I nearly fired as I saw the figure standing in the middle of the elevator platform. It was a combat suit, looking lethal and menacing with its weapons deployed and gauntlets upraised. It didn’t move. Neither did I. After several long seconds I noticed that its weapons were pointed above my head. And then I saw that the armor glass that should have protected the occupant’s face was missing. Inside was a skull that had been chewed on. There was also a hole in the facial bones that appeared to go right through the skull, just to the left side of the nose. I could see the papery thin bones within the sphenoid had been shattered as whatever it was had pierced right through.

It was not clear whether the wound had happened before or after death. There was also the matter of where the hell had the armor glass gone? He couldn’t have run out without that, could he? Maybe the armor was supposed to be down for maintenance? I remembered the shattered armor glass from the last security station at the lab. Two times was more than I was willing to accept as coincidence. Something was definitely wrong here.

I nearly changed my mind right then. But the facts remained, hordes clustered around the elevator and the suspicious quiet of the maintenance shaft. Perhaps I was being paranoid. But considering the amount of times I’d been surprised that day, perhaps again I wasn’t being paranoid enough. I considered the combat suit. Its boots remained locked to the deck, but there were manual releases. Every piece of equipment in space seemed to have options for when power failed or was unavailable, which struck me as quite sensible in the current environment. I’d never given it much thought before, but living through the last seven years had changed that.

The combat suit was massy, but once it got moving it stayed moving. Once it neared the charging cradles, several manipulator arms guided into place like a tomb welcoming in a fallen warrior. I don’t know where that thought came from, honestly, but there it was. The elevator seemed much larger without the giant suit of space armor in it. I could have entered while the suit was still there, but decided not to. Not that I was creeped out by the corpse in the suit, not exactly. But given how the day had been going, I wanted more room to dodge if I had to. Well. Dodge and run away. Hordes were scary. And I hadn’t seen much of the Headquarters Level. I kept my hand on the elevator panel as it rose, ready to hit the emergency button to shut the doors. My pulse pounded in my ears and my palms felt sweaty.

The doors rocketed open with a bang. It startled me and I jumped, trying to look in every direction at once. Nothing struck out to ambush me in the elevator car. There were no zombies close to me. I looked further in, still no zombies. No howls and screams. But then, the sneaky assassin zombie that tackled me hadn’t howled or screamed before. So that was no reassurance. I looked up, checking for quiet zombies, maybe hibernating zombies that somehow managed to sleep through the elevator door slamming open. The view above held me transfixed.

The sun was rising over Earth. A crescent of blue and green was illuminated in golden light. I’d lived in space for nearly a decade and I hadn’t taken in this view. Not even once. The telescopes I used to look down at Earth never caught this. The planet seemed peaceful. I don’t know what brought on that thought either, considering the wandering hordes of cannibal monsters.

There was a sort of mystique about Earth among those humans that lived and worked in space. Earth was home. Despite all the factions and in-fighting, the messes humans made and the diseases, bad smells, and urbanization, most people when they thought of Earth brought up a sort of parkland vision. Grassy hills and trees, sunny skies, sandy beaches and open spaces. It was the open spaces that astonished the most, for those born in space.

I’d been born and raised on Earth. The mystique was less for me, having seen things up close. But I cannot deny the effect of seeing it for the first time had on me. Earth was a precious jewel in the vast, uncaring universe. That thought stopped me. Uncaring? I should hope so. I’d seen what terrors could come from those operating under the delusion they were doing it for your own good. If there were aliens out there, may they remain ignorant or ambivalent. A caring alien would have its own agenda.

The errant thought about aliens brought me back to the present. Nothing had attacked, sneakily or otherwise, while I was gawking at the planet through the armor glass. The station consoles were still, their displays unchanging. No crewmen remained behind as corpses. Nor as zombies, at least not here. I stepped out of the elevator car, still trying to keep an eye on everything. I held the pistol in both hands, keeping my left thumb away from the bit on top that moved.

The high ceiling and open space was unusual. Other than the habitat atrium and the docks, there wasn’t another place on Walker to compare it to. So much open space was a luxury. But Headquarters was the place for luxury. They profited from every transaction on station. They also paid for all the services on station, but it was easy enough to forget that most of the time. Like Security, I had never really thought of the administration staff as a bunch of people doing their jobs.

The whole place was clean, I realized. Zombies had not been in here. The cleaning bots wouldn’t go where the zombies were, and the way they wandered and made their nests there was no chance of them being in a place this undisturbed. I relaxed my guard fractionally.

The elevators would be somewhere to my left according to the evacuation map on the bulkheads. There were offices for the higher ups to the right through an open hatch. I decided to check the elevators first. That was where I expected the zombies to be, and I wanted to make sure they stayed put. The assurance of cleanliness was nice and all, but I had to know.

Banks of consoles gave way to more offices with glass walls facing the corridor. They were huge, bigger even than the Chief’s office. Conference rooms and even a lunch area reminiscent of a high-end restaurant were part of the Headquarters Level. There was a monitoring station much like the one I found in the Chief’s office, too. More video panels and several stations were set up here so that Walker’s administration staff could see every public space on the station. Nearly all of those public spaces were full of zombies, though.

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Headquarters had a front desk area much like Security, and probably for the same reasons. A filter to separate the honestly ignorant and the legitimate business from the trouble makers. The difference here was the barricade set up beyond the desks. It was a formidable looking wall of metal and armor glass with gun turrets set up at the corners. The armor glass looked to be covered in paint for the most part.

Not paint. That was blood. Old, crusty, gritty blood. Through the few clear spots I could see carnage beyond the barricade.

Bones. Thousand upon thousands of bones and bone fragments. Scraps of clothing. Bullet craters. Whatever they were firing here wasn’t completely “Station Safe,” there were holes in the bulkheads. Parts of the bulkheads and the deck looked to have melted and run like butter. And amidst the fragments of former humanity, combat suits. Dozens of them.

Each and every one had ragged holes where their armor glass view ports should have been.

What had it been like? One moment dealing final death to what used to be station residents and crew now turned into mindless cannibals. The next they’re reaching into your suit to rip your face off and eat it. Did they run out of power? That seemed unlikely. Then there was the suit I’d found in the elevator. That had to have happened before all of this. Someone had to have put it there. Then come back here to stand and die.

And how the hell did the zombies shatter armor glass? That was as likely as a human being punching a hole in a tank with just the strength of their fists. Impossible. And yet something had evidently happened. Something that caused a material almost as strong as nanosteel to break like fragile sugar glass.

The zombies I had fought with had been strong, but not even strong to tear the emergency suit I wore. Nowhere near powerful enough to crack armor glass with a fist. Hell, I’d strangled one to death while it tried to chew through my helmet. Were these zombies just that weak?

I pondered the thought for a moment. Walker was a closed system by necessity and design. There was a large but finite amount of calories on station. The nutrient dispensers were fed by vast tanks of proteins and other nutrients suited for human digestion. I’d seen zombies hunt on Earth from my scopes, and it wasn’t just humans. Animals, too. Anything they could catch, they ate.

Did this mean that the zombies on Earth were superhumanly strong? And that the zombies on Walker had been starved down to a level puny enough that a moderately sedentary researcher could defeat one hand-to-hand? I hadn’t noticed evidence of such strength in my observations but now I doubted. Zombies would not be picking up air cars and tossing them. They hunted people and other animals, and once they caught them it was pretty much game over for whoever was so unlucky to draw their attention.

No, I doubted super strength was the answer. Sabotage? Somehow the armor glass on the station had been weakened? I was less comforted by the view in the main Headquarters section. Possible. But that didn’t seem right, either. That would imply more complexity than I was comfortable with, some force or faction setting the virus/nanite package loose for... what end? Absolute genocide? And they simultaneously sabotaged every Security combat suit at once, including the booth at the entrance to the Laboratory section?

And here, the armor glass of the barricade was intact. Chances were extremely good that there hadn’t been some idiot like me with his face up against the barricade view ports. Zombies were attracted to living prey. The Security officers would have been better off behind the barricades, or firing their weapons remotely if such a thing was possible. Out there they were a ringing dinner bell.

I left the barricade. The zombies had swarmed here while there were humans to be had. Now there weren’t any. Other than me. So I’d best be away, before some curious wanderer spotted me and summoned another horde to break through the barricade and eat my face, too. The horde hadn’t been after the admin staff that they couldn’t see beyond the barrier. They wanted the humans in the combat suits.

If Security had hidden like I did, they’d be alive. But then again, what if the carnage they’d laid down here had kept me safe in the Laboratory section? Zombies did not chase after shadows, but the shattered booth meant that they could have gotten through to me if they’d known I was there. I suspected that the steel of the hatches and blast doors was not so very much stronger than armor glass that it would prove a barrier.

I needed to get back to trying to escape the station. The Headquarters section had to have some information on how I could do that. They probably had escape pods up here as well. I hadn’t forgotten my desire for samples to study, but I had an idea on how to manage that. The Chief’s office had held options that other offices hadn’t. Perhaps the station CEO’s office would prove similarly helpful. I couldn’t help but look up at the view of Earth on the way back through in apprehension. It wouldn’t do to get into combat in this room. Probably an excess of caution, but still. I could deal with my caution being excessive.

Not just the CEO’s office, but the entire upper management was hidden behind a security lock. I placed my glove on the scanner to inject my nanites into the locking mechanism... and received an unexpected surprise.

Not necessarily unpleasant. Upper management had known about me! The secure lock had cutouts between the lock sensor and the unlock command functions. It was actually kind of interesting. They thought that by introducing a physical gap that needed to be bridged by a physical item, like a keycard, they could prevent nanite intrusion. It wouldn’t, of course. But they’d tried. It was an old school solution to someone with my abilities.

If they’d asked, of course I could have told them how to defend a device properly. A simple detection protocol could stop most low level incursions. You’d have to keep it powered though, so a savvy operator would enter through the power circuit, which couldn’t be blocked with a detection circuit. There were any number of escalating measures that could make it harder for me to get in, but the best way was also the simplest. A physical lock was exponentially more difficult to bypass. Not totally impossible, but it would take a massive amount of energy to affect the pins and springs.

Or they could have put actual human guards with eyes on the access point. That would do it as well.

I smiled to myself at the thought of someone from the Laboratory section, probably one of the team leads. Probably pulled him away from his projects to explain to some administrator that there was a researcher on station that could bypass locks among other things with just his nanites. They’d have to get the admin guy to believe him first. Then the admin guy would have to do something about it. The team lead, irritated at being away from his laboratory, would just tell him to build a better lock. That was the sort of guy most of us were. If it wasn’t related to our work, it was annoying.

I’d probably have done the same. For something not related to my research of course. If asked, I’d have built something it would have taken me a month to get through, and suggested a human guard to boot.

The lock clicked open, and I suddenly remembered the snacks that I’d grabbed from the Chief’s office. I sat down and consumed them rapidly, inhaling everything but the wrappers. They tasted somewhat sweet and salty, not like meal bars at all. Then I put my helmet back on and went inside.