The quiet of the clinic was oddly comforting. Since I'd been up on Minor, I'd probably spent more of my waking hours in this small room than anywhere else on station.

I logged into the deskcomm with Denon's credentials. He never bothered to change his password, seemed never to have heard of basic security.

Yet another reason I couldn't trust him.

“Cuff maintenance, it's gotta be here somewhere,” I muttered to myself.

Surely this couldn't be the only case of a malfunctioning unit. Just because I'd never seen one didn't mean it never happened.

But, so far, I wasn't finding anything. Like all communications on the Minor, the terminal was locked down. Information could come in, but nothing could get out.

Even with full access, I wasn’t sure where else I would look for a manual on the damn things without giving myself away completely.

I kept hunting until finally I found a subdirectory with a list of emergency reset and control frequencies.

I had always known I could get the cuff off, some variant of the device was used in a number of Imperial facilities, and they all had some of the same basic characteristics. Usually operations were controlled by a series of frequencies. Facilities could reset and customize theirs, but most didn't bother.

Despite myself, thoughts of Mack wormed through my focus. Why had he been sent up here?

A disturbing worry gnawed at the back of my mind. How would I know if he’d really been memory wiped? The marks - that could be a tattoo, easily recreated once you knew what the burn pattern looked like. I could search for his file, nothing was really sealed. But that wouldn’t tell me anything other than his cover story.

What if it was just an act, a way for the governor to get close to me, discover where I'd hidden the disk? His scanner readings only confused things. He was obviously the product of genetic engineering, to a level illegal in the Empire. Did that make him more likely to be a tool of one of the Syndicates?

I didn’t try to think of the details of my mission often. Safer to keep my mind as blank as possible, to not risk giving myself away.

But now I needed to examine the entire project. I knew I'd already been betrayed by at least one person. Did Mack fit into the pattern as another possible traitor?

When I arrived on Orem, it had taken a while to get past the rumors, find actual proof of the criminal activities by the station’s governor. As governor, he had the ultimate authority on Minor - it had been the logical place for his goons to toss me for holding. It would be easy enough for him to plant another inmate, make it look like he needed help, in an effort to get close to me.

The criminal activity was clear, but I had stayed longer than I should have, trying to identify who the governor’s partners were. There were plenty of little villains, but a majority of his business went through one far outpost - and I couldn’t find any details on who ran it. If we rolled the governor up, I didn't want bigger fish getting away.

When his goons had grabbed me, they’d made a mistake. No one knew where I'd hidden that chip. And that meant they didn’t know how much I’d uncovered.

I’d bet he’d do a lot to find that out. Even try to plant someone on the inside to get close to me.

And yet… I thought about Mack’s troubled night.

I'd heard his breathing - he was sleeping, I was sure. The nightmare wasn't faked, but, in the cold artificial light of morning, I couldn't say that it was proof that he had been wiped.

Finally, I found the list of cuff controls and scanned it quickly. Just as I’d guessed, Minor hadn't bothered to switch from the factory presets. And there was what I needed to reset my cuff to green. Good enough.

As I started closing screens, a subdirectory caught my eye. I brought it to the foreground, and for a moment stopped breathing.

Transmission logs. Outgoing. And from this terminal.

I glanced at the door, Denon still hadn't come in. From his regular pattern I could expect several more minutes of privacy, but the urge for caution was stronger than ever.

Quickly, I flicked open the most recent of the messages. I could work my way back, but I needed to know what was going on now.

Whatever you did failed. Don’t know why you thought the bitch would come back here. Told you plenty of times she wasn’t warming up to me. Just come and get her. But I still earned my deal, right?

I froze. The ‘bitch’ seemed very likely to be me.

I checked the timestamp on the messaging. It was after curfew. Denon must've had a way to get out of the dorms and back here, to the single terminal with access to the outside world.

The message was clear between the lines. Something had been deliberately done to my cuff in the expectations I would come back to the clinic. But why?

It had to be about the chip. There was nothing else anyone would want.

But who had he told to come pick me up? Where would be worse than here?

My throat dry, my eyes flicked back and forth between the screen and the door. There had to be more in the logs.

I picked a previous message at random, no time to go through them methodically. From the time stamps, they looked like daily reports, stretching back to a few days before I had been kidnapped.

Bitch isn’t warming up. I don't know. Maybe she just doesn't like guys. I still get my deal, right?

I stuck my tongue out. That sounded exactly like Denon. Obviously, if I wasn't into him, I wasn't into guys at all. Douche.

Time for one more. I picked one of the earliest messages.

I'm telling you, I want immunity from the ghosts, or no deal.

Ghosts?

My heart thudded in my chest as I checked the chrono. I didn't know what was going on, but it was too close to when Denon usually came strolling through the door to risk checking further. I swore under my breath. I could have sent a message to Stanton, let my handler know where I was being kept all along. But now I was out of time. Next time I wouldn’t hesitate.

I closed all of the windows, went back into the system history and wiped my tracks, until the comm looked just as it had when I arrived. But I couldn’t leave the thoughts of those messages alone.

Ghosts?

The word echoed in my head while I disassembled the hand-held scanner, used the calibration tool to reset the frequency.

That Denon had been co-opted to spy on me wasn’t a surprise. If anything, it explained why he was always just a little too friendly, a little too accommodating about logging my tasks as useful, even though they were obviously busy work.

But ghosts? How do you get immunity from ghosts?

By the time Denon sauntered into the clinic, I’d returned the scanner to its regular condition, replaced it in the cabinet, and was busily making sure we had enough bandages and gauzes. It looked like we were well stocked into the next century.

Denon hesitated just an instant when he saw me. The flicker in his eyes was enough to confirm what I had read in the messages. Something was going on, and he was a part of it.

“Leave that for now,” he said after a moment. “Just heard over the comms that the gasket blew on a poor sucker working the sterilizer in the mess hall. We'll need to get the hyperbaric gear prepped.”

We didn't have a full hyperbaric chamber, of course. The best we could do was seal and wrap it one section at a time in something like a large pressurized envelope, and dope the victim up. Out of habit, I checked the slender oxy tanks. Something else we were well enough stocked with.

By the end of shift, I was exhausted. Friends of the burn victim had come and gone throughout the day, and one of them had enough sense to offer to bring us meal packs.

I’d turned her down. After seeing the steam-scalded flesh blister across the man's chest, I didn't have much of an appetite.

“Go ahead and call it a night,” Denon said. “I'll keep an eye on them for a while.” He’d been professional and courteous, but a bit remote, all day.

Maybe knowing I was due for someone to come and ‘get’ me made him want to put a little distance between us.

“Sure. I'll see you in the morning.” He didn't look up from the comm screen.

Outside the clinic doors, I leaned against the wall. I didn't have all the information I wanted. Hell, I didn’t have nearly enough to even make a reasonable guess at the right decision.

But I'd run out of time.

A large shape loomed out from the side corridor and I stiffened, ready for another fight.

“Just me,” Mack’s low voice rumbled. “You look like you had a hell of a day,” his glance dropped to my cuff, “despite getting some maintenance taken care of.”

“Void, yes,” I sighed.

Time to choose, Zayda.

“Why don’t you buy a girl a drink, and I'll tell you all about it.”

He ran his hand through his brush of hair and gave a grin. “Think I could use one of those myself, darlin’. And I've got a few things to tell you, as well.”

As we approached, you could hear the heavy bass music reverberating through the deck.

“What the hell is this?” His eyes bounced from couple to couple in the makeshift bar. Ramshackle booths had been jury-rigged out of spare parts, machinery, anything that people could get their hands on.

Curtains made of drop chutes partitioned off part of the large room, and it didn't take particularly good hearing to figure out what was going on behind the fabric, with the faint illusion of privacy.

“Anytime you put people somewhere, you know somebody's gonna figure out how to make a still. Welcome to the Down Low.” I gestured expansively, and headed to the bar. “I'm warning you, it's terrible.”