Cold.
Damn cold.
At first it was all I could think of. The piercing, metallic chill. Back in academy they claimed that it was no worse than we might experience in a natural environment. Like so much else of the Caldari machine, it was propaganda. It was also bullshit. Oh, it's not that they were technically lying (the chamber could have been no colder than 40 degrees or so), but they knew. They knew that the cold of deep space reached right through the bones of a man, into the smallest and largest places of his body... of his mind.
Fortune favors the bold.
Wasn't that what was on the poster that had convinced me to first enlist? More bullshit. Well, maybe not completely. See, I didn't have to feel that terrible cold for long; after a few short seconds started the pain.
I remember when I was pretty young, 13 cycles maybe, I was running with some knuckleheads, snatching kredchips, clothes..... shaking people down for whatever we could. Anyway, I was always the one that had to let the poor prick know what was in store for him. Usually, two guys would get behind the putz on either side, and I'd walk up and say somethin like, "There's 30 billion people on this planet; they're not gonna look hard for the ones what gutted ya, pal," and most times they'd be all jelly in the boots and piss in the pants. However, on this one particular occasion, we didn't choose so wisely. The guy spun around, bringing a quick elbow up and into the chin of the first goon, cleanin his clock. Stepping back, he deftly thrust his foot to plant it between the legs of my remaining ally and then easily tossed this dude, I mean a real bruiser, down to ride his guts. I had one of those moments where suddenly things seem quite clear and you begin to seriously question the choices you've made that have brought you to this point in your life. Unfortunately my moment of clarity was interrupted by the hard reality of a swift boot to my groin. Through my budding tears I saw the next boot, a flash of black, hurtling at me from the right side of my body. Honestly, I remember thinking, No, boot! You cut that out! The boot wasn't very cooperative. When I came to, I had lost 5 teeth on my right side, had gained a fashionable scar across half of my face, and had a nice, ruptured scrotum.
That was the worst pain I had ever felt in my life, until a few seconds after I first awoke in space.
It's not like a paper cut, or a bad burn... it's more like...
It's more like having the skin across the fronts of your toes very carefully and precisely sliced in a fashion that is parallel to the bottoms of your feet. Then, ever so delicately, either side of the cut is wrapped and secured around a rod coming out the end of a servo-motor. Next, a friendly, terrible pressure is simultaneously applied to the sensory organs of the face and head and a good number of the internal organs as the servo-motors on the toeskin spools are activated and slowly pulled away from the body to aid in the progressive tearing of flesh in a jerking, tugging, unraveling fashion that creates an end product not terribly unlike an orange zest. Soon after the introduction of this first sensation all of the marrow in the body simultaneously revolts and seeks the fastest possible exit from one's bones by means of spontaneous evacuation of impeding bone matter.