Reece’s fingers flew across the screen, loading and configuring the app for use and pulling in all the schematics for the station.

“I want to thank both of you,” he said without looking up from the screen. “You’ve both saved my life at least twice over and I owe you one... or two actually.”

“Well, if this works, don’t worry about it,” replied Aika. “You can consider us even.”

“Okay, I’ve got it,” said Reece, ignoring Aika’s comment as he began drawing notes on the schematics with his pointer finger. “This is what you two will have to do when you get to the door panel near each bulkhead.”

Naeva and Aika watched carefully as Reece laid out their task for them and took them step by step through how to disable remote commands to the doors and how to manually lock them from their side. After about fifteen minutes, both women knew exactly what they needed to do. Reece wished them luck. Nodding in return, both women headed out to complete their missions. A minute later, Pasha gingerly walked into the infirmary favoring his right arm and sat in the next bed over from Reece.

“No sense standing guard now,” Pasha explained. “What in the world is going on? The commander shot Thomas and Thato right in front of me, Reece. I saw Sora run out of the Control module and I followed her but not fast enough to avoid getting shot myself.”

“Where is Sora anyways?” asked Reece with a perplexed look on his face. “Neither Aika nor Naeva mentioned her.”

“Well, we don’t know. I never caught up to her. We don’t even know who’s side she’s on at this point.”

Reece thought back to the last interaction he had with Sora. She had given him a yellow pill and a mysterious explanation. The poor girl was clearly distraught. She had said that her mind would no longer be her own. He wondered if that was now true. A thought came to him of all the times he saw her in the mess hall and her out-of-place demeanor.

“I didn’t pick up on it initially, but I think that they may have been trying to recruit her this whole time. She spoke to me and told me they had injected her with something that would take over her mind. Maybe the reason they attacked was that they had finally converted her, or at least believed they had. Maybe the fact that she didn’t help the commander attack you was because she hasn’t been totally won over to their cause yet.”

“That’s a lot of maybes,” replied Pasha. “We definitely can’t trust her.”

“Agreed,” answered Reece. “But I don’t want to give up on her either.”

Both men left the conversation at that. They laid back and nervously waited for the two women to return. Aika was the first to come back since she had the much shorter route. She only had to cross the women’s barracks, the mess hall, and the officer’s quarters. However, she was out of breath when she arrived.

“I... was…able…to…make it...to the mess…hall,” she breathed out before continuing. “Stephanie was…waiting for us…in the officer’s…quarters. We…fought and I was able to…incapacitate her long enough…to shut and lock…the dining room’s connecting bulkhead…to the officer’s module.”

“Okay, no problem at all. You did great. The fact that we’ve got the mess hall gives us a huge advantage, now we just need to wait and see how successful Naeva is on her end,” answered Reece. “Just have a seat and catch your breath. You did well. Speaking of which, when you catch your breath could you answer a question for me.”

Aika nodded as she sat down on the end of his infirmary bed and began to control her breathing.

“How were you able to beat Stephanie?” asked Reece. “When she grabbed me before, her grip was like iron. Whatever they did to themselves gave her strength and one amazing healing ability.”

Aika waited a minute before responding.

“It’s a long story,” she replied.

“Hey, we’ve got the time,” replied Reece, eager to learn more about the fascinating woman.

“Fine,” relented Aika, taking a deep breath before explaining. “So, my childhood wasn’t the greatest. My father and older brothers were all sadists and liked to torture me when I was younger. When I was old enough, my mother started teaching me Muay Thai and Jiu-Jitsu to defend myself. It took years, but when I was no longer an easy mark, they left me alone. It wasn’t long after that when they kicked me out of our home, so I joined the Marines at sixteen. I lied about my age and they let me in. It was there that I learned Krav Maga from a Jewish Marine that I dated for a while. His father was part of the IDF and had taught it to him.”

“What’s the IDF?” asked Pasha.

“The Israeli Defense Force,” Reece answered for her.

“Ah,” replied Pasha, seemingly satisfied with the answer.

“So, long story, short... I used over ten years of martial arts training. When I noticed how strong she was, I used it against her,” continued Aika. “She clearly had little to no hand-to-hand combat training of any sort.”

“So, you have combat medical training, and you’re basically a lethal weapon. I’m sure glad you’re on our side,” replied Pasha.

“I agree with him,” added Reece as he motioned towards Pasha’s bed. “You are a total badass.”

Aika blushed under the compliment before replying. “I’m glad I could help. I mean, we’re all in this together, right? I appreciate the kind words. For me, there’s nothing worse than feeling helpless.”

“You’ve got that right,” returned Reece, indicating his wounded arm. “It feels pretty crappy.”

“Oh, you’re not useless by a long shot,” argued Aika. “You’re the one who knows how this station works. Without you, we probably wouldn’t last too long. Despite my combat prowess or medical skills.”

“Exactly,” added Pasha. “It’s not like you’re a pilot in a vehicle that flies itself.”

“You’ve got more going for you than just your piloting skills,” argued Reece. “Besides, we’re eventually going to need those piloting skills when it comes time to leave this station. We can’t stay here forever. We’ll need you to pilot one of the remaining shuttles back to the ground.”

“That’s going to be a problem,” came a voice from the doorway into the module.

Naeva leaned weakly against the round frame as she stepped through the portal. She was holding her side. The white shirt she had on was stained with blood and she limped over to sit in one of the chairs bolted against the wall.

“Don’t worry,” she said while wincing. “The commander just grazed me. I’ll be fine. Aika, could you grab me some gauze and a bandage?”

“Of course, I’ll get you patched up,” replied Aika as she jumped up and swiftly fetched the items. “Are you sure the bullet isn’t inside you?”

“Yeah, I’m sure. It’s just a graze, and I’d appreciate it if you’d just let me patch myself up.”

“Alright. Suit yourself,” Aika replied with a shrug as she returned with sterilization foam, needle, thread, bandages, and gauze.

“Thanks,” said Naeva as she took the proffered items.

Reece watched as she waited for Aika to walk away. Turning away from them, she was apparently tending her wounds in semi-privacy. Reece figured she had already mostly healed and she wouldn’t be able to explain that away easily. So, she was probably just pretending to bandage a light injury, the whole time explaining what had happened.

“Everything started well enough, but I only made it to the Astronomy lab before I ran into the commander. As soon as he saw me, he began shooting at me. The bullet grazed me while I retreated to the EVA module. Still, I was able to follow your instructions. The bulkhead on the other side of the EVA has been locked and secured. I couldn’t make it to the mainframe, so they’ve got control of Zhengzhou Station’s control consoles and the main computers. Even if we could get to the shuttles, we wouldn’t be able to take off without station control.”

“We’ll worry about that when the time comes,” assured Reece. “For now, you both did an excellent job. We now have control of over half the station, and we have all the food. We need to isolate life-support, so they don’t try to freeze us out. That’s their last trump card. If we can do that, we should be able to wait them out.”

“That’s great,” exclaimed Pasha. “We may survive this after all!”

As Pasha finished his sentence, the lights went out and the four were abruptly sitting in complete darkness.

“I knew I shouldn’t have said anything,” cursed Pasha sullenly.

“It’s okay,” said Reece, reassuring the other three crew members. “Just wait a few seconds.”

Sure enough, the emergency lighting came on a moment later.

“The emergency lights are powered directly from the solar arrays. They are set to automatically come on for each module whenever main power is interrupted. It’ll take them a while to disable the emergency lighting as it’s not meant to be possible. Like anything else, there are still ways, but I doubt they have the expertise to figure it out.”

“Well, how can they disable life-support remotely? That sounds like something that shouldn’t be possible either.”

“Technically, they can’t,” answered Reece. “However, they can fake it out by telling the system it's much hotter than it is, for instance. That’ll trick the system into freezing us to death as it tries to compensate for the high temperature. The temperatures are stored in the mainframe, and each module has its own life-support system that first gets its values from the mainframe. If those aren’t present, it uses locally generated values. They are less precise but will be just fine for what we need. What we need to do is keep the control’s status values from reaching the life-support systems in each module. Okay, with any luck... we’ll be safely cut off from them.”

Reece explained the new plan, bringing up the schematics that he had downloaded to the tablet again. They had now locked him out of the mainframe, so he was glad he had previously retrieved the data before that had happened. He explained that they would need to go module by module and remove the status wire going into a specific terminal block located behind the door panels.

It was a simple procedure and the two women set about the task as soon as Reece finished explaining it. That was good too because they could feel the room growing colder by the second. By the time the modules became too cold to survive for more than a couple of minutes, they had managed to disable the status lines from the infirmary, female barracks, and dining room in one direction, and the gym and garden on the other side.

“We failed to make it to the bio lab, men’s barracks, and the EVA airlock,” lamented Aika. “Don’t we need access to those too?”

“That’s okay,” said Reece. “If we leave all the bulkheads open, it’ll force the warm air into the cold modules as the life-support systems compete with each other. There is one significant problem, however. If we do that, we risk overloading some or all the life-support systems which could put us in serious jeopardy.”

“I’ve got a better idea,” offered Aika. “I think there’s an old EVA suit in the female barracks that either Naeva or I could possibly fit into. With it, we could make it through the cold and disable the status lines to the remaining modules.”

“Good thinking,” commended Reece. “I had no idea we still had access to an EVA suit. The commander told me that mine was the last one after the others were all lost when the shuttle bay’s airlock was breached.”

“Yeah, well…,” answered Naeva. “That EVA suit hasn’t been used for a spacewalk aboard this station in nearly two years. I doubt he would have even known about it since it’s been in our barracks almost the entire time. In fact, the only time it left our barracks was for a couple of hours when Angel was installing an upgrade to all the suits. I’d completely forgotten about it until Aika just mentioned it.”

“Are you sure it’s there?” asked Pasha.

“Well…,” answered Naeva, “I think so.”

“I’ll go check,” cut in Aika before heading to her barracks to do just that.

“Why don’t we have more EVA suits anyways?” pressed Pasha. “It doesn’t make sense that we should be in this predicament.”

“I agree,” answered Naeva. “However, let me break it down for you. See, due to safety standards, we are only allowed to do necessary EVAs. Basically, only the engineers and designated backups do them. And that’s only for high-priority training, repairs, or maintenance. The training regimen for EVAs is pretty rigorous, so most astronauts don’t or can’t complete it.

Normally, it’s not an issue. We always have four to six astronauts with EVA suits who can do a spacewalk if necessary, and others could potentially do them with someone else’s suit in extreme circumstances. We even had them split between the airlocks for redundancy, in case of a fire or other problem like...well, what happened with the shuttle Hermes. It was just bad luck that we only had one good suit at the EVA airlock. At least on the upside…we had a female engineer aboard Zhengzhou Station about eighteen months ago, Cynthia Van Hollen. Luckily for us, Aika remembered she had left hers here for some reason when she returned to earth.”

“I see, well…lucky us,” Pasha responded with a shrug and half-smile.

Aika came back with the suit and laid it on the module’s only desk. It looked a little small.

“Does this one stretch?” asked Reece.

“Oh, that’s right,” remembered Pasha as he looked at the thin suit. “Everybody brings their own gear, even EVA suits. They need to be specially fit and only engineers and their backups typically get them. The shuttle suits we all have just wouldn’t hold up. So, to answer your question Reece...no, they don’t stretch.”

“That’s right,” added Naeva. “And Cynthia Van Hollen was a toothpick of a woman.”

“So, that means these aren’t one size fits all. Hmmm...can either of you fit it?” asked Reece before he thought better of it.

Naeva and Aika looked at each other, unconvinced that either could wear the thin suit. Naeva was tall and well-toned with muscle. Aika was a little shorter and had a thinner frame, but she was also quite busty. Naeva tried the suit first, but her legs and hips wouldn’t quite fit. Not that she was thick, just not as thin as the woman the suit was designed for. In the end, they were able to get Aika into the suit by uncomfortably squeezing her breasts into the suit’s top. Luckily, the suit was well-designed, so the zipper didn’t burst under the strain. She winced as they buttoned and zipped her up the rest of the way.

“Okay, let’s do this,” she wheezed. “I need back out of this suit ASAP, before I pass out.”

“Hey, it was your idea,” answered Reece with a smile.

Aika gave him a look that could curdle milk before taking off to the first of the inhospitable modules. Reece was starting to feel a little better, so he shuffled after them. Someone needed to lock the garden’s module’s bulkhead behind her in order to keep the freezing air from entering the module and killing the plants. Opening the door, Aika rushed inside. As Reece quickly closed it behind her, he could already feel the extreme chill in the air as it escaped the other room. Once the door was secured, Reece stayed and checked the growing vegetation, taking it easy while he waited for her to return.

About half an hour later, the bulkhead door spun back open from the other side. Aika was standing there barely breathing from being squeezed nearly to death for the better part of an hour. Reece immediately shut the door as the temperature was still very cold. With the door secured, he approached her and began stripping the suit off her. As soon as he unzipped her suit, her chest heaved as she took a long deep breath.

“Oh, my goodness,” she gasped. “That’s the last time I try and come up with a good idea.”

Reece laughed and she gave him a tired smile.

“I got them all done," breathed Aika. "Hopefully, we’re good for now.”

“I think we are, Aika. Thanks for doing that. Seriously," replied Reece. "I could tell that it sucked.”

“You don’t even know,” replied Aika as she walked around Reece to set the suit’s helmet down on one of the empty planters. “That was even worse than my last mammogram.”

Suddenly, Naeva came up behind her and grabbed her breasts from behind, and began massaging them.

“Ow, ow, ow,” complained Aika. “Knock it off. That hurts! Besides, I thought I told you a long time ago not to do those sorts of things with me.”

Naeva laughed but stopped the motion. She slapped her on the rear instead before retreating to the infirmary.

As she left, she called back over her shoulder in an unapologetic tone, “Sorry, I couldn’t resist.”

Reece raised his eyebrow at Aika, but she just rolled her eyes.

“You don’t want to know.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” Reece teased as he helped her get the rest of the tight-fitting suit off.

They met up in the infirmary with Pasha. It was time to discuss what they would do next. Suddenly, Sora walked in out of nowhere. Pasha yelped when he saw her and the rest of them turned to see her walk in unsteadily.

“Where in hades did you come from?” asked Aika.

“I woke up in the biology lab on one of the tables. I don’t know how I got there, or for how long. I was scared and groggy. I hid in our barracks and must have passed out again. I don’t feel so good.”

“What about before? Where did you get off to, when the commander started using us for target practice?” Pasha demanded angrily.

“I ran and hid in the storage area between the astronomy lab and your barracks,” Sora answered. “I stayed there for hours before I fell asleep. The next thing I knew, I was in the bio-lab.”

The crew all looked at each other for a consensus on how to handle Sora’s sudden arrival.

“Alright, Sora,” said Reece. “We’re just glad you’re okay.”

Reece was trying to calm the poor girl, not that they would trust her or let her out of their sight. Still, someone had to break the ice that was quickly forming over the conversation.

“Well, alright. Welcome to the team. Let’s fill you in on what has happened during your nap.”

“Okay, thanks,” replied Sora timidly, giving a weak smile.

They took the opportunity to catch her up on everything that had happened. They told her about the Beckers, Jared and the commander, and Thomas and Thato. Reece gave her a brief explanation of their current situation. He also mentioned how they secured the bulkheads and isolated the life-support systems. He didn’t offer her any details on how they had accomplished those things. They just didn’t know if they could trust her. She seemed to take everything in stride but didn’t ask many questions.

According to her, she was completely oblivious to what the commander and the Beckers were up to. That raised warning flags in Reece’s mind. She knew what was going on before when she had given him the pill. Although she did say she’d lose her memory, he was seriously starting to doubt her now. He suspected the others were similarly suspicious. The possibility seemed clear to all of them that the commander’s group had been trying to recruit her. Despite that, they silently decided to allow the situation to play out for now. They would simply wait out the commander’s group.

So that’s exactly what they did. The four always kept a cautious eye on Sora. Other than that, the time passed mundanely. Reece figured that after a few days, the commander would contact them over the intercom to work out a deal so that they could eat. That didn’t happen. While they waited, they searched their half of the station for any information regarding the commander’s group or the plague that had recently ravaged the planet.

They came up with nothing until Reece noticed something strange about the lab. All the modules were about the same size, but there were spaces in the lab that were unaccounted for. Once Reece realized this, he brought the rest of the crew to the room. He had each of them stand in the entryway.

“Now look down the hall,” he instructed Aika who was the first to take position. “Okay, now step to your right and look across the lab. What do you see?”

“The lab is significantly shorter than the length of the hall. Couldn’t the missing space just be a compartment for some system?”

“Nope,” answered Reece. “I know the layout for this module. There are no systems. This was retrofitted at some point.”

“So, they created a secret space,” stated Aika as the idea suddenly struck her.

“Exactly,” exclaimed Reece excitedly. “I think there’s a hidden room at that end of the lab. And I’ll bet we find what we are looking for within it. We just need to figure out how to get inside.”

Pasha and Naeva both took turns looking. They both agreed with Reece’s assessment. Sora showed little interest, apparently taking their word for it. Now it was time to find a way inside. It took some searching, but the lab was barren, so it went quickly. Eventually, Naeva found a small depression between wall panels. She clicked a button she could feel within it and the large panel next to her slid forward a few centimeters, ending with a click. Following the sharp sound, the panel slid to the side, unveiling a small room.

Inside, there wasn’t much to see. A few plastic cages of dead rats lined one wall. These rats looked normal and appeared to have died from exposure. Probably when the commander’s group tried freezing them all to death just a few weeks before. With the lab exposed, they all split up and started rifling through everything secured within the wall panels. It was Aika that discovered a file that had gotten stuck behind one of the pull-out drawers.

Clearly, the place had been cleaned of incriminating evidence. However, they had missed something. Within the file was a month’s time worth of detailed notes. They outlined ongoing experiments and included musings about the rest of the crew. It appeared to be written by the previous biologist, Aldo, who was part of the ill-fated shuttle, Hermes’s return voyage. Dates on the pages put this file about two months before Commander Rogers, Reece, Pasha, and Sora arrived. Most of it was not terribly enlightening, but a few passages stuck out. Aika read each one aloud.