Aidan watched the young captain as she replied. She was opening up to him a little, letting the conversation become less business and more personal, though she herself seemed a little surprised to be allowing it. Aidan got the feeling that it was pretty rare that anyone asked her a question that didn’t pertain to her rank or duties. That was what corps did, of course: they stripped you down to just whatever utility you offered them, treated you like a tool rather than a person with inherent worth.
Some people raged against that. Aidan accepted it as the way of the world. Corps were powerful, so powerful that nothing a person like him could ever do would be more than a drop in the bucket to them, a single ones digit on a balance sheet that held hundreds of billions. He wasn’t going to change the world, or even his little corner of it. But if he played his cards right, he could survive. He could wriggle into the little cracks between the leviathans and carve out a space for himself there.
He could squeeze out a little comfort from a cold world.
He might even be able to take care of a few other small people, too.
In the captain, though, he sensed a certain bitterness - or perhaps a slow-simmering anger. She knew how the world worked, same as him, but he got the feeling she hadn’t found quite the same peace with it. Of course, in her shoes, he might feel the same. Her unusual appearance and contracted corporate role were both constraints he didn’t suffer under. He could disappear by becoming too small and unremarkable for anyone to bother coming after… but she was a recognizable asset, locked into her part to play.
He suspected that expectations of her were unrelenting…
… even as treatment of her was poor.
Professionalism seemed to be her refuge. Officers on the surface often fail to live up to the same caliber I would expect of myself. She wanted to be a model security officer, to start standing out for positive reasons, to earn the respect she’d so long been denied. Aidan felt sorry for her, if that was her hope. In his experience, corps didn’t care about real professionalism at all. Their only interests were results and appearances. Quiet corruption or brutality didn’t bother them in the slightest.
Aidan was saved from having to respond by the arrival of the sergeant, who walked him through the paces of using a sonic. The basic techniques were a little different; the real differences, Aidan guessed, would become apparent when he actually fired the thing, if indeed he had to. He bio-signed for the gun and then twirled it around one finger, getting a feel for the balance. He supposed there wouldn’t be any recoil, which would be… odd. No bullet drop, either, and a very different type of range limit. He wished he could try it out on a firing range, but he’d just have to adapt.
As he sighted down the weapon’s length, the winded sergeant gasping her way through her report beside him, Aidan frowned. He’d pointed the sonic down, at the floor, so he didn’t cross anyone with the muzzle… but even at the short distance between his head and the ground, the metal plating seemed to blur in his vision. That was strange. His eyes were chrome; he wasn’t susceptible to ordinary eye fatigue, no matter how tired he got or how many screens he stared at. If his vision was blurry, then…
… then something else neurological was happening.
He was always a little short of breath, but now he was very short.
Aidan realized it only a little after the captain herself. “Not enough air,” he said, a hacking cough overtaking him as soon as he’d forced the words out. Damn it all; he’d come up here to get away from environmental conditions exacerbating the slow ruin of his pollutant-worn lungs, and within a few hours he was pickling them in carbon monoxide. He forced himself to keep calm, taking slow, deep breaths. Panic would only accelerate suffocation. He knew that… but the crowd?
One person is generally a rational creature.
Get together a big group, though, and that rationality fades fast.
It took a moment for the gasping sergeant to find her own helmet, adjust to her air supply with greedy gasps, and go looking for one for Aidan. He kept his mind occupied listening to the captain’s orders and monitoring the crowd, carefully not thinking about his increasing lightheadedness. When the sergeant finally pressed a helmet into his hands, he again had to sign it out with a bioprint signature; even in a moment of crisis, protocol had to be observed. Equipment cost money, after all. That affected the bottom line.
Aidan almost asked if they had anyone available to work on crowd control, but he suspected he knew the answer. If the security forces were understaffed enough to offer him a job on the spot, there was no damned way they had the personnel to organize an evacuation of this massive festival crowd - or even to keep the loosest of lids on the riot that would inevitably erupt when people realized what was going on. Their only chance to avoid chaos was to fix whatever this was before word got out.
That sidearm may be useful after all. “You think this is deliberate? Some kind of sabotage?” Aidan had no idea what the politics up here were like; he hadn’t heard any big stories of terror attacks on the moon, but corp-controlled news wouldn’t report on that, now would they? His bet would’ve been mechanical failure, but he was new here, and if the captain expected violent trouble, he’d respect that instinct. They needed to move quickly either way.
Carbon monoxide poisoning caused death in less than 20 minutes.
“I’ll cover you,”, Woldt said. He didn’t know the way.