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“Lunar port, this is Joachim, captain of the supply ship Sea Star,” the voice came to Chester from multiple drones standing in the port control room. “We are ready to descend.”

“Go ahead Sea Star,” the interim port master said. “We are opening the port doors now.”

The colony vibrated as the resupply ship descended into the port. From where he sat in his hab, Chester could hear the engines rumble and tried not to listen too closely to his drones who stood ready to capture the ship’s crew.

“Sea Star, you are in position,” the port master said, “engaging docking clamps.”

“Lunar Port,” Joachim said, “we have a positive on the docking clamps and are ready to unload our cargo.”

“You are cleared to proceed.”

It would take the crew a few minutes to actually exit the ship and begin unloading so in that time Chester pulled out a pair of his mice and began focusing on them, making them run around in circles and basically give him a distraction from what was about to happen in the port.

“Welcome to the moon,” a voice said faintly in the back of his mind.

“I expect you’re all pretty relieved to see us,” someone else replied.

“I think everyone’s relieved to have this port back open and running again.”

“Turn left, turn left, turn left, turn right,” Chester whispered as he commanded the mice.

Several drones began walking up towards the Sea Star and its crew.

“Jump and turn right and jump, jump, jump.”

“…need to come over here,” a drone was saying.

Chester made the mice take turns running and jumping over one another in a figure eight.

“Something’s not right,” a drone overheard a crew member from the Sea Star whisper.

“…too many of them.”

“…in trouble…”

Run, turn jump. Run, turn, jump.

“…hands off me!”

Race to the wall and climb up the pipe. Jump to the bed then race back to the beginning. The brown mouse was faster than the gray mouse.

“…why are…”

“…No! Please…”

“Someone help…”

Drones began activating the Bednirs.

Jump, jump, jump. The mice were tiring and slowing down but Chester kept them moving, using their exhaustion as yet another element to focus on.

Someone punched a drone, knocking them down in the hopes of being able to run back to the Sea Star. A dozen more drones blocked the path and tackled the crew member, being careful not to hurt them.

“Let me go!” Screamed the man. “I have a fam-

Run, jump, roll over, roll over, jump. The gray mouse’s heart was pounding now and it was panting heavily as it tried to keep up with the brown mouse.

The Bednirs were reset and the next set of people were forced into them. The new drones linked into Chester’s neural network and he let the mice rest while he examined them. Captain Joachim had been flying the Sea Star for only three years, though he had close to two decades of experience working his way up to being a captain. He was still young enough that he didn’t need genetic repairs yet, though he was starting to consider it as gray hair was beginning to show along his temples.

The ship’s engineer was a recent addition to the crew, having been transferred over to the Sea Star while it waited in orbit around the moon. She wasn’t very good at her job and was relieved that nothing had come up during her time on the Sea Star since that would have raised suspicions. In truth, she had been sent by the Solar King to plant a biological weapon on the lunar colony to kill everyone here but leave the infrastructure intact. There was apparently someone here that the Solar King wanted killed. As one of his assassins, it wasn’t her place to ask questions, just get the job done.

“Where’s the weapon?” Chester asked.

“It’s hidden among the supplies,” she replied.

“Can you deactivate it?”

“No. As soon as we landed it began to be released.”

“But it’s still on the ship, right?”

“That’s right, we were interrupted before we could get any of the supplies off the Sea Star.”

“Is the ship sealed?”

“Unfortunately,” the assassin replied, “the doors were closed when we were escorted away from the ship, presumably to make it more difficult for any of us to try and get back on board to send a distress signal.”

Chester let out a sigh of relief. The weapon was contained, for now, but how he was going to deal with this situation he wasn’t sure. A biological weapon could be anything from a virus or bacteria to poison gas.

“Any idea what sort of biological weapon it is?” Chester asked the assassin.

“It’s a virus,” she replied.

“And I take it you’re immune?”

“I was given the immunization for it prior to this mission.”

“What do you know about this virus?”

“There is an incubation period of four hours,” she replied. “Then, over the next two hours, the host will develop ulcers in their mouth and down into their throat. In the last three to five hours, the host will develop ulcers in their lungs, stomach, and intestinal track. Fluid will build up in the lungs while the host is also losing significant amounts of blood through the various ulcers. Death will come either by suffocation or blood loss within twelve hours of infection.”

“How long will the virus remain viable without people to infect?”

“The virus will die within the next five hours without a host to infect.”

It was a quick, if messy, way to clear out the lunar colony. It was only luck that had kept the virus contained in the ship, and with such a short life span, he could wait it out and then leave on the ship as planned.”

“Could we have the crew claim to have found a saboteur aboard their ship, carrying the biological weapon?” Chester put the question out to his drones.

“Might work,” Lyon said. “They could say they realized what the weapon was and isolated it so it didn’t infect any of them, and that they jettisoned the saboteur. That would be standard procedure anyway.”

“Okay, good,” Chester relaxed the muscles in his neck and jaw.

“There’s still the issue of needing an engineer for the Sea Star,” captain Joachim said. “When Siecha came aboard, we had to transfer our previous engineer over to the transport vessel. He was headed to the capitol for reassignment.”

“Is there anyone else here that could fill that position?”

“I was the engineer for an asteroid hauler for the last six years,” Tsukasa said. “Haulers are a bit different than supply ships but the basic principles are all the same. I’ll just need to study the ship’s schematics to make sure I know where things are and all that.”

That would have to do so Chester let Tsukasa get to work looking over the Sea Star’s schematics while the last of its crew became additional drones and nodes.

“We have five hours before the ship will be safe to enter,” Chester told his drones. “And just to be safe, let’s give the ship six hours before we begin unloading the supplies. In the mean time, let’s get the colony back to the way it was so it’ll look and operate just like it did before we I got here.”

That work had been, of course, already underway before the Sea Star’s arrival but now they could get back to work on it with the additional aid from the Sea Star’s crew. What made it even better was the fact that six members of the crew were turned into nodes and they were already taking the rest of the strain off of Chester’s mind.

“Having one node per twenty drones seems about right,” he said. “Good to know. Good to know.”