“Sorry,” she whispered, then booted the computer. It woke up, already logged in, one spot of luck. “I practically grew up at Belrose,” she told Edison while he watched the doors for them. “Summer job at reception. Not paid, of course, because hard work is its own reward according to my dad.” After a brief pause and a stuffed urge to babble nervously about her internships, Rosalyn found Danny Russo, Piero, in the employee ID log.

“He came through when the Brigantine docked here,” she said, squinting through the haze of spores lingering in the air. “Just a quickie. Picked up a package for them.”

“Working all angles,” Edison muttered. “That definitely sounds like Piero.”

“And making a mint, too.” Whistling, Rosalyn shook her head, glancing up from the monitor. “They paid him a small fortune for this. Package included . . . let’s see . . . ah! Perfect. Single-use experimental vaccination. Beta Tech–brand rebreather. Dangerous biocontaminant. Xenobiological samples. There’s just an address here, but it’s this same station, only a different suite.”

Rosalyn looked up again, consulting her AR, checking the floor schematic against the suite address.

“It’s on this floor,” she said, unfocusing her eyes from her display, training her eye not on Edison but what lay beyond him, through the doors. “One guess where it is.”

“Piero knew what he was doing. Bastard. He brought the Foxfire on board knowing it was dangerous.” Edison swore again and again, pacing in front of the open doors. “And the dates we found with his badge?”

“He’s a bastard, certainly, but there are a lot of bastards here. ISS is a shipping point, a middleman.” She backed out of the manifest proving Piero’s mission and called up the complex calendar, layered with icons. A small box in the corner, like a map key, allowed her to choose what information the calendar displayed. “Scheduled pickups.” She had memorized the sequence of numbers that coincided with the Merchantia launch dates, only a quick scroll through the calendar away. “There.” She poked the screen. She felt like she might choke. The dates were too close to be a coincidence. “There. Danny Russo had a stopover with ISS before each of those doomed launches. They weren’t accidents, Edison, all of them took deliveries from this place, and all of them went dark. Shit.”

Rosalyn pulled back from the computer, bumping the receptionist and watching as it dissolved into a flurry of bluish-white specks, like a dandelion blowing into the wind. She stumbled back toward Edison, pointing frantically at the back of her environmental suit.

“My filters. They’re not handling this level of contamination. I’ve probably got another hour, maybe two.”