“Go away,” commanded another voice, this one sharp and rigid. What she thought was Ellenex moved silently away, leaving Park blinded by the sterile white light the android’s head had been blocking off. Then another person moved into her watery field of vision, and this one she recognized more clearly: Chanur. The ship’s physician.

Park was in the medical bay.

Now she did panic, sitting up and clawing automatically at her arm; she ripped off whatever medical tab had been glued there and said thickly, “Am I sick?”

Sickness should have been impossible on their ship, she knew. All thirteen members of the Deucalion’s human crew had been rigorously examined, scanned, and tested for disease prior to boarding for the ten-month journey to Eos. And with no foreign microbes in space, the chances of incurring infection en route were vanishingly small. But just last night, Park had been informed that the expedition’s roboticist, Reimi Kisaragi, was indisposed and being held in quarantine. And if Park had caught whatever she had . . . well. The last time something like this had happened, an entire fleet of military vessels had been compromised, a foreign virus blazing through their ships like wildfire. Park remembered reading about it in the news before they left Earth: a biological attack by the rebels. No survivors.

Chanur watched her struggle with a thousand grim possibilities like a scientist watching a pinned insect squirm. Finally the doctor said, without warmth: “You’re not sick. Not in the way you’re thinking, anyway.” She sounded genuinely disappointed by that fact.

Park frowned at her. “What do you mean?”

“You spent the entire night throwing up in the waste cubicle,” Chanur answered in clipped tones, folding her arms as if it were Park’s fault; as if she were a child who had misbehaved. The doctor was a native of Phobos, and her voice always had the flat, tight tones of a human whose larynx had shrunk a little in space. Actually, all of Chanur seemed a little shrunken, a little hard: she was a compact woman with iron-colored hair and eyes, and a mouth that was perpetually pursed. Park had always thought that she would be better suited as a roboticist rather than as a physician. Or as a coroner. Despite her reputation in the medical field, Chanur didn’t like people very much. “You essentially passed out from dehydration. The janitor bot found you.”

Something jolted at the back of Park’s neck. “I don’t remember that,” she said automatically, tamping down the bubble of fear in her chest. Then she welded her mouth shut; Chanur was raising her eyebrows at her.

“Are you saying that I’m a liar?”