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.

Off at the command table the others were wrapping up, "The only option is to go down there and deal with that thing directly. Yebb and Krill have worked out a formula that can be used against the bastards. I say we hook up a hose to the main entrance and just gas the place.

Adam shook his head, "We need to get in there ourselves and make sure that nothing remains."

Yebb stepped out of the tent with Etium before the conversation could continue. The blast of cold air felt nice against her fur.

"What do you need?"

"Krill wanted your opinion on something."

She nodded and followed Etium through their little base camp, and across an open plane of ice towards krill's tent. The medical tent had been separated from the main operating base, and surrounded by a series of floodlights. No one was taking any chances with the thing escaping, not that it would do much considering most of the humans were wearing armor.

Etium pushed the tent flap aside holding it open as Yebb stepped in.

At the center of the room, a large safety glass jar held the specimen. It was about the size and shape of a human brain, but with its four spiked legs as white as bone. It had no eyes as far as they could tell, but there were a series of small protrusions on its upper legs that they thought might have soemthing to do with heat detection.

Yebb had a theory that these creature's were the void sickness's attempt to adapt to the climate and conditions of her planet. Where on other planets it had simply been enough to aerosolize and gas everyone, here it required a living being to crawl around in the dark tunnels below the earth. Suspended inside its clear liquid prison, the creature twitched and squirmed, becoming more agitated as she entered the room.

"Have you found something?" She asked

Krill turned from his work bench.

"Yes, with the formula you provided me, I have devised a secondary inoculation for void sickness. This strain is slightly different, but it is similar enough to the first strain that I didn't have to tweak the recipe much."

"And you tested it?"

"I have already tested it on myself, and a myriad of alien cells I promise its safe."

Krill was probably the only person yebb would test to inject her with something that hadn't gone through rigorous testing and multiple clinical trials. Krill lifted the injection gun, and it hissed sharply once before withdrawing. Yebb rubbed her arm.

Krill motioned Etium over pulling off his helmet so krill could just reach a muscle low on his neck.

"I will want everyone inoculated before they return to the ice vault."

He tapped the glass and the creature quivered and flailed its four bony legs. The human men and women had taken to calling the creature an Incubus, though yebb did her best to avoid thinking about why. Human culture and the monsters described in that culture were often disturbing.

"It sounds like they have a plan."

The tent was drawn open behind them and a burst of cold air entered the small room, "You would be correct at that."

The group of them turned to see Adam standing inside the room. He had his helmet tucked under one arm, "We're going in, thirty minutes.:" He turned to yebb, Head to the armory and get suited up." He sighed, "honestly I would rather not have civilian personnel on this trip, but this is your home planet and we are going to need you." She nodded nervously watching as the man knelt down to give Krill b an easier reach.

"you know I can float right?"

"Oh, well I forget, you don't do it often."

"In this environment my buoyancy system is actually more effective. The cold air is heavier and easier to float in."

Yebb stepped out of the tent to follow Adam's orders.

Not thirty minute slater she stood with Nobel team and Slayer team as they stared down into the dark. Terminator and Valkyrie were holding up the entrance just in case anything went wrong The inside of the tunnel had been lined with strips of lighting all the way to the void puddle, and a barrier and a permanent watch had been placed on the entrance. Floodlights brought the snow into crisp illuminating as the first SE soldiers began their descent into the darkness.

Yebb followed closely behind Adam as they descended the familiar rung. Her heart leapt its way into her throat where it nestled itself to say. The walls of the tunnel sparkled with crystalized ice as the group readied itself. They sat in a tight circle pointing in all directions, their weapons ready but not aimed. Yebb was paired off with one of the other SE soldiers, where she would be kept safely at the back center of the group.

Adam and Sunny took point like they always did, followed by maverick.

Ramirez had demanded he join the team thought he didn't have an Se exoskeleton. The others had argued against him, but eventually he pointed out that he had worked on this team longer than anyone and knew how to move with it.

Still he seemed rather small in comparison to all the other SE soldiers.

To compensate for his lack of SE equipment, he had gone Etium's rout and simply brought a bigger gun. Everyone had access to spray nozzles at the end of hoses which were in turn connected to large tanks on the back of the SE armor.

The tanks were full of Krill's void killing compound .

Someone had called it void weed eater, which Adam had said made it sound way less cool than it actually was. Yebb did not join in with the banter, she was far to worried about what they were going to find below. So far they had seen nothing of the rest of her planet nor the people on it, and no one had venture out of their caves to see the newcomers, A part of her worried that the rest of her species was dead, just like the kree. A part of her wanted to ignore this place and go searching through other caverns, but she knew that their job was to deal with this issue while it was here even if she didn't like it.

Up ahead of them Adam and Suny had come up to the edge of the void puddle.

As their lights rolled over the pooling clot of blood, something skittered across their vision vanishing down a side hallway.

The humans tracked it, their predator's eyes drawn to the movement. Yebb clung to the back of her SE soldier and shut her eyes tight.

"Incubus spotted." One of the SE soldiers called.

"Maverick, Sunny, you are on me. The rest of you, light up anything that gets past us, or you know, anything that tries to crawl inside our helmets and latch onto your faces. The soldiers laughed and Yebb cringed. The humans had such a dark sense of humor.

"Deploying gas." Adam said retracting a few feet of hose before aiming the nozzle at the tunnel wall which still glistened with blood, and those strange white fluid filled boils that clung in clusters along the floor and ceiling.

The gas hissed sharply as the nozzle opened .

The reaction was immediate and violent.

As soon as gas met clot, the blood bean to fizz and sizzle. An acrid cloud of off grey smoke rose into the air, and it seemed as if the tunnel walls and floor began to boil. Somewhere inside the tunnel something let off an ungodly high pitched shriek.

Yebb yelped in surprise heart pounding as soemthing rushed at them from the darkness of the cavern.

"Holy shit." Sunny said reacting even as she said it.

With one sharp trust of her spear she drove the tip at least three feet into the body of the incubus. The creature twitched on the end of her spear like a stuck boar before falling over dead, its skin fizzing.

"How big do these bastards get." Ramirez asked.

Apparently four feet long and three feet across as far as yebb knew.

More squealing broke through the air. Even at this distance yebb could hear the popping sizzling crackle as their gass interacted with the void creatures. A tremor seemed to move through the walls, and with a sudden series of sharp popping noise followed by a myriad of unappetizing squelches , the wall boils cracked open and more newborn Incubus began spilling out, screaming and squealing as they ran across the floor towards the first heat signatures they could find.

Gunfire erupted as Maverick began picking them off.

Sunny began batting at them with her spear as they leapt up towards her . She spattered one against the left wall, stabbed another through the top of its brain , kicked another one down the length of the hallway.

Every time one of Maverick's bullets hit the mark, the creature exploded.

One of them managed to make it past their guard and began crawling up Adam's armor, its bone feet jabbing into the crevasses seeking entrance.

It didn't get far as Ramirez impaled it on the end of a knife.

More began flooding around their feet, some of them no bigger than a fist, while others were almost a foot wide.

Most of them had come from the wall boils, and they saw no more of the adult sizes.

Yess squealed in horror as she watched the wave of fist sized incubus crawl towards her. The SE soldier which she clung to, began stomping her feet, methodically crushing the creature below her massive boots. One of them crawled up her leg and yebb panicked as it crawled its way onto the marine's helmet. She drew back her fist and slammed it into the creature, which exploded with icor.

IT didn't take long before the entire hallway was covered in Incubus gore which fizzled and blackened slowly as the gas dissipated through the hallway.

The Se soldier wiped a smear of Gunk from her helmet with a soft, "Ewwww."

At the front of the group Adam was a gruesome sight spattered from head to toe in Incubus pieces.

"I have a feeling that this is going to be a very messy job."

A murmur rose around the room in agreement.