if the pod works out,” Denver reminded her.
“What if the pod’s empty? You’ll be caught between two black holes trying to suck the life out all of us as soon as we get back to Titan X.”
Denver sighed and put his head in his hands, everything catching up to him at once.
The pod couldn’t be empty. He needed it too much.
“Hey, guys?” Laramie said. Not in Denver’s head, but over the comm, so Marit could hear him too. “You might want to get down here.”
“What’s going on?” Marit asked.
“I think I found the hatch.”
Chapter Three
Denver couldn’t remember the last time he’d careened through the ship so fast, bouncing off a couple of walls in his haste to get back to his brother. Marit followed a second later, the Jiminy coasting along on autopilot as they joined Laramie in the cargo bay. “You found a hatch?”
“Yeah,” Laramie said, drawing the word out like he wasn’t quite sure. “Up there at the top right. Seal looks good.”
“And you haven’t opened it because, what, you’re waiting for an audience?” Marit asked impatiently.
“How about you look at the damn fleet insignia on this thing and then tell me if you feel like being smart?”
Marit craned her neck to look at the imprint embedded just above the hatch. “T Exports. So what? Earth had hundreds of private shipping companies.”
Denver ran his fingertips over the tiny raised T but didn’t say anything. He knew what Laramie was getting at, but it was too soon to assume. They didn’t even know what was in the pod yet. He took a deep breath. “We should open it.”
“Exactly,” Marit huffed. “Can OPAL do it, or will we need to cut our way in?”
“We should try OPAL.” If there was anything delicate in there, cutting into the pod might damage it. “OPAL, cease projection and give us a hand.”
“I will give you eight.” The bot abandoned her place on the floor and crawled onto the pod. Denver had to stop himself from reaching for her. He knew she’d disabled the power draw this thing had been running, but the floor was littered with the bodies of a hundred fragmented tracers. If the pod had a high-security setting that turned the power draw back on when it was tampered with, or was booby-trapped in some way…
“Be careful it doesn’t give you a hundred-year-old program-transmittable disease,” Laramie said with a grin.
“My firewalls are firmly intact, thank you very much.”
“Yeah, you said that before you got hopped up on the last PTD burning through Titan X. The last thing we need is you coming down with a case of ancient computer clap.”
“Could you be any more crass?” Marit asked disgustedly.
“Hey, if we don’t talk to her about it, she’ll just learn from her peers. You want OPAL imitating a bunch of shitty station AIs?”
Denver ignored their banter and leaned in closer to watch OPAL insinuate her wiring into the control panel on the hatch. “Easy does it,” he murmured. “Back off if it looks like trouble.”
“I am most careful. Approximately five seconds to achieving access.”
“Good girl.” The hatch hissed open and apart a moment later, and OPAL stepped back.
The three of them stood silently for a moment before Denver finally moved in close enough to get a look. “Biologicals,” Laramie chanted behind him. “Holy sun, c’mon, let there be biologicals in there.”
Denver glanced inside the pod and nearly choked. “Fuck.”
“What?” Laramie almost shoved him out of the way. “Was that a bad fuck, or a good fuck?”
“No,” Denver murmured. “It’s not empty.”
The pod wasn’t anywhere near empty—it was ridiculously full. Tiny shelves filled the container, each one labeled, each one lit with an indicator light. Some of the lights were amber, and one or two were red, but the vast majority of them were bright, reassuring green. Viable, was what that meant. Denver could still remember watching a pod unveiling as a child, broadcast from Mars for even the distant stations to see. It had carried some biologicals as well, from this same time period, and the green indicators had made the officials opening the pod cheer.
“Oh my god.” Marit leaned in next to Laramie, her eyes bright. “Seeds! I can see carrots, cucumber, kale—”
“Thyme, coriander, mustard, fennel—what the hell is fennel, anyway—”
“And tissue samples, look! Nigerian pygmy goat, angora rabbit, Peruvian alpaca, Icelandic hens. There are enough samples in here to grow an entire farm.”
“More, if you’ve got access to a government cloning machine.”
Denver listened with