An enclosed walkway extended from the edge of the hangar until it touched the side of the ship. Kala was too far away to hear, but she’d been in enough spacecrafts to imagine the heavy hissing noise that meant the walkway was airlocked and it was safe to open the door.

Tinted windows lined the walkway, and Kala saw three figures walking behind them: two shorter, slimmer ones and one who was so tall, his head nearly brushed the roof. Stanos and his two female crew members had all returned alive and with the correct number of limbs attached.

Only then did Kala realise how stupid she must look, hanging around the docking bay after her shift was finished. Vivian was right; Kala hadn’t intended it that way, but she would look like a desperate puppy waiting for its master to return.

“Jeeze, what were you thinking, Kal?” she muttered and quickly turned towards the living area’s doors, hoping to slip out before Stanos saw her. She was a second too late.

“Holcroft!” a familiar voice called, and she turned back to the hangar doors that had just opened to admit the three returned travellers.

Stanos’s long, sharp face was still damp with sweat from wearing his helmet, but he looked genuinely pleased to see her.

Kala returned his infectious smile. “Good to see you back, sir.”

“You waited up for us? That’s perfect, actually—I’ve got a small job I’m hoping you can help me with. You won’t mind putting in a bit of overtime, will you, Holcroft?”

“No, of course not!”

His two crewmates, both middle-aged women Kala didn’t recognise, swept past her and left through the door to the living quarters without saying a word. It was a bit cold, Kala thought, to leave their captain without saying goodbye. Maybe they’d had an argument on the trip back.

“Great.” Stanos beckoned for Kala to follow him in the opposite direction, towards the labs. “It shouldn’t take us too long if we work at it together.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

Kala had to jog to keep up with Stanos’s long strides. She liked being asked to help; the station’s recreational activities weren’t especially stimulating, so she often found it more enjoyable to work late in the labs. She and Stanos had pulled a lot of long shifts together. They sometime worked well into the early hours of the morning, both of them so absorbed in their jobs that they hadn’t realised how late it had become.

Kala was part of the science crew on Station 333. Her job was to examine, categorise, and document samples of life submitted from other, more remote stations. Their database held hundreds of thousands of samples, divided into twenty-nine rough categories, and it continued to billow out as humankind’s long arm stretched farther and farther into the void of space.

At the bottom of the scale were lifeforms that were little more than bloated bacteria. The list also included vegetative forms that couldn’t think or move but still responded to stimuli. Then, less often, they found active lifeforms—the equivalent of Earth’s animals—that ranged from brainless to highly intelligent. While they hadn’t yet found a creature with an intellect developed to a human’s level, leading scientists predicted that they were out there, living beyond humanity’s reach.