Diaz
"Are we not going to talk about what that bot just said!?" Nye asked the group once they'd filed out of the cleanroom and the turrets' fields of fire.
"If we were smart, we wouldn't." Diaz offered. "That scrap better not come off my pay."
"If the client didn't want us to ask questions, they should have put that in the contract." Tony stated defensively, "The no questions asked clause usually costs double, so I might as well get some useful information while I'm here to try and recoup my losses."
"That's what you want to focus on right now?" Nye said incredulously.
"We're not focusing on anything right now," Diaz rebuked. "We're going back to the Cat, we'll collect our payment and then we'll leave. Under no circumstances are we instigating a feud with a spook. Everyone got that?"
As the trio walked through the simple white halls, Nye's words weighed on Diaz. Despite himself, he pondered how poorly this smuggling job had gone thus far. First, a damaged ship and now the client had to clean up what was left of a robot because someone couldn't keep their mouth shut. It was partially his own damned fault for not shutting Tony up sooner. A fact that only served to exacerbate his annoyance now.
"Why do you think he's a spook?" Tony asked.
"Where's your situational awareness?" Diaz replied, exasperated. "I haven't seen a single living staff member yet. Aside from that, the client was pretty quick to gun down his own bot when he thought it was going to talk. Doesn't get much more spook than that."
"If you think the Client sicked that bot on us, you're both being paranoid," Tony said. "The staff are probably deeper into the station. Basic the less you know stuff. Those uppity tin cans are a plague wherever they go. We're pretty close to the dead stars here, so it's probably still a sore spot for these people. In case you've forgotten, we just flew through an old warzone of scrapped bots. Anyone with enough common sense to point and shoot would gun down a rouge bot the second they saw one."
"You've got a point, but I agree with Diaz." Nye said, halting at one of the plethora of bland doors they'd passed thus far. "I noticed it too. These rooms look like dorms. Either this place is expecting company in the hundreds, or this wing has been abandoned."
Tony paused, casting a glance at Diaz before breaking off to look into every windowed room they passed. As an utterly unintentional side-effect of keeping an eye on him, Diaz caught several passing glimpses of the rooms within. Each could comfortably house a single occupant. They had all the basics for an easy life and enough room to walk around besides. You wouldn't be living the high life, but it was more space than you could get on any other station in these parts.
"I wish my room back on the Shadow was this nice," Tony said longingly before sighing. "Okay, let's say he is a spook who's too cheap to pay for no questions asked. What then?"
"Too cheap?" Nye chuckled roguishly. It was cute when she did that. "Tony do you know how much we cost? He could have paid a dozen chump smugglers and still has enough GSaC in his account to buy each of them new shuttles."
"The client probably thought that for our price, we would act like professionals, not nosy journalists hungry for a lead." Diaz said. "You'd learn plenty if you talked less and listened more."
The first thing Diaz saw upon entering the hanger was the Black Cat, bleeding an expanding pool of rich blue liquid from its disemboweled underside, around islands of metal panels and scraps. One pile of metal had Boomer's slab-faced EOD helmet resting atop it. Movement pulled his eyes to the potbellied old man sliding back under the mess to resume his work.
"How's the Cat coming along?" Diaz asked to the clatter of metal on metal. He repeated the question twice more before Boomer answered.
"Well…" Boomer began while indicating to the evaporating blue slime and one pile of scraps in particular. "The heat exchangers and pipes are shot, but we have enough solid argon still in the reservoir to keep the frame-shift engines from melting and the maneuvering fuel from freezing. We don't have enough spares to weld the pipes, so I'm splicing what I can and plugging what I can't."
"Wasn't Shores helping you?" Tony asked.
"He's resting up for the flight home. I'll get him to give my work a once over before we lift off."
"Must be nice to get to sleep on the job." Tony grumbled.
With the cap of his boot, Boomer shifted the mass of parts laid out in a methodically messy progression from right to left. Grabbing from the leftmost side of the pile, Boomer took a small length of tube in one hand and a wire coil in the other before sliding back under the Black Cat. Aside from shrapnel, scraps and the sizable puddle of mixed fluids, the ship's belly looked like it had been stripped to the bones and cleaned before the doctor had some drinks and botched the reassembly. Pipes and electrical cabling joined at improbable angles while others wept near-radiant goo as their contents shifted from solid to sludge to slush to gas.
"Anything I can do to help?" Nye asked. Diaz could tell she just wanted to show the token effort. Powered armor isn't known for its dexterous digits or fine finger functions. At best, she might serve as a mobile jack.
"Quit buggin' me. I can get us back to the Shadow, but I've always been better at taking things apart than putting 'em back together. Stay outta the way, and don't touch nothin!" Boomer threw his helmet in Tony's direction to drive the point home and force him away from the parts he was investigating.
"Okay, I'll stay out of the way." Nye was already walking around to the rear of the ship before Boomer was halfway finished speaking.
"Great! I can't ask questions, I can't snoop around and now I can't even look at some damaged parts. Guess I'll just go take a beauty nap with our supporter when he should be fixing the ship."
"Do you ever think about what you're about to say?" Diaz asked
"Not often, no," Tony replied. "It's part of my creative mind. Something a square like you wouldn't understand."
"No wonder you signed on with us. I bet you were kicked out of the colonies for being a smart-arse."
"You signed on with me. Got it, square? I've been here way longer than you."
"Hey Boomer?" Nye shouted from the tail of the ship. "When was the last time you saw Shores?" Boomer slid out from under the Cat and hastily wiped himself down with filthy hands, which only smeared more fluids over his coveralls.
"I haven't seen him since we landed. Princess said he was dozing in the cockpit."
"Well, I'll give you three guesses where he's not." Nye said.
"Maybe he's draining his catheter." Tony offered.
Diaz moved first, Boomer and Tony following in tow to the drop ship's lowered ramp. Looking in, he saw Nye standing near the far wall that divided the cockpit from the crew compartment. Resting on the floor next to the pilot's station was Shores's helmet, staring accusingly back at them.
"Where would he wander off to?" Diaz asked no one in particular. He pulled his mission clock to the foreground of his HUD and did some not-so-quick estimating.
"Princess must of spaced him." Tony said deadpanned.
"Or she ate him to gain his strength." Nye chimed.
"She would have just shot him." Boomer dryly added.
"Enough of that!" Diaz said. "We've been on this station for nearly three hours. He's probably stumbling around here somewhere. Boomer keep working on the ship. We'll split up and look for him in the surrounding hallways. If anyone finds him, bring him back here right away, otherwise let's meet up in fifteen standard."
"Why not radio for him every couple minutes?" Boomer asked. "He'll turn up on his own if we wait."
"The client got spooked for whatever reason, so we're on comms blackout until told otherwise." He said while picking up Shores' helmet and peering inside. "Besides, all the new EVA models don't have redundant comm suites built into the suits. It's all in the helmet."
Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.
"How do you know that?" Tony asked.
"It's important to know the capabilities of your team. I looked over everyone's gear specs on the flight." Even behind a helmet, Diaz could practically see the slack-jawed expression on Tony's face.
"It means he knows what we've got cause he's a big nerd." Nye said.
"I knew that," Tony said. "You guys saw how quick the client gunned down his own bot. Do you think he'll do the same to Shores if he ends up somewhere he shouldn't be?"
"I'd rather not risk it," Diaz answered. "Scrap meeting back here. Tony, head to the cleanroom and make sure he hasn't gotten mulched. Boomer no change for you, but if he comes back on his own make sure to keep an eye on him until we get back. Nye, you and I will sweep the halls, and if we haven't found him, we'll meet Tony at the cleanroom and push in further until we find him."
Minutes ticked away while he scanned the sterile white halls. No matter how intense his scrutiny, they showed no signs of passage and every door he tried was stuck fast by some unseen locking mechanism. The hanger had dozens of sealed doors, but the lone bulkhead allowing passage was the one leading to the drop point. Without a guide, the interlocking halls soon became a brilliantly lit labyrinth of pristine, glossy metal.
These rooms were lived in, some even had clothes sloppily discarded on the floor. Diaz thought he saw movement at the edges of his vision. More than once, double checks failed to turn up a living soul, so he dismissed it as nerves and fatigue. That didn't stop him from rounding every corner rifle first with the safety off and a finger on the trigger. Any second now, the ambush would come and he'd be caught in a close-quarters firefight while he was isolated and unsupported. Station clearance was superficially different from city fighting, but that wouldn't keep all his hard-won lessons from resurfacing. The cost was too great to ever forget them.
The eerie silence of the station was devoid of the sounds he was so accustomed to from a planetside upbringing. There was no wind rustling grassy fields or whistling between soaring towers. The living thrum of a working city was replaced by the echoing footsteps of his heavy gait. There should have been more. No city was this quiet, and even though he hadn't been on many, he knew no station should be either. His armor sounded deafening by comparison to the simple absence of background noise.
As Diaz searched, an age-old dilemma came to mind. When one soldier was captured, how many should be sent on a rescue mission? Should the rescue fail and the rescuers become captives as well, did you send even more in hopes of saving them? Was a single soldier worth risking a company or even a platoon for? Diaz knew both answers. An officer well away from danger would discard the lost soldier rather than endanger his troops. It was an acceptable casualty unless the situation forced their hand.
A grim smile tugged at his lips. A soldier's answer was always and irrefutably, yes. The logistics didn't matter, and even if the mission was a forlorn hope there would still be volunteers. That's just how soldiers were. But I'm not a soldier anymore, I'm a merc.
He finished clearing the leftmost halls and moved on to the next from what he was notionally calling south. Tony should be nearing the cleanroom somewhere in a general north-easterly direction. After discussing the station's apparent absence of human staff, he was growing increasingly aware of an itching pressure in his skull. His soldier's survival instinct, as he'd grown to know it. Or paranoia if this ambush never came. Or just an untimely headache. It was too easy to give meaning to things that had none.
His muscles were coiling tighter, the stress of walking into an ambush and waiting for the shooting to start. That creeping doubt that lurked where places pretended to be peaceful. Luring you in, waiting for you to slip up before they killed you. This feeling was what he lived for, seconded only by the chance to hone his craft in battle and that sense of total supremacy.
WHAM
A heavy, metal-on-metal crash clatters ahead of him sends Diaz exploding into action. Abandoning stealth but not caution, he advanced on the source of the noise, rifle at a high ready. Eyes flicking to every door he passes, he rounds a corner and sees Nye entering a room through the now vacant doorway. Sprinting for the door, he leans close to the carved stone and enters without hesitation, eyes looking to reveal his unseen killers. Nye snaps around and sights him down the length of her laser repeater for a half-second prior to relaxing her stance in recognition.
"What do you think you're doing? Did you see Shores?" He asked, cautiously scanning the room behind her
"I saw someone in here, and the door was locked... but, was wrong, empty." Nye replied after looking around, confusion forcing her words to trail off the longer she spoke. He looked at the door she'd smashed from its housing. It was the same as most of the others so far, solid metal from top to bottom.
"You saw someone in here?" He asked gently.
"I thought I did."
"Next time, do your double-check before you start breaching doors. But, since we're here, what's on that terminal? Anything we can use?" He asked while thoroughly searching the room for threats that may be hidden behind the blocky shapes of intricate surgical equipment. Some appeared to be the common everyday variety; auto-surgeon table, full spectrum scanner, rudimentary surgical hand tools. The rest were well beyond his limited medical and mechanical experience to guess at their functions. Finished his inspection, he turned to see Nye eying her suit jack like a medic did a loaded hypo before plunging it into the terminal.
"Looks like it's data logs. Most are just audio, no station map and no server access." She selected a file and queued it to play over the console's speakers. Five seconds of silence followed until impatiently drumming fingers struck something that clacked in rapid succession.
"SG one-oh-five. Log six alpha." A clinically gruff, male voice said. "The psycho-empathic link between these two is truly remarkable in its range, depth and complexity. While more notable in the female, both can repeatedly detect external stimuli of the other while in sealed environments. They have displayed the ability to regularly establish an empathetic support while one of the pair is exposed to trauma. Neither subject seems to be actively, or even consciously, using this bond but it has several effects on the recipient, which has been observed repeatedly in the male. This phenomenon could be the focus of a study in and of itself. In the future, I hope we receive more twins for the project, but alas, I must carry on with the current mandate. This pair will be undergoing stage two as planned. In the meantime, we'll monitor them closely and watch for similar manifestations in other subject groups. For further reading, consult the station's archives on deep-social empathy and collective consciousness theorem. Additional findings to be logged under the usual annals." The recording ended with a click, static hissing softly from the speaker.
"He's talking about those people like they're animals." Nye said.
"This station isn't old enough to be from White Light. Is it?" Diaz asked idly.
"That was almost a half-century ago. Besides, if it was, you'd think we'd see logos or something. This place doesn't exactly scream 'saviors of humanity,' does it?"
"We shouldn't be listening to this stuff." He said, eying the door they had entered from, rifle raised in a low ready stance. "We need to find Shores before anyone else does. Tidy up. The last thing I want to get caught up in is all this. Whatever they did with those people wasn't anything good."
Her mechanized fingers squirmed for no outward reason as Nye manipulated something within her armor's confines. Within seconds a small display in the screen flashed, and with an audible smirk, she withdrew her datajack and shouldered her rifle. A small pixelated character popped up onscreen before detonating and leaving a black slate where the terminal's display had been. As they left the room, stepping over the detached door that lay near the exit, she kept her eyes well clear of it. Diaz gave it a double check, solid metal from top to bottom.
"If they come looking, it'll seem like that computer just died."
"If someone was going to come looking, I think kicking in the door would have gotten their attention like it did mine." He said, eyeing both directions of the hall before they finished sweeping the area.
He spent more time waiting for the boot to drop while he looked, but the ambush never came. Neither did Shores. They needed to find him before anyone else discovered he was missing. If all went well, no one would notice what a good job Diaz had done, but if he botched it, things would go from bad to worse fast. Naturally, that'd be his fault somehow. It always was. The search concluded, they both met with Tony at the cleanroom.
"I was waiting for you to get here, you know just in case, but both the doors are open and I think Shores walked through here."
"What do you mean both doors are open?" Diaz could see what Tony meant, but his questions weren't intended for Tony. "Isn't this a cleanroom? The air should have had to cycle before either side could open. That's the whole point."
"Unless someone else walked through and kicked all these robot scraps out of the way, it had to have been Shores. It's not like we've seen anyone else on this station." Tony pointed out several liberally blasted chunks of destroyed robot strewn across the room, all heading deeper into the station. Diaz kicked a hunk of metal across the room experimentally, and the turrets remained dormant as it skidded into the pooling vapors spilling forth from the far door leading deeper into the station.
"Did they repressurize that section of the station?" Nye asked. "The air seems different from before."
"You're right," Diaz noted. "If it was left at half atmosphere then we should have noticed the pressure change in the hanger."
"I don't like the way this fog is curling around us," Tony complained from the rear of the group.
"Shut up and soldier, soldier." Diaz barked. Tony summarily ignored him.
"What's up with the frost everywhere? My suit says it's eight degrees Celsius." Tony was panning his suit's and repeater's mounted lights over the glossy black ice forming in patches all over the room and its contents.
"Maybe its the chemicals in the air. They must have a lower freezing point than normal water." Nye said.
"Wouldn't it be a higher freezing point?" Tony asked
"Whatever, same difference," Nye replied tersely. She cocked out an ear, snapped up a fist and brought her repeater to bear on the far door. "Did you hear that? People talking."
"Our echoes?" Tony asked.
"No, and I doubt it." Diaz said. "That crap eats sound almost as well as vacuum. If Shores went this way, then he'll be sandwiched between Princess and us." That triggered a childish laugh from Nye and a resigned sign from Tony. "Let's find him and get back before anyone notices we're gone."
Neither Nye nor Tony moved to take point and be the first to cross the cleanroom. Not one to stand idly by, Diaz pressed onward. Leading by example. If Shores was wandering through the mixed vapors without a helmet or air feed, they didn't have long to find him. The blue threat indicator lights on the turrets never so much as flickered while the group passed through their killzone.
An old soldier's advice came to mind. If an attack was proceeding too smoothly, it was a trap. Within his blank-faced warplate, he steeled himself with a rictus grin and a soul-haunting chuckle that morbidly echoed for his ears alone. Time to spring the trap.
This was definitely going to come off of his pay.