I awoke with a start, grabbing for the pistol I had placed beside the mattress. No zombies were creeping up on me to chew on my face. It had been a dream that they were. But such things could still happen in the real world. All those combat suited Security men lived and died in that waking nightmare. I felt my bruises and the muscles I’d abused yesterday complaining. My body was was hurting, but I was still alive.

Breakfast was meal bars and nutrient paste. My stomach needed the fuel. I yawned and stretched, feeling stiff. I wasn’t used to shooting a pistol, and my whole arm was reminding me of that fact. My bruises had faded a tiny bit. The nanites in my body helped to keep me healthy and fit but there were limits. It would take a while longer for those bruises to fully heal but I could get around adequately well for now.

There were two things I had to do first today. One I wanted to do, the other I dreaded. Searching through the emergency options menu was not something that excited me in the least. But it had to be done in order to find a way to escape. The other was investigating the airlock hidden in the CEO’s office. That sounded much more interesting to me. Maybe the upper management even left something behind that I could use to get somewhere safe. Or at least somewhere that wasn’t actively falling apart.

Before that, though, I decided to check the video feeds from the Chief’s office. The emergency suit was even smellier in the morning than I remembered. There were deodorant sprays. Probably somewhere in the pile of looted junk in this room. I dug around until I found one and tried it out. It seemed to help some. Not as much as one might prefer, though. Putting it on was necessary. Medieval knights probably didn’t like the sweaty stench of their gambesons either. I was no knight. But I did have armor.

Walking out through the unfamiliar corridors was surreal. The bulkheads of my lab had been my world for so long and now I’d slept in another place, awoken and was going about my day like it was years ago, save that it was in Security country and not the Level 5 labs. I even had a morning itinerary.

The deck and bulkheads were squeaky clean. All evidence of blood and gore, gone. The busy little bots had done wonders in turning the aftermath of combat and years worth of neglect into pristine surfaces. I wondered idly if this was something unique and transitory in the new world of today. With that unhappy thought, I entered the Chief’s office and began to look over the feeds from across the station.

There was more activity today than I’d seen just the day before. I wondered if that was due to the announcement or whether the zombies had some sort of diurnal cycle. Was it true long term hibernation? Or just a form of sleep? Did zombies even need sleep? The broadcast was set to trip once every eight hours, so it probably had played not too long ago. Like other predators, they paid attention to sounds that were out of the ordinary as well as sight.

Being in microgravity, they bounced and drifted clumsily. The way the three zombies in Security had worked together to ambush me said that there was more to them than first appeared. It wouldn’t do to underestimate them. They didn’t use tools but that did not mean that they were unable to use basic pack tactics.

In my observations of Earth I’d seen them swarm many times. There was no need for distraction and ambush when you could overwhelm or outlast a foe. Could zombies learn? Evolve somehow, change their essential nature even slightly? It was clear that there was some sort of communication between individual infected. Other than the howls. They worked together to advance. At least that is how it appeared.

In one monitor I saw a zombie pounding on a bulkhead. It held itself in place by gripping a protruding sign, the sort that advertised noodles and pork in the cafeteria. I knew that spot. It was on the Habitat Level and there was a hidden speaker somewhere around there. There was an option to enable audio on the desk so I clicked the one corresponding to that scene.

“Yakitori Dok Dok, Mm Mm Good! Yummy food I love to eat, tasty bits my favorite treat~!”

The ad jingle was familiar. They sold barbecue skewers and cheap rice pots. It was almost as cheap as meal bars. I’d had the rice there before. It was sticky, messier than meal bars. But it was cheap. The announcement loop must have triggered something that caused the ad to play. How much money had Yakitori Dok Dok paid to the station to get their ads to play after the official announcements over seven years later? That little rice hut must have been far more profitable than I’d realized. Or perhaps it had been part of a chain of stores.

There was no way to know. The important thing was that it was happening now. I checked the other feeds and sure enough, there were other zombies active in other places. Yakitori Dok Dok was apparently not the only one to buy ad time clustered around the official broadcasts.

It would depend on where I needed to go. And if and how long the ads continued. I set the feeds to record the active areas so I could analyze how long the zombies remained active once the broadcasts ceased. There might be an effect that regular broadcasts had that isolated and unique ones did not. This could help determine if zombies could remember things, and if so, how long information was retained. This would be a severely limited test but worth doing if the time allowed.

Speaking of such things, it was time to go dig through the emergency options menu. It was long and full of lawyer-speak and bureaucratese. But it was also the place that most likely would help me get off the station. I had even less enthusiasm for the task than I’d had for physical education when I was a student. That thought cheered me in some bizarre fashion. I’d been more active lately than any time in my life since I’d been a child. Probably in better shape, too, bruises not withstanding. Zombies made for poor gym teachers. But they made up for a complete lack of teaching talent with boundless enthusiasm to eat my flesh. It made for quite effective motivation.

The view of Earth was just as stunning the third time I saw it as I exited the lift. The planet was half in shadow. No lights twinkled in the blackness. Clouds covered much of the visible portion. It looked like a storm was brewing in the Atlantic. Zombies did not swim as far as I was aware. There were no ships plying the oceans anymore for the storm to threaten either. I watched the clouds for a moment. I could definitely see how humans in space had romanticized our home planet. It was stunningly beautiful when viewed from such a distance above.

It was less beautiful when viewed closer, watching the endless hordes sweeping over the works of Mankind in waves. I supposed someone with an aesthetic for post-apocalyptic art might appreciate the plant life creeping over buildings and vehicles. And over the bones of the dead, no doubt.

The upper management section was transformed. There were still little maintenance bots skittering about, claiming bits of trash. There was a processing bot as well, much larger than the cleaner units. That broke down the trash into feedstock for the plastics extruders, nutrient vats, and atmospheric slurry. It was nearly the size of a bus. I wondered how it had gotten in. The size of the room made it possible. Then I saw the opening in the bulkhead. It had been built in to the wall. I’d been learning far more about Walker than I’d ever thought lately.

Dawdling was getting me nowhere. The console was waiting for me, so I reluctantly hopped up to dig into it. But first I checked the maintenance logs.

As expected. No activity on the supply station logs. I sighed. There wasn’t time for self pity.

The emergency options menu was just as bad as I’d feared. There were long updates on procedure and drills. Legal notes on compliance. And updates on compliance. Safety drills. It went on and on. And on some more. I found out that the food vendors in the cafeterias were given tax breaks for maintaining emergency food stock reserves and allowing their property to be used as emergency gathering points. That maintenance had the special job of checking compartments for compliance with procedure and regulation. That the media could be drafted for the duration of emergency status to report directly to Walker’s command staff and failure to comply was punishable with jail time.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

There were hundreds of items like that. The laboratory section had an absolutely massive file of the same. There was even a provision to draft us all to work for the military in certain situations. I hadn’t recalled that part at all in my employment documents, but there it was.

Deep in the nested tree of bureaucratic and legal bloviation were a few things that looked interesting. The escape pods had a long list of requirements and regulations, maintenance procedures and the like. I didn’t find the “life boats” that the evacuation order had mentioned, but there was still a lot left to investigate. After nearly an hour on the escape pod section I found a link to operational status. And cursed for the second time in two days.

They were all offline for maintenance. Every. Single. One. Several dozen were downchecked for critical mechanical faults. At first I thought this was due to the time they’d sat without maintenance, but the logs told another story. Those pods had been suffering critical failures for years before the outbreak even occurred!

There were several thousand pods though, at least. Each pod could hold multiple people, but there were tens of thousands of permanent station residents, and it could hold over a hundred thousand at peak capacity. I tried to filter for severity of fault but quickly ran into a problem.

They all had at least two common major faults. Propulsion was completely empty. And software was missing. Not “some” software. All of it. There were no escape pods left that I could use at all. Somehow, through bureaucratic malfeasance, laziness, corruption or sabotage there was not a single escape pod capable of launching and keeping its occupants alive.

I would have to find another way.

It was probably petty of me to get frustrated at the roadblocks that I kept finding. I got up and left the console where it was. Time to check out the airlock in the hidden room.

The airlock was pockmarked with small dents from bullets or ricochets but that didn’t impair its functionality in the slightest. The hatch swung open to a larger compartment than I’d expected. Well, the hatch was oversized so why shouldn’t the room be, I suppose. There were suit lockers lining one wall, spare parts and equipment on the other. Patch kits on the ceiling and recessed lockers in the deck with even more supplies.

Even in the lofty heights of upper management the workings of the airlock were simple, pragmatic, and useful in an emergency. I check one of the space suits out and found that the air supply was out of date. Obviously. There was an easy fix for that. I cycled the air supply and refilled it from the station nozzle in the locker. Redundancy was everywhere here, thankfully. Unlike the escape pods, this equipment was as up to date as possible.

I took off my smelly emergency suit and climbed into the space suit. It was much heavier. Not just the maneuvering pack- I hadn’t put that on yet. The whole thing was covered in hard plates and stiff fabric. Moving around wasn’t as easy. It took a few moments for me to get used to it, but I grabbed the maneuvering pack and settled it onto my back with difficulty. I’d never done this before but had always wanted to. Every little kid on Earth dreamed of going to space.

Living on Walker wasn’t much different than living on Earth most of the time. Current apocalypse excluded. Well, probably excluded. There were zombies in both places, but Earth had gravity. That was bound to change things a bit. I spun the wheel to shut the interior hatch and flipped the lever to evacuate the atmosphere from the lock. The air hissed away, vapor forming around the vents as it pumped down. Then I spun the exterior hatch open.

I almost stepped out right then. The view was even more arresting with only the armor glass of the suit helmet between me and hard vacuum. Earth was huge. The moon was rising in the distance and the stars shone like diamonds in the void. They didn’t twinkle like they did through the atmosphere of the surface, but were no less beautiful for that. Hard edged shadows sliced my view of the station into bright light and absolute darkness.

Then I remembered that I was being an idiot. I had a safety line but it wasn’t connected to anything but me at the moment. Fixing that was the work of a moment, but I felt shame for forgetting such basic safety. I wasn’t practiced in spacewalking. Microgravity parkour, sure. But outer space was a different beast altogether. Stunningly beautiful but also dangerous.

The suit lights were easy enough to find and turn on. Everything on the suit was built for ease of use and practicality. Beyond the airlock was a docking arm, but nothing was docked to it. The station side hookups drifted loosely. That was probably a violation of some rule or other that I’d read in the emergency procedures and I resisted the impulse to put the hookups back in place. Now wasn’t the time.

I could feel the impulse to explore, to look over every nook and cranny of the exterior and take in the views from all sides. There wasn’t time for that, either. I carefully pulsed the jets to turn and take a look at the bright side of the station. I was looking for anything that would help me get away from Walker. Maybe there was a cargo lighter, a dropship, a shuttle, or something? I had vague memories of ship classes and structure from when I was a child and was briefly entranced by such things.

There were no ships to be seen along the exterior. The docking arm I was near extended out from the main body of the station and that allowed me to see a good bit of the exterior. The docks and warehouse section was beyond the curve that was visible to me. But it looked like there was visible damage in some places, though.

The outer hull of Walker was built in sections that covered and overlapped each other. Space trash and micrometiorites were known dangers and there were defenses in place for such things. Shield technology interested me, so I knew that it was based on the same principles that developed stasis pods. The station shield must have failed at some point for the damage to occur, but there was hull armor and point defense weaponry for anything large or fast enough to be a serious danger. The jagged scar I was looking at proved that those defenses worked.

Or maybe...

Wait.

That wasn’t damage. Those were old school solar panels. Huh. Looked like they were retracted and stowed. Solar couldn’t solve the power issues on a station as big as Walker. But maybe they could hardly hurt. I carefully made my way back to the airlock. Slowly. Because speed kills in vacuum. That was another thing my memory dredged up from who knows how long ago. I cycled the airlock and stepped inside. Thought about leaving the emergency suit behind but brought it along anyway. I did leave the maneuvering pack behind. It was just too heavy to carry around. And there might be zombies.

I still had the pistol and the belt I’d looted from the Security zombie in the beginning in case of surprise zombies. Back to the console in the second office and the detestably unhelpful emergency options menu. I abused the heck out of the context sensitive search function. It was a shame my nanites couldn’t sort through the data for me, but that wasn’t how they worked.

After two more hours of searching I gave up and looked up the maintenance records section and found the solar panels in five minutes flat. And felt stupid immediately after, because finding the escape pods was even faster through the maintenance status screen. I found that I could extend the solar panels remotely. So I did. There were more of them than I thought, and maintenance called them “supplemental power panels version nine.” Around thirty percent of them didn’t work. Either they failed to deploy, or they showed zero power generation, or they had connection faults. Maybe the zero power ones were in shadow? The others I had no idea on. The last machine I’d fixed was over a decade ago and that had been my food dispenser at the university. And only then because I hadn’t eaten in two days.

I was just about to leave the maintenance status screen when something jumped out at me. Stasis pods. There were warnings showing that stasis pods in the hospital were on the verge of critical failure. And one in the habitat section. That gave me pause for a second. I investigated it and found that it was a small stasis pod. A pet? An infant? Looked like it was a pet model. Probably. I could see a panicked parent putting their infant in a pet pod in desperation. That one had a few days before it failed according to the diagnostic. The ones in the hospital were in worse shape. Some of them had mere hours before they stopped working.

I didn’t know if that would kill them. They might have been early victims that might be infected. Maybe they managed to subdue a zombie and sedate it somehow, stuck it in a stasis pod. I couldn’t see information on the occupants from here, just the status of the pods. I could go and search the hospital records. But that would take time.

One thing I did know, though. If they were living humans in them I had to save them. I had to be the good guy. There was no one else left to do it for me.

The Hospital wing was on Level 2. Several support functions had offices and warehouses on level 2, including the food production facilities. It was probably crawling with zombies. There wasn’t much time to prepare, but I would at least plan a route in. I downloaded a copy of the maintenance and repair sheets for the stasis pods. I was no engineer. But those people didn’t have anyone else. I had to try.