PART 2: THE SPREAD
The others were waiting for her when Amanda arrived at the left bulkhead, straightening her hair as she came up the corridor.
'What kept you?' A trim, black-haired helm op as tight-lipped
below
the belt as she was
above
it asked, her arms crossed and her hips cocked. Amanda flipped her the bird and fingerprinted the door pad. With a blip, the access hatch status light flipped to green, and the group entered, every one of them ignorant of the helm op's attitude except for the op herself. Amanda must have been the last one back, because the lockdown sequence ended and the bulkheads retracted, allowing the groups behind bulkhead doors on both sides onto the bridge. She scowled at Amanda's backside and followed them in.
'Alright people,' Flint said, meeting them on the deck behind her newly released captain's chair, looking the same as she had done hours earlier, having only needed to sit and command things while her crew investigated the ship's potential threat for her. 'Let's hear it. Is this rust-bucket on the brink or do we have a critter on our hands?'
'I don't know Rooms, it feels off. We scan the ship, find nothing, and yet when was the last time we had a habitation breach alert?' A tall, blonde-haired male named Wes Orbison said. Rooms nodded.
'I tend to agree with that, Orbison.' She said.
'I can't believe this, we're literally at our destination and we're being held back from port,' the snippy little helm op said. Her name was Kelsie Chambers, and she was curt and officious and very
by-the-books.
She was also full of dust and cobwebs, but
that
had nothing to do with her posting on a lonely cargo ship and everything to do with the thorn she could be. She was short-tempered and quick to burst and hardly an attractive bed-mate because of it. Amanda wasn't sure she'd even had sex yet, and she was only half joking about the thought.
'You know the rules, we let an undocumented biological onto a new planet, we could destroy the whole ecosystem. Docking is prohibited anywhere unless the scans are clean for 72 hours.'
'So that's it, we wait it out up here and dock in three days,' the weapons operator said, a muscular black man unoriginally named Mike Black said, sitting coolly on the edge of a console that certainly wasn't supposed to have ass on it, period. Rooms ignored his posture -- she was good like that.
'That's the only plan we can go with, we have no other choice. In the meantime, we do six-hourly sweeps every day until this blip is just that on the radar, and live off the dog food. Got it?' Groans emanated from five mouths, but no one disagreed.