The Robert Walton was deader than a dodo.

Quinn suppressed the shiver as he and Thane materialized in the middle of the central cargo space of the ship. The still air filled his lungs, but there was nothing living in it, the oppressive silence around them a warning that they were not welcome here. 

Instantly, Thane had his gun in his shoulder, turning in a circle as he checked out their surroundings. Allen looked down at the phaser in his hand then back at the cannon the commander carried. The commander was a unit and a half so the thing looked like a kid’s toy in his hands. Quinn wasn’t the smallest of guys, but if he’d tried to pick that up, he’d have dislocated his shoulder and broken his own foot when he dropped it.

But, he reassured himself as he followed Thane as they made their way through the research ship and its shadows, he was more than packing in the brains department. Even if his ‘visitor’ from the time he’d spent as a guest of the Devore Imperium was long gone, it had left him a few… gifts. Enough for him to know there wasn’t anything alive on the ship. 

Thane caught his eye, and indicated the lockers and equipment crates around them. This was the central load space of the ship, the catch-all location for everything on the ship from catering supplies, right through sensitive scientific equipment. 

The beam from his flashlight stabbed through the darkness, washing over the boxes around them like silent sentinels. The skin between his shoulder blades itched but he shook his head. He’d been in many labs in his time… This kind of  jumbled debris was normal. 

“Main lab should be up ahead,” he murmured in a low voice. The sound boomed in the silence like a gunshot in a mausoleum. 

“I’ll take point.” Thane moved ahead of him without waiting for an answer.

Quinn didn’t argue. Thane was the hazard team guy, not him, if he wanted to put himself between Quinn and a phaser bolt or worse, who was he to argue? He kept his eyes and ears open as they moved, slotting himself in behind Thane. So far, he hadn’t seen anything out of the ordinary. No blood or bodies… no mad scientists lab. Pity. He’d been looking forward to something juicy.

Thane stopped in the doorway to the main lab, pausing for longer than Quinn expected. Long enough for tension to march up his spine, especially when he noticed the tightness in the big commander’s shoulders. 

Why had he stopped?

Then he moved aside and Quinn looked at him in curiosity as he passed by. They moved into the central chamber of the lab. It was octagonal, with work spaces off it like the spokes of a wheel. 

“Thought I saw something,” Thane replied, even though Quinn hadn’t asked, his deep voice little more than a rumble. “It’s nothing though. Take a look around. All this is… yeah, I’m useless with all this stuff.”

“Explosives, right?”

Thane turned to him, his features heavy with a frown. “Excuse me?” 

“What you said before… about layman’s terms unless we were talking about things that went boom? I assumed from that you worked with explosives. I mean…” he motioned to Thane. “You move like you know how to use that, squire.”

“Yeah. I do.” 

Quinn nodded, holstering his phaser as he started to look over the workbenches. There were a couple that had files and padds, actual paper notebooks. 

“Looks like there were two people working in here,” he said, keeping up a running commentary as Thane started to check out the rooms off the main area. 

He ran his hands over the work-benches as he moved, grounding himself with the touch of the metal. It was cold, the heat leaching from the ship without the environmental controls running at full efficiency. They’d booted things up remotely, but only as much as they needed to check things out over here.

He frowned as he looked at the notes on one of the counters. The handwriting was looping and scrawled, but… his gaze caught on the i that was dotted with a small heart… stylised, with doodles in the corner of the paper. He smiled slightly at the daisies. The pink pen.

“There was a young woman here,” he called out, keeping Thane in the loop. “She was matching records of some kind… looks like DNA pairs.” 

Thane grunted in reply, moving between the rooms. Quinn watched him out of the corner of his eye. It was like a dance each time. Approach the door fast, make a complicated movement with the big gun, like he was drawing lines in the air as he darted from side to side in the door frame, then move on. 

He moved around the counters, his own gaze flitting to the chiller cabinet at the back of the room. Bingo. If he took a look at what chemicals they were using in here, he might have more of an idea what Henries had been working on. 

Stepping around the last counter he froze. 

There was a head on the floor, long decayed eye sockets staring right into his soul. The implant on the side of its face drew what flesh was left up into a grinning rictus. 

“Bollocks.”