"H-How… how are you alive? Everyone was gone on my life monitors, I just assumed—"

I didn't let Ophelia finish her sentence before I threw off my suit helmet, ran across the room and pulled her into the tightest hug I've ever given, throwing her off her magnetic boot locks and sending both of us flying into the control room's far wall with a loud thump.

In a matter of seconds, the analytical part of my mind that had dragged the rest of me into pure problem-solving mode fell away, and I was miserably sobbing into her combat suit's hard nanofiber chest before I could stop myself.

"They're all gone, they're all gone, I saw them, everyone's gone, Liam's gone, Amanda's gone, there's a pipe through her fucking heart—" 

"Aspen—"

"I couldn't fucking do anything! I stood there frozen looking out at that autocannon fire and all that debris and I could've secured Amanda to the crash webbing but I was panicking and I got knocked out and I woke up and… and I was too fucking late. I was too fucking late, and I could've saved them, or done something, ANYTHING, but my fucking body fucked it all up again and now they're dead and they won't see their families again and their friends again and I won't see them again and it's my fault and everything's gone so wrong and—"

"Aspen, please—"

"What if I missed a pipe leak somewhere? Or skipped out on some routine inspection to go and read my stupid books? Or what if I set the fuel mix on the engine clusters just a little too heavy on the oxidizer and if I didn't do that we could've gotten away from all this and they'd still be here and she'd still be here and they could come back and I wouldn't have fucked it all up again—"

"Aspen!" She said, putting her hands around my head and gently shaking it.

I looked up at her olive face and into those hazel eyes with so many sparkles and flecks and stars that I had never noticed before, and I couldn't help but realize we were so close—

"It's okay, Aspen… it's okay… please, trust me, honey. You did everything you could. You did everything you could. You did everything you could. It isn't your fault. It isn't our fault." I could tell by the tears at the corners of her eyes. her folded-down augmented ears and the shudders that swept through her that she wasn't exactly holding together well, either.

"How… how can you be so sure?" I whispered out, breathlessly.

"Who… who could've expected this? Who could've possibly prepared for all this bullshit? The Lunar telescopes only saw those… faceless… orb… alien… dumbfuck things a few hours ago—"

"... dumbfucks?" I couldn't help but let out the tiniest of giggles—Ophelia was never particularly one to swear like that, even in the worst of crises.

"... I-look, you get… the point I'm trying to get across… words are hard, alright, Aspen? We couldn't have seen this coming. It was an outside context problem. We did everything we could."

I reflexively reached up to wipe away the tears that had formed on her left cheek, immediately accompanying that with a quiet "sorry."

"Hey, hey, it's okay." Ophelia did her damndest to reassuringly stroke my back, but through the hefty gloves of her NZRN combat suit it turned into more of a mediocre rough massage. "It's okay. It's alright."

"I shouldn't… I shouldn't be fucking sobbing like this. Gods above, I'm your superior officer…" I let out a self-deprecating laugh as I realized how flagrantly I was violating every rule of naval etiquette right now, and I took a moment to imagine the hours of lecturing and most probably multiple NJPs Captain Phillips would give me when he found out… if he was still alive, of course.

"And I'm your friend, honey. It's okay," Ophelia whispered.

Ophelia rested her chin on my hair, and for a few precious moments, the adrenaline and anxiety and despair and panic and utter desperation that had filled my stomach since I regained consciousness was swept away, replaced by a strange, soothing calmness that I hadn't felt in a very, very long while. Unfortunately, the much more unwanted sensation of my cheeks heating up accompanied that feeling, much to my still fuzzy consciousness' dismay.

Some part of my brain was dimly aware that I was wasting precious, precious time right now, and that every second I spent here not fixing the station was a second in which someone else might asphyxiate, but I couldn't move. The entirety of my short frame felt like jelly, and I couldn't bring myself to issue the neural commands which would have my exoskeleton haul me up. For what was probably a few minutes but felt more like a few hours, I simply laid there, with my friend, both of us quietly crying.

It might've actually been a few hours if I hadn't felt Ophelia stiffen and her suit servos gently whirr as she set me down on the ceiling, behind a large broken workstation, earning a blubbering questioning sound from her Chief Engineer, who wasn't terribly happy about being wrenched away from that soothing sensation.

"Stay quiet. Don't move," she whispered as her suit visor lowered again and she turned her head towards the air lock door, drawing and raising the low-velocity pistol she had holstered on her right thigh.

All the ammunition issued to naval and security personnel aboard civilian space installations like Nansen Ring was low-velocity, designed to near-instantly fragment and almost pulverize upon contact with a target, ensuring a lack of penetration and avoiding accidental hull and atmosphere breaches. Only dedicated military installations got high-velocity ammunition, and despite the substantial presence of the NZRN and Norwegian Republican Navy on Nansen Ring, it was still a civilian habitat, albeit owned by a consortium of the two militaries. I had to repeat those exact few sentences a few times to overeager military police who complained every time they were posted to the ring that they didn't get any of the high-velocity ammo they called "the good stuff," which is just… frightening, now that I think about it.

After exploring that tangent in my head for a moment, my focus thankfully snapped back to the situation in front of me—Ophelia crouched behind an overturned filing cabinet, her pistol in hand and aimed squarely at the inner air lock door, which was still very much closed.

The inner door cracked open ever so slightly, and I stiffened, my heart beating faster than a pulsar, but I didn't see anything come through other than a smattering of dust. 

My sigh of relief proved short-lived as the smattering of dust turned into a stream of metallic, glinting particles, which filed through the tiny gap in the door. I quickly recognized them as the nanites used in the station's self-repair system, and it didn't take five years of chief engineer experience to tell they weren't behaving as programmed, erratically shifting between amorphous shapes and failing to repair much of anything.

Ophelia kept her finger on her pistol's trigger, staring down the strange nanites for an agonizing few moments with her breathing as light as a feather, until a sudden neon blue light appeared at the center of the mass. At that instant, Ophelia pulled the trigger, sending birdshot-like particles through the nanite mass pulverizing whatever she was aiming at—after a second of seeming spasming, the gray cloud began to diffuse, dead in the air and indistinguishable from simple iron filings.

"What the fuck was that?" I gasped out from behind my improvised cover, looking over at Ophelia, who was still encased in her combat suit, as she flipped on her pistol's safety and holstered it.

"... the self-repair nanites have gone utterly fucking insane." She didn't mince words like this, did she? I mean, to be honest to myself, that was kind of hot—this isn't the time, Aspen.

"They've—what?! Oh, and here I thought I was going to manually restart the nanite system and use them to patch the big fuckoff holes in the ring." I sighed and slumped against the ceiling, a wave of weakness and dizziness crashing over me as the first step of my poorly thought-out, skeleton plan to repair the ring was foiled."

Can't let you do that, honey." Ophelia sighed and raised her visor once again, turning back to the sole functional workstation she had been fiddling with before I had interrupted her. "They've been an utter pain across the whole station for anyone left alive, and I'm here to kill all the ones I can from their network hub. As far as I can tell, they've been hijacked by our friendly neighborhood outside context problem, and they're more than a little hostile to anything on the ring that's still breathing."

I couldn't really see what she was typing, given that I was standing on what was technically the ceiling and she was standing on what was technically the floor, but it was probably the hardcoded kill switch for the nanite system, which had been distributed to all the commissioned officers in engineering prior to the system's installation.

I noticed the augmented bunny ears sticking up from her hair twitch, and I gestured towards them as I pushed off the ceiling and attached myself to the floor with a click from my magnetic boots. "Are your ears alright, Ophelia?" 

Ophelia barely looked up from the console as she muttered "they're still functional, and making them look stylish again isn't high on my list of active oh-shit-oh-fuck problems that might kill us at a moment's notice."

"Right, right… sorry for interrupting you," I muttered from behind her as I watched her work, her fingers dancing across the workstation keyboard like they weren't at all by the suit gloves.

"Aspen, honey, it's fine. I won't do what you did to Petty Officer Jameson for asking you about having a girlfriend in the middle of thruster repairs." Despite her concentration on the workstation, I'm pretty sure I didn't imagine that tiny, airy giggle.

I spluttered and held my remaining hand in front of my quickly flushing face as if to block the incoming wave of old shame from washing over me, a valiant effort that failed utterly. "Th-that was two years ago, and I thought we agreed to never discuss it again, Ophelia…"

"Nuh-uh. You agreed to never discuss it again with Amanda and Liam, but I was off having my ears retrofitted. I wasn't there."

"Wait... fuck, you're right." I still possessed enough force of will to pout as hard as I could, and I would've crossed my arms had one of them not been missing. Not that Ophelia could see me pouting, but I like to think she still could sense the playful disdain radiating from my brown eyes onto the back of her helmet.

A gentle beeep echoed out from the workstation, and I trudged over at that familiar awkward magboot pace, stopping by Ophelia's side. The screen, still occasionally flashing with power alerts and alarms, displayed the status of the station's four nanite control systems, showing the one Ophelia had just fiddled with in bold red OFFLINE, and the other three in light gray UNKNOWN, along with a bevy of other information that I filed away in my brain for later use.

"It's done." Ophelia turned towards me and gave me the slightest hint of a smile, which I returned in full, happy that we had accomplished at least something to help the station… even if it was mostly Ophelia's doing, and I had spent most of it standing awkwardly off to the side. Oh, well… it did give me time to rake my gaze over that brilliant brown hair and the mesmerizing speckles in her eyes that I had seemingly never noticed before when we were with friends, and before I realized it, I had stared into her eyes for far, far too long—

"... Aspen?"

Ophelia's voice pushed my brain out of its trance, and I quickly looked anywhere but the suited engineer in an attempt to hide the flush on my face. Gods above, Aspen Lyndal, control yourself. You are the remaining chief engineer onboard Nansen Ring, and standing beside you is Ensign Ophelia Stewart, your subordinate and fellow commissioned officer. Just because the world is ending doesn't mean you're allowed to be an idiot. Besides, she could never like a fuckup like you—

"S-Sorry. Sorry. Let's… just ignore that. What's next on our to-do list?" I sputtered out, still looking at the walls as I yelled at my cheeks to cease their involuntary flushing.

Ophelia raised a questioning eyebrow, but didn't press the issue any further. "I was going to head to our ring section's power distribution hub and check out how the couplings are holding up, and replace them if need be. We're barely going to get anything done if the station is still floating through space, dead, and it's on the route to the nearest spire, anyway." Nansen Station had four spires extending from the ring section to its central docking bay and industrial area that provided resource access and transport between the two sections, like all Banks-class habitats. Looking back to my journey here, I vaguely remembered having seen the farthest spire—on the other side of the ring from us—having been completely broken, a debris-filled void in the space where a segment of high-strength nanofiber, titanium, and transparent aluminum oxynitride should've been. Ouch.

"Let's get our comms units connected before we do anything else," I said. Despite the stationwide network being completely bust, our exoskeletons were still perfectly capable of maintaining local direct links for radio traffic and telemetry data. 

"Oh, excellent idea, Aspen," she replied. I tapped a few buttons on my left arm's control panel to set it to pairing mode, and left it beside Ophelia's right arm for a moment as the two devices recognized each other and went to work sharing information. Pushing the incessant thought of how close our hands were out of my mind, I waited until the panels beeped in sync, and our life monitors updated to show each others' location and vitals—for the rest of the engineering team, my panel still read unknown, while Ophelia's suit panel still read deceased. 

"Radio check," she spoke into her suit microphone, which was relayed in perfect fidelity to the small speaker embedded on my exoskeleton.

"Looks good," I replied through my corresponding microphone. I searched the room for the suit helmet I had discarded a while ago, walking over to pick it up and secure it once again to my emergency suit, while Ophelia lowered her visor, her face once again disappearing from view.

"Hold on, Aspen, honey. Look at your vitals monitor… your heart rate is high as hell, and your blood pressure's low. You're not injured or anything, right?"

I chuckled faintly as I realized she might not have spotted my missing limb through the limp suit arm dangling at my side, and replied "my right arm's gone."

"It's what?" The engineer's airy voice took on a severe undertone of concern as she looked over at me.

"Sheared clean off while I was unconscious, but the wound seems to have stabilized, at least. Don't worry about me. " As I finished my sentence, another wave of nausea washed over me, and my exoskeleton kicked in to prevent my legs from giving out.

"I'm… worrying about you, Aspen. I saw your legs go weak there, are you sure you're alright?"

"... no." My vision faded away into black at the edges,  and as I looked towards Ophelia rushing toward me, I dimly remembered that the symptoms of hypovolemic shock—rapid blood loss—were one of the first things taught in first aid classes back in Wellington.