“Man, this is going to take a lot of cleaning up.” Half of the workshop's internal database was dead, overwritten by corruption or simply too old to interpret. And the rest? Well, there wasn't any useful information in it aside from the old protocols, half-baked schematics, and some truly baffling log entries that suggested the workshop had been jury-rigged more than once by people with a deep hatred of OSHA regulations, whatever that meant.
There were scorch marks on the walls and cables dangling like synthetic vines from the ceiling, and at least three consoles had been opened up and hastily reassembled with what looked like a couple of melted spoons and epoxy resin, while the workshop permeated with the faint smell of ozone and old coolant, along with the rotting stench of several corpses belonging to a variety of animals.
For a moment, he had to thank God that he didn't have a nose and had only the sensors to pick up the scent that permeated the air, since after accidentally stumbling upon the dead body of a woman who was utterly and completely crushed by a lathe, her expression one of complete terror, as if her last moments before dying looked like she was trying to struggle out of the machine but was unsuccessful in doing so.
Unable to give the woman along with her fellow crewmates a proper burial, it just resorted to gathering them one by one and stacking them on top of each other into a pile before shutting their eyes and covering them with a blanket to conceal their bodies so it didn't have to see them. The woman was the only exception to this, though, since she couldn't be pulled out of the machine due to her arms, legs, and some of her waist being completely lodged in it, making it impossible to extract her without shredding what was left of her or causing the whole mechanism to collapse in on itself.
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"Ugh, finally.” With one last wheezing creak, the drone finished patching the auxiliary power conduit using a stripped wire, an old fuser coil, and what was possibly a bent fork. Its internal diagnostics gave it a solid “maybe” on stability, which, by current standards, was practically a gold star since the thing was supposed to power up one of the surviving terminals that it had desperately wanted to get into and use but couldn't really do so because of the lack of energy it had. It opened up the machine to activate it with a quick flicker, followed up by a hum, and then... static.
The drone smacked the side of the screen with its claw, which miraculously brought up a user interface into its view, albeit in a language it didn’t recognize much, but it decided that it would try to absorb it into its memory bank for any other potential future use.
“Great,” it muttered. “Now I speak half of a dead language.”
Still, half was better than none. A pulsing icon appeared in the upper corner of the screen, resembling a triangular warning sigil overlaid on a schematic. The drone tapped it with its claw, and the screen expanded to show a top-down map of the station’s lower levels. Several of the station sections blinked red, which was an obvious indicator to it that they were danger zones, while the others were completely blacked out, either due to a lack of power or a lack of maintenance that had all but rendered them useless and damaged beyond belief. Sighing in disappointment but still happy that it didn't leave empty-handed, it was about to close the user interface when suddenly a single corridor flashed yellow.
“The heck?”
Subsystem Tag: “Core Containment - Sublevel G9” Status: Power Fluctuating. Access: Restricted. Lifeform Detected.
Lifeform?
“Wait, wait, wait… that’s not a system alert. That’s a presence alert.” The drone’s optic glowed faintly brighter. “There’s someone else here.”