The top half of the suit was lowered just enough for his hands to reach the holes in the chestpiece. He had to pull it down the rest of the way on his own. A click went off as the two halves of the suit locked together at the waist. Two side compartments rotated inwards, each revealing a glove. The gloves were the only piece of the standard maintenance suit that was custom-fitted to the owner. Lars shuddered when he remembered the horror stories from the early decades of manned spaceflight - hard EVA work that left the men and women with blisters on their skin and sometimes even bent or torn fingernails, all resulting from the primitive design of their protective garments. Since the atmosphere around the Outpost was only slightly less dense than normal breathable air, Lars didn’t have to worry about his suit ballooning outwards when sealed and pressurized. After snapping the gloves’ locking rings onto the sleeves of the suit, Lars reached up and pulled his helmet out of the storage compartment. Helmets were similar to the gloves in that each maintenance worker was assigned his own, but they just came in several standardized sizes. The necessity for individual helmets came from the innumerable personal preferences of the workers. While almost everyone knew English fluently that day and age, many people still preferred their first language when English wasn’t required, and the helmets’ heads-up display could be customized with different layouts for displaying information. His own helmet was a reinforced model that combined a basic sealed environment with an inch of layered carbon composite and foam padding, making for an effective hardhat. A quick diagnostic showed that the suit was properly maintained and recharged. Lars gave a quick nod to himself and exited the locker. The airlock cycled quickly and a wave of bone-chilling cold hit Lars. His suit’s temperature sensors gave a beep of protest and the heating elements kicked in. A battery symbol on the top right of his helmet’s faceplate lit up and displayed the amount of operating time left: 5 hours and 45 minutes. Lars hardly needed half of that for the repair job, so he took his time as he followed the trail of beacons that lead to the power junction he was sent to repair. The beacons didn’t do a lot to light up the eternally gloomy snowplain, their glow swallowed up by the neverending blizzard within feet, but their radio signals were a different matter, guiding anyone who might be out and about to their destinations. Lars trodded on, the crunch of snow beneath his heavy boots reminding him vaguely of his childhood in northern Sweden. The memory put him in a reminiscent mindset, like a small rolling stone that sets off an avalanche.
Lars Hugo Erikson was born in 2043 onboard an oceangoing research vessel on Earth, his mother choosing to pursue her career instead of settling down and becoming a housewife. As far as his father was concerned, Lars only remembered the faint smell of cologne he always wore. Both his parents were scientists, but his mother was a marine biologist while his father was a physicist. When Lars became old enough to comprehend the concept of death, his mother explained to him that there was an accident at the lab where his father worked. He had saved seven co-workers by walking into the overheated exchange manifold of a fusion reactor with a sledgehammer and breaking open a jammed dump valve, knowing full well that his thermal suit would only last him one way. Needless to say, the funeral was a closed-casket affair attended by many upstanding members of the scientific community. Looking back on it, that was probably when Lars decided that pursuing his parents’ scientific legacy was not for him. His mother, disappointed but understanding, watched on as he got into the European Union Air Force Academy, got his pilot’s license, then his atronaut’s certificate. Spaceflight was a far more common thing those days than the beginning of the 21st century, but he couldn’t help feeling proud of himself. Space was still very much the final frontier it was made out to be by the science fiction vids of old. Lars made his first EVA at the age of 22, and with the invention of space compression drives, a two-year contract on Mars the next summer. When a recruiter approached him about a contract on an extrasolar outpost, Lars agreed without a second thought. He had wanted to see what was out there, and this was his golden chance. Three months of space compression flight and two years of mundane maintenance labor later Lars had become just as disillusioned as his fellow workers. “Even in space”, Lawrence loved to say, “someone’s gotta clean the toilets. Welcome to the Frontier, buddy.”
The ground shook under his feet. The planet was supposed to be far less seismically active in this region, one of the reasons for establishing the Outpost there. Lars could make out the faint silhouette of the power junction structure in the distance. Something seemed off about it. He sped up his pace. He glanced at the power indicator - it had been an hour since the heaters first kicked in. In a few more minutes, he could clearly see the monolithic concrete and metal bunker that housed the power junction that fed electricity from a nearby themal plant to the Outpost. The diagnostics Lars glanced over before heading out specified that the energy flow was not interrupted, just diminished. As Lars approached the bunker, he finally realized what was wrong with the silhouette. The short-wave antenna that all external structures used to beam diagnostic data back to the Outpost was torn away from its usual spot and was now a bright orange shape against the snow, meaning the tremor he experienced earlier was the mast hitting the ground. Curious, he walked over to what used to be the bottom end of the mast. The metal was bent and frayed. Lars logged the event on the datapad built into his suit along with the approximate time of the tremor, and cycled through the lock into the power junction bunker. His suit’s temperatures soon gave a satisfied blip and turned off the heating elements. The airlock chamber didn’t have a suit locker of its own, so Lars had to to keep his suit on. He knew that this was done on purpose - it saved on operating and maintenance costs, and it forced workers to stay protected whether they wanted or not. Lars opened his faceplate to conserve the suit’s air supply for the return trip, and wished he hadn’t. The airlock was not nearly as well-maintained as the one back at the Outpost, and the entire chamber stank of methane. Doing his best to ignore the smell, Lars quickly opened the door into the small workshop and sealed it tightly behind him. Immediately, the stench of methane was replaced by the stale, barely-circulated air of the concrete bunker. Lars typed his ID code into the console built into the wall. According to the internal diagnostics, something was connected to the main power line that was currently eating up a good 20% of the energy being sent. Considering that this junction handled all transmission from an entire geothermal plant, this was no small device. He wondered whether the broken antenna was really an accident. Question after question began to spin through his mind. A rival corporation? Some eco-terrorists among the Outpost’s numerous staff? Why a geothermal power plant’s junction? How many are involved? If sabotage it is, why such a sloppy job? Nobody suppressed or even tried to spoof the diagnostics, the antenna was taken down way later, almost as an afterthought. Guy wires holding it up could be cut easily enough and the wind would take care of the rest. What was the power being used for? Lars decided to tackle the issue one step at a time. First off, ensure the Outpost gets the full amount of power again as soon as possible. Second, find out if the guy wires were really cut. Third, find whoever did this and lecture him on proper sabotage tactics before kicking his ass and calling in a security team on a snowcrawler. Lars checked the maintenance log on the computer. The last person to cycle through the airlock was a James Cho, a good month ago, when the junction was just being brought online.