Jayda covered her ears, squeezing her eyes closed. “Stop it!” She gasped it out. Even his voice stirred up dead memories. Frustration made breathing harder. “Just leave. Let me work.”
“Yes, ma’am!”
CHAPTER FOUR
Jayda sat in her chair, her hands clamped over her ears. Voices not really there echoed in her head. “Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!”
She whispered her commands to herself, over and over, until things were quiet again.
After a few more breaths she activated her system. She needed to work, to distract herself, but first she had to report the accident. She’d been too busy, then too tired to let it cross her mind before now.
Links took a while, so she used the time to pull up Dr. Taylor’s list. Despite the young woman’s doubt, Jayda had components to construct an effective bronchial treatment, a problem she could solve in a matter of hours.
She set the robots to collecting the inventory from their storage bins and transferring them into the lab.
Her comm chimed a connection as she finished. Her contact popped up with a concerned scowl on his face. “What’s this about an accident? Is it the inventory? How much did we lose?”
“Is it the inventory?” Jayda growled at his corporate narrow-minded focus. “Foster, we’ve got dead people, wounded, no rescue and the first words out of your mouth are about the damned perfume? You’ve always been a dick, but really?”
The man on the other end of her rant held up his hands. “I’m sorry, you’re right, that was stupid and insensitive. What’s the situation? What can I do?”
“First, get a ship here faster than two weeks.”
Foster started tapping something into a computer on his end. “I’ll get on that, see if anyone is closer to you. Next… what happened? Details!”
“I don’t know, Fos. A freak particle storm hit just as the ship was departing, so both our shields were down. Ripped their ship up pretty bad. Threw it into the station. Killed two, probably a third, fifteen more incapacitated. Those still able-bodied are working on getting the ship stabilized. One of the dead was their ship’s doctor, so all we have is his intern. They used their shuttle to transport the six worst cases out to the sub-station, and of course the station’s evac ship is off somewhere.”
Jayda gasped. Her tirade was more words than she’d spoken at one time, in years.
Foster’s eyebrows scrunched together. “A particle storm caused all this? Why didn’t the perimeter net alert you?”
“I don’t know, but it didn’t. I was so busy I forgot to follow up.”
Jayda pulled up the safety net program, designed to protect the expensive station from little flying dust storms capable of shredding metal. The program came up with an error message.
She jabbed at the reset and got another error message. “Something’s wrong! I can’t get anything. Can’t tell it’s even there anymore.”
“So we don’t know how long it’s been down?” Foster was showing his bottom teeth now in his scowl.
“They were out here about a week before the last shipment, ran through all the programs and recalibrated the net. They replaced one quadrant.”
She thought back to her own scheduled reviews of the station’s systems. “I remember hearing several alerts since they left, but I always have the shields engaged, so I didn’t pay attention.”
“How are your shields now?”
“Reinitiated them as soon as we were hit. But back up protocols should have alerted me to any shutdown of the net, for just this reason.”
She jabbed at the control panel. Nothing came up. “What the hell…” Her stomach rolled over again. “Dual failure? Now I have no shields either.”
Foster’s upper teeth were showing now. “Data’s on a separate system. Back-up everything and go into lockdown. Run full diagnostics.”
“Great, you’re seriously thinking this is some kind of perfume espionage? It’s perfume!” Now she was spitting the word out like it was poison.
Foster scowled again. “One shipment is worth millions of credits so what do you think the formulas would go for?”
Jayda bit back a retort. She’d grown up on a freighter. Some ship captains dabbled in the black market, some up to their necks. Raiders might think a run on her was worth it.
“I’ll get on it, but that makes me leery of anyone who just happens to be in the area.”
“Yeah, me too. I’ll be careful what gets out, but we might have to wait for that official rescue.” Foster tried to put on a positive face. “This ship captain, I doubt he’d try to kill his crew. You think you can trust him?”
Trust wasn’t her issue. “He’s former military, probably just retired. He still breathes it so I’d say he can likely be trusted.”
“Then he’s like you. Eight years hasn’t taken it out of you either. The two of you need to look at this issue from the espionage angle.” Foster leaned forward. “And don’t assume this is all about perfume. You’re a valuable asset too.”
“Valuable enough to kill?”
He didn’t answer, signing off.
Jayda ran another diagnostic on her security systems, trying to reset them, but only got error codes. She’d driven Dolan from the galley, so it took an effort to call him back, but she did.
“Dolan here!” Despite their last encounter, he sounded unaffected.
“Capt. Dolan. There is an important matter I need to discuss with you. Can you return to the galley, no… come to my quarters?”
Telling him they were defenseless had to be done in private.
“Yes, ma’am!”
Before pulling herself out of the chair, she set the computer to readjust the gravity down another degree, hoping no one would notice.
She was barely in her room before the computer announced Dolan.
He entered, looking around her quarters before settling on her. “Taylor is horrified, Dr. Maldonado.”
She hadn’t meant to reveal herself, but she’d been mad about Taylor’s comment. “I’m not a doctor!”
“Maybe not, but your background is impressive. Military to medical research, at least a dozen patents
