Orbital

Fifty-Eight Insight

Samantha is sitting in a bare room in the hotel with a camera trained on her. Her eyes are still full of tears, her cheeks puffy and red.

I had Tamara and Eduard escort her to the room. They say she insisted on her innocence, claiming she had no idea how the canister got into her lab and begged to talk to me.

I still haven’t spoken to her. I have a variety of reasons. One is that I don’t know what I should ask. I have no idea how to conduct an interrogation. I think it best to leave that up to the people back on Earth. I’m too unqualified.

The other reason is that I’m conflicted. While I suspected her, like everyone else, as a potential suspect from the get-go, it’s just hard to reconcile my experience with her with the implication of her actions.

Unfortunately, a lot of things fit. She was there when I found the jammer. Her anxiety of the exploding spacecraft could have been a mask for her guilt.

Still…I’m just not sure.

All my life I’d regarded myself as a fairly good judge of character. I steered clear of, or intentionally into, the kinds of girlfriends other guys suddenly described as “psycho.”

My sophomore year of college I was assigned a roommate that was the most charming person you could imagine meeting. He would pepper everyone with compliments and had an inspiring story about how he lost both his parents when he was a child and made his way through the foster program and paid his way into college.

It took me twenty-four hours to realize he was a pathological liar and probably a sociopath. I threatened to withdraw unless I was assigned to another dorm room.

He was caught four months later stealing laptops, phones and game consoles out of other rooms. There were also rumors of sexual assault on girls who took pity on his sob story and didn’t want to report him.

Most everyone was in disbelief, either thinking it was some misunderstanding, or expressing their complete surprise at how well he hid that from everyone.

Not to me. It was right there on the surface. He told you anything and everything to get you to like him because he was covering up for something very dark.

Unlike my classmates, I’ve never had to say that someone caught me off guard with a shocking side to their personality.

Even when I spotted my commander putting a gun into his spacesuit on that fateful trip to the Korolev space station where he and Peterson lost their lives, I trusted my instincts about the man.

I certainly entertained the idea that I could have been wrong all along, but ultimately I was right.

I guess that might be why I’m not, or haven’t been, taken in by those kinds of personalities. I assume we all have a little meter that swings back and forth between absolute truth and bullshitter. Every time we make a little white lie it flickers to the bullshit side. Most of us keep our needle in the middle. Bennet’s meter was always on the absolute truth side — even when it cost him. His matter of factness was too much for NASA and that’s why he went to work for iCosmos and Vin Amin — who loved brutal honesty like a sunflower loves the sun.

Did I think Samantha was a little neurotic? Absolutely. All scientists are to some degree. And as sexist as it makes me to think so, I’ve found highly intelligent and attractive women to be a little more on that side as well. I think we men make them that way. We tell them on one hand how we treat them as peers, then comment behind backs to our buddies about their looks and fuckability.

Surrounded by two-faces who treat you one way, while thinking very differently, has got to make you a little on edge.

Samantha’s mechanism was a mixture of taunting and innuendo. I’d like to think she directed this at me because there was a genuine chemistry. But now it looks like it was cold calculation meant to keep me off guard.

Samantha stares up at the camera and wipes away at her eyes. Her shock has turned to rage. She’s mouthing something, but I have the volume turned down.

“You okay, David?” Laney asks over the comm.

“Yeah. I’m just not sure about this.”

“Me neither.”

I don’t know why I was expecting Laney to be filled with schadenfreude over this. She’s a far more evolved person than that. She’s certainly more evolved than me.

I click on the intercom. “I need everyone back in the lounge module ASAP.”

“What’s up?” asks Laney.

“A hunch.”

Tamara is the first one to poke her head into the module. “A new development?”

“We need everyone in here now.”

“Everyone is probably in their labs making sure nothing is missing,” she explains.

I get back on the intercom. “I will physically escort anyone not in the lounge module to here in two-minutes.”

People begin filing in, floating through the hatch. After a minute we’re still a few heads short.

“Where’s Ling?” I ask Randolph, his search partner, as he arrives.

“He said he had to go check on something.”

“Jesus.” I’d fire my gun into the air if it would help.

I spot Attwell and Cara hovering in the corner. I’m about to ask them to get Ling, then think better of it.

“Dr. Warren. Go get Samantha and bring her back up here.”

“Are we going to gaslight her?” she asks sarcastically.

“No. The opposite.” I head for the hatch. “Everyone stay here. If I catch you in the corridor I’ll shoot you.”

“Is he joking?” somebody asks behind my back.

I wouldn’t call it a joke as much as a threat. Things are already way too out of control.

I decide to give them some explanation for my erratic nature. “Sorry to act this way. But I think we’ve been had. Eduard can you figure out a way to fingerprint the canister?”

“Yeah. I have a UV light and a protein spray. Can I go get it?”

“Great. Take Alton with you.”

“Where are you headed?” asks Tamara.

“To round up the stragglers then apologize to Dr. Turco.”

I’ve been so stupid. I’m ashamed I even let it go this far. I just hope I’m not too late.