I had expected that most of the valuable equipment aboard the MO-III satellite would have been taken away before it was abandoned, but I hadn't expected that it would be stripped so thoroughly. The lab was almost bare. There were two stained and scarred tables left, a desk chair with a missing caster, one broken drill bit, and a certain amount of broken glass. Everything else had been carried away or flushed out into space.
"Fuck!" Duo said loudly. I think he spoke for all of us.
"Put a sock in it, Maxwell," Wufei snapped. I resisted the urge to kick him, but only because it would have sent me bouncing off the walls awkwardly.
Quatre drifted out into the center of the hexagonal room. He used his thruster jet to turn around in a complete circle, and then he came back to the group. Surprisingly, given his recent moods, he didn't look as grim as the rest of us. "All right, so there's nothing here, but let's not give up yet. We still have the living quarters to search."
"How many individual quarters are there, Rashid?" I asked.
"One hundred and forty-seven, if I remember correctly, Master Heero."
That was good to hear. On a satellite of this size, I might have expected many more. "I believe it's safe for us to split up for this part of the search. Between the five of us, if we each take five minutes to search each room, we can be finished in a little less than two and a half hours."
Quatre drifted over to my side. "We all have locator units that you can activate by pressing the orange button on your wrist units." He held up his arm to demonstrate. "I'd feel better if we all activated them now before we split up. That way, we can all monitor each other. If for some reason any you can't maintain voice contact and you need to alert the rest of us, press the red button. It will set off a personal alarm and let the others know where you are. There's a common area in the center of the living quarters that we can use as a rendezvous point, so let's plan on meeting there in two and a half hours. After that, we can…Duo, why are you looking at me like that?"
I glanced over at my partner. Even through the tint on his visor, his grin was nearly blinding in its intensity. His eyes, although a little teary, were shining brightly. His whole face nearly radiated joy. It would probably take wild horses to drag the admission out of me verbally, but Duo looks absolutely amazing when he's really happy. In spite of the bad air on the satellite and the company we were in, I wanted to get him out of his suit and into mine in the worst possible way.
"Why am I looking at you like that?" He repeated with a laugh. "Quatre, baby, do you realize that you just went into command mode?"
Until Duo said that, I hadn't realized it myself. I hadn't heard that confident, reasonable tone of voice coming from him since…well, since the wars, I suppose. I checked the rest of my comrades and saw that Rashid was grinning proudly, Wufei was smiling in a satisfied sort of way, and Quatre himself looked a little embarrassed.
"I, uh, I guess I did." I heard him swallow hard. "I'm sorry."
"Sorry? SORRY?!" Duo jetted over to him and squeezed him so hard that I heard a few vertebrae pop. "My little brother's come back and he says he's SORRY? Q, you are unbelievable!"
I felt like laughing. That's my Duo—he never does anything halfway. May he never change.
Wufei coughed to get their attention. "I hate to break up this happy little reunion, but we have work to do. Our air supply is not infinite. Shall we get going, gentlemen?"
"I'll lead the way," Rashid said, and we all filed out of the stripped lab area after him.
December 29, AC 199I forgot to set my watch when we left Earth, so I had to ask Heero what time it was locally. It turns out that it's just after midnight, so I'm going to sit down and do my log things right now while I have a few minutes to spare.
Thing one: We arrived at MO-III safely due to my outstanding piloting skills.
Thing two: Heero looks really hot in an EVA suit.
Thing three: We decided to check the lab areas and the living quarters for anything that has to do with either Q-babe or Instructor H, but the whole lab area was a complete bust. We're checking the living quarters right now. I'm pretty fast at this sort of thing, which is why I have a few minutes.
Thing four: QUATRE WENT INTO COMMAND MODE! He kinda went back into his shell afterwards, but oh my FREAKING God, it was good to hear him do that!
Thing five: Heero looks really, _really_ hot in an EVA suit.
Thing six: I think I just found Instructor H's quarters. I'm going to check it out while the others catch up to me.
December 29, AC 199Ever since we set foot on the satellite, I had a strange feeling about the place. Have you ever walked into a familiar room and felt that something had been added to it, or removed from it, or maybe just moved around, but you couldn't quite figure out what it was? It was like that. Of course the place to had been stripped of anything useful before it had been abandoned; that was standard procedure and I had expected it. But I still felt that if we looked carefully enough, we would find that one little thing that was out of place.
Rashid wanted to check the labs first, which was a logical place to begin. The labs had been the main center of activity when the satellite was operational, and I remembered the place as being a crowded and noisy place, pretty much packed wall to wall and floor to ceiling with engineers, technicians and their projects. It was odd to see that huge room looking so empty. I had to go out into the middle of it and look around before I could believe that it was really abandoned.
I wanted to check the living quarters also. My flight training may have taken place in the simulators in the back of the labs, but my real education took place in those small suites where I was tutored by the engineers, the mathematicians, and the technicians who made this satellite their home. It had never occurred to me then that my efforts at keeping up with my education might be for nothing, that I might not survive the war.
There was an embarrassing little incident as we split up to search the rooms—I went into what Duo calls 'command mode'. I didn't even realize I was doing it until Duo said something about it and then just about crushed me in a bear hug. It felt good, even though my ribs are still sore from it.
After that, we split up the rooms and started to search. Each suite was set up pretty much the same: A living area with a view screen on a desk, a few chairs, and some bookshelves; a bedroom area with more shelves and a sleeping platform partitioned off from the living area by an ornamental wall; a shower and toilet crammed into a tiny room off the bedroom. There was also a small kitchen unit built into the wall of the living area with a knee-high refrigerator, a microwave oven, a water dispenser and a cabinet. All of the furniture was bolted down or built in, of course. Even though it had never happened during my stay, the spinners that generated the 'gravity' on the satellite could have malfunctioned and it wouldn't have been pretty if loose furniture had been allowed to float around the suites.
Heero had allotted us five minutes for each suite, but that turned out to be more than adequate given the efficient layout. The rooms had been gutted as thoroughly as the labs. There wasn't much to find. I think my best loot came to one bishop from someone's chess set, a really ugly pair of yellow knit socks, a cloisonné barrette with a broken clasp, a set of dentures (uppers), and three pens. That was it. There were no revealing diaries, no cryptically-labelled data discs, no big signs written in dripping blood reading: QUATRE, LOOK HERE TO REVEAL YOUR DESTINY, nothing. And yet I still had that strange feeling that there was something here.
I was right after all, but was Duo who found it. I noticed the blue light pulsing on my wrist unit while I was working on my seventh room, indicating a request for a private channel, and I pressed it. "Quatre here." I said out of habit.
"Quatre, it's Duo. You didn't find anything, did you?" Duo's voice was shaking.
"No, did you?"
"Oh boy…yeah, I think I did." I heard him swallow. "Q, I don't know if I should be asking you this, but I think I need you to come here and identify a body for me."
In spite of the heating units built into my EVA suit, I felt cold. My skin suddenly felt two sizes too small as it contracted into goose bumps. "Okay. Where is it?"
"LQ-130."
"Roger. I'm on my way." I said in a voice that sounded (to me, anyway) steadier than I felt.
It took me about two minutes to kick and jet my way to the room labeled LQ-130, and I fortunately didn't run into any of the others on my way there. They would have stopped me. Not that I blame them—the way I'd been acting lately, I'd have stopped myself from going to a room with a known corpse in it.
However, Duo has always trusted me no matter how much of a jerk I might be sometimes, and he met me in the corridor outside of LQ-130 with a wave. "Heya, Q-babe. Nice to see a friendly face," he said cheerfully, but there was still a tremor in his voice and his eyes were showing the whites all around.
"Are you all right?" I asked.
"Magnificent. Terrific. Drop-dead sexy and proud of it. Hey, that almost rhymed!"
In spite of everything, I grinned. It felt strange on my face. "Cute, Duo, but didn't you say something earlier about a dead body?"
His joking smile faded. "Yeah. It's in there." He hooked a thumb over his finger to indicate the door to LQ-130. "I figured you'd know better than anyone if it's who I think it is." He grabbed my bad wrist with surprising force before I could key my way in. "It's pretty bad, Q. If you're not feeling…um…entirely stable, then don't go in."
I reset my codebreaker. "Thank you for your concern, Duo, but I'll be all right."
"Promise?"
"I promise. Could you let go of me, please? That's my broken arm."
I almost laughed at the expression on Duo's face just then, but my codebreaker was blinking and I only had a second to open the door before it slid shut again. I kicked myself in.
The suite was pretty much the same as all the others. Kitchen to the right, bedroom to the left. The only difference was the EVA-suited body floating in the middle of it. I kicked gently off the wall and floated up to see its face.
Behind the shattered visor, I saw the half-decomposed face. The environmental controls of the satellite must have been shut down near the same time as the death since it had decomposed only slightly before the freezing temperatures had mummified it.
The eyes were open wide and opaque with death and ice, but I imagined I could still see the small olive-green irises. The skin of his face was black with congealed blood and bloated with what bacteria had managed to survive before the freezing temperatures had set in, but I could still see the outline of the face. The mouth was grinning in a death-rictus, a grin that was almost the same as the grin the man had habitually worn around me.
Most telling of all, I saw the sharp black mustaches pointing out sharply from either side of the corpse's upper lip.
I turned away and pressed the blue button on my wrist. "Duo?" I felt ashamed at the weakness that had come into my voice.
"Yeah, little buddy?" The voice was as warm and as strengthening as a shot of brandy.
I took a breath, wanting to be calm as I said this: "I can positively identify the body as Instructor H. Please call the others."