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The night passed and after hours of dirty labor, searching for remains, the end of the shift arrived. They were far from complete with the task of finding all of the bodies, and once that was done they’d have to begin cleaning the mess up and repairing the damage done by the explosions and subsequent fire.

They were a quiet group as they walked back down the passageway and away from the port. Most conversations had stopped after the incident with H’lay. Once out, they handed their gloves and respirators back to the manager and that was that. He waved them all off, saying he’d handle the reports for their night’s work himself.

“Just get some sleep and be back here ready to work again in sixteen hours,” he said wearily.

He and the others from the night shift were filthy. Covered in ash and soot, only their faces and hands were clean, thanks to the meager gear they’d been given. The first thing he was going to do once he got back to the hab was get himself cleaned up.

Silently, Chester made his way back through the colony. The rest of the colony was starting to wake up and the first of the morning crews were beginning their daily labor.

“Cleaning up the port?” a woman called over to Chester as he walked by,

“Trying to,” Chester gave her a weak smile.

“Well don’t take too long,” she said, though not unkindly. “Gotta have the port open for supply ships.”

He nodded but kept on walking. Her comment made him wonder, though, just how long the colony could go without a resupply. He hadn’t seen any sign of greenhouses or the like for growing their own food, and livestock took up too much space to be feasible here.

“Anyone know anything about the supply situation here?” Chester asked over the neural connection.

He could only feel a few awake minds but it didn’t hurt to ask.

“Check with Vinay when he wakes up,” Pald replied. “He said something about being assigned to work in the depot.”

That could be useful, Chester thought to himself. With Vinay there he could have easy access to any materials the lunar colony had. Assuming, of course, that he could get around lunar security which was, currently, stretched thin after loosing a significant portion of their forces in the port fire.

Both Lyon and Doreb were asleep for the moment but Chester sent them instructions for when they awoke to begin finding out what they could about security patrols, surveillance, and any weaknesses they could exploit. The depot would certainly be a high priority location to keep secure, but as Chester had learned as a child, security took a number of different forms and not all of them were as effective.

If the depot, for instance, was guarded against attack but had little preventing someone on the inside from simply pocketing things, then Vinay could take whatever he wanted. If they were more careful about what was pulled off the shelves, requiring some form of documentation, then it became a matter of figuring out what, if any, vulnerabilities there were around that process of gaining clearance to write the requisition forms.

“I’ve been assigned to engineering,” Pald said without needing to be prompted. “Since all the port engineers were killed in the fire, they’re desperate for people with my training. Once you’re finished cleaning it up, I’m suppose to begin repairing the kill boxes. From what I’ve been able to find out, they’re just interchangeable wall panels so I’d guess they have at least a few bio-electric dampeners in the depot.”

“That’s excellent news,” Chester replied and added that to Vinay’s list of things to look for. “Anyone find out about their chemical stores?”

“Siffronia might,” Pald said, “she got assigned to mineral refining, but she’s still asleep.”

Chester’s excitement was such that he sent the instruction for Siffronia to wake up. It took a minute or so for her to be fully aware but as soon as her neural connection was stable he asked her about what she’d found out.

“All of the base chemicals you need are available,” she told him. “But no one has access to them. They’re all mixed, processed, and delivered automatically, and even when we’re working with them, it’s in huge batches of minerals. By the time I could reach in and take some it’s already polluted by the refining process.”

“Where are the chemical’s stored?” Chester asked.

“Not sure. Everything is just piped into the refinery from someplace else.”

“Alright,” Chester mused. “If it comes down to it we can just tap directly into their piping.”

That still left him with needing to find a way to process the neural gel as well as injecting it. The medical facilities were probably his best bet, but none of his drones had been assigned there and it wasn’t as though cranial injectors were all that commonplace to begin with. It wouldn’t surprise him at all if the colony medical facilities didn’t have one.

“Well,” he thought to himself, “the first necrologists didn’t have them either. If they found a way to get neural gel into the brain without a cranial injector, so can I.”