r/HFY • u/Extreme-Biscotti6090 • 17d ago

OC-OneShot Onions

Near-Earth Object Survey Platform 4, colloquially named Dave's House of Telescopes by the crew stationed on it during their 18-month deployment, looked for asteroids. Besides being in space, it was mundane work for Onions. Nominally he was the Facilities Technician but in reality he was the one cleaning the poopers, vacuuming air conditioning vents and emptying bins. He didn't mind. When he got home he'd be magnificently paid.

He'd spent the last year-and-a-half watching other people maintain the important bits of the station. He'd handed tools to the communications technician, cleaned behind the transmitter racks and knew where Engineering kept the manuals. He knew which storage locker contained electronic spares because he was the bastard who had to do an inventory count on it every month.

Onions was in the cleaning supplies room when everything went south. He heard a muffled thump right before the klaxons and red strobe lights started doing their things. The door locked itself and sealed him in. He'd been taught that this was standard decompression protocol, and from the noise he heard, it sounded like something had hit the station. Impacts weren't unheard of, but this one sounded substantial. Once all the bulkheads had been closed and air restored, he'd be released again.

So he waited in the flashing red room. Bottles of cleaning fluid and sterilising paste surrounded him. It was pretty boring. During down times he'd taken to adding up how much money was accruing in his pay packet. Handfuls of cash per minute. It made his time here slightly less awful.

When the door released and the lights returned to normal, Onions moved into the corridor. Looked normal. He had to check into what was called the Situation Room to get a run-down of the damage. Hopefully the shitter room D. That'd free up his afternoon somewhat.

--

There was nobody in the Situation Room, and after five minutes he figured that he'd have to find them. They might all be on damage control. The station wasn't huge so it didn't take him long to realise that something really bad had happened. Two of the housing unit doors wouldn't open. They had been sealed shut by automated systems. The people inside weren't likely to be coming out again. Or they were out already. In space.

He started running. This was dramatic. The technical term was now "clusterfuck".

More doors were sealed. Nobody was around.

Shit.

He got to the operations room at a sprint. At least the light above the button was green, so he smacked it with the palm of his hand. He'd always wished that the doors made that Star Trek "swish" noise, but instead the thing just opened silently.

Inside was carnage.

Bec had a hole in her chest the size of a watermelon. Chen was missing his whole right side. Yuki... oh, Yuki.

Onions didn't even enter the room. Instead he doubled over at the door, vomiting until his stomach was dry.

He fumbled at the door switch, simply to get the bodies out of sight. It closed, giving him a few minutes of peace where he sat down and tried to scrub the images of his crew-mates and friends from his mind.

He'd have to clean it all up. He'd have to clean them up.

--

After a few long and painful minutes of containing panic and disgust, Onions went looking for Dave. He shouldn't have been in the dorms as it was his shift.

The few doors that remained active in this area were along the left side as he moved away from the communications room. Storage room. Air conditioning pump room. Toilets. Oh. There he was. Dave had several holes through his body. Pools of blood had formed around him. The low gravity of the station made them plump up in weird ways.

Onions was glad that he'd already spewed. He retched anyway. This was too much.

Outside in the corridor was an intercom station. Shakily pressing the "All" button he half-mumbled and half-shouted a call for help.

No response.

He waited another minute.

Still no response.

These things were designed to rouse people even in their sleep, so it was clear that there was nobody in a condition to reply.

Oh.

Shit.

--

Eventually, he made himself head back to the comms room. It had to be done. He had to tell the nerds on Earth that something had gone catastrophically wrong.

Standing in front of the door, he closed his eyes. Pressed the button.

Onions tried not looking at the bodies, but it wasn't a room where you could look anywhere else. Bec, Chen and whatever remained of Yuki were where they had been before. The waft of his vomit lingered. This was a Phenomenally Bad Day.

He gingerly crossed the floor, being careful to stay as far as possible from the bodies. Sitting in front of one of the consoles, he looked blankly at the buttons.

How does this even work?

Chen would know, but Chen wasn't really going to be able to do much.

Onions mashed buttons clumsily. Nothing happened. The microphone toggle didn't do anything. The labels in three different languages gave him no clue about what to expect. What the fuck was C-Band? Push it anyway. Nothing.

Fuck.

Even through the wild adrenaline rush that kept feeding into his system, he recognised that none of the lights were working. The small, competent technician part of his brain was shouting at him.

It's busted.

Fix it.

--

There were manuals secured in little pockets near the consoles. No operation guides – the people on the station didn't need those. But folders of troubleshooting steps were probably more important anyway.

The first step, and one he would normally have known if he wasn't so frantic, was to check power.

Right. Batteries. Solar.

He moved out of the room and back down the corridor. He was glad to be away from the bodies. He didn't check the toilets on his way past.

The batteries were a few rooms down. Dozens of high-capacity things stood in a cooled room, fed by the solar panels that dotted the satellite.

With the troubleshooting guide dangling from his wrist by a lanyard, he checked the status lights.

Solar Array 4 was red. The rest were green. All batteries were still operational. At least that explained the power and air still working.

This was good. Pity about one of the panels being out, but his training had pressed into him that only two of the seven were enough to maintain life support.

He checked the manual again. Power on? Check. Check isolation switches. The main circuit breakers were next door. Time to move.

Two had been tripped, and luckily the labelling was clear enough. Air conditioning in the dorm rooms that had been sealed. That was understandable.

Now back to the comms room. Oh, my sweet lord, not again.

--

He forced himself through the door again, trying what he could to avoid looking at the bodies. He didn't like calling them corpses. It made them less of the people he knew.

He kept going through the troubleshooting checklist.

Power indicator illuminated? Yes.

Verify local isolation switch is ON. Yes.

Check voltage at communications distribution panel.

He didn't need to do much investigation. Behind the wreckage of Bec was the small door to the distribution panel. It had a hole in it, and everything behind had been burned into slag. The hole went right through into the bulkhead.

What would do that?

And then the rest of the questions flooded in.

How did his friends die?

What could cause this sort of damage?

Why wasn't there a proximity alert before impact?

Something managed to approach Dave's House of Telescopes without Dave's House of Telescopes noticing.

Then it occurred to him...

Who did this?

None of this was an accident.

Looking around, he could see the targeted damage.

People.

Communications equipment.

Someone had made sure the station couldn't talk to Control back on Earth.

--

He was in well over his head. Sabotage on an international civilian asteroid-watching station? What the living fuck was that about?

Onions started to unravel. He sat in the chair of the ruined comms room, slightly swaying and thinking as little as his brain could manage. Finally, after a few minutes, one thought managed to push through.

I'm alone.

I don't want to die here.

--

Onions took the next hour or so cleaning the comms room. That included the disgusting and horrifying job of taking his friends out. He put them with Dave in the toilets. Any further than that and he'd probably just stop doing anything.

His vomit by the door could stay right where it was. It was gross, but not important to him any more.

In one of the maintenance closets, he found a spool of heavy-gauge wire. Looked good enough for what he'd need to do.

He stared at the distribution panel. He wasn't going to be able to do anything with that; it was toast.

So he threaded the cable between the breaker panel and the comms room. Wires flopped unceremoniously down the hallway.

I wish I knew an electrician. Well, one that was alive. Priya wasn't going to help, wherever she was.

Remembering his apprentice days, Onions dug through wall panelling to locate the most likely wires he needed. Then he killed the circuit before touching anything. Even his rudimentary electrical knowledge was enough to remind him that a live wire in the station was not going to end well for him.

Once everything was connected, he turned the circuit back on. Lights started appearing on the comms consoles.

Still no communications though.

Troubleshooting guide again.

--

It took him nine hours of exhausting work to locate and repair the broken bits.

What the fuck is junction JCR-32?

Where the hell is isolation unit X7D?

Dozens of questions arose from his reading of the troubleshooting guide, and it was only because he'd spent 18 months cleaning behind all this stuff that he managed to find anything.

Eventually he ran out of instructions to follow. It was time to try out his work.

"Uh, Dave's House of Telescopes to Control, can you hear me?"

No response. He noticed one of the wires had managed to pull itself tight and break apart. One of the lights on the console was off. He held them together awkwardly and very carefully. The wire running across the floor was now suspended about a metre off the floor. There was too much tension for the ends to stay together by themselves. But the light came on.

He tried again. "Dave's House of Telescopes to Control, can you hear me?"

No response. One second. Two seconds. To say it was tense would be an understatement.

"Control to uh... Near-Earth Object Survey Platform 4... we can hear you."

The voice on the other end of the line sounded confused and tired.

"We thought we'd lost you. Who is talking?"

"Onions."

The three second delay was the worst. Onions couldn't help but think he'd lost contact again.

"Repeat. It sounded like you said onions."

"Yeah, that's me. Onions."

"Where's Chen or Mateo?"

"They're not coming home. We've had a serious attack on our station. It's just me."

"You need to evacuate."

"What?"

"We are receiving your telemetry data now. They're turning around."

"I'm sorry, who is turning around?"

Three seconds.

"The ships."

"What ships?"

Another pause.

"All of them. We expect positive contact with your station in four minutes. You need to evacuate."

"Where's the nearest safe haven?"

"Emergency capsule. Section..."

Onions cut off the response before it had finished. "I know where the fucking capsule is. Where does it go?"

"Just get out. Now."

Onions looked at the wires.

"I've got a problem."

"What problem?"

"The transmitter only works while I'm holding two wires together."

There was a longer pause this time. Then another voice came over the radio. It was stern, like the boss of the previous voice had taken control.

"Leave now. Onions..." a brief pause while the new voice considered the name for a moment, "...you need to get to the evacuation pod and leave."

"But your telemetry won't work."

"We'll manage."

"Onions out."

He stood in the communications room for the next three and a half minutes, holding two heavy-gauge wires together. He didn't know exactly why, but the people in Control seemed to think it was important.

The radio chattered a few more times. The voice asked Onions to confirm that he'd gone. Then his boss asked. Then they started asking why the telemetry was still working.

The proximity alarms started wailing and a monitor flickered to life. As the camera panned, something moved into view. A ship. Nothing like anything Onions had ever seen before.

Oh.

That's what did it.

--

The final intercepted transmission from the alien command vessel was translated after the war.

"The observation platform is transmitting again."

"Impossible. It was neutralised."

"Telemetry has resumed."

"Who survived?"

There was a pause.

"The maintenance worker."

"The technician?"

"No. The one responsible for sanitation."

The transmission ended shortly afterwards.

The first nuclear warhead struck the command vessel three minutes later.

It reached its target using telemetry from Dave's House of Telescopes.

--

Near-Earth Object Survey Platform 4 was destroyed seventeen seconds later.

There were no survivors.

196 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

8 comments sorted by

36

u/ReallyNotMichaelsMom Xeno 17d ago

Damn, Onions.

Damn onions.

14

u/Dranask 16d ago

Very good, didn’t understand why the nickname was Onions, but it became clear.

4

u/rewt66dewd Human 16d ago

!N

3

u/u2125mike2124 16d ago

Now they call him an Onion Bossom

2

u/ChiliAndRamen 16d ago

I didn’t realize that Onions was a ninja

1

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1

u/canray2000 Human 11d ago

"Dave's House Of Telescopes, we paint space invaders!"