(https://64.media.tumblr.com/731828b60e3acfaa4035dd1943fc2fc6/ee3bcd767a55ec96-2d/s1280x1920/65aea9d85f3f11e04bed1afc29ef69d09ff97a5d.jpg)<br/><br/><hr/><br/><span class="bbc_size" style="font-size: 12pt;"><span class="bbc_font" style="font-family: georgia;"><br/>Winter wasn’t sure if that faint fish-aquarium smell had always pervaded the habs near the hydroponics lab and he’d just never noticed, or if that was a new thing. Or maybe it was just  the sour smell of being awake at 3:48am. He hurried over the steel grid flooring, not making any courteous effort to mute the stomp of his books or to avoid the grid panel he knew was slightly loose and made an especially obnoxious ‘clack’ when he stepped on it. <br/><br/>As the old saying goes, <em>Solamen miseris socios habuisse doloris</em>. If he was going to be awake at this ungodly hour, he was going to share the misery.<br/><br/>He found the source of his misery in the form of a hysterical hydroponics worker flapping her hands in the direction of her bedroom. As stated in the maintenance report that had interrupted his pleasant dreams with angry bleeping, several strings of water were dribbling through a ceiling tile close to her bed. The worker (whose name he hadn’t bothered to make note of, even though it was in the header of the maintenance request) spoke with some kind of Eastern European accent, which Winter would have found cute if he’d been in any sort of mood for it.<br/><br/>“Oh my god, are we sinking faster than Garner told us? When is the rescue coming?”<br/><br/>Winter tried to stop the woman’s twittering with a disinterested hand. “We’re not sinking,” he said, leaving an unspoken addendum that they were on the totally opposite side of Almayer to the flooded sector. “It’s just a burst pipe. I’ll isolate it for now and we’ll get a repair out later today.”<br/><br/>He wondered if Garner actually would assign an engineer to repair the pipe. It wasn’t like anyone was gonna be hanging around this junkyard much longer anyway, right?<br/><br/>Nevertheless, he located the valve to isolate the offending bit of pipework, and sure enough the leaking stopped. He went through the motions of updated the work log, and left the emotional hydroponics worker to her blubbing and catastrophising.<br/><br/>On his way towards administration - where he would need to update the records manually because the connection on his PDA was broken, meaning he couldn’t do it from his hab - he stopped with a jolt as a slumped figure stepped out in front of him.<br/><br/>Jeremiah Garner looked at him through hooded, impatient eyes over an unlit cigarette that hung limply from the corner of his mouth.<br/><br/>“Greenwood,” the administrator said. “Never seen you around this early. What’d you do, shit the bed?”<br/><br/>Winter forced a tight smile. “Haven’t done that in weeks, sir. Just delivering a status update on a maintenance request.”<br/><br/>“In person? How diligent of you. Which is good to hear because I need someone to do something.”<br/><br/>Well wasn’t that just freaking great. Winter had hoped to be back in his bunk for a couple more hours before his regular duties began. His regular duties being, of course, monkey work in the hydroponics lab ever since that damned spaceship fell out of the sky and took out the whole western wing of the Almayer facility, where all the interesting work happened.<br/><br/>“Is it maintenance, sir?” Winter asked. “Because most maintenance is getting de-prioritized on account of…”<br/><br/>“It’s not maintenance,” Garner interrupted. “The rescue team are due it arrive in exactly ninety four minutes. I only just got the message because we only have one comm satellite operational since the impact.”<br/><br/>Garner said that last part as though it was Winter’s responsibility to fix the comms satellites, which he was pretty sure it wasn’t.<br/><br/>“That’s…good news, isn’t it sir?”<br/><br/>“Yeah yeah,” Garner scoffed. “I’m creaming my panties with excitement to get back to earth. But first, someone’s gotta volunteer to escort the rescue team to the Weyland-Yutani labs.”<br/><br/>“Uhh huh…” Winter smirked, assuming Garner was joking. “The labs which are half-underwater right now. We’ve made sure to tell them to bring their water-wings, right?”<br/><br/>“Real cute, Greenwood. I’m serious. They want to check out the impact site and, owing to the circumstances, we don’t want to rely on blueprints. We need someone who knows their way around that part of the facility.”<br/><br/>Winter sighed and shrugged. “Well, I moonlight for those guys as a submersible pilot, so I’m pretty familiar with the area. I’m assuming there’ll be a bonus for liaising with the USCM?”<br/><br/>“I don’t want <em>you</em> to do it, Garner spat. “They don’t want to be dealing with some smart-mouth colonist. I want you to get me someone from the W-Y team to play escort. Someone will have to go in person because they won’t be checking their messages before the marines arrive.”<br/><br/>Winter deflated somewhat, but on balance this seemed like he was getting off the hook. It had been more than two weeks since the disaster that took out the research wing. Two weeks to get used to the idea that the first woman he’d started to think he could actually grow to like had been declared missing, presumed dead. He’d come to terms with it, and he didn’t need to be guiding some grunts down that way to prove what everyone already knew.<br/><br/>“Yeah, alright. I know someone who could do it. Someone who isn’t too…well, you know…’company-ish’.”<br/><br/>“Great, who is it?”<br/><br/>Winter shrugged. “I try not to learn the names of the Weyland-Yutani science guys. It humanises them.”<br/><br/>Garner rocked his head back in exasperation and groaned at the clusters of pipes and ducts running down the corridor. “Just get someone - get a couple of people to be sure - and bring them to the community hall to meet with the marines, OK? And if you can do this without me having to interact with you again until we’re on the ship back to earth, that would be extra fucking sweet.”<br/><br/></span></span><hr/><span class="bbc_size" style="font-size: 12pt;"><span class="bbc_font" style="font-family: georgia;"><br/>Winter stared at the code pad to the Weyland-Yutani science team’s hab block, incredulous that it had rejected his passcode. It had only been a few weeks since he’d been down here. They wouldn’t have changed the code, would they? Or could he have actually cared so little about this place that he’d forgotten it?<br/><br/>This was a spanner in the works. But he didn’t want to have to go back. Garner would be pissed if nobody could get a message to any of the science guys before the marines arrived.<br/><br/>Normally, the Weyland-Yutani scientists were the guys you really, really wanted to mess with, but knew it was absolutely a terrible idea. They, of all people, had the kind of access to the company that could make your life really difficult if they wanted.<br/><br/>But now that the whole colony and mission on LV-186 was <em>FUBAR</em>, there really wasnt much any of them could do to make your career any more miserable.<br/><br/>Taking a long utility key from his belt, he located a specific bit of trunking on the wall that he knew led to the female science officers’ quarters. Taking a deep breath, he began drumming an enthusiastic reggae rhythm on that very duct, and singing the word “Beauchamp” with a melody and volume that he was certain would bring Sophie to the sector door in quick order.</span></span>