You want to verify there's a threat before you call anyone else in. Even though you're not suited up at the moment you feel pretty confident in your ability to handle a few trespassers anyhow so there's no point in risking the others if they prove hostile.

You ghost down the dark hall opening doors one by one and shining your flashlight around. The rooms all appear to be crew quarters and although you search any place anyone could hide, they're all empty and only three show any recent signs of usage.

Retreating back to the entrance the hall, you widen the scope of your search, but after another half hour are forced to admit to yourself there's no one here after all. This wouldn't be the first time you've had...hallucinations in the past. Or whatever the technical term would be for you. They have to get pretty bad before they impair your ability to work, but the woman's voice had seemed so close and chillingly real. You'll have to keep aware of the possibility of it happening again now. If it gets worse, you know you'll have to report it, but for now you're just glad you didn't drag anyone else down here for no reason.

You return to the crew quarters to look once again at the rooms the current maintenance crew were occupying, although more out of curiosity about them than any expectation you'll locate your phantom voices. The walls of Matti's room are covered in projected images of performers and celebrities...you recognize many of them from the media Karoff downloaded from Camarov.

Inea's room contains images of a family, presumably hers, and several empty bottles that indicate she had a minor pill habit. Nothing illegal enough for you to care about--even less so now that she's dead--and most of them are expired anyhow and you suspect taken from the station's abandoned medical arm.

Markov's room is somewhat grubby with dirty clothes tossed carelessly around. Your eyes are drawn to his desk immediately as the only uncluttered spot in the room. After a moment you realize that's because his personal computer is gone. Every other room, even the empty ones, had one of the devices built into the desk surface.

You don't care what kind of weird porn he was hiding

You return to where you left the hover platform and then begin making your way back to see if there's anything else you can help with. You can see Karoff has been busy here fiddling with the wiring, and indeed you're only halfway back to the medical station when you the lights suddenly flicker on and a much-missed humming fills the halls as all systems come to life. Karoff's triumphant voice sounds over the intercom, and a moment later Hinsman's to congratulate him. Everyone seems to be much more cheerful and you're relieved to see things returning to normalcy.

The main computer room he's working in now is quite close so you take a detour to see if he's pulled up anything about the damage to the station.

You damage Report

"Ah, I see. No 'thanks for getting the computers up so quickly' or even 'great job, Karoff'. Just more demands."

Startled, you begin to apologize before he waves you off. "Calm down, I'm not serious."

"Sorry."

"Jesus. You really need to work on not taking every little thing so seriously."

"That's...not a skill I need very often, though."

"Good point. Well all right, you wanted the damage report. It just finished compiling." Karoff spins in his chair to face the screen, chewing on a dirty thumbnail. "Hmm, let's see. This would indicate The Last Outpost is...yup, it's damaged all right. And needs repairs. From people who are not us."

"So nothing immediate needs attending to? There's nothing wrong that would put you or Hinsman in danger if you waited here a few days?"

"Well, unsealing some of the station's arms would be pretty fatal. They took the brunt of Matti's hack rerouting job and a couple lost atmosphere. The old medical wing itself is in real bad shape obviously, that's where Markov set off the first explosion. But all we really need is life support and power here and in the docking bay. We don't really have enough power for the rest of the station anyway as long as we're siphoning from the ship. I'll go and seal anything unnecessary off in a bit and then we don't even need to worry about leaving them with life support."

Good. That means you can leave here and continue carrying out your orders just as soon as this mess with the dead workers is sorted out.

"By the way, Hinsman is going to try waking Oswen up for a little while and then wanted us there afterwards to sort of put our heads together on how to handle all this," Karoff adds, nearly reading your mind.

You step toward the door. "I'll go now."

"Eh, what's the rush? But I'll be there after I finish a couple things. We're all just gonna sit around till the relief team arrives either way."

"I could go and take care of my mission while the two of you wait. Hinsman suggested that earlier, remember?"

Karoff snorts and shook his head slowly as he turns his attention back to his screen. "Don't you ever get tired of working so hard?"

You're a little take aback by the question. "No?"