THE FALL OF ROSENROT STATION

ALONE I

He stepped out into a brightly lit and wide and curving concourse that swept left and right at least fifty meters each direction to a steel horizon, beyond which was likely more of the same. There were more airlocks; he could see four others each marked by that outcropping of the bulkheads and the low squat plastic furniture arranged to wait before them. There were exterior windows, floor to ceiling glass windows, with their radiation shutters pulled down. The opposite bulkhead had doorways to upscale lounges and to bathroom facilities and to other compartments whose function was not immediately obvious. And everywhere there were signs all pointing towards that one central element of the concourse where it joined with a passage to a security checkpoint before people could enter the station proper. He looked about and saw that he was alone. The place was deserted and nothing moved and nothing made a sound anywhere and all that could be heard was the sometimes eerie fluted sounds of the ducts and the scratching whispers of rusted fans behind vent covers. He started off towards the only place he could go, that central part of the concourse and the checkpoint.

He passed a section of those squat plastic chairs. Some sensor must have picked him up then for the televisor that hung down from a ceiling mount came to life. It was not faced towards him so he walked around where he could see it. Its audio must have been disabled for there was picture but no sound. It showed imagery of some halcyon planet of blue and gold. Elysium. Get your land today.

He left it there showing to empty furniture and if it turned off he did not see.

He was almost at the center of the concourse when he smelled it. There was no doubt about what it was. There was something dead and decomposing nearby.

Shortly he had identified a certain door on his right as the source of the smell. It was designated with a decimal number etched over the doorway. It had no locking mechanism. He approached cautiously and stopped and reached into his kitbag for a mask. He pulled the mask on and then continued over to the door. He must have known what was behind it if not the details. He put his hand on the door handle and turned it and then pushed it in with a sudden movement.

Even through the mask the stench was almost unbearable. His eyes began to water as he stepped forward and felt around on the inside wall until his fingers touched a breaker switch. He flopped the switch up and then the arclight inside the compartment blazed white light banishing shadow.

It was a janitors closet. There were two cleaning bots standing against the back of the compartment eyes closed, dormant. The sides were racked with their equipment. His eyes went inevitably to the bucket overturned on the floor and then up those limp pointing feet that had turned black and up the legs to her body to her hands that were clasped together in a strange fashion one gripping the other.

The rope was done badly. The neck had not broken and worse had only cut off blood leaving her head. Blood had continued into her head and under enormous pressure had erupted from her eyes her sinuses and caused blooms of broken vesicles over her face.

He studied her and after a moment he took out his palmcoder and scanned the scene using its pulselight imager.

He looked at her again. Then he reached out and patted her down first one side then the other in an efficient manner, like he had done this before. He found something. He stopped moving then carefully reached into her right thigh pocket. His hand came back with some blocky electronic device.

He stepped back and examined it. He turned it over in his hands.

It was an old model palmcoder. The etchings on the back said Diacom. The model number was at least ten years old. It was bulky unlike his own thin panel device. His was built by General Systems and came with many extras not built into the standard ones. He found the contact diodes in the base and pressed them. The screen flashed briefly with a logo for Diacom. It booted swiftly but the login required a hexabase code. There was no getting past it, at least not quickly, or legally.

He crouched and placed the device on the ground beneath her dangling feet. Then he stood and looked at her one last time and then pulled the door shut.

He wrote a log then.

MET 05-15 Suicide fem mid20s compartment 109.66 ref scan_001 begs question and not in usual sense of suicides but that this must be connected to strange state of station. Loss of order poss. Mainframe deviance strongly sus.

He hesitated over the last part. But he let it be.