As Dylan had finished his book on Mursk history on the fourth day of the journey, he had long gotten bored. As such, he had been sleeping a lot to pass the time. It is one of these naps that he is woken up by the sound of a ship-wide announcement from Fletcher.

“Attention crew - hehe, this is fun - we have reached the station, and, boy, it sure as fuck looks abandoned to me.”

Dylan rolls his eyes and heads off toward the flight deck to get his own look at the space station. After a short walk, he arrives. What he sees leaves him speechless.

The station seems to have been under attack, by the Dar’Whaki he assumes. The station itself is in pieces. Rather than a full station like he had been hoping, all he could see was a clump of what was once a research outpost.

“I doubt we’re going to find anything in there. Whoever ransacked the place probably took everything the Mursk left behind,” Wallace, the resident guns expert, said.

“I’m inclined to agree with you there Wallace, but protocols are protocols,” Matthews said, “Can you bring us in closer, Fletcher?”

“Sure thing boss, but since there is so much debris, I can only bring us in about a mile out.”

“That will have to do. Everyone else, we’ve got a walk to get dressed for.”

A series of groans follows the order as putting on the EVA suits is incredibly uncomfortable.

Once everyone is in their suits, and properly adjusted so no parts of their bodies are being pinched, the crew enters the airlock.

“Remember, everyone, we’ve got enough oxygen in our suits to last a few hours under sustained heavy breathing. If you all remain calm, your tanks should have enough for up to eight hours. Now I don’t want any of you to get too comfortable over at the station. Start heading back in four hours. Am I clear?”

Everyone responds, and then the airlock opens to the void that is space. Even from a mile away, Dylan is shocked at how much debris there is.

He radios the crew. “There is a lot more debris here than anticipated. Please be mindful of any small, fast moving objects. The last thing we need all the way out here is for one of you to get a puncture in your suit.”

Thankfully, each suit comes equipped with an automatic repair kit. If someone were to get a hole in their suit, then the repair kit should activate to patch it, so long as it’s minor. Technology may have evolved a lot, but there are still some situations it cannot solve.

The crew makes slow progress to the main fragments of the space station because of the roundabout way they are forced to take. However, once they do get to the station, they aren’t surprised by the lack of anything immediately valuable.

It looks like the station was once powered by solar energy, as there are still a couple of solar panels intact. But, once inside, they can’t see any pressurized doors. It looks like they are going to be stuck wearing the beefy suits for their time on the station.

Visually, the entire station is a mess, however, when Dylan turns on the infrared setting in his visor, he sees a heat source at the heart of the derelict station.

“We’ve got a heat source down below.”

Dylan makes his way to the floor and activates his gravity boots, which allow for the user to walk on any surface where there is no real gravity. He motions for the rest of his crew to do the same.

Slowly, Dylan makes his way through the long corridor, stopping every now and then to take photos. While the station may be destroyed, parts of it could be copied for future human stations. The architecture seems to be very simple and elegant, yet sturdy. He finds himself at a T-junction. The other members of the crew had split off down other passages earlier to search for a way to the heat source. He decides to go left and hope for the best.

As he is walking, he notices the walkway getting brighter. Having been stuck using his flashlight, he is curious as to what is causing the light.

Could it be that there is still someone, or something, here? Dylan thinks to himself.

As he walks farther down, the light gets brighter and brighter.

What is this light?

He pulls out his pulse pistol and settles it on the ever growing light.

As he reaches the light, he sees a mirrored copy of himself - an EVA suit with a flashlight and a pulse pistol pointed at him.

“Who is that?” Dylan asked, growing frustrated.

“Oh shit, thank God. You really freaked me out there sir.”

“Wallace? What the fuck were you thinking? You nearly gave me a heart attack.”

“Sorry, Matthews. I thought you were a Dar’Whaki or something.”

“It’s okay. Have you found anything?”

“Not yet. I’m still looking for a way to get to the heat source.”

“We just need to keep looking. I passed a junction a bit ago. We can try going the other way.”

Wallace nodded firmly. “Let’s go then, sir.”

Underneath the visor, Dylan smiled. “Yes, let’s.”

Heading back to the junction, the two go straight through rather than go to the right, as that is the direction Dylan came from. They don’t make it far until they are face to face with the void. This section of the station was ripped apart. However, they can see the heat source is below them.

Wallace gets a wild idea. “What if we go outside, and down one floor. I don’t think we’re going to find a way down by any normal means.”

Dylan sighs. He knows there is no better way to get down. “Alright, Wallace. I’ll follow you then.”

The two make their way outside by grabbing onto the rough edges of the opening. They carefully make their way down to the floor below, which is a lot farther down than they anticipated. However, their efforts are rewarded when they finally make it into the corridor below.

Thanks to the lack of light, they only have the light from their flashlights to guide them. After checking the corridor with their infrared visor, they can see the light from the heat source at the other end of the corridor.

Making their way down the long walkway, they finally reach what appears to be a laboratory of some sort. However, when they reach the source of the heat that led them all the way down here, they are horrified.

“What the fuck?” the two said in unison.

Inside a cryochamber in the center of the room is a human. He looks like he is around Fletcher’s age.

“Oh God, what have they done?” Dylan asked, not even bothering to mask his fear.

They know they can’t bring him out since they don’t have a spare suit, so they are forced to take the entire chamber.

“We don’t know how long the chamber will last without power, so we need to get the kid back to the ship as fast as possible.”

Thankfully, the chamber doesn’t weigh anything in the vacuum of space and their boots’ power doesn’t extend to anything they carry. As such, it is a simple effort to bring the chamber back to the edge of the station. After some careful maneuvering, they are able to bring the chamber up to the corridor above the lab.

Dylan turns on his crew-wide radio. “We’ve got a human in a cryochamber here. I need everyone to get back to the ship as soon as possible. Ignore everything else. The kid is our top priority.”

The rest of the crew catches up quickly back to where they entered the space station. Each person grabs on to a part of the chamber, and they all make their way out of the station and toward the ship waiting in the distance.

Dylan knew he shouldn’t have expected the return journey to the ship to be easy. As they get to the point of being a few hundred feet out from the ship, a piece of debris smashes a hole into the chamber.

“Shit! Someone use their repair kit to block the hole,” Dylan said.

“Sir, the hole is too big for a repair kit to do any good.”

Dylan curses internally and tries to think of something he could do. “I’ll put my body against the hole and hope for the best.”

“But sir, your suit is going to get torn up by the glass!”

“It’s okay. We just need to get the kid safe.”

Dylan puts his body over the chamber, and the hole is mostly closed. There is just a small amount of liquid dripping out.

“This isn’t going to last long. We need to get back to the ship.”

When they get back to the ship, the chamber has lost a lot of its fluid that was holding the human in stasis. They don’t know how long, if at all, he was breathing in the vacuum.

As the airlock door to the inside of the ship opens, the crew medic, Julia, rushes in.

“I need you to take him into the infirmary. I’ll see what I can do. We need to get him inoculated as quickly as possible before doing anything else with him first. The last thing we need is for him to die from some disease he doesn't have immunity to.”

Dylan rushes to the infirmary carrying the kid over to the bed. In no time, Julia has him hooked up to an IV drip and vaccinated. Dylan's eyes start to droop as he sits down in an empty chair and waits for the kid to wake up.