A few days went by and at first Rush and Chloe had been terrified, they'd been forced watch as Cress lost her hair – eyebrows and eyelashes included – until finally the yellowing of her skin had started to fade leaving it porcelain and the cut she'd gotten on her hand from setting the fire vanished as though it had never been there. It seemed that her body was returning to the perfect form she'd been in when they'd found her what felt like forever ago, only time would tell if her brain had been reset as well. Cressida's parents hardly slept or ate over those few days and only returned to Destiny after several hours of Young nagging them that they had to at least eat something, they'd always gone straight back. The combined prayers of the crew for Cressida's recovery had been granted.

The rest of the Nakai ship had been stripped of anything valuable and Volker had downloaded every bit of data the blue aliens had, Doctor Park – whose eyesight had finally returned enough for her to walk the corridors on her own had started to help them try and make sense of it all but Tamara made sure she didn't over do it. Brody had even managed to start on the plan to wake Eli and as soon as they were certain Cress was safe they'd attempt waking him, everyone would feel better as soon as Eli returned to them; they missed his can-do attitude, stupid jokes and comic book references.

"Her hair is down to her shoulders again." Chloe told him the instant Rush returned to the odd half-circular room. "She looks like herself now."

"Good. Has she moved?" He asked approaching the large black terminal attached to his daughter's tank, it would be nice when he finally managed to get out of the suit for longer than ten minutes, it was bulky and cumbersome. "Anything happen with her read out?"

"No, all the same. I've noticed her eyes moving under their lids though, I think maybe she's dreaming."

"She could be or it could be her brain re-wiring." He answered as he continued to scan the terminal. "What's this?"

Chloe came closer and looked at what he'd pointed to on the screen.

"Oh, I don't really know. It's some kind of file or program that seems to be rejuvenating along with her. I only noticed it a moment ago. You can't pronounce it in English."

"What does it mean?" He asked inquisitively.

"... Downfall." Chloe thought about it a moment but there was no doubt it was that one word. "Yeah, downfall."

All went quiet for a moment, Rush had been reluctant to go messing around with the terminal without knowing what effect it would have on their daughter, things had only just started to look up for her. However, he felt the cogs of his mind starting to turn in that familiar and occasionally manic way until and idea struck him.

"Downfall." He repeated and Chloe just looked at him from his side. "What if this is what caused her to sabotage the ship? What caused her body to shut down? Think about it, it could be like a virus on a computer. Does what it's programmed to do, in this case it's cripple Destiny, and then deletes everything, killing Cressida. You said the file was resetting, so if we're putting Cress back to her factory setting then the virus is doing the same."

Chloe's face fell.

"So all of it is just going to happen again?"

"Not if we delete it."

"You want to go messing around in our daughter's brain?" Chloe looked to be half way between horrified and telling him to hurry up and do it. "We don't know what that would do to her!"

All fell silent in the large black metal room as Rush thought, a million pros and cons flying through his brain almost simultaneously. His finger started to tap furiously against the thick glove of his suit an almost absent-minded action helping to release some of the tension he felt.

"If she's still regenerating then so is the program. You said you only just noticed it so it's only just started, so if we delete it then it'll be like it was never even there."

"How do you know?" She asked quietly, eyes full of love and worry for her child.

Rush sighed. "I don't. Maybe I'm just looking at all this through rose-tinted glasses, Chloe. I have no idea what ninety-nine percent of this says, what will happen if I push the wrong button or even if Cress is going to come out of that bloody chamber and still be Cressida." He paused in an attempt to calm himself. "The only thing I know for certain is that I can't watch her go through all of this again, she's a child. The first thing she saw in this universe was those blue bastards... I won't let the last thing she sees be them as well. I won't."

Silence hung heavy in the air, almost suffocatingly so. That static fog stared to descend upon him again blocking out the world around him but then Chloe's arms were around his waist and her helmeted head rested against his chest bringing him back.

"Delete it." She told him in a whisper, almost so quietly that he missed it. "You're right, she shouldn't have to do it again. Delete it, Nicholas. Symbol on the far left."

Rush nodded but he knew she couldn't see it, with a deep breath he pushed the symbol Chloe had indicated and watched the file vanish from the screen like it had never existed; there was no turning back. Whiskey eyes flew to Cress instantly looking for any sign that what they'd just done had hurt her but she just remained floating in the translucent gel. He'd not noticed that his arms had slipped around Chloe keeping her close, he'd have kissed her if he could, oh how he longed to kiss her. Her skin was always so soft to the touch and... not the best time to be thinking about that.

Suddenly a fist was slammed down on the thick glass chamber, noise echoing around the large and rather acoustic room. It startled Chloe and the elder man so much so that they jumped away from one another. Blue and chocolate orbs shot up to see Cressida wide eyed and looking panicked and frightfully so , she said something they could hardly hear but Rush knew it was Daddy.

"Cressida!" Chloe raced forwards and pressed her hand to the cold glass desperately wanting to help her child.

"Cress, baby girl, I need you to calm down." Rush could see on the terminal her heart rate was way too fast and with her still recovering he didn't want to risk any more harmful issues. "Just relax, you don't need to breath let the gel do that for you."

Slowly the eight year old relaxed as her father had said and let her heart return to something resembling resting and her eyes lost that desperate panic. The thick liquid in her lungs kept her supplied with oxygen but it truly felt unnatural, but it wasn't so much her breathing that had scared her instead it was waking up in the chamber. At first Cressida had thought it was a nightmare but as her eyes fully adjusted it had dawned on her that it was in fact real, only when she realised it was her parents in the brown-gold suits did fear start to lessen.

"Are you in pain?" Rush asked loudly so as she could hear him, eyes alternating between his scared little girl and the screen readout.

There was a moment of pause, then slowly Cressida's left hand raised up to tap her head and then went down to press against the glass where her Mother's still rested. Rush wasted no time scouring the bulky computer.

"We just removed the programming that made you sabotage the ship and your body shut down-" At least I think we did, hope we did. "- You'll be alright, but if anywhere else starts to hurt or it gets worse you tell us, understand." Cress slowly nodded. "Shut your eyes baby girl, it'll help your headache." It took less than a second for Cress to obey her Daddy.

Things had started to look up after that, if fact now that the Downfall program had been removed Cressida seemed to be better than when they'd first discovered her. For the first time in days it looked as though the girl would be alright – would live – and her parents finally got to relax. Chloe stopped bursting into tears at odd moments and Rush found he could actually breath calmly again. Tamara, Varro and Camile had been just as relieved when Colonel Young had passed the information on to them, Cressida had touched the lives of just about everyone on board Destiny.

Nicholas had assured Chloe that one more day and they'd be able to take her back to the ship and TJ would look her over to make sure Cress was indeed okay. None of that meant that Cressida's parents were going to leave her aboard the Nakai ship alone though, especially now she was awake; dozing was probably a better term for it. Chloe has spend a few hours sat before the glass tube while Rush and Mister Brody double and triple checked every bit of data from her chamber, at first she'd told her daughter stories – she'd known they made Cress feel better by the small smile on her face – after that she'd sung to her, just little nursery rhymes and her favourite songs from before they left Earth, not to mention Be Our Guest from Beauty And The Beast which was her favourite. Eventually though Chloe's legs had cramped up and she'd been forced to stand, Rush understood the look in her eyes so had quickly taken over talking to their daughter leaving Brody to stand like an unneeded extra.

Chloe hadn't really paid much attention to the room around her beyond the chamber, at first sight it was just a half-circle of dark metal walls and oddly eerie lights. She walked over to the flat wall and ran her hand along it, smooth and featureless almost as though it had spend thousands of years being weathered by rushing water; it was just as cold as well. She walked absent-mindedly with her fingers gliding over the walls, her only intent being to banish the stiffness of her legs. She grounded to a sudden halt when the tips of her fingers felt a coarse section of the wall, almost unnoticeable and for a second Chloe believed she'd imagined it. The rough patch was invisible to the naked eye but it was certainly there, small, round and felt similar to limestone. That curious spark Chloe had passed on to her daughter flared up and she found herself pushing the circular section, it didn't dint into the wall like a button but it certainly released some kind of lock because hardly a second later part of the flat wall slid open.

Chloe screamed!

XXXX

For some reason I seem to be in a phase of doing drawn-out or cliffhanger chapters, sorry.