“How’s the suit look?” Anele asked. She was standing inside the small office that had been loaned to Joe, and was watching him go over the suit with the hand microscope. He’d been at it for over an hour now and didn’t seem inclined to stop. His concentration disrupted, he blinked and grunted.
“All good so far, the patch job looks decent - a bit thick on material but that’s not important. I’m looking at the internals now since they were exposed to a lot of heat.”
“Not to mention the previous occupant.” she replied with a smirk. He levelled a steady look at the security chief and she had the grace to look shamefaced.
“He didn’t bother to check the suit like you did. Got what he deserved.” she muttered, probably not intending to be heard. Joe snorted and replied anyway.
“Nobody deserves what this guy got, negligence or not.”
Anele cleared her throat. “Yea, you’re right. This... place makes you kinda numb. Sorry.”
Joe smiled, “No worries. He was definitely a moron, you got that 100%.” he turned back to his examination and Anele went back to work, grabbing a cup of coffee on her way.
Joe’s arrival and interrogation had raised a lot of questions and Anele had been busy. The first thing she’d wanted to confirm was now verified - buried in a dead admin functionary’s mailbox was official notice of Joe’s transfer and promotion to Chief Engineer - or Chief Scapegoat as she’d realised he was. There had been no transfers or even business to the station in recent memory, outside of Joe’s shuttle, and corporate stated in it’s own deniable way, that it expected him to declare the station a disaster and evacuate it for final decommissioning. Any other steps taken would thus place responsibility squarely on him - a lone engineer attempting to run an entire station - if anything further went wrong.
In other words, he was screwed and judging by the copy given to him, only vaguely aware of it.
Anele sighed as she closed the message. She’d tell Joe later, there was enough shit on the man’s plate as it was.
Checking through her inbox, she saw no responses to her other queries about the mysterious Aaron. She could barely even place a motive for his presence - what would a spy want with a backwater, broken down station like this? All the tech it contained was declassified and long since obsolete. There weren’t any notably rare resources onboard, or valuables, or important people. Joe didn’t seem the sort to lie so there had clearly been someone to greet him, but who that person was remained a mystery. Local station records showed nothing, and the CCTV was conveniently out of order in the shuttle bay and customs area during the time Joe arrived on station. The face looking at her from the screen - rendered by an expert system and Joe’s description - bore no familiarity whatsoever. Which made even less sense as the station had less than a thousand people at it’s peak, and less than a hundred still living aboard, most of whom were at least passingly familiar to everyone else. Biting her lip, she checked a query placed to the local criminal database and crowed as it came up with a match on the picture. The name was different but Aaron was obviously an alias. However it didn’t seem likely to be him - there was a resemblance but the figure was clearly older than what Joe described. An uncle, perhaps? No option but to keep digging. She dropped a message through to his hand unit asking him to verify anyway, just in case.
Joe, for his part, was just finishing up on his suit examination and was more or less ready to get going.He did one more quick visual pass without the scope, then checked that the tool compartments were properly sealed and their heat resistant contents were secure. Bundling it up over his shoulder, he made his way back to the front desk and gave the dour Sergeant a smile.
“Sergeant Mane, I’m finished with the office. I tried to leave it as clean as I found it.”
“Of course, Mr. Nier. I would expect no less.” she said primly, “Will there be anything else that Security can assist you with?”
“Yes, actually.” Joe replied, rubbing his chin, “I’ll need someone to help me get into the suit.” she nodded her head and tapped on the keyboard.
“Private Fuentes will meet you by the chief engineer’s office, it’s the next sector over from the reactor. He will also assist with managing the lock cycle.”
“Thanks.” Joe nodded and turned to leave, pulling his hand unit out and setting a waypoint for the former Chief Engineer’s office, maybe once this was over he’d turn it into his own office. He felt that might be too optimistic an outlook, but a man needed hope.
Joe’s journey to the reactor and chief engineer’s office was uneventful and as eerily quiet as most of the station seemed to be. Held separate from the regular engineering section, which focused more on fabbing and repair duties, the chief engineer was generally preoccupied with the reactor as their direct responsibility, also acting as the 3rd in line for station command and the overall technical voice.
As Joe approached the mechanical heart of the station conditions seemed to improve: lighting panels were glowing steadily and brightly, the stains on the floor cut down dramatically in frequency, and he only spotted a single, 2 inch pipe hissing steam outside of an environmental control room. The last caused him to stop and take a few minutes to relax and investigate; fortunately it was a simple matter of applying a few twists from his pocket wrench and checking a nearby pressure dial to ensure it stayed nominal.
The air in the passageway had become thick and steamy from the leak and Joe was preoccupied with watching the gauge, so he jumped and whirled about in fright as the clown reintroduced itself with a “Honk!”
“Feck!” he swore, glaring at the white and red pile of misery and frills. “What d’you want? I’m busy!”
“Honk!” the clown honked again, demandingly. It bore an unusually assertive frown beneath the smiling makeup, and gestured for Joe to follow.
“No, tell me.” he demanded, crossing his arms.
“Honk! Honk!” the clown’s honking got more frantic, and Joe sighed. Dark theories abounded as to why the Spaceys clowns were unable to speak. Generally speaking, they were only capable of emitting a sound reminiscent of a sick goose, which was apparently a light-hearted toot according to whoever had decided it was to be so. Surprisingly expressive, however - Joe could clearly sense the urgency in the clown’s strangled vocalisations.
“Fine.” he sighed, picking up the hardsuit again, and the clown reached out to take his arm with an oversized gloved hand.
Together the two walked towards the Chief’s office - but several corridors beforehand, the clown pulled Joe
left at a cross-junction, pushing open an old fashioned door into a disused office. Joe was starting to sweat a bit now, an unease settling over his gut as the clown did more and more crazy clown things. And everyone knew crazy clowns were the worst thing you could get on a station...
He almost screamed as the clown shoved him behind the desk in the office, and he was surprised to find a dusty but working desktop terminal. Sitting down, he tried swiping his access card but couldn’t find a reader. Pressing a key turned the screen on and he saw it was a password login, and looked at the clown.
“I don’t suppose you know the password.”
“Honkhonk.” the clown said simply.
“Is that a yes or a no?” he asked, patiently.
“Honkhonk.” the clown repeated, then started making taping motions with it’s fingers. “Honk. Honk.”
Joe went with his gut, typed in “honkhonk” at the prompt and... it worked! The clown had clearly - and clumsily - created an account on this abandoned terminal, which was running on an atypical, offline OS. Most modern computing was cloud based, with the central station mainframe serving as the cloud and all the departments all developing and working in a centralised computing environment. However even though it was disconnected from the station network, with such a weak password it was pure luck nobody had found the device and brute forced the login with a hand unit and a script. His mind was soon pulled away from information security, however, as he noticed several video and image files prominently placed on the terminal’s graphical desktop. Tapping the screen to highlight one, he looked at the clown and got a sad nod in confirmation.
“What is it?” he asked, knowing the question futile. The clown just tapped it’s gloved finger on the screen, indicating that Joe should start the video, so he did.
It was security camera footage, although it was hard to tell of where. It was little more than a grainy, barely coloured video taken in very low light on a very cheap camera. There was no audio. Two figures walked up to each other in the hallway. One seemed to be the clown, it’s chin bobbing up and down as it honked and gestured frantically. The other was faced away from the camera and the footage was too rough to get detailed footage, but it seemed to have a recognisable blonde hairstyle. Aaron?
Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
The footage was briefly interrupted by what appeared to be a static surge, black and white spots covering the screen for a bare second before the stream resumed. Only now there was only a single figure, that of a terrified clown crouching in the corridor, and no sign of the other figure.
The next video appeared to be somewhere in the main reactor section, according to the record label at the beginning of the footage. Segment 1-Cc, somewhere close to the reactor itself. This was even worse in terms of quality, appearing to have been taken from a miniaturised hidden camera somewhere in a gap between machinery or walls. Exposed to waves of radiation and with limited room to work with, the resulting footage quality was merely the silhouette of a figure on shifting grey background.
The images were a little better, the mostly taken from hand unit built in cameras. One was very clearly a picture of Aaron in profile, his head circled and the word “Honk” written in red nearby. He was in the same customs officer uniform that Joe had met him in. In fact it was taken from behind and Joe recognised the hallway. This picture was very recent. And useful, since he could give this to Anele.
“Really?” Joe turned to face the clown, “I can’t translate “Honk.” he got a shrug.
The next few pictures were of the damaged pipe in the reactor, taken using thermal imaging. The image glared red where the pipe had very clearly been cut open, ionised hydrogen spewing out in a bright hot plume and settling into the surroundings. Sabotage.
Joe quickly saved all the media files to his own hand unit and disconnected it from the desk terminal. He turned to face the clown, his expression thoughtful.
“These are some very interesting files, why didn’t you show them to security?”
“Honk!” the clown got angry and stamped it’s left foot a few times, gesturing at the dusty office around them. Clowns didn’t get hand units so it would need to have gotten someone - besides Joe - to follow it and see the footage. Still, this would be extremely useful for investigating Aaron. Hopefully.
“Well, I’ll make sure to show Anele as soon as I’m done fixing the reactor. This’ll convince her I’m not crazy.” he said, “Thanks.” he grinned at the clown, something that seemed to shock the supposedly comical figure. It offered a tentative smile in return, a slight upturning of the lips that disappeared faster than it had appeared.
Joe logged out, stood up and left the office, waving goodbye to the clown. It sadly honked a farewell and wandered away down the passage, it’s rubber shoes making a marked thwapping sound with each step.
Joe made his way back to his original route and was soon standing in front of the doorway to the Chief Engineer’s office. He was early it seemed - Private Fuentes hadn’t arrived yet. Swiping his access card on the office door didn’t get him inside, so he was left to take a seat on a bench in the corridor and wait. Some time later, just as Joe was starting to nap, he heard light, tapping footsteps from up the corridor.
Blinking himself awake, Joe saw the half red, half orange uniform of a Spaceys guard making it’s way towards him. The uniform seemed to fit ill on the figure, who was short and had a build almost as lean as Joe. The round helmet and visored mask that accompanied it seem to hang loose on the guard’s head, but the tinting on the impact resistant plastic made it impossible to make out the face. The guard came to a dishevelled stop in front of Joe and saluted.
“Private Fuentes, Mr. Nier. Pleasure to meet you sir.” the voice was distorted but sounded high, with a fast cadence yet very sharp pronunciation.
Joe gave a casual salute in return and the small private dropped into a more casual pose.
“Hello, private. Just call me Joe. I’m keen to get to work so first things first, get me into the chief’s office so I can grab the override codes from the safe.”
The override codes for each station reactor were unique and typically only stored in a single place. The chief engineer was the only individual authorised to retrieve or use them. The overrides were a set of custom CPU instructions in the reactor control circuitry, hard coded and different for every installation. These codes allowed for separate, independent and rugged control channels to vital systems which, due to their pre-baked nature, didn’t distinguish between who was using them. Highly dangerous, and thus only kept in the secure safe in the chief engineers office. The second layer of security was the key to the interfaces where the codes could be input, generally a simple hexagonal shape, similar to a chunky Allen key, with a connector on one end and a card slot on the other for the codes. This would also, optimistically, be kept in the safe even though it was supposed to be kept in a separate and secured location. Banking on negligence seemed a safer bet than Joe liked, considering the previous chief.
Private Fuentes posture revealed some discomfort - Joe had forgot to mention this earlier and it was against protocol.
“I’m sorry sir I was only asked to help you suit up and get into the reactor.”
Red and orange fabric shifted as Fuentes’ feet shuffled from side to side.
“Listen, Fuentes, I’m the chief engineer. Firstly.” Joe snapped back, “And secondly, without the damn overrides I’ll much less likely be able to do my job. Use your damn security override and get me into the office.”
Fuentes leaned away from Joe’s tirade, then seemed to give in to the inevitable and pulled out a logbook in a dainty gloved hand. Pulling out an old fashioned pen, Fuentes noted down the date, time and reason for the security override - as per protocol - then swiped a red-striped access card across the door reader. A loud BRRRRRP echoed down the hallway and the door slid open, letting both into the paper strewn mess of a workspace.
Flicking the lights on, Joe frowned as the cellulose carnage made it’s full extent clear. Torn pages were spread across the floor, every drawer and shelf pulled out and emptied, the contents dumped haphazardly on the floor, chairs and desk. There were a lot of engineering processes which required paper forms and ink signatures, and the fabbing section normally had several presses dedicated to synthesising ink, as well as a form of paper made using vats of genetically modified, densely fibrous fungus. This looked like a week’s worth of paper production in a single room, half of it ripped to shreds in apparent frustration. Joe sighed with relief however as he saw the safe still standing strong and secure. He gestured towards it.
“I don’t suppose you can open that?” he asked. The private’s head shook from side to side. Damn.
Joe tried a few combinations on the safe’s numberpad combination lock. 0000. 1111. 1234.4321. 1357. It only accepted 4 digits so in theory he could guess it within a day or two, but after the 5th attempt it gave a warning beep and he didn’t want to permanently lock it. This could be a problem.
Sitting down at the desk and powering on the terminal, a regular cloud model, he took out his access card and - with a slightly doubtful glance - swiped it for login. It let him online, his role as chief engineer granting him access on networked machines. He plugged in his hand unit to get a network connection as well and got a message from Anele, about a criminal database match for someone resembling Aaron. The resemblance was uncanny but the man Joe had spoken to had been young, far younger than the image he was sent.
He replied to the message with the files he’d gotten from the dusty offline office machine, mentioning that he’d been guided there by the clown, who might lead them to somewhere with a clue. He left a comment on the mugshot as well “Check
Once he’d responded, he checked the local storage for any codes or PINs for the safe. No luck. He was able to access the full suite of remote tools from this machine and verified that not a single networked function remained to allow the reactor to be shut down or even directly monitored. The fact it was still running was an absolute miracle and every minute probably counted by this point.
Fortunately, the backup reactor could be accessed from here - but it looked to be in a sorry state, unsurprising considering the last inspection and service done on the unit was signed twenty years prior. It was delivering at best 30% of capacity and - looking at the metrics for thermal load, surges and loss of current - was losing 40% of that to service outages in the local infrastructure, broken wires and mechanical failures. The backup generators, designed to accept dirty metal fuels that could be synthesised from asteroid mining, also tended to belch clouds of hot carbon monoxide and chemical by-products into nearby space, occasionally causing sensor issues and leaving fine clouds of soot around the place to cover approaching ships.
Sighing, Joe decided the primary reactor took precedence. If he could fix the plasma leak and get remote access working, it would be much easier to schedule shut-downs and repair both of the station’s lifelines. Assuming main power was still in a condition to repair. He’d need to find some technically minded volunteers among the residents. But that was a consideration for later, when people could actually move in engineering. Logging off, he stood up and turned to face his escort with a hint of reluctance.
“Okay Fuentes.” he grumbled, “Let’s get this suiting up over with.”