I

  felt...warm. Blissfully warm.

  That's

  what made me stop.

  My

  work light found nothing as I swiveled around. Dust motes were the

  only thing immediately visible, stirred by my intrusion within the

  dark tunnel. Something was off, but there wasn't anything I could

  see.

  Warm?

  Warm was new. Warm was dangerous.

  My

  fingers were now tingling.

  I

  licked my cracked lips, taking a deep breath. The skin was dry. Torn.

  The sensation should have been somewhat painful. I could feel the

  roughness and wetness of my tongue. I could even identify where my

  lips had been hurting, but now? The pain was gone.

  Physiologically?

  I felt the best I'd felt in a long time.

  That

  seemed wrong somehow, but I couldn't seem to line up enough mental

  dots to decipher the strange feeling.

  Overall I felt...good.

  Breathing felt glorious, like the first gasp after breaking the

  surface of a pool following a deep dive. I exhaled and inhaled deeply

  again, the rush of warmth and comfort increasing.

  I

  took another breath. It came easily; no unease or feeling of panic,

  no constriction or pain, which might indicate organ issues. My

  logical thought centers kept telling me something wasn't right as the

  warmth and comfort shifted to a floating sensation...like I'd taken a

  long pull from a jar of Wren's

  Best.

  Wren's

  Best was

  moonshine, and the name was a joke. Wren was one of the guys from

  Third Shift who made some of the worst moonshine you could ever

  taste, or at least it seemed to taste like the worst I could've ever

  tasted. Rob had threatened Wren pretty badly after one of the Second

  Shift guys went bli—wait.

  Why

  was I thinking about this?

  I

  felt lightheaded and dizzy now. The combination reminds me of what

  happened after trying his concoction for the first time.

  The

  drink had smelled horrible and tasted worse: pure alcohol and jet

  fuel mixed with rotten fruit and vitriol. Enough to make my eyes

  water just looking at it. Despite the harshness, I'd felt a

  euphorically floating bliss right before...I blacked out. It had been

  warm then too.

  I

  felt a mental tickle. The familiar trail of sensations allowed me to

  tug the string of an old memory, yanking it straight from cold

  storage into active view like a fish on a line. A safety briefing.

  The signs were all there: Disorientation, floating sensations,

  moments of euphoria that didn't match the situation, issues

  concentrating, and dry mouth.

  The

  logical parts of my brain spun, and I turned quickly.

  Oxygen

  deprivation. The lack of the urge to gasp and choke meant another

  inert gas was present, enough to keep my organs from functioning if I

  stayed...Oh no.

  How

  long had I been down here breathing it in?! I might be in some

  serious trouble...

  I

  intended to make for the doorway but stumbled and tripped onto the

  ground instead. A soft, keening alert notice came from my suit's

  sensors as I tried to make sense of my new position while the tunnel

  lifted and spun against the laws of physics. My temples were pressed

  within the jaws of a vice. My skull, reverberating with painful

  sensation, felt as if my brain were swelling to become too large for

  it to contain with every pulse of my heart.

  A

  new alert, delivered by the suit's feminine voice, buzzed in my sound

  conduction implants as I tried to clear the near-blinding notice from

  my view.

  [AIR

  QUALITY ALERT: WARNING! NITROGEN-RICH ATMOSPHERE DETECTED. SEEK LIFE

  SUPPORT MIXTURE IMMEDIATELY! WARNING!]

  The

  next few seconds went by as I clumsily managed to prop myself up. The

  rest came to me in disjointed flashes, like old-time celluloid film

  in slow motion.

  One

  flash and I was drunkenly bouncing off the feedline-covered walls, my

  head turning awkwardly as gravity led me to the floor in a tripping

  stumble.

  Another,

  and I could see my booted feet, one foot flying above the other as

  they clomped with each heavy, stumbling step in a pounding staccato.

  Dust flew to either side of my passage as I slid and fell time and

  time again.

  Now,

  a door. My finger aching as I jabbed it on the contact port a little

  too harshly.

  I

  heard my words slurring as my tongue sluggishly formed the sounds

  necessary for the opening code. It took three tries before it was

  finally accepted.

  I

  saw flashes of white, bordered by black, as the world began to dim

  and eventually go out.

  I

  came to. My consciousness rapidly returned before I'd realized I'd

  lost it.

  I was lying on my side. On the ground.

  I'd

  collapsed before the doorway, which was open. Just in time.

  My

  limbs ached. My eyeballs, hands, and feet hurt, but I was alive.

  Black spots I hadn't realized were obscuring my vision began to clear

  as the cold, the wonderful, biting cold, began creeping back into my

  body. The icy tendrils headed straight for my soul while I savored

  it. Absorbed it. The false warmth was gone, which I took as a great

  sign.

  I

  rolled onto my back and watched as my breath floated up and out the

  open doorway. A dull safety briefing, of all the darnest things, had

  actually saved me. I'm sure stranger things have happened.

  The

  atmosphere we breathe is made up of several different gases. Nitrogen

  represents about seventy or so percent of it. Combined with oxygen

  and a bunch of other stuff, it made up what some would call the

  proper mixture for breathing, or so the briefing had said. The same

  breathing I'd need to do things like walking, dodging, hiding,

  running, or...living.

  Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

  Oh

  man.

  Right

  now? The tunnels. The tunnels were going to be a problem, at least

  regarding my original plan.

  They weren't filled with the right

  ratio, or at least so my sensory history said as I called it up. The

  recorded air mixture tied to the suit alert was showing something

  somewhere around ninety-eight point four percent nitrogen. Someone

  somewhere had flooded the tunnels with pure nitrogen. While I could

  tell you it wasn't this way when I was a kid, it didn't help my new

  problem.

  My

  new problem was needing to somehow go through these tunnels, filled

  with an odorless, colorless, and entirely undetectable gas. Several

  times.

  The

  distance I'd traveled, how long I'd had the door open, my height,

  general level of respiration, and even relative temperature all made

  it difficult to accurately gauge when I'd hit the beginning reaches

  of the large pocket of gas. I also had no clue just how long I'd need

  to be exposed. Going through once wasn't an issue, but since I still

  didn't know if the other doorways functioned with my current code,

  the potential existed for multiple trips.

  No.

  For my original plan to succeed, I'd need to have a way of finding a

  working second door. That required a method of not passing out from

  the nitrogen and potentially dying while traveling through the

  tunnel. My suit sensors had only tripped after I'd fallen the first

  time, and that was also a problem. I couldn't trust them to let me

  know before I'd already gotten too much of a dosage to be dangerous,

  and there were now too many unknowns. The suit was a major part of

  it.

  Outeralls

  were the external-most layer of three, which consisted of Outeralls,

  a single-piece outer protective garment, a jacket, pants, boots, and

  a base-layered sweat-wicking skinsuit worn underneath everything

  else. Together they made up the whole of the official Port employee

  uniform. Originally, the Outeralls, at least the external portion of

  it, was simply a cut-down hostile environment suit meant for the

  outer fringes of abandoned mining colonies. It could do an amazing

  job keeping me mostly insulated from the cold environment outside

  without a head enclosure, so long as the undersuit did its job of

  warding off hypothermia by wicking away the moisture and sweat.

  It

  wasn't sealed. It wasn't airtight. The supply line feeds for water,

  air, waste, and nutrition were still present for convenience and

  operation, but the mechanisms had been changed out, just like Pod

  Housing; no longer valid for exotic conditions outside Corporate

  norms in the Stacks. In the currently retrofitted configuration as a

  Port Uniform, where weight mitigation and cost prioritized over

  utility and functionality? Let's just say I could've worn a plastic

  bag over my head and gotten more headway toward my current problem. A

  potential bust unless I could figure something out.

  If

  I just had a locking collar, helmet, or at least a soft hood, I

  could've even used it for a few minutes of extra air. Sadly, the suit

  configuration lacked those features. All I really had, besides the

  Ident-Chip and Contact Interface, was the wicking system, which put

  "captured" liquid into a fluid bag.

  Yeah,

  it's as gross as it sounds, but so was sitting in a pool of sweat.

  Stewing.

  Hmm...

  I

  sat up straight as a thought began to form.

  Without

  the wind chill, the cold could almost be manageable, and the

  undersuit was actually a touch larger than it should've been, so I

  might be able to stretch the neck up past my mouth and nose.

  Rob

  used to joke the wicking system worked a lot like a protein

  vac-sealer, which extracted air and liquids in order to seal the

  proteins within a polymer sheathing to be stacked and shuttled off to

  cold storage. The inner layer of the skinsuit worked much the same,

  keeping the air and liquids inside, close to our bodies, as the

  suit's condenser system worked to extract and funnel the captured

  medium into a fluid bag. The way it does this? Scientific

  Gobblety-Gook. When used In conjunction with terms like

  "Unidirectional Permeable Nano-fibers", "Liquid State

  Constrictiors", and "Systematic Distilation Processes",

  the idea boiled down to: gases and liquids out, but not in.

  Specifically

  if the outside were wet.

  Let

  me just say to you now: You don't EVER want to be in a suit with a

  malfunctioning fluid condenser system so the outside gets wet. Once

  the external part gets wet, it obtains the liquid retention qualities

  of a sealed bottle with you trapped inside.

  It isn't a pleasant

  feeling, but I was going to have to do it on purpose.

  Yuck.

  I'll

  save you most of the grisly details.

  Since

  I hadn't had time for a changeover after working a double, the bag

  was near full. It meant there was just enough for the exterior of the

  skinsuit. It only took one test run to confirm my makeshift air trap

  would work, but wasn't without flaws.

  For

  one: It felt atrocious, the sensation made worse by the requirement

  of having to pull the neck of the suit over my mouth and nose. Two:

  The smell. Silicon All-Father's-Missing Eye, THE SMELL.

  The

  liquid had been cool when I...deployed it, but once my body heat did

  its work of warming it up?

  Well...my

  ribs were still hurting from the series of dry heaves I'd done before

  I could get myself back under control. I'd only made it a few steps

  on that first try. However, since the makeshift seal worked, I at

  least proved I wouldn't immediately end up passed out and so

  continued.

  On

  the second trip, I progressed beyond the T-intersection but made the

  mistake of not controlling my breathing, made worse when I turned the

  corner and had to choke down a scream. My gaze had been unexpectedly

  met with eight glowing red eyes from directly above me. A crawler

  drone.

  I

  didn't dare move as the drone continued on, metallic legs creaking

  slightly as it glided its feet from tip to magnetic tip on its path

  toward me. Carbon dioxide levels rose with each short exhale into my

  makeshift seal suit. There was no false warmth, sense of comfort, or

  euphoria as there had been from the nitrogen exposure. In its place

  was a harsh urgency, the chemoreceptors of my brain screaming for me

  to find air as I stood stone still. Several smaller utility arms

  extruded from the flat, thin body, their tips and edges waving

  languidly toward me as it stopped, eyes bouncing around in scrutiny.

  I likely would've felt myself sweating if I wasn't already drenched.

  Instead?

  I stewed.

  With

  a sudden lurch, the drone caused me to jump as it skittered sideways

  into the gaping maw of a rectangular shadow above. I could still hear

  it as it worked, the taps of its utility arms almost as fast as my

  racing heart as I pressed onward. As I passed, I witnessed the drone,

  belly crouched down low in the sub-tunnel and maintaining an eerie

  watch as I swept my work light across it. It continued to direct its

  attention toward me from the darkness but let me continue on

  unmolested.

  I

  was unnerved. It had been the first drone I'd seen in person in a

  long while, and they were just as bad as I remembered.

  Wasting

  no further time, I headed in the direction of the working doorway, my

  skin and scalp crawling as I pulled down the neck of the skinsuit and

  breathed heavily. As a kid, I'd avoided any and all drones within the

  tunnel. Their spider-like movements, mannerisms, and extruded tools,

  which were capable of cutting through reinforced plastcrete like a

  hot knife through butter, were far too much for my childish

  imagination to be comfortable with.

  Now?

  As an adult? I was still finding them far too much for my mind to

  deal with.

  They

  were creepy.

  Oh.

  So. Creepy...

  I

  let the shivers finish going up and down my spine, wiping my arms

  fruitlessly with my gloved palms to shake off the imagined crawling

  feeling, before prepping the suit for another try.

  On

  the third try, I adopted an easy and measured pace, controlling my

  breathing as I walked quietly around the working drone with extra

  care so as not to disturb it. This time I made it fully to the

  terminus point, where I'd stopped originally. Two more drones had

  taken station in other sub-tunnels along my path. I was working on

  gliding by their positions undetected when I spotted it.

  There,

  further up the corridor where it stuck out from one of the sub-tunnel

  entrances illuminated by my work light, sat the sole of a boot.

  A

  boot, which seemed to be connected to someone, stretched out and

  lying face down on the floor.