Pain.
It always seemed to start with pain.
Specifically, in this case at least, it was in his head. Greg shifted and groaned quietly as he was unceremoniously dumped back in the land of the conscious. He laid there with his eyes closed, trying to take stock of the situation.
What was wrong this time?
How drunk, exactly, had he gotten and what, exactly, had he done?
Keeping his eyes closed, he began running his hands along his arms and chest, trying to feel if he had any bruises or sore spots. But as he did this, he frowned, sensing something was wrong. No blankets.
He sighed. "Babe, come on, give the blankets back," he groaned. No response. "Vanessa, come on," he said.
Still nothing.
Sighing, he reached over his right shoulder. His hand collided with something hard, solid, and entirely unyielding. Something that absolutely should not have been there. "Fuck!" he snapped, opening his eyes and pulling his hand back.
That's when it occurred to him that something was very wrong. He found himself staring up at an unfamiliar ceiling of sterile white tile. And something was wrong with his bed, too. Primarily: it wasn't a bed.
Greg sat up immediately, a growing fear slowly turning his insides to ice, and realized with horror the truth of the situation.
He was not in his own bedroom.
In fact, he was not aboard the Dauntless. There wasn't anywhere on the ship that looked like this. The aesthetic of this place was different. So where in the fuck was he? And why did his head hurt? As he gently probed his head for wounds, he studied the room he was in. It was small, clearly a cell of some kind, a holding room. He'd been resting on a flat metal slab sticking out of the wall meant to serve as a cot. It just had a thin pad, a flat pillow, and a simple blanket on it, all of which he'd been lying on top of.
The room itself was mostly just sterile white tile. No windows, only two vents, both of them tiny and tightly sealed, not even able to be opened. Only a single door, firmly closed, no way to open it from inside. Or so it seemed. Greg found that there were no external wounds on his head and, after another search, his body, either. Though he had some bruises. And he was wearing a generic blue jumpsuit that he didn't recognize.
Where in the fuck was he?!
Greg got up off the cot. He swayed briefly as he stood, his equilibrium thrown off. He spent a moment trying to remember how he might have gotten here, but his thoughts were a confused, incoherent mess. He made himself stop, clearing his head for the moment. Then, once his mind was settled, (or as settled as it was going to get), he began slowly going over the room, trying to find either a way out or a clue as to where he was.
He began trying to remember, going back to the end of his last mission.
They'd killed Erebus and rescued Allan, but they'd lost Mertz and Porter in the process. His relationship with Eve hadn't really recovered. The government had been on their ass, going over the Dauntless with a fine-toothed comb for...well, they wouldn't say what they were looking for. Greg and the others had gone on a week-long vacation on Mezzanine. It had been nice. He'd ended up inviting Vanessa Martel to go with him, kind of like, with him specifically, as his date, since they were already kind of-sort of involved.
It had been a good vacation, and he'd needed it, because once they got back, everything kind of turned to shit.
He'd spent whatever time he could with Allan and Callie, but it was difficult because the investigators were all over the place all the time. They'd asked him all sorts of questions, some of which he hadn't been able to answer because they pertained to his past. They'd had him go over everything, from Dis to Rogue Ops to Ash to his most recent mission. They'd asked a lot of questions about his decisions, his relationships with the others onboard, (that had been kind of weird to talk about), his perks and payments.
They'd asked about freaking everything.
It had gone on for another solid week after they'd gotten back from their vacation. When it was over and they'd left, seemingly dissatisfied with what they'd gotten, Allan had recovered enough to leave with Callie. They'd had a going away party, and then they had left. Just like that, they were gone. During this time, Greg had ended up moving in with Vanessa and he'd also started seeing Amy Weller on the side after confirming that Vanessa didn't mind keeping the relationship open.
Apparently he had a thing for pilots.
This also helped him keep his sanity together because, for another solid two weeks, right after Allan and Callie had left, the missions had begun. All of them had been thrown into mission after mission for the government and the military. Greg was lucky because Hawkins was nice enough to pair him up with Vanessa each time as his pilot. Having a partner around seriously helped his misery. The missions had been becoming stressful.
They'd still been investigating the break-ins at the top secret research facilities, which he was becoming more and more convinced was an inside job. The security measures were apparently disabled remotely, all information from the security systems themselves was erased each time, and these attacks always coincided with some kind of convenient changing of the guard or weather-based interruption or power failure.
Greg realized he was getting closer to the here and now in his memories.
There had been other missions in between the investigations. He'd had to help investigate a mass disappearance at an isolated snowbound outpost, then help deal with some kind of outbreak of an alien virus, recover a piece of Cyr technology from a crashed vessel. Stuff like that. But...Greg stopped his investigation and sat down heavily on the bed. There was no way out of here, nothing he could work with at all.
But that last mission he'd gone on...
It had been weird. He was to be dropped off, alone, with no backup but Vanessa, who had to stay with the ship anyway. There had been a strange power signal discovered on an isolated, distant moon. He'd been asked to take some scanning equipment to a site on the moon and run some scans. However, hardly a minute after he'd left, Vanessa had called and told him she was being ordered back to the Dauntless, as another mission had come up and she was the nearest pilot. She'd sounded very unhappy about it, but orders were orders, and Hawkins had said they were scrambling another Spec Ops speedship to pick him up.
He'd walked through a mostly barren, rocky region of the moon.
He'd made his way down into a valley, where this signal was supposed to be.
Then he'd gone into a cave system and...
Someone had attacked him, he remembered slowly. Someone in a power suit that he hadn't been able to make out the details of. They'd hit him with a stun round and he'd been knocked out. And...that was the last thing he could remember.
He'd apparently been taken here.
But where the fuck was here?
So someone had captured him. The whole thing screamed set up. Combined with all the sudden interest from the government, Hawkins's assessment that someone had an ax to grind with Anomalous Operations, and how fucking weird everything had been recently...yeah, definitely some kind of inside job. But who? Who the hell wanted to capture him? He didn't know anyone inside the government beyond the people he worked with. He'd probably just gotten caught in the crossfire between Anomalous Ops and...someone else.
But who?
He kept coming back to that, but each time he did, he came up against the fact that he wasn't going to figure anything out locked in this damned cell. But what could he do to escape? Wait for someone to come open the door, to bring him food maybe, or to come take him somewhere. He'd certainly had to put up with this before, although the last time he'd been locked up like this, he at least had more to work with.
This cell was pretty damned barren.
Since he was sitting here with nothing to do, he decided to check himself over again. His jumpsuit had pockets at least. He stuffed his hands into each one, feeling around, and came up with absolutely nothing. He checked his boots over and then frowned, studying the socks on his feet. That made him think of boxers...
He unzipped the jumpsuit and glanced inside, checking his boxers. Blue. He'd been wearing black, last he remembered. He sighed, zipped the suit back up and pulled the boots on, lacing them up tight. That means that either he'd changed and didn't remember it or someone changed him while he was unconscious.
What lovely thoughts.
Sighing heavily, he stood up and began pacing about the small cell. Something was wrong. He could sense it, somehow. Something was...off. And not just the obvious. Not just the fact that he was in a cell, obviously that was wrong. But something else about this situation. It could just be the sense of isolation, but...no.
Frowning, Greg closed his eyes and made himself become still, trying to open his senses to the world around him. He listened, he smelled, he waited. Abruptly, it came to him. There. It was a scent, very faint, very subtle, but it was there. Death. Blood. It was in the air. Greg opened his eyes. He'd definitely been drinking too much lately. He should've picked up on that right away. Although maybe they'd given him something...
He had no idea about anything.
Greg jerked in surprise and let out a small cry of fear as a power surge hit the area. The light in his cell brightened considerably and then burst in a spray of glass. Greg was plunged into darkness. Okay, well, this was new. New wasn't exactly good, though. He waited for his eyes to adjust to the darkness, then realized that the darkness was not absolute. Looking around, he tracked the source of the light: it was coming from the floor ahead of him.
The door. It had opened a little bit and light was leaking in from beneath it.
Hope surged through him and he dropped to his hands and knees. Laying his head level with the floor, he tried to stare through the crack. There were maybe two inches of space. Outside, he could see faint light and what seemed to be a hallway made of the same material his cell was. Well, it was enough to work with. He didn't see or hear anyone or anything. Greg got up and squatted down. Slipping his fingers under the door, he grabbed and began applying pressure. It took him all his strength and about a minute of forcing and straining and sweating, but the door finally began to give. He brought it up to about a foot and that was all he could manage.
It was enough.
He slid out on his back, headfirst, and surveyed the area as he escaped his holding cell. Yep, just a hallway. More doors around him, all but one of them resembling the door to his own cell. Okay, so...a holding area.
It was time to get some answers.
Two of the cell doors were open. Greg moved cautiously over to the first one, peering slowly inside, ready to put his unarmed combat training to use. But there was nothing inside, just an empty carbon copy of the cell he'd just escaped from. Same with the other cell. There were control panels outside of all the doors. He took a moment to open the rest of the cell doors and found more of the same. Greg sighed softly. What an anticlimax. As he approached the final door, he hesitated. He felt like crap. He took a moment to lean against the nearest wall, closing his eyes, trying to marshal his thoughts.
He needed some painkillers, to take a leak, and to get some food.
But that would all have to come later. Obviously someone had put him in here, and the more time went by, the more of a chance there was that they would notice he was out of his cell. He moved over to the final door, pushed himself up against the wall to the side of it and hit the open button. Nothing happened. For thirty seconds, nothing continued to happen. All he could hear around him was the dull hum of power, (definitely something off about the sound), and the quiet respiration of oxygen. For a second, he wondered if it was just air conditioning, but no, he knew the difference. Which meant he was in space.
Or some other atmospherically compromised environment.
Great.
He peered around the corner, steeling himself for some kind of attack, but there was just another hallway waiting for him. Four more doors for him to inspect. Only one of them was open. Two were along the left side, one to the right, and a fourth at the end, opposite where he was now. Greg stepped into the sterilized, white-tile hallway and moved slowly to the only open door. It led into a small bathroom. He moved into it and secured it, checking out the two stalls and finding nothing. There was nowhere else to hide.
He almost stopped and pissed, as the urge became almost overwhelming at the sight of the toilets and urinals, but no.
Security first, pissing later.
He left the bathroom and moved to the second door on this side of the hallway. His mind felt jumbled and confused, anxiety and fear gnawing away at him. Greg forced himself to focus. He was in danger, others might be. Typically the stakes were high. Either way, he'd need a clear head to get out of this alive. He opened the next door and found a break room, just a little kitchenette tucked away into one corner, a pair of couches and a coffee table in the other and, finally, a duo of old-school arcade cabinets.
No one in here.
He made a mental note to order some of those cabinets for the Dauntless. He kept meaning to, since they were so much fun, but always forgot. They were fairly expensive, given that they were pretty niche and therefore rare. Greg shook the thoughts off as he moved to the third door, across from him. Focus, he needed to focus. Now was a strange time to be thinking about video games, but his thoughts were kind of like soap bubbles right now, drifting away, popping easily.
He shook his head and opened the third door.
This one immediately got his attention. It was a security station. All of it intimately familiar to him, given how many he'd run into in his life. A bank of monitors to his left, a workstation beneath it, a swivel chair sitting in front of it. Gun lockers along the back wall, all of them open and vacant. A table with some emergency supplies scattered across it to the right. Greg moved into the room quickly, first going through everything that was available to him. Supplies and weapons were his bread and butter in a situation like this.
He spent ten minutes combing over the room, first checking out the gun lockers. At a glance, they appeared empty, but he'd been diligent in the past and it had paid off then. Sadly, this time, there was no pistol tucked away somewhere out of sight. The lockers really were just plain empty. Not even a single bullet to spare. He got down on his hands and knees and checked under, around, and behind whatever furniture there was. But still nothing. Sighing, he moved to the table scattered with emergency supplies.
Well, they were at least something to work with.
He saw a gasmask, for all the good that would do him. A combat knife in a sheath, which was probably the most useful thing and which he attached to his belt after checking it out. A bottle of water, which, after checking it out, he drained, as he was thirsty as hell. And, finally, some emergency flares. Well, waste not, want not. He shoved the three of them into one of his pockets. That was it. Nothing else.
Now, Greg turned his attention to the security monitors and workstations. They didn't really have much to show him, he realized after a moment of study. Most of them just showed the empty cells, another showed the hallway, another the break room and another...he frowned. It looked like a transitional junction between sections. It was clearly atmospherically compromised, as there was a big hole in one of the walls.
Well, he'd have to avoid that area.
There was no one moving on any of the monitors. In fact, there was no one at all in sight, alive or dead. He had no idea what was going on, but this place had the ominous feeling of abrupt abandonment, of people leaving suddenly, fearing for their lives. They hadn't even shut down their workstation.
Time to find out where that last door led.
Greg moved back out into the hallway and got to the closed door. As he began to reach out for the control pad, something made him stop. There was a little red light flashing next to a tiny screen set into the pad. Fearing the worst, he leaned down and studied the screen. 0% ATMOSPHERE was flashing in blood red lettering across it.
"Well...fuck," Greg muttered.
He stood there for a long moment, considering the situation. Unfortunately, he couldn't think of anything, not when he had to piss so badly, anyway. Heaving a sigh, he turned and moved back into the bathroom, then took a moment to relieve himself. Once he was finished, he flushed, washed his hands and moved into the break room. He poked around in the cabinets and the mini-fridge, but they were as empty as the gun lockers.
"Fucking wonderful," he muttered.
Dejected, hungry, and annoyed, Greg moved back to the main door and tried to clear his mind. He obviously had to get out of here. Which meant he had to pass through that atmospherically compromised room. But he didn't have a suit. Greg closed his eyes, looking at the situation from whatever angles he could, trying to reason it out. Vents? he wondered suddenly. Or maybe some other exit he hadn't seen, like a maintenance crawlspace in the floor or the ceiling? Greg turned and began another thorough search of the area.
Twenty minutes later, he found himself back at that door, even more dejected and miserably frustrated than before. There were no vents he could gain access to, and no crawlspaces hidden anywhere that he could find.
He was going to have to face this, he realized slowly.
He was going to have to face it head on.
Okay, okay, okay...he could do this. He'd gone through worse and come out the other end. Greg sighed and decided to tackle the first step, which would at least be easy. He returned to the security station and grabbed the gasmask, then pulled it on securely over his face. At least it would protect his face from the lethal cold of near absolute zero. He'd heard about people surviving being in zero atmosphere environments before.
And all he had to do, judging by the monitor, was cross ten feet, open a door, get through and close the door.
Easy.
Plus, the gravity plates were still functional, since nothing was floating free in there. So that was a bonus at least.
Greg moved up to the door and tried to pump himself up for this. He stared down at the pad, the flashing red light and words. His finger hovered over the open button. He knew there were things that could go wrong. The door on the other side might be broken or he might trip or something else totally random could happen. But he was at a dead end here. It was either do this or wait for someone else to come and rescue him.
And Greg had never been good at waiting.
He clenched and unclenched his fists several times, took a few deep breaths, shook his head, (which only made the low pounding worse), cracked his neck...man, he did not want to do this! But, in the end, he knew it was going to be stupidly dangerous and painful, and, well, he couldn't lie to himself about it: he liked the danger.
Greg pushed the button.
The pressure difference sucked him out into the room, giving him a good start, and he began running.
The cold hit him like nothing he had ever felt before.
It sapped the strength from him immediately, sucked the life right out of him in mere seconds. It was a burning agony, an ache that ate right down to his bone marrow. He pushed through it all, through the pain and the suffering and the godawful misery and sprinted across the short junction. He hit the open button and the door slid open. This time, the pressure difference worked against him. Greg forced himself in against the winds of the atmosphere being sucked out and the very second he was on the other side, he slapped the close button.
The door closed and he dropped to the deckplates, gasping, moaning in sick agony. He hurt all over, everything on his body burned and he was writhing in pain. He curled up into a ball, crying out, tears of pain escaping his eyes.
Then, mercifully, all went dark, and he was returned to unconsciousness.