“Ha, you were right. They fell asleep,” Charles said.

Jay had closed the doors behind them and was already working on the panel beside the interior doors. Without a reply, Robin stepped up to the plexiglass window and pressed her helmet against it.

Charles shifted uneasily as she waited. With the exterior doors closed, the only available light came from the backup lamp set in the wall behind her. It cast a strange greenish glow over the room. The more she thought about it, the more their situation unsettled her. Though it wasn’t unheard of for a station’s crew to sync their sleep schedules, it was against protocol… not that every station followed protocol, of course. But the station’s team would have known when to expect their response crew, and she would have thought at least someone could have waited up for them.

“Airlock pressurising,” Jay’s voice crackled in her ear. Charles heard a quiet hissing as the moon’s toxic atmosphere was pumped out and replaced with oxygen. Robin still hadn’t moved from the window.

“Aaaaand… done.”

Charles and Jay removed their helmets, placed them on an empty shelf, and unzipped the restrictive space suits. Robin finally pulled back from the window and took off her own helmet.

“Something up?” Charles asked.

“Turn your guns on,” she said.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Jay and Charles glanced at each other. They grabbed for the small handguns tethered to their suits and pressed the power buttons.

“Should we open the door?” Jay asked as Robin hung up her suit. The older woman’s creased face looked far more alert than Charles had ever seen it. Robin nodded, Jay re-plugged a cable, and the interior doors parted, letting them into the control station.

Charles did a double take. Part of the control panel had been smashed; the metal was dented inwards, and its little buttons and light covers bugged out of their holes. The chair was overturned, and something dark was scuffed over the tile floor. Charles stepped in front of her team and raised her gun. The hallway beyond the control centre was dark and empty, and the only thing she could hear was her companions’ breaths.

“We need to search the building,” Robin said, her voice a barely audible whisper. “We’ll start with the sleeping quarters.”

Charles nodded, led them through the open doorway into the hall, then turned left. Virtually every station was arranged in the same format: the kitchen and living areas were to the right, the work areas could be found through a hallway straight ahead, and turning left would take them to the sleeping quarters and bathroom.

Charles pressed the hall’s light switch, but the ceiling lamps stayed dead. Either the power had cut out, or the lights were broken. As she heard plexiglass shards crunch under her boots, she assumed it was the latter.

Two dozen paces brought them to the bedroom door, which stood ajar. Charles nudged it open with her foot, slipped a hand inside, and pressed the light switch.