Chapter XI: Space is Hell

AN:

Hey there, Fan-fic-folks!

Apologies for the radio silence again. It's, uh... been a bit hectic recently. I'm trying to become a Clinical Psychologist, which requires a lot of work beforehand to prove your mettle. Technically it's to show you have the skills and drive needed to do a difficult career, but I enjoy talking about it like I'm joining the Fighter's Guild or something. So, I've been working and volunteering in as many places as possible in order to qualify before I'm thirty (I'm currently 22 and fully expecting to be back in education by 27 or 28 if normal patterns hold out). I've basically had about two days to write and most of that was done on trains, so while quantity may be there, quality may not be. Let me know if I've lost my touch. :D

Thanks for reading and, as always, please review.

Everyone in the room was spat out of the Tether viewport like fruit pips in a machine gun. We went all over the bloody place, scattering out in random directions as we frantically tried to grab onto anything passing by to stop ourselves from rocketing off into space. The engineers scattered like bowling pins, Joyce and David clung together like otters, and Copse... Copse seemed to be enjoying himself, actually. Lunatic.

I was still screaming, my mind just repeating the words 'grab something' over and over and over as I spun round and round and round. My stomach was roiling with each wild movement and whirling flip. Terror and nausea filled every sense I had, the harsh smell of rising vomit in my nostrils and the foul tang of bile in my throat. Every tiny movement would suddenly sweep wide, like I was ridiculously drunk, and would definitely send me rocketing off into the endless, twinkling black if I weren't absolutely careful.

Not fun.

It was also something of an attention grabber. With all that going on in my head and the sensations whirling through the rest of my body, I couldn't pay enough attention to the space around me to notice the viciously sharp-looking outcropped girder that I was seconds from ramming at full speed.

"Fuck!" A weight slammed into me, knocking me aside just in time to avoid being sliced in half by the girder. The weight wasn't so lucky, and I had to watch helplessly as my wife bounced off me into the girder, flumpfing over it with another sailor-worthy series of curses and a screech of pain that cut off midway through. As I floated frictionlessly away, my brain added more panic to the mix, this one more personal. How could I help Chloe? Also, how I could stop myself - that was an important one.

The answer came to me a few meters later as I spotted some of the engineers begin to stabilise, little jolts of gas firing from different spots ono their suits that countered their movements and brought them to a stop, and I started pushing random buttons on my suit trying to do the same. Finally, I found the right one (RCS, whatever that meant) and tapped it.

The uh, nozzles, I guess, fired the gas and brought me to a stop in a couple of seconds. I somehow managed to reorient myself to face Chloe. She was still sprawled over the girder, her arms shoving hard at it. I didn't know why she was still there, but obviously something was wrong. I'd have to help. I tapped another key marked 'booster' and screamed as my boots suddenly lurched and the thrusters in my soles and shoulders shoved me rudely forward, rocketing me into space with enough force that it looked like I'd go right past Chloe and slam into an outcropped piece of metal of my own.

My frantic flailing at the RIG Controls somehow managed to hit the key again, deactivating the booster before I overshot Chloe. Unfortunately, space was frictionless, and my momentum threatened to carry me right past like the booster was still going. "Frickfrickfrickfrickin'frick on a bicycle!" My panicked babble reached a ludicrous crescendo at the moment I was about to go past and I threw out my hands in a terror-induced attempt to grab onto something.

The slight squish and instinctive flinch revealed I'd grabbed onto a person. Namely, Chloe.

I loosened my grip.

My legs kept going, swinging around my upper half clinging onto Chloe and sending my knees right into the girder with a dull thunk. A jolt of pain ran out through my legs. Ow. I quickly did my best to reorient myself again, coming face to face with a wincing Chloe. One hand was rubbing at her chest.

As our faces aligned, Chloe glared at me. I could see her lips moving, but nothing was coming through the comm. I frowned at her. "What? Why aren't you using your comm?"

She gestured down to her chest then, at my incomprehending look, grabbed a handful of the material of my suit front and dragged me in close so our visors were touching.

"You kicked me in the fucking boob, Max! What the fuck were you trying to do? That was so hella stupid, what-"

I pulled back and her angry yells disappeared. (AN1) Yeesh. I, um...

Woops?

She glared at me again, her lips twisting in a scowl. I mouthed a sheepish "Sorry" before looking down to see what the problem was. My eyes scanned over the suit, taking in the little details and placements and having no idea what any of them did, before something jumped out into the foreground at me. One of the bands of fabric had torn and several of the pipes and wires hidden inside had gotten caught on the metal. If she yanked too hard, she'd tear them right off. I touched my visor to hers again. "That's bad, right?"

"Yeah, Maxie. Hella bad. Can..." She sighed. "Can you untangle them for me?" Even now, Chloe asking for help sounded like a foot-stomping six-year old indignantly protesting some punishment or another, and even now, I still found it unbearably cute.

When she noticed me grinning in pure amusement, the foot-stomping became all too literal as she repeatedly stamped on mine. "Max! Stop smirking and fucking help me!"

I rolled my eyes, playful grin spread across my face. "Hmm." I said. "What do I get if I do?"

"You get to avoid my foot up your-" She muttered under her breath, for a moment she was entirely Joyce's daughter - her grumbling irritation was almost identical to some of the longer rants Joyce had given over one piece of childhood mischief or another.

I continued smiling as one incident came back to me, where Chloe and I had gone climbing on the roof of the Two Whales and she'd gotten stuck in some random outcropping of technology. I'd had to help her pull herself out and the moment she'd gotten free, power to the entire commissary had gone out. Joyce was furious.

Chloe thumped me in the shoulder, drawing my attention back to her. Her expression wasn't exactly thrilled. She looked kind of... impatient, really. All scowls and petulance. I chuckled. "Sorry, Chlo'. You sounded exactly like your mom there for a second."

She blinked. That... I couldn't work out that expression. That hadn't happened in years. "Uh... I sounded like my mom?"

I nodded, and the suit visors clacked lightly together with the motion. "Yeah. And this," I yanked at the cables, tugging one or two off the metal. "has totally happened before. Remember when we got on the roof of the commissary, and you got stuck? I had to rescue you then as well."

She smiled at me, small and sweet. "Yeah. I remember." Her smile turned playful. "My hella heroic Supermax."

Wow. I laughed. "I haven't heard that one in a while."

She twitched and the lightest dusting of red flush came across her face. "Well, you just haven't been doing enough heroic shit. I got hella high standards, y'know."

"You do, huh? Well, I'd-"

"Ahem."

We both instinctively pull apart and look around. Oh. Comm unit. "Yes, Copse?" I asked calmly. Chloe's "What?" was slightly less polite.

"You, uh... might wanna look to your left?"

We looked left just in time to see a monster floating in our direction. I froze, but Chloe quickly yanked me into the mess of metal and technology and pulled me close. Since our visors were touching, I could still hear her breathing inside the suit. It was deep, slow, oddly comforting, and... and... was she wheezing?

I looked up into her eyes to see them wide with panic. Her mouth was sealed shut and her cheeks were bulging. Oh no. "Shit! Copse, there's something wrong with her oxygen!"

Chloe frantically pointed me down, movements jerky and jolting like it was all she could do just to make them. I followed her gesture and swore again. "One of the tubes tore when she pulled us back here. I think it might be the air." Chloe nodded. "It's her air, she says. What do I do?"

Copse hmmed, and it was infuriating. Chloe was choking to death and he sounded calm. How could he be calm at a time like this? How am I calm at a time like this? Oh, that's right, I'm not. I was watching my wife slowly choke to death. Again. And he's not saying anything! "Copse!"

"What?"

"What do I do?" I demanded.

He paused. Again. Bastard. "You'll have to share oxygen tanks. Let you both breathe on your supply."

"Fine." I snipped. "How do I do that?"

He paused yet again. "I don't know."

"What? How can you not know?"

"I'm a pilot, lady, not an engineer. I saw it on a vid once, back in basic, but that's it."

I growled. Fine. Useless piece of... I'd have to find another engineer to help. Chloe was intent on keeping what little oxygen she had left, so I didn't exactly want her to waste the breath needed to tutor me through. I started to pull back, glancing around us to find anyone nearby. The moment I tried, Chloe yanked me back, pointing toward the nearby monster. I growled at her. "I don't give a fuck, Chloe. You're choking to death, dogdamnit!"

She shook her head and something in her eyes got a little less frantic. She blinked a couple of times, shook her head again, then reached down to tap a small metal panel on her thigh. It opened to reveal a tiny console and a series of nozzles and sockets and other things I couldn't even begin to guess the name of. Maybe a scuzzy adaptor? Is that a thing? Chloe tapped two keys, then extended her arm to do the same to an identical console on my suit. Then, she met my eyes and made a gesture like she was trying to pull a rope taut. I blinked. No, not a rope. One of the tubes! "I need to find a tube?" She nodded, and the corners of her lips turned up. Her next gesture was a rough, vague tap towards her back. "A tube on your back?" She nodded again.

I found the tube in a couple of seconds. There were only three, and only one was connected to the panel. I pulled at it and it came free from its mounting easily; these suits were so delicate!

I twirled her back around and held up the tube. She beamed, though continuing to keep her mouth closed made the expression extremely weird. The slight discolouration of her skin sent my heartrate skyrocketing again. Everyone living in space knew the symptoms of asphyxiation, we just didn't know what to do about it if we weren't a specialist. All school told us was to go find someone who knew what to do - engineers, doctors, EarthGov troopers, whoever worked.

Her hands shook as she took the tube from me, hurriedly bringing it down to the panel on my suit. I reached out and clamped my hand down on her wrist, steadying her. She didn't bother looking up, just kept going. She flicked a few switched, brought up a RIG interface and coupled the tube to a nozzle there.

Her face immediately relaxed as she took a big gulp of air.

I leaned in and rested my face plate on hers in relief. I took a few big gulps of my own, trying to calm my heart rate. Our eyes met and Chloe, face still splotchy and only getting more red - though I wasn't sure if that was the embarrassment of gratitude or just the adrenaline rush and accompanying over-oxygenation her system was now going through. "If I ever find out who invented this Rube-Goldberg bullshit of a buddy-breathing system, I'm gonna drown them alive."

I chuckled, despite the implied homicide while on-comm to an EarthGov trooper. Knowing Copse, he'd probably agree.

We pulled apart, and Chloe's voice vanished. Shoot. I forgot about that. I leaned back in. "What's wrong with your comm?"

"It's fucked."

I rolled my eyes. "No way. I hadn't guessed. But can we fix it like we did with your oxygen?"

She shook her head. "Nope."

"Why not?"

"Because it's currently impaled on that metal thing over there." She pointed.

"Oh."

"Yep."

Copse chimed in. "You two have to snuggle up anyway. Keep together and we'll be able to hear anything Chloe says over your link." He chuckled. "Sure you'll like that."

"Oh yeah," Chloe muttered. "Space is hella romantic. And with everyone watching, too."

"Didn't know you were into that, Price." Copse drawled.

Chloe blushed harder.

"Ahem," I said, pushing down a blush of my own. "We, uh... we should probably get going." A quick look around revealed the monster had floated off somewhere else. I did huddle a little closer to Chloe before activating the thruster to push us back out into open space.

The engineers had managed to mostly clump together. It was like watching soldier ants raft down a gently babbling brook. Copse had moved over to Joyce and David and was watching over them as they floated onward. We pushed the thruster harder until we caught up, then deactivated and turned to RCS to slow to their speed.

As we crept slowly onward, we somehow stumbled from my apparently now-reoccurring nightmare of oxygen-depriving Chloe into one of the most striking images I'd ever seen. We looked up as bright light flared overhead (relatively speaking) and Thus Spake Zarathustra played proudly in my head as the Arcadia System's two suns crested up above the station, picturesque and gloriously shining.

"Woah." I wilsoned, almost slack-jawed in my sheer amazement at the sight. I couldn't help the internal sigh as I realised I'd be missing this picture. Outside the spacesuit, my camera wouldn't function. Darned development fluids. I heard Chloe's muted chuckle through the spacesuit and realised I'd said that out loud. I gave her a quick flash of a sheepish grin before turning back to that astonishing view. I stared at all of it, probably for longer than I should. I couldn't help that, either. There was something about it. Something I hadn't seen since before all this started. Well, other than in the Haven shower, anyway. Beauty. Beauty without blood or violence or trauma. Just light.

I did not expect the shape, though. From out here, the suns were almost... elliptical. Like rounded ovals turned on their side. Dog, I really should've paid more attention in space class. If I could've been taking pictures like these...

A sharp elbow to my side pulled me out of my artistic trance. I looked over to Copse. The man smirked, then kicked off a thruster that boosted him away before I could poke him back.

That meanie.

I fumbled the activation key for my own thruster, feeling the slightly inflated suit-glove contort awkwardly around the button. How did Chloe do this every day? I eased the two of us forward, slower than Copse, but still enough to keep up with the group.

Several monsters floated about ahead of us. Most were the two-arm-bladed things, but a couple seemed... new. Tiny, indistinct shapes crawling over the various outcroppings of tech sticking off the station body. We glided forward as quietly and subtly as we could, given we were moving with tiny exploding things on our backs and jets of air in an entirely air-empty environment.

Like fish through water, we swam through space with jet fuel rocketing in our wakes.

We were so lucky that sound didn't travel in vacuum, huh? If we'd tried this inside, the noise would've drawn an army of those monsters. And probably deafened us. We floated past a series of arrays and antennae that Chloe gestured very forcefully for us to avoid. For a moment, I thought that she'd been slightly traumatised by the last metallic outcropping, but when a bolt of electricity sparked off one of the larger antennae and burnt a floating sword-armed monster that'd gotten too close, we all took her warning way more seriously. What the heck were those even for? As we all very, very carefully bore right around the mess of sparking technology, one of the smaller shapes pushed off of the metal hull it had been skittering across and started to float over in our direction.

Copse told us in hushed and urgent tones to look as uninteresting as possible. I questioned his sanity. How the heck are we supposed to be uninteresting in a vacuum? Scientists literally use it for experiments because it's boring so the thing they're testing will be the only interesting thing to look at! Especially when we look like people - apparently the main food source for these things. Eventually, I settled on trying to stay as still as possible, leaving the rocket pack off so I could just coast along. Things that explode are generally more interesting, or so Chloe had always told me, so not exploding is nice. Right?

...right?

The small shape closed on us, drifting silently past and the hard-to-make out form suddenly became horrifyingly clear. Dog, I wish it hadn't. If the sword-armed things that'd torn people apart had been foul and scary, these were monstrous. Terrifying. Wrong.

It was small, so it was harder to pick out the individual sections, to see it beyond the horrifying whole. For my stomach (and the visor of my suit), I stepped back and took in each part as dispassionately as I could manage. It wasn't easy. Four normal-looking legs extended out below it, surrounded by fleshy, sickly tentacles like bike stabilisers to central wheels. They moved with the creature's flow, a natural air to them, light and graceful. Like it was so used to the lack of gravity it didn't even need to think about what movements to make to adjust, it just did them. A zero-gravity ballet dancer.

The body itself, appropriately for that comparison, was lithe, kind of spider-like and sinewy. If spiders had tentacles instead of hairy legs, anyway. The skin was leathery and pale, barely a peach-tone above bone-white, and seemed to move between skin and scale almost indistinguishably. Where the big ones had two sword arms, these had three wicked-sharp spike-tipped tentacles that rose above the barest silhouette of a face, in the midst of which was a pair of hungry, yellow eyes. I stared into them as the thing went past. Into... into the, the eyes. Oh no. No, no, no, no. Oh no. They were children. Those things were children! It was in the eyes. The face. That barest silhouette that still showed the faintest signs of the small, delicate bone structures. The tall ones, they'd been adults, but these were so small. Too small. They'd been children and they'd been turned into monsters.

The dam broke, the wall shattered, everything I'd been doing keep control vanished and I couldn't stop a painful sob from falling out, a sob that made my chest hurt as much as that realisation had. Heartbreaks, one and all.

A sob that drew the thing that had once been a child's attention.

The head snapped up and those eyes - those horrible, hungry eyes - met mine and tilted like a curious puppy. As it registered what I was, the eyes widened in a cruel parody of a child's Christmas morning joy. It was absolutely horrid. It reared back and the tentacles writhed into action before shooting three spines out towards me. They barely registered. I was still staring at those eyes.

Suddenly, the shape to my side rammed into me, and the spikes rocketed smoothly through the space I'd once been. A hand grabbed the side of my head and dragged it round 'til I was staring into my wife's concerned eyes. She quickly pressed her visor to mine. "Max! You alright?"

I shook my head. I tried to speak, but my throat was still rough and all that came out was a sort of garbled groan. The concern in Chloe's eyes only grew, though I barely caught it before she dragged me to the side again as another trio of bolts came streaking past. She swore and fired a few streaks of bullets back in the thing's direction, the little horizontal bolts of energy neatly severing each of the three tentacles before a second volley from her hit the body - two went in the torso, and the last went right between those hungry yellow eyes.

Copse's slightly baffled voice crackled in my tinny suit speaker. "Uh... that was impressive. We should probably go. Now."

My heart was beating in my ears in panic and sadness and confusion as I peered around Chloe toward all the things in the surrounding area. I couldn't look at them without seeing what I now knew they'd been. It was only the nearest ones to us for now, but more and more of the monsters floating idly through space around us were starting to take notice. Something in the suit RIG flashed and a small golden glow appeared around a smallish access port a few hundred metres ahead. "In case we get separated," Copse said, "this is where we need to go."

Chloe wrapped her arm around me, and I could feel the motion slightly crumpling the suit around my torso, then fired her thruster to launch us toward our destination. "Chloe, what are you doing?" I choked out. "Stealth, remember?"

I could feel her shoulders tense in a weird, uncomfortable shrug. She knew I was upset, but didn't know why. Now wasn't the time. Not when she'd have to... "They've seen us, Maxie. Not like it matters."

"Right," I couldn't help bobbing my head, even though she wasn't looking at me. She was just... right. "Let's go, I guess."

She chuckled above me and reached down to fire my thruster too. Our speed suddenly doubled as we left the others behind momentarily before they fired their own thrusters to catch up.

I could feel the force the recoil from Chloe's rifle put her body under with every round she fired. As she pulled us left, then right, and loosed off another few shots that only made that feeling grow, I started. The sheer disbelief of what she was trying to do had knocked every other thought out of my head, so I took another leaf out of Chloe's book and decided I could very much deal with that heartbreaking realisation later. "Dog, Chloe, are you really trying to drive and shoot at the same time?" I said this in the same tone I'd mentally questioned Copse's sanity earlier. The feeling was about the same.

Chloe's voice came through teeth gritted in focus. "Yeah, sure. It's totally fine Max!"

"Well, you're about to ram us straight into that... whatever that is, so I'd disagree."

"Fuck!" She quickly pirouetted us left, then right, and flipped us around in a spiral upward as the sparks of another array of technical things passed us by. She took a few deep breaths before claiming in an overly casual tone. "See? Hella got this shit." I couldn't see her face, but years of apprenticeship at the school of detecting Chloe Price bullshittery came in handy.

Unfortunately, touching our visors together became nearly impossible as Chloe suddenly started dodging and darting and veering all over the freaking place. The regular shots gained a rain-like backing track as the tiny bits of space debris collided with us. As I got dragged about the place, I imagined faintly under the rising tides of nausea that this is probably how my clothes feel in the washing machine. Just up and down and round and round and round. Ulp.

It felt like space itself was pushing in on me. The massive, infinite stretch of black suddenly felt small. Like a prison. And through the bars came a familiar whisper. "Max. Turn it off, Max. Turn it off."

I shook my head forcefully. No. "No." No. I'm not listening. "I'm not listening." The voice I could understand had an undertone of unintelligible muttering and sibilant white noise at the barest edge of incomprehensible, like I could understand it too if I'd just lean in closer. If I'd just...

"Max!"

I blinked and the whispering vanished. We were... we were inside? "What..?"

Chloe's face appeared in front of mine, every inch of her expression practically exploding with concern. Normally, that was one of the things I loved most about her. Chloe couldn't hide a thing from anyone, good or bad. Her heart was on her sleeve, in bright neon and shouting "Look at me! Look at me!"

"I... I'm fine." I breathed out. Chloe's expression didn't change.

The doors from the Tether whirred and screeched open. Both squads of engineers hurried through and split off without engaging with them. I peered over Chloe's shoulder at their rapidly vanishing backs. "That was rude."

Chloe kept looking at me.

I met her eye again. "I'm okay, Chloe. I think all the flying about just got to me."

I hoped the subtle dig would get her to chuckle, but she just kept looking at me. "Chloe?"

"Don't lie to me, Max. Are you okay?"

"I'm fine! Like I said, I just think all the flying about got to me. It was like too much was just pressing down on me. And those things..." A brief flash of those hungry yellow eyes with the vaguest hints of innocence peeking through brought out another choking sob from my already rough throat.

Her expression immediately dropped. "Oh shit. I'm hella sorry, Max. I should've known you'd-" She got angry. "Stupid. Stupid! Stupid stupid-"

I grabbed her hand before she could punch herself, all my sad thoughts disappearing as I focused on helping Chloe. "No, Chloe! You're not stupid and you did nothing wrong, okay?" I felt mildly guilty that I'd made her think that, the last vestiges of my childhood abandonment of her still sticking to me to this day, over ten years later. She didn't look convinced at my earnest reassurance, so I gently took ahold of her face and held her gaze directly to mine. "It's not your fault. I'm just not good at the action stuff - remember that time with the spiders on Acrobad?" I pulled her in for a tight hug, pressing my ear to her chest to listen to her heartbeat. The one advantage of being short.

She did chuckle then, low and familiar. The gentle rumble was comforting. "Heh. Yeah, that car chase was awesome." She eyed me warily. "You're not gonna vomit again, are you?"

"No!" I poked her indignantly.

She continued on, disregarding my objections. "It's just, if you're gonna vomit, then I'd hella like it if you didn't vomit on me. We gotta keep these suits on, y'know, and-"

I clamped my hand over her mouth. "I'm not going to- Chloe!" I whipped my hand away and wiped her saliva onto her suit. She just grinned cheekily at me.

Copse leaned in toward us. "Are you two quite done? 'cause as cute as your banter is, and believe me, it is absolutely adorable, we kind of need to get going before the monster things come to eat our faces off. I don't think the banter would make you more appealing to them, but you probably don't wanna test that out, huh?"

Joyce and David were both eyeing us with amusement from the background. David seemed to be leaning harder on his cane than before we'd been blown out into space, but otherwise the two of them looked okay. Chloe and I both shared a look of empathetic irritation at the interruption, then glared at Copse. The man held up two hands in surrender, grinning casually all the while. As he leaned back away, he quipped "Well, guess they do. What do you say, Mom and Pop Madsen, shall we leave them to it? I'm sure there's some joke about eating in there, but I can't quite make it co-"

Joyce mercifully shut him up with a hand over his mouth. His eyes still sparkled with amusement, even as Joyce rolled her eyes. "The ass has a point, you two. We should probably get movin'."

I sighed. "Okay, okay. Let him go, Joyce." She stepped back to David's side, her hand falling away from Copse's face. "Lead the way, Copse. You can, uh, 'take point'?

He beamed at me. "Look at you. Giving orders like an EarthGov-er. We'll make an officer out of you yet." He tilted his head to Chloe. "She's the one wearing the pants in this relationship then, huh?"

He scarpered quickly before she could do more then growl.

I watched her bristle with a chuckle before following after the totally-not-fleeing soldier.

The corridors ahead, I knew, lead into one of the more affluent urban sprawls outside the central stacks nearest the command towers and innermost workings of the station. I had some negative opinions of the area, despite its pretty looks. I'd met several of the lower middle management executives of the 3M corporation here for interviews on various company actions over the years. Those stories were the kind I hated doing most. Corporate-sponsored puff garbage.

As we walked into the area proper, the contrast to when I'd last seen it was stark. The clean, well-kept corridors and canyons between buildings were now messy with blood and viscera. Strange graffiti had been scrawled across the walls, symbols I hadn't seen before and jumbled sentences of nonsense. And bodies littered the streets.

The monsters had torn through the expensive security like the steel walls were tissue paper and the guns were the wadded paper blowpipes everyone played about with in high school. Some, I observed distantly as we picked our way through the corpses, had given as good as they got. A few of the monsters were mixed in with the people, some blown to pieces, some impaled with their own blade-arms. I held to my lens-finder view of the horrors around us - composition, clarity, lighting. Setting the image made seeing the content almost tolerable. Almost.

The path ahead was clear of the dead, looking almost barren when compared to the rest of the area. And wasn't that a horrifyingly morbid thought. Copse lead us down it and through a series of small store-rooms that he had to force the doors of to get them to open. The last door opened up into a large square, enclosed on every side. Each wall had a single double-door in the centre of it; one wall to the left had a basketball hoop about ten feet up, the wall to the right was covered in colourful drawings of flowers and people. It was the schoolyard of the Ruttler Prep School. The lower middle elite wouldn't dare send their little darlings to the same school as the miners and maintenance workers that made up the rest of the station did. Perish the thought.

In the centre of the room was a pile of those tentacled monsters. Of those once-children. The little darlings of the not-quite-rich.

I began to cry.

Before I knew it, Chloe was at my side, one hand on my shoulder and the other on my side. "Max? What's wrong? Are you hurt? Is there-"

I shook my head and I pointed at the pile. I tried to speak, to tell her what I'd seen, but the words wouldn't come. I just felt... cold. Little shivers danced across my body like the low red emergency lighting danced around our silhouettes. Faint, flickering, and alternatively illuminating horror and happenstance at random.

I managed to summon a little heat and began to speak. David and Joyce had come over to listen in while Copse kept on watch. "They're... they're children, Chloe."

Chloe blinked. Looked at me, then the pile, then back to me. "Those things? They're monsters, Max, not people."

I shook my head. "Not now. But they were, Chloe. Can't you see it? In their eyes. They're children!"

They were all still eyeing me with concern. None of them believed me. Why didn't they believe me? How could they not see it? When I looked at them, I could barely see anything else. Aside from the tentacles, I mean. Chloe took a breath and began to talk in a very careful tone. "Look, Max. Even if they were kids, they're monsters now. You can't feel guilty about that shit. You didn't make them into that, and if we don't kill them, they'll kill us first. You gotta see that."

"I do, I do, I just... it's just..." I trailed off. How the hell am I supposed to express all of this in words? The kind of bone-deep horror I felt at this necessity. All that calculus of war crap that David used to talk about before we pulled the stick out. (AN2) "What... what if one of them was Victoria and Taylor's? What if we'd had to... what if we'd had to to ours..?"

Chloe tensed. I 'd gotten very close to skirting a topic we didn't talk about. Another thing for Chloe to feel guilty about - and this feeling I just hated, rather than feeling guilt of my own about it. "I'm worried about Vicky and Taylor too. If they're okay, they'll keep the sprog okay too, though. You know that." She let out a low, wry chuckle. "Crazy bitch'd scratch the eyes off any monster that came near her precious little princess. And..." She sighed. "And we don't have one to worry about. And being hella fucking honest here, Max, I'm kinda glad about it now. That I can't... that we didn't..." Another sigh, wrapping her arms around her midsection protectively. "I don't think a kid could've lived through this too."

The blunt, stark phrase, delivered in Chloe's trademark sledgehammer to the face style felt only slightly less damaging than the comparison. I sucked in a breath through my teeth, feeling them almost vibrate with the anxiety this damn topic always brought up. I hated that I agreed with her. I hated that I had to.

"I'm sorry." I let it out with the breath, trying that meditative thing of watching all my worries blow away. It didn't work. Not that I was expecting it to. With all my anxieties, I'd probably end up with a storm big enough to destroy the entire station.

Chloe removed her arms from her self-protection and wrapped them around me instead, still just as protectively. "I know, Max. It's fine. But we gotta keep moving. And we can't let up on these things, whatever they used to be."

I nodded numbly. This was wrong, but... survival made it necessary, right? I had to rationalise it away. "We need to, if we're going to live, right?"

Chloe chuckled. "Yeah, Max. And when we get out of here, I'll pay for whatever therapy we need to get over this shitshow. Hella awesome times where we talk about our feelings and how many Freudians it takes to change a lightbulb."

I smiled, rubbing away the tears as I indulged her. The things I do for love... "How many Freudians does it take to change a lightbulb?"

"Two. One to change the lightbulb, the other to hold the penis- Ladder. I mean ladder." She gave me a winning grin. The grin that dared the world to fuck with her, that said she felt confident enough to deal with whatever life threw her way. The grin that'd made me first realise how I felt.

I couldn't help but laugh. That joke was awful. Joyce and David both gave me those slightly baffled looks I'd seen so many times before. Eventually though, I calmed down and hugged Chloe back. I muttered a brief "Thanks" before letting her guide me on as we passed out of the school, away from the bodies, and along the auto-lane towards the manufacturies.

"Shit, that's hella... secure." Chloe peered curiously over at the turret-covered building that dominated most of this section of the Sphere. "Is that a forcefield? Woah. This place is awesome. Whoever's in there's kinda the only smart fucker around."

I frowned. "They are? Because they activated some turrets?"

She nodded. "They forted up, just like the guys back at the Haven. Hella smart option. Everyone who ran died in the streets, remember?"

Flashes of bodies, ripped and bloody. I shuddered, then shook my head to clear the image. It vanished, to my relief, but I was starting to feel like one of those old drawing toys. The ones with the iron filings that erased when you shook them. If I was shaken hard enough, what else would I lose?

As I worried over being shaken up inside, the station rocked with some distant explosion and the screens around us lit up with that message again - Sean Prescott preaching for us to walk to our deaths, to walk to those things. We all watched the announcements for a few moments, wondering how the heck someone could get so screwed up inside to advocate something like this?

Chloe shook herself out of the hypnotic malaise first, then brought us back with a loud clap of her hands that made us all wince and look warily out into the empty streets around us. When nothing appeared, we relaxed. "What now?"

She shrugged. "Now, we gotta get in. Anyone got any ideas?"

Copse pursed his lips. "I may have something. It's a long shot, longer than my mother winning the GalaxyBowl next season, but still. It's better than nothing, right?"

"Well?" Chloe demanded. "Fill us in, dude."

He smiled, and filled us in. Chloe blinked. "Huh. Y'know, that might actually work."

AN1 - This actually works. People might not be able to hear you scream in space, but they can hear you scream in your space suit. There's nothing in the vacuum for sound waves to travel through, but they can vibrate the fabric and glass of a spacesuit.

AN2 - I don't quite know how this comes off. In Dead Space, Isaac is very blase about most of what's happening, or just screams unintelligibly when he's hurt. There's very little actual "Egad, this is horrible, what could do this?" type conversation in the series, so I'm not sure if Max' reaction - ie. the reaction of a normal person - fits with the vibe of the rest of what I've written.