Conductor’s Log 17: Still Warm

Hello Everyone,

Welcome to this week’s Conductor’s Log. The team is heads down on Engine Room Update 0.3.4, which now lands this Thursday, 22 October. Keep an eye on our Steam news page for the full patch notes, and as always, let us know what you think! This log also hints at a few of the upcoming improvements.

Can you guess which ones?

Now, on with the story….

Conductor’s Log 17: Still Warm

“Still warm” isn’t something you want to hear over the comms with the battery timer ticking. I leaned closer to the supervisor’s desk and watched Gunner’s camera sweep the room. One pod. One open lid. No body, no blood, and no robot standing over it.

Brains crouched at the base of the pod and wiped a layer of frost from the floor. Underneath were footprints. Bare feet, small, leading away from the pod and through a maintenance hatch that someone had pried halfway open from the inside.

“Whoever it was, they got out on their own,” Brains said.

I checked the timer. Nine minutes. Not enough for a proper search, too much to just walk away. I told them to follow the prints, and to turn back the moment I said so.

The hatch opened into a crawlspace of pipes and cables, too narrow for Gunner’s Exosuit, so the elder hunter went first with the younger right behind. Their helmet feeds broke up in there, and I spent a long stretch staring at static, listening to their breathing and the scrape of armour on metal. Then a voice that wasn’t one of ours, high and cracked: “Stay back. I mean it.”

When the picture came back, I saw a figure pressed against the far wall of a storage room, holding a length of pipe like a bat. Their lips were blue. In the corner behind them was a small nest of torn insulation and empty ration wrappers.

The younger hunter lowered their rifle first. Then they did something I wouldn’t have thought of. They cracked the seal on their helmet and let the cold bite their face, so the stranger could see there was a person inside the suit.

“We’ve got a train,” they said. “It’s warm. There’s soup.”

The pipe didn’t drop, but it dipped.

Brains wrapped them in a thermal blanket, cracked open one of the new Medikits fresh off the Synthesizer, and Gunner carried them out over one shoulder, which they tolerated with remarkable dignity. Nobody tried jumping the pipes on the way back. Nobody had the stamina for heroics. The horn sounded as the group cleared the minefield, and Driver had us moving before the Expedition Wagon doors had fully closed.

Back aboard, we sat them in the Den with a bowl of Self-Heating Soup (Brains insists we stop calling it Hot Soup now) and let them thaw. They tried to give us their name. We stopped them, the way we always do, and explained. They nodded slowly, like it was the most sensible thing they’d heard since waking up.

Those ration wrappers bothered me, so later that night I asked how long they’d been hiding in there.

“Three days,” they said. “Maybe four. The pod opened, and nobody came.”

Three days alone, eking out rations and listening for footsteps. I didn’t know what to say to that, so I refilled their soup. Brains says soup won’t mend anything by itself, but a full stomach gives the body room to heal on its own. I’ll take it.

Brains solved the other mystery before the bowl was empty. The pod’s heater had never shut off when the lid opened, and our new passenger had been crawling back inside it to sleep each night. It was the only warm place they had.

I went back to the supervisor’s desk after everyone else had turned in. Sleep wasn’t coming, so I started pressing all kinds of keys, rebinding the controls one by one until the desk finally worked the way my hands did. On the camera feed from the Den, our newest passenger was already asleep, pipe still within arm’s reach. Some habits take longer than three days to break.