I hadn’t noticed the damage that the turrets had done to my exosuit earlier. During the fight it wasn’t important. One of the hooks on the shoulders was bent almost flat.

“Good thing the safety restraints on these things are in top shape,” Sam said as he met us at the decontamination chamber. I nodded back.

There wasn’t any specific place inside the MHU for me to stow my supplies and two weapons, but space tape made convenient pockets. I’d been introduced to space tape on the trip out. The stuff would stick where you put it and stay there, even through pretty extreme changes in temperature.

“You always carry around those awful meal bars. There’s better food to be found, you know.” Quenton had recovered from his earlier bout of vomiting. I wasn’t sure why, but there was something about him that made me dislike him.

That wasn’t a new sensation. I had disliked nearly everyone and only tolerated a few people for short periods back before the collapse. But I was trying to be a better person than that.

“You never know when you might need food, and not have it. What if we get trapped out there for a while?” Ileane spoke up before I got my words in order.

“I also might need it if there’s an infestation of rogue nanites out there. Using my nanites to suppress them uses my own body’s energy. I have to eat to keep up when that happens.”

“So the only reason you’re not fat is nanites? Sounds like a cheap diet plan,” he responded with a cocky grin. I frowned. That did not precisely follow.

Also, where had this attitude come from? We hadn’t interacted hardly at all on the trip here. Of course, I’d spent as much time as I could doing things that did not require social interaction. But surely my behavior had not caused offense in the few chance interactions we had.

Maybe it was because I couldn’t remember his name up to this point?

“Stow it, Quenton. Get your suit on and try not to throw up in it this time.” Vera already had her gear and was a suited up. Sam was going to get the combat suit and Hank looked to be ready as well.

I took the opportunity to get into the MHU while nobody was paying much attention. Once inside, the rear facing camera showed that Sam was already on his way back. That made Quenton the one we were waiting on. He put his suit on with minimal complaint after that.

The minimal complaint was the way the smell of disinfectant and vomit combined once he sealed his helmet. Why he had not cleaned it out thoroughly in the time he had remained would remain a mystery to me.

Other people were a puzzle that I did not care to contemplate. At least, not any more than was absolutely necessary.

The cleaner bots were still working on the mess in the cafeteria as we passed. The bodies and body parts were largely gone by now with only a handful remaining. The processor was out of the bulkhead again, busily converting the trash into useful things.

Plastics, raw nutrients for the algae trays, metal sheets for the refinery and factory came from the various bits of debris that the bots picked up. I could just imagine the pile of raw material down there by now, with all the continued destruction and decay that had gone on in the last seven years.

“Where did the bodies go? There had to be a hundred of them in here,” Vera asked.

“A hundred and fifty three, according to the Security program’s analysis. As far as where the bodies go, I am not quite certain.”

“They’re not going into the food, are they? Tell me we’re not going to have to eat reconstituted human bodies,” Quenton asked.

“They’re not,” Doctor Delveccio said. Sam had been about to say something, but she cut him off with a look.

“The bodies go through the crematorium. The ashen remains are then processed and prepared for delivery to any remaining relatives. That protocol is consistent across most space stations in the system for several reasons, not the least of which is health related. Leaving decomposing corpses around is not sanitary.”

That made me wonder. I’d come across dead bodies before on Walker. They’d been in places that zombies were though, or maintenance tunnels where the bots did not go.

“What is it, Z?” Ileane asked.

“There are places on Walker were dead bodies will be found. I have come across them several times. The maintenance bots do not appear where people already are. There is probably an instruction in the code to keep them from coming out during the active cycles when people are around.”

“That makes sense. Autonomous code like that is dangerous,” Sam said. “The machine code for things is pretty sophisticated- was pretty sophisticated, I mean. But it can’t quickly adapt on the fly to changing circumstances. Its why AI is still beyond our reach, even at this stage of technology. You’d need basically a self-aware code to reach that level of intelligence.”

“Come on, is it really?” Vera asked as we exited the elevator platform. I looked up towards the Earth as we went. The sun was rising over the curve of the planet, illuminating everything in pale blue light. The wildfire I’d seen before looked to be dimming. Storm clouds covered part of it in wisps of cotton.

“I bet the governments might have already made an AI on the sly and just wanted to keep anyone else from having one,” she continued.

“If they have, it was a really well kept secret,” Doctor Delveccio said with arched eyebrows.

“I rather doubt that they have,” Ileane said. “Self awareness requires perception of the outside world. You need a body to act in the world, senses to perceive it, all of that stuff for the awareness gestalt to arise at all.

“There were a lot of experiments during the gene revolution. Some people wanted to uplift animals to human intelligence. Others wanted to create totally artificial life forms, not based on any existing biological frame. They all failed.”

“I read about that,” Doctor Delveccio replied. “The uplift project was beyond vile in their experiments. They used human children as test subjects. Children go through periods where they learn things at a rapid pace, assimilating language and learning to speak and understand very early on. That’s what they were focused on, how that learning worked- and how to replicate it.”

The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

“It was sickening, what came to light once they uncovered the uplift project. I think that’s what finally stopped the war, really. They couldn’t defend the torture of children, let alone what they did to those poor animals.”

I tuned out the discussion as much as I could after that. My work with the crippled and maimed victims that the powers that be forgot made me think that nothing was really learned from the gene wars. They were still trying to do unconscionable things.

The young men and women that had come to my lab were not children. Not the ones I saw, at least. But my funding came not from trying to fix them, but trying to understand what beneficial effects came from their corrupted nanite colonies.

Those colonies could not be removed without damage. In some cases, even when they were actively harming the patient they were also the only reason that person was still alive.

I remembered one young man, early on in my work. He had no lungs. His heart did not beat. Below mid chest, there was nothing left. No arms. No legs. Yet he still lived, hooked up to a machine that fed him, breathed for him, and filtered his blood. The nanites in his body kept him alive long enough for him to be attached to the machine.

He would never survive without it.

He told me once, that if he had a way to commit suicide, he would take it In a heartbeat. A heartbeat that he no longer had. The incident that had maimed him changed his colony. They prevented him from getting any regenerative therapies or cybernetic implants. A nearly whole cybernetic body would be required in his case.

The unique way that his remaining colony had kept his brain from dying for a full eight minutes before they placed him into a stasis pod, and a further twenty once they pulled him out was something the company wanted me to study. So I did.

The young man died two days after leaving my office for the last time.

There was evil yet out there. It would not surprise me if what had become the zombie virus was the result of some of the meddling that I suspected went on outside my lab. The depths that humanity could sink to was something I’d had personal experience with.

The airlock entry into the factory was inside one of the docking bays for the ore sleds. There were horrors in there. In one of those bays.

“The area around the office we’re going through is a mess. Stay close to each other. Maybe link together so we don’t get separated.”

I wouldn’t be telling them about the broken open bay and the many small space suits inside.

The office was cramped with all seven of us inside. I opened the door and stepped out into the soupy cloud of debris and decaying flesh and blood. Walking with the mag boots sticking and releasing from the deck was a skill I hadn’t practiced, but it was easy enough to pick up.

It turned out that there were spare cargo tie downs in the office, so we used those to connect our suits together. Quenton complained about it until he got to see the mess we were walking into.

“What the fuck is all this crap? Is the whole sector like this?”

“There was a fight here. A lot of zombies were killed. There were also shipments of raw materials that were broken open. It’s mostly sand and plastics with some dried blood and rotten flesh mixed in.”

“Seriously Z, did you have to tell us that last part?” Doctore Delveccio asked. “Some of us have weak stomachs.”

I could hear the grin in her voice.

“Shut up! My stomach is just fine!”

So could everyone else. The laughter that followed was lighthearted, and even Quenton joined in after a moment. I was fortunate that Sam and Doctor Delveccio weren’t shell shocked after waking up. They’d slept through most of the last seven years.

That sort of resilience was rare in people. There were a lot of worse ways to deal with the death of nearly everyone you’d ever known than a bit of humor and laughter. Of course, we knew that there were other people out there now. Humanity wasn’t completely gone. That probably helped, too.

The debris cloud slowly began to thin out as I towed our line of people into the processing area proper. One of the trains that moved cargo and people across the massive space was parked in the distance. Maybe even the same one that had brought me here.

“The tools and materials you were looking for should be around here somewhere,” I said. Everyone untied themselves and began looking for the welding rig and supplies that we needed.

“I will keep watch while you look,” I said, pulsing the jets to get higher. The towering machinery blocks still kept me from seeing very far in most directions. And all the zombies I had seen were clustered around the main shaft area.

That didn’t mean that we were safe, though. It occurred to me at that moment that anything they touched down there that was powered could be infested with rogue nanites. Anything at all really, as it still wasn’t a guarantee that the power nodes would be present only in areas that had existing power.

“Remember to be careful of what you touch. Rogue nanites could be anywhere down there.”

“Node detector hasn’t picked up anything yet,” Vera replied.

“Nothing here either.” Sam had the other one. I really wanted everyone to carry one at all times. But we’d only been able to manufacture three so far. The last one was with Magnus on the Mauler.

It took longer than I expected for the group to find what Sam and Vera wanted. Mostly because the two kept adding things to the list. A decently sized cargo pod was seized to hold all the loot.

I questioned whether or not it would fit through the airlock and allow someone to operate the controls.

“Oh, it’ll fit. Not with me or you in the lock with it. But one of the others can go in with it.”

“I’ll go,” Vera responded immediately, not allowing the chance for anyone else to volunteer first. Doctor Delveccio was the smallest and probably the best suited for the task, in my opinion. I did not offer this advice, though.

The train had exited the factory and processing sector early on while the others were still searching. I could see it coming back in the distance.

“Have you found everything that you need? Do you need more time?” Much as I wanted to start securing what we could, every moment away from the relative safety of the Security level meant we were still in danger.

“Nah, we’re good Z. There’s more stuff down here than I thought. Heck, there’s even a mobile machine shop crammed into a cargo unit down here. Wish we could take that with us somehow, but it wouldn’t fit in the airlock.”

“Not even close,” Hank replied. “Standard cargo units run forty feet long. We could get it out through one of the ore sled bays. But there’s no way to get it back inside once we get it out.”

“Actually, there might be a way,” Doctor Delveccio said. “There’s a cargo access point on the Hospital level. Then you could transport it up and down with the food service elevator. It’s large enough, barely, to handle the length. Width and height would be no problem.”

“Huh. Hadn’t though of that,” Sam replied.

Something was moving behind the train in the distance. I used the suit’s magnification to focus on the objects.

Zombies. Lots of zombies.

They were chasing the train. Why were they chasing the train? I looked closer at the train itself. There was a figure clinging to the train. It was mostly hidden by the engine.

“Get ready to move. We have a horde incoming.”

The figure pulled itself up, climbing onto the top of the train. A glint of silvery metal flashed as it turned its head. A zombie. An implant zombie.

It looked like the same one that had attacked me before, in the Hospital that first time. Had it followed me here somehow? Had it been here in the beginning, silently observing as we gathers our supplies? Then gone an fetched a horde to deal with us?

That was distinctly un-zombie like behavior, if so.

“Z, how close are they?” Vera asked. She was securing the cargo pod to the combat suit. Sam had not brought the massive backpack of ammunition this time, quite possibly for this reason. I flew down to join my companions.

“Getting close. There’s an implant zombie with them- a fast one like the two that ambushed us earlier today. They don’t howl, and they tend to run away if they don’t succeed at first. The horde is following the train here. The implant zombie is on the train.”

“What do we do? We’re exposed here, no cover and no turret backup,” Vera asked.

The horde would tear through the thin metal of the office in a blink. I’d seen at least one of the bigger, stronger specimens leading the horde.

“There is one place we can go,” I said. “But you’re not going to like it. Sam, I’m giving you a waypoint,” I said, using my HUD to show him where I wanted us to go.

“I’ll bring up the rear. Punch the jets. Don’t dawdle.” I picked up Doctor Delveccio, who was having problems with her cargo straps. Ileane jumped onto my shoulders and Hank followed her.

Howls chased us into the debris cloud as we flew towards the one place that might give us a chance to survive.