And for another, she thought, they’d be redundant. She knew that ISF had not, could not have commissioned the android crew of the Deucalion to act as secret observers, meant to report back on the actions of the expedition members.

She knew that because it was what they were paying Park for.

Fulbreech sighed then, looking over at Natalya, who seemed to be locked in some sort of tirade against Megex; presumably the android had sworn at her, too. “The thing is,” he said, “it is pretty strange, how many androids are on this ship. I don’t totally blame people for wondering about their purpose. The spy thing is silly, but I find myself wondering, too. Why are there so many robots?”

He looked at Park, as if expecting her to know the answer, but she only shrugged. Even she had wondered this; she didn’t like it either, to a degree. Because she didn’t know what it meant. Machine life matching human life was common on two-seater mining ships, but not on three-deck behemoths like the Deucalion. Normally there were human navigators, other mechanics, auxiliary staffers who prepared food or swabbed the decks. But for whatever reason, this time the ISF had deemed it necessary to minimize human life aboard the ship as much as possible. The only reason why the lucky thirteen were there was because they each had specializations, elite roles the ISF hadn’t figured out how to replace with software—yet. Everything else could be done by the androids, who were often as light as children, or by bodiless AI. The Deucalion wasted no space on self-esteem.

The assumption was that it was all part of the push to propel their ship to Eos as fast as possible. If she looked at everything from a bird’s-eye view, Park could see the logic of it. Let the superfluous deckhands weigh down other ships, the ones that could take their time getting to new planets. This ship couldn’t. And besides, if their vessel ever needed to lighten its load, there was the added benefit that the robots could be ejected as ballast. You couldn’t do that with ten, twenty, forty additional human crewmembers.

But the rest of the crew was disgruntled by this, all the same. Friends and colleagues who could have been saddled along had been ousted by androids—for reasons murky and unknown. Of course that caused resentment, anxiety about the future. On the next mission, who would be deemed dispensable next?

Hence why they projected sinister motives onto the robots, believing they had some purpose other than simply rendering human colleagues obsolete. Crewmembers like Natalya thought they were spies . . . and now Park was being lumped in with them, too. Blamed for their presence, their inquiries. As if she were the mastermind and all the androids just her proxies, mechanical limbs leading back to the same source.

Did that mean the crewmembers were going to turn their ire on her next?