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to flip its polarity.
    With an audible click, the bay door opened. "Ha!" she cried and peered into the room. Her work-light splashed a cone of brightness a few meters in. Instead of the scrap she'd expected, the dim space was filled with row after row of boxes, piled at least a meter and a half high. She stiffened, rocking back on her heels. What was a hold full of sealed cargo doing behind a locked door? She turned the light off and stood in darkness, her heart pounding.
    Frowning, she ran a security sweep. Silence pressed down on her. The back of her neck tingled with the sense of being watched. Ro stood her ground at the room's threshold.
    Come on, come on , she thought, urging the micro to finish. If security had tagged her, she would have company soon. Having the full station access codes would at least give her plausible deniability as far as her presence here was concerned. She wasn't doing anything wrong, at least not yet. Micah would just have to fend for himself.
    Time seemed to stretch out as she waited. Her own breathing echoed in the metallic space. Finally her micro gave a soft beep that also seemed loud in the silent storage bay. The sweep found no security threats. She exhaled, furrowed her brow, and turned her light back on.
    Something was definitely out of true here: a sealed door, cargo where there should have been nothing but scrap, and no electronic security or tie in to Daedalus. Ro tapped her finger on the schematic's representation of the storage bay, thinking of her father. Her mind raced as the image enlarged and shrunk. If he needed to hide something, this would be the perfect place.
    She stepped fully into the storage bay and the door slid shut behind her, silently. The vaulted ceiling swallowed her little light. As she moved, the shadows danced around her like living things. Unclipping the light, she gripped it in her hand, directing it into the room's corners. All she saw were rows of boxes. "Sorry, not leaving until I figure this out," she said aloud, as much to break the stillness as to convince herself. Even the cartons huddled close to each other, as if the darkness pressed in on them, too.
    "All right, let's see what goodies we have here." Ro left the security of the solid door behind her, her light bouncing round the bay as she walked. There had to be hundreds of crates piled up. "A cargo manifest would be helpful," she muttered. Focusing the light on one of the boxes, she looked in vain for a label. "Yeah, why am I not surprised?"
    Holding the light between her teeth, she grabbed the box on the top of the stack and carefully lowered it to the ground. When she saw the lid, Ro swore and the light tumbled from her mouth. She scrambled to pick it up and stared in horrified fascination.
    These boxes had Hub Diplomatic Service seals. The most complex security in the Commonwealth, it came complete with a "phone home" feature and an anti-tamper subroutine. What the hell were diplomatic crates doing here? This couldn't be her father's doing — he'd never get access to this kind of cargo. And Daedalus wasn't a way-station from anywhere to anywhere.
    Keeping her hands steady, she put the box back where she'd found it and backed out of the storage bay slowly. Somebody was hiding something. Whoever that somebody was would probably be coming through the ship to check on their stuff.
    "Well, Micah, you're about to have company," she muttered. The cart followed her as she headed back to the ship's nose. Sharing his space wasn't ideal, but it also wouldn't advertise her presence. He'd be pissed, but by the time he returned, she'd have already set up her workstation.
    A door whooshed open somewhere behind her. She froze, listening for footsteps. The seconds ticked by without a sound. It wasn't Micah. He had no reason to hide.
    Ro crept along the corridor. The soft pad of footsteps moved away from her. She followed. For a supposedly abandoned place, the ship seemed to have a whole lot of traffic. Another