Maintenance Crew
Brett pulled off his insulated gloves and warmed his hands over a heater in the airlock. Even with his heated suit, by the end of a shift recaulking leaking Ammonia storage tanks the bitter cold of Louie’s interior made it hard to even move his fingers. After about a minute, he could feel enough with his fingertips to flip the clasps on his helmet and shrug out of the top half of his suit, revealing the tired Hawaiian shirt he always wore over his thermals. He reached up and pulled his hat down from the peg on the wall where he’d left it, the cog badge on the front of the blue Monstrucker hat reminding him of happier, or at least warmer, days riding colossal road trains across the Taba desert.
Next to him, Parker was just starting to get out of his clunky suit. Unlike Brett, he’d brought his own powered exoskeleton, a clunky Ariadnan model he’d earned working for Kosmoflot. His background as a Patcher meant he was pretty experienced slapping hasty repairs in hard to reach places, though he had to leave more complicated work to Brett.
“Man, I can’t wait to get paid. Breaking this AWU strike is finally getting my BitCred balance out of the red,” grumbled Brett.
“Yeah, I hate sneaking around and hiding from the AWU guys, but the longer this strike goes on, the richer we get,” agreed Parker. “and this shit is safer than EVA work, at least if something goes wrong here, we have a few minutes to freeze to death. No chance of just tumbling away into space.”
“Right,” said Brett. “It’s easy money for us, but did you hear something got in and cleared out the food storage two months ago? Nobody saw it, but I heard it gnawed a hole a foot wide through a rock wall to get in. Wouldn’t want to run into that thing.”
“Maybe it’s one of those hungry creatures the Morats keep releasing in the Averroes Campus parking lot. I bet the Dravot group want to get business going here,” mused Parker, hoping he was wrong. Labor relations were already contentious enough without red skinned aliens joining in and picking fights. “If there is some alien critter roaming around, we better go find that asshole cat and keep it out of trouble. Rocaworks put something about keeping it alive somewhere in our contract.”
“Right.”
“Here, kitty. Here, kitty, kitty. Enough of that kitty crap. Jones. Jonesy? Here, Jonesy. Meow. Meow. Jonesy? Here, kitty, kitty, kitty. Meow. Here, Jonesy. Jonesy?”
The mining complex was huge, and pretty much empty. Even with the mining crews on strike it stayed heated and pressurized, as letting it get closer to Louie’s exterior temperature would cause all kinds of systems to fail. The lights were set to save energy and flickered on ahead of Brett as he came to a new area of corridor, waiting thirty seconds before switching off again once he’d passed.
He went room by room, checking for the cat. Luckily, there didn’t seem to be many appealing hiding spots, and he moved on pretty quickly, past mining tag hangers, a sprawling machine shop and the vast streches of an empty storage hanger.
As he walked into the corridor past the hanger, the lighting didn’t trigger. A draft flowed past him and the temperature seemed lower than normal, but there on a pile of discarded overalls, was the unmistakeable silhoutte of a cat.
“Jonesy? Come on buddy, let’s get out of here,” begged Brett, as he switched on the light built into his comlog bracer. “Here kitty, come on.” The light illuminated a large Ginger Tom, who looked at him, hissed angrily and ran down the corridor, turning a corner.
“Parker, I’ve found him, and he’s being an asshole as normal. Once I’ve caught him I’ll head back to you. Also the lights are out past hanger 5, looks we’ll need to come back here and check for leaks too,” he spoke into his Comlog, but a small blinking warning in his retinal display showed that the message was just queued, and couldn’t be sent until he got a stronger signal.
Scanning his light back and forth to make sure the cat couldn’t run back past him he walked down the corridor and turned the corner.
“Great, what the fuck are you eating,” he said, as he quickly scooped up the cat, which was licking at a slimy puddle on the floor. A gross, spinnbarkeit strand of stretchy mucus stretched from the floor up to Jonesy. “Ewww, what is this shit,” said Brett, and swung his torch further along the corridor.
Where his torchlight hit the wall at the back of the corridor it revealed the rough mouth of a tunnel, looking like it had been chewed right through Louie’s bedrock, twelve to fourteen feet from one side to the other.
Holding tight onto the cat, he turned and ran.