White Space

45

 Finally, a bit of luck, Yemon thought. He really needed a break. It's not like he'd won the lottery either, but after the events of the past hours, he felt like finding an axe was nothing short of winning the jackpot. It was wedged between two pieces of plastic in the recreation room. Or, rather, in the remains of it.

 The place was getting seriously flooded with toxic shit. Too fast. From previous experience with stations on the edge of complete system failure, he'd never seen such a relatively large volume of air degrade in quality so fast. He could smell it. There was a strange heavy quality to it, like being in a musty old house, only the odor was even more foul. It smelled like death. Not rotten death, but raw death. Cold death. In the past few minutes, disgusting white particles started floating around too, which was not a symptom of a scrubber malfunction as far as he knew.

 With the axe clutched firmly in his hands, he decided to check the laboratory first. He thought about initiating the cycle and going in for a while, but then he saw the state of the room from the outside and quickly decided against it. Instead, he went to try the med-bay, remembering Yin Shu. She was being cared for in there. Or whatever she was at that stage. Yemon could tell that somebody hastily removed some medical equipment and bled all over the place, not necessarily in that order. The trails led him into the neighboring room, which was even worse. The caked stains were a specific shade of red. He knew it very well. The room itself was also in complete disarray. Clearly, a fight had taken place here, but there was nobody to be found here either. That only left Narayanan's room worth checking out.

 Passing through the shambles in the rec room, he made more than a few nervous glances toward the double metal doors leading to the submarine bay corridor. Whatever the thing inside was, it must have been looking for a way through. And he didn't want to be around when it figures it out.

 He hurriedly passed into the corridor leading toward Narayanan's room, slowly getting used to all the flickering across the entire station. It was driving him crazy. What he realized, however, was that this issue was much less prominent in other parts of the station, like the lab or the med-bay. Here, it looked like it had been dialed to eleven. Apart from the blinking, the air here was also somehow becoming even heavier as he was getting closer to the end of the corridor. He had to close his faceplate again and start the filtration process for fear of being poisoned by it. The white particles floating around the station everywhere were getting bigger and thicker in the air. They weren't oversized dust motes anymore, as Yemon had thought. Instead, they became more akin to large snowflakes or maybe even shed skin. Except so much and so big, they were virtually impossible.

 Reaching the halfway point in the dim corridor amid the flashes, he realized the walls had started to shift. It had happened so gradually that he couldn't even tell where it had all began. He remembered they were smooth composite when he had entered. Now, they were of a pale white, slightly rougher texture. He'd seen this before in the caves, only then it was more alive. He touched the surface to feel if he was right. It was the same weird, soft sensation he had felt in the caverns. This was also a living construct. Barely noticeable, but it was there. Along with the shifting. And the rest of the corridor in front of him, as much as he could tell, had even more of the stuff, growing ever thicker and thicker on the walls, blotting out even the remaining faint, flickering light.

 The strange, thickening, fleshy pattern led him directly to Narayanan's room, growing over and completely obscuring all the rest of the doors in the corridor. But this one was open. Overgrown, but not closed. And the flickering inside the room was a constant. The lights were completely crazy, changing brightness and hue with every blink, accompanied by the panels on the side of the door, on the wall and even a broken screen under a desk by the wall. At least it seemed to be a desk, as the general outline was merely hinting at the form because the white growth had already devoured it in its entirety. The computer screen below it was also just a strange rectangle flickering through a layer of white skin. The milky surfaces all around him seemed to ripple slowly, like the surface of water. In certain areas, this slow movement was interrupted by rapid convulsions, while in other places, the substance itself was replaced by a grayish, dry surface, slowly shedding the white particles he'd seen floating around.

 He took a cautious step inside the room, turning on his light, because the ever-changing illumination was making it a thousand times harder to make out anything than proper darkness. Directing his lights on a sudden, twitching movement, much more defined than the undulation of the walls, he could make out something that was not part of the white growth. It was also white, of course, but the movement distinguished it from the general structure of the room. Whatever it was, it had legs. Or something like legs. As his eyes and mind adjusted to the white-on-white image in front of him, he saw that these spread at least two meters apart, probably more. They were reaching the farthest corners of the wall. They were also slightly wobbling, caused by some kind of movement in the structure at their center.

That section was an abomination. Yemon wasn't keen on abusing phrases like that, but these things, whatever they were, they defied explanation altogether. This creature was no different. Between the legs hung a completely white, desiccated human torso. Upside-down at that. At first, Yemon couldn't even understand what he was looking at. The human part seemed to be the main body of the creature, but it was also twisted and tortured almost beyond recognition. In the back of his mind, Yemon wished the transformation to be complete instead of like this, so that he wouldn't be able to see the human underneath it all. The throat of the person was ripped open, and continued in a kind of elongated, fleshy tube that turned inward toward the wall. It was throwing up more of the white thing.

Yemon reluctantly stepped closer with his axe at the ready, contemplating if it would be better to just leave the thing to be. The realization that his whole body was quivering didn't really help. The sight disturbed him more than he thought it rational. But then he decided that there might still be survivors on the station and if this thing was behind the air poisoning by secreting this white layer on the walls, then it had to go. A sudden twitch of one of the terribly long legs made his heart skip a beat. He took control of the rising quiver and swallowed hard. He sucked air in between his teeth and lifted his axe above his head, ready to strike.

 "There's some weird shit in here!" His radio crackled in his helmet. "I just saw a worm with Anisim's face on it or some shit!"

 At precisely the same moment as the words first split the silence in his helmet, Yemon saw the creature react. As the legs shifted in a mind-bogglingly complicated motion and the being turned around, while the human head opened its eyes. There was an unmistakable expression of terror on the face. The tube coming out of the throat flailed around wildly. The thing suddenly erupted in motion. It reached for Yemon with too many legs to fight back against at once. He brought down the axe on one of them while he grabbed another. The end of every leg ended in a pointy and sharp claw, ready to pierce through Yemon's body and he could only hope the creature lacked the sheer strength necessary to do it. He hopped back while letting go of the leg and swiped across another one with the blade of the axe, sending wide splashes of brown stuff all over the room. With another back step, he was already at the door, trying to squeeze the monster into a bottleneck, but it had already hopped onto the floor, scurrying toward him. With its insanely long legs, it only took a few half steps each to close the distance between them. He chopped off an approaching limb while backing right into the wall. Another one barely missed his face, piercing the composite next to his head as the thing reared up, trying to skewer him with multiple stabs at once. He ducked and swept his leg under the creature. This didn't send the entire assortment of limbs tumbling down, as Yemon had hoped, but made it wobble just long enough to give him an opening. As soon as he finished the move, he rolled aside and stood up, burying the pointy end of the axe into the human head. Then, he gave the handle a firm twist to make sure it's lodged in there good and pulled the entire thing over his head while he turned around. This sent the monster flying toward the recreation room, splattering the eerie white walls with brown liquid. Not even giving it a chance to properly hit the ground, Yemon dashed across the corridor and smacked the creature with the axe mid-flight. Once he brought it down with force, he started hammering down on it with repeated blows. He made sure he didn't stop until the creature was at least in two separate halves. Then he stood above it, wheezing, looking down at the contorted, sickly white human face, glancing up with glazed eyes. It didn't stop twitching, but Yemon decided it had to be enough.

 "That was some tough shit." Jaleel said, approaching from behind. He stopped above the creature and looked at the human face. Yemon couldn't help but remark how he didn't seem all that surprised.

 "Holy shit." Jaleel said. "It's Colin or what the hell his name was."

 "Yeah." Yemon kicked the human half away, sending it sliding on its own fluids toward the double doors.