THE FALL OF ROSENROT STATION

THE LIGHT

ML MEL(unknown)

Recovered artifacts [ITMS 0038-0039] from (suspected) agents (post mortem) [BIOSIG 00922-00923] - these contain large caches of data, in the exabyte range, encoded onto a 5D crystalline matrix - obvious parallels to company 'backup' implants - the storage media is novel and advanced - the data is protected by lattice encryption and will require more work to decode.

He sat stiffly at a desk in a certain room of the complex with his elbows propped on the edge of the desk and holding his coder up as he typed into the mission log. The room was spartan but in an upscale manner and had been redecorated recently as it lagged the fashion of the core worlds, but by only a year maybe two, and that was no time here at the edges of space. On the desk was a lamp that provided an aged-yellow glow and the rest of the room was long shadows and dark spaces. There were noises too groans and creaks from the ducts from he decided newly-disused machinery settling into some new configuration and scuttling sounds that were probably hopefully just a poorly-oiled ventilation fan. Harder to ignore were the shrieks that carried long through the interconnected airways occasional but so occasional as to be more startling than if common. At these he would glance up sharply then listen and try to tell if they sounded closer than last time. Invariably they did and so he rationalised that they did not. As he could not be certain he wished for an acoustic meter.

Now and then he would pause and lean back in his chair and glance down the hallway where, through another door, he could see Sarah as she passed by the opening. She carried things, misshapen and illshaped things and things with shapes that defied description. Cables and tubing and slabs of vacuum circuitry. Miscellaneous components. She shuttled them to and sometimes from the workbench she had set up in the corner of that room.

He finished the log entry then pushed back his chair and put away his coder and stood and went out. He paused in the hallway a moment and cocked his ear to the ceiling and his hands sought his carbine futilely because it was in the room behind him leaned against the desk and he waited for a particularly ominous groaning to end which filtered down through the ducts until it came from everywhere and nowhere. Then it stopped. It did not die away. It just stopped. After a moment he shook his head and breathed out slowly through his nose then continued down to the end of the hallway and stood in the doorway leaning against the frame. 

She looked over and waited and when he said nothing she kneeled and picking up a coil of thick cables she shouldered it and carried it over to the workbench. Here was an assembly. A row of vacuum circuit boards and stacked compute slabs cobbled together in an adhoc manner with expanding tape and wound about with cables and veins of copper. They'd discussed cooling methods perhaps fluid or pressurised air and decided against it. It would have added hours to the project and besides they did not need the assembly to survive long. It was made from the pieces of many personal terminals from this room and those round about that she had pulled apart. Now she leaned forward and loosed part of the coiled cable on her shoulder and plugged it into the assembly. Then she backed away and laid the cable out as she went.

He watched her work for some minutes. He had slept and she had worked while he slept and still worked. She did not grow tired.

She had healed of her former injuries. Repaired. He reminded himself. She had repaired herself. Only living things heal. She was repaired and now once again she moved with that fluid grace as to be superhuman or inhuman. Watching her, the preciseness of every movement, it was a thing of beauty and uncanny and surreal.

She laid the cable out to the dead workstation. This was damaged and the damage was not subtle. Some time before the blood having already dried to black and cracking off the metal someone unknown had fired a weapon. Probably automatic. Several rounds had struck the workstation and pierced the compute slab. The fight was recorded also in the spatters of blood across the floor on the far side of the room and in a single bloody handprint on the wall nearest the other door. Perhaps ten hours before they arrived and no more than forty.