The drums in her head thundered louder. Weird. That was an upsettingly soft word to describe the total annihilation of three entire crews. It was strange enough that Girdy showed up personally to the launch, but his behavior made her even more suspicious. A slick guy like him would usually jump at the chance to impress upper management, but now he wanted to circumvent them? She smelled a rat, but whether that rat was Girdy or his bosses, she couldn’t yet say.

He had her full attention. Rosalyn nodded, doing just like Girdy, putting her hands in her pockets to hide her suddenly sweating palms. She felt the message from her father there and squeezed it. Last chance. For this job, or for her to pull out. Maybe she ought to just tell Girdy to fuck off and she would find another way to run from her problems.

“Do this,” he said, lowering his voice further and leaning in toward her. “Because it isn’t just about second chances. It’s the right thing to do. Three separate expeditions go dark, almost at the same time? That’s a lot of dead people. That’s a lot of questions that need answering.”

Altruism or angling for a promotion? Rosalyn studied him but couldn’t quite decide. Her coworkers deserved justice, that was true, but if this was all simply a series of unfortunate accidents, then there wouldn’t be much justice at all, only funerals and filling vacancies at Merchantia.

“I get it,” she said. “I’ll see what I can do. What I can find.”

“Good. That’s good. Because, look, we’ve signed on to a lot of new tech partnerships lately—ISS, Belrose Industries, Beta Tech . . . It would be better if these deaths weren’t ours, right? We do good work here; I would hate to think we were responsible in any way.” His shark eyes glinted, and he said it with an oddly straight smile.

Definitely angling for a promotion. The more he talked, the more she became convinced Merchantia had done something wrong. Of course Girdy would want a slipup pinned on someone else. All of their jobs would evaporate if Merchantia had purposely caused multiple crew deaths. She had suspected negligence, but Girdy’s black eyes suggested something worse. But there was more there, a name that made Rosalyn’s ears burn. Belrose Industries. When she quit her job and left Earth, that partnership had just been a whisper among the board members. It hadn’t mattered much to her then, only the science really interested her, but it certainly intrigued her now. Did her family business—her father’s tech—have something to do with these catastrophes?

“So you’re trying to pull a cover job,” she said.