By the time the shuttle descends for approach, it's bouncing and jostling me in my seat, making my stomach do flips. "I thought you said the atmosphere was thin," I hiss, biting my tongue.

Sparrow huffs from the pilot's seat, eyes locked on the nav display. "Yeah, but at our velocity... well, we're in range in about five... four..."

I pull my links up and wait for a positive connection...

"Two... one..." There's a blip, but I don't even get a response to my handshake before we're out of range.

I sigh. "This isn't going to work. We blew by way too fast; we need to land on the next pass."

Sparrow gives me a quick glance before pulling her eyes back to the navigation console. "Are you nuts? Rusteater is going to try to kill us both."

I swallow. "Yeah. So I'm going to get that plasma pistol, and a voidsuit. You have one on board?" I stand, bracing myself on the wall and back of the chair.

"What?" Her voice is high and tight, eyes wide. "Yes, but it's only a generic suit. It's in the engine room, but Melody... that's only a two-shot pistol. And I don't have any reloads."

"You what?" I gasp. A sudden motion jostles me into the wall, and I slip to one knee. "You don't have one spare plasma pack?"

"No!" Sparrow slams a palm into the console. "I'm not a terrorist. The gun is for show, in the kinda situation where it's a deterrent. If I end up having to use it, I'm already screwed. Besides, Rusteater is a synth. Their reflexes and reaction time are going to be way above-ah!" A sudden bounce makes her squeak.

My teeth slam shut on my tongue, and I hiss as I taste blood. Almost no atmosphere, but of course there's vacuum-sucking turbulence! "Yeah, well, as much of a prick as he is, I can't leave Cartwright to get his throat slit by some squid-humping terrorist. Besides, he's the only officer on the station that Rabi doesn't outrank. I need him alive and on my side when I confront her," I call out.

Sparrow snorts at that. "You're all heart, Melody."

Slowly, stumbling and slamming into the walls, I make my way to the engine room. Bracing my hands against the bulkheads, I narrowly manage to avoid a concussion when the ship leaps like a horse beneath me. "Please don't plaster me to the inside of the Chimera!" I call back to her.

"No promises!" She shouts. "Except for one; if you become part of the ship, I promise to rename her Frankenstein's Monster."

Hah. Alright, Sparrow's pretty funny too.

----------------------------------------

The landing is pretty rough. It's not Sparrow's fault; even with the thin atmosphere, the wind resistance creates a lot of turbulence. The storage module isn't aerodynamic, it wasn't designed for atmosphere. Somehow, Sparrow manages to bleed enough velocity without smacking the surface or compacting us into the ship's hull. It's not graceful, but she manages to put the craft down with only a moderate jolt and whine of metal on ceramic plate. The shuttle rocks on the landing pad, the automated bay sliding closed overhead like a shutter.

Sadly, it's not going to pressurize. After a few moments of silence, I unbuckle myself from the seat. "Careful pulling out, you'll scratch the paint," I say, pointing at the unmodified shuttle parked in the adjacent bay. The cheeky image is spoiled by the thick gloves of the voidsuit. I'm pointing Cartwright and Rusteater's shuttle; it's powered down, and the hatch is open.

Sparrow looks at me anxiously. "Melody, I'm serious. Even with the suit, you'll die fast at the surface. It's almost 200 below zero, and-"

"I'm not going to be out on the surface. Cartwright isn't a synth; he'll stay inside. It's cold, but with so little atmosphere, there won't be much heat transfer short term; it's near enough to vacuum," I say, as I reach kneel and open the hatch to the cargo bay. "Besides, inside the base it's only about 50 below zero. Practically toasty."

"Do you know where to look?" She asks. Her tattoo is running haphazard patterns along her arms and legs.

I shrug as I swing my legs over and onto the ladder. "If he's alive, I figure he'll be at the control room." The simple outpost here is set up in a lopsided triangle. The machine bay sits in the East corner, the generator and control room are placed in the North corner, and enclosed landing pad is the West corner. The actual mining takes place in the center and expanding south, on the surface. No need to shelter the autonomous machines from the elements.

I awkwardly try to climb down the shuttle ladder in the voidsuit. It's not some crazy high-tech environmental suit that'll regulate my temperature or a military-grade battle-suit that'll protect me from small arms fire. It's just a standard vacuum-rated covering of radiation resistant, lead-boron impregnated thermoplastic. It's a mass-printed suit, one size doesn't quite fit anyone, with a pair of oxygen bottles on the back. A little over two hours of air, if I keep my breathing and pulse steady.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

The boots are too thick to get my feet fully in the rungs, and the gloves are awkward. The joints seem stiff as I fall slowly, bouncing to the floor of the storage bay. I settle and tug as the material; it pinches between the legs, too. I pat my side, feeling the pistol there; it's strapped to me with some thermal tape. Makeshift holster for a makeshift gunslinger.

"Kick ass, Melody," I hear through my link. I look up and see the blue-haired silhouette of Sparrow before she shuts the shuttle hatch. I turn, watching the cargo door slide open with a hiss of venting atmosphere.

The shuttle bay is lit only by red emergency lights and the Chimera's exterior lighting. Not a good sign. I've pinged the network down here, but I'm not getting a response, not even an error code. I can think of a few explanations, none of them good. Occam's razor; comms are down. Someone doesn't want me talking on the network.

It means someone, probably Rusteater, took down the nodes that allow us to link in. No port, no entry, no calls, no linking into any of the hardware. But that also means Rusteater is cut off too. There's a couple of ways to do that, but it probably means they either took the generator offline or shutdown the computing core. Which means, north corner. Walking is both easier and harder. I'm less than 15% of my weight on Earth, so it feels almost like Luna gravity. It's familiar, but the suit makes my bouncing movements stiff and awkward, and I'm exerting myself fighting it.

There's a hatch on each side of the landing bay, through a corridor to the generator. The hatch is heavy, and I struggle at the handle. The power is down, and I grunt and strain to manually open the hatch with these gloves. And then I have to open an even more stubborn hatch at the other end of the hallway. Rusteater doesn't have to worry about pulling a muscle. It takes me nearly ten minutes just get to the generator room, and I'm winded and flushed by the time I slide through the half-open hatch.

The room is a large cylinder, divided into two levels, with a sealed control room in the center above the generator. The thick exterior wall is peppered with scorch marks. The heavy block of the generator lies in the center of the room on the bottom. The turbine isn't moving, but it doesn't look damaged. Probably just shut down. There's a ladder to the second level catwalk, but it looks like someone tore it free and tossed it aside.

A pile of scorched and twisted and melted polymer and metal lies where the communications array should be. From the scoring, if I had to guess, I'd say someone emptied a plasma rifle into it. My voidsuit's thermoplastic isn't likely to withstand a plasma round much better; it's thinner, and it doesn't have any ceramic or heat dissipation.

There's a spiral staircase leading up to the control room that I can barely climb in the clunky suit. It's teeth-achingly slow. The control room is burned as well, though the damage is much less indiscriminate. Someone poured short range fire into the comms antennae and the physical jacks for the computer. It's exactly what I would expect if someone were trying to cut off the base from the outside. The computer is intact, just shut down. If I can find an active port, I might be able to turn it on.

But the one thing I don't see is a body. Living or dead, synth or human, there's nobody here now. Well, if Rusteater wanted to hide a body, he could toss it outside. Could a synth survive out in that? Maybe for a little while, until the radiation began to degrade their software, or their hardware froze over. Or... the Mech Bay...

Well, if I don't check it, I'll spend the rest of my life wondering.

***

I've burned over a third of my oxygen getting to the machine bay. The hatch gives me enough trouble that I'm sweating, hair plastered to the sides of my face. I feel a thrumming, a strange percussion, through the wall of the bay. When the hatch finally wrenches free of the wall, it swings slowly open to show me a disturbing sight.

The bay is large, about two-thirds the size of a football field. Half of the bay consists of five rows of four alcoves, with sockets and umbilicals for the mining robots. Only one is actually in the bay, hoisted off the floor with its two drilling limbs detached and its spiderlike body hanging above the floor; the rest of the alcoves stand empty. On the other side is a series of armatures and tools from a serious of benches, and diagnostic equipment in a series of raised stations. On the far wall across from me is a maintenance shed built against the side of the structure.

There's so little atmosphere that no real sound gets through. But I can feel it through my feet. About forty meters away, at the far end, I can see Officer Rusteater's back. They have a thick, heavy length of dark metal beam in one hand, perhaps a half-ton of metal. They are holding onto the wall with the other hand. As I stare, their mechanical body drives the meter-long beam with shocking force into the alloyed door of the maintenance shed. The heavy, rhythmic thud is nearly silent, more sensation than sound. I can see the bent frame of the door. Each steady, unrelenting blow seems to drive it a little deeper, making the door shiver and bend.

I'd guess he's been at it for a few minutes at least. Fuck, Cartwright's gotta be locked in that shed. Rusteater must have gotten the rifle from the Captain to shoot the comms. But they don't seem to have it now. So, Cartwright flees, gets cornered...

I grab the plasma pistol, tearing the tape and pulling it off my hip. With no comms or active ports, I can't ping Cartwright. I can't ping Brent on the station. I can't even ping Sparrow to let her know. Well, come to think of it, I can't even ping Rusteater to order them to surrender, but they should-

Something must have given me away. Maybe they sensed my footsteps, or maybe they caught a glimpse of my reflection in the metal. Rusteater turns fluidly to face me. Half of their face is deformed and discolored from heat, a sickly, frozen, bubbled yellow mess. There is a first-sized hole melted into the warped and scorched polymers where their right eye should be. It's from a plasma rifle, probably point-blank range. Cartwright.

Rusteater's mouth opens, lips working, but of course I can't hear them through the thin atmosphere or my helmet. I can't link to them, even if I wanted to. Not that it matters; I don't even have time to yelp when Rusteater pulls their arm back and hurls the heavy beam like a javelin, directly at my face.