02/02/2022 Snippet, THE THING IN THE AIRLOCK.

A body!

Patreon!

They found the body in a broom closet (Tobias dimly remembered being surprised to find brooms on the moon, even if they did look more like mutated feather dusters). The smell was unfortunately quite describable, if you were willing to use the word ‘wretched’ early, and often. Plus, the corpse was oozing.

“How did we miss this?” Tobias asked West. The two of them were in light suits, the kind worn when you were a little worried about leaks but still had to move around easily. They had bubble helmets and could filter the air, and that was the important thing. “I thought we did a room-by-room search for suicides months ago.”

“We did. This is Corporal Shirley Oates,” West said. “She was alive and standing watch on Thursday.”

Corporal Oates was not reported missing, Asenath whispered. And biometric tracking remains offline. But even if the corpse has been here for three days, its decomposition is still unusually rapid.