Working on the Kepler station was completely routine until a rock jockey called Nova Epsilon Scorpii arrived on the station. She was from a comet herder called the Istari and was trying to trade some of the raw materials they had mined, not that a research station such as the Kepler has much use for such materials. While she was aboard the Kepler, a distress signal was received from the Istari. A mission was planned to take the Kepler shuttle to the Istari to provide assistance and a routine backup of everyone was taken. That was the last memory anyone had before waking in the medical room of the Kepler.

There was a warning siren sounding and the uneven pressure light was lit on the door. Two weeks had passed since our backups were made. It looked very much like we had not returned from the Istari and something had triggered restoration of our backups.

The medibot was talking in the voice of Keplers Agi Hans though it kept breaking up. Hans seemed to be warning against connecting to the stations mesh. The nano fabricator was not accepting access and I had to hack into it. I started it making some vibro knifes. The medibot released the door when commanded to. The air pressure in the rest of the station was dropping and the air flow pointed to the leak being in the machine shop. In investigation it was found that one of the mechs had welded something in the airlock to stop it closing properly. When I approached it, the mech started acting aggressively so I neutralised it with my laser pulser. After distributing vac suits to the meat puppets I closed the door to the machine room and started working to use scrappers gel to clear what had been welded into the airlock.

While I worked the others investigated the status of the rest of the station. The reactor room was in darkness and Hans had locked the door to the ops room. The medibot / Hans refused to unlock the door and stated it had been sealed due to a risk of infection. I went outside the station to look through the ports into the ops centre. There was nothing obviously unusual except some dust floating about. Examination of what was on the inside of the port with nanoscopic vision revealed some sort of mixed organic/mechanical nanobots. While I was outside I saw navigation lights of an approaching ship which was about an hour away from the station.

I checked on the Nano fabricator and found that with the vibro blade it had also created some dust similar to what I had seen in the ops room. Prof. Aronnax studied it in more detail. He had not seen anything like it before and thought it could be capable of infecting both organic and inorganics. He also observed it to be self-replicating. I modified an X-ray emitter to emit a high power beam and used it on the nanobots. They turned black but Prof. Aronnax examined them and declared they were dormant rather than destroyed.

Nova used a laser communicator to contact the Istari. All that was received was static with a faint underlying pattern. It quickly became clear that the transmission was trying to affect everyone and Nova cut off the communicator. I went outside the station to observe the Istari when it docked. The others took cover in the machine shop and waited. I saw through a port that combat started as soon as the Istari docked. I could not see at the time that what came from the Istari was hideous mutated versions of the crew of the Kepler station. Presumably the versions of ourselves that had gone to their aid two weeks earlier. As they fought inside, I found myself having to fight off a humanoid robotic drone from the Istari that also looked corrupted somehow.

The others reported the interior of the Istari was covered in the dust and there were growths everywhere which showed signs of being alive. A tendril slashed nova, penetrating her vac suit. Lucas came outside with me rather than face the tentacles and we investigated the Keplars shuttle which was docked on the Istari while the others investigated inside. They found three former crewmen in the recycling room crawling around. They were emaciated, twisted, broken and held together with patches of growth similar to the tentacles with irregular legs sticking from their bodies. They had a fight and killed them.

We gained access to the shuttle. Inside we found a version of Nova mutated like the members of the Keplar crew that had been killed earlier. I shot it in the head and killed it. We depressurised the shuttle to clear out the mess then gained access to the Istari through shuttle. We met with the others in the recycling room. From there we made our way to the crew quarters. The last Istari crewmember was in a chair motionless, attached to the bulkhead with tendrils.

We went into the Ops centre. The controls were smashed. The AI Lyla would only accept commands from the Istari's crew. Lyla reported a fault with the Istari's internal clock and was unable to playback any of the security video without a time reference. Nova's implants started reporting she was infected with an unknown organism. Ketrah put her in a healing vat in the medical room but the healing vat was ineffective so Ketrah popped Novas cortical stack. I fitted it into a servitor robot we found which appeared uninfected.

We found serviceable access jacks in a service corridor but it was full of the grey dust. Nova and myself went in and fixed the internal clock of the Istari so we could playback security videos then went to the shuttle to cycle the airlock and flush any of the grey dust on us into space. Shortly after the servitors internal routines started reporting Nova was infected again so I removed her stack from the servitor. I found an Ecto device and plugged in Nova's stack. We were unable to get the security video to play as Nova was too traumatised to command Lyla.

With no prospect of extracting the security video we decided to leave on the shuttle before anyone else got infected. I Plugged nova into the shuttle and she moved it away from the Istari and the Keplar. We waited 17 days for the next supply ship. The tweetware Aronnax moaned repeatedly about not having enough space to fly and the rock jockey Nova was also a constant irritation moaning about being stuck in an Ecto but at least she could be put in one of the lockers out of the way when she complained too much. Finally a LLOTV (Large lander and orbiter transport vehicle) arrived and took us on board. The fate of the Keplar was reported to Titan and the Argonauts put it under quarantine. It was a 48 day trip back to Titan but at least the LLOTV was less cramped than the shuttle.