Jinx slipped into A-Deck's staff facilities, using a cleaning droid access door. Voices sounded at the other end of the locker room, but the dim maze of storage units rang hollow. Most of her colleagues were in the middle of shifts. She only had to dodge a few people to get to her locker unseen. As she reached it, her wrist com vibrated.
A call request. The fifteenth in the last few minutes.
Baring her teeth, she let the request go to her message service. News of the quarantine had hit the masses. Everyone wanted to 'talk'. She'd had to adjust her com settings to filter out all media contacts and abuse from ship crews.
She'd have liked to have filtered out Dem as well. His foul mood had been fed steroids. People higher up the port's food chain—senior advisors in Legal, pissed off mine-corp VIPs—were demanding an explanation for the top deck being tied up 'unnecessarily'.
Olsen had also cornered Dem.
Dem's last colourfully worded message had been an order for her to report to Medical—or the morgue, where he'd be sending her later. Level five quarantine? Suspicious organic? Fainting while on duty? Was she trying to drive him to homicide?
Another buzz on her com. Text file received.
Snarling, she checked the message. Not from Dem. From Legal. Her warrant request had been put on hold, pending advice from senior heads on Feuria. The blood she'd dropped off for analysis would be staying in cold storage.
For weeks.
"Damn it." She ground teeth then forced out a breath. As much as she wanted to kick Legal for their cowardice, she understood the decision. The local authorities couldn't challenge the Xykeree without military backup. And, in truth, the delay would probably make no difference to whoever had bled on the roaches' deck. The injured human had either escaped during the attack on the Bullhead or was already bio-paste.
Her gut twisted at the thought, but she grimly ignored it. She'd done what she could. Probably more than she should have given the reaction to the quarantine. As for the possible explosion out in the wastes, Lenton was working on getting approval to deploy an air droid to the site. There was nothing to do now but clean up and get back to work.
Except Dem wouldn't let her. Not until she'd been checked out by the med techs.
Fuck.
Resting her forehead against her locker, she took a moment to just breathe. The first real chance she'd had to since regaining consciousness. Nausea hovered in her gut. Dull pain pulsed at her temples, in time with the clank of the air-con overhead.
Across the room, one of her colleagues slammed his locker and yelled at someone to wait up. The sounds seemed distant. As if a veil had fallen between her and the world. She felt off, vaguely deaf—disconnected.
That word kept circling her mind.
She closed her eyes. Continuing to pretend nothing was wrong wasn't an option. But going to Medical would be pointless. Not even the experts treating her father could help. They could rebuild brains, not individuals. To stop the degradation, they'd have to manipulate her genetics and renew pieces of her. That wouldn't have mattered if they'd treated her earlier, when she'd been an infant. They could have changed who she was before she knew who she was. Mess with her mind now...
A person could die and still keep breathing.
The ghost of her father's stare flickered. The memory jolted lose another: her on the Bullhead, fighting a wave of recall about her parents and disturbing images of bodies in med beds—four in a row. Her stomach took a queasy dive. She'd been wigging out even before the scorp had come at her. Had she fainted out of fear or because her brain had started to—?
A roar of sound: her blood surging. Harsh clanging: her boots pounding across metal decking. The whine of weaponry. Flashes of black bulkheads and laser light.
Her blood iced. She resisted the instinct to reject the memory and let the images come.
Plastic wrapped biowaste. A storage alcove. Broken pieces of curved metal and composite.
Scuttling sounds all around her.
She pressed a fist against her chest, her heart echoing a ragged, remembered beat. She hadn't collapsed in the hold. She'd run. She'd lunged out of the door and...
She'd got disorientated, had ended up near the med bay. In an off-limits section of the ship.
The smell of burnt plastic—acrid, overwhelming. Deformed plex. Metal and composite plates and ... jointed limbs scattered across the deck with dislodged circuitry. Biomatter—yellow, nonhuman—smeared up one bulkhead.
The remains of a Xykeree.
There'd been another explosion. Recent. The mess not yet cleared away.
"Shit." She turned and slumped back on her locker. She stared at the storage units across from her, her mind racing. Whatever had happened to that exskel, it hadn't occurred during any pirate attack. It had happened while the Bullhead was docked.
Either that or her recall was mixing war imagery with nightmare.
She could be losing her grip on reality.
Her stomach flipped.
Inhaling sharply, she steadied her hands and unclipped her scanner to check its logs. Again, she found no strong evidence of explosive use, but about the time she should have been leaving the barge, the device had detected high levels of combustion residues and other molecules, like ozone, consistent with a violent electrical discharge.
She closed her eyes, rolling her head back against her locker, gut unclenching. She wasn't crazy. Just scared and confused.
But what did the data mean?
She reviewed the readings again. Were roach exskels prone to malfunctions? Fuel cell issues, maybe? But what did that have to do with her finding human biomatter on the barge? And if she hadn't collapsed in the hold when the scorp had come at her, when the hell had she blacked out? Where and when had she found the blood? The shifting pieces in her mind weren't settling—weren't fitting.
And her time for finding answers was running out.
She checked her coms. Five new vid messages from Dem. One text from Lenton: Air droid approved. But even with supersonic speed, the droid wouldn't get pictures back for at least an hour.
Nothing to do but wait. Wait for images, wait for blood results, wait for her brain to glitch ... then fail completely.
"Fuck." She resisted punching a storage unit. Instead, she yanked off her ruined shirt and jerked open her locker. The jumble of her stowed gear only reminded her of everything she needed to tie up—terminally—so she could leave the planet. And what brilliant explanation was she going to give her friends for that?
Not the truth.
But after today's loss of consciousness, Soh and Dem would insist she have a thorough med check, something she'd so far managed to avoid. Her job only required blood screens for toxins and communicable diseases, and her parents hadn't believed in routine medical checks during her childhood, not trusting doctors.
Things might have been different if they had.
"Damn it." She blinked up at the ceiling, her breath too short. "Screw this." She needed to do something—anything other than wait around replaying the nightmares in her head.
Jerking up the strap of her lime-green civvy singlet, she looked at the shirt in her fist, the sad remains of the top half of her uniform. Not something she'd wear again. A few bloodstains remained on its torn sleeve. Evidence some poor bastard had had an even crappier day than she'd had so far.
But who? And how had they ended up on a Xykeree vessel?
If the victim were a local, he or she could have a record on Enforcement's database. ID that individual, she might find out what kind of outlaw she was dealing with, who had attacked the aliens, and maybe why. All she needed was a bio profile to compare against official records. That's what would eventually happen when her warrant got approved in two to three weeks' time.
She'd be long gone then. On her way back to Sylus 3. To her parents. To the clinic.
Or alone, heading into the cold dark.
Her pulse gave a hard beat. She stared at the shirt in her hand.
Fuck waiting. Fuck everything.
She ripped off a chunk of soiled fabric and stuffed the sample into one of the evidence bags she carried in her pants pockets. After tossing her scanner and the rest of her shirt into her locker, she messaged Dem, telling him she was going off-duty. Then, with a tap on her com, she activated a discreet program that disrupted the unit's location-related functions.
No one needed to know where she was going. What dumbarse thing she was about to do.