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The young mouse sat in the corner of the room, nibbling on the bread crust Chester had left out for it. It was skittish and initially bolted the instant it saw Chester. Over the last few days, however, as Chester continued to leave bits of food out in the same spot, it stopped running away and began to stay and eat the food. Each day, Chester sat in his chair, watching the rodent. And each day his chair was a little bit closer to the mouse.

“How many of you are there in the colony?” Chester mused out loud.

Talking to himself was the other main strategy he employed in getting the mouse to become comfortable with him there in the room.

“I guess the trash piles make for pretty good homes for you, too.”

He wondered if the first mice had been brought as part of some experiment, or maybe as pets.

“Either way, you got out of your cages and now…well now you’re probably a major annoyance for the colony.”

The mouse continued to ignore Chester, only pausing now and then to look around the room before returning to its meal. Chester had to laugh a little at the mouse as it ate. They really were cute, in their own way. Tiny heads with relatively large eyes that looked more like dark ball bearings. Twitching ears that followed any passing sound, making sure it wasn’t a threat.

“I wonder if there’s any predators in the colony. Anyone with a cat, maybe?”

There had to be something keeping the mouse population in check, unless they were a recent addition to the colony’s ecosystem. Though, they did have a tendency of finding critical systems and then chewing their wires apart. Every decade or so it seemed a ship or outpost suffered a critical failure because of these kinds of creatures getting into places they weren’t supposed to be in.

Chester leaned forward ever so slowly, a bowl held in his hand over the mouse. Just before he brought it down, however, the mouse bolted away, leaving the rest of the crust behind. It ducked into the small hole in the wall was gone.

“Almost,” Chester sighed and set the bowl down.

He turned back to his desk and to what he’d been working on before noticing the mouse’s return; a tiny set of syringes, perfectly sized for a rodent, connected to a pressurized reservoir. The reservoir was empty currently, but Chester had set some plans into motion that, if successful, would soon provide him with the chemicals he needed to begin formulating neural gel.

“Update, Vinay?” Chester asked over the neural connection.

After a moment, he heard Vinay’s voice responding in his mind.

“Bio-electric dampeners are secured,” he said, “and I’ve found where the chemicals are stored.”

“Excellent,” Chester smiled as he continued to work on the tiny injectors. “Can you get to the chemicals?”

“Unfortunately, the valves on the tanks are all one-way so we can’t pump anything out of them,” Vinay replied. “They don’t even have emergency release valves, from what I could see. We can either steal from an incoming shipment, or install our own tap.”

Neither of those solutions would be easy but there didn’t seem to be much else he could about that.

“Let’s find out how closely they monitor the chemical vats before we try tapping any of them,” Chester said all of his drones. “Any idea on how accurate their volume meters are?”

No one responded which meant none of them knew.

“That’s going to be our best bet since it’s going to be a while still before the port reopens so try and focus on that issue,” he ordered them.

One by one they sent in their confirmations that his instructions had been received. It had been a while since any of the drones had resisted him and that was both comforting and concerning. It was nice not to have to work so hard to keep them under his control, but the fact that he still hadn’t figured out what had been going on or where their secondary implants were bothered him. It could have been something that Jezah had been doing, and once she was dead they all went back to normal. Or, it might be that his current goals aligned closely enough with their own that there was no reason for them to resist him.

“Chester,” Lyon’s voice spoke in Chester’s mind, “They’re about to check on you.”

Chester nodded and he carefully put away everything that was on his desk into the hidden compartment he’d made in the wall behind his bed. Then he lay down as if he were asleep. A few minutes passed and all the while he was careful to keep his breathing slow and his body relaxed.

The hab was, of course, monitored by lunar security but Lyon had quickly found a way to provide Chester with some privacy. Each day Lyon and Doreb pulled clips of Chester behaving normally and then replayed those throughout the following day whenever no one was actively watching him. Then, when the hab came up for official review, they would warn Chester so he could conceal anything he didn’t want security to see. Once the review was over, Chester could simply go back to what he was doing.

A knock sounded on the hab door. Chester waited until the knock came again to ‘wake up’ and answer the door.

“What took you so long?” the security officer asked as soon as the door was opened.

“I was asleep,” Chester said while stifling a yawn that was only partially fake.

“It’s the middle of the day,” frowned the officer.

“I work the night shift,” Chester said, “with maintenance.”

The officer paused, checking his records, before responding.

“Right,” he said, “well we’re here for an inspection.”

“Fine, fine,” Chester stepped back and waved for them to come in.

They did this every day and it was a familiar, if annoying, interruption to his day. He knew they could have picked a time when he was supposed to be awake but it wasn’t that hard for him to just shift his own schedule a bit more to be awake and working in the hab when they thought he was sleeping. Then he could actually sleep the rest of the time since they tended to leave him alone during those hours.

Chester sat down in a chair and waited for the search to be completed. The security officers weren’t trained for this sort of work so they weren’t very good at it. They were use to stopping fights, standing guard, and not much else. That didn’t mean that Chester wasn’t very careful with how and where he hid his contraband. Just one slip up and he could be in very real trouble.

“How long have you all been on the moon?” Chester asked.

He liked to make small talk with the security forces whenever they came over. It helped pass the time and kept them a bit more distracted. It also didn’t hurt to make a few friends, if possible.

Their responses ranged from a few months to a few years. He didn’t ask them why they chose the moon. Lyon had already explained why no one ever chose to work security on the moon. Instead, Chester asked about mundane things.

How often did they get time off? What did they do for entertainment? Was it worth it to pay for a walking tour of the lunar surface? And so on. All harmless questions that they were all too happy to answer while they looked inside of cupboards and drawers. It was also helpful information, too, since he found out that certain patrols were still getting their weekly day off while others had lost their day off to make up for those who’d died in the port fire. He also found out that most of the security forces preferred to avoid the main populace during their off hours and didn’t do anything in particular for their own entertainment. They just went home and didn’t do much else.

They finished their inspection and left after only fifteen minutes or so. They were getting quicker at this which was good for Chester. It meant they were getting bored of it and weren’t seeing him as a real threat. The first couple of searches had been hour long affairs and hardly anyone would speak to him. Now, they weren’t exactly friendly but they spoke to him and only searched his rooms halfheartedly.

“Lyon, Doreb,” Chester said as soon as the security officers were gone, “I want you two to start inviting a few of the other officers over to your quarters after your shift for a drink, or games, or something. Start building rapport with as many of them as you can.”

“Understood,” both men replied.

Chester didn’t have a specific idea in mind for what he might do with such connections, but the more he thought about it, the more he figured it would only benefit him to have more allies. In fact…

“I want everyone to begin making friends with those you work with,” Chester told all of his drones. “Don’t force it or anything, but if you have an opportunity to make a friend, find a lover, anything like that, do it.”

He waited a moment and then their confirmation began to come in. If anything, it would make it easier to begin making more drones, though he wanted to keep that to a minimum. He couldn’t have too many more drones without needing a new intermediary drone to help manage the neural input and that would require making multiple types of neural gel and it would be tricky enough just to assemble the equipment and chemicals needed to make one.

“One thing at a time,” he told himself as he pulled out the tiny injectors from their hiding place and returned to his desk to work on them. “One thing at a time.”

He heard a slight skittering sound and looked over to see the mouse had returned and was munching away once again on the crust of bread.

Slowly, even more slowly than before, Chester lifted the bowl and leaned over the mouse. Initially he was going to slam it down over the creature but instead he just continued his slow and steady motion until the bowl was mere inches above the mouse. Then he brought it down quickly and had the mouse trapped. He smiled as he heard the scratching and squeaking from inside the bowl.

“Yes,” he whispered to himself, reaching under the bowl and grabbing the mouse. “One thing at a time.”