Mick stepped into sickbay, closing the hatch behind her. She didn’t want Ariston to overhear the conversation she planned to have.

Dev sat cross-legged on the sole exam table/bunk in the ship’s compact sickbay, not resting and recovering, as one might expect, but creating slides and peering into a microscope. Woodruff sat in a chair beside the bed, his eyes closed, his head propped on his arm, and his breathing heavy and even. He wore a shoulder holster with his handgun in it.

Safin had left sickbay at some point. Hopefully, he was back up on the bridge, monitoring the storm—and the comm. Mick supposed she should relieve him, even though her bunk called to her. She didn’t want to miss any important messages between the men on the planet and the ship in orbit.

She looked for a place to sit, but there weren’t any other chairs, unless she wanted to hop up on the narrow counter in the back. She opted for leaning against the wall and waving under the microscope to get Dev’s attention.

“Dev, did you know this planet was protected by the Confederation?”

Dev blinked and looked up. “I’m fine, thanks for asking.”

“Ha ha. I asked that earlier, and you already told me. You also look decidedly un-debilitated.” Mick waved at the work spread out around Dev.

“I do have a headache.”

“Join the club,” Mick said. “The planet? Did you know?”

Dev shook her head slowly and looked at Woodruff, but his eyes remained closed. “I was told—I believe all of us were—that this planet was uninhabited, unclaimed, and haunted. We assumed—or at least I did—that the haunted aspect, and the fact that it hasn’t truly recovered from the mega volcanic eruptions it had in the past, were why nobody wanted it. Also, it sounds like there are all manner of habitable planets in the galaxy. This one is convenient to Earth, hence why it was chosen, but it’s not convenient to Dethocoles or the home systems of any sentient alien species, as far as we know. Or were told.” Dev frowned. “Who told you it’s protected?”

“Ariston.”

“That’s hardly a reliable resource,” came a tired grumble from Woodruff, his eyes open now. “I bet he’s trying to work some angle.”

“Yeah, the angle is that I think he’s some law enforcer. He was talking about arresting some of the people out there. Okay, capturing them, he said, but he hinted that if we helped, our crimes might be overlooked.”

“We haven’t committed any crimes,” Woodruff said. “We’re a research team for God’s sake.”

“That’s what I said, but—”

Woodruff’s head spun toward the corner, his hand twitching toward his gun.

Mick looked toward the corner. “There’s nothing there.”

“Shit.” Woodruff rubbed his eyes. “I was hoping that would stop if I got some sleep.”

“You only slept for seven minutes,” Dev said. “I think the body needs longer than that to repair itself.”

“Are repairs what need to be done?” Mick asked, leaning her back against the bulkhead. “Or do we just need to get off this planet?”

Hail beat against the exterior of the Viper, as if to remind her that there were numerous reasons why they wouldn’t be leaving any time soon. Mick now felt uneasy about being trapped in the ship with Ariston.

“I don’t know,” Dev said. “I’ve been thinking about that. I’m the only one who’s had a seizure, but we’ve all been having weird symptoms, right?”

Mick nodded. She liked the idea that these might be symptoms, symptoms of something that could be explained by science. If that was true, then maybe they could come up with a shot to fix things. Hauntings were tougher to fix with shots.

“Not all,” Woodruff said. “Sven said all he’s had is a bit of a headache.”

“Safin hasn’t left the ship, right?” Mick asked. “For that matter, neither have you, Woodruff.”

“I was out there briefly, mostly lurking in the airlock and shooting ineffectively at the guys trying to force their way in. Also, I can tell you’re former military with your thing for last names. You can call me Cecil if you want.”

“I don’t think you should encourage people to do that.”

“There’s nothing wrong with the name Cecil,” Dev said, smiling shyly at him.

She must have decided that Ariston, however appealing his body, didn’t hold the allure of her red-headed civil engineer.

“It was my grandfather’s name.” Woodruff shrugged, then turned toward Mick. “I don’t think I experienced any symptoms until after I was out there. Dr. Lee mentioned a headache too. I’m not sure if he’s been seeing things.”

“At least you guys aren’t seeing huge black evil spirits coming to possess your body. Like demons out of some Sri Lankan legend.” Dev looked at Mick curiously. “What are you seeing?”

“Mostly stuff out of the corner of my eye,” Mick said. “But when I turn to focus on it, there’s nothing there. I keep thinking someone is going to jump out and attack.”

She opened one of the cabinets under the counter and pulled out a medical scanner. Her training on the thing was rudimentary, but the sickbay had an AI that could advise on numerous treatments. She also flicked open the tablet computer, a larger version of Ariston’s logostec, so she could take some notes.

She was probably the last person who could solve a medical mystery, but the idea of ambushing a shuttle, flying to another ship to forcefully acquire a part, and flying back down to the planet, and then taking off again, all while experiencing hallucinations, did not sound appealing. Or like a recipe for success.

“I’ve heard sounds too,” Mick added, shivering when she remembered how dead people had seemed to moan in that wreck.

“What about you?” Dev prompted Woodruff as Mick used her finger to scrawl words on the holographic notepad.

Hallucinations, audio and visual. Headaches.

“Same as the captain. Things out of the corner of my eye. A couple of times, I thought I saw… well, ghosts, for lack of a better term. White apparitions you could see through. That’s been when the lighting is poor. It’s stupid, but it’s made me not want to go to my bunk, even though I’m exhausted.”

Weariness, Mick added to the list.

“And here I thought you were staying in here to talk to me because of my wit and charm,” Dev said. “Not because you were afraid of monsters under your bed.”

“Ghosts under my bed, thank you. And your wit and charm were absolutely what made me choose to spend time with you. I could have spent time with the weird, naked man in the mess hall.” Mick started to smile, but Woodruff added, “I left him for the captain.”

He cocked an eyebrow at her. Maybe Mick read too much into the gesture, but she thought he was suggesting she was spending too much time with a guest that they shouldn’t trust.

But if it turned out he was a law officer, did that change things?

Not if he believed they were criminals, Mick thought grimly. Damn it, she’d had a bad feeling about this mission from the time they had reached orbit. Now, she wished she’d turned around and headed home, and to hell with the money.

“Yes, the naked men should always be left for me,” Mick said, focusing on her list instead of accusing stares. “Medtech?” she said, waving a hand in front of the device she’d set on the counter. “Are you there?”

“B.A.S. Delta at your service, Captain,” the medical scanner said. “How can I be of assistance?”

“We’re trying to figure out what could cause some specific symptoms.” Mick always felt stupid talking to computers and phones and other devices, even if the technology was commonplace at home now too. “Hallucinations, weariness, and headaches.”

“And seizures,” Dev asked, with a grimace.

“Do we include something that only one person has experienced?” Mick asked.

“Some people are more genetically predisposed to experience certain symptoms than others, and humans often react differently to the same stressors,” the AI said.

“That was a yes, right?” Mick asked.

“Yes.” The AI sounded dry. It probably knew it was dealing with a medical ignoramus. “Are there more symptoms?”

“Isn’t that enough?” Mick grumbled.

“These symptoms all manifested after people had been outside of the ship and on this planet,” Dev added.

“That’s not exactly true.” Mick scratched her jaw. “I was still in the cockpit when I saw on the sensor display, or I thought I saw, that there were two life forms—two people still alive—in that crashed ship. But I later learned the people had been dead since the ship crashed.”

“You learned that from our guest?” Woodruff frowned, clearly not ready to trust anything Ariston said.

“Yeah, but I’m not sure why he would lie about that.”

“To make it seem like his people aren’t huge assholes for murdering people still alive at a crash site?”

“They’re the ones who caused the crash,” Dev said. “I think that makes them assholes, regardless.”

“I got there before they did,” Mick said. “I saw with my own eyes that there weren’t any survivors.”

“Your own eyes that have been seeing things?” Woodruff asked.

Mick sucked in an alarmed breath. What if she’d seen those people as dead, but one or two of them had actually been alive? What if they’d turned imploring eyes toward her, but she hadn’t seen it? She’d seen something else. Did hallucinations work like that? Could she trust anything she’d witnessed since coming down to this planet?

“I think things only started happening once we got outside and were exposed to the atmosphere here,” Woodruff said. “Because Sven, who hasn’t been out there, says he feels mostly normal. We’ll have to check with Weiss to see what he’s been experiencing. He’s in his cabin now, sleeping, I imagine.”

“But we weren’t exposed to the atmosphere,” Dev pointed out. “Mick was always in her armor, and we only went out in our hazmat suits, suits specifically designed to protect us from exposure to an alien atmosphere. If there was something in the air, we shouldn’t have been exposed to it.”

“Maybe we had rips in our suits.”

“That might be believable for one person, but not all. And Mick’s armor is as airtight as a spacesuit, right?”

Mick nodded. “It essentially is a spacesuit. With a full oxygen tank, you can survive in space for several hours.”

“I think we need to operate under the assumption that we’ve been exposed to something,” Woodruff said. “Our suits were designed on Earth. This is an alien world. Maybe there’s something out there the makers didn’t anticipate.”

Mick figured the makers of her armor, the space-faring Dethocoleans, had anticipated everything, but she didn’t argue the point. It wasn’t as if she had another explanation.

“Ariston hasn’t seemed that affected, either,” she pointed out, recalling that he hadn’t seemed surprised when she jumped at tricks of the eyes, but she hadn’t seen him do anything similar. “He admitted to being tired, but that’s about it.”

“Can we leave him out as a data point?” Woodruff asked. “We’ve already decided that anything that comes out of his mouth is suspect.”

He’d decided that. But again, Mick didn’t argue. She couldn’t prove him wrong.

“We don’t have that many data points,” Dev said. “To dismiss one doesn’t seem like a good idea. Especially if he’s been out there as much as the rest of us and isn’t affected, or is affected to a lesser degree.”

“Maybe he’s not letting on that he’s affected,” Woodruff said. “If he considers us enemies, he wouldn’t want to show weakness.”

“I never saw him shooting at shadows,” Mick said.

“Did you do that?”

She grimaced. “Unfortunately, yes.”

“Maybe it’s because his ancestors were dropped off on another planet,” Dev said. “Could he be genetically different from us after two-thousand-odd years?”

“That’s only about fifty generations,” Woodruff said. “There could have been some changes, but it’s hard to imagine the people in the rest of the galaxy are all that different from the people of Earth. Unless they’ve been tinkering with their genomes. They are supposedly more advanced than we are.” His lips twisted with distaste. Nobody seemed to like admitting that.

“But the rest of the men trapped down here are affected,” Mick said. “Earlier, they were shooting at each other.”

“Are we sure that’s not normal behavior?”

She snorted. “I wouldn’t stake my life on it, but Ariston seemed to think it odd.”

“Ariston, Ariston,” Woodruff grumbled. “How do we know he’s not the one who’s infected us with something? Or put something weird in our drinking water?”

“This started before we ever saw him.” Mick, tired of having to defend Ariston, turned toward the medical device. “Let’s just see if something comes up with a scan, eh? BAS, can you check us for atypical bacteria or viruses or anything that might explain our brains doing funny things?”

“I only have a scan on file for you, Captain,” the AI said. “Since we did not record scans of your passengers, I do not have a baseline, which would make it difficult to ascertain ‘funny things,’ unless something blatantly obvious is awry.”

“Well, scan me first, but then do them too. Maybe we’re all kinds of awry.”

Dev nodded ruefully and peered into her microscope as the scanner examined Mick. It emitted a beam of light that slowly traversed her body from head to foot.

“What kind of scans does that thing do exactly?” Woodruff asked. “I assume those aren’t X-rays since the rest of us haven’t been asked to step out of the room.”

Mick, who knew little of medical technology, whether Earth-based or Dethocolean, was about to ask the AI to explain when Dev set a slide aside and gave her a troubled look.

“A problem?” Mick asked. Another one?

“A peculiarity.”

“I’m not sure that sounds better than a problem.”

Dev smiled slightly. “Based on the information that Umbra gathered, we’ve been operating on the assumption that the humans who were deposited here didn’t have very long to establish their civilization and propagate the species before a mega volcano blew, which created an ash cloud around the entire planet that caused ninety percent of the flora and fauna to die off, including humans.”

Woodruff nodded. “That’s what I was told too.”

Mick spread a hand. She’d only been told to pilot the ship.

“Do we have an exact date for when humans were taken from Earth?” Dev asked.

“Uh, two-thousand years is what I heard,” Mick said.

“Approximately two thousand three hundred and eighty-four of your Earth years,” the AI said. “I am ready to scan the next individual.”

Dev waved for Woodruff to go next. She seemed to be finding her slides interesting.

“Is there a comm in here?” Dev asked. “I have a question for Dr. Lee.”

Mick moved so Woodruff could take her spot next to the scanner, and she tapped the wall panel, bringing up a map, and tapped Lee’s cabin.

A long moment passed before a groggy, “What?” came in response to the comm’s ding. Mick wasn’t sure if it was Lee or his cabin mate, Weiss.

“Dr. Lee?” Dev asked.

“Yes?”

“Have you had a chance to date those ruins yet? I know you picked up some samples of the rubble in the hope that carbon dating would be effective here.”

Mick shifted uneasily, remembering Ariston’s claim that the ruins were protected. Would picking up a couple of rocks cause her and her passengers to be classified as criminals? Ariston had implied just being down here might cause that.

“It’s the middle of the night, Dr. Bakshi,” Lee groaned.

“I assume that’s a no. I would appreciate it if you would do so at your earliest convenience.”

“Why? What’s going on?” Lee sounded more alert now. Intrigued by a mystery?

Mick watched Dev, waiting for the mystery to be rolled out. She didn’t even know what was odd yet.

“My soil analysis provides evidence to support that a major volcanic eruption did happen in the planet’s past,” Dev said, “depositing several feet of ash in this area, but it doesn’t look like it happened two thousand years ago. Judging by the layers of deposits atop it, I would guess it happened three thousand years ago.”

Lee hesitated before answering. “I’ll date the ruins now.”

“Good,” Dev said.

They both sounded grim.

“So, the volcano erupted before the humans were deposited here?” Mick asked, trying not to sound—or feel—like a dumb soldier. “What’s the significance?”

“If I’m correct,” Dev said, “the volcano isn’t, as the galaxy apparently believes, what killed them off.”

“Then what did?”

“We don’t know.”