Outpost

The generator was less than happy about it’s current situation - Rye had done the best she could in the circumstances, and according to the Rabyth woman it’s power output would be stable and totally not blow up at any point. Dustin was too worried about who or whatever had cut the cable to argue, instead listening patiently as his engineer explained that while stable, it was running at way less than it’s expected output to maintain that stability. “Basically Dusty, we’ve got about twenty, maybe thirty percent power at a push. It’s enough to run the antenna on general system broadcast, or get life support fully running, or possibly get a short burst message out over outside-system comms, but any more than that and it’ll junk the reactor. Entire thing needs to be overhauled and rebuilt to be honest.”

Dustin had fretted over that, even as he helped the Rabyth woman drag some floor panels she’d unhooked over to the lift shaft and stack them in a makeshift pile. “Need to get the amount right, doing this is going to burn out the plating on the tiles and probably a chunk of the wiring so we only have so many attempts to get topside.” The bunny girl had commented with a cheerful grin as she started hooking connections together. “This should be about right, though I hope you’re good at climbing; I don’t want to overpower the jump and have us smacking into the roof at the top - just enough boost to jump up, grab the edge of the door and pull ourselves through.”

The idea of just hanging from the doorway while an unknown person might be watching them try and climb through did not fill Dustin with confidence - but he had no better plans, so he just buckled down to the task at hand. It took them a further twenty minutes of work before Rye at last nodded to herself. “That’ll do it. You stand on that one” and here she pointed to one of the piles of tiles they had assembled “and I’ll stand here. I’m gonna count down from three, on zero we both jump and I hit the switch to power the grav plates. Then it’s up to how athletic we are, and how good I am at guestimating our weight versus these plates grav output.” Dustin grimaced, but did as he was told, tensing his muscles as his lover counted down. Then, feeling slightly daft as he did so he jumped - and felt a jolt to his boots as the plates pushed him up hard. Like a jack-in-the-box he found himself springing up the lift-shaft; he managed to retain just enough presence of mind to reach out and grab on to the doorway as he reached it.

Beside him, Rye also grabbed the lip of the door, wincing slightly as her forward momentum carried her into the wall. “Ooofff… Off by half a kilo. That’ll bruise. Right, let’s get out of this pit” she muttered, before those powerful legs of hers scrabbled for purchase on the smooth wall of the shaft and she vanished upwards. A moment later, Dustin felt her reach down and grab his arm; with a heave and a lot of scrambling he made it up as well - and for a moment the pair lay on the floor of the atrium, breathing heavily and listening to the annoyed beeping coming from their suits air supplies at the high usage rate. As soon as he got his breath back, Dustin toggled his communicator once more. “Solar Ascent, come in?” he asked; to his relief, a crackling Meli answered. “Reading you captain. We appeared to have lost comms for a while there - I was just starting to get worried.”

Dustin relayed the situation, even as Rye stretched and looked around the room once more. “Comms should be over this way” she said at last, once he had finished filling the rest of the crew in. “Other side of habitation, from the looks of it.” After a pause to let the others know their ongoing plans, Dustin followed as the bunny girl started pushing her way through the abandoned habitation wing. As they walked, Dustin’s eyes were on stalks; whoever had cut that cable hadn’t left the base - Meli had been running scans of the entire area the whole time they had been inside in case there had been any external threats. Which meant they - whoever ‘they’ happened to be - were still in here somewhere.

The habitation wing was spartan; rows of wide bunks built to accommodate both the large bodies of the Dronth and the Selssa’s preference for curling into a circle when sleeping. Without any actual crew, the place had the feeling of an empty store front - all metal racking with no goods on display. Passing the kitchen, Dustin suddenly paused and took a step back, beckoning for Rye to follow. The room was mostly bare - save for one table. On it sat what looked like an open food container of some kind. “Left from the construction maybe?” Rye said nervously as they paused their search for the communications array and stepped into the kitchen properly. Dustin tentatively prodded the container with a ladle taken from a nearby hook. “I doubt it.” He said after a moment, stepping aside so his engineer could see into the pot. “Doesn’t look like food to me.”

Rye examined the container for a moment, then pulled her multitool out and ran it experimentally over what ‘food’ remained inside. “Urgh” she said after a moment, before turning to Dustin. “It’s food, just not for us. Looking at the composition - silicates, some carbon-chains; it matches what I think I remember of the diet for inorganics but I’d want to go over the exact mix with the other two to give you a clear picture. Hell, only reason I can recognize it is because it’s not that far off the power blend some of our early android prototypes used as a fuel supplement.”

Dustin winced at that. He’d hoped she was going to say it was just debris - left over oil or something from the stations construction maybe, just dumped into a food container as a time saving measure. He looked at the box again, and noticed faint symbols along one side. Turning his head, he bent down to scan them - he didn’t recognize the lettering, but maybe Emely or Sola would be able to decipher what they were, and more importantly what species they belonged to. Straightening up, he turned back to Rye. “That at least solves the mystery of the sabotage; neither of the species here are inorganic. So either it’s a mercenary or it’s some third party butting in. Either way, the question is why.”

Rye shrugged. “Dunno. Doubt it’s a merc tho, there was enough parts down there for anyone to get the reactor at least somewhat running.” Dustin doubted that - he was pretty sure Rye overestimated how good non-Rabyth engineers were, but said nothing as his companion concluded her thoughts. “And a merc would’ve cut the cable when we were going down it - and probably dropped the lift on us for good measure. At least, that’s what the ones in my da’s old holo movies would have done.” She finished with a chuckle. After a moment, Dustin stepped past her to the doorway back into the corridor they’d been following. “Alright. Well, either way we’re not going to find them standing in the kitchen. Let’s keep moving, just - keep alert, okay? Just because they didn’t kill us earlier, doesn’t mean whoever it is won’t try if we back them into a corner.”

As the Rabyth woman acknowledged the warning, the pair turned a corner and ran into two things. The first was a large room, dominated by a tall spire that ran from floor to ceiling and was surrounded by complicated looking equipment - the communication array, Dustin thought in the back of his mind. The main part of his brain however was focused on the second thing in the room. On the far side from them, hastily pushing some kind of device into a bag stood a spider like figure. Eight limbs, two of which were working on the bag, two on which it was standing, two which appeared to be adjusting some kind of harness - and a final pair that were holding a large cylindrical object. It looked sort of like a gun of some kind. It was in fact - a gun. A fact that became apparent even as Dustin dove sideways, knocking Rye to the floor an instant before the gun fired a blast that punched a hole clean through the reinforced door-frame behind them.