She consulted the clunky VIT monitor on her left wrist. Hard-coded information that was sensitive or classified went to the physical monitor. Vit Tech was too jumpy about body jacking to let companies send encrypted information that way, so old-school hardware it was. Four hours to launch. Alexia was one of the best pilots Roz had worked with at MSC, but she didn’t exactly seem in fighting trim at the moment. Having her on the three-man crew would be the only thing making the presence of Dave Walters tolerable.

“See you, Roz,” Alexia said, still smiling, and drifted out the door.

“Yeah.” Rosalyn gave a short wave. “See you.” And then when she was gone: “Jesus.”

As if summoned by the ending of that strange interlude, a wiry, redheaded man bounced into the garden, hands in pockets, whistled tune on his lips. Dave Walters. Great. Rosalyn picked up her turkey and cheddar and began eating it, smacking her lips hard with every bite. Even subjecting herself to a painfully awkward launch with Griz and Owen again was preferable to working with Walters. Every woman on the station knew he was a pig, and Rosalyn had already strategically used one of her allotted absences to avoid an assignment with him.

But this was a test. Her second chance. Tests weren’t meant to be easy.

Walters was of course the kind of person to advertise his relationship status in his AR profile. Single! What a surprise. And a Pisces not looking for anything serious. Fascinating.

“You see Courtney?” His song dropped and he let out a low whistle this time, rolling his eyes. “She’s fuckin’ blasted, man. Fruit loops. That last cleanup was a real shit show. Generator malfunctioned, raised the temps, practically cooked the bodies for weeks. Rotisserie research crew. Courtney said they were vacuuming up people paste for days.”

“Fuck, that’s awful.” Rosalyn blinked hard. And weird. She had just seen almost exactly the same thing. What was going on? Apparently it wasn’t the latest VIT patch messing with Alexia. Maybe Rosalyn was lucky to survive that horrendous cleanup without going mad and talking about whispering trees. Modern ships were equipped to drop temperatures the second no life readings were detected, keeping any dead bodies from decomposing too quickly, but things occasionally went wrong, sometimes the temps didn’t drop and, well, people paste. She wondered at the likelihood of there being two similar cleanups back-to-back, though she hadn’t heard anything about Alexia’s being caused by an actual murderer.

“Poor thing,” she added. “I finished something similar this week. It’s hard to scrub those images out of your mind.”