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Someone else had a similar question. “What are you doing to my specimens?” a voice asked sharply.
Startled, she jerked around.
Kim Jong Suk frowned at her. Anger narrowed his eyes. He stood only three inches taller than her, but he carried himself as if he were taller than seven feet.
Jazz didn’t back down. “Your specimens? I thought you collected these for a late-night snack. Clearly no researcher would mishandle their research subjects in this manner.”
Kim’s lips paled to a hard line under a thin black mustache. He was a professor from KAIST—the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. He was clearly unaccustomed to someone challenging him, especially a post-grad student, and a woman to boot.
“Ms. Patel,” he said coldly, emphasizing her lack of a doctorate. “I have time-sensitive research and found your chamber to be mostly empty. And with Dr. Reed gone, I imagine no real science will be conducted here. The tank might as well be put to good use in the meantime. I’m sure whatever busy work assigned to you by Dr. Reed can wait while real research is being done.”
Jazz merely smiled at his condescension, not taking her eyes off him. “We’re about to identify an entirely new subphylum ofCnidaria. And you’re playing with a species of shrimp that have been studied for years. What is your research? To discover a new way to stir fry them?”
“Ms. Patel, I’ll have you know—”
“And I see you’re still here atTitan Station Down. While my boss is six miles under the ocean, exploring an entirely new biosphere. So, whose research is truly more important?”
By now, the other biologists in the room stared toward them. Jazz was sure the story of this confrontation would spread throughout the station.
Kim’s hands had balled into fists.
Jazz’s smile broadened.Try it, bub.She had been raised with three older brothers and knew how to fight dirty.
The conflict was interrupted by a sharpclickfrom the tank behind her. She turned as the decompression door popped open near the base of the chamber. Her sample was ready for collection.
She swung around and carefully withdrew the small open-mouthed Nalgene bottle that contained her sliver of coral. While she would haveliked to have knocked Kim down another few pegs, she had real work to do. She snapped the decompression chamber closed and collected a matching lid before turning back around.
Kim crowded close, anxious for her to get out of his way, trying to assert his dominance. Jazz continued to block him, staring down into the bottle. He huffed loudly, but she stood and swirled the content, rolling the black sliver of extracted coral in the seawater.
“Can you please step aside?” Kim asked her. It clearly strained him to be even this civil.
She finally relented, feeling that she had affirmed her place well enough. But before she could shift out of the way, the floor jolted. The sharp quake threw her into Kim. On reflex, he grabbed for her hand to hold her up, knocking the sample bottle away. Its contents splashed across their fingers.
The ground shook for another five long seconds.
When it ended, she pushed out of Kim’s arms, her face heated with embarrassment. She shook her wet fingers and stared down at the bottle on the floor. She bent to collect it, praying the cored sample was still inside.
Before she could touch it, something stung her middle finger. It felt worse than a hornet strike. She gasped and dropped to a knee. The intensity of the pain grew into a fire. She turned her hand and spotted a millimeter-size green dot clinging to her finger. She grimaced and brushed the polyp off.
Kim stumbled back, rubbing his hand on his chest. His face was fixed in a rictus of pain. He had clearly been stung, too. “What was that?”
Jazz picked up the bottle, which rattled with the sample piece still inside. “Just a coral bite,” she scolded, acting nonchalant while her finger continued to burn.
She collected the plastic lid and screwed it on. As she did, the pain slowly ebbed. Kim frowned and headed out of the room; apparently his time-sensitive research wasn’t as urgent as he had claimed.
Jazz crossed to a cleaning station, gathered paper towels and a spray bottle of antiseptic solution, and cleaned up her spill. She dumped itall into the biological waste chute, where the contents would eventually be incinerated.
Once done, she headed away, embarrassed and subdued. She was sure this incident would also be shared across the station’s tiers. Feeling somewhat defeated, she returned to the lab and stored the sample for the night.
I’ll start fresh in the morning.
She headed up toward the women’s dorm. She opened and closed her hand, working away the residual heat in her finger. She felt foolish for breaking safety protocol. She should have sealed the bottle as soon as she had taken it from the decompression chamber.
While climbing the stairs, she pictured the little pink shrimp toppling to the bottom of the high-pressure tank, chased by emerald polyps. From the fire of that sting, she now understood how the small crustacean had been felled by the attack.
The polyp’s venom was intense.
Thank goodness I’m not a shrimp.
