Chapter 36

Chapter Thirty-Six
Despite the exertions of the night before, Connor’s sleep was troubled, interrupted by nightmares about suffocating and cramps. He finally gave up a couple hours before he would normally wake and decided to head down to the galley.
At some point, Selen had snuggled up against him, so he had to disentangle from her. That was a challenge, more because of how good it felt to have her pressed against him than for fear of waking her, since she was sound asleep.
He padded quietly down the passageway, listening for any other activity. Martienne’s muffled grumbling leaking from the bridge was the only sound.
Connor’s calves and back muscles spasmed while he descended the ladder. When he passed into the galley, the lights flickered on, but not before the chill he’d felt prior to the airlock accident washed over him again.
Just my imagination, he told himself.
He heated a mug of synthcaff and dropped into a corner chair.
They’d come close—him, Rudy, Aubriella, and Yemi.
How? There were so many failsafes, so many redundancies, that an airlock opening like the cargo bay airlock had was almost impossible. There were physical overrides, certainly, and there were super-user overrides available from the bridge, but those were obvious.
He would have heard someone on the deck above pushing the override button.
Activating the bridge override would leave a trail…
Connor pulled out his pocket computer. Only he and Selen had power-user privileges for all the ship’s systems, but the pilots could issue overrides, and anyone with sufficient skill could hack their systems. It certainly seemed like Mosiah knew his way around computers.
Unfortunately, there was no record of an override.
Still, if Mosiah knew computers well enough to track the jobs Connor and Selen had been trying for on Mara, he might be able to erase his trail after a hack.
But the same applied to those with the ability to issue the override normally.
So, what did that leave?
An unlikely accident that would be another in a string of highly unlikely events.
Or…a system failure.
The Lucky Sevens was falling behind on all sorts of maintenance tasks. It was an older ship, which made upkeep tough in the best of times.
Connor pulled up the maintenance logs.
There at the top of the maintenance queue was a bolded red entry: Cargo Bay Airlock Maintenance Overdue. In the log, Drew had left a note indicating she would perform the work after maintenance on the shuttle landing gear.
Selen would be able to see that. Now that everything was okay, she would go through the same steps he had.
And she would see Drew’s note.
Something heavy scraped down the passageway toward the galley.
Vicente’s big head came around the corner. He had a fresh bandage, and there was a dullness to his eyes. The brilliant red sleeveless T-shirt had been replaced with a dull green one. “Hey, Boss.”
“How are you feeling?”
“Tired. A little slow.” The big man flexed. “Weak, too.”
“You took a nasty hit to the head. That takes time to heal.”
“Sure, Boss. I thought I was doing better, but I guess I collapsed.”
“Relapsed.”
“Yeah, yeah—that. Man, I’m hungry.”
Connor closed down the connection to the maintenance records. “You going to be ready for the shuttle drop?”
“You know it! This sounds like the perfect job for a heavy weapons expert.”
“I didn’t ask if you thought we’d need you. Are you going to be ready?”
Vicente opened the refrigerator and took out two large, brown boxes with fold tops. He set those down on the table across from Connor and sat down. Connor was the closest of anyone to the big man’s size but was still dwarfed by him.
“Y’know, Boss—” Vicente took foil pouches of a foul, non-fat, sugarless protein paste from the boxes and made a small pyramid in front of him. What he had out amounted to two thousand calories, which he consumed three times a day. “—my old man told me once that you either earn your way through life, or life eventually passes you by.”
The big man uncapped a pouch. A gray paste that smelled like mushrooms gone bad leaked onto his fingers.
He licked them clean. “I earn my way.“
Connor pushed up from the table, then set his cup in the small sink. “Just remember, if you go down with us, we’re counting on you.”
“You can count on me.”
Vicente held a massive fist out, and Connor bumped it with his own before heading out.
He’d intended to head up to Drew’s cabin to chat with her about the log entry, but stopped in the passageway when he saw her shambling toward the galley, one hand covering a yawn. She wore the same greasy coveralls as the night before.
Behind her, climbing down the ladder from the deck above was Selen.
She’d taken the time to pull on her jacket but was still in her sleeping clothes.
And she was clearly angry—lips pressed tight, brow pinched.
Drew had no idea. She waved at Connor. “Up so early?” Her voice was thick with exhaustion, the words tripping over each other.
Selen stalked forward. “He’s lucky to be alive, don’t you think?”
The engineer spun around. “Selen! Good morning.”
“I don’t think it’s all that good, actually.”
Connor pointed toward the ramp down to the cargo bay. “Down there, please?”
Drew’s eyes narrowed. “Sure. Is everything—?”
He hurried to the ramp without a word, then headed down, feeling Selen right behind him. Drew’s steps were slow…hesitant.
Most of the mess from the night before had been cleared already. Cases and containers were closed, and the debris that hadn’t been sucked out and blasted by the ship’s rocket plume had been gathered into bins for sorting and recycling.
At least the inexplicable coolness wasn’t there.
He leaned against one of the larger containers, arms crossed. The situation was Selen’s to run now. At best, he could try to do damage control.
Selen hooked her thumbs over her hips. “I reviewed the maintenance logs.”
So, she knew. He figured it wouldn’t take her long.
Drew didn’t flinch. “Uh-huh.”
“And I saw that you were scheduled to work on the cargo bay airlock.”
“Yeah. I did the inspection and cleaning after we finished the landing gear.” Drew shrugged. “It wasn’t a big deal. Why?”
Connor cleared his throat. “Because the maintenance logs don’t reflect that.”
“What? I did the work. There’s an actuator that has some wear and needs to be watched, and there’s a small fluid leak I’ll need to tear into next time we’re in port. That was it.”
Selen got up in the engineer’s face. “That airlock nearly killed four of my people!”
“It’s not like that. The airlock system worked. It’s good.”
“Or maybe it’s not. Maybe you were too strung out to notice—”
“I’m clean! Selen, I swear it!”
“You swore it the last time, and then we found drugs in your system.”
“I’ll let Lem test me. I’m clean. Please! Selen, I wouldn’t—”
Selen held up a hand. “Don’t talk to me. Have Lem check you out. If you’re clean, I’ll log a reprimand for failure dangerously poor performance. If you’ve got anything in your system—anything—you’re fired.”
Drew held herself together until Selen had stomped up the ramp and was gone.
Then the engineer turned to Connor, tears in her eyes. “I did the work. I swear.” Her shoulders shook as she sobbed.
It was the same display as last time. She’d protested her innocence until the test results came back.
But this felt…different.
She cupped her hands over her face. “I don’t know what’s up with the records.”
He did the same thing he’d done the day they’d confronted her so long ago, wrapping his arms around her shoulders and letting her cry on him. “If you’re clean, you’re safe.”
“I’m clean!”
“Then everything’s going to be fine. I promise.”
Her sobs dropped until they were barely audible, but she kept her face buried in his chest for a while.
This was the part of being Selen’s second—providing moral support, especially since he wasn’t sure there was anything he could do to save Drew’s job, even if she was clean.