Once the production was finished we headed back down, Carolina changing into the suit that had been suspended by machine arms when we entered.

  She didn't bother to try to hide behind anything when changing, I kept my gaze forward towards the exit doors. No peep show for me... though I wondered if this planet had any porn available.

  Hey, a guy has needs.

  Carolina walked next to me by the hatch, twisting back and forth in her new suit.

  “Feels pretty sturdy, sturdier than what they normally give us for EVA.”

  “I bet what you had is similar to the emergency one I wore once. Felt tissue thin.”

  “Yeah... worked though.”

  “Mine did. I got sucked out a hole into space in one.”

  She blinked at me.

  “You what?!?”

  “Long story, pirates, some kindof missile called a vampire, and a broken crowbar were involved.”

  She kept staring at me, so I thought clicked the open button on the hatch in front of me.

  Which opened into an airlock.

  “I kindof expected a ramp or something.”

  “The ramp is on the other side. We wouldn't be able to use it on an airless planet otherwise.” Hook replied.

  “I really don't remember any of this in the design when we were doing the rework.”

  “My former self took your requests for the design and integrated them into a workable whole, given the constraints and other needs it foresaw.”

  “So it took my changes as more guidelines, and smoothed it all together to make it functional?”

  “Essentially. It is one of the things our software is quite efficient at doing.”

  “Good.” I said as the airlock finished cycling around us, and the next door opened, finally onto the open ramp I had been expecting.

  The first thing I noticed was the smell.

  Smoke, burnt plastic and scorched concrete hit my nostrils and I blinked as tears came to my eyes. I covered my mouth and nose with my hands and a screen popped up in my HUD, asking if I wanted to deploy the helmet. I thought clicked yes, and it deployed up my neck, dropping a see through visor over my face.

  I immediately turned to Carolina to see her doing the same, covering her mouth and nose, and stepped up behind her. She couldn't deploy her helmet with implants she didn't have, so I did it manually, pulling up the back part over her neck to the base of her skull, and this triggered the rest of the deployment.

  “Oh that's much better.” She turned and looked at me, giving me a smile.

  “Yeah, smells like they've had a lot of crashes around here... lets get to the terminal, see if we can convince someone to get us a hardline into their systems to try to clean them up.”

  We both walked down the ramp and surveyed the starport.

  It kindof looked like the runway of a giant airport, one big building leading out to a massive tarmac, only there appeared to be lots of large landing pads for a super sized helicoptor more than a runway, one of which I had landed on.

  Part of the terminal, or at least what I assumed was the terminal, was a tower, and I pointed to it.

  “Bet that's their... void traffic control? Space traffic control? We called it air traffic control back on earth but I assume things have changed.”

  “Eh, it can be any of those depending on the planet, we are not as monolithic as I'm sure earth was.”

  I snorted.

  “Earth wasn't monolithic at all, even in my country you had fifty states and a district, and they all had different opinions on things. Hell most states were also strongly divided on things. I can barely get my head around a whole planet agreeing on... well, anything.”

  “It's probably easier when people who disagree can just... go somewhere else.”

  “Fair.”I agreed.

  We reached the terminal and tried the doors, locked. I looked for a buzzer, but found a control panel. It fuzzed up with a keypad on screen, but kept distorting to static every few seconds.

  “Well that does not bode well.”I deadpanned.

  I reached out and touched the panel, and a new window popped up on my HUD.

  INTRUSION ATTEMPT DETECTED! INITIATE COUNTERMEASURES? Y/N

  I thought clicked y and a probe extended from my hand. I inserted it into what looked like a USB port that had evolved, shrunk, then grown, shrunk again, then wound up basically the same as we had back on earth.

  WARNING: ADVANCED MALWARE DETECTED. HEIGHTENED COUNTERMEASURES REQUIRED. ALLOW ACCESS TO USER IMPLANTS AND NEURAL SYSTEMS? Y/N

  I thought-clicked yes. That's why we were here after all.

  There was a loud K-CHUNK In my suit and I felt something slide into the port at the back of my neck.

  I felt myself go slack in my suit, and panicked for a second.

  It was very similar to sitting in the helm and fully synchronizing, but somehow more terrifying.

  I could still see through my eyes, but I couldn't move them, my body was still upright, but it was only being held in place by the suits servos.

  At the same time I could feel things probing at my mind, trying to send commands to my suit to crank the thermostat, to amp up the servos and twist my body in directions it was never meant to twist...

  This virus was nasty.

  But it couldn't find any purchase in my mind. I felt a twinge here and there, it felt like it was trying to send commands into my brain through the interface, but it felt like little more than a tickle.

  I attempted to frame jack myself up like I did in the ship, but I could only manage a 10x reference frame increase. Still fast, but nowhere near the reference frame I could reach in the ship. Likely due to hardware limitations.

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  I could feel my own counter intrusion software working. This node I was accessing, the little USB port, didn't have access privileges to the rest of the airport, so I couldn't just magically clear the virus from everything, but I was able to 1: shut off it's connection to the rest of the facility, locked with a long code that would take, at least with the computers of my time, several billion years to crack via brute force attacks, and 2: Now that it was shut off I was able to flush the infected code out with the built in anti-malware suite in the suit.

  Or at least I was able to try.

  I had multiple windows popping up in my hud, both raw code and more visual representations of the infected sections of the code in the machine ahead of me. I had several counter intrusion programs I could run and try to input, but I was limited both by the onboard hardware of the suit I was in and by the bandwidth of my little USB cable, which while substantial, was not infinite.

  I didn't know much about hacking, but my suit seemed to, and I followed most of it's recommendations.

  Most, not all.

  A few times an alert asking for permission to communicate with and utilize the resources in other parts of my suit popped up, this was about the point I began feeling things trying to reach through my brain. Even without the brain feel it was suspicious, so I denied access.

  The Virus was smart, it was attacking at all angles.

  And unlike virus' back home that just wanted your account details or social identification number, this one wanted to kill me.

  I wonder if all this counter intrusion software was standard or if Hook loaded it in knowing what we were going to do...

  The door popped open, and I both frame-jacked down to normal and disconnected my suit from my implant.

  I blinked my eyes, that were now dry as hell from being open this whole time, and found myself looking at Carolina's face.

  “...you okay?” The last of her most recent sentence finally reached my ears. While I had been linked to my suit I hadn't heard her, my suit didn't have any audio receptors and I had honestly been too busy.

  “Hmm? Sorry, I was fighting with the keypad.”

  “Fighting? You looked like you did when you plugged into the... Ah, your suit has one of those jacks and you plugged in didn't you.”

  “Yep... didn't know that till I clicked yes and all of a sudden I was in full synch. Thought I was going to fall over but the suit kept me upright.”

  “Damn! We might not have to run a cable from the ship if you can just do it in your suit.”

  I shook my head no.

  “The hardware in here is really limited, I could barely hack this thing, I have no idea what I am going to do about...” I spread my arms wide to encompass everything.

  “Could I take a look at the hardware in your suit? Bet we could put together a pretty impressive hacking rig for you if we added some processing power.” Carolina added, thughtful.

  Right... Engineer.

  “I mean sure. Later though.”

  In fact, my 'encounter suit' was already feeling pretty toasty, no sooner had I thought that then an A/C popup jumped up on my hud.

  I of course maxed it out.

  “Well, let's see what things are like inside shall we?”I said.

  I touched the panel and it immediately went green, followed by a loud mechanical click from the door that allowed it to be swung open.

  It was surprisingly low-tech, I had expected an automatic door.

  “Quaint... but I guess it does make it easier in emergency situations like this.” Carolina commented.

  “I was just thinking similar, even back on earth most doors in a big place like this were automatic, at least with an assist for disabled people.”

  I eyed the doors, which were quite big, I had to take several steps to fully open it before putting the kickstand down.

  “I think they might be drone or robot operated...” Carolina said, pointing to what looked like several specialised grips or locks on both the inside and outside of the door.

  “Like, humanoid robots?”

  “Not necessarily androids, but like, weak ai driven helper bots yeah. We don't have many of them on the stations back home, everything is run by, you know, a person, but I have heard some planets love them.” Carolina said, scrutinizing the door and the environment around us. She looked extremely wary.

  My stomach lurched into free-fall.

  I looked out onto the tarmac.

  No people, but there were buggies, and tractors for luggage, and all kinds of vehicles. Vehicles that didn't really have seats, more like shelves where the operator would be.

  “Get inside.” kicking out the stand I had just put down to keep the door from shutting.

  Carolina looked at me quizzically.

  “Get inside!” I said, as a whirring sound caught the edge of my hearing from around the corner.

  Carolina hurried in the door, and I quickly pulled it shut.

  I reached the probe in my suit to the locking mechanism on the inside just as a mechanical hand slammed into the door.

  “YOU ARE IN DANGER! PLEASE COME WITH ME TO THE NEAREST AVAILABLE EMERGENCY SHELTER.” The voice from the robot penetrated the reinforced glass door and shook my bones.

  The robot that had blurred around the corner of the building and reached us in the time it took to close the door, which was still not a swift process, was boxy. It had a rectangular torso, that connected to a neck that appeared to allow it's head to swivel in all directions and lean back and forth without issue, bare metal everywhere but for what I assumed was the motor at the base of it's rectangular 'skull'. Capping it off was a square head with three camera's built in at different heights in non-uniform spots, all of different sizes. It's arms and legs were of similar construction to it's neck, bare metal joints save for wires leading to a covered object that I assumed was the motor for said joint. It's hands bore three fingers, that looked like that would be able to grasp something as small as, say, a cucumber, but not much smaller than that.

  I belatedly realized a human throat is bigger than a cucumber as I took in the blood covering it's hands.