“What happened?” Dahl asked.
“She was shot by a Cirquerian assassin,” Collins said. “The assassin was aiming at the Dub U ambassador to Cirqueria. The captain pushed the ambassador down and Margaret was standing right behind him. Took the bullet in the neck. Dead before she hit the ground. Jenkins chose to at least partly disassociate from reality after that.”
“So what does he think is happening?” Dahl asked.
“Why don’t we save that for another time,” Collins said. “You know what’s going on now and why. I’m sorry we didn’t tell you about this earlier, Andy. But now you know. And now you know what to do when either me or Ben suddenly say that we’re going to get coffee.”
“Hide,” Dahl said.
“‘Hide’ isn’t a word we like to use,” Cassaway said. “‘Perform alternative tasks’ is the preferred term.”
“Just not in the storage room,” Mbeke said. “That’s
“I’ll just alternatively task behind my work desk, then, shall I,” Dahl said.
“That’s the spirit,” Mbeke said.
At evening mess, Dahl caught up his four friends with what he learned in the lab, and then turned to Finn. “So, did you get the information I asked you for?” he said.
“I did indeed,” Finn said.
“Good,” Dahl said.
“I want to preface this by saying that normally I don’t do this sort of work for free,” Finn said, handing his phone over to Dahl. “Normally something like this would have been a week’s pay. But this shit’s been weirding me out since that away mission. I wanted to see it for myself.”
“What are the two of you talking about?” Duvall said.
“I had Finn pull some records for me,” Dahl said. “Medical records, mostly.”
“Whose?” Duvall asked.
“Your boyfriend’s,” Finn said.
Dahl looked up at that. “What?”
“Duvall’s dating Kerensky,” Finn said.
“Shut up, Finn, I am not,” Duvall said, and glanced over to Dahl. “After he recovered, Kerensky tracked me down to thank me for saving his life,” she said. “He said that when he first came to in the shuttle, he thought he’d died because an angel was hovering over him.”
“Oh, God,” Hester said. “Tell me a line like that doesn’t actually work. I might have to kill myself otherwise.”
“It doesn’t,” Duvall assured him. “Anyway, he asked if he could buy me a drink the next time we had shore leave. I told him I’d think about it.”
“Boyfriend,” Finn said.
“I’m going to stab you through the eye now,” Duvall said to Finn, pointing her fork at him.
“Why did you want Lieutenant Kerensky’s medical records?” Hanson asked.
“Kerensky was the victim of a plague a week ago,” Dahl said. “He recovered quickly enough to lead an away mission, where he lost consciousness because of a machine attack. He recovered quickly enough from that to hit on Maia sometime today.”
“To be fair, he still looked like hell,” Duvall said.
“To be fair, he should probably be dead,” Dahl said. “The Merovian Plague melts people’s flesh right off their bones. Kerensky was about fifteen minutes away from death before he got cured, and he’s leading an away mission a week later? It takes that long to get over a bad cold, much less a flesh-eating bacteria.”
“So he’s got an awesome immune system,” Duvall said.
Dahl fixed her with a look and flipped Finn’s phone to her. “In the past three years, Kerensky’s been shot three times, caught a deadly disease four times, has been crushed under a rock pile, injured in a shuttle crash, suffered burns when his bridge control panel blew up in his face, experienced partial atmospheric decompression, suffered from induced mental instability, been bitten by two venomous animals and had the control of his body taken over by an alien parasite. That’s before the recent plague and this away mission.”
“He’s also contracted three STDs,” Duvall said, scrolling through the file.
“Enjoy your drink with him,” Finn said.
“I think I’ll ask for penicillin on the rocks,” Duvall said. She handed the phone back to Dahl. “So you’re saying there’s no way he could be walking around right now.”
“Forget the fact that he should be dead,” Dahl said. “There’s no way he could be alive and
“They have therapies to compensate for that,” Duvall said.
“Yeah, but not for this many times,” Dahl said. “This is seventeen major injuries or trauma in three years. That’s one every two months. He should be in a constant fetal position by now. As it is, it’s like he has just enough time to recover before he gets the shit kicked out of him again. He’s unreal.”
“Is there a point to this,” Duvall said, “or are you just jealous of his physical abilities?”
“The point is there’s something weird about this ship,” Dahl said, scrolling through more data. “My commanding officer and lab mates fed me a bunch of nonsense about it today, with the away teams and Kerensky and everything else. But I’m not buying it.”
“Why not?” Duvall asked.
“Because I don’t think they were buying it either,” Dahl said. “And because it doesn’t explain away something like this.” He frowned and looked over at Finn. “You couldn’t find anything on Jenkins?”
“You’re talking about the yeti you and I encountered,” Finn said.
“Yeah,” Dahl said.
“There’s nothing on him in the computer system,” Finn said.
“We didn’t imagine him,” Dahl said.
“No, we didn’t,” Finn agreed. “He’s just not in the system. But then if he’s the programming god your lab mates suggest he is, and he’s currently actively hacking into the computer system, I don’t think it should be entirely surprising he’s not in the system, do you?”
“I think we need to find him,” Dahl said.
“Why?” Finn asked.
“Because I think he knows something that no one else wants to talk about,” Dahl said.
“Your friends in your lab say he’s crazy,” Hester pointed out.
“I don’t think they’re actually his friends,” said Hanson.
Everyone turned to him. “What do you mean?” said Hester.
Hanson shrugged. “They said the reason they didn’t tell him about what was going on is that he wouldn’t have believed it before he had experienced some of it himself. Maybe that’s right. But it’s also true that if he didn’t know what was going on, he wouldn’t be able to do what they do: avoid Commander Q’eeng and the other officers, and manage not to get on away team rosters. Think about it, guys: all five of us were on the same away team at one time, on a ship with thousands of crew. What do we all have in common?”
“We’re the new guys,” Duvall said.
Hanson nodded. “And none of us were told any of this by our crewmates until now, when it couldn’t be avoided anymore.”
“You think the reason they didn’t tell us wasn’t because we didn’t know enough to believe them,” Dahl said. “You think it was because that way, if someone had to die, it would be us, not them.”
“It’s just a theory,” Hanson said.
Hester looked at Hanson admiringly. “I didn’t think you were that cynical,” Hester said.
Hanson shrugged again. “When you’re the heir to the third largest fortune in the history of the universe, you learn to question people’s motivations,” he said.
“We need to find Jenkins,” Dahl said again. “We need to know what he knows.”
“How do you suggest we do that?” Duvall asked.
“I think we start with the cargo tunnels,” Dahl said.
