Deck One - Medical Suite.

The dying breath of a broken alarm wheezed down the dark halls of the station. I coughed and forced my eyes open. Blood red light hit them like ground glass and I forced myself to my feet. Blood dripped down from a gash in my forehead. I was in a sterile room with a single reclining chair at the center. A dozen spidery mechanical limbs surrounded the chair, each one tipped with a variety of pincers, scalpels and syringes. A medical suite. A small table was bolted to the floor next to the chair. Blood stained the corner of the corner table. It probably explained the cut on my forehead.

I staggered to the chair and sat down heavily. Just a few steps took all the energy I had.

“What the hell happened?” I said. My throat was raw and so dry it felt like I'd eaten about four pounds of sand.

A soft masculine voice rolled out of the surgery bot. “System error. Please contact an engineer to have this unit recalibrated.”

“It, uh, it looks like I fell. And I don't remember how I got here. Can you help?”

“System error. Please contact an engineer to have this unit recalibrated.”

I gingerly pressed two fingers to my forehead. Dried blood crusted the edges of the wound. “Can you do stitches?”

“System error—”

Typical. Nothing here ever worked when you wanted it to. Half the damned station was held together by duct tape and hope. I shouldn’t have expected the medi-bot to work. I shouldn’t have expected it to help me. No one was ever there to help me. It was too bad the whole place wouldn't just blow up and take me with it. I grabbed the nearest servo arm and tore it from its mounting. “Shut up.” I stood shakily and swung the arm at the machine.

A high pitched whine rang in my ears and the blood red emergency lighting flickered and failed. The mewling alarm died with it, leaving me in total darkness with nothing to keep me company save for a severed robot arm. If the station had been damaged so long that even the emergency power had failed, everyone else had surely been evacuated a long time ago. No one was going to help me. No one was coming. No one was left.

I staggered towards the door and groped for a manual release, silently cursing the idiot who had built this damn place with flat black touchpads for every interface. So minimalist. So modern. So bloody useless when the power went out.

I found the release and the door slid open, spilling me out into a hallway just as black as the surgical suite. Panic grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and hauled me to my feet. Every instinct screamed at me to run, but sprinting blind down the hallway wasn’t going to get me anywhere. I steadied myself, putting my left hand on the smooth alloy of the wall. I shut my eyes, even though it didn’t make a difference, and forced myself to take a deep breath. I had to think. I had to remember. I was in space. I knew that much. On a space station where nothing ever worked right… and I knew that because I was a scientist. I worked here in the ass end of nowhere on … something. Nothing was clear. All the memories were disjointed and scrambled. It was like trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle by feel alone. Panic wasn’t going to help me. Running wasn’t going to help me; I had nowhere to run to. The station was three rings stacked on top of each other and rotating around a central core. I could run like hell and I’d only end up right here where I started. On top of that, it was a good three day’s burn from here to civilization. I wasn’t going anywhere without a ship.

That was a start at least. My mind was scrambled and scattered, but I knew who I was. My name was Sam. I was a scientist. I worked in space, and I needed a ship. That was enough.

This place had to have a map somewhere. I could find that. I opened my eyes, and took a careful step forward, still keeping one hand on the wall for balance. A white-blue light flickered in the distance, reflecting off a mirrored panel at the end of the corridor. That would help. I inched forward, my footsteps echoing in the chill silence. Shattered glass crunched underfoot. The rap of hard soles on the floor echoed behind me. I took another step and cleared the broken glass. The glass crunched behind me anyway. I was being followed. I spun, staring into the dark. The darkness froze. I knew that didn't make sense but it did. A wall of void black shimmered and roiled in front of me, icy and churning with patches of deeper darkness. It was nothing and it was everything. I reached for it. The darkness recoiled, but then lashed out with a scream that wasn't a scream. A sound that wasn't sound. The silent cries of a thousand people dying in hard vacuum.

I tripped and fell backwards, scrambling away from the darkness. It rolled after me, always inches from me but never touching me. Something at the back of my mind said it would be an incredibly bad idea to let this shit touch me.

I bumped into something. More debris. I rolled over the obstacle and pulled it over top of me. I waited for the darkness to come. And waited. And waited.

It never arrived.

I pushed the debris aside and found the source of the light I'd seen earlier. It was the ghostly glow of a wrist mounted display attached to a space suit. The debris wasn't debris at all. Panic struck me like lightning and I shoved the body away.

Hands trembling, I reached for the wrist display. It would have a map or at least a way to contact the rest of the crew. I scrolled through the crew roster. It tracked everyone on the station through bio- monitoring implants. The captain was dead, along with the chief medical officer, the entire engineering crew, the pilots. All dead. Every single person connected to this suit was dead.

And I was alone with whatever had killed them.