Stifling a yawn, Heather wrapped the throw around her knees even tighter. It felt cold in her room, despite her having the temperature set to a pleasant twenty-one degrees. Maybe the heating was on the blink again. Whenever engineering had a big job to do, they left the smaller problems, such as room temperature and ensuring there were enough ice cream flavors in the food replicator, on the bottom of their to-do list.

Heather had asked five times for salted caramel and pecan ice cream. She was still waiting.

She slid her finger across the tablet in her hand. “These matches are dreadful.” The pairing in front of her showed a Banti matched with a woman just on the limits of breeding age.

“What’s a Banti doing on this list?” Banti were violent and had a liking for human flesh. This was quickly realized when Banti had been allowed into early negotiations, stolen a group of women, and eaten them. Despite assurances from the Banti High Council that it would never happen again, Heather was certain they’d received a ban from using My Single Alien’s services.

Maybe there had been a policy change she wasn’t aware of. Knowing the ins and outs of the Council of Representatives was way above her pay grade, and she was glad of it. Politics was not her thing. Give her a lonely heart to fix and she’d have no problem. Sort out a diplomatic crisis involving trade routes and logistics and she’d flake out.

Heather looked at the next match, also terrible. What was going on with these matches?

She took a sip of hot chocolate as she read through the file in more detail. The alien was twenty years younger than the human female. She liked quiet, bookish males and had asked to be matched with a calm-natured alien, who enjoyed reading and silent movies. A Monomar was the complete opposite. Heather scooped a blob of marshmallow off the top of her hot chocolate and sucked it from her finger.

Her bedroom door slid open. Ernie scampered out, almost silent on the carpeting on her floor. He hurried to her feet. “Your bed is prepared.”

She reached down and stroked Ernie’s metal head. “Thanks, buddy.”

“More hot chocolate?”

She gazed into her half-full mug. It was tempting, but this was her second one. Too much sugar and she wouldn’t sleep. “Not tonight. Have you checked the shower? When I used it this morning, there was only cold water.” One thing she hated was cold showers.

“A scan of the system shows no problems with the thermal heating modulators.”

She glanced at Ernie. Heather was still working on his communication module. Sometimes, he sounded like one of the first-off-the-rack prototypes that used to walk awkwardly around the station and respond with one-word answers. But he was improving every day. “It must be me. I jinxed the controls. I’d love a shower before bed.”

“I can check again.”

“No need. I trust you.” She patted his head again.

“You work too hard.”

Heather grinned. She’d programmed Ernie to help with tasks around her small apartment. In addition, she’d added a few extras, so he’d remind her that there was more to life than work. Work she so often brought home and continued into the small hours.

She looked at the framed picture on the table beside her. That was her dream. That was why Heather worked so hard. Once she’d gotten her hands on her own perfect piece of land and built her dream home, then she could relax. Until then, she’d focus hard on saving and earning any bonuses she could.

Although Diadora was as scary as an undiscovered black hole, when a member of staff hit a target, they sometimes discovered a little bonus in their pay packet. It wasn’t guaranteed, but every time Heather got one, she squirreled it away in her dream space station pad fund.

Her smile faded as she returned her attention to the tablet. “Let’s see what’s going on here.” Pulling up the coding files for the matchmaking protocols, Heather spent half an hour scrolling through streams of code. She couldn’t see anything wrong, but the matches were awful, real idiot matches that would make the couples miserable if they met. There was no way any of these would work.

If Diadora saw them, she’d have a fit and blame Heather or Vegas or anyone within shouting range. If the matches failed, it looked bad on Diadora. When that happened, she went looking for someone else’s blood. With Diadora, the buck stopped at whichever sucker she could pin it on.

“What’s this?” Heather peered at an odd piece of code. She’d never seen it before. Some of it wasn’t normal coding language. It looked alien, which sort of made sense, but they used a universal coding language that all aliens and humans stuck to.

The overhead lights flickered before becoming glaringly bright.

Heather glanced at the ceiling. “I swear, one day, this place will just explode. Ernie, we’re going to be nothing but space dust if this station doesn’t get a major overhaul.”

“I will fly us to the nearest planet before that happens.”

“Of course you will. You’re my protector.” Although he was small, Ernie had a number of built in safeguards. One was a small fusion reactor. It meant his power never ran out. He also had the ability to recycle waste water into oxygen and came with a mask Heather could use if she ever found herself sucked into space with no space suit on. It was highly unlikely, but it was good to be prepared for the worst.

Ernie also had a diagnostic repair program and an intergalactic navigation system. He was her super-powered, super-efficient metallic pet. She loved him.

“Take a look at this code.” She lifted Ernie onto the couch next to her.

He plugged a portal connector from one of his legs into her tablet and scanned the code she indicated.

“Does anything look strange to you?”

Sparks shot out of Ernie. He flew backward across the couch, landing on his back with his legs in the air.

Heather yelped and grabbed him up, her heart racing. “What’s wrong? What happened?” She ran a hand over him. Ernie felt too warm, like he had a fever.

“Error. Reboot required.” Ernie twitched in her hands, his green sensor flickering on and off at an alarming rate.

Heather placed him gently on the couch, feeling guilty for asking him to look at the code. “I’m sorry, Ernie. I had no clue the code would do that to you. Do what you need to repair yourself.”

She watched him for several minutes, making sure he wasn’t going to explode or go into meltdown. When his sensor light turned amber, she relaxed a little. That meant he was in repair mode.

Heather kept half an eye on Ernie as she returned to studying the evil code that had zapped her buddy.

She wasn’t a coding expert. She was self-taught but knew the basics. What she was looking at was way beyond her understanding. Some of it was definitely not the universal language of coding geeks.

There was something in this code that had aggravated Ernie’s internal systems. Something that must have detected it was being studied and came with a built-in defense mechanism. Heather shook her head. There should be nothing like that in the matchmaking algorithms.

She tapped her chin with a finger. “Unless someone tampered with the system. Why would they do that?” She looked at Ernie. He didn’t respond. “Everybody wants alien and human matches to work. Everybody wants children.”

Heather yelped as the lights overhead blinked out. “Not now. Lights on.”

Nothing happened.

“Illuminate.” Heather waved a hand in the air, even though she knew the lights didn’t operate on sensors.

“Lights. Switch on. Light up.” Heather groaned. “Please. I don’t like the dark.”

Using the illumination from her tablet, she eased herself off the couch and hurried to the comm panel on the wall.

“Heather Roberts to engineering. I have a problem with my quarter’s lights. Can you send someone to fix them?”

No response came back. In fact, the whole panel was unnaturally quiet. Heather always had a newscast in one corner, plus the weather chart—there was weather of sorts in space, but not as she knew it from Earth. It was more solar storms, meteor warnings, and space debris alerts. She also had a few bloggers she kept up with. All that information was missing.

“Engineering, please respond.” She sighed and rested her head against the wall. The panel was also malfunctioning. It wasn’t sending her message.

“Maybe it’s not just me with this problem.” Heather turned toward the door, just in time to see it slide open. The light in the corridor seemed gloomier than normal as if set to emergency power.

“Hello. Who’s there?” A shiver of unease ran down her spine. “Ernie, was that you opening the door?” She turned her tablet toward the couch. Ernie still lay in his prone position, his lights off.

Sliding her tongue across her dry teeth, Heather saw the door slide shut again. “Is somebody in here?”

There was no response.

Of course, if it was someone coming to attack her after tripping out her lights, they’d hardly announce their arrival. She shook her head. No one would do that.

Heather forced herself to remain calm. It could be another system glitch. If the lights were misbehaving, then so could the door access panels. It meant nothing. She’d watched too many spooky movies and was getting jumpy for no reason.

Those thoughts took away none of the shadowy panic inside her.

Heather turned back to the panel on the wall. “Vegas, are you there?”

There was no reply.

“Prodigy, show me Vegas Munro’s location.”

The panel hummed but didn’t bring up the station’s map or location of Vegas.

“Computer, respond.”

Heather spun around, convinced she’d heard something shift across the floor. “I know you’re in here. I don’t know what game you’re playing, but it isn’t funny. I have a laser. I know how to use it. Don’t think it’s set to stun. I always shoot to kill.” She had no laser. They were banned on the station. If you blasted a hole through the protective shield of the station, you risked getting sucked out into space. Nobody wanted that.

Feeling light-headed from forgetting to breathe, Heather sucked in a deep breath. “Calm down,” she whispered to herself.

She crept toward the door. She’d go to engineering and see what was wrong. Chances were, her comm panel was simply playing up. It wouldn’t be the first time. When they’d first arrived at the space station, only fifty percent of things worked, and that was on a good day.

There had been a week when there was no fresh water or food. They’d had to live off freeze-dried ration pouches used by astronauts. It had been kind of cool until it all started tasting the same, and she missed her breakfast waffles with syrup.

Heather jumped as something brushed across the back of her leg. “Ernie?”

It couldn’t be him. He took at least five minutes to reboot. From the way he’d reacted, that code had messed with his system. He might be down for hours while he made his internal repairs.

“Stop freaking out.” Her hand went to the panel to open the door, her fingers shaking as she touched it.

As the door slid open, several strong shackles wrapped around her calf and dug into her skin.

Heather yelped. “Holy mother of stars.” She crashed out of the room and landed on her hands and knees. More metallic shackles wrapped around her wrists and yanked her, so she fell flat on her face, her nose squashing into the ground.

The lights in the corridor were on an emergency setting, giving just enough light to see what was attacking her.

Heather raised her face from the ground and stared at her wrists. In front of her, two bots had hold of her wrists, their metal limbs wrapped around her. Two more were clamped to her ankles. “What are you doing? Get off me.”

The bots’ sensors glowed an angry red as they dragged her across the floor. For such small guys, they sure were powerful.

With a yelp of alarm, Heather kicked at the bots wrapped around her ankles as they assisted in pushing her along the corridor.

The bots did not budge. If anything, their grip tightened.

Panic raced through Heather. Bots never behaved like this. They were there to help, serve and occasionally annoy, not drag innocent people along the corridor. “What are you doing? What’s going on?”

The bots didn’t respond and continued to drag her.

“Help! I’m being... taken by bots.” Heather looked around. No one came to her rescue, which was odd. Where was everybody?

Again, Heather tried to shake the bots off her legs. They simply tightened their grip until she felt the metal break through her skin and draw blood.

“Bots, stop. Your programming is malfunctioning. You’re not supposed to harm any lifeform on the station.” And they were harming her. She could feel blood making her skin slick beneath her jumpsuit.

They didn’t pause in their determined efforts to drag her wherever they’d planned to take her.

“You’re breaking protocol. You’ll be decommissioned for this. I’ll do it myself.” Heather would say anything to get them to stop. But they didn’t care. These bots were on a mission. Nothing would stop them.

Heather’s breath caught in her throat as she saw where they were taking her. “No! No way are you going to push me through there.”

The bots continued toward the emergency airlock.

She dug her toes into the floor. The metal surface simply aided in her forward slide. “I am not going into space. You’ve made a mistake. Whatever it is you think you’re doing, you have to stop.”

One of the bot’s sensors glowed brighter. “Threat of death.”

“Yes! My death. I’m the one at risk here.”

“Laser threat. Must remove.”

Heather gritted her teeth. They were going to kill her because of her bluff with the laser. Was that what all this was about?

She bucked and kicked, trying to break free from the bots’ strong grasp. If they got that airlock open and pushed her through, she’d be dead in seconds. She didn’t want to die alone. She didn’t want to die at all. She had so many plans. On none of her bucket lists was the thrill of being slung out of an airlock by four deranged bots and stuck in space until she exploded.

“Mission abort.” Heather thrashed her arms around, trying to get the bots off her. “Stop it. I was only joking when I said I had a laser.”

They slowed as they came to the airlock. If they opened it, they’d go out too. They must really hate her to sacrifice themselves that way. But bots didn’t hate. They couldn’t. It wasn’t in their programing.

Heather sometimes had nightmares about dying in space. There were so many ways to die on a space station. In all her imaginings, she’d never dreamt it would be at the hands of four angry bots who’d made a mistake.

One bot let go of her right ankle and scuttled to the control panel of the emergency airlock.

“Don’t you dare,” Heather hissed. “Keep your metal limbs away from that code.”

All the airlocks could only be unlocked with an eight-digit code. There was no way this bot would know that code. If anyone decided to play with an airlock code, the second they hit a wrong number, it flashed red, security was alerted, and the code was immediately changed.

Her bottom lip trembled as she saw the bot key in three numbers. There was no flashing red light. “How do you know those numbers?”

The fourth number went in. Then the fifth.

Heather kicked at the bot wrapped around her other ankle, trying to dislodge it. She stamped on its limbs, refusing to feel bad. It might be small, but it wanted her dead.

Nothing worked. The bot held on tightly. She tried to drag herself upright, but it was as if the bots had welded themselves to the ground. They weren’t going to let her go.

The sixth number went into the panel. No alarm sounded, and no security came.

Heather inhaled as much air as she could. It was a waste of time. As soon as she was out into space, it would do the rest. She would have no air to breathe and would blow up like a balloon as her internal fluid bubbled. Her lungs would rupture, and she’d black out as the sun gave her a horrendous level of UV exposure. Soon enough, she’d be just another piece of space debris floating around and causing trouble for passing satellites.

“I’m not ready,” she whispered. She had so much she wanted to do. Build her dream pad, fall in love with a gorgeous alien, and have a tribe of amazing alien babies. Maybe even get married. Her life hadn’t even begun, and it was already over, thanks to these death-seeking bots.

A sound like an angry donkey rolled along the corridor. Heather twisted her head, trying to see who it was.

Before her eyes had a chance to focus, she was lifted off her feet and came nose to nose with Loka.