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in the void, they dwell
chapter four

Written by Proxy

The airlock of the Entropy IV lay opened like the maw of some strange beast - a mechanical cave one imagined might contain the chittering of alien life. The longer Cassian stared into it, the more he expected it to swallow his soul. It was a familiar dread - the tip of a sword or the catacombs of some forgotten hellscape. He reached over and netted his fingers into Adair’s flight suit, giving it a tug to keep the room from spinning.

“Well?” Florian cut the silence and rolled their eyes.

“Is the good man too busy quaking in his boots to make a decision? Shall we stand here on the precipice forever, wishing that he had replaced those shaky legs as he’s replaced that eye? Tell me Cassian did you…”

“Knock it off,” Adair said, shooting Florian a nasty look.

Florian put their hands up and paced away from the door.

“Looks like the entire station’s power plant is, well, to put it mildly - unusable. Seems like Adair cut the backup generators when she turned off the security system,” Bruno offered, busy with a small tablet scrolling with various things that to Cassian looked like magic.

“So, life support is a non-starter,” he said.

Florian cut a grin through an invisible proscenium arch , “How poetic.”

Adair tapped a switch on the wall to their left with a casual kind of flair, and a series of small doors lifted in the room around them. Helmets, oxygen tanks, and thermally protected suits lined the shuttle’s airlock. Florian clapped their hands together with enthusiasm and immediately began stretching the suit over their cargo pants. Bruno seemed to stiffen at the sight of the equipment. Cassian’s mind turned to the annoyance of how sweaty these damn things are. Though, he figured it was always better than your eyes distended from their sockets in the vacuum of space. They finished suiting up and Adair finally cracked the Entropy IV’s airlock.

The Entropy IV was a strange model as deep space colony stations go, built with some quirks that Cassian had noticed when he was doing one of his nightly tours through his dad’s “classified” material. These extended airlocks were an essential part of the design. He knew they were to be kept lit only by “safe-light” as if this were the universe’s most expensive photography lab. He didn’t know why. Regardless, the eerie red glow of the battery powered lanterns didn’t do much to dissuade the sense of dread as he wandered through. His eyes were at his feet as they entered the station properly. It was dim, with grey, metallic corridors extending out in multiple directions. They were near the bottom of the station. A dim emergency light blinked on a nearby panel - an access point.

Cassian reached back and pressed a button at the point where his suit’s helmet connected to its spinal column. He flinched as the suit begin whirring a bit; a small metal tendril reached up his spine and clicked into a small flesh-colored hatch just below his temporal. It slowly tugged at his consciousness -each centimeter felt like his spinal cord was being drained from the base of his skull. As the words “suit integrated” populated his vision, he reached his hand forward to the station's access point. Then, he met resistance. Adair’s hand rested against his and she cut him a soft, knowing, smile.

“Cass, itching to get a virus again huh?” she said.

Cassian paused, his hand drifting down to nestle at her side. She was right; the last time he had tried plugging into a strange vessel, the ship’s autonomous piloting program force fed its code to him for its own amusement. Even now he could hear the voice ringing around somewhere in the back of his skull, “Hey, there.”. He felt his body shiver - yeah, good call Adair.

Without much conversation, Cassian began wandering down a corridor. The others followed, cautiously looking around for signs of life... friendly, or not. After a moment, he turned a corner and he felt his head hit something. Something… soft.

Suddenly the hiss of the radio communicator carried Florian’s laughter like an emergency broadcast. Cassian looked up, and his eyes widened. Hanging from the ceiling, as if a cocoon was a bedsheet dripping with liquid. He reached up and grabbed at its base lightly - it squelched and then oozed some kind of fluid onto the floor. Cassian looked to Adair to make sure her eyes were as wide as his. Then, he pushed the object out of his way only to find something much, much, worse.

The hallway was riddled with a steel wire web, on each like was another bedsheet dripping fluids and flesh. Some of them had been pierced through as if kabobs for the Entropy to digest. Some had been fused to each other with what Cassian now believed was blood and purge-fluid. Adair pulled a knife from her belt and ran it against the sheet Cassian had just pushed from his view. Inside was much worse than he had imagined. Bolts shoved into eye-sockets. Metal riveted onto exposed bone Heads sawed in half and replaced with junker flight computers. Wires threaded into veins. These hardly even looked like men anymore.

Bruno’s labored breathing cut into the communicator, “It’s…”. he gagged, “deeply unscientific. A 20th century mechanic’s understanding of 23rd century technology.”

A silence hung between them and droned on and on. Seconds turned to minutes.

“Should we… cut them down?” Cassian asked. Adair shook her head.

“Adair can you open this one, I might… have a plan,” Bruno cut in.

Never one to turn down a chance to use her knife, Adair cut the base of a sack nestled up against a fire extinguisher. To her surprise, there was a mostly intact head and a cybernetic implant similar in structure to Cassian’s eye.

“I can wrench the memory chip-set from the skeletal graft if you’re willing to connect to it, Cassian. It should be compatible… maybe a few firmware updates back but…” Bruno said, trailing off.

“Do it,” Cassian let fall out of his mouth. Bruno swallowed hard and stuck his hand into the eye socket of the deceased. His fingers seemed to wrench around for hours before he began to push against the cold metal of the wall. Suddenly Bruno fell back into Adair’s arms holding a small chip and a piece of skull; Cassian imagined the pop it would have made and felt the bile rise in his stomach. Bruno thrust the bone fragment into Cassian’s hands with an apologetic smile.

Cassian flicked a switch on the outside of his helmet and placed the chip-set in the palm of his hand. A green light flickered on first on the exterior of his suit and then glared against the interior of his visor. His vision fizzled out as it was replaced with the immensity of all of his synapses firing in rhythm with the deceased neural pathways. His mouth hung open, his eyes washed over with the expanse of a life’s worth of visual data and equipment logs.

“There was a man…” Florian and Cassian said in tandem.

Florian had been staring down the hallway intensely. Adair and Bruno turned to track his position... and they saw a shadow shift at the edge of the corridor, and two glowing lights disappear into the artificial night.

Florian smiles, “I’m quite mad - but that was a man most, perhaps pathologically, artistically inclined. I wonder if he thinks we’d make exquisite corpses ourselves?”

“Can we throw this guy out of the airlock?” Bruno quipped.

“If you’d like to hasten your own turn toward sculptural, yes, you may. Take me, man of knowledge. Release me into the vastness of space! Satiate your own…”

“I told you to knock it off,” Adair cut Florian off.

“For someone with such a good sense of timing, you sure are annoyingly straight-laced,” Florian huffed.

Cassian returned to consciousness just in time to shoot Florian a glare.

“Lucky little shits we are, this particular John Doe was a technician for the Entropy IV. I downloaded about 6 months of maintenance reports; it seems like the life-support system has its own dedicated back-up not too far from here,” Cassian said.

“Where's the catch?” quipped Adair.

“There is none. If you don’t mind weightlessness, solar-ash, and long walks on the shores of the void,” Cassian laughed to himself nervously. Adair, Florian, and Bruno glared at him. “Uh… yeah… it’s on the exterior of the spaceship.”

“Or we could just leave. We could say that the Entropy IV has a serial killer problem and that it’s probably covered by the company’s existing contracts, your father could send callously written letters in legalize about “workplace hazards”, and we could all leave before this becomes the final chapter of all of our short, insignificant, lives,” Bruno said.

Cassian studied the floor with increasing intensity. He wondered if all the good choices died a long time ago.

Art by Skyler