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“Are you going to fight or stare off into space like you’ve forgotten your own name?” Rexx threw out another punch and growled.
Striker rolled his shoulders. If he tried to help Wren, she’d think he was messing with her. “Let’s fight.”
“Anytime. I’m always happy to kick the crap out of you,” Rexx said.
Chapter 3
Wren jerked upright. She groaned as her neck protested. The lights were low and her eyes gritty. Where the hell was she?
“ELVIS, what’s going on?” Her throat was dry, as if she’d slept with her mouth open.
“You fell asleep at your desk. I lowered the lights so you wouldn’t be disturbed,” he said.
Wren massaged the kinks in the back of her neck. “I only meant to be here for a couple of hours. How long have I been asleep?”
The lights rose to a warm, mellow glow. “Eight hours.”
She leaped to her feet, her heart pounding. “I’ve been asleep here all night? What time is it? I’ve got a mission to get to.”
“It’s seven forty-five AM. Your mission is leaving in fifteen minutes,” ELVIS said.
“Fifteen minutes!” She raced to the door then ran back to the chaos she’d left at her workstation. “You should have woken me. You know my schedule.”
“You deserved a lie-in after the exploding toad incident.”
“Screw the lie-in. I have to fix the mess I made yesterday.” She stored slide samples into boxes and closed her programs on the computer.
“Or rather, the mess Striker made yesterday,” ELVIS said.
“It’s the same thing. We’re a team. He messes up, I mess up.” She made a valiant effort of tidying her workstation, grabbed her tablet, and opened the mission brief. Sweat prickled under her armpits. She wasn’t ready. She needed to change her clothes. And... And... “Oh! Dinky!”
“I checked on him during the night. He’s not dead,” ELVIS said.
“That’s not reassuring. He’ll be angry and hungry. I’m a terrible parent. ELVIS, can you shut things down for me here? The spectrogram is still on, and the—”
“Of course. I trust you feel better after your sleep.”
“I feel terrible. I really wish you’d woken me. Next time, I’ll set an alarm.”
“You did. Just before you went to sleep at your desk, you mumbled at me to wake you up by six.”
She glanced at the time. “Why didn’t you wake me?”
“Humans need sleep to recover and regenerate their cells. You had a stressful day. I made an executive decision.”
“ELVIS!” This damned AI was too clever and independent-minded for his own good. “You shouldn’t make decisions about me. It was my choice when I woke up, not yours. Don’t do it again.”
“I make no promises. The well-being of the crew is my top priority. If you don’t get enough sleep, your productivity falls by twelve percent.”
“It feels like it’s fallen by eighty percent after sleeping at my desk.” She scanned through the tablet, looking at the list of things she needed to take on the mission. “I’m heading back to my quarters.”
“Have a pleasant day.”
She grumbled under her breath as she jogged along the corridor that led from the lab. Pleasant day! So far, it had started out as a waking nightmare and was rapidly going downhill.
She’d only meant to spend a couple of hours in the lab, seeing if she could get useful DNA from the sapo explosivo remains. None of it had been any good. The opportunity to capture a sapo and preserve the species was lost to them for now.
She arrived at her quarters and dashed through the door. She took a quick sniff of her armpits. There was no time for a morning shower or anything to eat, but she could change and squirt away the worst of the smell with her deodorant.
