Chapter 16: Chapter 16: Experiment number one.

The Wampus Kitten was apparently an infant. Infants were supposed to stay with their mothers until they were weaned. I looked down at the thing, busily licking at a bloodstain on my shirt.

“Stop that. It’s probably not good for you.”

It did not stop this time. I kept reading. If separated from their mothers they needed to be kept warm because they couldn’t regulate their own body temperature yet. That seemed unnecessarily sloppy from a species perspective, but what did I know?

The thing seemed fine where it was at the moment, not shivering or anything. I looked for options. There had to be some infant formula or something I could feed it. I chewed on a meal bar while browsing the file.

It took a few moments more to find the proper formula. It was listed as a suggestion only and the file mentioned it hadn’t yet been through trials to judge viability yet.

“Well, no time like the present. You’re going to be a science experiment, fuzzball.”

The thing in question vocalized what might have been the world’s tiniest growl.

“Sack up. This is for your own good.”

It did not reply.

I was able to get the medical system to synthesize the formula. Then I had to find where the formula was being made, which involved shoving crates aside to reveal a room I hadn’t noticed off to the side. Stasis fields held drugs and medications in little vials lined up in racks and rows down one wall.

The other held various bits of medical equipment. Some of it looked like torture equipment. I’m pretty sure that one thing I saw was a handheld laser cutter.

It occurred to me that there was pain medication somewhere in those racks. Pain medication sounded nice. It also sounded like something I should avoid in case zombies showed up. Or more stasis pods started going offline. Or something else went wrong.

A box in the corner started beeping softly. Inside was the formula, conveniently held in a tiny baby bottle looking container.

“Alright, science time. Come on experiment number one. Time to get your first batch of the testing formula.”

The fuzzball in question took the nipple readily enough. The bottle was actually bigger than it was, so I expected the thing to last a while. That was good because I was dead tired already. There was just one thing left to do before sleep, though. Clean up my bloody wounds.

I wiped down with disposable towels, rubbed disinfectant on a few quick clotting bandages and applied them to the leaky bits, juggling the Wampus Cat and its bottle as I did so. It was still wriggling about, so I tied a gauze bandage lightly around it and wrapped the other end around my bicep. That would have to do. Then I tied myself into bed and passed out.

* * *

I was awoken by the fuzzball four times during the arbitrary “night.” Once because the bottle floated away. Once because the bottle was empty, which defied all logic. I had to clean up a messy furry behind at the same time. And twice more as the thing tried to explore. I was reminded of the reason I hadn’t ever had a pet. The things were high maintenance.

The fifth time it happened I decided to get up and be about the day, soreness and pain be damned. I needed food. By the look of things, the fuzzball did too. The bottle was empty again. I checked the time. Three bottles the size of the thing’s entire body in under ten hours. Voracious little thing.

I got us both breakfast and grabbed the space suit. Getting soaked with decontamination fluid over open wounds was not on my list of tasks for the day. Or any day, ever again. The fact that this was the precise opposite of the reason for a decontamination chamber did not escape me.

It was simply that in my current state I could not find it in me to care. I tied the Wampus Cat to my neck so I could keep an eye on it and headed to the Chief’s desk. It decided to explore my face while I traveled.

Something stopped me on the way to the Chief’s desk though. A piece of trash drifted in the air across from Security’s front desk area. I knew the cleaner bots had been through here already. There shouldn’t be any trash left, but there it was.

I checked the pistol. It had gotten even more gunky in my flight from the horde. I would just hope it would work for the moment. The cleaning kit was back in the Chief’s office. There hadn’t been time before. But now I needed it. I had to make the time to keep it clean and in working order. There would always be reasons to put it off.

I put the helmet on, sealing the space suit back up. The Wampus Cat squirmed awkwardly into my hair. At least it was out of the way. It still hadn’t opened its eyes. I hadn’t done much more than skim the file on the medical console last night so I didn’t know if that was normal. Whatever sufficed for “normal” for a six legged cat-dog-spiderbeast-thing.

A small cloud of trash was clustered around the open elevator shaft. Sure enough, there were zombies about. I used the desk to pull myself forward inch by inch, scanning through the cafeteria. Then a severed arm drifted into view. A zombie arm.

It was doubtful that it had managed to be pulled along from wherever the zombies came from, be it the Habitat mega-horde or the one that was sitting in the Headquarters cafeteria and lobby last I checked. More bits of gore and flesh became visible as I rounded the corner.

It had to have been the turret guns, I realized. Security had its own defenses. Had these activated at the same time I’d brought the Hospital Level checkpoint back up? Or had they always been active? There had been zombies here before.

I hadn’t searched through their corpses, messy as they were. They could have been more Security zombies. The turrets might not have fired on them, but would on those that got too close otherwise.

Then again, Security didn’t appear to be as paranoid here as it was at the laboratory section. They had to have visitors from time to time that weren’t Security. That meant they couldn’t be gunning down station residents willy-nilly. So the guns shouldn’t have fired, if that were the case. So why had they?

The answers were likely in the Chief’s office. But before then, I wanted to secure this path once again. I drifted out towards one of the pillars that marked the boundary between Security country and the public space. Nothing around the elevators for now. But inside the cafeteria were a few unwelcome guests.

Five zombies clustered around one of the food vendors. Another three floated limply near the tables. There was another one near a food cart further away. Something about that one looked different than the average wasted, corpse-like appearance that characterized the average infected.

It was taller, but that wasn’t it. Zombies came in all heights. Then it turned its head, ripping a bite out of the meal bar it held. Disgusting wrapper and all.

A glint of silver shone on its left temple. That’s what I had noticed when looking at it before. Some sort of implant. No way of telling what it was. Humanity had embraced technology to the point that we could surgically attach devices to and within ourselves.

It remained an uncommon practice, as the benefits were often negligible. But certain occupations were more likely to use implant technology at a more than baseline frequency. I briefly wondered what sort job the individual in question had been involved in when alive.

Then I decided that it was past time these zombies needed shooting. They were on my lawn, metaphorically speaking. It was time they were removed.

My first shot struck one of the five. Not the one I was aiming at. The laser on the pistol had long since been clogged with blood, so I was attempting to use the sights. It was probably more luck than anything I’d done that guided my bullet to strike a target rather than a bulkhead or the ceiling.

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The zombies startled, then howled. Predictably. It was not the deafening wall of sound that I’d heard in the Habitat. I lined up my second shot, but didn’t fire yet.

There was something wrong with the pistol. A bullet casing was sticking out of the top. That was definitely not normal. I tried to pull it out, but it was stuck solidly. Then I remembered the piece on top that moved. I pulled on it. Well, yanked it in panic would be more accurate. The casing popped free and the sliding piece jerked back into place.

By this time the turrets had opened up again. The zombies were close enough to trigger whatever programming that was running. They easily shredded the remaining four as I’d struggled with the pistol and the floating three were being taken apart as I watched. But the strange zombie was nowhere to be seen. The cart it had been perched on tumbled slowly.

The turrets fell silent as I quickly looked around for it. I’d had enough of sneaky assassin zombies. True, most would charge right at me as soon as they either saw me or heard the howl. But sometimes they showed rudimentary pack tactics. I wouldn’t discount even a pack of one. One zombie had nearly killed me when I was unarmored. That was all it had taken.

I counted heads. Then torsos, then limbs just in case. No implant zombie. Where had it gone?

With the pistol now no longer reliable I decided to retreat to the Chief’s office and the armory. At worst case I could grab one of the rifles and try to use that to shoot zombies. The long guns were heavier and bulkier, but the same logic that had me wearing the space suit ruled.

Getting bitten, beaten, and stabbed was not something I wanted to repeat ever again. Which reminded me of the deadlined maneuvering pack. There were others in the Headquarters airlock. Since I didn’t know how to fix it then I’d probably have to replace it.

I sat down at the Chief’s desk and took the helmet off. Then tugged experiment number one out of my hair and gave him the bottle again. I wedged it into the suit’s collar and the little monster went to town on the bottle like it was the best thing it had ever tasted. Possibly true in retrospect. I had no idea how the formula tasted and was disinclined to investigate. Meal bars were enough for me.

The first thing I did was to dig into the Security turret programming. Why had they fired on the zombies this time? For that matter, why had the ones in the laboratory section fired? I knew Security was highly paranoid, but gunning down civilians was bound to be a public relations disaster.

The instruction set for the turrets was well hidden, but I found it by going through the update logs. Security had been aware of the “rioting” on station and had deployed to the docks first to keep things under wraps.

Management didn’t want the residents to even know they were there, by the look of things. Once the zombies started turning and attacking people, Security had first attempted to restrain them like normal human rowdies but that failed to work. Actually, “failed to work” was too kind.

It was an utter disaster.

The records log had video. Burly security men attempted to restrain a writhing, biting zombie with flex cuffs and stun rods. The stun rods were completely ineffective. Focusing on containing the flailing limbs meant that one of the security guys got bitten.

That was all it took. Suddenly there were two zombies in play. A third was quickly infected and after that the Security men began shooting. The problem was, the zombies were already in melee range.

Two men escaped, fleeing at least a dozen new zombies. I closed the video log. According to the records, things had changed after that. But by then it was too late.

The instruction set I was looking for came into play after Security decided to go with lethal force. Turrets were charged with firing on anyone approaching a Security checkpoint that did not have a Security ID. Mine was logged into the network now, so theoretically I was fine.

But that also meant zombies that still had Security IDs could potentially infiltrate Security. I’d have to watch out for that.

Then I checked the status of the stasis pods. I didn’t have the maintenance screen to show me the activity I was looking for, but some fiddling about brought me to the cameras that were still active in the pod room. Blue lights and red ones, no amber. That would have to be good enough for now. I could check them manually later.

Next was to review the monitors to see what the zombies were up to. The Headquarters horde was missing again. Nothing stirred in the Hospital section, but there was a horde in the food warehouses. That got me thinking.

If I could somehow cut off the zombies’ access to food, would they go into hibernation like some of the ones I’d seen had? That could potentially make my travels through the station safer. Zombies congregated near food and water sources. If I could somehow block them off it would help.

But there were so many places zombies could get access to food that it would probably take too much time. I had no idea how much the auxiliary solar panels were helping. If they were helping at all at this point.

Then I got to thinking about what had just happened on the way here. What was up with the Security turrets? There had to be log files or something that could explain that. A few more minutes digging and I found them. The turrets had been shutdown because of power issues.

Of course! The heat exchangers failing in my lab was what initially pointed me to the fact that station power was on the decline.

I didn’t have access to overall data, but somehow or other the local turrets were back online. Possibly other Security turrets could be brought back as well, if the solar panels were helping. Or maybe this was just a temporary, localized phenomena. I would have to check the manager’s console to see what was going on there. But I dreaded the horribly designed interface.

Hopefully it would be more like Maintenance, functional, practical, and clear. More things should be like that. But first I had to clean the pistol. The cleaning kit was right there. It even had instructions inside. Easy to understand instructions, even.

The guide showed how to take the pistol apart to clean it, but I became so engrossed in it that I went beyond the simple “field strip” that the manual first showed and disassembled the weapon completely.

There were cleaning agents, several types of lubrication, brushes, wiping rags, swabs, and more. Every little piece got cleaned, lubricated, and reassembled. Then I took it apart again and put it back together. It was a surprisingly simple device. Completely mechanical, excepting the laser sight. The smell of oil and cleaning agents was distinctive, but not unpleasant.

I was now ready to shoot zombies again. And hopefully not miss. Well. Hopefully not miss as much as I had in the past.

There was nothing lying in wait for me as I took the hidden elevator up to Headquarters and the management section. Earth was dark in the view ports overhead, depriving me of what was quickly becoming my favorite sight.

No city lights glowed on the planet below. There hadn’t been any for a long time now.

The stasis pods were in good condition, according to the maintenance terminal. Even the two all the way down in the warehouses. I skimmed through the cameras on the Habitat Level, seeing the mega horde was still there. The upper level apartments were open to space behind the blast door.

The decompression event hadn’t killed as many of the horde as I’d have liked. A few bodies and parts of bodies floated in the airless corridors, but only three of the halls were affected. There was also a lot more trash. Mattresses and furniture, clothing and bones, zombie nests and unidentifiable detritus.

There looked to be more cameras online now. There was even one active in the docks. Just one. But through that camera I could see a horde that rivaled the one in the Habitat Level through the shadows.

Where had they all come from? There were thousands just in that one view, and the docks were massive. That reminded me to check for docked ships and the ones that the burueaucratese had mentioned as applying for refugee status.

It was time to look for ships. If I could get the stasis pods on a working ship, we could all finally escape Walker. Experiment number one burped and batted the bottle out of my collar. It was empty again. I sighed.

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