“All right. We should eat first. Is the printer online?”
Maria swore loudly from the kitchen.
“Not yet. Katrina and I are in the kitchen now.”
“Good. Can you let me know about those tox screens?” he asked, sounding like he was already walking.
“Food printer is lousy with hemlock, we can’t trust it. Luckily we have the new one.”
“All right.” And the connection went dead.
“Takes it in stride, that’s my second in command,” Katrina said.
Joanna and the captain waited in silence until Wolfgang arrived. He came in, took one look at Maria with her struggles, and joined them without a word.
“There is something I didn’t mention about the hemlock,” Joanna said quietly. They were far from Maria, who was making a lot of noise behind the printer, but she still kept her voice low. Katrina and Wolfgang leaned in to hear her.
“We all ingested it, only a lot less than Maria did,” Joanna said. “I want to know why Maria wouldn’t notice her printer had been sabotaged.”
“There are many ways to slip something in someone’s food,” Wolfgang said. “It’s also possible Maria didn’t cook every single meal for twenty-five years.”
“Her knife. Her kitchen. Could she have poisoned herself, then killed us all, then died?” Katrina said. “Someone tried to kill her with the knife before she erased all the logs?”
Joanna shook her head. “Self-poisoning with hemlock? That’s not the way I’d choose to go. Besides, I still think she hit the resurrection switch. It’s safe to say she was killed. With just the hemlock, sure, she could have done it herself. But the knife? No one can stab themselves in the spine.”
“Perhaps she wasn’t working alone,” Wolfgang said.
“I think we’re getting away from Occam’s razor here,” Joanna said. “Let’s stay simple while we can.”
“We need to dust that knife for prints,” Wolfgang said.
Joanna stared at him. She held up her hand and began ticking off her fingers. “Wolfgang, we don’t have a crime lab. There was no reason to put a forensics lab on this ship. I only have the tech that I have because it’s used to diagnose live clones. We don’t have anything that would resemble a good clear way to lift prints off the knife. With proper technology we could grab partial prints and identify them, but we don’t have that.”
His blue eyes were stony. “It’s evidence,” he said.
She lifted her hands in an I give up motion. “You’re absolutely right. We should talk to Maria about who she thinks she would have let use her knives.”
“How would she know who she’s bonded with on this ship in twenty-five years?” Katrina said.
“It’ll be evidence,” Joanna repeated, smiling.
“She doesn’t seem to like the food printer,” IAN said. “So they didn’t bond.”
“Neither printer is an AI, IAN,” the captain said. She paused. “Is it?”
“No. I just like this one a lot. Its name is Bebe. Cute, isn’t it? And I’m up to fifty-three percent and feeling better!”
It’s Always Five O’Clock in Space
Maria needed alone time with the Behemoth, and she wasn’t getting any.
She was so distracted by running the printer through its paces that she hadn’t realized most of the crew had raided the liquor stores. Hiro, Katrina, Wolfgang, and Joanna all sat at a table with a bottle of whiskey between them.
“Really? Whiskey at nine in the morning?” She paused and then realized the thing she was truly angry about. “Without me?”
“It’s always five o’clock in space,” Hiro said, raising his little shot glass to toast her.
“Whatever. We’re so far outside the realm of social norms anyway,” Maria said, shrugging.
“I don’t recommend drinking with new clone bodies on an empty stomach,” IAN said.
“Now ask us how much we care,” Hiro said.
Joanna hadn’t touched her shot glass. She looked at them all in disgust, her hands wrapped around a mug of tea. “You know we all have time-sensitive work to do, right?”
“I’m useless until I get some food. And whiskey will help the waiting,” said Katrina. “Just a sip.”
Joanna looked at Wolfgang. He shrugged. She rolled her eyes.
“If you get drunk and rowdy while I’m trying to fix this thing, then floating bloody in the cloning bay will be the least of your problems,” Maria said.
“Understood,” Wolfgang said, smiling slightly.
She refocused on Bebe, wishing there were a door between her and the tables.
“Where is Paul?” Hiro asked.
“He was working on the servers when I left him,” Wolfgang said. “I told him to come here by nine.”
“It’s five after,” Hiro said.
Wolfgang pulled his tablet out and paged Paul.
“Here,” Paul said, his voice sounding stronger than yesterday. “Is it breakfast yet?”
“Not quite yet,” Wolfgang said. “We’re all in the kitchen, though. Join us.”
“I should work more on these servers,” he said doubtfully.
“I’ll let him know when it’s time,” IAN said.
“Hey, IAN, do you watch us in our rooms?” Hiro asked suddenly.
“In the interest of full security, I have to,” IAN said. “When the cameras are all functioning, that is.”
“Well. That’s interesting,” Hiro said, going slightly pink.
“All your cameras aren’t functioning yet?” Katrina asked.
“Not yet. I’m taking time to run the various commands you’ve given me, as well as repair my internal issues. I’m getting more and more eyes and ears all over the shop.”
“Let me know when you’re fully operational,” Katrina said.
“You’re right, I could use a break,” Paul said over the link. “I’ll come down.”
“All right, everyone,” Maria said. “I need to go back to my quarters for a backup disk that has all of your tastes in a program. But in the meantime I want you to give saliva samples to Bebe because apparently it can determine your tastes by just that little bit of DNA. Hiro can show you how.”
“Why do you need the disk, then?” Wolfgang asked, narrowing his eyes.
“I want to compare the two. If it makes a wrong decision, then we’ll have the backup.”
“I’ll come with you,” Joanna said.
As they headed down the hall, they passed Paul hurrying to the kitchen. “Food yet?” he asked, his red face hopeful.
“Yes, in the last minute we went from nothing to a full meal,” Maria snapped.
Joanna put her hand on Maria’s arm. “We’ll get breakfast soon,” she said. “Wolfgang is waiting for you, Paul.”
“I’d rather have breakfast,” Paul said. They continued on their ways.
“He seems to be returning to us,” Maria said. “Any idea what was wrong with him yesterday?”
“Some people get uptight about the cloning process, some people don’t like when routines get damaged, some maybe don’t like waking up to floating gore. It could be anything,” Joanna said.
“Or he could be responsible for it,” Maria said in a low voice.
“If we were to damn people based on acting oddly after waking up the way we did yesterday, I could point fingers at any one of us.”