The Roomba with a knife duct taped to it: sup -- Anon Guest
[AN: This prompt was edited for IP erasure and brevity]
Something horrible had happened here. The signs were clear. Foreboding and hurried grafitti on the walls. Signs of struggle. Signs of chaos. And an ominous trail of reddish-brown smears that had nothing to do with children's hospitals[1].
...the distinct lack of survivors...
Well. There was a reason why this station had fallen silent. There was nobody around to send a signal. As to how and why that had happened... that was why Nash and his crew had been sent to investigate. They were highly-trained space marines in the best battle-armour that tech could concoct. They should be safe from anything deadly.
'Should', unfortunately, is not 'is'.
Paranoia was a space marine's best friend. Their second-best friend was active cams, scanners, and diagnostic displays on each helmet's HUD. The third was the knowledge that their stunners were fully loaded and ready for action.
They went slowly. Extremely carefully, since whatever had ended the crew could still be present. And hungry. It didn't matter how clean the scanners said the air was, there could still be undetectable spores in it. Samples were taken, bottled, and sent off to the chemlabs in the intermediary clean room, where even more paranoid scientists examined every atom in the containers.
They checked every passage, sealing off each space once it was cleared. They decanted each log, each diary, and the records of infonet traffic from the in-station comms systems. Boffins scanned and purged any virii in the system, then searched for anything that might resemble an apocalypse journal.
Anything that might give a hint about what happened, and why so many had died.
Something bumped Nash's ankle. It scraped along his durable greaves and started moving away just as Nash looked down. "They have a Stabby," he reported.
Someone had given it googly eyes. It circled around Nash's legs and sent a message over text chat.
'Sup?
It went after Blake, jamming its blade against battle-rated armour.
I stab U, it said over text chat. Mwa hahahahaha!
Nash picked it up and ran it under the scanner. "Oh sweet Powers," he whispered, "it's full of pathogens."
His inital assessment was correct. The station's Stabby was allowed to run riot and nobody cleaned it. The filthy blade spread disease and someone's idea of a joke made it fatally worse.
What sucked about it all was that the ultimate cause of this disaster was operator error.
[1] The colour theory post is a Tumblr classic.
[Photo by Nevin Ruttanaboonta on Unsplash]
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