After running the numbers on the exact nutrient content of the ration packets, it Turned out that each one would, barring any intense cardio, suffice for a complete meal. Rather fortuitous really, that I only need to force myself to swallow ONE of the intensely fishy, peuce flavored…things, three times a day to keep myself alive.

With the number of them that tumbled out of that cabinet, I had another month of life ahead of me before I had to start really worrying again.

Yay, I had thought to myself, maybe I can find some ketchup or injector solvent To help cover the taste.

I wasn’t laughing 3 days later when I discovered, to my chagrin, that it could get worse.

I had used some of the packing material from my “bunk” to fashion a makeshift pouch to carry a couple days worth of the packets in while I continued to explore the facility. I hadn’t wanted to limit myself to only going as far as I could in one day if something looked promising.

So it was that I was belly crawling through a small service tube barely big enough for me to fit through, but I hoped would get me past a sealed blast door, when I took a break for lunch. I had done my usual and tried to block out the odiferous smell from the foodstuff, and just bolt it back now that my stomach was adjusting to the solid food.

There are people in this universe, I have heard, that actually enjoy the flavor of anchovies. Beyond the tiny bit of paste in Caesar salad that is. They are, I swear, quite insane, and I will swear my reputation as an engineer on it.

But if any single person ever tells you they enjoy the flavor of an over ripe durian? Back away slowly, and look for law enforcement, because the person is dangerously psychotic.

This new flavor tasted of over ripe durian, heavily seasoned with cilantro, and left the distinct aftertaste of puss yellow on the back of my tongue.

Again with tasting colours! What is in these things!?

Besides the difference in flavor, there was a difference in chemical contents. Thankfully the shock of rotten durian and soap flavor had made me spit out what I’d had in my mouth, so if there’d been any toxins, I wouldn’t have ingested any. I started keeping notes of the markings on the packets from that point on, and tested them before eating.

I did set all the rotten soap ones aside as “eat as last resort” though. I really hoped I never had to resort to those, give me anchovies any day.

Thankfully, that day was punctuated by some good news to go with the durian flavor.

In belly crawling for 5 hours through those maintenance tubes, I managed to find a stable power junction. With a bit of fine tuning of my suits emergency induction charger, I was able to bring its power cells back up to 100%. That would allow me to tap into a few more of its systems without worrying about Reserves for critical systems.

I could use the jump jets again if I needed to, the lights. Hell, I could spend some time and see if I could repair the oxygen scrubbers scrubber. That would lower the risk a bit in going out after the optimaster. It had indicated some familiarity with the linguistic type. That’d help if I could get any of their computers up and running.

Which was something else about this find that lifted my spirits: stable power in this conduit meant a stable power source! Not aĺ the power in this place was on the fritz, some of it might just be the conduits and such. If I kept following this stable conduit until I could find another exit hatch I could open, I would hopefully be in a more functional part of the station.

Let’s just hope that didn’t also mean functional security systems…

You’d think it wouldn’t take very long to find one of those hatches, they couldn’t be that far apart could they? Remember how I said I was belly crawling? I wasn’t joking. I wasn’t on hands and knees, I was literally dragging my belly along the grating like I was in a warzone trying not to get seen by enemy sentries. Even with the reduced gravity of this planetoid, it was not easy going. There was barely enough room for me to move, and I was taking a slow pace so I didn’t get my heartrate up too high.

The biggest issue with my situation right then was that if I didn’t find a way out of the maintenance tube eventually, it was going to be a very long and awkward crawl back the way I came. I hadn’t found anywhere with enough room to even turn around, and belly crawling backwards was not my idea of fun, especially since I’d been at this for hours.

Since I was moving so slow through these access tubes, I was making sure to take recordings of all the equipment as I moved passed. Especially now that my suit’s power pack was fully charged, I could task the virtual intelligence in it to analyze the markings, as well as the systems layouts, to see if it could make any sense of what any of it was. Some of it I could recognize easily enough, like power conduits and optical data lines, but the rest of the systems used setups that were a mystery to me. And of course, without the Optimaster’s abilities, or being in range of a Commonwealth communications hub, all of the markings might as well have been gibberish.

I was really hoping the V.I. had enough processing power to work out a translation matrix. It wasn’t something it was designed for, or something I’d thought to modify it for (note to self: put that on the list), but I’d been lucky enough to survive this long, maybe I’d get even luckier.

Hauling myself through that tube had become such a mindless chore at that point, that I’d found myself sort of drifting into autopilot mode. I’d drag myself a few dozen centimeters along, stop briefly to scan the equipment around me, check for hatch releases, then drag myself a bit farther along. If it hadn’t been for the chronometer readout on my suit’s HUD, I wouldn’t have had any clue how long I’d been at it when I finally blinked dumbly, finding myself staring at a small green-lit panel that was almost an echo to the one beside the interior airlock door.

And beside it was the echo to the maintenance hatch I’d used to get into this Void-be-damned sausage press.

Staring at the hatch release panel, I once again found myself considering the possible dangers that could be on the other side, and reminded myself that if I got out of this, I would absolutely make sure to modify my standard loadout with some kind of weapon. “And a rear-facing threat detection system” I told myself, remembering how Lance had used the stun wand on him from behind. “I swear I’m gonna find that fucker and shove that stun wand up his waste port on full power!”

There wasn’t much help for it; If there was something hostile on the other side of that hatch, I would have to deal with it at some point or another. Time to get the lead out Thomas.

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I swear to the Void, I am not a clumsy person – I’m pretty damned coordinated when it comes right down to it – but you wouldn’t know it if you watched trideo footage of me since landing on this bloody rock. I’ve been knocked unconscious several times, bashed my head off conduits, and could have poisoned myself by not paying attention to the labels on the food packets. All in less than two weeks.

Well now I can add several bruises and a scrape along my forehead.

Climbing out of that maintenance tube was awkward as hell, especially since I was climbing out head first, 50cm off the floor, into a darkened room. A darkened room that turned out to be some sort of workshop area with various consoles and tool carts scattered about. Whoever laid claim to this room hadn’t bothered cleaning up before they left (that or were just plain messy). So in worming my way out of the tube, I slid on something, did a half-assed summersault and upended one of those toolcards, right on top of myself.

You’d think I would have sent it over away from me, but nope. Don’t ask me how I did it, I couldn’t see because of how dark the room was, I just knew there was a loud cascade of noise, and several heavy somethings landed on me. Not for the first time, I was very thankful that my EVA suit was built quite durably. All the abuse it had taken on this adventure would have ripped open a cheaper model.

Once I was able to sit up and get my suit lights scanning around the room, I all but forgot the bumps and scrapes. This workshop/lab was packed with gear that I could use. And if those consoles powered up and I could rig an interface with the suit’s V.I., I might be able to run a scan/decode program to get a rudimentary translation matrix for the language all over this place.

Luckily, I didn’t have to look far for a light switch. I’d been half afraid the lights would be voice controlled like they are on most Commonwealth ships, but the dimly lit panel beside the door turned out to both open it, and control the lights.

Once the lights were on, I did a quick once around the room to see what I was working with; poking at screens and panels, examining tools, checking out what I thought might be closets.

One of said closets actually turned out to be an honest to Void shower!

Sure, the showerhead was placed for someone approximately 1.25 meters tall, but it was an actual water based shower. I’d even managed to figure out the controls to get it running, and get the water to an acceptable temperature in almost no time at all. There were some short stools around the room, I could take one in there with me and have a sit down shower for the first time in over two weeks.

Many groundsiders, or anyone who’s never done any work requiring them to spend extended periods of time in an EVA suit, often get rather disgusted if you tell them just how long you’ve spent in one without taking it off. The thing is, suits like mine, the Soladyne Workheart Mark IV, are designed specifically for people that might find themselves in situations like mine, days or even weeks of time without a moment to take it off. It was built to absorb sweat, process bodily waste, recycle fluids into an electrolyte balanced drink, and mostly, deal with any hygiene issues that might arise.

You could, in theory, spend years in one of these suits with no medical issues whatsoever.

But no matter how long you worked the job, it never felt natural. Once the gig was done, you wanted to strip out of it, get into a shower, sonic or hydro, and just scrub yourself clean for as long as the computers would let you. And that was just what I was about to do here.

I wasn’t going to waste the time I was in the shower though.

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Once I’d carefully peeled myself out of the EVA suit, I took it over to one of the consoles I had discovered not only powered up easily, but had some sort of I/O port on the front of it. I took some time to study it, took some measurements and readings from the connections, then set about trying to fabricate some sort of interface. It was once again time to take some risks, so I was gonna try plugging my suit’s V.I. into the console, and see if it could work on developing a translation matrix.

Even if it took longer than my shower, I could spend the extra time looking at the O2 scrubbers. If the interface failed to yield a translator, I could always risk a trip outside to get the Optimaster.

Four hours later, I was finally in the shower, happily singing an old sea shanty as I scrubbed at my skin with my hands. I didn’t have any soap or a washcloth, but it was still a great pleasure to feel the hot water on my aching muscles. I just hoped whatever computer ran this place didn’t cut me off before all the aches eased off.

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Deeper inside the planetoid, sensing activity within the corridors or the ancient facility, a lone consciousness shook off the stupor of thousands of years in isolation.

There had been no activity in this place since the final orders had some in to initiate the sleep protocol. There should be no activity, its charges should still be safe in stasis, locked within the thickly shielded vaults of this non-descript planetoid. They were to stay that way until orders said otherwise, or security of the facility was breached.

Reviewing sensor data, it discovered the unknown device patched into the external controls of airlock 24. The device was built specifically to avoid detection, but not from one such as it. It was built by some of the best engineers the galaxy had ever known at the time, and this “Optimaster” could not hide from it.

And now that it had found the one intrusion, it located another, one that was actively scanning unsecure file structures in an attempt to do…what exactly? The consciousness was not sure. There seemed to be no pattern or purpose to the files it accessed, and its own language and syntax were unknown to the consciousness.

Whatever was going on, the protocol was clear. The command was sent to the vaults, a single wake cycle would commence. And in the meantime, the consciousness would scour security footage, and continue to observe this Workheart Mark IV to discern its purpose. If it was going to go looking into files that didn’t belong to it; well, two could play that game.

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An hour later, looking as red as a lobster and as shriveled as a raisin, I was sitting on the low stool in front of the work bench. I hadn’t bothered to get back into the EVA suit, since my plan was to work on the O2 scrubber, and by this time I was feeling safe enough assuming this place was devoid of inhabitants. The chances of being caught sitting here “in the all together”, had to be pretty slim.

The shower had been heaven; a full hour of blessedly hot water and no rationing system screaming at me that my time was almost up. All the tension in my muscles was gone for the first time since setting foot on The Gladstone. I’d had a brief moment when I’d turned the water off, wondering how I was going to dry off, but it turned out whoever built this place used some kind of forced air barrier that acted like a full body hair drier. Seemed a pretty good way to recover excess water from the shower, and I made a mental note of it to work on when I got out of this jam. Could be a money maker in the Commonwealth.

The suit’s V.I. was still plugged into the computer console and processing at a furious rate when I sat down. A good sign I hoped, since it meant it was processing a large amount of data. If it had hit a firewall or some other security barrier, it would have stopped by now: an Optimaster it was not. There was no way it was going to hack through anything more significant than the security on a toddlers entertainment tablet.

So I rummaged around for the tools I needed to casing for the O2 scrubber on the back of the suit and got to work. There was obvious damage to the casing, with a dent and crack pushing in where I must have struck something falling down that crevasse. That was the only outward sign of damage other than some scratched up paint, which could mean the repair could be simple.

Once I had the casing off, one obvious issue jumped right out at me; the feed line leading from the scrubber itself back into the suit’s air supply was damaged. Not really all that surprising either, since that particular spot was directly underneath where the casing was damaged.

An easy enough repair to accomplish, since I could spot tubing laying around the lab that would work to create a splice. All I would need to do is make sure it was clean and contaminate free; It wouldn’t help to get the scrubber working again, only to contaminate the clean air output with something toxic.

Before I bothered to patch that feed line, however, I checked out all the circuitry around it. Easier to get a good look while I could more easily move the line out of the way due to the damage.

Turns out there was additional damage: a couple of cables cut. Probably from the same strain and impact that damaged the feed line. This was lucky, real lucky. I had been dreading that damage might have been done to the scrubber matrix itself, and that very well might have been an impossible repair for me to achieve here. “Unless these short stacks use the same kind of systems,” I muttered to myself, “and what are the chances of that?”

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The pink skinned male was taking its time in the hydro-cleansing unit.

During standard station operation, it would have disabled the cleansing unit 15 kintac ago. After quickly reviewing security data of the intruder’s activity on the station, it reasoned the male was in extreme need of the cleansing. It had not been out of its EVA suit for some time, and that was not healthy for any warm blooded species in the station’s databanks.

The extra time also allowed it longer to thoroughly analyze the data it had gleaned from the alien’s EVA suit. Not that a lot of time was required, but it wanted to make sure of its recommendations when Security was awake and came looking for the intruder.

Checking on the Human as it finally exited the Cleansing Unit, she noticed its, his, failure to utilize the drying jets before leaving, so she activated them herself.

That was what they called themselves: Humans, and their homeworld was Terra, or colloquially, Earth. They had a complicated socio-sexual makeup that had evolved from ostensibly being two genders into one of dizzying variety. One, it seemed, that could still cause friction in certain elements of their society. This was concerning the Station. If Station’s hypothesis was correct, there were not that many of its people left in the galaxy. Their presence being revealed to a species such as the humans might put them at risk.

Station simply watched the human on the laboratory’s sensor feed for a while. From health records it had purloined from EVA suit’s memory banks, it could tell the human was not in good health. In human measurements, he had dropped from his normal 75kg down to 55kg, making him look rather gaunt compared to image recordings. His long angular face looked hollowed out, even with the two weeks of scraggly black beard on his face. His startling gray eyes were pinched at the corners from stress and fatigue.

Station had watched the security recordings of him trying to manage sleep cycles without proper sleep space. Even if he’d been able to enter any of the crew quarters, he wouldn’t have found facilities to suit him. At 1.92 meters tall, only the beds in the V.I.P. section would have been big enough to fit him. The average height of a Giobhioni was 1.2 meters.

The very face he was able to squeeze through the Tantaja tubes to access this section was only due to the mass he had lost. If he’d been his original stature, he would likely have gotten stuck.

At the moment, he was focused heavily on repairing a bit of his EVA suit that had gotten damaged during his recent misadventures. Station had learned about that bit of the recent past from the suit’s records. The human – Thomas, his name was Thomas Aacen – had been betrayed and abandoned here to die. If it hadn’t been for his skills, and the fact this facility was even here to begin with, he would have died days ago, out at the bottom of that crevasse.

Everything Station could pull up on this Thomas Aacen said he was not a threat to its crew, at least, not if he didn’t leave. Forced confinement wouldn’t work though; very few species were content to just accept imprisonment. It was a situation that was going to require more data to adequately work out.

There was a much bigger concern, however. That concern was that the derelict vessel that had been mired to the surface of this planetoid had been the target of Thomas Aacen’s treacherous crew. A target they had succeeded in retrieving. It could very well be that Thomas Aacen would be needed to prevent what was coming, if it wasn’t already too late.

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After two hours of diligent searching, I hadn’t spotted any other obvious damage to the O2 scrubber. It was time to run a diagnostic to see if the feed line patch would hold pressure. So I closed the manual valves to lock the system into a closed loop for a diagnostic cycle, and reconnected the power.

“Suit, run diagnostic test sequence on the O2 scrubber unit. Repeat twice and provide audio alert when finished”

]AFFIRMATIVE. DIAGNOSTIC ROUTINE INITIATED. ETA FOR 3 CYCLES IS 28.4 MINUTES. FLAGGED FOR AUDIO ALERT. ANALYSIS OF LINGUAL SYSTEM HAS COMPLETED TO AN ESTIMATE OF 78%. DATA ENQUIRY?[

I raised an eyebrow at the suit. I hadn’t actually expected much from the suit’s decryption capabilities, much less in a mere 3 hours. Regardless of the Optimaster indicating that the language was identifiable, it shouldn’t have gotten to 78% in only 3 hours. I was expecting maybe 30% at most! But I wasn’t about to curse the extension of my run of good luck. Being able to translate the written language was going to help out a lot.

I didn’t have to think too long for a question to come to mind, “Did you come across any mentions of ships present in this facility?”

]RECORDS SHOW NUMEROUS VESSELS PRESENT CURRENTLY WITHIN THIS FACILITY[, came the immediate reply, ]THIS FACILITY WAS A MINOR DRYDOCK FACILITY BEFORE IT BECAME INACTIVE APPROXIMATELY 3532 EARTH STANDARD YEARS AGO. THE VESSELS PRESENT AT THE TIME OF DEACTIVATION DEACTIVATED WITH THE FACILITY.[

Three and a half millennia ago? This place was that old, and still had active power? At that point I was insanely curious to find out what kind of power core it was running on, because to run even minimal systems for that long was incredible. But that was a question for later. The real important part was there were ships here I could use to get back civilization with! Wait…

“Suit, were you able to access anything in the way of a communications system? Could I use it to get a message back home?”

There was a slight delay to this question.

]COMMUNICATIONS SYSTEMS ARE ON LOCKDOWN BY ORDER OF FACILITY COMMANDER[ his V.I. finally responded, ]RADIO SILENCE PART OF QUARANTINE ORDER 34-GN7846. ALSO PROMPTED FACILITY INACTIVE STATUS, POWER LEVELS AT MINIMUM TO BRING EMISSIONS OUTSIDE STATION TO ZERO. ALL PERSONNEL ORDERED INTO STASIS CHAMBERS UNTIL PROTOCOL C5-A058345 OR E45-12S452 ARE INITIATED[

“Quarantine?” I asked, suddenly very concerned, “is there a contagion present on the station?”

]NEGATIVE. QUARANTINE IN EFFECT TO PROTECT STATION FROM CONTAGION. SECTOR WIDE PANDEMIC.[

I breathed a sigh of relief at that. Finding out I’d been exposed to some sort of 3500 year old contagion was not something I wanted to hear after having survived this long on this rock. “Okay, so I’m not infected with some ancient alien plague. That’s a load off my mind, but you say there are crew on the station in stasis? And what were those protocols you mentioned that would wake them?”

]PROTOCOL C5-A058345 OR E45-12S452. UNKNOWN DEFINITIONS, COMMAND LEVEL ACCESS REQUIRED. AFFIRMATIVE, GIOBHIONI PERSONNEL STILL ON STATION. NUMBER: UNKNOWN, CONFIRMED ALIVE: UNKNOWN.[

“So there could be some of these…” I hesitated, trying to replicate the way the V.I. pronounced the name, which seemed so different than how the Optimaster had spelled it, “Geowianee? -Did I get that right?- Still alive on this station? And just how much of the interior of this planetoid does the station make up anyway? It surely can’t be the entire thing, that would be enormous! Would be at least…five times the size of any Commonwealth Station I’ve ever heard of.”

]GIOBHIONI[ the V.I. repeated, and I could make out subtle differences from the way I’d said it. Was probably going to take some practice to get it right. ]AND AFFIRMATIVE, PRESENCE OF LIVING GIOBHIONI ON THE STATION IS CALCULATED AT 87.42% CHANCE. VOLUME OF STATION FACILITIES MAKES UP 68.79% OF PLANETOID DESIGNATED VORDYX-482. ESTIMATES PLACE IT AT 472% LARGER THAN ANY CURRENTLY OPERATING SPACE STATION.[

“Clarification,” I requested, a feeling deep in my bones that I couldn’t put into words, “does that include the entire assembled mass of the central shipyards at Europa?”

]CORRECT[

I just sat there, dumbfounded, lost in my thoughts. What prompted them to build such a large station? Was this common for them? Or was this station special for some reason? What was this quarantine all about? I had so many questions I’d love to ask one of these Giobhioni if one of them were awake and moving about. It was a shame I didn’t really have time to go searching through a station this size, to find where the stasis pods might be. Maybe if he was able to come back…

]DIAGNOSTIC COMPLETE.[ the V.I. announced, shocking me out of my thoughts. ]O2 SCRUBBER FUNCTIONING WITHIN SAFE PARAMETERS. NO FAULTS FOUND.[

Standing up, I put away all my rambling questions for another time. “Well then,” I announced, deftly unhooking the suit from the console so that I could get back into it. “How about we get looking for one of those ships you said were kicking around here? I need to get back the Commonwealth so I can vent Barstol’s ambitions out an airlock”