Kala opened her mouth to argue, but her tall, bone-thin companion had already turned and was halfway to the doors leading to the living quarters. Her long black plait swayed gently in her wake as she marched with a well-trained precision. Vivian paused in the doorway, one gloved hand hovering over the sensor to keep the door open, and glanced over her shoulder. “He also outranks you in combat training. He’ll be fine.”

“Thanks?” Kala said, but Vivian was already gone. The door slid back into place with a quiet whoosh.

Kala shook her head. She’d been living with Vivian for three months, ever since Vivian’s previous roommate had requested a transfer to a different station. Kala would have thought that was enough time to get to know someone, but she seemed no closer to figuring out what went through the frosty woman’s head than she had been on the first day.

Kala turned back to the window and leaned her forehead against it. The glass was pleasantly cold, and the business of the docking bays below made a good distraction. Stanos had been gone for just over a week, travelling to a part of the system where gamma rays made communication channels less than reliable and emergency assistance took days to arrive. She missed him, but more than that, she worried for him.

He and two teammates had been deployed in response to an emergency signal from a remote moon base. Without any information to go on—just a cry for help, broadcast into the vast emptiness of space—they had no way of knowing how serious the situation was. It could be as minor as one of the crew being injured and needing transport back to Central, or Stanos could have been walking into a death trap. They hadn’t heard from him since his ship left easy communication range, and Kala knew that every hour he was late increased the likelihood that something had gone seriously wrong.

Worse, there had been a spate of similar distress signals—all coming from remote moons—during the week he’d been away. Two distress signals a week was normal. Forty-five in ten days was alarming, and the gossip was that something was very wrong on the remote monitoring stations and that Central had deployed investigative crews equipped with full quarantine facilities, stunner guns, and the most advanced diagnostic tools available.

Vivian’s right, though. Stanos and his team are well trained. That’s why they were sent; they can cope with danger. They thrive on danger.

On the other hand, I thrive on security and knowing that my friends aren’t dead, and there’s an alarming shortage of that today.

She’d meant to stay no more than an hour after her shift, but even though time was crawling by and she was in danger of missing dinner if she lingered much longer, she couldn’t summon the will to move. Just a few more minutes. Just in case.

A deep humming noise startled her back to attention, and she blinked furiously to wake herself up. The carrier doors were opening, then a familiar silver shuttle glided through the hatch and landed on the tarmac. The artificial gravity in the hangar was weaker than it was in the rest of the station, but the force was still enough to make the ship shudder as it hit ground. Kala waited until she could read the name emblazoned on the ship’s side—Delta Shock—before she let a shaking, relieved smile spread over her face.