“This has got to be it,” Holden said, tapping a finger against the screen. Under his nail, Monica’s doorway opened. Two people came out. They wore light blue jumpsuits with no signs or insignia, dark, close-fitting caps, and work gloves. The crate they wheeled between them was the same formed plastic and ceramic that food and environmental services used to transport biological materials: raw fungal matter to be textured and flavored, then the foods that were made from them, and – when needed – the processed fecal remains taken back as substrate for the fungus. Magnetic clamps held it to the cart, and the indicator on the side showed it was sealed. It was big enough, maybe, to hold a woman. Or a woman’s body.

They’d gone in an hour earlier. Monica had gone in twenty minutes before. Whatever happened, she had to have been in that box.

Fred, scowling and hunched over, marked the crate as an item of interest and put a follow order on it. Holden couldn’t tell what the older man was thinking, but his eyes were flat with anger. Anger and something else.

“You recognize them?” Holden asked.

“They’re not in the system.”

“Then how did they get on the station?”

Fred glanced at him. “Working on that.”

“Right. Sorry.”

On-screen, the two men – Holden was pretty sure they were both men – took the crate to a maintenance corridor, the trace clicking over from camera to camera automatically. In the narrower space, the crate bumped against the walls and tried to bind up where the corridor turned.

“Doors and corners,” Holden said.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

The security trace showed men and cart entering a warehouse. Pallets of similar crates filled the space. The men guided the cart to a half-filled one, unlocked the clamps, and hauled the crate up and onto the pallet with its siblings. Fred split the display, holding the trace on the cart, but adding one to each of the two men. One panel showed the storage space; the other followed the two figures out to the common corridors.

In the warehouse, a pair of mech drivers came, logged in from lunch, and resumed the task of piling on crates. In the common corridor, the two men went into a lavatory and didn’t come out. The trace on them flickered forward until the green border that marked a live feed framed the images. A short call to the warehouse manager verified that the two men hadn’t holed up there; they’d just disappeared. The cart, still going through the older records, was buried in among others just like it. Fred advanced the feed. Mech drivers came and went. Pallets filled and were piled on top of each other.

“Present status,” Fred said, and the security feed skipped forward without moving away from the warehouse camera. Whatever had been in the crate was still there.