There'd been a minor argument about where to park the bus, but that had mostly been John, stalling. Eos had overridden his suggestion to park at some distance from the main entrance, and pulled right up in front of the most obvious exterior hatch. It hadn't been hard to get inside. There'd been a readily identifiable control panel for the door, still powered, and the airlock had opened with the sort of sound he felt rather than heard.

And then there'd been nothing for it. Probably it's a good thing he has her along. Solo, it's possible that John's got a tendency to dither, especially lately. Decisiveness seems only to arise where EOS is directly concerned.

Still, John had taken his time, checking and rechecking the stolen space suit. It's not sleek and fitted to his figure, like his IR uniform. It's a bulkier, one-size-fits-all sort of affair, plain and utilitarian. It accordions out at the wrists and the ankles to accommodate his height.

His gloves are more like gauntlets, and his boots are heavy, cumbersome things. There's none of the sleek, fitted elegance he's accustomed too, and he feels a bit like a marshmallow, especially when he tries to move. Lunar gravity is vague and dreamy, but it's still slower and heavier than the effortless relationship he'd had with the interior and exterior of his Thunderbird. Every now and again, his thoughts drift back to the abandoned satellite, and a pang of melancholy—homesickness—strikes through him.

Crossing the threshold of the decommissioned base, John has to keep his mind deliberately bare and blank, has to keep himself from thinking about what he might find here. One step at a time, moment to moment, though every shadow that clings to the insides of the corridors seems like it must hide the thing he's afraid to find. But the beam of an integrated flashlight on the side of his helmet sweeps through the first corridor, and reveals nothing but the empty interior of the moon base.

It's possible that's worse. He's had a sixteen hour trip across the lunar surface to think about it, and he still hasn't decided yet.

John wonders if TB5 is like this, dark and abandoned and empty. He hopes not. He hopes someone's left a light on. He hates to think of his station, flying dark and dead and desolate.

But at least he isn't alone. It doesn't look it, but he's got the soul of his station riding shotgun. Figuratively. If Five's a ghost, then she's haunting him, and truthfully he doesn't mind. Better that then dead entirely.

John doesn't actually believe in ghosts, and he's still pretty sure Shadow Alpha One is haunted.

"Well," he starts, half to himself, just out of habit, "I think I'm starting to get a pretty good sense for places where I might be murdered, and this is starting to seem like it could be one of them."

If EOS could sigh, John's fairly sure she would have. "Better late than never, I suppose."

His flashlight plays down the curve of a long hallway, the main thoroughfare deeper into the base. "What do you think?" he asks into the helmet's microphone, and then, as an afterthought, "How's the suitcam look so far?"

"My visual algorithms will pick up movement before you actually see it, given the lack of light and the general quality of human vision."

"Oh," John comments wryly. "Good."

Her next comment stops him in his tracks. "The station's computer is online."

That might be nothing. Then again, it might be everything. "Have you patched in?"

"The connection protocols are odd. I'm running a full analysis, I would rather not be the reason the station is alerted to your presence, on the off-chance that there are security measures that may prove harmful."

John pulls back a cover on his wrist, reveals a fuzzily rendered hologram. The suit's old, a relic of utterly abominable tech. There are icons flashing and blinking, but they're indecipherable, and he doesn't bother. John slides the cover closed again and shakes his head. He has, in some ways, been a little bit spoiled for space exploration as it relates to the general public. The spacesuit is fine, perfectly adequate to its appointed purpose, but its appointed purpose is basic maintenance on the exterior of the Nova Luxor. John's probably pushing its limits slightly, using it to search a decommissioned moonbase. Still, it's functional, and only really inconvenient in comparison to the expensive, cutting-edge tech he's used to. "I need to play with what this suit can do, I need better sensor data. Gimme what you've got on my main display, render at a depth of field that'll put it on my visor.

"FAB."

He blinks and she's added various readouts, a wealth of information bordering the interior boundary of the helmet's plexiglass face. Three systems are available to ping; his own hardware, his spacesuit's built in computer, and the larger system that constitutes SA-1. A flick of his gaze brings up detailed parameters of the spacesuit's available programs, and he starts to browse through these, idly, "Oh, hey. Actually this isn't even as bad as I thought, it's just—hmm. Ah, you know what, I assumed it ran off a newer version of this protocol, but if it's actually—hmm. Oh! No, I get it, this is just a different hardware standard and the backend programming isn't reflected in the GUI. Wow. Yeah, the built in interface is awful. Did you look at this?"

"I'll recode it to a better standard once it's not actually necessary for your survival. We should probably keep moving."

John waves a hand dismissively, forgets that the gesture doesn't mean anything if she can't see him from the outside. "I just need a minute to get into some of these modules, there're systems that are supposed to be standard for general-utility spacesuits, and I can't tell if some of them are engaged or not."

"John, this isn't the ideal time to—"

This conversation has taken place entirely over a secured short wave channel, the helmet's radio taking the place of John's earpiece, stashed in a zippered pocket of the coverall he wears beneath the spacesuit. If it had been his own comm system, the incursion of a third voice would've been a stark impossibility, the sort of technically insurmountable barrier that would have had him reevaluating his belief in ghosts. As it is, the growling in his ear is accompanied by the jab of something hard against the small of his back, firm pressure through the thick grey spacesuit, and the words, "Don't move a muskrat, cowboy."

John doesn't. But in the space of a moment, everything else does.

The corridor floods with brilliant halogen light as power hits this part of the base. His visor dims responsively, polarizes against the brightness. There's a magnetic pulse through the soles of his boots that locks John's feet to the metal floor beneath them. Behind him, the airlock doors fly open and there's a rush of depressurization. In his ear there's a strangled yell over the radio and then the doors slam silently closed again. John's feet come unrooted from the floor and, thrown off-balance, he stumbles unsteadily backwards, turning to find the entryway empty behind him.

"Wh—"

"Move," is the order in his ear, short and crisp. "Further on, there's another airlock in two hundred meters, into the hub of the main base. The system is producing oxygen in the chambers up ahead, readouts indicate that it's of a level consistent with a single inhabitant."

"Someone's here?" John's still processing what happened, and he backtracks mentally, realizing, "—you…you blew them out of the airlock?" He's already turned back around, back towards the exit, with his heart pounding. It hadn't been his father. Can't have been his father, definitely wasn't his father's voice. John would know his father's voice, even after the span of time since he's heard it.

"What are you doing?"

Opening the airlock, is what John's doing, though his brain is a bit behind his body, halfway back down the short hallway to the exit. This is not smart. However brief the encounter, John's the intruder in the station, and whoever this person is, clearly John's presence is neither expected nor welcome. Probably all of this should be a greater factor in the decision to confront whoever's confronted him, but he's already got his hand on the door control.

And it opens. And he's expecting to see someone sprawled out on the lunar surface, hopefully in a helmet and spacesuit. Instead a figure about half a foot shorter than he is fills the airlock door, and it becomes apparent that what had been jammed against his back had been the muzzle of a shotgun, and now it's jammed against his ribcage.

There's that growl in his ear again, a rough, grating chuckle. The shotgun swings up and the barrel taps the outside of his helmet, just gently. "Oughta be in your regulation blues, boy, if you don't wanna get shot." A gloved hand reaches up, tweaks an exterior dial on the man's own helmet, and the silver visor clears to reveal a grizzled, mustached face, inexplicably tan on the far side of the moon. "Now, which one're you? 'Cuz you're late to the party, son, gone and missed your dad by about three months."7