movable equipment. She flexed her wrist like it was sore and she was working out the pain—which was half true—but she used this natural motion of her hands and fingers to cover up what she was doing on her EAR. With every motion and flick, she subtly pulled and prodded at the EAR windows as they materialized. Compared to an exocortex, the EAR windows seemed flat and lifeless, but she was glad to have them as company.She looked around again. No one seemed to have noticed. She considered the possibility that Grayson and the others were all operating on their individual EARs, plugged into their equipment and whatever communications mesh they had brought with them. They might have simply not switched networks, leaving Chaeyoung as the only one with an EAR attempting to connect to the station’s local network. They might not have noticed, yet. She didn’t care what the reason was, as long as no one caught her using it.Seeking a list of other devices on the EAR, she scoured the network. The radio was on and transmitting. She listened in, connecting the implants near her auditory nerve to the radio’s output. Aberrant noise screamed into her eardrums, and she had to bite down on her lip, hard, to stop herself from yelping in pain before she could turn down the volume.Undulating squeaks and pops and warbling filled her ears, even turned all the way down. An unsteady heartbeat-like bass thump pulsated beneath the squall of noise. Her molars sympathetically vibrated. It was a rhythmic pulsation, not unlike music. There seemed to be some kind of structure to the anharmonic screeches, yet it was dissonant and discordant. Completely unlike any music genre she had ever heard. She wondered if it was an encrypted message from the survivors in this hab to other Grayson Services Group assets. Certainly, the quasi-periodic nature suggested structure, though the complete unintelligibility suggested nonsense or background noise.This old mining EAR network had almost no blocks or barriers, and she could see every system being used. No other device had made connections to the radio, and yet the radio was transmitting and consuming significant power. She frowned. Who was transmitting? And why?The transmission changed. There were voices, human voices. It sounded like traditional throat singing, only the tone changes and pitches inexplicably turned Chaeyoung’s stomach and made her deeply uneasy. Some voices sounded at the edge of familiarity—all her thoughts stopped in place. Mimo, that was Mimo. And that was Sato. And that was Garcia. They created an inhuman symphony as their voices blended. A scream sent out to the void through a radio dish she had helped, in part, to power up.She couldn’t think, she only reacted on instinct. She flipped open another window and recorded the strange broadcast to one of the radio station’s computers. It only continued for another thirty-seven seconds before ending abruptly, replaced by the crackle and pop of the cosmic microwave background.No one else broadcast through the radio after that. She looked around confused. Grayson must not have noticed what was going on—at least no one in this portion of the habitat had. Implications slammed into her awareness at orbital velocities.She discreetly pulled open an EAR window, looked around on the network for anything that could transmit audio, and found it. There, across the room near one of the work desks was a public addressing microphone to coordinate with the freight elevator. With her hands shaking in anxious excitement, she stood up as nonchalantly as she could and walked up to the desk. Casually, she leaned over it, popped open the panel above the microphone stowage compartment, and skillfully concealed her hand motions as she accessed its EAR controls and redirected it to connect to the radio as an output device. She pulled up another EAR window and hit “transmit.”“My name is Chaeyoung. I am being held captive by Grayson Services Group on Tritonis Prime. Please help me.” “What the fuck are you doing?” someone from the desk next to her asked.She repeated herself more urgently.“I am Dr. No. Chaeyoung, No. Grayson is going to kill me! I am on Tritonis Prime, please help—”Someone forcefully ripped the chair out from under her and threw her to the ground, away from the desk. She held the microphone in her hand until someone kicked it out and away, to be crushed under someone else’s boot. With a yelp, she landed hard on the floor, tried to skitter away, and ran into someone. They pulled her arms back and dragged her backwards along the ground. She pulled free and got onto her hands and knees, trying to get to the airlock. “Oof.”A boot smacked into her stomach, hard, knocking the wind out of her lungs. She rolled onto her back, clutched her abdomen, and moaned. Movement all around her. She lifted her head, rolled over, trying to dodge more kicks. A heavy metal boot smacked into her face, the back of her head slammed into the deck, and she blacked out.***When she came to, her face ached against a cool metal floor. It was dark. Her wrists hurt where they were bound behind her back. She was lying on her side. “What did you fucking do?” a voice asked her from the shadows.It was Devi.“What the fuck did you fucking do?” Devi asked again.“I called for help.”“Not that,” they snapped. “You fucked our radio connection. We can’t get another signal out, only that repeating bullshit you set up.”“I didn’t set up any—”A chair scraped on metal. Devi’s furious face was now right above Chaeyoung. Cold metal boots rested next to her chin. Devi’s face was crimson red with rage. “No more bullshit! You did something. The station sends out the same signal every twelve hours. And it’s encrypted. What the fuck did you do?”“Twelve hours…how long was I out?”Devi shook their head. “Answer my question, damnit!”Chaeyoung laughed. “Are you kidding me? I have nothing to do with that. That’s coming from the core lab.”Devi’s rage faltered, their face went white, their pupils swallowed their eyes. “You’re…you’re fucking lying.”Chaeyoung just laughed, rolled onto her back.“God fucking damnit, we shouldn’t have drugged you. You’re useless now. Fucking useless.”Devi disappeared back into the shadows. She heard footsteps receding, then a hatch open and close. Chaeyoung laughed until she was crying.***Snap. Chaeyoung startled awake to what felt like an explosion going off in her head. Struggling against the ties that bound her hands and feet, she briefly recalled her situation before placing her face back down on the cold floor in the dark room. She did not feel drugged anymore, only woozy. It seemed like it had only been minutes ago when she was uselessly sobbing. Now she had to strain to remember when she had fallen asleep. With a pounding headache, she let out a groan. Her stomach was in pain after being kicked. Her eye was puffy and swollen, making it difficult to see. But her thoughts were clearer, and nothing about her situation struck the chord of hilarity as it had last time she awoke in this dark hole.Thud. Snap. “Fuck!” she sputtered as she realized the sounds were real, and not a night terror.She squirmed but was tightly bound. All she could do was slightly reposition her body relative to where the sounds seemed to originate.Snap. There were blood-curdling screams on the other side of the door, then a pop and a wet plop. She gulped, her hand twitched a little as she recognized what the sounds implied. Something was inside the hab.Fwap. The door flew open, and sudden light forced Chaeyoung to squint and look away. She closed her eyes, expecting the worst. Nothing happened. She thought she heard footsteps, only they were very faint. Only the slightest muffled click click of gecko grip reached her ears. Her body tensed, she balled her hands, and she braced for more violence, just wanting it all to be over. She heard the bindings on her hands break with a crack crack, then the pressure on her wrists was gone. Her hands were free. Something heavy came to rest on the deck next to her chest, and she heard human breathing.A warm and gentle voice spoke to her. “Chaeyoung? Dr. No? Are you oke?”