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command centre. As she went past him, Samson could see how tired she looked. He reckoned she hadn’t gotten much more sleep than he had over the past few days, and that wasn’t good for anyone. She seemed to be doing everything she could to redeem herself, and despite it all he had to give her some credit for that.

He sat down at the command station and adjusted the chair to try and extract some comfort from it. After a few days of luxury on the Maggie, naval facilities seemed overly spartan. Once he got to something he reckoned he could tolerate for a few hours, he turned his mind to the things he needed to do.

He turned on the depot’s external cameras to watch the SBB transferring the alien scout ship over to the depot’s tractor magnet, which then guided it into the hangar bay. It was a little smaller than the Bounty, so it looked like it would fit in with room to spare. Once it was safely inside, he would go down and take a closer look, but as it was, he had some time to think through and see if there was anything he was forgetting.

The Maggie had undoubtedly taken passive scans of the alien prior to sending it on its involuntary spacewalk, so Samson messaged her to send over any data they had. While he reckoned he’d made the correct trade-off, he was eager to recover whatever information about it he could. He should have loaded the Maggie up with the corpses, but he reckoned Smith would have drawn the line at that.

Everything he did would be scrutinised by command, and every omission and mistake questioned. He knew he was making plenty of both—he needed to keep the scales balanced in his favour.

The data came through a few moments later—Ali still displayed all his old naval efficiency despite years of living the debauched lifestyle of a pirate. Samson brought it up on screen, and ran it through the depot’s medical system to see what light it might shed on his erstwhile prisoner. He would never be a xenobiologist, but he was curious to learn as much as he could about the alien race, not least because he didn’t want to have to repeat ‘I don’t know’ over and over when it came to his debriefing with Admiral Khaimov.

He played around with parameters for a while until he was able to bring up a graphical representation of the data in a way he could understand. By scanning the alien as though it were a human being, he was able to look at how it diverged from what the scanner’s software considered normal. It was a surprise to see how similar they were. Different, for sure, but overall there were a great many similarities. They both relied on oxygen for respiration, calcium for skeletal strength.

The list went on and on, but highlighted one thing of which Samson had never thought. Their biology might be broadly similar, but that didn’t mean they shared immunity to the pathogens they each carried. As soon as the realisation dawned on him, he reached for the intercom button.

‘All hands, all hands. Prepare for immediate station decontamination in five minutes.’ He brought up the procedure on his control panel and recited the instructions for the crew—where to go, where to find glasses to protect their eyes from the strong ultraviolet light that would bombard the station’s interior, along with a variety of chemicals and types of radiation. They’d all have upset stomachs for a few days until their natural gut fauna had returned, but better that than melting from the inside out due to some unknown alien disease.

He patched through to the Maggie, which was still docked at the depot, and relayed the information. All space-going ships had decontamination systems, many of which ran passively to allow the crews to move about the galaxy with no noticeable imposition, but he reckoned this warranted special attention, and was confident that the Maggie’s system would be state of the art. He set the decontamination process into motion. Every screen on the depot lit up with the countdown timer, and arrows directing crew to the nearest supplies locker that would contain the safety items they needed. He found the one nearest, and pulled out a pair of protective goggles. They certainly weren’t fashionable, but they’d stop him from being blinded.

An alarm rang for the last thirty seconds of the countdown. Samson returned to the chair and did his best to relax. The air filled with a fine mist of sterilising chemicals that he hoped would have no adverse effect on him. The lights cycled through several colours as the mist grew so thick he could barely see his hand in front of his face. The air was moist and warm, with a bitter taste. The process lasted about ten minutes before the depot’s ventilation system recycled the air and cleared it of the disinfecting chemicals.

When it was done, Samson could see there was a message alert on his pad. It was Smith.

‘Time for us to be on our way,’ Smith said. ‘Thanks for the reminder about the decon, although I don’t reckon there’s anything the passive systems can’t handle. Never thought of running a full one after the last time we were on the ship, and we were all right. Well, Ali had a dose of the trots, but I reckon that was down to a dodgy curry.’

‘You’re welcome,’ Samson said, ignoring the over-sharing. All things being equal, it had been a fruitful partnership, and he couldn’t see any reason to end it on a sour note. In any event, Smith was as innocent as a newborn babe with his pardon.

‘There’s something I wanted to let you know before we’re on our way. That alien won’t be telling any tales.’

‘What?’ Samson said.

‘I had Bert put a timed charge in the beasty’s environmental suit. One that’s hard to scan for—trade-secret type thing. Anyway, not sure if it’ll

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