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“You are an empath?”
“Nope. I have years of people watching skills. I knew they’d come in handy one day. I never expected them to land me on a space station with a host of weird and wonderful aliens.”
Loka pulled back and studied her. “You received training for life in space before coming here?”
“I knew how to match make. I’ve been doing it on Earth for years. As for shooting into space, not so much. We had a one-month induction program. We were given the go-ahead to launch My Single Alien earlier than expected and didn’t have much time to learn to spacewalk. Diadora needed us up here and operational as quickly as possible.”
“That was a risk, you coming here. What if you didn’t like space?”
Heather shrugged. “Trust me; anything is better than Earth.”
Loka nodded as he finished attending to her wrists. Earth was on its knees. He’d seen old photographs of the planet. Once a beautiful, vibrant blue globe, it now hung in space like a dying blob of toxic sludge.
Heather rotated her wrists. “You must have medical training.”
“The basics.” Loka knelt in front of Heather, noticing her color was restored and feeling the knot of concern in his stomach recede. “Do you feel able to investigate our current situation?”
“Absolutely. We need to know what’s going on. There could be a crisis in engineering. I couldn’t get hold of anyone from there. It won’t be the first time they’ve blown things up. The first few months we were here, there was an explosion once a week. Some people even ran a book on how big the next explosion would be and if there would be any casualties.”
“People bet on the safety of the station?” Loka shook his head. Humans could be so odd. He stood and returned the medical supplies to the bathroom. When he returned, Heather was by the comm panel on his wall, pressing buttons.
“Nothing is working. Nobody is around.”
“They’ll be around. Aliens don’t simply vanish. We just need to find them.”
“Some good old-fashioned detective work.” Heather smiled at him. “I can handle that. I enjoy a good mystery.”
“I enjoy solving puzzles, myself.” He returned her smile. “It could be a virus infecting the comm system.”
“Maybe the station’s systems have been hacked.”
“It could be that.” Loka opened a comm channel. “Hoan, are you receiving me?”
There was no reply.
“Hoan’s your friend?”
“He is. We’re working on a project together.”
“The mapping project of the Milky Way?”
He turned to her. “You know of that?”
Heather’s cheeks flushed, and she looked away. “It interests me. I don’t pretend to understand it all, but I’d like to learn more.”
“It’s not a secret project. Do you know about the percentage calculations we are anticipating for dark matter in your galaxy?”
“No. Not really.” Heather shrugged. “I’m just a matchmaker who loves space.”
“Which is as important, if not more so. If there were no people to work because no babies had been born, then this is all for nothing. What you do is more significant than my work.”
Heather’s hand brushed his arm, making his skin tingle. “Thanks. That’s nice of you to say so. What I do isn’t so special. You just have to see it a few times, the spark that goes off between people when they meet and like what they see. It’s a science thing, as well. It’s chemical reactions triggering in the body, you know, when you see a nice pair of eyes or long legs, or you see a great set of boobs.” Her gaze went to her chest. “Well, you know what I mean. The sorts of things that attract individuals to each other. Big... big eyes, nice hair. The indicators to show you’re genetically fit.”
Loka resisted the temptation to study Heather’s chest. He already knew how appealing it was. “Matchmaking is more scientific than I realized.”
“I can teach you matchmaking if you teach me dark matter calculations.”
“Well, yes. Why not?” Loka looked around his room. “But first, we need to figure out why these bots have malfunctioned. In fact, we need to figure out why this station is misfiring.”
