Breach of Conduct

As she hung the rifle and belt on the mounts in the next bunk, she decided it was interesting enough to make a day out of. Maybe she could kill time trying to figure out a riddle without looking up the answer. There was usually an index to these things somewhere for reference.

The comm came to life again, this time clearer. The rilo returned to the main room and took a headset from its store hook. Listening in, she dialed the volume up almost to maximum.

Panting. That was it. It was nothing but heavy, sustained panting.

She looked back at the comm board and confirmed that this was a narrownet broadcast from Private Taroth. He must have left his mic on trying to transmit his location to someone. She looked back through the channel log from him and found widely-spaced reports confirming drone pad functionality and dust clearing procedures. The last one had been over eleven hours ago, closing in on twelve now.

It started to make sense to her now. He'd been part of the previous squad and left to his own devices for whatever reason. She checked the weather. Ah, there it is. West of the station, the storm moving east had grown almost three times in size since she'd last checked in on its progress a day ago. It was going to last a few weeks at least.

Based on that, she put the shortlist of facts together. Late, but not missing squad member. Extra food in storage. Their impatient, hurried departure. They'd left him enough food to survive on and then bounced so they wouldn't have to be cooped up here for the next month with a rilo. Her lips pulled back further than their usual, slightly-parted symmetry. Of course; you're a big, smelly alien and all these humans have no fucking interest in talking to you for more than three seconds.

She idly tuned back in to the panting still coming across the headset. Triangulating the signal, the station comm display pinned a small green dot on the geomap being refreshed on the wall. Old technology, an actual plasma light display from when Destrec was first colonized and this station was regularly used as a resupply depot for suborbital traffic.

The wall-mounted screen vibrated almost imperceptibly, marking out a vector from Private Enn's current position that intersected the fueling station. Taga shut the screen down and continued about her business unpacking and cleaning up. It still smelled like they hadn't had a fresh air exchange in a few weeks, probably due to lack of desire to clean out the filters, a painstaking process of removing magnetized microfilament air filters and combing them with a special set of tools that held functional charge for about eighty seconds at a time.

The whole cleaning process took the better part of six hours and,to maintain full functionality, needed to be done after every moderately-windy storm. Which was virtually all of them.

No wonder the place still smelled like human. Taga keyed the fresh air regulator to check just how badly the dust filters needed changing. Two of them read nonfunctioning. Two functioned, but the system recommended cleaning. The last one, the reserve, was showing it was optimally clean.

Well, at least they didn't leave everything a complete shitfest.

Getting to work on the storage lockers, Taga started taking inventory like regulation said she was supposed to. The handheld said the last inventory had been done a hundred and seventy two days ago with two units of stimulants dispensed in that time. She scrolled down the inventory list to see what kind of task she was getting into. After the eighth page of item codes, she gave up. Great, she thought. Here's to spending the entire day looking at numbers. With Private Taroth's steady panting keeping her company like a virtual metronome, she started her thankless task.

An hour later, the door chimed for entry.

Taga whipped her head around and peered into the growing strip of laser-bright light made by the parting halves of the front door. In from the impenetrable sunlight stumbled an armored figure in dark grey, angular features covered in a fine layer of dust.

The metronome in Taga's ears came to an abrupt conclusion as its source's body halted in front of her. Well, mostly halted. Upon entry, the armored human figure slowed to a shuffle and started to remove his e-suit with heavy, slow movements.

Off came his helmet, dropped at his side like a child's discarded toy. His hoarse voice carried across the twenty-meter room as he struggled with both gloves, unlocking them and tossing one, then the other, down to the floor like their partner just before.

Still moving, Private Enn managed to part the security panels on the front of his suit and then unzip the interlocking magnetic teeth that kept it sealed. The interior membrane retreated as he shrugged his shoulders out of it, gleaming with a fresh sheen of sweat.

He was naked by the time he reached the cold storage room and keyed the access code. He shut the door in his wake without so much as a glance in Taga's direction.

What in-

The smell suddenly hit her with full force. Rilo were used to the smells of other races; they picked up on that pretty easily, having originated on a world where catching scents on an errant breeze once meant the difference between starving and living long enough to breed.

Sensitive as she was to odors of all kinds, this was particularly intense. He must have been in the suit for over a day, hot and recycling his own fluids for water. It smelled sour and musky, stinging a place behind her eyes as she cut her breath short.

Grabbing a washcloth from the shower, she held it to her face to mute some of the smell, tossing the e-suit's discarded pieces into the washroom. He can deal with that himself when he's out of the cold box, she thought with some annoyance. She turned the air filtration on and listened to it start sucking out the human's scent and blowing mostly-filtered air in from outside.

Warm and dry was marginally better than whatever smell this alien was putting off. No doubt the cold storage room was going to need some superficial cleaning to get his smell off everything. Whatever he was sitting on in there was probably going to need to sandblasting to get the smell off. If his clothes were this bad, then actual contact with him must be an order of magnitude worse.

She waited about half an hour for him to come out.

When he did emerge, he was cradling a purified water canister in his hands, shivering all over. Little pinpricks of skin stood up all over his body, like thousands of needle marks rising to like in unison. His hair had followed suit, standing straight up and fleshing in waves as he trembled from too much enthusiasm for the cold box.

He walked aimlessly forward as the door swung slowly shut behind him on a pressure piston. Taking a long drag of cold water, he shivered violently. His face turned into what she believed was an expression of relief. Odd, given that humans didn't generally like to almost freeze on a regular basis. But then again, she didn't spend much time interacting with them. Maybe this was how they liked it? From one extreme to the other?

"You alright?"

He nearly threw his canister into the air.

The water certainly went flying, thrown with enough force to get it to the ceiling in a liquid heap. Somewhere in his consciousness though, there was the immediate reaction of someone who had a career in the military. Even naked, his right hand was at his waist, reaching for a gun that wasn't there.

Water came down on his head and he hissed sharply through his teeth in surprise. "Fuck lady, you scared the shit out of me."

Taga smirked, pulling one side of her mouth back to reveal two interlocking rows of blunted fangs. "Says the human who staggers in in full enviro-gear without even saying he's dropping by."

Collecting himself, Enn managed to set his empty water canister down and lean on the table for support with both hands. His shoulders hunched back from the strain of support, a sheen of perspiration still clinging to his body like an oily second skin.

"I thought I was gonna die out there. I just beat the second storm back in." He stood up and took a deep breath, holding it as his body shook again, less violently than before. He let it out slowly, reaching for a point of calm somewhere inside himself. She waited. "Sorry about all that. Kind of a dramatic entrance, I guess."

Taga nodded, still amused. "Kind of dramatic?"

He gave a sigh in mock resignation. "You want me to start quoting poetry and make it very dramatic?"

Taga held up the little book still held in her off hand. "What, like the stuff in here? About jacknet static and missing a home between the stars?"

If humans could turn a better shade of red, Taga in her seventy-two standard years had yet to come across it. Enn's face lit up like a significantly irritated pressure warning strobe. It took the rilo a few seconds to understand what the look on his face meant when combined with the sudden darkening in his features.

Embarrassment.

"Yeah, I guess that kind," he admitted.

The rilo scoffed. "What, the book was too much but your dick hanging out wasn't?" She tossed the book to him and he almost dropped it as it slapped against his bare chest.

He scrambled to cover himself with the meager benefit of something to hold, but it didn't help much.

His face went even redder.

Taga just laughed.

------------ Enn Taroth, on Destrec, in orbit around Mi Kho ------------

Taga finally stopped laughing at him once he got both of them some purified water from the cold box. She settled back onto the sofa meant to accommodate for her large, two-and-a-half-meter stature. Even with its excessive length, she appeared to take up too much of it to be comfortable. Her back legs dangled off the end of the sofa like two unfolded robotics arms with splayed digits each, waiting for a command.

Rilo had a strange biological architecture compared to most other species. While they resembled reptilians in several ways -- narrow nose slits, soft, scaly skin, textured hands and fingers, fanged teeth, no external ears -- they had their own biological architecture otherwise. Their upper body was like that of an armored snake, but with shoulders that tapered up to the neck and an upside-down teardrop shaped head. Their lower body had two sets of legs, a stronger pair at the junction of their upper and lower halves, and a pair that generally remained folded beneath them in the rear.

Taga, the rilo, appeared to have noticed he was staring at her.

"You like what you see, human?"

He shrugged, having lost nearly all of the wild embarrassment from a few minutes earlier. "I've only ever seen a rilo up close once before. And that was back on Inrids."

"Inrids a busy place?" Taga ventured.

Enn nodded slightly. "Yeah, lotta big cities. Mostly Telkei and Niburanan. Someone said there's a rilo district somewhere in Genakke Shushum, but I only ever saw the one the whole time we were there."

"Well, I've seen plenty of humans." She gave him a once-over with two large blue eyes lacking pupils. "Nothing remarkable in front of me today, though."

"Well, let me hydrate some and get some color back in these cheeks and you'll be singing a different tune."

She twisted her mouth up, revealing teeth in a predatory way. "I've already seen you as red as human get. You turn other colors too?"

"Ah, shit. You caught me." He grinned and leaned back in his chair. It adjusted slightly to meet the angle he demanded. Looking around the room, he realized they were the only two people here. "So, they send you up here alone every time or what?"

The rilo made a gesture with one hand he didn't recognize. "It's my first time here. Rilo are adapted for desert survival, so I think they figured I could handle it by myself."

"That's a rough post by yourself. Five of us and we still got bored off our asses."

The wind outside picked up and the air filter warning buzzed in its low tone that at least one of the filters was unusable. Taga moved to get up, but Enn held out a hand and she stopped where she was, half-raised. The human navigated through his notepad's link with the central computer and acknowledged the warning remotely. It fell appreciably silent a second later.

"You're gonna have to show me how to do that. It goes off close to every other hour."

"I'll hook it up for you later. It must really be bad out there if the filter's getting dusted while everything's closed up. Gonna be a lot of smells in here after a few days."

"There's an unused filter on standby," Taga noted matter-of-factly. "The spare."

Enn arched a brow. "What, number five? Sensor's busted. Filter has a giant hole in the middle big enough for me to crawl through."

"What? The..." She hauled herself to her feet and moved to the central computer display. Both hands worked through the menus to the filter sensors and she double tapped the spare. Everything read all clear. Yeah, we made the same mistake too.

"Says it's clear, right? If you run it you'll start spraying sand everywhere about twenty seconds after the fans kick on." He added, "Which I'd rather not go through twice if it's all the same to you."

Taga returned to the couch, falling into it this time with a defeated lack of grace. "So we've got two filters to last us the whole time. Fucking perfect," she droned sardonically.

"If there's a break in the storm, we could probably run the deep cleaning function one. How bad are the two we've got now?"

The rilo held her two far fingers a few centimeters apart. "Bout this close to shitting out on us. Your friends didn't clean shit before they left. They didn't even do an exit inventory."

"They didn't note any of it in the log? I thought we kept up with all of that for the next crew." Enn logged into the local datanet and pulled up their status log. Everything was still there. "It's all still here. You didn't look at it first?"

"I checked the station log as soon as I got here because your friends bailed so fast. Nothing but the refuel and weather update and the two stims."

Enn shook his head. "No, the next squad's to-do list always goes in the status log. The station log is just for stuff that happens. Log in and give it a look."

She did with some skepticism and then cursed under her breath as she found the log with its full contents waiting patiently for her perusal. "You gotta be fucking me; I just spent three hours doing inventory instead of cleaning. Fuuuck this place is gonna smell so bad for a quarter cycle."

"Well, we can at least use the handhelds if they all end up dusted. It'll take forever, but it beats having to crack a window."

Neither of them enjoyed the prospect of using a device with a magnetic field range of nine centimeters across to clean a surface area of over twenty square meters. It already took six hours with something ten times larger and far more powerful. And the handhelds were generally uncooperative after a few hours of use. What a backwards-ass system. Who the fuck came up with this anyway?

He couldn't be completely critical though. A system that all but self-regulated and repaired, on top of using the minutia of electrostatic discharges between fine particles to power the station's batteries, was pretty ingenious. The only real gripe with the technology was that there was no substitute for actually cleaning it. For whatever reason, it either wouldn't or couldn't self-clean without being deployed outside. The storm outside was bad enough to necessitate cleaning the filters via handhelds, which was extremely tedious.

Something about too many moving parts as it was. Either way, they were in for a long and very tedious few days getting even one of these filters into working order. And as much as they could ignore it in the meantime, they required fresh air exchange eventually. Sealed up as it was, the fueling station was as airtight as a starship. The only way to affect air exchange was to open the exterior doors or use the air system.

Enn pushed the thought from his head and rubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. He was still exhausted from the trek home, but cooling off and getting some water in his body truly made the difference. At least now he didn't feel like death. His head was still pounding like someone had thrown a rock at it, but the discomfort was manageable. He was alive, comfortably so, and out of what looked like week-long storm in the making.

"Hey, how big is this thing anyway? Eight, nine days? I never looked back to see."

"What? You were out there for at least an hour and you didn't see the giant sandstorm chasing you here? It must have been big enough to block out the sun when you got here!"

"Hey, they taught us in Ground Intro that looking back is a waste of time and energy when you're trying to get the fuck out of a blast zone. I was trying not to have a heatstroke."

"But not outrun the storm."

"Fuck the storm; I thought my heart was gonna explode out there. I couldn't even see when I got here; thank fuck the suit has voice commands or I'd probably be dead out there on the slab."

Taga grabbed her notepad off the nearby table with a long arm and managed to bring up the weather coverage and geographic overlay with some effort. The signal was jerky, updating bits and pieces of the image as bits and pieces were lost due to electrical interference. Even laser communication was strained when things got rough here.

Okay, that is way worse than I thought it was going to be. Enn watched the display with a skeptic's eye as the bloom of dust and sand stretched twice as far as he thought it would. Probably a fifth of the continent was caught up in it. Rocanto lay in its path, inevitably preparing to use the subterranean shuttle and roadways in the meantime. Things would function nominally there, no matter how long the storm lasted.

But here at station 2, things were a little less hopeful. By the look of it, the storm was going to last forty days, at the least. Taga backed the image up and watched it play a few days worth of satellite footage. The storm collided with a twin coming up from the south and then the air surge blew away the tiny-in-comparison storm that Enn had been caught up in this morning.

The enormous air system dragged its way across the continent, eventually reaching their location. This was about as far as it had lumbered so far. They were on the hazy edge of the storm, almost dead center across its diameter. A short calculation from the computer estimated a hundred and ten days until things were clear.

Yay.

"Bummer, dude. Looks like you're stuck. They couldn't fly a starship into here without some badass geolocation software and a full spectral scanner." She thought for a moment. "And a fuckton of maneuvering thrusters."

"That's actually a problem."

The rilo looked at him curiously. "Why's that?"

"I don't have rations for even fifty days, let alone a hundred. Even if I stretched it out." At the realization that there was a point at which they'd run out of food, trapped in this station with no hope of resupply, a real sort of anxiety started to well up in him. He took a breath and stuffed the emotion down. He had an impressive record in survival exercises, even for soldiers far veteran to him.

They'd find something to make it work. If worse came to worst, he could trek all the way out to Near Marker and loot whatever the storehouse had for the drone pads.

Near Marker was about forty kilometers away though. Bad odds on that one. Something'll come up though, even if you do have to make that walk. You're smart. She's smart. You'll figure something out.