The Secrets of the Outpost

DAY ONE - MORNING

Someone was knocking at the door.

It was a dull noise, interspersed with a few moments of silence, and it was pounding in her skull.

"Fuck..."

Shynar cursed after glancing at her old Baume & Mercier, which was on the nightstand.

It had stopped so she'd have to wind it manually. It was a mechanical self-winding watch, made in Switzerland in the twentieth century and which in the early twenty-first century had still been quite valuable in the various Earth currencies of the time. Today, in the Twenty-second Century, it was just a nice collector's piece that she was very fond of. She'd received it as a gift from her father, who had in turn received it from his father, and so on all the way back to her great-great-grandfather.

Or so she seemed to remember.

An heirloom, in short, which still worked perfectly and which she much preferred to modern holographic clocks.

She'd managed to sleep for a few hours—maybe three—after Dr. Enrich's dead body had been discovered. She still couldn't believe it, and she'd been dreaming again. Unfortunately, this time she was sure it hadn't been a good dream. The images still stuck in her mind depicted her crying at the funeral of a woman she knew very well, and who had become one of the reasons she'd ended up on this outpost so far from Earth.

She cleared her head, pushing the memory away and trying to steel herself to get out of bed.

She was aware that she'd have to forgo her morning jog along the base corridors; there were far more pressing matters to attend to, and she hoped to make it through to the end of that day without collapsing from exhaustion.

"Shy, excuse me," a voice said on the other side of the room door, belonging to the man who was knocking so insistently. "You told me to come get you at 7:30 sharp, and not a minute later. Your words. I always carry out my commander's orders!"

"I never told you to come by at 7:30 in the morning. I just asked you to arrange an early meeting, but not this early, damn it!" she replied.

"Are you ready yet or do you need a few more minutes to make yourself presentable?" the voice asked, giving no indication that he'd heard her reply.

It was Kane, her deputy, speaking to her in that deep tone that she liked so much and that right now kindled thoughts that were not appropriate to the situation. Shynar promptly banished them from her mind.

She struggled to her feet.

"Yes!" she bellowed in response. "You're a bloody nuisance," she added in a low voice, but in such a way that he would hear her anyway. "Door release, ECO1 clearance, Commander Shynar."

The doors to the living quarters, the armory, the control room, and the elevator access to the shuttle hangar that could be locked and unlocked by her voice command. Chief Engineer Dirk and Kane had the same clearance, and Shynar appreciated that her deputy had not entered after knocking. She'd requested this particular security procedure herself upon her arrival, as per the habits she'd established over the years. In theory it was a useful system to have in place, especially during emergencies, when one was in a hurry and couldn't waste time using a personal badge. Not that there had ever been a need for it, at least until now.

"Come on in. I'm just going to freshen up and I'll be right there," she said, heading for the bathroom after casting him a glance as he entered.

Unlike her, Kane was as always impeccable in his uniform, his face well-rested as if he'd soundly slept through the night. Of Hispanic-American descent, very reserved, all Shynar knew of him was that he'd spent his youth in the 'Big Apple', the city that never sleeps, on Earth, and that as soon as he'd had the chance he'd travelled extensively throughout the solar system both for work and for the sheer pleasure of discovering new places and planets.