“Yes.” I shrug. “Weird. Is it some kind of repair job on the old one?”
She stands up and slips the box into her pocket. “Can you walk?”
“Are we going somewhere?”
“My lab.”
“And why would we do that?”
She leans in and whispers into my ear. “So I’ll know if you’re bullshitting me because we can be overheard here, or because you’re just committed to lying to me.”
I’d drop the matter and tell her that she was acting a little psycho, but I need the box. Short of physically taking it from her, I don’t see any other alternative than to go to her lab.
“I don’t understand. What’s this all about?” I try to sound like a guy that can’t see what the fuss is for.
“My lab. Five minutes.”
“Let me stop by my room first and get out of this spacesuit.”
In the event that she’s planning on murdering me, I want her to think that I could be telling someone that I’m going off with my killer to her secret lair.
It’s not the most clever ploy, but I can’t think of anything better to say that doesn’t sound too suspicious.
She turns around and heads towards the ladder with the box, leaving me in the lounge.
I go to my room and contemplate an emergency call to Earth to ask Admiral Jessup for advice on how to proceed. That would just make me look incompetent. Already I have to explain how my space shoe mishap was technically my fault. Telling him that a third person suspects I have a secret agenda will really take the cake.
Better to just handle this situation and then report to Jessup. Or get murdered by Samantha from some kind of space poison she brewed up in zero-g.
I could ask Laney, but for some reason I feel a twinge of guilt over the foot massage — which is completely ridiculous. It was just my foot and there’s nothing between Laney and me. We’re just really good friends.
Focus, David.
When I enter Samantha’s lab I’m surprised to find out that it looks nothing like mine or the DARPA labs. Instead of sterile white and chrome surfaces, her module has wooden counters and ferns growing all over the place.
It feels like an old country kitchen in a treehouse.
“Nice,” I reply.
“I’ll give you the tour later,” she says as she closes the hatch. “But first I want answers.”
“What happened to the other foot massage?” I say, trying to sound playful and casual.
“Is that really all you’re after?”
She knows that I know that could mean two different things. Beneath her serious demeanor is a woman that really likes to torture me.
I decide to change the topic and put her on the defensive and see what happens. “So what’s this fuss about this box of yours?”
“Do you really think I’m that stupid or are you in a position where you can’t say anything?” she asks.
“Let’s go with the former.”
“I’m interested in it for the same reason I think you are; it has something to do with the fact that someone almost murdered me.”
Forty
Confidence Man
“Murder you?” I blurt the words out so quickly there’s no way that it can be an act.
From the look on her face I can see that I totally caught her off guard. If she was waiting to see how I tried to dance around that revelation, my genuine shock must have come as a surprise.
“Who tried to kill you?” I ask.
“That’s why I assume you’re here — to find out.”
“Lady, you got the wrong guy. While I’d be happy to help you find out who the culprit is, I can promise you this is the first I heard of it.”
She stares at me for a moment, hovering in mid-air. A lock of dark hair falls in front of her face, hitting one of her impressive cheekbones. She flicks it away in an almost nervous tic kind of manner and for a fleeting second I see a vulnerability in her eyes that wasn’t there before.
Wait…she wants me to be here, or rather, the super slick space spy she was trying to get me to cop to being. Where Attwell and Tamara clearly were made uneasy by my presence, Samantha was hoping that I am that guy — or doing an incredible job of acting like it.
“Tell me what happened?”
“It’s not important. I just thought…never mind. It was stupid.”
“It doesn’t sound like it.”
She takes the box from her pocket and tosses it towards me. I feign disinterest and push it away. “Samantha, what are you talking about?”
She lets out a sigh. “Four months ago we had a service ship dock at the station. I was due to go to Earth for two weeks, but there was a problem with one of my experiments and I had to postpone. When the ship returned to Earth…”
I finish her sentence. “It burned up on reentry.”
“So you know?”
“I read about it. I didn’t know that it was supposed to carry passengers.”
“It’s human-rated because of the equipment it has to carry. We’ve used it a few times. Anyway, this one didn’t make it.”
“That must have been terrifying.”
“You have no idea. What happened next was almost as bad.”
“What was that?”
“Nothing. There was a perfunctory FAA investigation that’s still in progress. But nothing else. The anticipated cause was mechanical failure, even though this model has flown close to 500 missions without so much as a hiccup.”
“Space travel ain’t like aviation, yet.”
She gives me a withering gaze. “How would you feel if you almost died on reentry?”
“Is this a serious question for me?”
“Right. Right. I forgot this is the indestructible David Dixon.”
“As you saw today I’m quite destructible.”
“Anyway, besides the emotional trauma of missing the flight that didn’t make it, is the frustration of trying to find out what happened. I sent requests, filed reports, I did everything I could to find out what happened. Maybe that’s the scientist part of my brain trying to find a rational explanation.”
“These things take time.”
“Yes, but you didn’t let me finish. I finally got a copy of an internal FAA preliminary report, something that wasn’t supposed to be forwarded to me. It said to withhold the final assessment from public review. The sender address was someone working for the CIA. What the hell is the CIA doing telling the FAA to obstruct an investigation unless they suspected sabotage?
“I kept waiting for them to send someone here to look into what happened. And waiting. Finally you show up. Given your background with the Korolev, I figure you must be some kind of special government operative.”
“There’s nothing special about me.”
“That’s the second time you’ve deflected a direct inquiry into your purpose here with a non-response. Which makes me think you have something to hide but aren’t fully committed to lying about it.”
Jesus, this woman is too smart for me to keep up.
“So, can you tell me why someone would want me killed?” she asks.
And she’s paranoid… The woman thinks what happened to the ship was about her.
“I have no idea why anybody would want to kill you. And nobody sent me here to find out why. I’m sorry. I can ask some of the people I know to ask around, but I don’t know anything about that.”
She wraps her arms around her body and bites her lip. If this is an act, it’s amazing.
“You don’t understand what it’s like being up here, thinking someone close to you tried to kill you. And too afraid to go back to Earth.”
“Wait? You haven’t gone back since then?”
She looks at me like I’m crazy. “And let them kill me? I keep extending my contract promising my employers I’ve got something really big I’m working on.”