Maria caught a note in his voice. “Was this someone you were very close to? An old lover?”
Hiro didn’t answer, not for a long time. “I’m not sure. I don’t think we were. Do you remember all your lovers?”
She got up and started programming the breakfasts into Bebe. “Well, no, not really. It has been hundreds of years. But if she got you your job, you’d think she would stand out in other ways too. What was her name?”
“Natalie Lo,” he said. “Detective Natalie Lo. And I’m pretty sure we weren’t lovers.”
Maria had the feeling she was on the edge of a cliff, looking over. “Did—did you want to be?”
His head snapped up. “Now, Maria, who could take your place in my heart?” he asked, grinning.
“You just met me,” she said, rising from the table and focusing on programming other desserts into Bebe.
“But I feel I’ve known you forever,” he said, his voice low and romantic.
“Right,” Maria said. “You can sit here and drink, I’m going to take another pass at cleaning the medbay before bed.”
He made a disgusted face, and she rolled her eyes and left the kitchen.
“Weird guy,” Maria muttered. She felt uneasy, as if a hurricane had been about to hit her, but changed course at the last minute. Hiro was sweet and intelligent and unpredictable. And unpredictable men were mysterious and romantic when you were in your youth. After a few decades, no matter the physical age of the body, unpredictable men lost their appeal.
In Maria’s experience, unpredictable meant dangerous.
Maria was bone-tired, but Joanna had looked so drawn and worried at dinner that Maria wanted to search once more for the possibly missing syringe.
She donned a biohazard suit and climbed the handholds on the wall to the ceiling. She clipped a carabiner from her belt to a securing ring on the ceiling. The air intake vent was up here, and it had sucked up no small amount of horror. If she weren’t searching for clues, she could just throw out the filter and get a new one, but she had to look closely through all the fluids to make sure nothing was hiding.
Something was hiding.
A tiny syringe was indeed lodged into the air filter. It was stuck in a sticky puddle of stuff she didn’t want to identify, but she plucked it from the sludge with her gloves and put it in a biohazard bag the doctor had given her.
“Best job ever,” she muttered to herself. She put in a new filter with a mental promise to return to sanitize the vent the next day.
Still sticky and filthy, Maria delivered the syringe to Joanna, who was in the medbay watching the captain’s clone.
Maria held the bag out to her, and Joanna accepted it wordlessly, with a nod.
The doctor had machines in her lab that could synthesize drugs, and that had obviously been where the ketamine had come from. Could she program a food printer to synthesize hemlock?
Maria mentally shook her head. If Joanna had been behind the hemlock, she would have worked harder to keep it a secret instead of reporting it immediately.
This kind of speculation was Wolfgang’s job, not Maria’s. She had other things to worry about.
“I’ll let you know my findings. You deserve that much,” Joanna said. “Thank you for your discretion.”
Maria shrugged. “Good luck. I hope you find what you’re looking for.”
On the way back from dumping Maria’s biohazard suit into the cleaning tube, her tablet pinged. She saw with alarm that it was Bebe, letting her know the desserts were ready.
“IAN, did you know Bebe could message me?” she asked.
“Of course. I helped it connect to you.”
Maria wasn’t sure how much she liked that. Still, it was helpful. She told IAN to inform the crew that if they wanted dessert, it was in the kitchen.
“That was fast,” Hiro said when she got back in.
“I just didn’t have the energy to do it, I guess,” Maria said, walking over to Bebe. She retrieved Hiro’s green tea ice cream and placed it in front of him.
“Wow, how did you know that’s what I was craving?” Hiro asked.
Maria shrugged. “Everyone craves comfort food after waking up. It’s pretty easy to please them. And Bebe seems to always know.”
Maria returned to the printer and retrieved her dessert, a sweet treat that always put her in mind of her aunt.
The food that came out of the printer wasn’t exactly the same as they had been used to on Earth. Technology had perfected the ability to clone humans, copy and modify their DNA, and even copy and modify their very personalities. All of that was possible, but it was difficult to replicate a good clotted cream. Or proper stinky Limburger. Or the heat of a habanero. But the printer did its best and the crew didn’t complain.
But Maria secretly mourned the perfect flavor of a good coquito acaramelado, and the knowledge that she wouldn’t get another authentic treat like it for over four hundred years—maybe never, considering they didn’t know what plants would propagate on the new planet—was slightly depressing.
However, Bebe was managing to replicate the smell. The good, thick, heavy steam that came from the inner chamber was almost like the real thing.
The first one she gobbled in the kitchen, her back to Hiro, relishing the taste in a private moment. She put it in her mouth and chewed, cheeks bulging, eyes closed.
The taste, thick and sweet and comforting, always reminded her of home.
Aunt Lucia, over a hundred years dead, had been a second mother to Maria. When nostalgia cropped up and brought a yearning for comfort, Aunt Lucia’s kitchen was what Maria always thought of.
When the memory came this time, it did not come as it always did. It came as something else, a trick-or-treating neighbor that you knew and yet still looked entirely different in a cheap costume.
Maria kept her eyes closed and let it wash over her.
Aunt Lucia’s rocking chair creaked on the porch.
The porch was on the moon, with an open inky black sky and glowing Earth in the distance. It was impossible to sustain life outside the Luna dome; the rocking-on-the-porch thing was probably not happening. A dream, then.
In the distance, the Luna dome glittered, and Maria could see the activity within, the shuttles and monorails and the people taking pedestrian bridges. She wondered why she, her aunt, the porch, and the chair were outside it all.
“Can’t trust them. You know that, don’t you, girl?”
The odd thing about Aunt Lucia was that she was lighter-skinned than Maria remembered. Her hair was kinky, as if African-descended instead of Latina. She wore a silk robe too. Casually dressed but in clothes more expensive than Aunt Lucia’s entire wardrobe.
She also toted a chain saw, which she placed beside her rocking chair.
Maria never remembered Aunt Lucia carrying a chain saw.
“Can’t trust who?” she asked.
“Whom, child. Learn the language, else a white man in ironed blue jeans will correct you. He’ll think he’s helping you, poor girl.”
That was another weird thing. Aunt Lucia didn’t speak much English. And this one had an American accent.