She paused just inside the galley, finding the floor damp and almost slick with something blackish. Not again. Only a few feet away sat a small folding table with the remnants of a card game and a few chairs, two knocked over and askew. She carefully padded to the table, making sure she didn’t slip in whatever coated the floor. The lights strobed again, unevenly, and she gazed around at the walls, marveling at a strange blue flicker she hadn’t noticed before.

Where was their Servitor? And what the hell was all over the walls . . .

“Devar? Hey. Talk to me.”

Grimacing, she tore her gaze away from the strands of glowing blue on the walls and looked down at the card table. “Crazy eights,” she said.

“Pardon?”

“They were playing cards,” she added, noticing a distinct smear of blackish red on one of the spades. She waited a beat, spreading out one of the card hands and then walking away, slowly approaching the odd filaments of iridescent blue pulsing along the walls, as bright and spidery as human veins.

Rosalyn leaned in, squinting. “The floor is sticky. My VIT just keeps saying, ‘Unknown Substance,’ and there’s something biological growing on the walls. God. It’s everywhere. I’m actually getting a spore level alert inside a ship.”

“That doesn’t sound great.”

“Here, grab the visuals,” she said, using her VIT monitor to grant him access to the little camera affixed to her helmet. Anything in her AR display would stream directly to him. “See it?”

“Ugh. Yuck. Although . . . it’s kinda . . . I mean, if you squint, it’s sort of—”

“Beautiful,” she finished for him, gazing around. “Definitely. Reminds me of those glowing caves, you know? With all the fluorescent mushrooms. Malaysia, I think.”

“Nothing on the VIT?” he asked.

“No, nothing. Best I’m getting is ‘Unidentified Fungal Growth.’ Can you broaden the search from the Salvager? Maybe there’s something in the MSC biological database.”

Walters fell quiet while he performed the search. Through his mic, she could hear him tapping away at the console and breathing heavily. His VIT screeched again, trying to alert him to the refueling mission redirect. Rosalyn tuned it out. She moved farther along the wall, noting that the glowing blue growth became thicker as it neared the doors leading out of the galley, even disappearing into the creases along its edge, suggesting it had spread deeper into the ship.

“I’m going to take a wild guess and say this growth is our mystery killer,” she said, sidestepping the door and following along the perimeter of the room. She needed to find that Servitor, and he was somewhere in the flickering darkness, powered down and waiting.

“You better decontam yourself for about a solid decade before you step foot on campus,” Walters shot back. “Or on my ship.”

“Our ship, thanks. And no arguments there. Anything in the bio database?”