Vodka. She needed vodka. The worst of the withdrawal symptoms had passed, she thought, but no, here they were again, louder and more insistent than ever. It was like a drum in her head, an itch in her throat, a burn that went from her tongue to her hands and made her fidget constantly. Just one sip of something would make this all feel far away, like a nightmare she could laugh at in the morning.

Morning. Sleep. How was she supposed to sleep? Rosalyn paced, flexing her hands and then stretching out her fingers, over and over again, hoping the pattern would somehow become soothing. It didn’t. The little room she had locked herself in was bathed in the harsh orange cast of emergency lighting. With her mind jumping from thought to thought to thought she almost didn’t notice the one thing that was conspicuously absent from the room.

No Foxfire.

Rosalyn scrubbed at the bloodstain on her visor with both hands until the dried muck flecked away. She searched along the walls, floor and ceiling but found there wasn’t a trace of the blue glowing stuff. Outside the safety of the plastic shielding, the flowering spores ran right up to the doorway and then stopped, as if shying away. She turned around, staring for a moment at the decontamination chamber next to the cold storage lockers.

It was just fungal matter, sophisticated, surely, but could it actually know not to come near the decontamination area? Was it possible even the growth itself was afraid of the room?

It wasn’t a triumph, but at least she felt relieved that she might have blundered her way into the safest part of the ship. Her suit came standard equipped with environmental filters, but this much contaminant in the air would wear them out quickly. At least in a more or less clean zone the filters wouldn’t be bombarded with spores. Eventually the suit’s filters would need to be replaced, and she didn’t imagine they had an infinite supply aboard.

But that was about where her luck ran out, she thought, going to the cubby and bench near the lab equipment and sitting down hard. She leaned back and called up her AR display. Without a recognized network connection, she would have access to only limited functions, but she could at least start a running list of what she knew and understood about her circumstances. And she still had the crew dossiers. Maybe she could mine those for more information . . . They were all clearly dangerous, the crew, but it seemed like Edison was using his own memories and past to somehow fight back the Foxfire’s control. If she knew the crew, then if they turned on her again, she might be able to call up some tidbit from their profile to bring their humanity back.