Tanya woke up not remembering having fallen asleep. She was still at the console, several thousand scans at different resolutions before her. She remembered staring at them, and working through them one by one, trying to find that one key thing that was going to cure it all, but could not remember where she had left off, nor could she gauge how long ago that had been.

She turned, and realized what had woken her up was Grin’s gentle hand on her shoulder. He nodded towards the doorway, and for a moment she nearly protested, but she realized it would have been futile to continue working at her station. Her thoughts had more or less seized, caught on ineffective plan after useless treatment after false start.

She grabbed a single pad from the pile and left with an acknowledging pat on his forearm but no complaint, and the barest look of warning at Nosedive, who had slipped in silently behind him. There was little she could do in her current state, but that did not give him free reign to terrorize her remaining patient.

She made her own way back to her bunk, never seeing another person. She did not know the precise hour that she left, and it didn’t matter. Not down in the bowels of the earth. She missed the sun, which she had not expected. Back home she had never seen that much sun–-the northern wetlands was notorious for its harsh winters and wet summers. But, she had grown rather used to southern California’s hot, dry offering, and would have liked a nice meal somewhere with outdoor seating in the evening. Just one more time, if she was destined to the same fate as her patients.

Foolish.

She wanted to simply collapse on the bunk, and knew she would regret doing so. She forced herself to strip off the soiled clothes of the day—was it two days now? Three?—and shower, scrubbing vigorously at everything that even looked like it might be a stain.

She knew that she was being illogical. There was no need for such an in depth ritual. She had seen it for herself.

The parasite could not survive in atmosphere, whatever it was. It desiccated and corroded away nearly instantly when it was exposed to oxygen. Every compound and treatment she had readily available, it did not even flinch at. Air, just simple air was enough to burn it away. It would have died either in transit before it landed on her or shortly after. Skin itself was a barrier, and an effective one–it had to be, for life to exist. She did not have to use water so hot it turned the skin under her feathers pink, and she did not have to scrub so hard with harsh soap that it stripped feathers from her arms. She did anyway.

In the first corpse, Tank, her attempts at dissection were met with immediate disaster. The creature disintegrated quickly as soon as she made the incision, and became black dust within a matter of minutes. She put the dust itself into analysis, and it was so broken down and fine, that it was barely anything more remarkable than a mist of elementary particles. Useless.

The second body, Ariana, she was able to handle more carefully. The others had vacated the cold storage, as they had discussed. Being able to effectively flash freeze the remains made all the difference, and taking slices of the creature that were frozen, unable to react with the atmosphere, and then sealing them became possible. It was still not the immediate source of knowledge that she had been hoping for, that they all had been hoping for, but it was something that she could study. She took every kind of sample she could think of this time, did the best she could to document the invasion into every organ, and tried to put the body back together as respectfully as she could, in both cases.

Air. She just had to expose it to air.

The problem was, of course, that the body is not supposed to have air in it. The body is not a sterile environment, not by any measure, but it was evolved as mostly a series of fluids and electrical impulses and suspensions, carried by the skeleton. Having air inside the body, other than within the lungs, was actually incredibly painful, if not dangerous.

She thought, perhaps, that the best she could hope to do would be to open up the primary and secondary infection sites manually and expose the two masses therein to atmosphere. From what she had found in the remains of her two other patients, she felt increasingly confident this would have been effective in killing the thing.

Tanya did not know if her patient was going to survive through her sleeping a few hours, but she knew for a fact she was not comfortable making an incision along a spinal column in her current condition, whether or not it was guided by the medicom’s stabilizers and observation. It was one thing to inspect and sample bodies that were freshly dead, but it was entirely another to be the cause of death. She would try, because she had to try something, and so far this was the best she could think of. She did not look forward to it.