-Hweet-

  Hweet’s crest and eyes flared in panic, his mind racing to collect, catalogue and connect the facts as he could discern them in the now altered world seen in the emergency lights. His body slowing as his mind ran into overdrive and pulled cognitive control from the rest of him.

  “Fact: There had been an emergency launch from the Escape pod bay that he was in charge of guarding against tampering.

  Fact: The GalCom appointed inspector had just gone into the room to complete and inspection of the Escape pods.

  Fact: Such inspections were only to be done via diagnostics unless otherwise informed due to need for extra staff in case of mechanical malfunction… and he had not been informed of the need for extra monitoring staff.

  Fact: The Inspector was NOT in the room, and there were no other exits.

  Fact: The ventilation systems have stopped. Primary lights were off, and emergency lights were on.

  Fact: Outside of an exceedingly rare maintenance malfunction, which shouldn’t have occurred as they had been extremely meticulous about maintenance, the only way to activate a pod was to enter and manually activate it.

  Fact: All other pods were reading Inactive/Locked on their station side interfaces.

  Fact: No one had attempted to contact him regarding the unexpected pod launch.

  Suspicion: The act of launching the pod was intentional, and there were other serious problems at play. Too many to be coincidental. Lack of communications, life support and escape options.

  Logical Result: Enemy Action.”

  Hweet immediately attempted to contact the Command and Control room using his wrist terminal. His rising suspicions of there being more at work behind the scenes pushing him to verify, and needing to report in anyway.

  The tool on his wrist bleeted an error, ‘Disconnected from network’.

  He slapped the wall terminal’s interface and received the same error.

  Frustration, fear and desperation rising, Hweet punched the door release.

  … no response.

  Hweet froze in shock, then mentally reviewed all of the procedures that he had been briefed on. He realized that the station was now in a full hull breach/security lockdown. There was a fifteen second delay from the time that sort of lockdown was initiated to when it actually went into effect. The idea was that affected areas had a brief window to respond and evacuate to safety. Unfortunately, that window now meant that he was trapped in the Evacuation Chamber.

  “Trapped, but not without options.”

  He mentally restructured his action/response chain to fit the new conditions.

  There was no longer any need for him to report in, the problems were self-evident to anyone on the station. There had been no explosions or overt vibrations signifying the same, so there was no need to believe that there was actually a breach to be worried about. All active systems and controls were either down or locked out, and would need to be bypassed somehow, but he didn’t have the necessary knowledge to do it for all the systems that needed it.

  “So, breaking and exiting it is.”

  Hweet pulled out a multi-tool and began working on the casing for the door terminal. He would need to open the door, then find someone who could work the electronic systems to get the pods working again. Given the state of affairs in the system and now the station, he had no doubt that they were on borrowed time. The life support issue alone meant that they had but a scant few hours left to live.

  Hweet heard a chirping sound as he pried open the casing enough to get behind the terminal screen. He paused to track down the sound, finding it to be his personal communicator, the Chirleen built comm device that he had completely forgotten he’d kept as a keepsake after they had swapped to GalCom built tech as a species. A keepsake that some others also kept.

  He quickly grabbed it and slid the screen open, finding his elder sister staring back at him, her face eerily caught between the screen’s illumination and the back-up lights.

  “Hweet! Where are you! Ops in in a full-blown panic. Everything just went down!”

  “I’m…”

  He paused as his mind caught up to the implications and again began restructuring his responses.

  His sister worked in Traffic and Control, keeping the incoming and outgoing ships from crashing into each other, satellites and space debris. It was a subsection of the Command and Control Center, and it meant that he now had a line to the Command staff.

  “I’m stuck in the Evacuation Chamber at the moment. Listen, Cheay, I need you to put me on with whomever is running things at the moment. It is vitally important if any of us are going to get off the station!”

  Cheay, long used to managing stress and tracking multiple tasks, and completely trusting her brother, only hesitated but a moment before rushing off, calling for her supervisor. Hweet took the time to pull more of the casing off and get a better look inside for the necessary components to mess with.

  If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  A few moments of chatter and wildly shifting views later a distinguished, but haggard looking Chirleen was taking up the tracking sensor of Cheay’s comm unit.

  “This is Chwill, Senior Controller. You are Hweet of Security?”

  Hweet stood back up from examining the internals of the terminal, “Yes, sir. I was stationed to guard the Evacuation Chamber. The GalCom Inspector went in just before everything went to the tides. The Chamber set off alarms for a launch and when I went in to check, the Inspector and a pod were gone, and everything was shutting down. I got locked in and am currently working to override the door to grant access, but the pods are all locked out too. If we are going to get anyone off the station, I am going to need a technician down here to override the lockout.”

  Hweet paused a moment to catch his breath before continuing with the worst of it, “Sir, I know it isn’t my place to make the judgement, but I believe this to be some sort of enemy action. Those pods can’t be launched without someone inside of them setting it up. If I am reading the waves right, this was all intentional. Everything GalCom related has been shut down, only our own equipment seems to be working. And the timing… I know it isn’t confirmed, but that is a LOT of circumstantial evidence all pointing in the same direction. We should try to secure an exit should the worst come to pass. At least get as many people off the station as possible in case life support runs out.”

  Chwill sighed, “I understand your conclusions, and agree on the evacuations at the very least. As for the rest… It is above my paygrade currently.” He paused as he considered his options, then turned to a subordinate.

  “Tewoit, go work with Quorl and Swoots. Redirect them from re-coding the core and life support and instead direct them to get the doors to the manned sections open, then work on overriding the lifeboat lockouts. We can always come back and fix things properly later, but we if we can’t get the life support online in time without an exit strategy, there’s no coming back. And if you happen to find an Administrator, send them here please.”

  The Chirleen in question chirped her acknowledgement and ran to find the two Techs and re-task them. As she did this Chwill barked out to the rest of the staff in attendance, “Anyone else have home world omni-tech with them?”

  His question was met with disappointment, and he sighed in frustration. Only two of the forty-odd workers in the C&C raised their hands.

  “Alright, we will work with what we can. Those of you that still have them, start making calls to whatever contacts you have… ALL of them! Get the word out that we are blind, deaf and dead in the storm. Get them to contact the highest authorities that they can and get the word moving. If we are lucky, then this begins and ends with us. If not… then the Fildecl Government is going to need as much warning as they can get. Cheay, you too. I am also appointing you as liaison with your brother, keep me posted on how things are going, and let me know as soon as we can start the evacuations.”

  Cheay and Hweet both chirped their acknowledgements. Cheay said a quick goodbye to her brother and cut the connection, leaving Hweet alone to work on the door. Though he wasn’t a Tech, the concept was simple enough. The station had a number of fail safes built in to allow for trapped personnel to escape, fail safes that no amount of tampering could truly shut off permanently. For the doors, specifically, there was a mechanical redundancy of a small power cell designed to operate them in case of emergency. Usually this was done with an emergency code input into the door terminal, which was also run off that power source. With the terminal itself shut down and cut off it meant that manual operation was necessary, which meant cycling the output to the door from the source, effectively hotwiring it open.

  The effort took him more than a few minutes. Isolating the power source and tracking down the proper wire was easier said than done when you weren’t familiar with power sources, but he was eventually able to find the right line to back feed. Using that knowledge, he was able to move faster to unlock the other doors heading toward the Ringway around C&C.

  This led him to meet up with one of the Techs opening doors. Here Hweet joined the rest of the Security Team to unlock the necessary doors to free the rest of the trapped personnel, bringing them to the Ringway, while the Techs moved to unlock the escape pods.

  Once everyone was accounted for, Hweet finally joined his sister. They gave each other an affectionate head bump and chirp before standing to the side as the one he recognized as Chwill gathered the attention of the Station’s crew.

  “I need everyone to pay attention and hold to order! The Administrators and I have spoken and agree that your lives are more important than the equipment that surrounds us. With that in mind, we are abandoning the station! Thanks to the efforts of our Security Team and Techs we were able to override the lockdowns on the Escape pods, there is room enough for everyone, but we must stay organized! With that in mind, please follow the Security Team as they lead us to the pods. Security Chief Choil, please take charge and lead the way.”

  After his brief speech, Hweet saw Chwill making his way over to him and his sister instead of joining the rest of the Command Crew in the evacuation.

  “Hweet, a pleasure to meet you in person. I need to thank you. It was your information that allowed me to beat the bureaucratic tides and convince the Admins to abandon the station. Your observations were enough to push the issue and create firm doubt in their minds. Yours and Cheay’s nostalgia may have saved countless lives beyond even this station.”

  Chwill hesitated as his face worked through a variety of emotions. “I hope. Truthfully, we have no idea what is happening outside. But the word has at least gotten out. We have been dark for almost an hour at this point, there is no telling just how chaotic things will be until we are free of this.”

  “That will be a consideration for a different tide, Sir.” Hweet responded, “For now, we have done what we can.”

  As they approached the Evacuation Chamber, Hweet nodded at the Techs waving groups into the pods and the ready lights showing on the pod terminals, “Look, they have gotten around the lock out. Soon, we can report directly and find out for ourselves just what is going on.”

  Chwill clacked his beak and tilted his head in agreement and the two siblings, the closest a Chirleen could get to a grin.

  “I suppose so. Perhaps we could…”

  A fully loaded pod hit the launch button, and the station shook around them as everything went white, the bulkheads cracking and shattering under the pressure of a Capital sized fusion reactor going maverick and forcing jets of superheated plasma into the rest of the station.

  Chwill, Hweet, Cheay and the rest of the crew still waiting to disembark were killed immediately by the over pressured atmosphere condensing and crushing them all into near dust in a microsecond. Whatever was left was then carbonized as the plasma reached the Evacuation Chamber and beyond, blowing through the comparatively weaker pod bay doors, carbonizing and scattering the launching pod and all inside of it into microparticles.

  In their desperation, no one had thought to check for malignant code beyond the lockdown interfaces. Code that the leaving pod’s launch button had activated, triggering the core’s meltdown.

  As the dust and debris from the shattered station silently drifted apart from the explosion, some of it fell through the planet’s atmosphere, creating a nighttime meteor shower of twisted scrap with a background of fading plasma and lightning arcs. Farther out, the ships that had been in-system to trade were fleeing the encroaching Qazirxel interdiction fleet, a fleet that was now close enough to begin shifting into a preliminary orbital formation.