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My lavender skin flushed hot, and I felt like my whole body was on fire. Until the ship’s air pressure had stabilized, I needed to wear my helmet. Air must have leaked into it when I’d hit it on the closet, and now my equilibrium was completely off.
Why would someone so high up in the company be here on the ship? I wanted to remind Mr. Neptune that the captain needed him in the engineering quadrant, but considering the precarious nature of my presence on the ship in the first place, I chose to keep my mouth shut and play it cool. Nobody said anything else for an uncomfortable couple of seconds.
“Where’s the uniform lieutenant?” Neptune asked.
“I’m the uniform lieutenant.”
“No, you’re not. Daila Teron is. Where is she?”
“She—she was sick and couldn’t make the launch. I’m her replacement.” He studied me for an uncomfortable couple of seconds. “It was a last-minute thing,” I added.
Neptune nodded as if he accepted my explanation. “I’ll have the medical team come to collect the body.”
“Wait,” I said. “Who is he? What’s his story?” I pointed at the body.
“He was the second navigation officer, just like you said.”
“I know his rank. What’s his name?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Yes, it does. He was a person.”
“Crew members check our identities at the door when we board a ship.”
“He was the second navigation officer. A member of the crew. He was a colleague.”
He cut me off. “Call the bridge and tell them I confirmed your Code Blue.” He turned to leave but stopped by the door. “His name was Dakkar,” he said over his shoulder. Before I could ask any more questions, he left.
As soon as the men were out of my ward, I untwisted the controls on the side of my helmet and pulled it off my head. Cool air rushed at my skin. I dropped onto the end of the bench next to the dead officer—Lt. Dakkar, I repeated to myself—and closed my eyes. From the moment I’d discovered his body, I’d relied on my unemotional Plunian side to manage the circumstances, but now my earthling emotions overtook me.
My temperature was dangerously high, and if I couldn’t cool down, I’d pass out. Plunians were not dissimilar to earthlings, except for one glaring difference: our skin was purple and ran about twenty degrees hotter than theirs. My mom was from Earth, but when it came to being judged by the color of my skin, there was no sense trying to hide my lineage. Purple is purple.
But that wasn’t the problem. When the medical crew took me to the medical ward, they’d run enough tests to find out I had failed the entrance physical. After that, I’d be dropped off at the nearest space station. At least once we were past the breakaway point, they’d have to keep me on the ship until after the moon trek was over.
I reached up and picked at the seam of my uniform until I found a loose thread by the sleeve and then played with the seam until my fingers poked through. I was still burning up and needed to get air onto the surface of my skin. I tore the sleeves off and tossed them under the bench. I had another uniform in my quarters, and I could repair this one in my spare time. That was the problem with being part Plunian. I had wild swings in body temperature. My helmet helped, but it was against regulation, and I’d expected to ditch it as soon as I could. The body in the uniform closet had thrown me off.
Speaking of the body, I had been given a direct order from Neptune. I went back to the call button and radioed the bridge. “Uniform Ward to the Bridge, Sylvia Stryker reporting.”
“This is the bridge,” answered a computerized voice.
“I have a Code Blue. I’ve checked the BOP and—”
“Standby. Medi-Bay personnel will be there to collect the corpse in a moment. Over.”
I recorded the call into my journal. Even though it had seemed way more likely that I’d take over the family business from my mom when she was ready to retire than ever work on a space ship, here I was. No matter what happened, I wanted to remember and document every single second of this experience so I could tell her all about it when I got home. It was just my luck that things had started out like this.
“Can you believe this?” I asked Lt. Dakkar’s body. “Of all the people who could have walked into the uniform ward before we hit the breakaway point, I get the head of Moon Unit security. And what’s he doing walking around in coveralls? Nobody’s going to know he’s security section if he’s dressed like that.”
Head smack. Of course, he was in coveralls and not a uniform. Security wouldn’t want to advertise their presence, especially not after what happened to the previous Moon Units. I’d read something about this somewhere.
I pulled my finding tool out of my personal belongings and cross-referenced the information back to the BOP in my center console. I found what I was looking for in a footnote on the page about the first trip made by a new Moon Unit.
Until the ship is cleared for departure and has passed the breakaway point into the galaxy, security personnel will remain in utility gear. Regulation uniforms are required for all other ship crew at all times. Additionally, throughout the moon trek, security is not to rely on any of the ship’s wards for supplies. They are beholden to the safety of the ship only.
In doing my research on Moon Unit 5, I’d learned that in the past, security had developed loose loyalties to different departments and neglected others, and that had been the downfall of Moon Units 1-3. The truth about what had happened to Moon Unit 4 was kept tightly under wraps and remained a mystery despite how often I hacked into their chat room to read their security logs.
It was the physical that tripped me up, and all because my dad was from Plunia so my biological makeup came with a few challenges. Nothing I hadn’t figured out how to handle by now.
The ward doors slid open, and a medical crew stepped inside. Doctor Edison, the ship’s resident physician, led the team. Behind him was a pretty woman in a blue uniform that matched his own, followed by two men in standard gray. Gray was for flex crew members, trained to manage a variety of positions on the flight. Blue was for the medical staff (the uniform colors corresponded to their related codes, Code Blue meant medical, and the medical team wore blue.) He glanced my way, and I pointed to the body under the dressing gown. “The body is under there,” I said. “He’s the second navigation officer. Neptune confirmed his condition.”
Doc pulled the dressing gown back from the body and ran a couple of standard tests. A series of whirs and buzzes and beeps sounded while his nurse assisted. After a few minutes, Doc stood up, capped the end of the nozzle that he’d used to take a sample of the inside of the officer’s cheek, and handed it to the woman. Doc turned to me.
“What did Neptune tell you about him?”
“He didn’t say anything. Neptune didn’t even want to tell me his name.”
“Why did you want to know his name?” Doc looked suspicious.
“He was one of us. It seems right.”
“Neptune was following protocol. Who told you he was the second navigation officer?”
“I’m in charge of uniforms. This officer is wearing a red shirt, and red shirts go with ship navigation. There’s are two black bands around his left cuff, so he was second in command, not first. And the ship was able to depart from the space station, so he couldn’t have been part of the main crew or they would have noticed he was missing from his post.”
“Neptune didn’t tell you any of that?” he asked.
“No. Neptune didn’t say much of anything.” As I stood in front of the doc and his assistant, I became aware that they were staring at my bare purple arms. I wrapped my arms around my body, but there was no covering the exposed flesh.
“You appear flushed. Are you feeling okay?” He stepped toward me and lifted his vital signs scanner.
“I’m fine,” I said, stepping backward and out of range. “I was shaken up when I found the body and got a little warm.”
Doc looked from my arms to my face. “What’s your name?”
“Sylvia Stryker. Second Lieutenant.”
“Stryker.” He thought for a moment. “Come to the medical ward after your shift ends. I’d like to give you a physical.”
Alarm bells sounded in my head. “I thought all of our physicals were conducted before departure,” I said, carefully avoiding the truth about my own results.
“Lieutenant Stryker, you’ve been in contact with a dead man. I won’t know what killed him until I give him a complete workup. You don’t look all that hot yourself. It’s my duty to make sure the crew stays healthy.”
I wished I knew more about Lt. Dakkar, his background or his reason for being in the uniform ward. I wished I knew whether or not it was possible to catch something from a corpse. It was too late for that now.
“Every person on this ship has had a physical to clear them. I doubt he was sick, but I’m going to check his records and see what I can find out from an autopsy. In the meantime, I would request that you not mention this to the ship’s guests. The captain has made it clear that a lot is riding on the success of Moon Unit 5, and the last thing we need is to create a panic. Do you hear what I’m saying, Lt. Stryker?” Doc Edison asked. “Until we know more, the details surrounding this man’s death are not to be discussed.”
“Of course. Confidentiality is understood.”
The men in gray moved the body from my bench to a cart. They left the dressing gown over his face but draped him with a black blanket that covered the rest of him. The doors swished open, and the team departed as efficiently as they’d arrived. As soon as the doors swished shut behind them, I packed up my finding tool and put the BOP back onto the cabinet shelf where it was routinely stored. I reset the call button and locked the plastic dome into place on top of it, and then turned my attention back to the inventory closet. Previously neat stacks of uniforms sorted by size and color had been knocked out of place when the body had fallen out and were now in messy heaps on the floor.
“That’s just great,” I said. “Maybe I should have said I was a stowaway. At least that way I could avoid the humiliation of the physical and I wouldn’t have to refold all these uniforms.” I kicked the pile in front of me, and the stack fell over. “This whole thing was a huge mistake. I should have just stayed on Plunia and mined ice with my mom.”
I scooped a pile of uniforms from the floor to the cabinet and scanned the room for a surface to use for folding. Just getting this inventory back into organization was going to take the better part of the day. “Stupid Sylvia,” I muttered to myself. “This is your punishment for thinking you could get away with sneaking on board the ship. Sooner or later somebody’s going to find out you’re not supposed to be here.”
I heard a noise behind the open cabinet door. Slowly, the door swung toward me, exposing a skinny pink alien girl who peeked out from behind it. She grinned at me in a manner so friendly that if she was a threat, I was the queen of the galaxy. She held both hands up in front of her. Her palms were dirty, as was the skin around her mouth. She looked like she’d picked a Plunian potato straight out of the ground and eaten it, dirt and all.
“I won’t turn you in. I promise,” she said. “But I do want to know how you managed to make it look like you belong here.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re like me! I mean, I’m like you! I mean, I’m a stowaway too.”