It had taken her nearly two days to figure out where the rations for the station's crew of corpses had been kept. But with judicious use of the crowbar, she managed to pry the front of the dispenser open and access what apparently passed for food these days.
It had taken her two weeks to find and decipher a manual on the strange weapon she'd taken from the robot she'd beheaded. If nothing else told her she'd been under far longer than the three years she'd agreed to, besides the fact she was on a fucking space station, it was the design of that weapon. So advanced she couldn't even begin to understand the progression from the gunpowder propelled weapons she knew and loved to this "mass accelerator" weapon. Fortunately the manual was written in a style she'd often heard described as "Army Proof," intended for rank amateurs.
After that, killing the damn robots that still roamed the halls of the ghost station became much, much easier. Which was fortunate; because she didn't think she could take much more of the shocks the blasted things delivered when they got too close to use their sidearms.
The same manual had given her a hint of just how much time had passed since she first lay down in the cryo chamber and Doc. Forsythe gave her the shot that would help the transition from warm, living person to a human Otter Pop.
Over a hundred and fifty years, Jesus that's a long-ass nap.
She was foraging for a few more rations to drag back into the hidey hole she'd found in the station's maintenance shafts. It seemed the robots either couldn't fit in the shafts, or weren't programmed to search them so it was as safe a place as any to live while attempting to figure out how to get out of this predicament. She'd found a pair of glove-things that she'd worn at first just to ward off the ever present chill of the station, but had discovered, completely by accident, that they also allowed her to interact with the holographic computers.
At first she'd been thrilled at the discovery, but then discovered that interacting with the computers did her no good if she couldn't even read two-thirds of what was on them. It seemed that everyone on the station wrote their reports in their home language and allowed the software to translate it into whatever language the reader needed it to be. She'd stumbled across at least six that were set to use the Cyrillic alphabet, two set to what looked like Hangul, and one in French.
At least with the French one, I could understand one word in ten. Jade thought wryly. She'd puttered around on that console, pushing buttons and clicking on things at random, until the heavy clanking steps of what she suspected was a very large robot indeed began thundering down the hallway and she'd scampered back to her vent until it passed.
Suddenly a much louder rumble than she'd heard before echoed through the station. Curious, Jade took to the vents and headed toward the docking bay.
'S the only place big enough for anything capable of causing that sort of ruckus to be. Wonder if that's good news, or bad, she thought as she wormed her way along passages that were uncomfortably tight, stopping at times to try to get a view of anything passing through the halls.
At first all she saw was a stream of the smaller robots heading the same direction she was, then, ahead she heard the distinctive sounds of a firefight.
Halleluiah! Sounds like somebody's here to clean house! She cautiously crept around the area the battle appeared to be occurring in. She wanted to get a good look at these people before she just ran toward them with open arms.
She peered through a grate at her prospective saviors.
There were three of them, all trussed up into some type of bulky body armor. Huh, makes sense I suppose. If what I read is right, these little pistols pack one hell of a punch. No way plain Kevlar'd hold up to that. Gotta have something stronger.
She watched as the three worked together like a well-oiled machine, always covering each other and moving in a way that spoke of long hours on the battlefield and under fire. It sort of reminded her of how she and Joe used to move when they were on ops that had gone to shit. After a moment, Jade shook herself from her reverie. The three below had finished the last of the robots and were preparing to move to another room, picking up spare ammo along the way. Thermal clips she reminded herself. Ammo comes in blocks now. Gotta replace the heat sink instead. Goddamn this future shit is hard to get used to.
Making a decision not to let the trio get away from her, Jade pushed open the vent she'd been looking out of and dropped head-first to the floor. She rolled and slowly came to her feet, hands held out and open at her sides, fully expecting the three gun barrels that had been trained on her.
"Howdy, I'm Master Sergeant Jade Harmon, 24th Special Tactics Squadron, United States Air Force. I hope to hell you all can help me get the fuck out of this place."