Chapter 1

The world fell forward and, with a gasp, I tumbled into cold and hate. My body curled up on the ground and I shuddered convulsively, my mind buzzing and sparking and flashing. My eyes couldn’t – didn’t – work, and I breathed in shallow, fast gasps. Slowly, the sensations of dislocation faded and I became aware that I was laying on a grille, with enough space between the lines of metal to fit a finger. My eye opened and I saw that the corridor I was in was lit by a pale, unearthly blue luminescence. A soft voice spoke in a language I knew.

“Station time is error.”

I closed my eyes. My hand pushed to the floor and I shoved myself to my feet. My body unfolded with a series of creaks and pops and I gasped as I finally stood straight. My head spun and I grabbed onto the wall to keep myself from toppling right back to my knees. My skin prickled and I realized I was naked and I knew that there was something deeply shameful in that fact. My eyes closed and I felt images – disassociated and pulsing with red light – pushing against the back of my mind. They refused to form into coherence. I saw a triangle of metal, grasped in a bleeding hand. I saw an orb of metal, looking down at me.

I heard the words.

She’ll do.

I shook my head.

I had no name. I had no memory. So, I decided to get at least some knowledge of myself. When I opened my eyes, I saw that the corridor was not quite a corridor. Rather, it was a pair of rows of machines. Each one was large and squat and looked like it was designed to contain something, with silvery doors and hatches, bolts and latches. A fine mist coiled around my feet and the chill in the air felt like it had been made for a reason. The machine I had stumbled from remained open – the hatch swung wide. Inside, there was a drain and I could see the last droplets of a pale blue fluid sweeping away.

I shuddered and didn’t know why.

Each machine was labeled. My brow furrowed as I saw mine was labeled with a number.

0451.

I shook my head.

The interior of the machine had a reflective, metallic sheen. I stepped closer and in the distorted reflection, I saw myself. Strawberry blond hair, spilling around a wide, heart shaped face. A small button nose and a pair of cat-green eyes. Freckles and a trim, athletic body. My breasts were large, and tipped with a pair of rosy red nipples. Looking down, I saw that they jutted from my chest. They looked firm and perky and I wondered what it would be like to squeeze them. I shook my head slightly. Focus. A pair of pert pussy lips sat between my thighs, utterly hairless. I had no hair on my body, in fact, beyond my eyebrows and my head.

That felt faintly unnatural. But ... pleasant...

I stepped over to the next chamber – 0452 – and looked inside the porthole sat on the top of the closed hatch.

A death’s head leered back at me. Desiccated flesh and sunken eyes, teeth clenched in a rictus grin. My heart hammered and I put my fingers on the machine, trying to feel what had gone wrong. I was alive. This person was dead. Why? I stepped to the next tube. 0453 was also a shriveled corpse. I started to run now, my whole body jiggling as I ran past row after row of corpses. Dead. Dead. All dead. Who had put so many people into ... into ... these things? Were we supposed to be dead? My heart sprang into my throat and my toe caught on the grille of the floor. I tripped and skidded forward.

I rolled onto my side, gasping, my hand going to my knee.

“Fuck,” I croaked, my voice feeling strange in my throat. I closed my eyes. Had I always sounded like that?

Once the pain was under control, I forced myself to my feet and this time, I walked.

It took me a slow eternity to reach a doorway. The door itself actually provided one answer: Where I was. Scrawled on the middle of the door, right underneath the window that looked out into the adjoining corridor, was a symbol and a pair of words. The symbol was a gear surrounding a small flame in a golden cup. The words were in the same language I spoke and thought in. English? That was the name, wasn’t it?

The words.

Virgil Station.

The door had a black plate of plastic next to it. A glowing interface of numeral keys sprang up when I brought my hand near it. I somehow knew that was going to happen. The numerals went.

7, 8, 9

4, 5, 6

1, 2, 3

A zero was tucked into the corner, with a backspace and enter key to the other side. I shook my head. What a weird way of arranging numbers. But it was clear the door wanted numbers. I hesitated. Then slowly, I tapped in my machine’s numbers. The keypad flashed red and didn’t open. I scowled. My fingernail dug into the edge of the plastic and I yanked it hard. My fingernails ached, but the plastic gave first, revealing the internal guts of the machine. I let my hands work – not questioning it. But I managed to connect that optical core to that wire and the door hissed. Pneumatic pressure faded and the door dropped into the floor.

I looked at my hands. Flexed my fingers. Ow.

How had I done that?

Then my vision focused and I saw that there was something more than a mystery hacking ability to worry about. Laying on the floor, tucked up against the corner of the adjoining corridor, was another woman. She was dead. And I could see why. Her mouth was filled with a frothing white liquid, her throat bulging grotesquely. The rest of her body was achingly beautiful, even in death. She had been wearing some kind of nice suit that had been shredded, her body marked with dozens of cuts that no longer bled. Claws had torn her suit apart, careful to leave the skin underneath untouched. Her legs were cocked wide, and her sex lips dripped with the same thick white fluid that filled her throat. But the thing that made my breath catch was her eyes.

Even dead, those were the eyes of someone in the throws of intense pleasure.

My mouth went dry.

My eyes dipped from the obscene scene and I saw, laying on the ground about five feet from where she had finally died, was a wrench. It was a sturdy Krugmaster 98, made for loosening the kinds of bolts normally only seen on a fusion reactor. I knelt down and grabbed it up without a second thought. It was a comforting, heavy presence at the end of my arm. I tossed it into the air and caught it again with a meaty thunk.

“Thanks,” I said, her voice still raspy.

The dead woman didn’t respond.

The next hour was a long, furtive, quiet time. I moved from room to room in the corridors of this section of the station and found the same story, writ large again and again. Where there were people, those people were dead – and those places were rare. I only counted five other corpses, all men who had been ripped to pieces. This whole part of the station seemed devoted to the clunking, groaning, grinding pieces of machinery that kept everything running. Some rooms were filled with quiet machines whose purposes were entirely beyond me. Others, though, were more obvious: Store rooms filled with materials and components for fixing the other, quiet machines.

But I was able to at least get a rough idea of how the station was formed down here. There was an outer ‘ring’ of support rooms, all with pipes leading into the ceilings towards the central chambers. On the inner side of the ring there were four chambers, each one identical to the one I had been born in – long corridors of those coffins, numbered. I was able to find the highest number on the third room from mine and knew that there were six thousand, six hundred and sixty six coffins. I wasn’t brave enough to check each coffin to see if any of them held living people like me.

I had planned too.

But I ended up standing at the end of the chamber, looking at the vast vaulted room, at the tubes leading down into the coffins, at the empty face plates. I imagined walking past them and a cold, creeping dread started to fill me. My knees locked and I realized I couldn’t move – the thought of looking away was impossible. Instead, my mind could see the image of a coffin opening up and something like me coming out. But rather than warm, living flesh, that thing would be cold and clammy and moist and rotting. Their flesh would creak and groan as they stood, eyes glowing with a pale light.

And so I stood there for who knows how long, listening only to the faint groaning of the station and the thundering of my heart. If I turned away, the door would open behind me.

You’re being ridiculous, I thought.

But, in the end, it took an explosion to shake me out of my paralysis. The entire station shuddered and I felt the floor shifting underneath my feet. I staggered, grabbing onto the frame of the door, then looked up and down the curving corridor that made up the outer ring. The dim lights that came from the ceiling flickered on and off – and then a voice came from the ceiling.

“Bloody hell, is this working?”

I blinked. “H-Hello?” I asked, my voice feeling faintly raspy.

“Ah! I heard that!” The voice said. It was male, deep and slightly lilting. I cocked my head slightly and wondered if he could see me too. I blushed and didn’t know why I was embarrassed ... but I was. I crossed one arm over my breasts. “Hell, you’re in CryoSup. Okay, um, shit. Listen, whoever you are, my name is Lucas. I’m in tech support, and I think I might be one of the only people left alive on this bloody station. If you want to survive, we’re going to need to work together. Okay?”

I gulped. My hand rubbed my throat as I looked around for some speakers. They had to be amazingly well hidden.

“Okay,” I said.

“What’s your name?” he asked. “Are you, uh, one of the cryonics?”

“Those coffin things?” I asked, biting my lip.

“Yeah,” he said.

“T-Then yeah,” I said, nodding slowly as I dropped my hand from my throat. “What was that sound?”

“Well, ah, that was the sound of the habitation deck’s station keeping engines ... exploding.”

“What!?” I blinked, my mouth opening, then closing. “That’s bad. That sounds bad. What the fuck is a station keeping engine?” I rubbed my face with my palm. “S-Sorry, I ... I don’t even remember my name. I just woke up in a cof ... er ... cryonics. Um, it was labeled 0451.”

“Okay, I’ll start trying to crack the networks for the cryonics. We had a lot of bigwigs in there, we’ll see who you are.” He chuckled. “You’re probably five or six steps above me on the social strata. So I’m going to enjoy bossing you around until your memory comes back.”

I made a face somewhere between a scowl and a smile. “Enjoy it. So, station-keeping?”

“Right. Virgil Station’s in the L3 point – basically, a place where Earth and the Moon balance each other out gravitationally speaking. It normally doesn’t need much station-keeping, but the experiments the boffins were running makes everything screwy. So, without our station-keeping engine, the ship’s going to start slewing out of orbit. If we get too far out, then a week or two from now, we’re going to smash the whole thing into the Earth.”

I gulped. “And that’s bad, right?”

“Well, for them,” Lucas said. “If we can’t get off this station in two weeks, we’ll be dead either way. Though, I mean ... wait ... wait, wait, wait, if you’re free to move around, we could just head for the escape pods and-”

I closed my eyes, pinching the bridge of my nose, holding up my hand. Lucas cut himself off.

“I should get upstairs to habitation, shouldn’t I?” I sighed, quietly. The idea of just getting out of this place was tempting, but ... no. I couldn’t just let this station – which had to be huge if this was just part of it – drop onto the Earth. “How long do we have to fix the engines?”

Lucas coughed. “Two hours before the degradation becomes irreversible.”

“Fucking wonderful,” I muttered.

The first thing Lucas helped me get was some clothes. Turned out one of the storage rooms had lockers that I hadn’t been able to access by touching their open buttons. Lucas told me the pass-key for his locker and I punched it in. Rather than finding clothes, I found a sleek collar and a small tube of gray looking liquid. I picked up the tube, my brow furrowing ever so slightly.

“What is-”

“Right, you’re missing out on important facts,” Lucas’ voice cut me off. “That’s a container of nanites. The collar’s a clothing fabricator. In engineering, we had to have clothes tailored to specific situations – best choice was a sheet of nanites.”

“Huh,” I said. I undid the collar, frowning as I looked at the interior. It seemed to be smooth silver, though it was etched with an odd set of curving symbols. The name that sprang unbidden to mind was runes. But I had no idea what a rune was, or why the symbols made me think of them. I traced one with a finger and felt a strange, uncomfortable nervousness slide through my spine. “Lucas, are you sure these are safe?”

“Sure are,” he said. “I mean, safe as anything else on this bloody station.”

I gulped. “I could just-”

“What? Wander around bare arsed?” he asked, sounding amused.

Embarrassment filled me. I felt my whole body turn bright red.

“Y-You can’t see me, can you?” I asked.

“ ... well...”

He was watching me. His eyes were on my bare ass, on my pale skin. He could see the swell of my breasts, the hard nubs of my nipples. Everything. I closed my eyes and clenched my jaw, the embarrassment becoming shame. And arousal. Intense, confusing arousal – arousal that made my pussy glisten. I snapped the collar onto my neck without a second thought. Nothing happened.

“You need to put the nanites into the socket – near the front, lassie,” Lucas said.

I found the socket with my thumb. Attaching the tube of nanites to it was a matter of moments. The collar buzzed and a thin line of grey goop started to spread from the bottom half. It flowed along my skin, like cold water mixed with mud. My nipples grew stiffer stiff as the goop dripped down my breasts ... but rather than falling to the ground, the droplets swung around and cleaved to my breasts like a second layer of skin. The cool, tight grip of the material around my nipples felt as snug and as comfortable as a lover’s grasp. Then it tightened slightly and I whimpered as my breasts became perkier and thrust out – supported by a lattice of nanites. The flowing liquid came to my bare pussy, slithering over my sex with the same disquieting sensation.

I squirmed and bit my lip hard to keep from moaning as the coolness slurped up between my thighs, looping around to find the cleft of my ass. It spread outwards and upwards, meeting with the nanites that came from the back of my shoulders. I looked down and found a whimper escaping my clenched teeth as the thin line of nanites that pressed to my sex drew taut. I was essentially wearing a completely skintight layer of paint that formed the rough shape of a one piece bathing suit as designed by a fetishistic Japanese anime studio.

... the fuck was an anime?

“W-Why don’t I have pants Lucas?” I snarled, arousal and embaressment transmuting, through the magic of a human soul, into anger.

“You’re a tall lassie,” Lucas said, his voice so studiously neutral that I was sure he was popping a hard on as tough as my wrench. “Well, you’ll have ta live with it, until we can find more nanites. We’re not getting those other lockers open unless-”

I grabbed my wrench and brought it smashing down into one of the lockers. The door bent inwards and the electronic lock crunched with an ear popping squeal. Red lights flashed on the lock and I smashed again – causing the door to cave inwards. It was made of really cheap metal, light weight rather than sturdy. I used the wrench and the opening I had made to lever the door open, and grabbed another tube of nanites. Soon, they were flowing along my thighs and knees.

“Blood hell!” Lucas said. “Ask me before ya do something like that!”

“It worked, didn’t it?” I asked, eyeing the other lockers.

“Aye, it worked. It set off every security alarm on Cyronics!” He groaned. “Shite! Shite! Shite!”

“I thought the only thing I had to worry about was those...” I paused. “What the fuck is going on on this station?”

“That’s just it,” he said, through clenched teeth. “We got monsters running around, the security system’s gone ahoo, and you just called down two fucking TCS drones to check out what the noise is. And, lassie, they don’t ask nice in Cryonics.”

I blinked. “Oh.”

Lucas sighed. “You better run, lassie. And don’t stop.”

I started for the door, but the sound of the drones approaching stopped me dead. There was something horrible in the sound they made. It was a rattling sound, but so fast that it became an almost tearing sound. Worse was their voices – computerized and deep.

“Stop, lawbreaker.”

I hefted my wrench. From the sound of their approach, I knew I couldn’t outrun them. But they sounded big and rattling – so I stepped back and away from the door. Then the first drone came to the door itself and I was struck almost dumb by their design. At first, I thought that a massive hula-hoop had come to kill me. But it was too wide, too thick. The outer edge of the ring was studded with metal that looked designed to cling to walls and grated floors with thick, curved teeth that glinted in the pale light of the room. Between the teeth were circular eye-cameras, each one glowing with a malignant red flare, as if the whole thing had been set on fire. Looped within the ring was a second ring, providing a pair of wheels that could rotate and spin the drone around in any direction. More, I saw that the ring was compressible, squeezing through the door and shifting the two rings so they overlapped to make it as thin as possible.