Free Home Planet: Awakening (Part 1) by T.J. Sedgwick Page A

now, familiar reply.
    Something was wrong—it wasn’t recognizing my surrender.
    I sank down, attempting to grab my gun and that’s when the droid opened fire, advancing as it did so. I dove to the floor, rolling from where I’d been toward the stairwell doors but failed to retrieve my weapon.
    “Damn it!” I said as I crawled prone through the open door and into the darkness, shots coming all too close to my legs.
    I could hear the approaching bot, the whirring sound mixed with soft, regular footfalls. I got to my feet and rushed down the stairwell aided by the emergency lighting strips. When I heard the droid reach the landing above, I realized the doors to Level 19 were closed and probably unpowered. There was no time, so I went down another floor, then another until at Level 17 I found the doors open. I listened, poking my head into the stairwell, but the droid wasn’t pursuing.
    I caught my breath and exhaled deeply. I’d escaped the malfunctioning droid but now had to decide how to get past it. With no weapon other than my ax, it would be no trivial task. The ship’s security droids were efficient and deadly when they needed to be. This one seemed to be deadly even when it didn’t need to be. To last this long at all meant that it still had access to a source of wireless electric power. That might even be the reason it hadn’t pursued me. Although designed to last for the mission’s duration, the batteries may have been less efficient by this point, requiring wireless power to supplement them. Interesting, helpful even, but ultimately academic.
    All I knew was that there could be more lurking around, so I decided two things. First, that I needed a new weapon. Second, I wouldn’t try to get past the droid; I’d just go around it. Since Level 20 was at the top of the cylindrical module, it meant that on that particular level there was no way around. In the short-term, though, I had no choice but to hunt around for a weapon and a do my best to avoid further contacts until I found a way out. The other link tunnel connected the modules on Level 1, seventeen floors down. That was where I would head to next. Eventually, I may need to face off against the droid or an equally dysfunctional counterpart, so I reconsidered my next destination. There was nothing else for it—next stop, the weapons lab.
     
    ***
     
    When I’d started from Level 18, I’d had no idea where to find the weapons lab. The hunt had taken me down four additional floors—searching each one in turn—before I found it. In Module 3, I’d been through everything you’d expect to find at a major technical university from test labs to classrooms, from offices to stores of spare parts. But I didn’t think you’d find a weapons lab like the one I entered on Level 14. With its own branch corridor, the place was like its own mini-institution. Until I’d reached it, there had been only intermittent signs of conflict. I’d counted a dozen dead—all died of laser or gunshot wounds. Two marines, four crew and six colonists. I did a brief search of each and got another handgun to replace the one I’d lost. I got a couple more clips and found an unopened ration bar, too—chocolate and banana, apparently. It didn’t taste like it and I wondered what effect it’d eventually have on me consuming such out-of-date food. The sugar felt good, though, but made me thirstier than I already was. I eventually found a small coffee break room with a faucet with some undrained water in the pipe next to some offices. I drank greedily until it stopped. Again, I wondered what the plastic pipes had donated to the water over so many years. It was hardly an immediate concern, though.
    In hindsight, I could’ve used the escalating level of damage and battle scars to find the weapons labs—the closer I came, the more damage I saw. I eyed the scene of complete devastation that was in the weapons lab entry corridor. What had been double glass security doors lay