Dalton, Tymber - Bightmares [Deep Space Mission Corps 2] (Siren Publishing Ménage Amour) by Tymber Dalton Page B

respiration from him being conscious. “Get him some water,” she told Taber. “No solid food yet.”
    After an hour, the doctor showed no signs of a rage. Emi had Taber reposition him, still shackled but sitting up on the table.
    Ilse wouldn’t leave his side. Emi tried not to think about the woman’s emotions, instead focusing on the job ahead of her. She turned to Sam. “There are three cases of testing supplies on the lander. Please bring them for me.”
    He nodded and set off to do it. She turned to Taber. “Get all the men who aren’t infected, and gather them here so we can take samples. We also need samples from the infected men and from all the boys. We’ll do the women after that, but I want to send the samples from the men up to the Braynow Gaston now and let their labs start working on it. Maybe they can figure it out. We also need the info on that resupply freighter so we can see if their crew had any issues.”
    “You’ve got it, Doc.” He took off to get the men.
    Aaron still hadn’t interrupted her. She watched as he tried to wiggle his nose and upper lip inside his suit’s helmet to scratch an itch. “Will you please go back to the lander now?” she pleaded. “I’m not in any danger. Run a decon cycle in the air lock and get out of that monkey suit.”
    “No.”
    She sighed in frustration. She picked up her com unit and hailed Donna on the K-2 .
    “What have you found out?” Donna asked.
    “I’m going to sync this info up to both your data banks and the Braynow Gaston . See if you can find anything in it, a pattern or something. I’ll have samples to send up to the Braynow Gaston crew in the next couple of hours.”
    “Roger.”
    Emi plugged a patch cable into the hand-held. Within a few seconds, the data streamed up to the ships.
    Donna paged her. “Got it. I’ll go through it now.”
    “Thanks.”
    The sound of a rumbling stomach rolled though the room. Dr. Martinez blushed. “Sorry,” he apologized.
    “That’s okay. You feel like eating something?”
    “I’d kill for a piece of Ilse’s cinnamon toast.”
    Ilse laughed. “Figures you’d ask for something like that.”
    Emi smiled. “One piece to start with. I don’t want to overload your stomach. I should make you eat soup first.”
    Dr. Martinez managed a weak smile. “I’m willing to risk it, Dr. Hypatia.”
    Emi cleared him to try a piece of toast. Ilse hurried off to make it. After a few minutes, Emi leaned back and closed her eyes. A tension headache threatened. Nothing in her preliminary scans indicated anything out of the ordinary. Maybe whatever it was had run its course?
    “My wife makes the best cinnamon bread,” Dr. Martinez boasted to Emi. “You should try it.”
    Then she had a thought. “Cinnamon? You grow that here?”
    “Oh, no. That came from Earth.”
    Her heart sank. “You’ve been growing your grains here?”
    “Almost from the start.” He sighed. “I thought maybe it was a food issue, but everyone’s eating the same things from the same sources.”
    He had a point. A food issue should have shown up a lot sooner. “How long did you live here before you started eating planet-grown foods?”
    He frowned, thinking about it. “After the first year. That’s when we grew a batch of crops and knew they were safe after we’d completed extensive testing.”
    There had to be an answer.
    “What about the transport crews? Did they eat food grown here?”
    He nodded. “Sure. They loved it, being able to eat fresh food instead of frozen or dried and reconstituted.”
    “Livestock?”
    “Earth lines brought here. We’ve been eating seafood since the second year on.”
    “And nothing wrong with the cattle or other livestock?”
    “No. And yes, we grow their food grains here. That was one of the first crops we established and tested so they could be self-sustaining. We couldn’t keep shipping in grains.”
    “Corn?”
    He nodded. “Corn, alfalfa, barley, and various grazing grasses. Some