The song for this chapter is AC/DC's "Thunderstruck".

"Any luck with countering that virus yet?" I asked Meza. We'd been checking in frequently, waiting for the okay to exit the game. In the meantime, Gwen and I had worked our way to the end of Mission #8 and were taking a breather in the Marshal's office. Even with dodging the Alien successfully, I got choked by a synthetic once, and Gwen still had a slight limp. We were both a little singed from the explosion and subsequent fire in Mission #6. Needless to say, we'd gone through a few more medkits. Both of our health bars were sitting at ¾ now.

"I'm starting to make some headway, but it'll be a while yet," Meza told me. "And Devon's been trying to track down the back door and ip the hacker used."

"Any idea why they hacked the VR in the first place?" I asked from my seat on a desk.

Gwen sighed in her chair, turning her newly acquired cutting torch in her hands. "The day before our big reveal? My bet is sabotage by one of our competitors."

"I'd take that bet," Devon chimed in. "And no offense to Gwen, but she hasn't made herself a lot of friends in the industry. Not the easiest person to work with..." He added under his breath. "Someone may be looking to hurt or discredit her in particular."

"Is that really enough reason to kill us though?" I asked, a little curious what Devon meant. I absently rubbed at my throat while talking. It was still tender, and my voice came out a bit strained.

Gwen swatted my hand away from the growing bruise on my neck, and I stuck my tongue out at her. "Apparently," She said with an eye roll directed at me. I waggled my eyebrows in response. That was too much for her. I grinned triumphantly as she laughed.

"Well, Gwen, shall we continue? Time's a-wasting!" I said, sliding off the desk to stand. "Mission #9 is a literal walk in the park. You don't have to worry about any homicidal robots or hungry Aliens on this one, promise."

Gwen shot me a skeptical look before rising and clipping the cutting torch onto her utility belt with practiced ease. It occurred to me that she must use one quite a bit in her own workshop. I wondered if such a tool was responsible for the wrinkled scar I'd spotted on her forearm earlier. She'd covered the old burn when she saw me looking, clearly self-conscious of it. I'd made a point of ignoring it since then.

We walked to where Meza's chicken was patiently waiting for us by Marlow's cell. I glared at the pristine rooster, annoyed that it had somehow come out of Mission #6 without a single feather burned or broken. I was tempted to test the stun baton clipped onto my belt, but decided against it. The bird still had a purpose.

I barely paid attention as Gwen spoke to the imprisoned salvage worker. As player 1, Gwen took lead on all of the NPC interactions and cut scenes. I had most of the lines memorized by now anyways and entertained myself muttering the lines a second before the characters spoke.

I looked around the room, noting again the subtle increase in detail from the original. The only exception to this was the forlorn save terminal against one wall. No one was sure why, but the virus had attacked those as well. That section of wall looked pixelated and flickered occasionally. We stayed as far away from the corrupted area as possible to be safe, but knowing that we couldn't save was more unnerving to me than the actual world damage.

The loading screen flashed in front of me, blocking out my view of the Marshal's office. When it vanished, we were in space suits standing in the cargo bay of a salvage ship. The stale smell of recycled air and old sweat sat heavy in my helmet, and I wrinkled my nose in distaste. I distracted myself by figuring out which suit belonged to Gwen. Just look for the one who walks like they've never worn a space suit before. At least the chicken hadn't followed us on this mission. There was no reason for it to come when there was no danger.

I moved next to Gwen, slightly weirded out by the feeling of the confining suit against my skin. The cargo bay door lowered, and a blast of wind pushed us back a step before we caught our balance. Streams of dust blew into the hold as the door eased itself down to thud against the rocky ground, and the air whined and howled as it whipped past us. It was difficult to make anything out through the dust storm raging on the planet's surface, and jutting rock formations and boulders could only be seen as dark smudges against the grey air. As we drew nearer, we could see the exposed rock had pockmarks and gouges eroded away by the unrelenting wind. The ground was made of more of the uneven rock and was blanketed in a layer of the dust clouding the air. I wondered idly how long real space suits could be exposed to these conditions before they were sand blasted to ribbons.

We walked in silence for a while, taking in the view, until I couldn't stand it anymore. "Meza, can we please have some outside music in here? The silence is killing me!" Gwen turned to look at me, but I couldn't see her face clearly through the grit clinging to her visor.

Meza chuckled. "I'll see what I can do." Not even a minute passed before a very familiar song started playing through the radio in my helmet. The way Gwen jerked in surprise, I knew she could hear it too. Maybe that meant Meza was making progress with the virus.

"Oh, Meza, you know just how I like it!" I yelled to hear myself over the guitar and drum that started the song off. Thunderstruck by AC/DC had to be one of my favorite songs. The boring walk wasn't so boring now, and I bobbed my head to the music, lip singing as we continued.

The song had just finished when we reached the first obstacle, a rockslide blocking the path. Off to one side there was a cliff just tall enough to be a hassle for a person in a space suit to climb solo. I gave Gwen a leg up and backed away from the rocks, waiting. Gwen would circle around the rockslide and blast a path for the rest of us to make it through. As player 1, she was filling the role of Marlow in his flashback, which meant she had the explosives he usually carried.

Meza was just starting a second song playing when the world rippled big time, and the song cut out. The vertigo with this ripple was almost as bad as when the hacker had trapped us, which made me worry. Meza swearing didn't ease my concerns. "Meza," I said, looking at my surroundings anxiously. "Talk to me here. What's going on?"

"The hacker just undid an hour's worth of work," Meza said bitterly. After a pause he continued with a very different tone. "Oh no..."

"What?!"

"He also switched the game to nightmare mode."

"D*mmit!" I swore, kicking a loose stone. Nightmare mode was the game's hardest setting. The Alien learned to track us quicker, enemies hit harder and took more hits, items were less abundant, and player health bars didn't show. Of all the changes nightmare mode enacted I suspected the lack of materials for medkits would be the most difficult to deal with. The item spawn rate had been the same in multiplayer as it was for single. That hadn't been a problem when we were playing on normal. On nightmare...

I laughed softly and leaned my head back, running a hand over my helmet. "Oh, we are so f*cked." I shook my head and dragged my gloved hand down over the visor of my helmet to remove some of the dust.

I was jarred from my thoughts by the roadblock exploding. Bits of rubble rained around me, and a chunk of stone the size of a watermelon bounced and rolled a few feet away. "You coming or what?" Gwen said over the radio.

"Well, if you insist..." I said seductively, catching up to Gwen.

"X33N!" She yelled between laughs. She playfully shoved my shoulder, and we fell into step beside each other.

The trail narrowed as we went until cliff faces loomed over us and pressed close enough that only one person could walk at a time. The three NPCs trailed behind at their own pace, and we lost sight of them. I took the opportunity to explain what the hacker had done with his last stunt. She took it surprisingly well, expressing relief that he hadn't killed us outright. She didn't understand just how brutal nightmare mode could be. She'll find out soon enough.

Our destination—an alien spacecraft—came into view. It was hard to appreciate the massive size of the place with the dust storm, but the upside down teardrop of the doorway was plainly visible. The ship's previous inhabitants had conveniently left the door open for us. We followed a corridor lined in exposed hoses, pipes, and wires. The walls and floor were bowed rather than the flat surfaces preferred on most spacecraft. Gwen ran a gloved hand over a ribbed wall and mused, "I wonder what the ship's original occupants were like? Is the shape of the hallway to accommodate for a different body structure or merely artistic preference?" I grinned and nudged her forward. Not that loitering would get us in trouble on this mission. If the tech here caught her fancy, she'd have a field day in the cockpit.

It didn't take us long to reach the massive chamber. The interior of the spacecraft was as I remembered it, but much more eerie. A central platform and chair dominated the otherwise empty space. The ground around it was littered with small pieces of debris that were nearly invisible through the mist hovering just above the floor. I could hear our footsteps echo off the vaulted ceiling as we circumvented what I took to be the captain's chair. "I'll take care of the beacon," I volunteered. "You can go check out the helm; I can see you drooling through your visor. Just don't touch anything."

Gwen nodded and began approaching the raised platform the chair and machinery rested on. The trip to deactivate the beacon was a quick one, once the NPCs hurried up and got here. (I needed a hand up to reach the doorway leading out of the cockpit.) When I returned, the NPCs had already set up the tripod stand and rope to lower us into the bowels of the ship via a hole. Two of them had already gone down, leaving one to man the mechanism to bring us back up. Mission #9 was almost over.

"Gwen, get over here. You don't want to miss out on the Alien nursery," I called.

She looked up from studying the skeletal remains of the pilot and answered, "I'll be right there."

I turned and clipped one of the tethered carabiners on my suit to the mechanism on the rope. I hit the button on the device to start lowering myself and glanced back up. Gwen was making her way over, but the thing that caught my attention was the NPC, strangely enough. Heyst—I think it was Heyst—was pacing beside the hole. I furrowed my eyebrows in confusion. I've never seen him do that before. Usually he just stands by the tripod. Does the VR add details to NPC behavior too?

Deciding that must be it, I turned my attention back to the hole I was being lowered through. The walls were coated in what looked like stalactites and mineral deposits cascading over each other. From my experience with Aliens, I suspected the stuff was more organic in nature. Thinking of the changes we'd see to the station in the later missions, I wondered just how long it took Aliens to make a nest.

Hearing a scream while thinking about Aliens made me jump, but I didn't have more than a second to ponder it. A weight hit me from above, making me lose my grip on the device managing my descent. I swung and spun by my tether, trying to right myself. The mechanism whirred and strained but didn't give out under the impact and extra weight. Whatever had landed on me clung to me, and I grappled with it, trying to peal it off before it could tear into my space suit. What the h*ck was an Alien doing h...

"X33N, it's me!" A terrified Gwen screamed over my radio.

"What?! Gwen?" I asked, stopping. I tried to twist myself to be able to see her. For the first time I realized how restrictive these space suits were. Finally I caught a glimpse of her space suit's helmet. She was holding onto me from behind, which didn't help. "What happened?"

"Th-the NPC. He cut my tether and pushed me." I looked up and could just make out the shape of Heyst looking over the edge. The figure pixelated as I watched before returning to normal and leaving the edge. If he wanted to kill Gwen, why didn't he just cut the rope now?

I grabbed Gwen's arm when she started slipping and looked at the ground. We were almost down, thankfully. "I think our hacker friend is getting impatient."

"Wait, what about the hacker?" Meza asked, distractedly.

"Meza, one of the salvage guys in M9 just tried to murder Gwen," I told him. "Can you see if the hacker messed with any of the other NPCs?"

"Sure...Give me a minute."

We didn't hear back from Meza until we were back in the Marshal's office, debating who should handle the flamethrower. For the sake of both of us having a weapon, I gave Gwen the revolver and took the heavier flamethrower for myself. Gwen weighed the weapon in her palm and sighed. "I really should take a self-defense class after all this, maybe get a conceal and carry license."

"Never hurts to be prepared," I commented.

"I'm beginning to think I shouldn't have come to this convention at all," Gwen said, rubbing her eyes. "First that threatening text, then a guy with a knife chases me, then..."

"Text? What text?" I interrupted.

"Some douche with an unlisted number saying I should cancel my speech 'if I know what's good for me'," She said rolling her eyes and crossing her arms. She wouldn't meet my eyes though.

An awkward silence settled as I tried to think of something to say. Meza saved me. "Um...Is this a bad time?"

"Meza," I said with a grin. "You heard what Gwen said about the text?"

"Yeah, yeah. We'll look into it. Sorry I disappeared during M9. The cops had a few more questions about what happened to Michael."

"Sounds like you've been busy," I said, careful not to give anything away to Gwen. "You and Devon have any luck yet?"

"Yes, actually! Good news: Devon tracked the ip when the hacker interfered this time. He's somewhere in the building. Police are looking for him now. Bad news: I can't turn off nightmare mode, and we probably want to get you two out of there before they find him. Don't know what he'll do if he feels backed into a corner."

I quickly relayed the information to Gwen. "Right. We should get moving then," She said, frowning. We started walking, and Meza's chicken clucked and ran to get in front of us to lead the way.

I asked Meza one more question. "Find anything to explain why a non-hostile NPC attacked Gwen?"

"It looks like the hacker may have hijacked the NPC for that. He can't very well join the game without a helmet, can he? I'll keep an eye out for that trick and alert you if I see it again."

"Alright, man." Turning to Gwen, I laid out what we'd be dealing with for the next few missions, because there were plentiful ways for us to die if we weren't careful. "Just so you don't get caught off guard, I'm going to tell you. We'll be getting chased by the Alien the entirety of the next mission, and the marshal scr*ws us over at the end. On the upside, we get a break from the Alien in Mission #11 and only have to worry about the androids actively hunting us."

"So we get rid of the Alien only for the androids to go full mental?" Gwen asked to clarify.

"Hey, when it rains it pours, and this station was in the middle of a sh*tstorm before we ever got here," I pointed out.

"Okay, what's the plan?"

"We're going to have to move a bit quicker now or risk the Alien finding us. Distractions and hiding places won't work for long."

Gwen nodded. "You said something about items being scarce earlier?"

"Yeah, that's a feature with nightmare mode. Let's inventory what we have. We'll figure things out from there." I dug through my pockets, which in true video game fashion were deeper than they should have been. "Got any Molotov cocktails?"