by M. D. Cooper
“How are you doing?” Sera asked.
“Mm, good,” Nance replied.
Sera saw that the lenses of her bio’s mask were fogged up and the woman’s limbs had a slight tremble.
“Nance, honey, take off the hood, let me see you.”
Sera had never seen Nance out of her hazsuit, and had only seen her face a few times, when Nance had her suit’s hood only half-off. There was a pool on the ship with a big pot for whoever finally got her to reveal her entire head.
Without speaking, the bio reached behind her head and unsealed the hood. Sera held her breath as Nance slowly slid it off her head.
“You have hair!” Sera exclaimed. “It’s beautiful!”
Nance stepped back as Sera reached out to touch the dark brown locks.
“Of course I have hair; it’s a normal thing to grow on a person’s head.”
“Damn it!” Thompson swore. “I can’t believe you picked now to try that—and it worked!”
“You can’t believe I won,” Sera said with a grin. She turned back to Nance and reached for the bio’s hand. “Seriously, though, are you OK? You seemed fine on the Link.”
“I think you missed my sarcastic tone,” Nance replied. “I was scared shitless.”
“I guess the suit masks it,” Sera replied.
Thompson got the lift under the mysterious crate and it rose into the air. He leaned against it and eyed Nance.
“That is a pretty amazing amount of hair.”
“Says the blonde ape,” Sera smiled.
“Hey, nine thousand years ago, this amount of body hair was perfectly normal.”
“Yeah, and nine thousand years ago, people had just upgraded to pooping in public troughs,” Nance grimaced.
“Don’t try to distract me, Nance,” Sera said. “I had never even imagined that you had hair. How do you keep it so soft while it’s plastered to your head all day? Doesn’t it get sweaty?”
Nance made a disgusted sound. “I don’t sweat. I had all those oozing glands removed years ago.”
“I enjoy a good sweat,” Thompson said, with thinly veiled innuendo.
Sera sniffed in his direction. “That’s no secret.”
Thompson ignored her. “Don’t you get hot, Nance?”
“No, my suit has a cooling system.”
“I’d think you’d still get itchy,” Thompson frowned. “All that flaking skin with no sweat to lubricate it.”
Nance shivered convulsively. “Ewww! I have a controlled shedding, which my nano activates when I’m in the shower. I don’t have flaking skin.”
Sera peered at her bio’s face, hands held back so Nance wouldn’t flinch away. “You do have really smooth looking skin. And it looks so clean…”
“You’d be amazed what lives and accumulates in your pores. Thank god I don’t have those anymore,” Nance looked at the super. “Look at those crevices on your face. And Cheeky wonders why my suit has tinted lenses.”
Thompson seemed to decide that there was no way this conversation would favor him, so got back to the situation at hand. “So what do you think is in here that they wanted so bad, Captain? I’m betting it’s no dog.”
“If it is, it’s getting its shots,” Nance said. “No way I’m letting some dirty mutt run around the ship and contaminate my environmental tanks.”
Nance pulled a holo display into the air over the crate. Initial scan showed that some living creature was inside, but its vital signs were masked by cryostasis.
“I’m not getting a reading on anything hazardous,” she said and looked over Sabrina’s scan on the emissions and power levels in the crate. “No heavy metals, probably running on an SC Battery.”
“Let’s take it into the sealed chamber. I don’t like little tiny surprises any more than you do, Nance."
It never hurt to pop a container that seemed harmless into the biohazard chamber and check it out by remote. Their lives were dangerous enough without extra unknowns adding risk. Not many ships had a hermetically sealed chamber, but from time to time Sera found it necessary to determine the exact level of danger a cargo presented for herself and her ship. If it was more trouble than she’d been told, extra charges were applied to the transport.
Once the container was in the chamber, they stood back and watched as Sabrina used robotic arms to crack the seal and lift off the lid. Inside was the cryostasis pod Nance had detected.
“Either it’s a kid, or an adult that’s going to have some serious cramps,” Thompson observed.
“You don’t cramp in stasis,” Sera said.
“Depends on how good the system is and how long it took the stasis to kick in,” Thompson replied. “Once I had to hop in an evac pod on a gas platform, it took the stasis over an hour to fully set in. That’s not an experience I’d wish on my worst enemy.”
“Owww,” Nance said, casting an appreciative look at the super.
“What do the readouts look like, Sabrina?” Sera asked.
A robotic arm extended and fitted a physical data connector into the cryo pod. Sabrina had done this before and knew to exercise extreme caution. All of the systems within the sealed chamber were isolated from the rest of the ship. Sabrina felt the same way about foreign computers as Nance did about germs.
“Nance, it’s finally a party you’re already dressed for,” Thompson said with a smile.
Sera caught a glint in his eye when he said it.
Sear gave her head a slight shack and addressed Thompson. “Take it into the med lab, Thompson. Nance and I will pop it open and see what we see.”
Nance looked as though she was being asked to juggle flaming knives. She pinned her hair up and pulled her suit’s hood back on.
Sabrina re-sealed the crate and Thompson entered the chamber and keyed the grav lift to float the it down the hall and into the med lab.
Ten minutes later, the stasis pod sat on the floor of the med lab with Sera and Nance standing to either side. Thompson and Cargo were both outside peering through one of the observation windows.
Sera sighed and bent to look the console over. The controls were fairly standard and Sera entered the sequence to open the pod. Immediately the pod’s interface flashed a warning and prompted for additional access codes. She attempted to bypass it with some of her usual tricks, but the pod locked down entirely.
Shielding her actions with her body, Sera pressed the tip of her finger tight against the hazsuit’s glove and spoke to Helen.
Sera ignored Helen’s mothering tone and use of her childhood nickname. She acted as though she was working on the pod’s interface while the nano completed their task and the interface altered to a simple security setup, set to the final stage of a basic hack. Sera manually entered the final sequence. The outer cover hissed pod open, and she left her index finger on the edge of the console until Helen informed her that all the nano were back in her body.
The pod flashed a short countdown as it pulled its occupant out of cryostasis, before the inner shell split open. Sera stood and peered in as Nance pulled one of the scan arms over from the examination table, her other hand double-checking the seal of her hazsuit’s hood.
The occupant of the container was a woman. She had the same ageless look that most people acquired after their first rejuvenation treatment. She was also naked; whoever had placed her in stasis hadn’t bothered to put her in a stasis suit, or even put a salve on her skin to deal with the quick freeze.
Nance looked at the med scanner’s readout as it hovered over the pod.
Nance's avatar smiled at Sera.
They lifted the woman out of the pod and Thompson let a whistle loose as they set her naked form on the table, earning a cold look from Sera. Cargo grinned but was smart enough not to add more.
Nance pulled a blanket over the woman, then lifted her head, smoothed her hair, and placed a low pillow underneath. The action was very gentle for someone who eschewed tactile contact. Sera peered at the bio, but the opaque lenses of her hood hid any expression that may have been behind them.
Nance’s expressionless face looked up at Sera.
Sera looked down at the woman. She appeared to be normal. Her body showed the tall frame of a person raised in lower gravity, but her muscle tone indicated time spent in full gravity as well. The readout put her at one hundred and fifty-five centimeters; just shy of ninety-seven kilograms, though probably well under seventy without her internal tech—which was considerable.
Her features were classic Scandinavian, from the slight slope of her brow and high cheekbones to the perfectly straight, blonde hair. Of course, none of that meant she had a drop of Scandinavian blood. It could just indicate a good rebuild.
Sera looked at the two men.
They looked at one another and shrugged.
Cargo said, and the pair sauntered off.
The women turned to the med system’s status display, watching the nano filtering through her body, moving toward the injuries.
They both stared as the med unit lost contact with the nano in the woman’s body and then reported that they had all been destroyed.
Nance pulled up the detailed logs on the med nano’s ill-fated venture and looked them over.
Sera said, and pulled a high-res holo image of the woman over her body.
Nance scowled at the images, then took a blood sample with a biohazard extractor.
Sera pressed her index finger against the woman’s arm and several of her nano passed through the hazsuit and into the flesh under it.
Sera laughed out loud.
** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** **
“So how’s our visitor?” Thompson asked as Sera stepped into the galley. Everyone except for Nance was around the table tucking into a dinner of soup and sandwiches.
“Helen and I managed to get a hold of her AI. It told us quite simply that our assistance isn’t welcome and it will wake her tomorrow.”
“Is she okay?” Cheeky asked.
“Yes and no.” Sera replied equably as she poured herself a
cup of coffee and grabbed a sandwich.
“That is the opposite of clarifying,” Thompson grunted.
“Her body has been put through the wringer. If she were stranded on some backwater, with no nano, she’d be in a hospital for months. If she were relying on our med nano, she’d be taking it easy for a week. With her personal nano, she’ll be up and about tomorrow.”
“Her personal nano is that good?” Cheeky asked.
Thompson and Flaherty didn’t say a word as they chewed.
“Yeah, she’s got some pretty impressive stuff, and a prickly AI running the show. It nuked our med nano and even my bots after it delivered its message of displeasure.”
“Can’t say I blame it.” Thompson said. “I’d hope my AI would have my best interests in mind if I was beat up and somewhere strange.”
“You don’t have an AI… or even I,” Cheeky said with a grin.
“Har, har, that’s original.” Thompson replied.
Flaherty gave an uncharacteristic snort of laughter, which earned him a sour look from Thompson.
“What does her DNA say?” Cheeky asked.
“Nance took blood samples; she should be up shortly with the results. Hopefully it may shed some light on the identity of our…stowaway?”
“I don’t know how accurate that is. We stowed her ourselves.” Thompson offered.
“I deem her our ‘reluctant hitchhiker,” Cheeky said around a mouthful of her sandwich.
“Actually, her name is Tanis,” Sera offered. “Her AI, Angela, gave us that much info before telling us to go screw.”
“Her DNA said about the same thing,” Nance stepped into the galley and slipped her hood up, exposing her face. “I couldn’t find DNA anywhere similar to it in any of our records. It’s not as though we have an extensive library, but we do have a sample from nearly every inhabited world.”
“What, the rest of us don’t get to see your hair?” Cargo asked.
Nance cocked her head at Sera, who lifted her hands defensively. “I’ve only been here for a few minutes. I didn’t blab.”