Free Derelict: Halcyone Space, Book 1 by Lj Cohen

methods, he wouldn't have a comparison and this would turn out to be a colossal waste of time.
    Barre's bittergreen had a yellowish tinge to it. Micah opened the packet and an odd musty smell rose from the crumbly leaves.
    Micah quickly lost himself in the routine: Weigh out ten micrograms of the dried sample. Add it and the extraction buffer to the test tube. Shake, warm, extract, chill. The familiar prep for the assay distracted him, at least a little, from his father. The hell of it was he loved the lab work and studying botany on the cellular level. His mother had been so proud when Micah got his early acceptance to Uni. She'd already started to show signs of the neural degeneration that would kill her eight months later, but Micah had been so absorbed in his schooling and his father in himself, that neither of them noticed. If his mother knew, she also knew there wasn't anything they could do about it.
    The beep of a timer broke into his memories. He stripped off the gloves, grabbed the sample rack with two labeled test tubes, and headed through the rudimentary airlock back to what had been his office space before Ro had disrupted his only refuge. She, like his father, seemed to be able to wreck his life with as little thought to the consequences. What in the Hub was she doing here, anyway?
    The heat and humidity faded as cool air from outside the bubble mixed in the airlock. The sweat chilled on Micah's skin, pimpling his arms in gooseflesh. The outer seal opened, and he stepped into the chaos of Ro's half of the room. She stood in front of the surplus counter that served as her desk, the holographic interface sparkling all around her.
    Watching her manipulate the images and windows winking in and out of existence, he forgot his annoyance. She seemed more program than human, her whole body interacting with the display. Micah blinked, trying to keep her in focus. Her hair had slipped free of its usual tie back and whipped around her shoulders every time she moved her head. He couldn't look away.
    By the time he realized what he had done, Micah was halfway across the room, standing just outside the colorful sphere surrounding her. His hands tightened around the test tube rack and the glass encased samples clanked against one another, startling him out of his trance. Ro's gaze flicked toward his face. He stared into her sometimes-brown, sometimes-green eyes before she shifted her glance away from him and back to a part of the program that scrolled so quickly, Micah couldn't make out more than a blurred letter or two.
    He wasn't even sure she'd really seen him. Turning his back on her, he walked to his side of the room to load the centrifuge. Once the samples had been spun, he washed them gently in cold ethanol, shaking the test tube to collect as much of the material as he could. As long as he had to do this, he might as well do it right.
    Out of the corner of his eye, he caught occasional blurs of movement. Ro still stood at her desk, manipulating something on the heads-up holo. She didn't try to talk to him. Working alongside someone who showed the same insane focus as he had, made the lab less lonely.
    He turned back to the samples. The dried bittergreen had balled up nicely into tiny pellets he collected carefully and placed in a drying tray. He'd have to wait at least an hour until they could be loaded into the sequencer. For now, he could stretch the kinks out of his neck and shoulders.
    Looking across the room, he caught Ro in a rare still moment. She stared into the display, her arms upraised, motionless, a frown adding lines to her forehead. Micah crossed to her side of the lab. One virtual window showed code more complex than he'd ever seen before. He squinted at it, but couldn't keep up with its scroll rate. A second displayed a full ship's schematic of the original freighter. A third window flickered with a barrage of lo res images Micah recognized from the ruined ship.
    She pressed her lips together and swept