Chapter 14: Chapter 14: Second Chances.

I slept the sleep of the dead. No dreams troubled my sleep. Not that I could remember upon waking. I felt stiff and sore, but much better than I’d expected. My leg, arm, chest, and lower back still hurt. The bruises I had gained were still there, yellowing and aching.

But I could move around if I had to. The skin over my various cuts, bites, and stab wounds felt tight as I carefully stretched and tested my range of motion.

There were things that needed doing still. And still no one else to do them. The only other human beings on Walker were dying by inches as the power system degraded. The escape pods had been either sabotaged or left with such criminal lack of maintenance there was no difference. I still hadn’t found a way off Walker. And there was possibly an infant on the Habitat level that was in a stasis pod that was on its last legs.

That one would have to be taken care of soon. But after the Hospital Level I was wary of charging in. There were a lot more zombies on the Habitat Level. And I was no longer at 100%. Or even close to it, morning recovery surprise notwithstanding.

My stomach growled, as if it hadn’t been filled to bursting before I’d slept. Perhaps my period of unconsciousness had been longer than I’d thought. Food was certainly required. Food, then fix the damned HUD so I could see what time it was again. And a change of clothes. I was still in boxers and bare skin. Clean, but not necessarily comfortable.

Breakfast was easily sorted. I wouldn’t be running out of meal bars any time soon, even with using my nanites more often. There were crates of them stacked to the ceiling. I wondered where the scavenger had gotten them all.

Had Security been stockpiling them? That was at least possible. The question was, were they stockpiled here or elsewhere? Maybe the food warehouses on the Hospital level had some? Might be worth checking out later.

Spare clothes were in the jumble of looted objects. It took a while to find some that fit moderately well, but I found a belt. The pants were a bit baggy and loose in the waistline, but the length was fine. Most of the shirts would fit me like a tent, but I found a pack of tee shirts in my size. Then a holster for the pistol, some spare magazines and reloaded everything. Knife in sheath. Done.

Then I headed out to the Chief’s office. There hadn’t been any zombies on the Security Level since I’d cleared out the two groups initially, but that didn’t mean more couldn’t wander in. The elevator shafts were still open.

It would be nice to block them off, but I didn’t know anything about welding and just stuffing boxes in there wouldn’t necessarily keep zombies out. I didn’t take my safety for granted. Especially not in thin clothing rather than a suit, combat or otherwise.

My sore muscles protested the exercise but I needed it. Too much inactivity would be bad for me. My nanites were already working to keep my bone structure from degrading in low gravity. They even had to help me digest food when gravity wasn’t available.

I sat down at the Chief’s desk. There was a seatbelt to keep you in place for when gravity was on the fritz. I wondered if it had ever been used before now. With that idle thought in mind, I pulled up the monitoring screens to skim the day’s video logs.

There were zombies. Still. My little gun-and-grenade rampage didn’t seem to have impacted the total population of zombies on Walker overmuch. There was a localized scarcity of flesh eating monsters on the Hospital Level, but I saw that there was a horde on the Headquarters Level now, outside the barricade. They were floating limp and listless, asleep for now. There hadn’t been one there when I’d looked through the armor glass the other day. And now there was a horde.

It would be nice if I could lure the zombies away and trap them somehow, like I’d done in the food warehouses on the Hospital Level. Some of those doors had been broken open, though, in the madness of the battle. Either grenades or the weight of zombie bodies assaulting the barrier between them and potential food had broken them open.

I thought about the blast doors that were supposed to close in the event of a breach or loss of atmospheric pressure again. That functionality was reserved for the bigwigs in upper management, though. I’d have to check into that later.

For now there was the problem of the stasis pod on the Habitat Level. Wait. Stasis pods. There were active ones that still had power in the Hospital. Were there more on the station? I’d do better looking for that in the management console above.

So that’s what I went and did. I unbuckled from the Cheif’s chair and put on the space suit. It was bulkier and stiffer. But I wasn’t going to be running about doing low-g parkour just yet, so I reasoned that it evened out. It wasn’t because my inner teenager equated space suit with awesome. At all. Really.

The truth was I was tired of getting beaten, bitten, and scratched. The harder plating of the space suit meant bites wouldn’t penetrate to pinch me. And once I healed up more, I’d be fast enough to not get cornered so they could somehow slice through the armor glass of the visor like they had for the combat suited Security people. I would just have to learn to adapt to the heavier weight. And that training started today.

The secret elevator didn’t have line of sight with the barricade and that meant I didn’t have to sneak. Though I was being careful. Just because there hadn’t been zombies before didn’t mean there wouldn’t be this time.

My hack of the inner offices remained unpatched, so I was able to go right in and up to the console I’d used before. It had seemed to be a vice-CEO or something or other’s desk. Not the main guy. The big dog’s desk had been trashed in the firefight between Security and his bodyguards and was now inoperable.

The main interface was still a mess of bureaucratic nonsense. I went to the Maintenance subsection again only to find that Maintenance did not maintain private pods, which was what the one I knew of on the Habitat Level was.

I checked the status of the ones Maintenance claimed but they were all on the Hospital deck. Actually, it looked like there had been more at one point in time but they’d been moved to the docks to be transferred off station some time before the crisis really hit. They were either in storage, on ships, or installed elsewhere on Earth or another station or colony by now.

I decided to look up licenses and fees, since Walker seemed to float on a sea of bureaucratic nonsense from what I could tell. And sure enough, one had to contract with the station to allow them to draw station power to run a stasis pod.

There weren’t many, owing to the cost of the fees in both bureaucratic graft and power bills. I could call it nothing more than graft. There didn’t seem to be any need for it all, save to produce more bureaucrats to write more reports that only machines would read.

There were five. Two offline, either they failed and stopped working or they weren’t hooked up and drawing power from the station currently. The small one in the Habitat Level was in apartment G-447-A. I made a note of that on my HUD.

Or tried to. Then I scribbled it on the inside of the space suit’s left forearm. Because even once I fixed my personal device, there was no reason not to have redundancy. So next I went into my personal circuits and had the nanites rebuild the HUD framework.

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It didn’t take long. My own circuits were a personal, custom design that I’d worked on since college. Since then I’d modified them even further. Especially during the seven years of isolation before I’d left my lab.

The final two were deep in Level 8. They were active and drawing power. Someone or something was inside them. By the look of things, they were installed in one of the warehouses. That was odd. My first thought was that they were prisoners awaiting transfer, but there was no indication of that. No security holds or warnings. The pods had just been stacked in the warehouse, powered up, and left on. Odd.

I delved into the bureaucratese of the license that governed the two pods. It appeared there was disagreement as to how the occupants of the two pods should be disposed. There was nothing to indicate what was actually in the pods though. People? Plants? Exotic foodstuffs? There was no way to tell.

That meant going down to look myself. The docks weren’t likely to answer my request for further information, and the thing I wanted to know was either nowhere in the system I could access (doubtful) or buried somewhere in the paperwork that would take until the heat death of the universe to find.

Okay, probably not that long. But it was a lot of information that was incredibly unfriendly to the user.

The docks were still dark on the monitors. The cameras were not showing faults, so it wasn’t that. I looked around for remote options in the docks and found a few. Doors, warning lights, hookups, and telltales showed up, but the information on each of them was blank. I couldn’t even turn the lights on in the docks to see if there were any zombies.

Wait. Of course there were zombies on the docks. Silly me. That was a foolish thought.

The docks could wait. The one on the Habitat level needed to be taken care of first. The elevator shafts I eliminated right off for the same reason as the Hospital Level- I didn’t want to be ringing the dinner bell before I even showed up.

The Maintenance shaft held horrors. It was not worth imagining the horde that would result from the thousands of zombies I could see in the monitors combined with whatever was sleeping at the bottom of the Maintenance shaft. Then there was the big elevator in the food service section, which had the same sort of problem as the main elevator bank.

There had to be a way to get to Level 3 without bringing the horde down upon my head. Once I got inside I had to somehow get to G-447-A, extract the small stasis pod, and escape without getting bitten. Again. Or torn to tiny bits, which was more likely.

The answer to the first part was obvious. So obvious I once again felt like an idiot for not thinking of It first. I was wearing a space suit. I didn’t have to risk any of the ways I knew would alert the zombies. Going outside and over the exterior hull would bypass all of those problems. Or avoid them, rather. Temporarily.

There were several airlocks on the Habitat Level. Two on the main concourse across from the cafeterias. Those were farther away from my target. Another pair on the level above, nearer to the apartment with the stasis box. And the last two on the top level, further away again.

Most of the zombies were clustered in the central concourse that rose through the levels. They floated there, barely moving at all.

That could change the instant a hunting howl was heard, though. And there were zombies scattered through every hallway in the Habitat Level. Nests in the cafeteria as usual. A few infected were actively moving around, knocking into things and each other.

That reminded me of the zombie banging on the panel the other day. Zombies could be attracted to noise. Just not as many as followed the howls...

Which gave me an idea.

I had access to the station logs. The cameras in public places kept records, but they were regularly overwritten as time went by. There was video of the fight at the Hospital. And audio. It was the work of a moment to bring up that recording.

Strange how easy it was to access video logs with how convoluted everything else on the management terminal was. Which gave me dark thoughts of what management had gotten up to in its spare time, but they were years safely dead anyway. Not worth getting worked up over. Again.

Testing was conducted at the cafeteria on Level 5. I had no desire to go back that way. It was far enough away that I wasn’t worried about the small horde there making its way to the Habitat Level. Sure enough, the horde responded to the howl played through the broadcast system.

Given that it was coming from different directions, the horde split to follow the one they were closest to at the time, bunching up by the ad monitors. They stayed that way for a time after the video ended, then split up again. Eventually they were still once more.

The ad monitors on Level 3 were everywhere though. Using the broadcast system was out. But there was a better option.

On the main concourse was a fairly sophisticated holo system with its own audio system. Occasionally there were concerts that the station licensed to play there in the evenings. There were also block parties that used it for their own entertainment on occasion. I’d never patronized such gatherings. Far too many people for my taste.

But the location was good to use as a distraction. It would have to do.

My wounds were still healing, but I’d already found out that stasis pods could fail early. I would have to transport the pod directly over the hull though, because there were no options for infant sized space suits. When meant there was no more time left.

I set the howler broadcast to start on a delay in order to give me time to make it over the hull. Then I headed for the airlock.

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