In the rusty, decaying bowels of XStation, Lane Maxwell was making marks on a piece of paper.
He sat on a cube of metal, against a circular table. The piece of paper was flat on the table, and Lane held a black carbon pencil in one hand. He was silent, barely moving, the pencil making straight markings on the paper. XStation was silent around him.
Eventually he sat back and laid the pencil to one side. He turned the paper over, took a stick of adhesive, and ran it around the perimeter of the sheet. Then he stood, holding the paper in both hands, and looked at the walls.
Every bare surface was covered in sheets of paper like the one Lane held. He paused, chose the right spot, and pressed the paper over it, covering another, yellowing piece of paper.
The patterns on the walls around him were simply connected black lines, tangling around each other in ever more complex configurations. But they encoded a history, a history only Lane could possibly unravel.
It was a very deep, dense history - in places the wallpaper had been pasted over four, five times.
Lane smiled, and headed down toward the cockpit. Rust flakes shook from the ceiling with every footfall. The air had a nasty smell he no longer noticed, like electricity and damp soil.
Lane still remembered the early days, when every space pirate had traded through him. Then the newer operators had arrived, with their larger hangers and high-tech cargo handling machinery, and business had rapidly dried up. Those guys looked like they belonged here. He, on a space station like a 3D cubist nightmare, was like some deformed freak of nature. And if he had been the first... who cared? For the last twenty years Lane had got by on old supplies and the occasional visit from a long-ago friend.
He could have done work on XStation, spruced it up and made it modern. But there was no point. The station was in a decaying orbit around Himalia. In less than ten years, the whole place would flatten into the stony surface of the moon. Lane had no plans to be anywhere else.
And that was kind of what he liked about his wallpaper scheme. Every week for twenty years, all that concentrated activity and intelligence - and in the end it was all completely useless.
Just like life.
Lane was thinking these rather usual thoughts (to him they were neither gloomy nor cheerful) when he heard a beeping coming from the cockpit. He quickened his stride and sat himself down in the pilot's seat.
A craft approaching. After scraping some dust off the instruments, Lane was able to determine that it was a Mark IV. An oldish craft, but Lane couldn't think of anyone he knew who flew one.
And it had no identifying markings. Lane may have been fatalistic, but he wasn't stupid. He flicked on the security force field around the basement cubes, then looked through all the compartments until he found his phaser. He examined the power level - still charged? Hard to say. He stuck it in his belt and went back to observing the spaceship approach.
What had they come here for? If they knew his location then they'd surely know his history, so he couldn't see them as wanting to steal his cargo - all he had left of his trading empire was some asteroid rubble and twenty cubic metres of ice. No prize to anybody. But they must be here for something - what?
Whatever it was, Lane knew he must seem like easy pickings to them. An old trader on a decrepit station, it'd be like taking candy from a baby. Doubtless they wouldn't have dared take on anyone else - I mean, a Mark IV spaceship?
Lane grinned. Whatever they had planned, he wasn't about to make it easy for them. Why, they might just find out he wasn't so toothless after all...