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eyebrow at the way she was sitting in the dark grinding away at her assignments. Carver was gifted, though. Everything came easily to him. He couldn't have understood how Patty had to work to live up to her parents' expectations.
    It wasn't Carver. “Lights,” Patty said.
    A burly blond man—a crew member in a heather-gray athletic shirt stenciled Property of HMCSS
Montreal
—paused inside the doorway. “Sorry,” he said. “I didn't realize anybody was in here.”
    “I was looking at the view,” she said, standing.
    The crewman crossed to the beverage dispenser and drew himself a cup of coffee. “Would you like anything, miss? . . .”
    “Patty,” she said, feeling foolish and about ten years old. “Patricia Valens. Seltzer water, if they have it?”
    He fussed with the panel, not turning toward her. “Are you related to Colonel Valens?”
    Because a girl never would have made it here without knowing somebody, right?
Patty's back tightened. “He's my grandfather. Who are you?” Almost brusque, her voice startled her.
    The blond crewman handed her a disposable cup full of clear fluid. “I'm Lieutenant Ramirez,” he said. “Chris. That's water with lemon juice flavor. Best she'll do.”
    “Thanks.” Patricia sank back into her chair and set the cup on a low molded table, which she noticed was bolted to the floor. “I'm sor—”
    “Think nothing of it,” he answered with a dismissive wave. “All you pilots are testy. I know. Will I be invading if I sit here and do some work?”
    “What are you working on?” Intrigued despite herself.
He called me a pilot!
“I'm not a pilot yet.”
    “I'm a specialist,” he said, producing a hip unit from somewhere and tapping it on. “I maintain the ship's operating system and the pilot interfaces. We'll probably get to know each other very well if you decide to stay in the program.”
    Not
if you don't wash out
.
    Patty felt another blush stain her cheeks as she drew her knees up and, burying her feet under her butt, hid herself in differential equations again.
     
    0430 Hours

Monday 6 November, 2062

Clarke Orbital Platform
    If there was any fate in the galaxy more miserable than suffering through a cold on a space station, Charlie Forster hoped he never had to encounter it.
    It could have been worse, of course. It could have been zero G, or he could have not caught on that he was getting sick until the
Montreal
was under way. Which was a good way to burst an eardrum, if the decongestants and antihistamines didn't quite keep up with the flow of snot.
    As it was, he'd managed to catch the
Gordon Lightfoot
returning to Clarke, and was able to weather his misery in conditions of relatively stable pressure, gravity, and acceleration. Which wasn't to say that he wouldn't cheerfully have died about three times an hour. But at least he wasn't in immediate danger of his head bursting open like an overripe plum, no matter how imminent it felt.
    And he had his work to distract him.
    Charlie leaned back in his desk chair and pressed a damp, freshly microwaved cloth to his face. The aroma of menthol, citrus, and camphor pierced the fresh-poured cement clogging his sinuses, and he coughed in the middle of a sentence “—considering for a moment my own research on Mars, Paul—”
    “You sound
awful
.”
    “I feel awful,” Charlie admitted. “One of the ground-siders must have brought something up from Toronto or Brazil. Half the station is sick.” There
was
a light-speed lag in communication, but it was barely noticeable compared to the eight minutes one way he'd been accustomed to when he was working on Mars.
    “What about the
Montreal
?”
    “Nobody sick over there yet,” Charlie said. “Give it a couple of hours. It looks like a three-day incubation period, which means if they go they'll start dropping any minute now. The earliest infected Clarke staff is already recovering. And
Montreal
's life support is more efficient. More modern. Augmented carbon dioxide