Empyrean Iris Story Collection Vol. 4

Incubus

They had been on Yebb's homeworld for almost half a week, and still, she had yet to lay eyes on a member of her own species. She saw plenty of ice striders, and on one or two occasions when the slow let up, she through she saw a windhawk circling high above.

That at least was good news. Arcadian scientists had confirmed the presence of the void sickness on the surface of Yebb's planet, but to everyone's great interest, the bloodfog had not taken hold as effectively as it had on other planets. The air was too cold, and the wind was too strong causing the blood to crystalize and fall to the earth. Since Yebb's homeworld never rose above freezing, the blood couldn't aerosolize.

Even below ground, in the ice vaults and tunnels, where it was significantly warmer, it still never rose above freezing.... except for where a mass amount of energy was being produced. Right now, below their feet, the city's powerplant harbored the perfect environment for the growing void sickness.

Yebb sat curled inside the pop up command tent idly rolling a melting ball of snow between her hands.

Across from her, standing at a pop-up table, Adam Vir and his command team where pouring over maps provided by subsurface sonar. Etium's armor sonar hadn't been enough, so when reinforcements arrived, they had brought with them a much larger unit. Yet they didn't see any damage to the internal structure, but that didn't mean that there was none.

It was hot inside the tent.

Now that she had been back on her home planet for a few days, she was allowing her fur to grow out. I the presence of the cold, her body had begun producing hormones to increase the rate at which her hair was growing. She already had a light layer of fuzzy underdown where her fur was usually shaved short. It felt strange looking and feeling like this again, but it felt appropriate.

Still she hated sitting around doing nothing even for a second. The past few days had seen her very busy. She was a microbiologist in training, but she did know her way around regular biology, and with Dr. Krill's help and a few brave marines, they were able to catch themselves a specimen of one of the brain creatures, which was now being kept heavily contained in another pop up tent for study. So far the creature was clearly void made, and highly infectious from what she could tell.

Not from direct contact of course, whatever the void sickness was, it wasn't particularly adapted to very cold environments, so the creature would actually have to bite, or stab with its little prong feet to actually infect anyone. Not that it would have mattered, everyone here was vaccinated against void sickness, or had natural immunity resulting from catching it in the past.

Still didn't mean any of them wanted to handle it with their bare hands.

"This thing likes heat, the one logical option is that its made its home around the power core." Adam was saying, "I've seen enough horror themed games to know how this works."

"Do you always base your tactical knowledge on things you have seen in videogames?' Ramirez asked. The man was dressed in only half armor and was significantly dwarfed by the SE soldiers standing around him. At his right side, even maverick had a few inches on him, and she was rather small in comparison to other humans. He was wearing a very large fur-lined hat with ear flaps which yeb thought looked rather goofy but the humans insisted was the best cold weather hat designs.

Humans weren't made for the cold, they were hairless and designed specifically for warm weather climates, the only reason that they managed to survive in the cold at all was their insistence on wearing clothes, which was a practice they shared only with the Rundi and the Tesraki for the most part, and to a much greater degree than either of their counterparts.

Adam snorted, "When my life stops looking like sci-fi novel or a videogame, than I will stop treating it as such."

Yebb was about to tune out their bickering again when a hand tapped her lightly on the shoulder. She turned to find Etium standing behind her. He still wore his armor, and helmet. Despite having fur, he was even less acclimatized to the cold than humans were.