In Space No One Can Smell You Rotting

"We need to get to Cass," Tanaka said. "Sounds like she's in trouble."

"I found a landing bay, a few clicks ahead of us." O'Malley said. "But there's a... hiccup..."

"Define: hiccup?" Tanaka said.

"I can't seem to detect any oxygen on the ship. I don't think the oxygeneration unit is functioning." O'Malley answered.

"Do we have any space suits?" Tanaka asked.

"No." O'Malley winced at the answer. "We... sorta needed them to... well..."

"Your colon can survive solar radiation now!" Pickman announced to Tanaka proudly.

Tanaka sighed and facepalmed. "So how do we get to Cass?"

"Well you can go." O'Malley told Tanaka. "You aren't, strictly speaking, alive."

"I can go into hard vacuum?"

"For a while..." O'Malley thought about it for a second. "You could still freeze but it'd be more of an annoyance than anything fatal. At least until it began to effect the cybernetic components that are running your body."

"So I can do it, but there's a time limit?" Tanaka asked. "Fine, let's just land and go help Cass. Pickman, send a message to the blue midget out there, tell them we're getting Cass."

"Right on it!" Pickman said then sent the morse message: "WE COME FIRST... IF HOT... GET FIRSTS DIBS."

O'Malley couldn't help but chuckle at that. Tanaka didn't know morse so he was completely oblivious to what they had just sent Dick.

Tanaka landed the starbug in the landing bay and, after O'Malley handed him a psi-scan with Cass's location on the ship, stepped out into the cold, mute, vacuum of space. Tanaka felt weird. It was cold, certainly, but it wasn't as cold as he though it would be. Maybe his nerves were degraded to the point feelings were somewhat dulled. That thought scared him more than the fact that he was currently walking in a room without heat or air.

He followed the psi-scan's waypoint marker through the ship until he got close to where Cass was supposed to be. He soon found herself in an immaculately cleaned mess hall and there stood Cass in a space suit and a mechanoid who seemed to be giving her the cold shoulder. Tanaka tried to call out to her, but soon realized that without air he couldn't speak. So he sauntered over to her and tapped her on the shoulder.

Surprised, she spun around and upon seeing what looked like a frost-covered corpse walking around like nothing was wrong she screamed. At least she looked like she was screaming, Tanaka couldn't hear her, for all he knew she was laughing at him.

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So Tanaka obviously looks very different since Cass last saw him, and he can't quite tell her he's a friend and not some scary space zombie. But I think a walking corpse is only going to be the second-most-terrifying thing Cass has seen in the last several hours once Dick shows up...
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