Free Derelict: Halcyone Space, Book 1 by Lj Cohen Page A

her arm toward the third window. With fingers moving so fast, they practically blurred, Ro organized the images, overlapping some, discarding others, until she'd built a second ship to echo the schematic. She melded the images into a single fused picture and pulled it until it overlaid the middle one. Standing back, she stared through the photographic representation into the schematic beneath.
    "What are you doing?" Micah asked.
    She jerked, her hands jumping, the images spinning around the room. "Working," she said, before she swept her arm through the entire display and it folded in on itself, disappearing to a tiny point of light. "Did you finish the assay?"
    "Waiting for the next phase."
    "How about you wait somewhere else?"
    Micah didn't know what annoyed him more — that she seemed immune to his Rotherwood charm, or that she was even more closed than he was. "I got here first."
    "Tell you what, I won't snoop if you won't."
    "That's hardly fair. You already know what I'm working on."
    "And I don't care. Learn to cultivate a little disinterest, plant-boy."
    A half smile twitched across her face. Fine. So Ro had secrets. He excelled at uncovering secrets. Most people never looked past his surface. They saw the politician's son and little else. She wouldn't be the first to underestimate him.
    Shrugging, he was glancing at the waiting gene sequencer across the room when an alert sounded. Ro stiffened and turned back to the terminal, ignoring Micah completely. He knew an opportunity when he saw it.
    She pulled up what looked like a medical file. Micah added a few more degrees of difficulty to his self-appointed task. It was a good thing he liked a challenge. He leaned forward, squinting to make out Barre Durbin's blood tox results, the top right corner of the file flagged with a red virtual sticky note.
    "You."
    He jerked his head to face her, ready to retreat with an apology.
    "How much do you know about biology? The breathing kind, not the plant kind."
    Well, plants breathed too, but he knew that's not what she meant. "I'm good."
    She frowned at him, probably wondering how much of a liar he was.
    "What are we looking at?" He stepped beside her, and she moved over to give him room.
    "I was hoping you'd tell me," she said.
    "Well, it's a tox screen."
    "That much I got, moron."
    "Touchy, touchy," Micah said, smiling. He pointed to the information in the footnote. "That tells us they did a rapid assay with a limit of detection cutoff."
    "And that's important why?"
    "Because if the concentration of whatever they're digging for is below a certain threshold, it gets reported as negative, even if the drug is there. The absolute detection is more reliable, but it takes longer, and usually requires a bigger sample."
    "Good."
    Micah glanced over at her and raised an eyebrow before turning back to the report. "They tested for all the major metabolites. See?" The basic report was decent enough, but sloppy, scientifically. A real assay would have included the spectrophotometry curves and the absolutes.
    "So he tested positive for bittergreen." Ro bracketed the results and blew them up.
    "Yeah, but I still don't get how it's responsible for his symptoms." He gestured at the results, but nothing happened. "If you wouldn't mind?"
    Ro flicked a finger and zoomed out to the full results.
    "This doesn't make any sense." Part of him had hoped they'd find something other than the major metabolite for bittergreen. At least that might explain his collapse. "It's basically a borderline amount anyway." A few sips less or an hour later, and Barre's report would probably have shown up clean.
    "Good. Then you have no scientific objections to doctoring the report."
    "Look, there are things you don't screw with. This is probably one of them." What if it was something in the stuff? "I can't be responsible for this," he said, raising his hands and taking a step back.
    Her laugh echoed back at him from all the hard surfaces in the storage bay. "Oh, that's