The NRT ship, a great, white, angular, boxy thing, with four side thrusters and one window in the cockpit, twisted its thrusters vertically and settled in for a landing on a pad in MK2’s third Quadrant Production Facility. Inside, Allister McCullinay sat in a white, armored spacesuit, her helmet on. Beside her sat Itomi, dressed much the same. There were four others in white, and two in black and green: her lab team, and their escorts. The NRT ship fired its thrusters hard as it settled down on four wide landing feet.

Then, the back opened like a jaw, and the two soldiers rushed out, clearing the landing zone, before waving the scientists out. Allister’s team stood with their lab briefcases, hard steel rectangles containing testing equipment and the like, and hurried out of the ship. Then, Itomi and Allister stood, looked at each other, and, when Allister nodded, alighted the ship as well.

She looked around as she stepped onto the landing pad. They were at the base of a set of massive steel spheres painted orange with staircases running up their sides. Pipes and tubes ran everywhere here, mostly connecting with a building across from the landing pads, which was but one in a sea of them. She took a deep breath and steeled herself. She wasn’t sure what they would find in here, but she was sure it wouldn’t be easy to stomach. She’d never seen a dead body before Ceres, and while she had since seen them in her dreams, real life was a different matter. And the QPF had been sealed since Shishone’s team left, so presumably she would be facing them soon.

Itomi, noticing her hesitation as the NRT ship settled its engines, leaned over and gave her a quick hug. “It’ll be okay Doctor. We’ll be home by tonight and we can play some video games or something.”

Allister smiled, and looked to Itomi. “Thanks Itomi. You’re right,” she said, stepping off the landing pad with the soldiers. They walked down a small set of stairs and over to the building, where one of them punched in a keycard, opening the doors.

“I guess they’ve got some power running to the place again,” Itomi said, watching the soldiers enter the building with their rifles and flashlights raised. Allister nodded, and looked around.

“Not enough for the lights I guess.”

They headed into the building, which was a large foundry-like area, with massive buckets hanging from the ceiling on rails and huge tanks and troughs lining the room. It was silent, eerily so here, amongst the tubes and wires and machinery. It was almost liminal. Here was supposed to be a place of life and production, not silence.

She looked around more, and noticed something else: there were no bodies here. Nor was there any dust, which struck her as odd. The place was clean, and empty. The two soldiers looked to each other, and waved the other forward, before both moved out. The scientists followed. They made their way through the large hall, and into a small set of stairs that descended into the underground of MK2.

“There are tunnels below the facility,” one of the soldiers said. “We’ll take those to the fusion reactor. There seems to be a concentration of heat there, so the reactor is likely functional. Once we get the lights on, we will head to the command center. Hua?”

“Hua,” said the other soldier, as they bounced down the stairs.

Allister looked at Itomi, who shrugged.

Soon, they were at the base of the stairs, which spat them out into a small hallway leading to an arched tunnel of stone that stretched out far in either direction, so far that light could not reach the end. They came out on a concrete landing, and descended some stairs to the tunnel floor proper, before one of the soldiers looked at a map on his PDA, and pointed to the right.

“This way.”

With that, they started walking.

For at least twenty minutes, they walked in silence. During that time, Itomi and Allister fell back a bit, and started to talk amongst themselves. Every so often, they would pass an empty truck, abandoned in the tunnel, or a forklift, or a cart. The running theme was that they were all empty. No bodies, no dust, just emptiness.

“Where are the bodies?” Allister eventually asked, as they walked.

Itomi looked around. They were passing by a truck carrying barrels in its bed, and it, too, was empty. “I don’t know. Weren’t there supposed to be a lot of them?”

“Yes.”

A strange feeling befell Allister’s gut. Something started to churn a little, twisting ever so slightly as they walked on.

Itomi was the one who spoke next, seemingly reading Allister’s mind when she said, “I have a weird feeling about this.”

“I do too,” Allister concurred. “I don’t like this.”

“Have you been feeling well?” Itomi asked, looking at her through her visor.

Allister shrugged. “I suppose. It’s all been a lot to think about.”

“Yeah, I bet,” Itomi said. “How has your head been?”

“Better, since they took the stitches out.”

“Good. No more wooziness?”

She shook her head. “No.”

“Good.”

Just then, her radio came to life. Allister nearly jumped when she heard the static.

“Allister?” she heard a gravelly voice say over the static. “It’s Xiao.”

“Commander,” she said into the microphone. “I was told you’d be accompanying us on this trip.”

“I am, from Makemake.”

“I see.”

“Let me know what you find down there. I’ll be here just in case something goes wrong. Not that anything should, scanners show no signs of movement or even life down there,” Xiao said.

“That’s a relief,” Allister said, truly feeling some relief from that statement. She breathed out a small breath she wasn’t aware she’d been holding in. “I’ll keep you in the loop Commander.”

“Thank you, Doctor.”

Then, the line cut.

Just in time, too, as the soldiers had stopped. The lab team stopped behind them, and Allister and Itomi beside them, all looking forward to see what had brought them to a halt. One of the soldiers stepped forward, looking at the ground, before crouching down and touching something with two fingers.

“What the fuck is that?” he said.

Allister stepped forward. “What is it?”

He looked back at her. “Come take a look.”

When she approached him to see what he’d been looking at, as he stood and stepped behind her, she saw stringy red sinew-like material scattered around the ground like veins. It was fairly sparse, yet clustered together like tissue, thicker lines in some areas, thinner in others, like a web. Allister knelt down and prodded it with a finger, finding it fleshy and crumbly.

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“I don’t know what this is,” she said, motioning for her lab team to come forward, “but we’re taking a sample.”

She waved for the briefcase, and the scientist holding it gave it to her. She popped it open on the ground, and pulled out a small scalpel and a tube with a cork. Carefully, she leaned in and sliced a piece of the sinew, which broke apart as though it was dry, and crumbled. She took the sample and placed it into her tube with a pair of tweezers, and then corked the tube, placing it in the briefcase. Then, she locked the briefcase down, clicking down the latches, before handing it back to the man who’d given it to her.

“Alright. Let’s keep moving,” she said, sounding more confident than she felt. This was weird, certainly. She’d never seen something like this before. They weren’t pulsating, or moving, but they certainly looked like organic tissue strands. The way they crumbled when walked on, or cut, or touched really in any way, further added to their unsettling mystery.

The soldiers looked at each other nervously, and then one stepped forward, and the group continued on down the tunnel, a little more on edge now. The soldiers kept their rifles raised and the conversations died.

They worked their way further down the tunnel, winding through it until they came to a large circular room with a domed ceiling, where multiple trucks were parked along the wall and there were several doors. Here, the sinew-like material was thicker, weaving around on the floors and walls and trucks and even a little on the ceiling. Every step they took, they crunched some down, and it was making Allister more and more disquieted with each step.

“We’re right beneath the reactor,” one of the soldiers said, looking at his PDA. “This way.”

He guided them to a door and opened it, leading to a set of stairs covered in the tissue like a waterfall. Allister grimaced at the thought of having to walk through it. It was so thick here that it looked like tree roots. Still, the soldiers had already started their ways up, and so had her team, and so she continued after them, trying to step where they stepped to avoid crunching down any more of the sinew than she had to. Up she climbed, to the top, where they found themselves in a large ringed hallway that stretched out to either side of them.

“We have to go to the other side,” said a soldier. “The entrance to the reactor is over there.”

So they started walking through the tissue, through the doughnut of a hallway, to the other side where there was a small foyer, an exit into the rest of the facility, a security checkpoint, and the entrance to the reactor. It was a set of heavy double doors that, when the keycard was placed on their scanner, slid apart from each other very, very slowly.

Within was a nightmare.

The soldiers flashed their lights through the room, discovering layers upon layers of the tissue like substance, all folded over arms and legs, some of which were withered to the bone, over skulls and half-skulls, all surrounding the massive, tall, wide core of the fusion reactor, with all its tubes and inputs and hoses. The wall, usually grooved and lined with coolant pods, was just layers of the tissue. It clung to the ceiling, to the reactor core, and to the floor, and it was hot in here, too.

Allister almost gagged.

“Oh my god,” she muttered, looking at the corpses and tissue in the dim light.

Itomi gagged. “Oh God,” she muttered, backing away.

Allister stepped into the room and looked down at the corpses beneath her, speechless. That is, until she noticed light movement behind the eyelids of one of the faces that lay half covered in sinew. “Oh my god, I think we have a survivor! Everyone, I think–”

As she spoke, she brushed off some of the tissue, only to find the other half of the man’s face was rotted and decayed. Still, his eye moved, and then, opened, bloodshot, and stared right at her, right through her, into her very darkest of dark places. She gasped, and staggered backwards, falling onto another corpse, the tissue crunching beneath her.

She screamed, pushing herself up, and stumbling again. She felt sick. Her heart beat like a thousand horses rumbling down a valley, and her legs felt weak. One of the soldiers reached out quickly and grabbed her, pulling her up and out of the room, where he helped her to her feet. She gagged and tried to breathe, but struggled.

“Doctor!” Itomi called out, rushing up to her. “What happened?”

Allister doubled over, hands on her knees, and dry heaved as Itomi rubbed her back. “Are you okay?”

She nodded, but it was a lie and they both knew it. “We need to tell the Commander,” Allister eventually said, standing back up and choking down her stomach. “Oh, God, we need to tell the Commander.”

She reached up and clicked the radio on her helmet, calling out to Xiao. “Commander? Come in, Commander Xiao.”

“I’m here,” he said, almost immediately. “What happened?”

“We found them,” she said, shuddering. “We found the bodies. Oh my god, they’re… they’re all in there. One of them looked at me.”

“Bodies? Looking at you? What did you find?” he asked.

“Tissue,” she said, swallowing. “We found tissue, red tissue. It’s eating the bodies. Oh God it’s eating them. Oh my god.”

“Calm down,” he said, “Breathe. What’s this tissue?”

“It’s everywhere,” she said, looking around and panting. “On the walls, the ceilings, it looks like sinew but it’s dry and crumbly.”

There was a pause.

Then, after a moment, three gunshots came over the radio, almost deafening her. She screamed, and the whole team looked at her. “Commander Xiao?”

“I’m still here, Allister.”

“What was that?”

“I’m wrapping up loose ends.”

“What?” she exclaimed, looking at the others, who didn’t seem capable of hearing the conversation. “Why?”

“Because,” he started, “I don’t need witnesses for this. Allister McCullinay, you and your team have served your purposes to me. For that I thank you. But this is where we part.”

“What are you talking about?” she stammered.

“Allister McCullinay,” Xiao said. “You’re fired.”

With that, the line went dead. An icy chill ran up her spine, and she shivered, looking at the others. They looked at her expectantly, and Itomi stepped forward even, saying, “Doctor McCullinay? What’s wrong?”

“Xiao,” she said, her voice soft and defeated, “just killed them. He just killed the people in mission control.”

“What?” Itomi said, backing away.

Allister swallowed. “I heard the gunshots. He killed them, and fired me. Us.”

“Fired us?” one of the soldiers said, lowering his weapon. “He can’t do that, that’s not how our contracts work.”

She shrugged, feeling dizzy. “Well it’s what he said.”

“We need to get back to the ship,” Itomi said, looking at the others, who nodded to her. “C’mon.”

She started off, waving for the others to follow, and they did so in a hurry. Allister stood there in shock for a moment, her heart pounding, when one of the soldiers, one of the last ones out, put a hand on her arm and squeezed it, saying, “Come on Doctor. We need to go.”

He gave her a small tug, and it was enough to get her moving. She started after them, hurrying, and they all rushed back down to the tunnels, crunching the tissue beneath their feet with every step. Running as best they could in the low gravity, the lab team, sometimes stumbling, managed to keep up with the soldiers as they worked their way back through the tunnels and to the landing pad.

They rushed up the stairs, and through the long building of buckets and rails, out of the structure, to the landing pad, and… stopped. They all stopped and stared, arms at their sides, weapons down, flashlights down.

The ship was gone.

They’d been stranded.

Itomi looked at Allister, panic in her eyes. “What do we do?”

She looked to the soldiers, who looked to each other, and felt panic begin to set in. “I… I don’t know. Try the radios.”

They all reached up and clicked their radios, but they found their long range radio jammed, providing nothing but static and garbled noises as feedback. “He’s jamming us!” one of the soldiers cried.

“What do we do?” someone said.

Allister swallowed. “We… we go back inside. We find a radio, or something. We get in a truck and head to another QPF. Something. We do something.”

A small murmur kicked up amongst them as the realization of their situation settled in. They’d been left to die.

And die they might.

“How much air do you have on your tank?” Allister asked Itomi.

She checked the computer on her wrist. “Seventeen hours of compressed air.”

Allister checked hers, and it was about the same. So, they had seventeen hours to figure something out. Or else they would all die here.

“Then we’re wasting time,” she said, swallowing her guts and standing upright. “Come on. I have an idea.”