He had called the contract a fancy way of charging people for being scared.
At the time, everyone had laughed.
Sepha was not laughing now.
She asked why Helix was investigating possible defects in its own shipments.
The security director explained that Helix operated the only transport fleet approved to carry the temperature-sensitive medicine into the outer sectors.
That answer did not satisfy her.
It frightened her more.
She opened the case again and examined the cartridges beneath a diagnostic lamp.
The printed batch number was genuine, the seals matched the approved standard, and the liquid inside had a faint violet shimmer that legitimate antivenom did not possess.
Sepha asked a technician to prepare a spectroscopic comparison.
The result arrived twenty-six minutes later.
The cartridges contained a biological protein that had never appeared in any authorized formula.
It was not inactive filler.
It was an enzyme designed to interfere with the binding mechanism of the medicine.
Someone had made the treatment less effective on purpose.
The security director leaned toward the screen and asked whether that could happen accidentally during transport.
Sepha replied that transport could damage a protein, but it could not write a new one.
She ordered the laboratory sealed and called the one person whose response to a medical crisis was almost guaranteed to be inappropriate.
Hamish answered from the cockpit of his cargo ship with a piece of toast in his mouth.
His first words were an inquiry about whether Sepha had finally found a way to cook the antivenom.
She told him seven people were dead and that someone had been altering their medicine.
The toast disappeared from his hand.
Tell me where to land, he said.
Sepha hesitated because she remembered the months after the original bite, when the human had become a symbol that he never wanted to be.
Every news service wanted him to demonstrate his remarkable blood.
Every corporation wanted his face next to a product.
Children sent drawings of blue monsters with human teeth.
Hamish had answered them all with jokes because jokes were easier than admitting he was frightened.
Now she asked whether he understood how serious this might become.
I understand seven dead people, he said.
That’s serious enough.
He cut the connection before she could argue.
Across the station, Vela sat on her bed and watched a video recording of her mother in a workshop.
Her mother was a short woman with careful hands and a voice that treated complex machinery as though it might understand kindness.
