While space biologists Jonathan Bartell and Gaby Larsen attend a conference held at a base in the asteroid belt, a man approaches Jonathan in great distress.
He was asked to take over command of a previously commercial research station, but strange things started happening: plants glowing in the dark, lights turning themselves on and off, computers misbehaving.
He discovered the cause, but Section Command issues a gag order on the issue. This is strange, because the Force is investing big in research.
Jonathan is left with many questions: who is this man, why does no one want to hear what he says, what is he doing at the conference, and what is the ultimate enemy of humanity?
A novella in the Space Agent Jonathan Bartell series, which explores biology in space and what happens when people start messing with it.
Snippet from the book:
The worst things about Olympus were the corridors. They were grey and featureless, with a grey floor covering, grey walls, a grey ceiling that was almost low enough to touch, and an endless progression of doors on each end.
The doors bore little plaques with numbers, but other than that there was no indication to show where you were. Of course, while coming here as delegates for the conference, Jonathan and Gaby were only allowed to see a very small part of the station. And that was more than enough to know that it was a mind-numbing, confusing warren of a place that harkened back to its low-budget commercial origins.
For the duration of the conference, Jonathan occupied a room in what was called the B corridor. Gaby was with the women in the C corridor.
Already, when going from one to the other, Jonathan had wondered if maybe they should have asked to stay as a couple in the same room. Not that there was a luxury, or, as it were, awkwardness of a double bed available, but at least they would not have wasted so much time looking for each other. But they weren’t a couple, as such, although Jonathan wouldn’t mind if they were.
It was just that . . . well, he guessed he was afraid she’d say no and their relationship would be irretrievably broken.
They were colleagues. A team. They were meant to do work together.
Jonathan’s little room had no less than four beds, but it was more than amazing to suggest that four people were expected to stay in this tiny cubicle for any length of time without killing each other.
Well, his and Gaby’s work showed that killing each other was in fact a fairly common occurrence in space.
Even the breakfast room was small, with a very low ceiling. In fact, the only place where any concessions had been made to the fact that this old commercial station was now used as a conference centre was the conference room itself.
That side of the dumbbell-shaped station had been renovated, with a beautiful conference room that sported all the newest technology.
The accommodation quarters, however, were old and tired, presumably to be upgraded some time in the future. About two hundred delegates had come to this conference on the maintenance of closed ecosystems. It sounded like a boring enough subject, but Jonathan and Gabby had already been through a number of adventures that proved otherwise.
It meant recycling. It meant clean air. It meant human waste—like, shit.
It meant talking about processes and equipment that turned the latter into the former. It meant contamination that might make a habitat unliveable and the atmosphere unstable, and could put the various cleansing and composting processes out of balance. It meant the difference between life and death.
And in that respect, this station was quite an unremarkable place to hold a conference about scientific advances in something of that importance.
But apparently, the commercial company who ran this conference—a first in the asteroid belt—had big plans for it.
