Maybe I should think about putting them back in those tanks.

Since Ronan and I had come to our agreement, he must have told his brothers to make sure I wasn't bored. And, by extension, that meant Loree wasn’t bored.

Every time I turned around twice there was another of them.

“Does this look useful? We weren't sure if it was a medical device. Can you use this?”

I'd grumble about it more, but Loree had it worse. If she said she was looking for a particular type of electronic, Xander brought her a dozen possibilities.

You know, just to be sure.

If she said she wished she could get out and see things, did he check with me?

Of course not.

Did he put her in one of the wheeled chairs we'd found and help her get through rooms?

That would be ridiculous.

Instead, he carried her from room to room explaining the changes that we'd made. Which didn't really matter much, since she hadn't seen much of the corridor before.

I worried I would have to treat her for a case of strained optical ligaments, she was rolling her eyes so hard.

While I was sorting through the piles of possibly useful things, they came into the clinic.

"What in the Void do you think you're doing?" I snapped.

"Loree wanted to look around again." Xander had perfected the art of an innocent appearance, but Loree looked at me beseechingly.

"Thank you, I wanted to check her out anyway. Please put her down on the table.”

We both stared at him as he lounged by the door.

"Why don't you grab her chair, bring it here, and then go?"

He brought the chair, waved as he bounced out, and Loree slumped against the pillow that I moved under her shoulders.

"Can’t you make him stop?"

I moved the monitor further down her body.

They had actually brought useful instruments. Whatever the original intent had been, I was glad to have more than just my hands and a tube of wound sealant.

But I didn't like what I saw on the monitor screen.

"Have you seen this room? Why do you think I can do anything about it?”

"Because you're the boss lady?" She shook her head, already visibly tiring. "Or the boss’s lady, or something?"

"I think, given the circumstances, the phrase you’re looking for is alpha bitch."

She cracked a small grin. "You were that before we got here."

I helped her up and back into the wheeled chair.

"Is there actually something you want to find, or are you just sending him out to keep him out of your way?"

She tied her hair back into a messy bun, took a length of wire from around her wrist, and wrapped it up.

"I've got software cleaning out a lot of what the Hunters put in, their codes are actually kind of clumsy. But there's a spot on the ship that I can't find anything on. It's just an empty space in the schematics."

Working together, we got her back into the bed, blankets wrapped tightly around her legs to keep them from the twitches she hated so much.

“What do you think it is?”

She shook her head. “I don't know, but I'm trying to get visuals on it. There're cameras here and there around the ship. Working on getting in there. Maybe it doesn’t matter, but it keeps my brain occupied while the software is running.”

“And that’s what you need the parts for?”

She reached over and picked up a small box, turned it over at her hands.

"No, it's just weighing on my mind. I don't like mysteries. The parts are for this.”

Loree handed it to me. Dark gray with segmented areas, as if it might open up or unfold, it was just a little too large to fit comfortably in my palm. It didn’t look like much, but, honestly, I didn’t know what I was looking at.

“I know Ronan and the guys are worried that, even if we find a way to control the ship, the Hunters will be able to somehow control it remotely. This should block that." She put it down and slid a little further under the covers. "If I get it finished. If I find where to put it."

"You get some rest, and if people decide to stop taking you on tours around our little world, I'll bet you have a brilliant idea when you wake up."

My hand hovered over the injector, but Loree shook her head.

“It's not really doing much anymore. I think I'd rather skip it.”

Her words kicked at my chest. But it was her decision. And there wasn't anything I could do with what we had.

“Then you have to promise to rest. Deal?”

“Deal.”

Not surprisingly, in the corridor outside I found Xander. “Anything you--”

I didn't even let him finish. "Bring me a Hunter and leave her alone.”

For once, I think I shocked him.

"What?"

"She needs to rest and you need to leave her alone or, so help me, I will find a way to hurt you."

He stepped back, face serious. "I wouldn't do anything to harm her."

I took a deep breath, recentered myself. "I know that. But she does need to rest. And I still want a Hunter."

“A particular Hunter, or would any do?”

“A dead one. Let’s start there.”

I headed back to the clinic, looked at the selection of instruments, nodded grimly. There was enough here to work with.

Xander followed, noticeably not bringing me a droid to dissect.

“This is what I can do to help. I want to take one apart, figure out how they communicate and we will get that problem off the table. The seven of you should have all sorts of samples in a variety of conditions for me, right?”

He rubbed his chin. "Hate to tell you this, but I don't think we have one."

“How can we not have one? At this rate, I should have a dozen specimens. Do they dissolve, disappear, after you kill them?”

"No, don't know anything that does. But Ronan didn't want them on the ship. As soon as we had control of the airlocks, we started spacing them."

Oh. Well. There went my project of trying to be useful.

"Anybody injured?" I tried to make it sound like I wasn't hoping for someone to be hurt, but it may not have come out that way.

"No, ma'am."

Fine. There was one more thing.

“How many people are up in the secure area, besides Loree?”

“Me and Lorcan.”

"Then you can take me down to the cargo bay." He started to protest, but I cut him off.

“Will he protect her?”

"Of course.” He looked offended that I would suggest one of his brothers would do anything less.

“And is he less likely than you to listen for her to wake up and try to engage in conversation when she should be going back to sleep?”

For once, he looked sheepish. "Maybe."

"Then let's go."

* * *

The storage area of the cargo bay was no longer clean and organized, with all of the contents neatly stacked on the shelves.

There hadn’t been time. We needed anything useful, and chances were good we needed it yesterday.

“I'm going off to study those tanks,” I told my slightly sulky guard. “Why don't you take a look further down the racks?”

He didn't look excited.

“I promise I'm not going anywhere, you'll be within range if I shout.”

“You realize you could be whispering a deck up and I’d probably hear you. We have exceptionally good ears.”

My face heated, remembering my screams of the night before. Didn’t need to know that.

“Whatever.”

But he looked so morose I had to give him something to make up for taking him away from his sleeping beauty.

“You know, she's trying to build something that will block communications between the compound and the ship.”

An expression of interest crossed his face.

“I'm not a tech, but I've noticed all of you seem to have a reasonable amount of cross-training. I'll bet she could use some finer tools, and if you kept an eye out for some specific electronics that would be useful for blocking of comm signals, she'd like that.”

The grin broke out, like I knew it would. “Nobody's checked all of those shelves yet. I'm sure there's something she could use in there.”

He turned a serious look on. “You promise you're not going anywhere other than the horror show over there?”

“I promise. They're there for a purpose. I want to know what it is.”

“Ronan will skin me alive if you get hurt. Please don't.”

I headed towards the tanks. “But at least it would give me something to do, sewing you back together.”

He didn't laugh.

I walked through the rows of tanks. There had to be an order, some connection between the experiments performed and the numbers engraved on the side of the tanks.

Maybe it was like the Venarian labeling system. First set of numbers referred to a class of experiments, second set to a further refinement within that class, the third set referring to that individual experiment.

Taking that as a starting hypothesis, could I find other similarities?

Of course, the tanks hadn't been stacked in numerical order. I muttered as I scribbled on one of the other tablets that we had found.

I could only see what had been done to the external body. No telling how much had been changed internally. But it was enough to start a theory.

I ran back and forth between the cylinders, grouping, comparing, spinning theories quite possibly out of no more than stardust and exhaustion.

I stood in front of one, occupied by a man that almost could have been one of Ronan's brothers.

But the hybridization had failed, the skeleton still obviously more lupine than human. It couldn't have worked; if it ever had lived, it would have been in horrifying pain to try to walk with the mish-mash of anatomy that I could see.

“It's like they were trying to re-create them,” I muttered. “But didn't know how.”

I walked to the tank that held the experiment that would've been next in the series. Nothing but a sad implosion of guts that had somehow never formed properly at all.

But they didn't know how. At least they knew to keep a record, probably trying to avoid past failures.

To run so many experiments at once was staggering.

I guesstimated the age of the dog-man at early twenties, looked around at the other more formed experiments, some with the bodies of children, others in their teens.

“This would take hundreds of years to breed, watching them develop, and then deciding if that variation failed,” I wondered. “Who could be running this for so long?”

Ronan's arms slid around me from behind. "Probably vat-grown."

“What?”

He laughed. “You don't think Doc kept a ship full of infants, do you? She had us decanted when we were about ten, I’d guess. Even in batches, we were still more of a handful than she could handle sometimes.”

He let me go, walked back down along the row of tanks.

“I'd bet they did a full-force grow on all of these, didn't decant until they decided the experiment was over. Faster, less mess.”

I thought about it. You could run almost everything simultaneously if you had enough vats.

But you wouldn't learn much doing it that way.

It would be like throwing everything at once to a wall and seeing what stuck, instead of trying a few things, analyzing what went wrong, and trying it again with better data.

I watched Ronan as he examined the tanks. The first time we'd been down here, he'd been angry. Now I saw nothing but pity in his eyes.

“Doc wouldn't have done it this way. She was better than that. Void, not morally. Doc’s morals were pretty firmly shaded to the gray side.” He touched the side of the tank that held the closest approximation to himself. “But skill? She'd never have turned out anything like this.”

"But then who was doing this, and what do they want? Why didn't they just hire her?”

“Maybe they did,” Ronan rumbled.

I looked around and he shook his head.

“Not for this. But look.” He stood away and, for the first time, looked slightly uncertain of himself. “We ran missions, hired out to provide funding for the ship. Doc’s hobbies didn't come cheap. But she took plenty of private clients.”

I waited. Nothing I said would make any difference to what had happened back then. But I had the feeling maybe she’d crossed a few more ethical lines than I’d realized existed.

“Nothing like this, we'd have seen it on the Daedalus. But bringing people on for a little adjustment here, a tweak there? She didn't have any problem with that.”

We headed back up to the secure area. If I had Dr. Lyall’s skills, would I have a problem adjusting people, tweaking their code?

I thought of Loree, trapped in a body that had betrayed her.

I would do it in a heartbeat.