Now I am officially breaking and entering, she mused.
Beyond the staging room was some kind of engineering center, filled with monitors and consoles and conduits, its walls lined with cabinets whose contents she could not begin to guess at. She inspected a few of the work stations, but none of them had what she needed, so she kept looking. A network node overhead blinked at her, indicating that the station’s innernet was operating, but she didn’t trust it enough to let it connect to her brainware. At least not until she knew what had happened to all the people here.
Finally she found a small office with a floor-to-ceiling bank of security monitors, and she sat down at the main desk and activated the manual controls. A map of the station was easy to summon up, though it was far from detailed. The two uppermost levels of the station core were mostly offices and meeting rooms, with a few interconnected labs. The levels below were unmarked, save for titles spaced evenly around the station: Biome 1, Biome 2a, Biome 2b . . . this place must have been a biological research station once. What if some disease had gotten out of control and killed everyone? Could that explain why there wasn’t a person in sight? For a brief moment she questioned the wisdom of her visit. Then curiosity crowded out her unease, as always. The danger was perversely invigorating.
She copied the map onto a chip, then decided to take a look at Shenshido’s transit log. The system wouldn’t let her into its secure files, but she managed to access a summary of activity that was part of the public record, and scrolled through the data from two years back, when Shenshido had first gone dark. If something odd had happened on the station, that might be reflected in its traffic patterns. But there was nothing out of the ordinary: no grand convoy coming in to assist the station, no organized evacuation going out. Shenshido had descended quietly into silence.
That means most of the people who were working here probably never left, she thought. Are they dead, or . . . what?
She finally closed the transit files and called up the data that Jericho had asked for: Shenshido’s communication history. He’d given her a program that would gather the information he needed, so she loaded that and watched as data scrolled across the screen. In theory, it would reveal what signals had come in to Shenshido around the date of the Harmony explosion, and hopefully where they came from. But she wasn’t adept enough at interpreting such data to know if she was collecting what he needed. She would have to deliver it to find out.
If he shares that much with me, she thought bitterly. Once I deliver what he wants, he’ll likely shut me out again, like Guild folk always do. They’re happy to use us, but they don’t see us as equals. A flicker of ancient resentment stirred in the recesses of her brain, and she had to force her thoughts away from it. He’s always treated you decently, she reminded herself.
When Jericho’s program had accessed and recorded everything it could, she tucked the chip back into her headset and called up the map for her own use. Information on what had happened to the people here would be valuable to Jericho, so she would take a look around and see what more she could gather.
She left the engineering complex to explore the rest of the station. Hallway after hallway. Room after room. The further she went, the more eerie it seemed that there were no signs of trouble anywhere. Every automatic system was functioning perfectly. Lights came on when she entered a room and shut off when she left. The data stations she found in a few offices were operational, but passcoded. She searched a dozen offices and meeting rooms, tested a dozen computers, opened the cabinets in a dozen labs, looking for some kind of clue. She did find one room where some furniture had been broken up, and it looked like there were pieces missing, but there was no way to tell what they were without reassembling everything.
Finally, exasperated, she decided to try the labs on the next level down. She used the map to locate the nearest staircase and headed toward it, nearly tripping over a floor-scrubbing bot along the way.
The ambush came without warning. Projectiles suddenly flew at her from both sides of the hall: long, sharp rods that shot out of the air vents and slammed into her armored coat. Arms, shoulders, torso. The safeskin solidified momentarily as each rod hit, preventing it from piercing through to her flesh, but that did nothing to lessen their momentum. Projectiles battered her body like hammers as she fell back, trying to get out of the line of fire. Then one of them struck low on her leg, beneath the hem of her coat, and she could feel it bite deeply into her leg. An arrow. Shit. What were arrows doing here? At least there were no more of them coming at her; whatever trap she’d triggered seemed to be limited to a single volley. She started to back away from the area, watching the walls as she did so, wary of any other openings that might harbor weapons. Then she hit the bot again and stumbled, nearly falling. But no. Wait. There was no bot there. She’d stumbled over nothing.
Shit.
Her right foot was numb now, and coldness was rapidly spreading up her leg. What the hell had been on that arrow? She tried to pull her pistol out of her pocket, but it took all her concentration just to close her fingers around the grip and pull it out. Then her legs collapsed beneath her, and she fell to her knees in the middle of the hallway. Get up! a desperate inner voice urged her. Get out of here! But whatever poison had been on the arrow was too powerful; fiber by fiber, her muscles were giving up the fight.
They came then, rushing at her from doorways and intersections nearby, half a dozen humans in worn jumpsuits, primitive weapons in their hands. Knives. Spears. Bludgeons. She tried to lift her arm to fire at one of them, but the limb wouldn’t obey her. Spots were swimming before her eyes. I’m going to die now. The thought was oddly distant, like it belonged to someone else. This is what dying feels like.
Someone was standing over her with an axe. A fucking axe. He looked like an illustration from a vid game. She wondered if she would feel the bite of his weapon, or if she had become too numb for that.
“STOP!”
The man with the axe hesitated. The label on his shirt said Cisco Tech, Ru noted. A company name. What a strange thing to notice when one was about to die.
“Stop!” the voice repeated.
She blinked as footsteps approached her, trying to fight off the darkness that was closing in. A man crouched down by her side: weathered skin, black hair streaked with gray, a short beard to match, and cruel eyes. Such cruel eyes. His headset was black and coarse in texture—faux wrought iron—and shaped like the hand of a great clawed beast, talon-tips framing his face. He stared at her for a minute and then reached out and grabbed the collar of her coat and pulled it down, so that the lining was visible. “Safeskin! There’s no safeskin on this station. Where did you get this?”
She wanted to push him away, but her body would no longer obey her commands at all. It was getting hard to breathe. She had no strength to talk.
“You’re from the outside,” he challenged her.
Somehow she found her voice. “Yes.”
“You have a ship?”