Blood Promise

“Paris,” Bennie spoke only after she finished loading the nucleotide sequencer-synthesizer with fresh libraries, understanding how temperamentally precise the out-of-date tech demanded its instructions, “Jallet just sent us another case.”

“What this time?” Paris looked up when he didn’t answer immediately. She read the news from his face. “You’ve got to be kidding, more pro bono work? When the hell does she think we’re supposed to do our own research?”

Bennie shrugged sympathetically. As her lab manager, he would be the one to make the schedule work with only two graduate students and himself. “Not more pro bono work, per se. More like more of the same. Another broken Promise sitting in the camp morgue.”

Paris rubbed her fingertips against her brow. “We haven’t sequenced the last one yet.”

“About that,” he continued. “This one’s marked as priority. She upgraded the last one, too.”

“Retroactively?” Now she understood Bennie’s reluctance to interrupt. “Can she even do that?”

Bennie sighed. “Our charter doesn’t say she can’t. Which Xenomix takes as license.”

“So the clock started ticking a week ago.” Paris glared but not at him. “Which means what, we’re supposed to dump all of our sequencing in progress?”

“Only if we want to keep our Land Grant status.” He stated a fact they both knew all too well.

“Without which we get shut down.” An island like Deino-Durans didn’t have enough money to keep a research lab open on its own. Paris bit back the rest of what she was thinking. “Did Jallet happen to give you an update on that new sequencer she promised us after the last round of pro bono work?”

“Still backordered.” Bennie spread his hands. “Maybe in the next shipment.”

Same answer as last month. And the month before. And the four before that. Paris shook her head. Her mother had always told her the research game was rigged on Grant. She would know. She’d gifted Paris the lab that she had built from the ground up with nothing more than her husband’s reputation, persistence and her own degree. Paris felt fortunate to inherit both her parents’ research talents along with a certified Land Grant research lab and Bennie to help run it. Too bad she was bound by the charter for another seventy-something years.

She could always walk away and find other work. But research positions in decent labs were getting scarcer by the day. Herman Tong constantly offered to set her up on Venture, just a transit away so she could come back and visit if she wanted. She’d always refused. Working for his corporate research division was worse than here from everything he said. At least Xenomix allowed her some freedom to do her own research even if they took a healthy bite of any profits. And kept screwing with her schedule.

She still had the option of taking them to court over a charter violation. Not on Grant, course. Xenomix owned all the local courts even if they technically didn’t run any of the archipelago governments. Filing in LOW OrbIT court would be expensive and require at least a month in transit, more if the case made it to trial in a decade or two. Which was only part of the reason no one ever did. Xenomix had a corporate seat in the League of Worlds council. Which meant the legal dice were always loaded.

No, her only real choice was to bide her time and do their bidding. Two priority cases within a week meant they needed something badly. Maybe she could publish something out of it. Shining the lab’s reputation might provide leverage later.

“Ok, Bennie, see what you can salvage from the last sample run. We’ll work day-night shifts for a bit. I’ll be damned if we’ll lose anything we’ve thawed. I don’t have time to collect more samples this year.”

“That will put a strain on the sequencer,” he noted.

“Can’t be helped. Jallet keeps saying she’ll get us a new one anyway, right? So we’ll just tack equipment degradation onto the bill. Call it accelerated depreciation.”

“She won’t like that.” He smiled.

“Well,” Paris smiled back, cold and vicious. “If she wants any more favors, she’ll have to live with it, just like us.”

“You want me days or nights?”

“Days,” she said, still mentally juggling her schedule. “You and the kids keep running these samples. I’ll work the priority cases. Wouldn’t want Jallet to think she isn’t getting top talent.” Which they both knew she wasn’t with Bennie working days. “Forward me the new case and the files from the old one. Send them to my comm. I need to find some caffeine.”

“Brandi just brewed a fresh pot,” Bennie offered as he started tapping out commands on his comm.

“Which is exactly why I’m going out,” Paris replied as she grabbed her tablet. “I have no idea how you let that girl out of training without being able to make a decent pot of tea. I’ll pick up the samples from the morgue on my way back.”

---

Before she headed for the morgue, Paris retreated to her office. She needed a moment to think. Dr. Bonet wouldn’t be in for another half hour.

In the privacy behind the closed door, she pulled the Promise reader from her desk drawer. Hers was a small, portable affair, not one of the more elaborate and expensive home installation models. The mobile unit had limited sound quality and holographic capability but it was all she’d ever needed. She still received regular offers to upgrade which she could now afford, but the reader had been as much of a gift from her father as his Blood Promise itself. At the time, the device must have set him back a small fortune. And somehow Bennie managed to keep it going. Where he got the parts, she didn’t know and didn’t ask.

When she’d been young, her mother had eventually hidden the reader away, saying Paris would go anemic if she kept viewing her father’s message all the time. It was the last piece of either of them she had left.

She pricked a finger, rested it on the sensor and slid down the volume. Her father’s hologram sprang to life, unaged in over twenty years. She watched his smiling reassurances to her younger self, wondering how she’d gotten here.

He and her mother had sacrificed everything to get her off Blood after the Green Revolution. Their plan had taken years of patience to see through. Even her name was meant to influence Xenomix, to indicate she was as French at heart as her mother despite her father’s name. Paris Parikh. P. P. Her parents definitely hadn’t thought that through. It had taken no time for the local children to seize on that alliteration to torment another unwanted fugee. Though no one would dare sling that singsong jab now, at least not to her face.

Like her mother, she’d refused to change her name back to Pichon alone. Not that it was any better. His name was one of the few pieces of her father both of them had to cling to. As was the Blood Promise he’d gifted each of them.

Even with her mother’s previous residency on Grant, she and Paris had spent years in the camps, most of which she was almost but not quite too young to remember. With only the meager possessions they’d been allowed to take with them from Blood, her mother had been forced to sell herself for genetic samples and testing so they could survive. Level 1 trials, Level 2 experimental splicing, Level 3 vaccines. As often as they’d let her under their scant medical ethics rules. Her but not her daughter. Never Paris even though Xenomix would have paid five times as much.

All the tests and trials had eventually taken their toll and cut her mother’s life short. Metastatic molecular breakdown disorder. MMBD. A condition whispered but not fully acknowledged. An agonizing death. Not vastly different than the broken Promises in the morgue. Theirs from a rare metastatic leukemia that mimicked unshielded exposure to the worst exotic radiation.

But that was after her mother had clawed out the Land Grant lab. Even that her father had figured into. The only reason Xenomix had noticed her mother at all, a world class microbiologist in her own right, was because of his reputation on Blood.

Initially, he’d relocated with his wife to Blood to work with the planet’s native biome, an invaluable opportunity for a xenobiologist. The Green Revolution and then Paris had followed a few years behind. While her father’s pre-Revolution research had added chapters to the textbook curriculum, that work had not set his wife and daughter free. But it was what had kept the post-Revolution government so tolerant of his activities for so long. When he’d smuggled his wife and daughter off-world in the chaos of the Bloodite schism after the liberation of Darwin, he’d doomed his own departure. But he’d vowed to help anyone who came to him to escape. Their biggest obstacle was the Bloodeye Virus.

Like Grant, Blood was a water world. The multiple and varied red alga blooms which covered the ocean’s surface and gave the planet its name were harvested as a source of much needed protein by the early colonists. It was one of the few local assets that made human settlement viable at all. Thoroughly tested in the lab and generally recognized as safe for human consumption, one of the minor algae species nevertheless concealed an amino acid that triggered an epigenetic change in the local population. It reactivated a long dormant retrovirus, a previously undocumented hemorrhagic fever characterized in its end stages by uncontrolled bleeding from the capillaries of the sclera and the retina.

Highly virulent and mutagenic, the Bloodeye Virus produced humanity’s first xeno-pandemic which quickly spread through both person-to-person and person-to-mammal transmission, creating an immediate threat not just to Blood but to the surrounding colonies and potentially all of human space. It was now easily enough treated if detected early. Now, not then. Easy but not cheap. The vaccine consisted of a half dozen tailored antivirals wrapped in eight layers of patents and proprietary trade secrets, many of which Xenomix owned.

Because the virus had ravaged nearby worlds early in humanity’s colonization cycle, LOW OrbIT required proof of vaccination for everyone who interacted with the local biome on Blood before they could reintegrate into the rest of human space. Vaccinations and proof that the post-Revolution government had weaponized as a tactic to silence any opposition that hadn’t fled, hoping they would eventually die out. And that was just the first barrier to flight on the fugee shuttle to the stars. But one her father had the means to address.

He had concocted his own homebrew vaccine, one eventually shown to have fewer side-effects and better efficacy than the original. He administered the shots and then forged the necessary government documentation.

When the scandal first broke, refugee camps on over a dozen worlds were placed under strict quarantine while the local governments decided whether they could deport millions of unwanted fugees, and more importantly to where. Eventually, the League of Worlds Health Organization stepped in with research teams. They certified her father’s vaccine was as good or better than the original and didn’t violate any existing patents. When they assumed financial liability if they were wrong, the refugees were reluctantly allowed to stay.

Unfortunately, the publicity damned the government of Blood at a time when they were seeking to assume their pre-Revolution seat in the League of Worlds council. So a deal was cut that benefited both sides. Blood opened up emigration to LOW OrbIT standards. LOW OrbIT ceased its investigation into human rights violations while allowing Blood to resume its place in the League. To ease the government’s losses, the council agreed to expedite Blood’s patent filing for her father’s work and recognize it, as well as the vaccine, retroactively. After an initial flurry of feel-good publicity, her father was quickly moved to other projects.

To hear Jallet tell the story, that episode had directly led to the founding of her mother’s lab. Jallet had been sitting in Left Bank Brew and Bookery bemoaning the lack of competent prospects for Land Grant labs in her new district, without which she would never get promoted to regional. The chief medical officer of the refugee camp, who had taken an unrequited shine to Paris’s mother, casually said he knew that was untrue, that he knew she had a prime candidate sitting idle in her district right now. When he’d explained that Parikh’s wife was working as his lab tech, Jallet’s eyes had lit up. It had taken the corporate equivalent of an act of God but she and her daughter had been released within a week. Tardigrades Research Station had been born.

Paris’s mother leveraged her father’s reputation for everything it was worth. She’d hoped her success might pressure Xenomix to secure her husband’s release. By then he had completely disappeared from public view. But Xenomix only moved quickly when they saw profit. They saw none in risking future operations on Blood. Years later, their agents relayed that they believed he’d been quietly executed for some undisclosed transgression. A few months later, her mother’s first MMBD symptoms had appeared. By the time Paris had finished an accelerated Land Grant Academy doctorate, her mother, too, was dead.

And so Paris had been left to carry on for the past three years with neither of them. To make her way investigating broken Promises. Paris would have inserted another Blood Promise from her mother, but there wasn’t room for a second without erasing part of the first. So Paris had to use her father’s Promise to remind her of both of them.

She didn’t need to hear the end of the audio. She’d heard his voice so many times she had it memorized and could read the words from his lips. “Remember I love you, Paris. Always do what mommy says. I’ll find you both as soon as my work is finished.”

She always knew he was either dead or his work had never been completed. She understood now that work had been helping others like her escape. But how could you explain that to a four-year-old? You couldn’t. She’d taken him literally, integrating each new piece of information she learned about each of her parents into a personal mythology. You always protect others who are powerless to protect themselves, no matter the cost. Especially if they’re family.

Paris dabbed her finger with a sterilizing towelette, wiped the reader and hid it back in the drawer. It was time to face the life she’d inherited.

---

Outside, she walked. The island wasn’t so big that it was necessary to drive. Thankfully, because the roads were almost too potholed for use. Grav vehicles, like the one Jallet could afford, had no difficulty. But ground vehicles like hers tried to shake apart especially after even the lightest rain. And it rained almost every day they weren’t in eclipse behind Burning Face. Besides, after seeing her father, the walk would clear her head.

Down the hill and around the bend, Paris entered what passed for a local downtown, a single, straight, paved street lined for a half a klick with worn, jaded shops, business fronts and local eateries. Almost all plascrete block construction with barred windows and little architectural detail or variation except for contrasting, brightly colored paint and a few elaborate murals that on other worlds might pass as graffiti.

Not many people stirred under Kruger A’s cool, reflected, blood orange glare this time of day. The mechanics of the moon of a gas giant orbiting one star in a binary system made what passed for a day-night cycle on Grant complicated. Currently, Burning Face, whose swirling yellow-tan, red and orange stripes dominated the sky, shielded the worst of the pulsating light from Kruger A’s flare star companion that so many transplants found disconcerting. Paris had almost grown used to it. Though she could still remember hiding in a blanket fort beneath her cot from its eight minute heartbeat when she and her mother had first arrived in the camp. Now, she almost drew comfort from Kruger B’s slow, steady regularity whenever it was in the sky.

She stopped at Left Bank Brew and Bookery, ordering a hot Irish breakfast tea, whitened, for herself and a tall black dark roast, both to go. She perused the lend-lease book exchange for new arrivals while she waited. As usual, she found nothing interesting. Not that she would have time for reading any day soon. When Sheila set her order on the bar, Paris scooped up both cups and headed for the back exit. The egress-only back door closed quickly and firmly behind her.

Across the hundred meters of cleared dead zone, the low, squat Central Administration blockhouse bunker confronted her, with the plasti-wire fence of the camp proper extending not quite a quarter klick out in each direction. The strip of multicolored downtown effectively concealed the refugee camp from Deino-Durans

like a Potemkin village. Being situated in a swale meant the locals didn’t have a daily reminder of its unwanted existence though they rarely allowed themselves to forget.

Nor could Paris as she approached the entrance. Her mother had shielded her from the worst of daily camp life by signing up for experimentation, like all the refugees who had wanted to survive. Paris liked most of the staff in the camp, many of whom had adopted her and sheltered her as much as they could. But she could never quite reconcile their kind behavior with the camp’s intended purpose. Even seeing it more clearly through adult eyes left her with conflicted feelings. Most of which centered on her being thankful she was no longer that powerless little girl, and never would be again, played off against the deathbed promise she’d made her mother to help the other refugees still trapped by the compassionless bureaucracy that reflected the majority prejudices of the population.

Paris stacked the disposable cups one atop the other’s lid in one hand and swiped her ID at the security door with the other. Inside, she held up the cup of coffee like a second ID. Behind the security glass, beneath the sign that read “All bags subject to search. No food or drink beyond this point”, Marcus quickly buzzed her through. She turned right at the triple intersection beyond the reinforced door. At the cipher lock to Medical, she pressed the announcement button on the panel with a finger and held the coffee cup up to its camera. Dr. Bonet quickly opened the door and ushered her inside. But not before he relieved her of the burden of the coffee.

“You are literally a lifesaver, Paris,” he said after he breathed in the scent steaming from the drink hole. “If I can get this into my system fast enough, it just might counteract whatever tea-colored poison my companions choose to call coffee this morning. What’s today’s pleasure?”

“French roast, what else.” She settled into the chair across from his desk.

“It’s been so long since I’ve had anything but the genetically modified swamp water the guards brew up that I’m not sure my taste buds will recognize it.” He blew through the hole, took a sip and seemed to melt a little bit as he sighed contentedly. “So what brings my Trojan princess bearing gifts?”

She smiled at his running joke. Dr. Bonet had taken the same shine to her as he had to her mother. She couldn’t help but think of him as Dr. Bonet even though he had insisted she call him Mobi since she’d taken over the lab. “A little bird told me you have samples for me.”

“I would have couriered them over.” He relished another sip. “Or you could have sent Roland to pick them up.”

“And deny me the pleasure of your reaction?” She smiled innocently. “Never.”

Their banter complete, they got down to business.

“Your thoughtfulness probably saved us both another trip,” he said. “Another broken Promise showed up this morning. I’ve collected samples from all three. Unless you want to sign for the bodies?”

“I trust your samples. You can keep them for the moment.” She savored her smooth Irish breakfast, which had none of the bite of its British counterpart. “What else can you tell me?”

“Not much.” He nursed his coffee in tiny sips. “Three refugees who developed sudden onset metastatic leukemia. Two males, one female. All recent arrivals. All sourced from Blood by way of the fugee archipelago. Preliminary bone marrow cores confirm broken Promises.”

“Do you know why Jallet called in a priority marker? I take it the new one is as well.”

“If not, it will be. She instructed me to be on the lookout for new cases and inform her personally if any cropped up. It’s the only reason I wasted resources on post-mortem samples at all. I’m hoping we get reimbursed this time.”

“Just bill the lab direct. Add anything you think I can justify, including labor this time. I’ll tack it to her tab.” They both knew this was how the game was played. Xenomix might drag its feet for months and niggle over every microCredit before reimbursing Tardigrades Research Station, but would eventually make her whole. The camp was afforded no such luxury. Technically, it fell under LOW OrbIT’s hierarchy but in reality everything but salaries and security were funded locally. Padding the bill meant Dr. Bonet might be able to afford a few basic supplies for the refugees. While he was good about providing what he could, his resources only stretched so far.

But Paris could never forget that he was the one who injected her mother, regardless of how reluctantly, and monitored her progress. He was the face of Xenomix even if he wasn’t formally within their or the camp’s ruling hierarchy. Just following orders and doing a job someone else would do perhaps more cruelly or callously if he didn’t. A plowshare in one hand, a sickle in the other. She tried not to dwell on it.

“I wonder why Jallet is suddenly so concerned with a spate of broken Promises,” Paris mused. “It’s not like they’re contagious.”

Dr. Bonet shrugged noncommittally, taking another sip. The internal logic of the bureaucracy held no special interest to him. A fool’s errand he would say.

She didn’t really have the time to worry about it either. “Do you have those samples handy?”

“All packed up and ready.” He pointed to the disposable transport cooler atop the bookcase by the door. “The files are in the folder under it. Have Bennie run back the originals once you’re done with them.”

Her brow furrowed briefly at that. Not at the paper files, as that was standard for the camp. Normally, he’d just tell her to scan them with her comm and keep the originals. She wondered what else she might find in there that he didn’t think she’d want stored electronically.

“And let me know when you’ve completed the initial sequencing,” he continued as she rose to leave. “I could use the room in the morgue.”

She nodded and scooped up the bundle on her way out, leaving him cradling his remaining coffee possessively.

---

Back at the lab, Paris stored the samples in the ultra freezer and checked on the kids. Bennie had started a mini assembly line of processing and initial analysis. The man could be mind-numbingly efficient. As long as he didn’t keep them at it too long, the error rate should be minimal. It would free them up to help her sooner.

Back in her office, she thought about catching a nap. It was already going to be a long night. Instead she opened the files to review the ancillary information Dr. Bonet had given her before deciding how to set up the data libraries for the sequencing runs.

The first file was Gurpreet Singh. Thirty-nine year-old male. Born on Blood according to his LOW OrbIT ID. He would have been nineteen when the Green Revolution ended. No travel outside of Blood before now. Basic health history, what little had been logged. Vaccinated against the Bloodeye Virus just before he emigrated. The initial bone marrow sample indicated a broken Promise. The sequencing ID number had a sticky note arrow pointing to it.

Initially, nothing special stood out about it. A seemingly random thirty-five digit number ending in 001. It consisted of the first thirty-two digits of the data in his Blood Promise after the header and formatting information had been stripped away followed by the three digit run number. Since the data was individualized, it was a safe way to create a unique identifier for limited internal use. A feature of the older sequencer-only model used in the camp which was even more ancient than her own sequencer-synthesizer. But they both used the same standard so she was familiar with parsing the sequencing ID number in her head. Even converting the base code of the Blood Promise data was nearly instinct for her. The only thing she noticed were a lot of G’s in the initial nucleotide sequence, many back to back. The mark of an amateur removal. It led to problems. Broken Promises being the worst.

She flipped open the next file and scanned it. Nikhil Jairu. Male. Fifty-eight. Old for a broken Promise. The technology hadn’t been around that long so not a youthful indiscretion. Maybe a midlife crisis. A native of Blood as well. No orbital or interstellar travel logged on his ID. Vaccinated against the Bloodeye Virus on the same day as Singh. Interesting coincidence. His sequence ID number also had a sticky note arrow next to it. The first thing that struck her was the 002 run number. Different date, different time in the metadata, as expected. She wondered what happened to 001. Faulty run? Then she noticed the data portion. She had to flip back to Singh’s file to confirm what she thought she saw. The initial Blood Promise data was the same. Exactly the same.

She’d never seen that happen. It was supposed to be impossible. Technically, even if two people encoded the same message or video, the Blood Promise algorithm should alter the data coding based on their individual DNA to avoid unexpected genetic expressions from interlinked sequences in other strands. So effectively every Blood Promise should be different. And because the removal process didn’t strictly remove the data, just recoded it so it couldn’t be recovered, even the erased data should be unique to the individual.

But these two weren’t. Paris suspected a sequencer malfunction. Had to be. It’s not like Dr. Bonet could afford the chemicals for a confirmation run. She was surprised he burned office supplies like the sticky notes. They were down to counting paperclips over there. Normally, she’d slip him some when she ran back the files but it wasn’t like she dealt with a lot of paper records anymore. His were pretty much the only ones.

Intensely curious now, Paris opened the last file. Ravi Sharma. Female. Sixteen. Another Blood native. That was even weirder. Promises weren’t available on Blood after the Revolution. Also no record of travel beyond Blood’s atmosphere. Also vaccinated against the Bloodeye Virus on the same day as Singh and Jairu. This was beginning to smell like more than a coincidence. Her sequence ID number also bore a sticky note. Run 003. Different date, different time. Same initial data sequence.

That had to be a sequencer issue. Paris wondered when it had been calibrated last. She could have Dr. Bonet forward the logs, but why. He obviously knew about it. And they both knew she would sequence the samples again as a part of her more comprehensive tests.

But this did help her with her initial sequencer library design. She’d throw in a triple-redundant check before having it begin dissecting the initial encoding sequence to tease out where the metastatic leukemia might have originated as well as look for genetic vulnerabilities or other potential conditions that might have exacerbated the problem in the victims. Victims? Where had that word come from? Subjects.

She removed the sticky notes and carefully stored them in her desk, just in case Dr. Bonet wanted them back. Then she scanned the files with her comm, transferred them to the central computer and started formatting the necessary case study files. Once that was done, she sat down to assemble the data libraries. By the time she had the libraries verified, Bennie and the kids should have finished up for the day. She should be able to get through all three initial confirmation sequences before they got in the next morning.

---

It was nearly midnight before the first sequencing run finished up. Triple-redundant checks took time as did reconfiguring the sequencer-synthesizer from the day shift runs. Bennie had warned her that it was being unusually temperamental. It now required almost constant supervision. Worse than a fresh intern. After Paris removed the first sample, she then ran the machine through a double decon cycle to ensure there was no cross-contamination and loaded in the second sample from the freezer.

She then made the mistake of reviewing the day shift’s runs of her other samples, just intending to spot check them. The preliminary results were not surprising but she found what she thought was a procedural error that might skew her results. By the time she chased down that it wasn’t an error but Bennie carving out a series of redundant steps that over time might have increased the error rate, it was nearly dawn. She hadn’t even remembered cycling Bonet’s third sample set through.

After Paris reconfigured the sequencer-synthesizer for the morning runs and typed up her notes on the initial review of her own data into the lab tablet, she was too exhausted to go home. The day shift would be in soon. She crashed on the couch in her office to wait, leaving the door open so she’d be sure to hear the kids when they got in. She closed her eyes, just for a moment.

 She awoke to find her door shut. Someone had pulled the throw from the back of the couch over her. She glanced at her comm. Nearly noon. Damn.

She sat up and rubbed her eyes. She tried to smooth her clothes so it didn’t look like she’d slept in them. After a futile minute, she gave up on the shirt and changed it out for a spare she kept on hand for just such emergencies. The skirt would have to do. She emerged in search of caffeine.

She spent the next couple hours reviewing her notes with Bennie, checking on the kids and tamping down several smoldering administrative crises before they ignited into full-blown brushfires. By the time she returned to her office, a headache had begun to blossom. It was nearly three. She never had found her tea. She just had time to go home, change and hopefully catch a shower, and maybe scrounge up something to eat. But first that cup of tea.

She forwarded the results and logs from last night’s runs to her comm without looking at them. She’d review them over breakfast/lunch/dinner.

Feeling refreshed after a quick stop at her apartment, she found herself back at Left Bank Brew and Bookery. A steaming cup of tea and a tray loaded with soup, bread, cheese and fruit filled the tiny table before her. As much as she knew she needed to get back to the lab to check on the day’s progress before Bennie left, she needed a moment to slow down and savor a meal. Likely her only one of the day.

Paris started scrolling through last night’s results on her comm. Not unexpectedly, Singh’s initial sequence ID number was identical to Dr. Bonet’s. So it might be that Dr. Bonet’s sequencer had developed an electronic or biological glitch. A known issue for that model. It would likely require a full sterilization and electronic diagnostic suite to clear. Not the kind of thing she would DIY debug and repair if she wanted to keep her lab certification. That would not be a concern he’d share.

Then she saw that Jairu’s and Sharma’s sequence ID numbers hadn’t changed either. She quickly reviewed the logs to verify she had double sterilized between each run and that each had been triple redundant. The logs indicated both. That seemed to rule out an equipment malfunction. Could Dr. Bonet have confused the samples?

She scanned the encoded data sample for all three, not a full raw sequence, just the initial compressed kilobyte. Out to over a hundred places, the data were exactly the same. She could run the entire sample through a comparison check back at the lab but she suspected the entirety of it would be identical. More than curious.

She opened the summary analysis for Singh. Apparent cause of death: Metastatic leukemia, as expected. She glanced at the ancillary information and cross-referenced it with what little background health information Dr. Bonet had provided her. Everything was consistent with a broken Promise. Until she came to his blood type.

She nearly dropped her spoon.

The sample was different than his records indicated. She opened the files for the other two. Both of theirs were different, too. But they weren’t the same as each other’s, now or then. She scanned back through the records. Dr. Bonet had confirmed all three of their blood types during his initial examinations on arrival. So either he had purposefully misidentified them, which seemed unlikely given Xenomix need for accurate information on its test subjects, of which blood type was still a fundamental.

Or something had changed them.

When she did a quick search of her comms onboard research library, she found only a couple references to a condition which could cause that. Both referenced a metastatic leukemia variant that catalyzed enzyme changes in the subject's gut flora. One abstract named the variant. She didn’t recognize it so she looked it up. She only found one paper.

She downloaded that and read it more slowly. The same symptoms as the metastatic leukemia the analysis had identified. Consistent with high levels of exposure to exotic radiation. Usually seen only in particle accelerator accidents or fusion drive malfunctions. Often mistaken for a broken Promise in initial diagnosis but differentiated by certain telltale markers, including blood type change. She skimmed through the referenced case studies. Not that there were many of them. A rare diagnosis. But unlikely a broken Promise at all.

That made even less sense. Unless… She paused to consider. Unless all three had been exposed to the same radiation accident. Unless the fugee archipelago had used the same unshielded freighter to transport them all. That was more than possible.

She reopened their individual background files. As she remembered, they all shared the same vaccination date. Which likely meant the same emigration date, too. Blood didn’t keep émigrés hanging around for long. Transport was the long pole. Vaccination was the final step in the administrative process. They usually didn’t do that until transport was onsite. But Dr. Bonet had seemed to indicate they’d each shown up at the camp on different days.

Then how had they all ended up with identical data spliced into their junk DNA? The odds of that were vanishingly small.

Paris finished up her soup, which had grown cold, and wrapped up the rest to take back to the lab. The task list that she thought would be a simple series of confirmation runs and dictating a final report for Jallet looked to have grown longer. She’d have to set up to confirm more telltales on Singh tonight. If they came back positive, then she would put in a request to LOW OrbIT for their passport data based on potential systemic health concerns. The forms were bureaucratically nightmarish enough that she didn’t want to wait to get them started. Every professional instinct she had whispered that she’d need them.

---

The next several days blurred together.

Days, Paris fought the usual fires that invariably waited until she was working nights to flare. Between trying to catch something that resembled normal sleep and regular meals, she interspersed touching base with Bennie on the progress of her samples, reviewing her own data and starting a preliminary analysis while her thoughts were fresh. Plus several conference calls on other upcoming contract work, meetings with vendors and suppliers that couldn’t be deferred, and a couple periodic status reports for ongoing analysis, with the normal cyclic maintenance issues of running a Land Grant research lab, expected and unexpected, which always seemed to strike at once.

Nights, she set up detailed runs of all three camp samples, including reconfirming their causes of death, verifying the other telltale markers and an in-depth analysis of the Bloodeye Virus vaccination metadata encoded around it for each in case it was somehow related. She couldn’t quite make the time to examine the results. She wasn’t looking forward to seeing her father’s data signature when it came up in the vaccine.

Instead, she ran a full sequencing and analysis of the data spliced into what still appeared to be the three refugee’s broken Promises to see what the heck was in there and why it might be the same. She only finished Singh’s, and a partial on Jairu. Something else she also didn’t have time to look at. But she whipped off the passport request forms anyway. Technically, she should have sent them to Jallet to forward, or at the very least given her the heads up, but she didn’t have time to deal with those inevitable delays and explanations. Better to ask forgiveness than permission.

Especially after Jallet had tagged the third broken Promise as priority, too, as Dr. Bonet had expected she would. Paris wrote up a request for a deferral of the initial reporting requirement based on the triple caseload. Jallet must have been in a good mood. She approved it overnight. She granted a reprieve of three more weeks to get her a report.

Paris couriered a request to Herman Tong on Venture, a neighboring planet in the fugee archipelago, to see if he’d run across any similar cases, asking if he had that he forward her the data. This all had the scent of a potential publication which might just salvage the inordinate amount of time she was spending on it. She offered him a collaboration if she wrote it up. She was pretty sure he’d turn it down but would send any data he collected anyway. There were no real accolades in refugee research. She wasn’t sure whether she hoped there were more cases or not. But keeping her name in the journals wouldn’t hurt the Tardigrades’ reputation.

Amazingly, the lab’s network connection had more up time than down, a rarity. Xenomix liked to mask public infrastructure neglect as routine maintenance rather than rationing.  For water, sewer, and power the lab had onsite backups. Paris couldn’t afford a backup satellite link, so messages and information searches often sat queued until the network came back online. Even the public wireless access on Deino-Durans was sporadic at best. And that only available downtown. No one saw the profit in running it up the hill.

She’d had to turn down several requests for emergency analysis. She’d slipped the schedule on some routine work to keep from peak loading the sequencer-synthesizer which continued to complain. Enough so that all the work, her own and Jallet’s, slowed to a crawl. Normally delaying routine contract work wouldn’t have been a problem but of course this week she had several clients screaming at her on a daily basis. So she duly but professionally screamed back. To top it off, at the end of the week, the sequencer-synthesizer completely shit the bed. All their research ground to a halt.

She and Bennie were tag-teaming a tech to come out and fix it, which he insisted would take another week to just schedule, maybe two on Deino-Durans time, when word came back from the LOW OrbIT consulate two island chains over. Her request for the refugees’ passport data had been denied. Whoever had misread her request would reconsider if she provided almost the exact information she was seeking, countersigned by their boss. Typical.

So she pulled the pin on Bennie to allow him to use whatever extraordinary measures necessary to coerce the tech to get out within the 24 hours the maintenance contract stated, parts in hand, and retreated to her office to hash out a contingency plan.

Bennie and the kids had sequenced enough of her own samples that she no longer worried about that. She had data to chew on for a while. Anything that hadn’t been thawed could wait. But now the rest of her schedule for the month was compacted. Worse with the sequencer-synthesizer offline for an indeterminate period. She hadn’t even reviewed the broken Promise data she had yet. She vaguely remembered receiving word from Dr. Bonet that he’d destroyed the bodies when Roland had shuttled back his original files. So the samples she had were all she’d get unless Tong got back to her. That would take at least another week.

She sketched out an interim schedule around the work they could perform without the sequencer-synthesizer. She could subcontract another lab to use one of theirs, but she’d be damned if she’d front the money to do that for Jallet’s data without a solid promise of getting paid back. She was only about halfway through the second camp sample. Now everything would now have to be rerun. Another delay.

But she might be able to borrow Dr. Bonet’s sequencer. His was one a couple generations older, a sequencer-only model before they’d saved money by combining the synthesizer function into the same machine to save on redundant electronics. Which had turned out to be less ideal than anyone expected. As she was learning firsthand, the combination meant that when you lost one function, you lost both. Better to have two separate machines but that was money she didn’t have. Xenomix had gotten a closeout deal on the combination model so practically gave them away to the Land Grant labs.

Renting Dr. Bonet’s equipment she could add directly onto Jallet’s bill with no up front cost. The sequencer was probably back to gathering dust. Medical couldn’t afford the chemical cartridges to run it, cartridges she had on hand that would be doing nothing while her machine was being repaired. Even if they didn’t fit, she could transfer the chemicals if necessary or have Bennie jury rig something. While she was at it, she could get Dr. Bonet to request the passport data she needed. No one would blink at that and he’d know exactly how to get it and from who. 

The more she thought about it, the more she liked the idea. Win-win all around. Less than ideal in that his antique would take even longer to process than hers, but any progress was better than none.

So after she forwarded the new schedule to Bennie, who was still arguing with the tech, and checked to see the kids had work and everything else was under control, she headed down the hill toward Left Bank Brew and Bookery to pick up a sufficient bribe for Dr. Bonet. This time she sprang for Italian dark roast and a pastry.

He knew the moment she appeared outside his office waving an éclair that she wanted something beyond the ordinary. When she laid out her offer, he merely smiled as he savored his confection.

“The sequencer is not a problem,” he said after washing down the first mouthful of his treat with a swig of coffee. “Though I can’t guarantee what shape it’s in. But you’ll have to use it here. Getting a property pass to remove anything has become almost impossible. I’ve got it stored in my old lab.”

Paris looked at him, confused. “I thought I’d be using the one you ran the initial samples on.”

He laughed. “That’s just a mini-sequencer, good for detecting broken Promises but not much more.”

“I could have saved you the hassle with the travel data,” he continued. “Had I known you wanted it, I would have accessed that information directly before I remitted their passports to LOW OrbIT after I destroyed the bodies.” He took another bite of éclair. After a long moment, he added. “Lucky for you, I anticipated your needs.”

He unlocked his desk drawer, removed a folder, and slid it across to her. Inside a single sheet of handwritten notes lay on the back side of a recycled safety memo. She skimmed his neat, compact handwriting. It looked like a complete record, dates and all. More than she wanted to process right now.

“Can I hang on to this?”

He nodded. “File it under professional curiosity but don’t store it electronically. Unless you want us both to have to explain how you got it. Because you know I’ll deny everything.” He popped the last bite of the pastry into his mouth meaningfully, and then licked his fingers.

She folded the paper and tucked it in a pocket, passing the empty folder back to him. He smiled as he stashed it in a different locked drawer. His own personal supply cabinet she suspected. She wished she’d thought to bring back his sticky notes.

“Now,” he pushed himself to his feet and grabbed his coffee, “let’s go see what that sequencer looks like.”

---

He led her to a basement room tucked behind the san that was no larger than a closet. Inside, the sequencer lay under a dustcover on a work surface beside a serviceable sample freezer. Odds and ends that only someone with no prospect of resupply couldn’t afford to throw out filled the shelves that ringed the top of the room. An old thermo-cycler, which was like a dark age oligo-synthesizer. Electrophoresis equipment, much like a primitive sequencer. A set of DNA isolation kits she suspected were long past their expiration dates. Plus all the standard stuff you might expect to find in any biochemistry lab, glassware, reagents, a PH meter, slides, filters, stains. A balance, a centrifuge, an autoclave, an incubator. Speakers for someone’s personal audio entertainment device.

She and Dr. Bonet spent the rest of the morning refurbishing the ancient sequencer. He seemed enthusiastic to get his hands dirty with real lab equipment again. Now almost all he did were routine physicals, oversee Xenomix’s sample collection and monitor their trails. He taught her all the tricks he’d learned to get the machine back online. Most he said he’d learned from her mother who had picked them up after the Revolution on Blood. He mentioned her expertise casually with a genuine fondness.

Paris grew quiet, remembering her time in the camp and Dr. Bonet’s exact position there. She fought back a wave of powerlessness that tried to overwhelm her. Her mother’s last days came crashing back. She had to remind herself she wasn’t that helpless little girl anymore. And never would be again.

Bonet seemed to pick up on her thoughts and quickly said, “Well, I should get back to it. I expect you can handle it from here. I’ll write up a property pass for any sequencer cartridges you bring, in case you want them back. I doubt there’s enough in there to do more than a basic calibration cycle.”

He paused at the door. “Oh, and nights might work best for your processing. I’ll tell Marcus you’re helping me with a data audit. I hear he likes dark roast, too.”

With that he disappeared.

At this rate, she’d have to dip into petty cash just for bribes.

---

When Paris dropped off her Left Bank offering with Marcus that evening, she was prepared to pass off her sample cooler as dinner. But once he saw the proffered coffee, he no longer seemed interested in anything else in her hands.

Waiting on the work surface of the improvised lab, she found the property pass for her chemical cartridges. She scanned it with her comm as a precaution. Paperwork in the camp got lost all the time. Sometimes on purpose.  

After she’d installed her cartridges in the sequencer and ran a test to validate the calibration, she loaded in the first run. She’d mapped out her plan in her office after explaining the situation to Bennie. They’d both agreed they couldn’t use the borrowed sequencer for any meaningful work clients could later complain about. She certainly wouldn’t use it for her own data. But it seemed adequate for Jallet’s work.

She quickly found the quiet environment of the mini-lab agreed with her. Having no distractions within easy reach and no one to interrupt her meant she got more done more quickly than she’d thought. She had her comm should a true emergency arise. Of course, she couldn’t get it to talk to the speakers she’d seen in the lab. They required a physical connection. No comm she’d ever owned supported one. So instead of using the comm’s substandard internals, she’d opted for silence. She flashed back to grad school with Herman Tong. No food, no drink, no music was his ironclad rule. Nothing that could contaminate the samples or serve as a distraction.

She’d decided to rerun Singh’s sample so all the data came out of the same machine. It shouldn’t make a difference but in her experience shouldn’t wasn’t always good enough. Especially without a professionally calibrated machine, at least that she could verify, she wanted all the results skewed in the same direction.

Once Singh’s sample was humming away sequencing the entirety of his broken Promise data, she started reviewing the information she already had.

She examined Dr. Bonet’s handwritten passport data. It became immediately apparent that her first conjecture couldn’t be right. None of the three shared the same path along the interplanetary fugee archipelago to get to Grant even though they all departed Blood on the same date. She mapped out their paths on her comm.

Singh had taken the most direct path, Blood to Scorn to Bank to Venture to Grant. Four transits with two stops before his final destination. He’d debarked on Bank just long enough to be processed in orbit, less than a week. Venture not much longer, probably spent haggling over a transit visa. And finally offloaded on Grant.

Jairu took a more roundabout route. Blood to Down 2 to Scorn to Park to Exile to Grant. Five transits, two stops. The diversion to Down 2 was curious as it was generally the gateway toward Home in the opposite direction. Some contract, real or forged, must have fallen through which put him back on the route to Grant, the favorite fugee dumping ground now. She assumed the stopover at Exile was only for refueling. Unless his IQ was high enough to meet the prison’s standard for conscripted mental labor. Even LOW OrbIT hadn’t quite taken to treating refugees as prisoners. Though they had no qualms with essentially selling them to Xenomix as test subjects.

Sharma took the longest route. Blood to Scorn to Tao to Darwin to Blue to Venture to Grant. Darwin still accepted select refugees, as did Venture on a more limited basis. Blue and Tao almost none. All of those must have fallen through, though only after a stopover of several days on each. Testing? Background checks? Ship transfers? Six transits, four stops.

None of the stops for the three had been groundside until they got to Grant. Nothing past the Sovereignty Line between LOW OrbIT and local control to make sure no one could claim asylum. By route, none on the same ship. They had arrived on Grant nearly three weeks apart but shown symptoms within the same week. That struck her as genetic variability. Still likely the same initial exposure. So what were they up to on Blood?

She ran a comparison of the three initial data sets on her comm. Identical out to a kilobyte, as she suspected. The preliminary analysis had flagged the long strings of homo-nucleotides that she’d noted earlier. Either an amateur erasure or a primitive algorithm, neither of which made sense. Unless someone was truly desperate and trying to hide something. But three of them?

Even with the risks, there were plenty of legitimate reasons someone might want to erase a Blood Promise. A jilted lover, a painful memory, or just a plain bad choice. She'd even heard rumor of them being removed for political considerations, though she didn't really understand exactly what those might be. Securing a clearance? Winning an election? Maintaining the right image for the right position with the right interplanetary corporation? All that was well above her professional day-to-day. In dark corners, conspiracy theories continued to circulate of erasures by the rich and powerful to cover up a scandal or a crime. Those she viewed with a more jaded eye.

But none of those seemed to fit here. She hoped the full data sets might enlighten her.

Over the next week, Paris sequenced all of the data from each of the three broken Promises. The work went quicker than she’d expected. Her sequencer-synthesizer must have been slowly degrading for longer than she’d thought. Even after the sequencing was complete, she hid out for a while performing the base analysis. She told herself because she might need access to rerun samples if something turned up missing but in her heart she knew she just liked the peace and quiet. She’d forgotten how much she could accomplish when she could focus solely on the work.

After a week of struggles and threats, Bennie had finally gotten the sequencer-synthesizer back up and running. That had required a full factory reset, a desperation resolution. The tech had informed Bennie beforehand that the chances of the machine coming back up at all were fifty-fifty given its age and component degradation. If it ever had to be reset again, the odds went down to one in ten, best case. He also warned that all the intervening patches which needed to be reloaded would not be maintained on the network much longer. In a few months, Bennie would have to download them and store them somewhere locally. And there was still no replacement unit in Jallet’s latest shipment.

Once Paris had the full data sets in hand, she began running analyses. First, she transferred the sequencer output to her comm. What should have been a simple task ended up taking half a night. Her comm didn’t like supporting something in the older sequencer file format. It should be exactly like her own, but somehow wasn’t. She had to hunt around for a codec that made it compatible. Even then, she had to scrounge a short range interface protocol to transfer the data by hand, using a limited bandwidth.

After she finally got it uploaded, she compared the full data sets of all three samples. Identical again, all the way out. A quick search of her onboard research database made no mention of duplicated Blood Promise data even involving illicit erasure procedures.

So she set up a filter to attempt to recover any underlying structure buried in the data set. Even the most careful erasures sometimes left telltale markers behind. Like ghost bits in electronic memory. After the initial run on her comm lugged it to a near standstill and came back inconclusive, she farmed it out to the lab’s main computer. Surprisingly, the full analysis application tied down nearly fifty percent of its bandwidth, and in the end only said the data did not appear consistent with either a Promise or a broken Promise.

On a whim, she opened up the filters and ran a wider search. With the routine network outages, this one extended over the course of days. She had to limit its bandwidth consumption to five percent to keep from interfering too much with paying work. But now she was more than curious. Someone was doing something here she didn’t understand.

After exhausting its remote databases, the application asked permission to reach out to the larger planetary library to search for a match. She allowed it to search the public but not corporate databases, setting the priority to piggyback exclusively on idle time processing to limit the search’s impact and expense. Like most corporate colonies, Grant was fully profit-driven. Xenomix rarely left a credit generating revenue stream untapped. Idle-time processing was one of the few perks she received as a Land Grant lab. Access to proprietary corporate data would require Jallet’s countersignature. Paris doubted her corporate liaison would be that interested.

As much as she loved the quiet, distraction-free environment of Dr. Bonet’s tiny lab, she could no longer justify hiding out in it as a working vacation. So she bundled up her samples for storage, locked the sequencer into long-term standby, leaving the cartridges in it in case she needed it again, and returned from self-imposed exile. She couriered Tong an update with her initial findings and the raw data. Maybe he’d recognize it.

---

For the next three weeks, the regular chaos of keeping Tardigrades afloat consumed nearly all Paris’s available bandwidth. She had just caught up on the backlog of work from the sequencer-synthesizer being down when three messages arrived, each flagged for a priority interrupt notification. One from Tong, one from Jallet, and one with a report on her background processing.

She opened the last message first expecting another inconclusive result. She’d forgotten she’d left it running.

To her surprise, the message contained a strong match, an old, stripped-down transmission control protocol. The application had recognized an end-of-file marker terminating the data and worked backwards from there. The fields for header length and data length within the reconstructed header matched the data set exactly. That could be an unlikely coincidence. But the corresponding checksum field within the header also matched the data set spot on.

The application had tried several standard algorithms to decode the payload without success. The report concluded that the data were likely protected by military grade encryption. But the header indicated that this packet was one of sixteen unique fragments making up the whole of an expanded data set. Fragment thirteen to be precise.

As one of many footnotes at the end of the report, she noticed the end-of-data indicator just prior to the end-of-file marker. Not a standard indicator, really a unique data tag used as a version number, or less often, a terminator to identify a process or operator. Previously, this signature had only been seen in certain vaccinations against the Bloodeye Virus.

Her father’s signature. She would have recognized it if she’d sifted through the raw data herself.

Stunned, Paris collapsed back in her chair, trying to digest the implications of what she’d just read.

Someone was using fugees to smuggle data off of Blood and making it look like a broken Promise under her father’s vaccine signature? That made no sense. At least until she thought about the history of the Green Revolution and all the other ways everyone had failed those refugees, including here on Grant.

In a backhanded way, the Green Revolution had been born from the AI War. When the androids on Chance revolted against their corporate overlords, their cause resonated with all the colonies in the newly formed Fringe Alliance. Especially Anarchy whose information-shall-set-us-free attitudes had always conflicted with the proprietary mindset of the corporate colonies. The tabloids maintained they had funded independent raids on those corporate colonies through operations like Methylation Labs that manufactured Red Chiggers and Black Bindis then smuggled out their products to the children of the corporate elite. They dubbed it engagement through ennui.

A half a dozen systems bore the worst scars of the fighting with some changing hands several times. The raids and counter-raids lasted two years. LOW OrbIT, true to its charter, remained content to protect the interstellar shipping lanes, and nothing more. Technically, they were not a full military force, more of a cross between an ancient Earth coast guard and interstellar peacekeepers. Thus their name. The League of Worlds Orbital and Interstellar Taskforce. But when an AI fleet raided their bases on Luna, lighting up the dark side of the moon, and effectively forced a negotiated settlement, The League council quietly allowed LOW OrbIT to grow into something much more powerful.

After the androids had been granted autonomy on Chance, many people felt technology in the form of independent AIs and the biotechnological experiments of the Fringe Alliance now actively threatened humanity. A healthy dose of anti-corporatism soon got wrapped up in the movement, too. But no one was certain whether the revolution was fueled by some bruised faction of the AI War nursing old grievances or whether it spread organically. Dark corners of conspiracy said LOW OrbIT had initially funded the revolution as retribution but lost control.

The central idea behind the Green Revolution had started as an altruistic environmental philosophy from Mulch: Work with the environment, not against it. Guide it, don’t rule it. Scorn radicalized then weaponized that sentiment, deftly merging it with their own quasi-Luddite outlook. The resulting manifesto claimed that any technology above a certain level, generally that of pre-computerized Terra, posed an existential threat. A threat that could only be countered by seizing control of the colonies and destroying all their technology in armed revolution.

This time fighting raged across another five worlds for seven years. When Scorn, Down 2 and then Blood fell like dominos, few people noticed. All three were the backwaters, a failed but sanctioned League of Worlds colony flanked by two decrepit national ones, one Russian, one Indian. Fourth World downside squabbles that affected only the unfortunate populations who lived there. Who cared? No one until Green sympathies spread to the more strategically positioned worlds, including two of human space’s three primary agricultural planets.

As a corporate colony, The Farm mostly handled itself. Before the cancer could metastasize, USB excised it by staging a counter-coup and installing an authoritarian regime. Even so, the population remained sympathetic and restive with several major incidents requiring LOW OrbIT Peacekeeper intervention. But The Farm didn’t generate many headlines as it lay on the farthest edge of human space.

Not so Darwin. Not only was it centrally located and foremost of the League’s breadbaskets, it was also only two transits from Scorn. Caught between was Bank, another League of Worlds sanctioned colony that, like it’s name implied, housed the headquarters of the largest finance institutions that fueled commerce for all of human space. Its loss would be incalculable.

Before anyone could grasp the scope of the problem, dissident colonists and provocateurs had seized power. But not completely. Strong anti-revolutionary elements held out in isolated locations like Blind Mouth Bay. The largest group was led by a LOW OrbIT reserve Marine lieutenant. He provided all the political cover LOW OrbIT needed. They never left one of their own behind.

So at Darwin, LOW OrbIT made a stand. First, it channeled covert funds to mercenaries and independent colonies to harass the Greens until the interdiction of Darwin could be broken. Then they landed military advisors and eventually Peacekeepers to support the holdouts and reclaim the planet. The liberation of Darwin consumed four years and millions of lives. But at Darwin, the expansion of the Green Revolution ceased.

Though like other revolutions before it, it never really ended. More, it came to an armed truce based on mutual exhaustion and lack of support. After the bloodshed of the AI War and the body count on Darwin, the public had no stomach for another grueling campaign. So Scorn, Down 2 and Blood were left as problems to be solved another day.

By then, millions on both sides had been displaced as they tried to escape the carnage and chaos to seek a better, safer life. Most became despised and distrusted fugees who generated little sympathy anywhere they went, no matter which side of the Green Line they’d occupied. They were reminders that all the suffering and loss on both sides had resulted in little more than stalemate. They became pawns in the conflict they’d tried to flee, ruthlessly exploited by the few colonies willing to accept them. Colonies like Grant. Exploitation Paris remembered intimately.

Still, the information she’d uncovered had to be wrong. Twenty years later, how could anything on Blood still matter? Sure, tabloid rumors insisted that the Greens still supported the interstellar raids and acts of terrorism that followed everywhere humans went. But no one offered any proof. Blood had quickly split from Scorn over doctrinaire interpretations. Bloodites insisted on a slightly higher level of acceptable technology than officially sanctioned, and were quickly cast out of the Green hierarchy as heretical. Since their independent treaty with LOW OrbIT, they’d forged their own way, even if they continued to keep the inner workings of their society hidden behind an opaque curtain. Most of what Paris heard from the recent immigrants said the people there were solely focused on survival and reclaiming a modicum of respect. That last came hard. After their technological devolution, they had very little to offer human space.

But what if her information was right? What could she do with it? Turn it over to Jallet? Her message was probably screaming for status. Paris opened it next.

Not only did Jallet want a full report by the end of the week, she was terminating the investigation and demanded all the data Paris had collected. Not just copies, originals including samples. And a full electronic purge backed by the threat of an external audit. Any remaining administrative records were to be marked Xenomix proprietary, eyes only and FOUO.

That answered the question of whether to turn the information over to Jallet. Only if she wanted it buried.

But without more evidence, what exactly could she do?

Her eyes came to rest on Tong’s message. Paris opened it hoping against hope that he might have something for her to cling to. Anything.

His message was more oblique. Confusing actually. It appeared to be a personal message not a response to her previous request or update. He told her he was cleaning out his office and to look for a small cargo shipment with a number of books she might find interesting, some of which might have belonged to her father. Delivery care of the Left Bank Brew and Bookery. She could sell them, keep them or store them; he didn’t need them back. He’d been offered an unexpected early retirement in the latest corporate restructuring. Generous enough that he was thinking of setting up his own lab on Anarchy. As Dr. Parikh’s daughter, she was welcome to join him if she was interested. If not, he wished her luck.

None of which made any sense. Tong had never met her father. Maybe he meant her mother, but she didn’t think so. She’d never mentioned him before Paris worked with him in grad school. Only Bennie had. Very few scientists maintained a library of physical textbooks which became outdated too fast. He was older than she was, but was only Bennie’s age, still too young to retire. And he’d never had so much as a single good word for the rogue labs and tech shops that occupied the ethical borderland that was Anarchy. He was always too buttoned-down and precise.

Was Tong telling her that her request for fugee data had become too high profile? It sounded like a warning that he, too, had found her father’s signature.

So what had he meant sending an RSVP to Anarchy? Where? Could he mean Methylation Labs? That had been a running joke when she’d worked in his lab in grad school. The illicit drug lab where his assistants would end up working if they didn’t pass Titration 101 to his approval. But even if that’s what he meant, how would she make contact? It wasn’t like she could send a courier drone message to them care of the Chaosium.

Maybe Bennie would know. He and Tong had been undergrads together.

Paris made a snap decision. She drafted out a report for Jallet, which made her investigation sound inconclusive. She didn’t mention her sequencing. Her conclusion was that, in absence of better evidence, the deaths had been a series of coincidental broken Promises. She promised to forward her detailed analyses by the end of the week. Those would take time to invent. She would polish the message and send it to Jallet after she got back.

First, she needed to secure her samples. And hope Dr. Bonet was still there, not that he had many other places to be when she’d been around. Maybe she could crowbar him into screening more recent arrivals for similar “broken Promises” to see if there was a trend.

She grabbed her sample cooler then stopped at Left Bank for her bribe. The small space was crowded by the time she got there, just after shift change at the camp. While she knew most of the guards and other camp officials by sight if not by name, there was one stranger she didn’t recognize. No one else paid much attention to him. There was really nothing remarkable about him other than his presence. Either a lost tourist or a visitor to the camp. Though he didn’t really look like either. No one else seemed to take much notice of him. Deino-Durans didn’t get many visitors, at least unaccompanied or that people didn’t remark upon.

Even though she was trying not to stare, he briefly met and held her eye. His eyes seemed to shift in the slowly pulsing light. She couldn’t quite tell if they were green or blue or some sort of sea gray between. She must have stared a moment too long. The ghost of a smile played across his face before he turned away.

Embarrassed for a reason she couldn’t quite pin down, Paris rushed through her order. As she waited, she studiously focused on the book exchange hoping the stranger wouldn’t take her curiosity as interest. When Paris looked up after Sheila called out her name, the man was gone. As if he’d never been there.

“Oh, I forgot, a package came in for you,” Sheila said as she handed over the tea and a daily dark roast coffee. “Don’t know why they sent it here. You want me to send it up to the lab?”

Tong’s package was here already? Paris almost said yes without thinking, but something about the strange man had unsettled her. “Could I leave it with you a bit longer? I’ll pick it up on my way home.”

“It’s really heavy,” Sheila said, obviously fishing.

“It’s full of books from a friend,” Paris responded, knowing she could get Sheila’s hopes up that some might be coming her way. “I need to look through them before donating the ones I don’t want to the bookery.”

“No worries.” Sheila smiled accommodatingly. “I tucked it in the storeroom. It’s not like we don’t have space.”

“I appreciate it,” Paris replied. She hitched the strap of her cooler onto a shoulder before grabbing a cup in each hand and heading out the back.

At the door to the admin bunker, she balanced the tea and coffee in one hand, and swiped her ID with the other. When the door popped open, she redistributed the cups, holding up the coffee toward the security window as she stepped inside. She waited for the inner door to buzz open so she could hand Marcus his bribe.

Instead she heard through the tinny speaker below the clear plastisteel window, “You can’t bring that in here.” When she looked over at the window, she saw Marcus pointing up to the sign. “All bags subject to search. No food or drink beyond this point.”

At first Paris thought he was messing with her. Security seemed to get off on jokes like that. They had a weird sense of humor. But his expression hardened as he tapped the security glass and pointed again, this time more emphatically. What the hell?

“Uh, then what am I supposed to do with these?” she asked, holding up the two cups, playing along. “Seems a shame to waste them.”

“You can leave them outside,” he responded coolly but authoritatively, “but you can’t bring them in.”

He was serious. Which made her wonder who had come down on him and why.

Warily, she reopened the outer door and set the two cups on the ground to one side. She hitched the cooler higher on her shoulder again and stepped back in, this time standing in front of the security window. She no longer expected to get buzzed through immediately.

“Purpose of your visit?” Behind the window Marcus held the security log. He’d be logging her time in and out, as well as who she was going to see. At least her ID meant she didn’t need an escort.

“Picking up sequencer cartridges on loan to Dr. Bonet.” The lie came out quickly and easily. If Marcus was doing his job by the book, he would definitely search her cooler in both directions.

As if reading her mind, he said, “Open the cooler and hold it up to the window.”

She complied, making sure he could see every empty corner. All the memories of being on the wrong side of the wire came flooding back. It took so little for her to feel six again. She hated feeling that vulnerable but knew she had to do this if she wanted to get inside. At this point, she’d be lucky not to get patted down. She’d caught his sidelong looks before.

He jotted a note in the log. To her left, the inner door buzzed.

“You’ll need a property pass for those cartridges on the way out, Dr. Parikh.” His expression softened for just a moment as he gave her the heads up. So he wasn’t just being a hard-ass. Someone up the chain must have come down on him. She wondered if it was about everyone or just her.

She nodded to him in response before stepping inside. His mask dropped right back in place. She wondered how she was going to secure her samples now. Getting them out through the front door seemed impossible as long as security was playing by the rules.

At Dr. Bonet’s office, she pressed the announcement button and smiled at the camera. The door didn’t open. It wouldn’t be surprising if he were gone for the day. He wasn’t expecting her. She entered the five digit code into the cipher lock. He’d given it to her in case she needed something from his meager supplies in the middle of the night. The door lock flashed red. She entered it again, this time more carefully in case she’d gotten it wrong. Another flash. She knew she’d remembered it right. She didn’t dare try again. A third failed attempt would alert security, who would question how she’d gotten it. As it was, Dr. Bonet would see the two failed attempts when he came back. As would security if they were diligent about checking the logs. She hoped the crackdown didn’t extend that far.

So she went to his lab instead. When she punched in the same code, the door lock flashed green and snicked open.

Inside, the room was stacked with boxes. Almost every available space was occupied, in some places literally floor to ceiling. What the…

Paris had never seen this much largesse anywhere in the camp ever before. Like a lifetime of Christmases and birthdays come early along with a corporate bonus. No wonder security was on alert.

She scanned the labels. Everything from overstock for Medical to office supplies. And this looked like the excess. She bet even better equipment was locked inside Bonet’s office.

Son of a bitch. He’d gotten a brand new sequencer-synthesizer, still in its hard-sided shipping case, top of the line, a better model than Jallet had promised her. With enough cartridges to see him through retirement. And a new ultra freezer. Something was definitely wrong.

Well, at least she wouldn’t feel bad about stealing back her sequencer cartridges. She was glad Bonet had insisted on the property pass when she’d brought them in. But those weren’t nearly as important as her samples. She still had no idea how to get them out without getting searched. While technically custody had been transferred to the lab, only she and Bonet knew they were here. She had a distinct feeling if she tried to take them out, they’d be confiscated under Jallet’s order.

Staring at all the boxes gave her an idea. She scanned the shelves lining the top of the room. After a bit of rearranging so she could search all the nooks and crannies, she found exactly what she needed. A sample case with an electronic shipping label. An antique version where the data were still input by hand. Someone had tossed it up there without clearing the old data. She checked the memory archive. This label held one address back from the current, a feature for returning samples to their source. The previous addressing information was still there, too. The container had originally come from the camp. Someone had conscientiously returned it, knowing Dr. Bonet’s lack of supplies. That would do perfectly.

First, Paris snapped a picture of the camp’s addressing details on her comm. Then she erased all the data. Carefully, she reconstructed the information set to get the camp’s particulars right. She entered all the information she would have if she were sending the sample case from Tardigrades to the camp, with return postage paid by her lab. She had to look up an appropriate account number to bill it to on her comm, one she could bury it in that wasn’t related to Bonet or Jallet in case it got audited. It took her twenty minutes to walk through it, double checking that she didn’t slip up inputting any important field. Bennie probably could have done it in five or less even dead tired. She then keyed it as received, and hit to return to sender which swapped all the addressing information, with a note to collect on delivery billed to the lab account number in the memo. Fortunately, this label was too old to integrate the official postal billing and tracking details like newer models.

When she was done, it appeared as though Tardigrades had initially sent the package to Dr. Bonet under a bogus account number and that he was now returning them, postage collected at the destination. She’d tell Bennie to look for the case and to just forward it to her house when it arrived. From home, she’d return the empty case to the lab, effectively destroying any trail of where it’d come from. Easily lost unless a truly motivated auditor went digging. Which would raise a flag with Bennie. Who would raise it with her. Which she’d cover with client confidentiality since the account wasn’t under Jallet’s supervision. Before the client got billed, she’d transfer the charges to her personal account.

Bennie would be proud. He’d struggled so hard to help her navigate the practical bureaucracy of running a Land Grant lab, a bureaucracy she ordinarily had no time or patience for.

Now it was just a matter of dropping the sample case where the mail room would pick it up. They wouldn’t care about sending it if someone was paying the bill. As long as it was collect on delivery, not unusual for the camp, they wouldn’t even bother checking with Bonet. You had to love a mindless bureaucracy. Bennie always said you could ship a body without anyone noticing if you had an appropriately large container and properly filled out paperwork.

Next, she shifted the boxes again to get to the sequencer. She removed the chemical cartridges and packed them carefully but accessibly in her cooler. She sent Bonet a message telling him that she’d stopped by to retrieve her cartridges now that her sequencer-synthesizer was back online but said nothing about the samples.

On her way out, she dropped the sample case in the pickup spot for this wing of admin. It looked like the mailroom interns hadn’t made their last rounds yet.

At security she submitted to having her cooler searched without comment, presenting the property pass on her phone when asked. Marcus barely glanced at it before telling her she was good to go.

When she looked outside the admin door, she noticed one of the two cups she’d set down was no longer there. She left the other exactly where it was. Someone would eventually clean it up.

---

By the time Paris got back to the lab, it was late. Roland and Brandi had gone home. It looked like they’d caught up enough that something resembling normal hours had resumed. She was glad for that. All she needed to do was tie up some loose ends before she headed home herself.  

She unloaded the cartridges by the sequencer. She had the electronic assistant on her comm send a message to Brandi to put them at the front of the supply rotation.

On her way to her office, she noticed Bennie’s light was still on. Good. She could tell him about the package now instead of in the morning. She’d rather not leave an electronic trail.

“Success?” he asked as she collapsed into his therapy chair. “I wasn’t sure you’d be back tonight.”

She nodded. “I retrieved our cartridges. I asked Brandi to use them next. Oh, and I have a package coming from the camp. Should get here tomorrow or the next day.”

Though with the postal system they both knew there was no guarantee. How it could take them more than a day or two to move a package about a klick up the road was beyond her. Deino-Durans wasn’t a big island. But somehow they managed.

“When it does,” she continued, “just reroute it to my house on my personal account. I had a moment.”

Bennie shot up an eyebrow but didn’t ask.

“Long day. I was on autopilot.” She shook her head and rolled her eyes. “I’ll correct it in the weeklies. Anything new I should know about?”

He gave her a synopsis of the day’s successes and setbacks. Not a lot of either. He finished and grew quiet. She thought about asking him about Tong and Methylation Labs. Before she could figure out how to approach it, he spoke again.

“There’s a man in your office,” he said, somewhat reluctantly.

Her brow furrowed. She didn’t usually get after-hours drop-ins. “Did he say what he wanted?”

Bennie shook his head. “Just said he was from Jallet. Offworlder, I think.”

That set her mind racing. Was he here to follow up on Jallet’s message? Paris had never seen her move so fast. Most of her subordinates had the local we’ll-get-to-it-tomorrow attitude. Demain, demain was always the answer when you asked when anything would get done. The secret being that tomorrow never comes.

“You want me to wait?” Bennie asked when she didn’t immediately respond.

Paris waved a hand distractedly as she got up. “No, go home. We’ll pick it up in the morning.”

She checked the door locks and alarms on her comm, waiting until she was sure he’d left before proceeding to her office. The light was on. As she entered, she froze. The stranger from the coffee shop was sitting behind her desk, examining a piece of coral that normally adorned a corner of it. That annoyed her.

“Why not make yourself at home,” she said, motioning him up.

He didn’t move. She smoldered as she stood there awkwardly. Her patience evaporated.

“Who the hell are you and what do you want?” she demanded.

He set down the coral and flipped up a Xenomix security pass as if that alone were an explanation. As a Land Grant lab, Xenomix representatives had emergency access. This didn’t qualify.

“A pass isn’t an ID,” she said. “That doesn’t tell me who you are.”

“I’m the man who is about to offer you a new, state-of-the-art sequencer, Dr. Parikh.” He motioned to the couch by the door. “Come in. Sit.”

She had no intention of playing guest in her own office. She glanced at her comm. She started to form the first of a quick series of words that would tell her electronic assistant to initiate an emergency call to the island police. If he was for real, they could sort out his credentials.

“Before you do what you’re thinking,” he continued as if he could read her mind, “you’ll want to hear me out.”

She glared back at him. “I like my patrons to have names.”

“Call me Nick Michaels,” he said. “Or today, maybe St. Nick Michaels would be more appropriate.”

She eyed him suspiciously. “Ok, I’ll play along, Mr. Michaels. What exactly do I have to do to get the new sequencer that Jallet has been promising me for months?”

“Just a simple signature.” He slid a datapad across the desk toward her.

She picked it up but didn’t bother reading it. “And why should I believe you?”

“You’ve been to the camp.” He smiled. “You’ve seen what I can do. I’m generous with my friends.”

Her return smile was cold and professional. “I didn’t realize we were friends.” She glanced down at the datapad. A legal document. She started skimming it.

“An NDA?” she said after a moment. “You’ve got to be kidding me. Xenomix has one on file for every year since I took over Tardigrades.”

“Then signing it shouldn’t be a problem.” He held out the stylus he retrieved from its stand on her desk.

She didn’t like the way that sounded. She began reading the document more carefully as she scrolled further down. Her eyes narrowed as she finally looked up at him again.

“This sounds like you’re buying out my contract with Xenomix as well as the lab and all my data. Rights transferable and enforceable by undisclosed third parties.” She lowered the datapad. “What makes you think I’ll sign this?”

“Because it beats the alternative,” he said, still extending the stylus.

 Paris made no move to reach for it. “Which is?”  

“Less generous,” he responded. Michaels extended the stylus again. “Trust me, you really want to sign.”

Something about his tone of voice gave her pause. Somewhere between an offer and an order. She made another gut decision.

“Cut the bullshit, Michaels.” She slid the datapad back across her desk. “You don’t represent Xenomix. The penalty clauses sound as bad for them as for me. So what’s this really about?”

He didn’t move, didn’t so much as twitch, just continued studying her. Like a specimen. When he finally spoke, the easy condescension was gone.

“You may have been exposed to certain hazardous samples recently. Samples that may have gotten mistakenly rerouted here from their intended destination. My job is containment. Quarantine. I recognize the inconvenience but the virulent nature of these samples demands extreme preventative measures. Cooperation benefits everyone. Recalcitrance puts innocent lives at risk. Lives like yours. And your father’s.”

“What’s my father got to do with this?” she demanded, then added. “My father’s dead.”

His smile returned. He tapped the stylus on the datapad.

That alone confirmed something she’d seen in the samples from the camp. She stalled. “I’ll need to talk to Jallet first. This affects her as much as me.”

“Jallet’s already onboard. I spoke with her this morning.” He tapped the datapad screen a few times and slid it back across the desk. A new document, similar to hers though heavily redacted, signed by Jallet.

Paris stared at it a long, hard moment before looking up. “Then I’ll need to run it by my lawyer. I want to make sure I understand all the terms.”

Michaels was no longer smiling. His eyes grew cold, bluish-gray like a stormy sea. He flipped the datapad back around, tapping another sequence. He then picked it up and said. “I’ve sent it to your legal counsel on file with Xenomix for review. I’m giving you three days grace. In the meantime, I’ll be consulting with Xenomix Legal for contingency options.”

He finally got up and moved around her desk. She refused to give ground as he approached the door. He didn’t seem to mind. He just turned sideways as he slid past, facing her as she turned. “Three days,” he repeated, looking down at her as his chest brushed hers on the way by. She held his eye and tried not to shiver.

She succeeded until he was gone.

---

Behind her closed and locked office door, lightning thoughts flashed through Paris’s mind. What had she gotten herself into? Was Michaels government, corporate or representing some private interest? What did he know about her father?

She needed time to think, time to plan. Time to gather information or at least figure out what she had. She needed more than three days.

Michaels might be big enough to push Xenomix around but she doubted he knew how things really worked on Grant.

First, she’d stall through her lawyer. A quick comm message would see Sil on his boat at dawn fishing for a sea bass variant Xenomix was testing along the remotest areas of the Durans archipelago, out of contact, no questions asked. All for just a few discrete blood tests she’d done without his wife’s knowledge with the promise of more in the future if he needed them. She zipped off that message to his private access. The truly private one, not the personal one with any official record.

That should buy her at least a week. Plus however long Sil could legally drag his feet. Which knowing him could be a while. He’d evolved demain into a professional art form of cette semaine. This week, I promise.

Paris jumped at the soft raps on her door. Clutching the coral from her desk, she cautiously opened it to find Bennie standing there, his eyes wide as they came to rest on her improvised weapon. Her adrenaline drained into relief.

“I thought you’d gone home.” She set the coral on the corner of her desk, then adjusted it back to where it belonged.

“I came back to check on you and see how it went.” He shot another look at the coral. “I take it not well.”

Paris tried to decide how much to tell him. She started to ask about Methylation Labs. Before she did, an icy sweat of paranoia raged through her. How long had Michaels been alone in her office? She wondered if it was still completely private. She’d need to get it checked.

“I was just heading out.” She grabbed her tablet and stuffed it in her bag. “Let’s talk over a cup of tea. I’m buying.”

---

Over a pot of oolong in a corner of Left Bank Brew, Paris poured out a description of recent events in subdued whispers. Not unlike a hundred other conversations they’d had over the years. Whether the topic was professional or deeply personal, Bennie was a good listener. Empathetic. He didn’t know where the bodies were buried, at least not all of them, but he certainly knew more about her than anyone, on Grant or anywhere else.

When Paris got to the part about smuggling the samples out of the camp by mail, Bennie smiled and nodded approvingly. She told him about Tong’s package waiting in the nearby storeroom, along with his confusing message.

He grew silent, thoughtful in a way he only did when he was trying to choose his words carefully.

“Are you sure you want to get involved in this?” he finally asked.

“Michaels is trying to take control of the lab,” she said. “I don’t have much choice.”

“Tardigrades can be rebuilt,” he reminded her. “Maybe Tong has the right idea. Take the money and start somewhere new.”

“Like Methylation Labs?” she shot back. “I can’t imagine Tong on Anarchy.”

Bennie froze for an instant. Paris had never seen that happen. Then he relaxed.

“If he’s leaving what he built on Venture, it means he has no other choice. There’s a lot about Tong you don’t know, Paris. He had to sell his soul to get that position. Corporate labs don’t just drop out of the sky.”

Paris stared at her friend, dumbfounded.

“Oh, sweetie, don’t take it that way.” He reached across the table and stroked her arm. Only he could get away with that. “But you have to realize that you’ve lived a bit of a sheltered life here. A lot of us protected you. More than you might imagine.”

She took that piece of information and stashed it away to sort out later. No sense in getting into it here and now. “Well,” she said, “Maybe it’s time I repay the favor. If they take the lab, what happens to you and the kids?”

“Don’t worry about me,” he reassured her. “I’ve got a nice little retirement cabin I bought a few years ago. Roland and Brandi are young and talented. They’ll adapt. Just like we all have. Even you will land on your feet. There is more to this galaxy than Grant.”

“It’s my lab,” she said looking down, smoldering. “My mother’s lab. You helped her build it from the ground up. And now you want me to give it up without a fight?”

Bennie smiled tolerantly. “Your mother used to say that there are fights you can win and fights you’ll lose. When you get to be my age, you begin to learn the difference.”

“And sometimes you need to fight for what’s important even if you know you’ll lose.” Paris looked up at him intently. “My father taught me that.”

His smile turned rueful. He shook his head and sighed. “It won’t be easy, even if it can be done.”

“That’s why I need your help.” She reached across the table and clasped his hands reassuringly. “What are you thinking?”

His smile warmed. “I think we should give Sheila back her table, and maybe free up a little space in her storeroom. Then I need to show you something.”

Paris broke into a smile.

---

Outside, the light had faded. Burning Face had eclipsed Kruger A. Kruger B had fully set. Grant would be wrapped in near complete darkness for several hours.

Once Paris had retrieved her package, Bennie drove her out to the farthest spit of the island. They loaded into a little runabout tied to a dock that Paris hadn’t known existed. Fifteen minutes later, they were tied up to another dock nestled among the mangrove analogue Xenomix had modified and planted all along a spray of islands just offshore as a field test. Even by starlight, Bennie’d had no trouble navigating the electric craft along the maze of waterways.

“I mostly come out here at night,” he said. “The solitude is rejuvenating.”

The dock angled up into a walkway that dropped them on a deck surrounding a medium-sized square cabin set on stilts over the islet beneath. A drop-in field research station.

Paris took it in, somewhat amazed. “I didn’t know anything like this was out here.”

“Before your time,” Bennie told her. “It’s an old monitoring station for the mangroves. You could get these places for a steal back when they were first decommissioned. Most people have forgotten about them. This was the only one in Deino-Durans.”

He unlocked the door and ushered her inside. The layout was simple and reconfigurable, prefab corporate colonial built to last fifty years. A great room that once doubled as the main workspace which was now dominated by a large, hand carved dining room table. Along one wall a kitchenette with extra countertops and cabinets that could be walled off behind bifold doors. Along the other, two doors that presumably led to a pair of bedrooms with a san between. An equipment locker that doubled as a closet and a utility room near the main door. French doors led back onto the deck where she could just see the tops of a couple of reclining web chairs. Probably with a cooler set between as an end table knowing Bennie.

“It’s solar powered with a desalination filter and fully composting biofuel recycling plant. Completely off the grid,” Bennie said. “So we have a place to work if we need it.”

“Is that our old sequencer?” Paris nodded toward the kitchenette as she set Tong’s crate on the table.

“I bought it off the surplus list when we got our last upgrade.” He noticed the look she was giving him. “Don’t worry; I paid the list price you authorized. You got a good deal.”

“If I’d known, I would have just given it to you,” she said.

He smiled. “I know.”

She never really paid attention to what happened to this stuff once she signed off on it. She only knew where it ended up on the lab’s balance sheets.

“I picked up the freezer, the computer and the other stuff, too,” Bennie continued. “It’s all calibrated and fully functional. I thought I might finally find time when I retired for a couple side projects I’ve been kicking around for a while. Just never seem to get to them. Probably never will.”

Paris smiled. She couldn’t imagine Bennie retiring. Or playing with side projects if he did.

“Oh, well.” He shrugged. “Let’s see these books Dr. Tong sent you.”

The package was a standard white hard-sided shipping container rated for vacuum, locked and keyed to Paris’s authorization. Pretty standard for moving goods in space even the single transit from Venture to Grant. When she popped it open, she found a small, self-sustaining cryo-sample unit, a datastick and sheaves of hardcopy smart paper. That last was unusual. Though maybe not for Tong. Older researchers still preferred to hold something physical in their hands when they read.

Paris divided the hardcopy into piles. They both started skimming, each reading the most interesting information aloud as they found it. Tong had done an amazing amount of data collection and processing in such a short time. He must have declared it a priority.

At first, he hadn’t believed Paris’s results could be right. There were no broken Promises in the camps on Venture in the past year. They were rare to begin with. The odds of having three show up within a week in unrelated populations on Grant was so far down the probability chain as to border on impossible. Improbable to say the least.

But because she had worked for him and he trusted her instincts, he took a few samples from recent arrivals at the camp on Venture anyway. He didn’t start sequencing them until her second message came giving him the initial format she’d discovered. He started processing a sample from the most recent fugee to arrive and found the same format. He had only collected a few more before the reorganization came down. Those were in the cryo-sample case. The data was on the stick and in the hardcopy.

More incredibly, Tong had then sent word to his former grad students and contacts along the fugee archipelago from Darwin to Home to collect samples of their own. He was somewhat of a legend as a grad school advisor. A lot of researchers had transitioned through his lab. He already had an inkling that if what they were seeing was real, it would touch a nerve somewhere so he didn’t forward the information Paris had sent him with his request. When he became convinced he was about to get shutdown, he sent another message asking them to forward their data and samples to her, care of Left Bank Brew. Any that hadn’t been in transit to him should be on their way to her.

Paris and Bennie spread the sequencer printouts on the table. Paris immediately recognized the headers in the ones Tong had sent. The five headers showed two more unique numbers in the series. Tong hadn’t processed the full data set yet. That would be the first task they’d have to tackle.

Paris wanted to immediately publish what they had to get Michaels off her back. Bennie urged caution. They didn’t know exactly what they had yet. Attempting to publish provisional results might make matters worse. Retractions could be expensive to reputations.

They debated back and forth over which course to take. Paris needed action. She wanted to burn this Michaels down. Bennie reminded her that Michaels was powerful enough to push around an interstellar corporation. They didn’t know exactly what they were dealing with yet, just that they had something. If they wanted to expose it, they needed more.

Bennie carefully sidestepped any discussion about whether Tong might have been talking about handing the data over to Methylation Labs, only saying they shouldn’t get ahead of themselves.  Paris knew Bennie had more information than he was sharing, but knew if she pushed him too hard, he’d set his teeth. So she let it go. For the moment.

In the end, they decided to wait through Sil’s vacation to see if any other samples arrived. In the interim, they would try to gather more of their own.

Paris would have liked to contact Dr. Bonet to see if he’d be willing to help, or at least let her do the work herself. But with Michaels’ supplies and his sudden silence, she didn’t know whose side Bonet was on. He had left her access to his lab even if he’d changed the combination to his office. So maybe there was hope. Except deep down, she knew he was Xenomix man. He had to be for the work he did. But maybe if she could talk to him face to face, she could get him to turn a blind eye. Or at least get a better sense of where he stood.

Bennie would discretely probe his contacts at Xenomix and elsewhere to see if anyone knew who this Michaels was. Bennie knew everyone on Deino-Durans and beyond. And knew how to get almost anyone to open up.

They both agreed they couldn’t reveal exactly what they’d found or what they were looking for. The fewer people who knew what they were doing for the moment, the better.

When they locked up the cabin and loaded back into the runabout, dead tired after an extended day, Paris felt better than she had in a while. At least she had a direction and a plan.

---

Her plan didn’t survive a week once she got back to her ordinary world.

Bonet wouldn’t answer her messages or comms. From the return receipts, she could see they’d been delivered if not heard and read. Initially she thought he was taking his time to decide how to respond. Why else allow the acknowledgements to go out? But when she attempted to contact him through the security station, she was informed by Marcus that her credentials with the camp had been revoked. She was persona non grata and would be escorted out by armed guards if she showed up.

So much for that avenue of data acquisition. Paris had to hope more samples from Tong’s colleagues came in.

None of Bennie’s contacts with Xenomix could give him any more information on Michaels. They all despised and feared him, but no one had any idea who he was. At least that they were willing to share.

Three days after Paris had encountered Michaels, Sil was physically recalled from his impromptu vacation. Someone at Xenomix located his boat at his secret fishing hole by scouring the satellite data then sent an island police chopper out to retrieve him. Whether that was voluntary or under duress remained a point of contention.

Either way, interrupting his trip just pissed Sil off. He wasn’t much of a lawyer, merely competent, until he was crossed. Then he became inspired. He took a personal interest in Paris’s case, filing in every court imaginable in a specific order to use the appeals as a delaying tactic until she could find something he could use to legally block Xenomix and Michaels. After burning through more than a decade of billable hours on retainer, he finally convinced a League of Worlds civil court to stay any action until the appellate court on Bank could review their initial ruling. He assured her that would take months.

Michaels struck back with slash and burn economics. Contract after contract with Tardigrades Research Station got cancelled, each paying the early termination fee. The lab’s bank account grew but its revenue stream withered. Paris now had the reserves to make it through the appellate process but increasingly it looked like that might be a pyrrhic victory.

The good news was that left more time for her and Bennie to do the sequencing without being interrupted by other obligations. The kids could handle the rest of the workload, what little there was left, with light supervision.

But the annoyances began to pile up. Mail got lost, suppliers missed deliveries, accounts got audited. Routine inspections got moved up and turned in dozens of violations. Fortunately, all petty, nothing that could shut her down.

By then Paris was barely able to leave the lab without getting hassled by island police. She no longer drove at all after two speeding and three fix-it tickets. Then they cited her for jaywalking on eight consecutive days. Plus a citation arrived by mail for littering at the camp on the day of her last visit. She just handed all those over to Sil.

Then one night, Roland quit without notice. Just packed up his personal belongings and dropped a resignation letter on Paris’s desk. She finally wheedled out of Brandi that his student loans had been called due. Brandi’s, too, but her dad had offered to put a second mortgage on the marina to get her out from under. Before he could, Paris paid them off from the lab’s reserves. When Brandi asked, she told her to consider it a Christmas bonus. Quietly, Paris had Sil do the same for Roland, and then reach out to him with an offer when she heard he couldn’t find any other work, including at the camp.

That required a change of plans. Paris asked Bennie to put in for vacation, everything he’d saved up, and advertise it as a pre-retirement dry run. She duly marked it in the records fully intending to make him whole when everything returned to normal. That meant he and Roland could work the sequencer in the cabin full time. She paid Roland under the table.

More containers trickled in to Left Bank. Sheila stubbornly refused all outside pressure to inform on Paris. The woman was untouchable on Deino-Durans. She knew too many secrets about the locals, who was sleeping with who, who was cheating on which contracts, whose kids had gotten in trouble with island police and whose parents had paid what to who to get them out. Brandi’s father ferried the containers out to the cabin no questions asked. He couriered back Iron Lock encrypted data sticks that Paris analyzed on a laptop secured by the best privacy protection suite of Ronin Software.

Michaels upped his game. Paris received a certified notice that the lab’s League of Worlds taxes were being fully audited for the past seven years. Then someone called in an abuse claim against one of Sheila’s kids. Another anonymous tip saw Paris’s apartment turned upside down by island police looking for evidence of human trafficking. She was convinced the only reason the officers didn’t plant any was because they weren’t fully onboard with Michaels’ agenda. But all the new investigations began to overwhelm Sil’s small practice. They were running out of time.

Paris developed a streamlined protocol to speed up the sequencing. Slowly they filled in the missing data segments. Each new segment contained the same header format. Each bore her father’s signature as an end of data marker. She played his Blood Promise again and again wishing she knew if he were still alive. She couldn’t quite bring herself to hope he wasn’t. She prayed he wasn’t involved.

Bennie filled out the forms so Paris could be certified as a beta tester for a new Ronin Software decryption algorithm. Each time they saw each other they argued about sending the raw data to Methylation Labs as leverage. Bennie as much as admitted both he and Tong had contacts from when they were in school but demurred on using them.

“It’s Anarchy, Paris,” he emphasized. “Eventually, they’ll decrypt it. We don’t even know what we’re handing them.”

“Something someone very powerful is going a long way to hide,” she reminded him. “Something they are willing to let innocent people die to smuggle out.”

“The question is, are you? Because that’s what we could be doing depending on what this is.”

“What if it’s something like the vaccine my father developed?” she responded. “Can we allow that to be suppressed? They tried that once.”

“And what if it’s a method to circumvent the vaccine and weaponize the Bloodeye virus?” Bennie shot back. “Would you want Methylation Labs to have their hands on that? They smuggle Black Bindis and Red Chiggers throughout the colonies. To them addictive psycho-hallucinogenic drugs fall under freewill, for God’s sake. And they aren’t the worst people on Anarchy.”

“At this point, I’m willing to live with it,” Paris said. “Someone is trying to hide something important.”

“And if your father’s alive and involved like Michaels implied? Are you willing to live with that, too? His signature is right there, every time.” Bennie let that sink in a moment. “My point is, we don’t know what we’re dealing with. This could be bigger than you imagine. Think, Paris.”

Against her better judgment, they compromised. Bennie agreed to set up a dead drop so on a moment’s notice they could send what they had to Anarchy and three investigative media outlets they thought they could trust. He wouldn’t reveal the specifics. If it all went sideways, just his contact with Methylation Labs could land him on Exile for life. He refused to risk seeing her at a workstation beside him.

Then the ruling came in from Bank weeks earlier than expected, not much longer than it took a courier drone to transit back and forth. Appeal denied. The local magistrate issued a temporary stay while Sil requested a poll of the full panel. A desperation move he said. He needed something, anything if he had a prayer to convince them to reconsider. Paris still didn’t have it.

The curtain was poised to descend. They all knew there was little they could do but hope the last few pieces fell into place before it did. Paris itched to pull the pin on the data drop before it was too late. Bennie held her off one last time. They were close. The two week transit time of the courier drone might just see them through.

So Bennie and Roland redoubled their efforts, taking a few more calculated risks to gain a little more processing time. Both of them rarely left the mangroves now. Paris wished she could join them, but she knew at this point that she was the bait, the distraction. So far, Michaels had focused his attention on her and Tardigrades Research Station. They all agreed she couldn’t risk leading him to the improvised lab. If they lost that, they’d lost everything. So she and Brandi focused on analysis by configuring the beta decryption program she’d downloaded through an anonymous Ronin proxy. They set it chewing on what they had. They analyzed everything again, looking for any telltales they might have missed.

On the ninth morning of their reprieve, Brandi didn’t show up for work. Paris received a text message from her on her comm. “Check the news” was all it said.

Paris’s heart raced as she brought up the local feed.

“Explosion at Rogue Drug Lab on Deino-Durans” was the breaking story consuming the majority of bandwidth. She read the summary to be sure, hoping against hope.

“Methylation Labs has expanded their drug operations to Grant,” the story claimed, “by setting up an illicit Black Bindi manufacturing lab in a decommissioned research station out in the mangroves off Deino-Durans. The owner of record is unconscious in the hospital awaiting skin grafts and questioning when he revives. Island police have cordoned off the site and are processing evidence. The search for an accomplice is underway. More detentions are expected soon. Updates as they became available.”

Paris’s heart dropped to the bottom of her chest. That was it. Michaels had won. All she could do now was organize the incomplete data she had and begin to publish it. If she hurried, she might get it uploaded onto the Durans archipelago network before the island police came for her.

A second message came, priority from a masked address. No text just an enclosure. When she opened it, she could tell by the format it was the last segment of data. Roland must still be at large.

She saved the data immediately. Caution seemed irrelevant now. Just as it finished downloading, her network access went down. She got an innocuous message about routine maintenance, the kind she’d received a thousand times before.

This time she didn’t trust it. It could be an intermittent outage like the island often saw. Or it could be that someone wanted to cut off her access to the world, either so she would stray out looking for information or sit in ignorance. If they were coming, she wouldn’t have much time.

Roland might have made it to Bennie’s dead drop. Or he might have given away his location by sending her the data. Or it could have been a warning that he wasn’t going to make it. She had no way of knowing. If the data didn’t get dispersed, Michaels would get away with it. Whatever it was. She still didn’t know.

Paris needed a backup plan, something that would get the data out in case Roland failed. She knew if she stepped outside, someone would be watching. Maybe that could work to her advantage.

She set up her comm to alert her if anyone tried to enter the building. It wouldn’t give her much warning but perhaps enough. Then she added the last segment to the files already on the laptop. She set the laptop to send a message with the full data set enclosure to Sil, Tong, every researcher who had sent her samples, and the three media outlets she and Bennie had come up with. She encrypted each message with Ronin Software, keyed to each recipient’s personal credentials. She used a level of encryption that would finish within fifteen minutes. It wasn’t the highest but that would take more time than she had.

She configured the laptop messaging tool to automatically send everything as soon as connectivity returned. She mirrored the queue on her comm. She authorized her account to use courier drones paid for through her personal account with one tied to the lab as a backup. Now whichever device re-established a connection first would shotgun the messages throughout human space at the highest priority. Which wouldn’t matter if Michaels or island police had already interdicted her financials. Grant and Xenomix took illicit drug labs seriously.

Her plan was to walk out the front door and head for Left Bank. If the satellite wireless picked up along the way, her comm would connect. If not, she’d try the dedicated line in the Bookery.

She thought she’d be intercepted long before she got that far. But if Michaels thought he had her, he might slip and restore the connection to the lab. In which case the laptop set would go out. She’d have to setup the laptop somewhere out of the way where it wouldn’t be noticed. But where? She needed to think about that a moment.

Even with a contingency she still felt vulnerable. As another backup, she transferred the encrypted files onto the Iron Lock data stick. She dropped it next to the laptop while she figured out where to hide it. If she had it on her when she left the building, she risked it being confiscated, not that if it worked as advertised anyone could crack its encryption within a thousand years. But if she didn’t have access to the data, it was useless to her. How could she get the stick back to herself or someone else? Once she left the lab, she didn’t think she’d get back inside.

The Iron Lock specs said it would survive corrosive and caustic conditions. She wondered if she could slip it into one of the spare chemical cartridges she’d had Brandi restock after her time in Bonet’s lab. She could play the same trick with the mail and mark them for return. But she knew she could no longer trust him.

Where else could she mail it? Sil? After the incident on his boat, she no longer thought he was safe. Where could she hide the data that Michaels was unlikely to look? He struck her as the type who wouldn’t stop until he was certain he and he alone had the information.

When her hand strayed to her desk drawer, seeking the Blood Promise reader almost instinctively for comfort, it dawned on her that she knew exactly where to hide the data, a place she’d never lose it. A place Michaels might overlook.

She dashed for the lab and set up the sequencer-synthesizer with the data from her comm as quickly as she could. The data set was big, maybe too big, but she thought it would fit.

She programmed the synthesizer as fast as she could, barely taking time to double-check her work. She used the same formatting as the broken Promises. She had no real choice. She loaded a sample of her blood to calculate a baseline. After a moment’s analysis, the sequencer-synthesizer spit back a location.

Only one. Not alternates or backups like it would normally offer. The data set was just too big.

Her father’s Blood Promise had to be overwritten.

And when she did, she knew the homopolymers in segment thirteen would kill her within a few months. But what other choice did she have? She couldn’t risk altering the data without knowing what it was.

Paris set the sequencer-synthesizer to construct the compressed sequence chains and then loaded up an autoinjector with the resulting chemical cocktail. Like a Blood Promise, it would only take a few minutes to begin modifying the DNA of her bone marrow to incorporate the data set into her red blood cells. But once the chains from the autoinjector began to unzip in her bloodstream, she’d be powerless to stop them. She’d be a dead woman walking.

Before she did anything else, she reset the sequencer-synthesizer back to its factory settings including a full memory wipe. The tech had said nine out of ten that would result in the machine never working again but she no longer cared. If nothing else, it might slow down Michaels from figuring out what she’d done.

Within seconds of its restart, the machine complained of a fatal boot error and began to buzz horribly. She shut it down.

Her comm alerted her that someone was entering the building. Brandi? Roland? Island police? Or Michaels? She checked the video feed. No one there. They were already inside. The locks hadn’t even given them pause.

She didn’t bother to rewind the feed to see who it was. She just wrapped her arm, found a vein and let the autoinjector do the rest. She quickly cycled the empty cartridge through the sterilizer set to heat and radiation. If that didn’t completely destroy the sample, it certainly would scramble it. Quietly, she returned the empty autoinjector to its cabinet and headed for her office.

Where she once again found Michaels sitting behind her desk. Her laptop was open, facing him. He twirled the Iron Lock between his fingers. Damn.

“You thought you were being clever by setting up a secondary lab,” he said without looking up as she entered. “I have to admit, we nearly missed it.”

Paris bit off the first response that rolled through her head and tried to act like she hadn’t seen the news feeds.

“Don’t look shocked,” he said, tapping his comm. “I put a trap on everything coming in and out of your lab. I see what you see.”

She wondered whether to believe him. “I’m surprised you didn’t bring island police with you. Or aren’t you eager for anyone else to hear what I might say?”

He finally looked up, smiling. “I’ve taken the liberty of running a comm blocker so our conversation will remain private. Oh, and I’ve re-keyed the doors temporarily. We’re quite alone.” He motioned her toward the couch. “Please, sit.”

Alone? Her eyes darted around to the coral on the corner of her desk.

“You won’t make it,” he said as if reading her mind again, again. “Let’s be civilized about this.”

“Like you were with Bennie?” she shot back, standing defiantly by the door.

“Your friend will recover. In fairness, I gave you plenty of warning. You let things get out of hand.” He shrugged. “But that’s the past. We need to talk about the future.”

“The future where you get me to sign your NDA in exchange for a sequencer?” she asked, her anger rising like heat off of plascrete in the island sun. “I’m not sure how much use I’ll have for one with my Land Grant status revoked.”

“Oh, no.” He shook his head. “That ship sailed weeks ago. I’m talking about the future where you turn over all your data to me. I already have your samples.”

“And what do I get out of it?” she asked. She leaned against the doorframe to look nonchalant. She found she needed its support more than she’d thought.

“A life outside the camps,” he answered succinctly.

She stiffened. Her eyes must have widened against her will. Did he really have that power?

“Oh, yes, I can make that happen,” he continued, glancing at the Iron Lock still threading through his fingers. “An official review of your immigration status will reveal you never actually qualified for residency. Which would mean deportation and a return to the camps. Not here, of course.”

“But I suspect that if you wanted that to happen,” she responded, trying to recover her posture, “it would have by now. Which means I still have something you want. Something you can’t just take, not easily.” She smiled sweetly. “Which brings me back to my original question: What’s in it for me?”

The Iron Lock stopped moving. Michaels eyed her narrowly but said nothing.

“Since you seem at a loss for words, how about I tell you,” she continued, ticking each point off on her fingers. “First, you are going to make everyone you’ve interfered with whole, both here on Grant and elsewhere. That means all charges dropped, all positions and properties restored, all damages compensated, and all expenses paid.”

Michaels listened with an expression that appeared to be amused interest. His eyes seemed to shift from blue to sparkling green.

“Second,” she ticked her middle finger, “there will be no further reprisals. No anonymous tips. No tax audits. No inspections. No contract cancellations. Nothing that damages anyone involved in any way. And you will guarantee Tardigrades Research Station retains its Land Grant status through the remainder of its contract with Xenomix.”

He yawned then rubbed his nose as if it itched. His dirty blond hair took on a reddish shine each time he moved his head.

“Third,” she ticked her ring finger, “as a goodwill gesture, you will create a trust fund to pay for full medical screenings for all refugees from Blood in the past year, as well as for the research to undo any genetic damage you have done. Plus, you will set up a fund to compensate the victims on a sliding scale for any permanent mutations, in accordance with League of Worlds civil law. Disguise it any way you want, but might I suggest an anonymous humanitarian aid donation overseen by the camps.”

He raised an eyebrow as if to inquire if she was finished. One eye went slightly gray, which she found disconcerting.

“And finally,” she said with all the defiance she could muster. “You will restore all my samples and draw up a contract that allows my lab to take the lead on that medical research, with a clause ensuring none of our results or data get censored or suppressed for any reason.”

Now, Michaels laughed.

“Alternatively,” he said, “I could set you up with a nice lab on Terminal. That’s after a quick vacation in a Sky Cell. By the end of which, you’ll have revealed everything you know, and then some. I am done screwing around with you and your friends. I’ve wasted too much time in this corporate shit-hole already. All it takes is one Section 37 charge linked to the Green Revolution, and you all disappear.”

That meant he was LOW OrbIT. At least Paris finally knew what she was dealing with. It was her turn to smile tolerantly. “Even if you take everything, you still won’t have it all.”

Michaels scrutinized her a moment, then glanced at her laptop. He set the Iron Lock beside it as if freeing up his hands. He shifted his weight forward in her chair.

It was now or never to execute her bluff.

“If you check their backgrounds,” she continued, “you’ll find both Herman Tong and Benedict Johannessen had contacts from university with the individuals on Anarchy who founded Methylation Labs. Throughout the process, we have been sending them our encrypted data. A key to that data will drop from an anonymous source the instant it doesn’t receive our heartbeat signal.”

Michaels laughed again, more earnestly this time. He leaned back.

“I think you must have drifted off when I said I trapped all your communications. After the incident with your lawyer, nothing got in or out without my knowing about it. Right now, I have a team of technicians sifting through every stray electron from the equipment in your offshore lab. By they time they finish, I will know exactly how many times the data have been copied. They will do the same here as soon as I allow them access. I will then hunt down every one, no matter how long it takes, no matter how many branches I find. All while you adjust to your new living accommodations at an undisclosed location far, far away.”

Paris noted that Michaels hadn’t mentioned Roland. Maybe there was still hope.

He cocked his head, watching her. “Did I miss something? Benedict Johannessen and Brandi Tomei are already in custody. Roland Sackey will be any moment now. He made a fatal error when he sent you that file. His data won’t get out. Nor will yours.” He flipped her laptop screen to face her, revealing the messages in her queue. “Your Ronin Software won’t take a day to crack. Your Iron Lock? Better. It might take a week. And that beta release decryption module you downloaded?” He tapped his chest. “Mine. It was never going to work.”

She could no longer contain herself. “Too many people already know about this. Too many researchers with reputations in the community.”

“Researchers who had reputations in the community,” he corrected her. “Herman Tong is finished. Washed up. Retired. Most of his contacts were former grad students who could only find work in refugee camps. Wisely, he didn’t send the particulars in his request for samples. How do you think this plays out? Especially if we prosecute you, your lab manager and your techs for running an illegal drug manufacturing operation. By the time I’m finished with it, any information that does survive will be just another desperate conspiracy theory that floats around the dark net.”

Michaels shook his head. “And I’ll make sure that anything that does get out will heavily implicate your father.” Michaels pulled open her desk drawer.

“My father is dead,” Paris said with all the certainty she could muster. She felt a deeper flush that she hoped would come across as anger. The synthesizer chain must have fully unzipped and begun modifying her bone marrow to rewrite the DNA of her red blood cells. She was the data at this point. She only had to hide it.

“Are you certain?” Michaels began toying with her Promise reader. “His signature is all over the data. He’s developed rogue technologies before. Who’s to say he isn’t now working for Blood and the Green Revolution? That he hasn’t been all along? Shaping that narrative would be trivial.”

“Leave my father out of it,” Paris said with as much finality as she could muster. “This is between me and you.”

Michaels returned the Promise reader to the drawer and slid it shut with a click. They sat in silence a moment.

“You said, ‘If we prosecute…’” she noted. “What exactly are you offering?”

“You’re perceptive,” he said, his smile returning. “That’s why I like you.”

Suddenly she felt faint. She really needed the doorframe for support. She stalled for time to recover. “Perceptive enough to realize that everything was going fine for you until Jairu got turned around at Down 2. What happened there?”

“Bad luck.” Michaels shrugged when she didn’t fill the pause. “Too many colonies are refusing refugees now. Too many camps are closing. There’s an overdeveloped fear of Bloodites even among Green Revolutionaries.”

Paris couldn’t help but dig at him. “More bad luck that two broken Promises showed up in our camp. We might have written that off to coincidence. Three formed a pattern.”

His smile now died at his eyes. “Sometimes I have to remind myself there is such a thing as an inspired amateur.”

Michaels seemed to be in a sharing mood so she asked, “What exactly is in that data?”

“Proof,” was all he said.

“Of what?” she pressed.

Michaels considered her a moment, then seemed to shrug. “Green activity that we’ve long suspected. It runs deeper than we thought. Our agent had to get the information out quickly, so he crammed in as much data as he dared. I don’t understand all the science, but ideally there should have been at least twice as many segments.”

“You people in LOW OrbIT say everything is the Green Revolution.” Paris snorted.

“That’s because they took over three systems and almost got a couple more. The cost to reclaim those two was enormous. And they won’t stop until all of us are dead.”

“Neither will you from what where I stand.” She noted he didn’t deny the LOW OrbIT connection.

“This is bigger than a few refugees, Dr. Parikh,” he admonished.

“It always is,” she mumbled.

He didn’t seem to hear. “Though you did me a favor by gathering all the data in one place. That made it easier to contain.”

She stared back at him coldly.

He continued, undaunted. “You followed through on details where no one else did. Through luck or skill, you put together the pieces, most of them anyway. And I dare say you would have succeeded with the rest if you hadn’t been hamstrung. That’s the type of person I want working for me. The type of person LOW OrbIT needs.”

Now she stared at him nonplussed. “You’re offering me a job?”

“I’d set you up in a state of the art research lab, much better than this. You could choose your own team, within reason. And you’d have full control, with initial supervision, of course. We’d even allow you to pursue your own research in your spare time, again within limits. Not unlike your arrangement here, only with better resources. And more interesting and meaningful work. About the same pay, though. You’d be getting most of what you asked for.”

“And my father?” she asked.

Michaels spared a glance to her desk drawer. “As you said earlier, your father’s dead.”

She thought furiously a moment. Now she felt almost downright feverish. She needed to end this. “You’re saying that all I have to do to walk out that door is agree to work for you?”

“In essence, yes.” He scrutinized her. “Contingent on you handing over all your outstanding data and samples, subject to verification. And signing a security agreement with assurances that would guarantee your silence for the rest of your life.”

She calculated how long that might be. Her mind cleared. Maybe the chemical cocktail had done its work. She weighed off the pros and cons.

As tempting as a state of the art lab was, working for Michaels would feel like a betrayal of everything her parents had fought for. Could she even get a blood sample to safety under his surveillance? If only half the things he’d said were true, she doubted it. And if she miraculously survived her overwritten Blood Promise, she doubted she could stomach working for him long.

“And if I decline?” she asked.

“Then I’ll install you in the camp while I decide exactly what to do with you,” he replied matter-of-factly. “While I tear this lab down brick by brick until I find everything I’m looking for.” He shook his head. “No, Dr. Parikh, your best bet is to cooperate while I’m in a good mood.”

She knew the camp, knew how it worked, knew she had once had friends there. Blood samples were easily taken and more easily lost. But after Dr. Bonet had sold out for a few medical supplies, she no longer was certain she could count on his friendship. Plus she didn’t have Bennie’s contacts and might never get them. She doubted Michaels would let him visit. And she didn’t have a lot of time.

“What if I offer you a third option?” she finally asked, trying not to shiver as her clarity shattered in a wave of chills.

“I’m listening,” he said patiently.

“I give you all the data we have. You already have my samples. I call in Roland and have him do the same. We all sign your NDA or whatever security documents you need. But we all stay here on Grant. No charges, no reprisals. I’ll even take a leave of absence until things settle down.”

He looked at her quizzically. “And why would I trust you?”

“Aside from the assurances you mentioned, for the same reason I’d trust you. You know I won’t survive in the camps for long. And like you said, you’ll recover all the data whether I cooperate or not. Without it no one will believe me anyway. My reputation is damaged beyond repair.”

He didn’t appear convinced.

“Look,” she continued, “you want this all to go away with no more publicity than it’s already had or we wouldn’t still be talking. That’s in both of our best interests. I don’t want my father’s reputation tarnished any more than it has been. Or my mother’s and this lab’s. Family is important to me. You know that.” She nodded toward the drawer with the Promise reader.

Still he looked skeptical. She had to make him believe her. She only had a chance if she remained free.

“I know when I’m beaten, Mr. Michaels.” She let her shoulders slump in defeat, which wasn’t hard given the way she felt. She allowed the quaver to emerge in her voice, which also didn’t take much. “I’m trying to salvage what I can and protect the people I care about. My staff is like family to me, the only family I have now. Family protects each other. This is the only way I see to do that.”

He considered her a long moment as if accessing the definition of family from a memorized entry, then slowly nodded. “Disappointing but pragmatic. Let’s start with the key to your Iron Lock and see how it goes from there.”

She rattled off the code. She would sign over the lab to Bennie to make up for the loss of his cabin. She trusted him to protect Brandi and Roland at least until they were ready to move on. Without her around, their lives might even get back to normal, at least for a little while. All she needed in return was his contact with Methylation Labs. And she might not even need that.

When Paris emerged from Tardigrades Research Station several hours later to be greeted by the slow, rhythmic heartbeat of Kruger B, she was already calculating transit times to Anarchy.

© 2018 Edward P. Morgan III