Sepha asked for the raw temperature logs from Bluehaven Cold Storage.
Voss said they were commercially protected documents.
Imani asked whether commercial protection was meant to prevent the theft of engineering designs or the discovery of dead patients.
Voss looked at her as though a piece of equipment had interrupted his speech.
He explained that the documents could not be released without approval from the consortium’s legal department.
Hamish asked whether the legal department could spare a moment to explain why medicine had been traveling beside venomous animals.
Voss said there was no proof of such travel.
Vela stood up beside the diagram.
She told him her mother had found the shells.
Voss looked at the girl, and his expression changed so briefly that Sepha almost missed it.
He knew her.
The realization arrived as a physical sensation, a tightening in the chest that no diagnostic instrument could measure.
Voss asked Vela for her name.
She answered with her mother’s name instead.
My mother was Nerin Tal, she said.
Voss said he remembered her as a talented employee with a history of unauthorized investigations.
Vela took a step backward.
He spoke about her mother as though he were reading the last paragraph of a personnel file.
Hamish moved until he stood between the girl and the representative.
He said that Nerin had entrusted them with evidence of danger and that the station would examine it.
Voss smiled again and suggested that unverified claims could frighten frontier communities that relied on the treatment.
Sepha said that communities had more reason to fear an undisclosed medical defect.
Hravik asked both parties to submit written requests and promised an independent review.
The meeting ended without a resolution.
Within an hour, Helix had petitioned for custody of the data wafer on the grounds that it contained proprietary information.
Within two hours, a message appeared on the station’s public network accusing Sepha of allowing a contaminated child into the medical bay.
Within three hours, patients who needed antivenom were being turned away from clinics by frightened administrators.
Sepha had spent her professional life trying to prevent panic by being precise.
Now she learned that precision could be turned against her by people who controlled which facts reached the public.
She called the senior nursing staff into the conference room and described the problem in plain language.
Some cartridges had been altered, she said, but they had identified a reliable method of distinguishing them from authentic medicine.
