Free Grower's Omen (The Fixers, book #2: A KarmaCorp Novel) by Audrey Faye

but now my Fixer radar was up. It didn’t take too long to realize that everyone else neatly piled food on their own plates—and only their own.
    Clearly these people weren’t Lightbodies.
    Whatever. Fixers were supposed to blend in as much as possible, but I wasn’t going to apologize for disrupting the culture of a buffet line, especially when that culture needed fixing. Tribes shared food, and the good ones shared it with happiness and generosity of spirit. That was a belief well established in me before I could walk, but I’d spent the last ten years in communities all over the quadrant, and that little piece of wisdom hadn’t been wrong yet.
    When we reached the end of the buffet, I smiled a thanks to my temporary partner, and then I turned to Glenn. “Where to?”
    “Far left corner by the windows.”
    There were windows everywhere, but I assumed he meant the particularly spectacular bank of them at the far end of the caf, with what appeared to be a view of a lovely Japanese water garden. I headed that direction, moving slowly enough to make eye contact with the locals, and quickly enough that they didn’t try to stop me.
    And learned plenty before I got to the far left corner.
    For three hundred people, this was a very quiet cafeteria. What conversation there was stayed at the individual tables, and the people sitting together tended to be wearing skinsuits or lab coats that matched their table mates. If this was an organism, it was one where the cells didn’t talk much and definitely didn’t mingle.
    I also saw more evidence of the recent disturbances. One young man with his arm in a cast—if I remembered rightly, he’d gotten in the way of a sleepwalking scientist and been pushed down a stairwell for his efforts. An older woman with curly hair and paranoid eyes, sitting at a table alone.
    And those were just the visible wounds.
    I was on high alert by the time I reached the table in the far left corner. It was raised on a small dais and surrounded by eight chairs, five of them filled. I navigated to an empty chair with my back to the gardens. For now, information trumped beauty.
    I watched five sets of eyes as I set down my plate and took a seat. Politeness, and a veneer of welcome—but unlike Glenn’s genuine warmth, it didn’t run any deeper than that.
    Or that was true for four of them, anyhow. The man on my far left was a study in dark and handsome, and as distant as the craters of Pluton.
    “This is Mary Louise Bastur, and her husband, John.” Glenn had begun introductions, and I yanked my attention back to where it was supposed to be. “They head up the science team here on Xirtaxis Minor.”
    Mary Louise was clearly the force to be reckoned with, and her eyes said she wasn’t yet certain whether she planned to let me do any reckoning or not. “I don’t know what you can do that we haven’t already done, Grower, but we’ll appreciate whatever useful assistance you can provide.”
    I was fluent enough in diplomatic fencing to translate that just fine. She wasn’t expecting to find me useful.
    Her husband smiled, his eyes kind. “I’ll be happy to show you around our facilities at your convenience. We’ve got some lovely gardens, and a hothouse facility you might find particularly interesting.”
    His words were much more pleasant, but they translated exactly the same as hers. If I didn’t want to be pushed into irrelevance here, gently or otherwise, I was going to have to take a stand. I was, however, wise enough not to do it quite yet. I nodded mildly and turned to the next face at the table—fast enough to catch the quickly veiled surprise.
    There was a lot of that going around this evening.
    “This is Anastasia Toli.” Glenn kept the introductions rolling. “She keeps the labs running smoothly.”
    She held out a businesslike hand for me to shake. “Welcome to Xirtaxis Minor, Dr. Lightbody. Everyone calls me Toli. If you need anything during your stay here, I’ll be happy to