"Ugh. Here's another one."

Seth grasped the edge of the doorway to stop his forward motion long enough to glance into the room. Kamala floated in the middle of the crew quarters, holding her ultratool in her upper-right hand and covering her nose and mouth with her upper-left. Near the wall, above one of the bunk beds, was yet another decaying corpse.

Seth shuddered and turned away. They'd been at it for over an hour, dividing into teams and spreading out through the ship, and all they'd found was one body after another, some human and some anthros of various species. Every now and then, they'd come across disabled mechs as well.

The air was saturated with the stench of rotting flesh.

"Nothing we can do for them now." He moved on down the corridor, not bothering to check any of the other doors or move his flashlight around as he caught up with Marissa, Hitomi, and Asuka. He'd seen more than enough, already. "Find anything?"

"More of the same." Marissa rubbed her bare arms and Seth hugged her.

"Some of them are so far gone, it's impossible to tell what killed them." Asuka shined her flashlight into another room, shook her head, and moved on to the next. "Others looked like something had chewed on them. Though I couldn't tell whether that happened before or after they died."

"Jesus Christ," Marissa grumbled. "Thanks for putting that in my head."

"Sorry, kiddo." Asuka shrugged. "I've been in varying sorts of police work for over sixty years, and in that time I've seen people killed in more horrible ways than I can count. After a while, you get used to it, or you lose your fucking mind."

"Unless getting used to it is the same thing as losing your mind," Hitomi said, prompting a chuckle from Asuka.

"A sexbot getting philosophical." She shrugged again. "Guess that's almost normal compared to recent events."

"I started out with very simple programming, but once I started installing new software to help deal with one crisis after another, I couldn't help evolving a little." Hitomi shrugged. "Then my boyfriend modified my software even further, so I'm much more now than I was a few months ago." She closed her eyes and ran a hand through her hair. "That's one of the reasons I miss him so much. He helped me 'awaken.'"

"We know how you feel." Marissa patted Hitomi's shoulder. "Seth and I fell in love with your guy's sister, so … yeah." She squeezed her eyes shut and held her breath for a few seconds.

"She's okay." Seth put his arms around her and rubbed her back. "Everyone we know back home is okay. We've got to believe that."

"I want to. But something cut off a huge piece of the station."

"Take it easy." Asuka smiled. "That place was built with multiple failsafe systems. Losing a big chunk of its mass would throw the rest of it off-balance, but its centrifuges stop rotating automatically when something catastrophic happens. And it's got thrusters all over the hull to prevent it from deorbiting."

The soft click of claws on the wall drew Seth's attention and he looked over his shoulder. Kamala was pulling herself toward them, waving her ultratool around. Roger followed close behind her.

"I'm still not detecting any life signs." She sucked in a quick breath, almost let it out in a sob, but reigned herself in.

"We scanned a few of the bodies," Roger said softly. "The ones that hadn't already rotted away, that is. Some of them had teeth marks on them, others appeared to be partially eaten."

Marissa shuddered again, and Seth gave her hand a squeeze.

"At least that's better than a plague. Because if it were that, we'd all be exposed by now." He kissed her forehead. "And if we're lucky, whatever chewed on them died a long time ago."

She nodded but didn't look reassured. "So, uh … what kind of ship do you think this is? I didn't recognize any of the uniforms, but a lot of them looked sort of military."

"Last time Omega reported in," Asuka said, tugging on a door frame to propel herself forward, "he said he saw some people in lab coats and 'sciencey'-looking garb. So it could be a military ship with a small research staff or a science or exploration ship with military support."

"Since the design is sort of a more advanced version of the ship being built along with the jumpgate," Kamala said, "it might be an explorer ship."

Seth almost smiled. "If that's what it is, I wonder what kinds of things they found out here."

"It's starting to look like one of the things they found ended up killing them all." Asuka peeked into another room, grimaced, and kept drifting forward. She cocked her head, smiled, and glanced over her shoulder. "Just got a message from Omega on my comm implant. His team has reached the medical bay. If we can restore the ship's power, they might find records that'll tell us what happened to the crew."

"Restoring power," Marissa said under her breath. "That'd be good. Thaw this place out."

"Yeah." Seth managed to chuckle. "It's so cold in here, my nipples are like pencil erasers."

She snickered but reverted quickly to her previous morose state. "Asuka, can we skip the rest of the corpses and head straight for Engineering?"

"Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. Okay, let's haul ass. The sooner we can get the power and heat turned on, the sooner we can move on to other critical needs -- like food and water."

Oh, lovely. Seth sighed. Survive all this shit only to die from starvation or dehydration -- or get gnawed to death by some horrifying space critter. That'd be the perfect end to a day like today.