Last Voyage of Delilah, Episode 101: An Auspicious Start, Part 5

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Once he's sure he's got them both out of earshot, Valentine cuts to the chase.

Valentine: (evenly) You know something. What do you know?
Tian: It's not what I know. It's what I'm afraid of.
Valentine: What are you afraid of?

Tian takes a beat to frame her reply. It's obvious the subject is a sensitive one. Valentine keep his expression neutral: no judging here.

Tian: … When the Independents took Boros … (pauses)
Valentine: Yes?
Tian: … I was on Boros.
Valentine: Okay.
Tian: My clinic was evacuated. I evacuated my clinic …
Valentine: Okay.
Tian: I did not go.
Valentine: Okay.
Tian: I spent three months in custody.
Valentine: Okay.
Tian: And I was sent back in a prisoner transfer.
Valentine: Okay. (thinks) So the Alliance is not terribly fond of you.
Tian: … Well, I put in my retirement papers and I was informed in my exit interview that they feel they didn't have hard enough evidence or facts to convict me on anything.
Valentine: (nods) I know that particular line in the sand. Go on.
Tian: I … am concerned that this particular … (tries again) … I don't think I'm important enough as a person to have been set up with these weapons. However, if they wanted to make an example of someone and they felt it was important enough to do, I'm a good target for such a thing.
Valentine: (grim sigh) …. Yeah.
Tian: There is no one who has these weapons like this. No one.
Valentine: Well, someone clearly did.
Tian: Sure, they've been developing them. These are not in-circulation weapons.
Valentine: (nods, thinks) … Give me a minute to process it … (sighs) … Okay This is beyond … The Triad are clearly involved. The question is, are they involved in somebody else and—Once again, let me step back. What I don't want to get into is meaningless wheel-churning about who's involved where and in what. What I want immediately is—
Tian: My concern is when we land, the greeting party that we may have could look two different ways. It could be the Feds, and frankly if it is, I'll give myself up. I haven't done anything, this has nothing to do with me, but I'll still give myself up for that. All right? I will not let you and your crew, your people, go to prison for something they were not involved in.
Valentine: I accept that you want to do that but if the alliance is like any bureaucracy anywhere I'm reasonably certain that at that point, we're going to get swept up in it.
Tian: But I will do what I can if that's what we're facing. My main concern here is, let's put all that aside, put my situation completely out of it: someone in the IRP is selling prototype weapons.
Valentine: You're jumping again.
Tian: No, I'm not, because they had to load those weapons into my clinic's container when they packed it. Those containers have not left IRP custody.
Valentine: That doesn't necessarily mean the IRP are selling weapons. Someone there, yes. But it doesn't mean the IRP.
Tian: No, the organization itself may have nothing to do with it, but someone in it who's high enough to get their hands on this kind of weaponry.
Valentine: Once again, I want us to be clear. I don't want us to add any more groups to our list of people who may be after us.
Tian: I'm not trying to say the IRP itself, but someone in it.
Valentine: All right, so there's somebody.
Tian: And are we the only container they have?
Valentine: (evenly) Honestly, Doctor, I don't care. What I want us to do is get out of this with our hides intact. I don't see any need for any of us to play the hero to get us out. What we need to do is find a way to get rid of these and get rid of them in a way that won't get traced back to us. I don't know what that is yet. I'm not saying I have it.
Tian: One of the two things is supposed to happen. Either we were supposed to wind up with our containers jacked, so that I that to turn around and say hey, I got truck-jacked. That means I wasn't supposed to be out here on this mission or something. Right? Or they now think I've now taken their weapons on board our ship and somewhere out here, someone is waiting for them but neither I nor Vikki knew they were there. So, who's supposed to be meeting us where to get this stuff? I'm not dropping the clinic anywhere. It's supposed to continue to travel with me.
Valentine: Yeah. (breath of a sigh) The problem is, the Triad may or may not have known—or rather, the Triad may have known that these were being shipped and just took the opportunity to jack it, but that doesn't eliminate the fact that when we have Triad folks and whoever's making and shipping the weapons … (Never mind!) … It's all to hell.
Tian: (sighs) Oh, God …
Valentine: This is the last thing I wanted. I just wanted to scrap the ship. Let's just for moment keep it under wraps. We've got a couple of days to think about it while we're on the way there. And we'll see what we can do about … (sighs)
Tian: I want to have your permission to test one of the rounds.
Valentine: I want to know before you do it exactly what your precautions are going to be. I trust you but I need to know.
Tian: I can seal the clinic completely off. It's in a container, for God's sake.
Valentine: The clinic. Not the infirmary?
Tian: Not the infirmary. The clinic.
Valentine: Yeah. I wouldn't trust being able to seal anything on this ship off. So you're sealing off the clinic. What's your risk when you do that?
Tian: The risk is primarily to me, primarily.
Valentine: See, this is what I want to know.
Tian: I don't know what the risk is to me because I don't know what's in the round.
Valentine: Once again, it's not knowing exactly what the risk is but about who the risk is to.
Tian: Just me.
Valentine: … Okay ….
Tian: And if something happens to me, you jettison that cargo container.
Valentine: Can we do that in space?
Tian: Yup. Seen it done.
Valentine: Okay. I'll take your word for it but just take all precautions.
Tian: Well … let me rephrase myself and say that on a normal ship, I've seen that done.
Valentine: I'll take your word for it but take all precautions, please.

They inspect the clinic, looking at how they'd accomplish it. Tian gives it a good look-over and thinks on the procedure.

Tian: I'm sealing it under a hood and if something happens to me, you know what to do. But I assure you it's going to be sealed off.
Valentine: I trust everyone's individual judgment until proven otherwise.
Tian: I'm pretty sure that opening it isn't going to make it instantly aerosolize but that's the purpose of the hood. In case it does, it'll be contained.

She takes up one of the bullets and seals herself up in her container. She examines the bullet in the containment box her clinic was equipped with. She determines that the bullet tips are made of a type of plastic designed to break on contact. That suggests an aerosol dispersal. Tian frowns, disliking this new development, because bullets are designed to kill people as they are. The person's already dead from the bullet, so why introduce a biological agent into the equation? She tries to figure a way to extract a sample via syringe without breaking the bullet, but it's sealed up in a way to prevent extraction. She would have to breach the case and on brutally honest reconsideration of what she's got to work with, Tian has to admit she can't guarantee that she can contain whatever the bullet would release. If she were in a decent lab, she would try it. But here?

Accepting defeat, she unseals the container and delivers the news to Valentine who's waiting just outside.

Tian: No. I won't do it. I don't feel confident that I can keep everyone safe.
Valentine: That's okay. Once again, more information is better than less information but in this case I don't feel like we're gaining a lot that we don't already have.

There being nothing more to be said, they rejoin the others on the bridge. They walk in just in time to hear Rachel regaling the crew with a tale obviously from Delilah's glory days.

Rachel: … compared to anuther ship, Delilah's got a kick like a mule, but it's like runnin' a sports car.
Poco: (thoughtfully) Well, it's like a recycler … You capture the engine waste and use it to fuel the booster.

Recycler? Engine waste? Booster? What? Maybe not a tale from Delilah's glory days, then. Valentine and Tian settle to the side to listen. Rachel confirms that Freddie's father, unlike his son, knew what he was doing.

Rachel: I told ya Pipes was brilliant. Is there any way you could fix it?
Poco: From inside the ship? I dunno. I'll have to take a better look.
Rachel: Well, no. Not right now while we're runnin'. I don't wanna be doin' nothin'. But once we get down where there's air, so that when somethin' goes wrong, we somewhere to go when it happens.
Poco: I can poke around some but I gotta work on some of the more basic stuff. If we could get some of those repairs done first. If we could fix the collectors then we could contain this stuff so it wouldn't give us cancer.

He takes a deep drag on the ever-present cigarette. Apparently some cancers scare him more than others.

Rachel: Well, it might help, but it's radioactive.
Vikki: Radioactive?
Rachel: Well, yeah. Lilah's kinda condemned.
Vikki: Okay, so it's more than just a haunted house in space. It's a radioactive, cancer-inducing haunted house in space. Good to know.
Poco: (drags, blows) … Yup.
Rachel: See, when Pipes was doin' it, we didn't have all this stuff in here.
Poco: Well, we did, because it was the design of the ship.
Rachel: Yeah, but it was collecting the bulk of it and burnin' it off in the engines. If I didn't need to, it got stored. Pipes was always telling me to burn somthin' off as a joy ride every now and then.
Poco: Yeah, you would need to, to keep from blowing up.
Vikki: So what do you need to fix the collectors?
Poco: At first guess? I'm wondering if we need to be landed or not. Like, rig an external booster. I would need some time to figure out what the procedure is. I'll have to poke around, having just walked in, you know.

Tian and Valentine get filled in on the topic of discussion: the source of the HWN is the substance Delilah's engines are producing. Anhydrous Tetra Hydrazine. It's radioactive, carcinogenic, caustic, flammable, and explosive … and it's being pumped out by the engines. We suck it in every time we speak and breathe. Under normal circumstances when the ship was in better repair, the collection system would have scrubbed whatever escaped the engine-based collector from the atmo and stored it in a special tank. Pipe's innovation was figuring a way to use it as fuel for a booster, the controls for which are now gathering dust on the bridge.

Valentine took the news rather well, considering he's just been told that his father's last gift to him might be death by cancer. Him and the entire crew, actually. All anyone can do to reduce their exposure to the toxic stuff is avoiding the engine room and getting rid of the source of the poison by repairing the systems or scrapping the ship.

Over the next two days, the crew settles in and explores Delilah. Vikki and Poco catalogue the more immediate dangers and try to decipher the illegible items on the To Do list. The others keep themselves occupied as best they can. Delilah is beyond the White Sun system and midway to Red Sun when the proximity sensors start pinging.

We have incoming.

We have a stowaway who might be in Dutch with the Triad. We have a passenger we know is in Dutch with the Triad. We have a cargo container carrying high-tech and most likely illegal weapons with biohazard rounds. We don't know where they came from or who they belong to. We do know that if we're caught with them by the Feds or the Triad, it would go bad for us. On the other hand, we are stuck on a ship that is killing us with every breath we take.

Being caught by the Feds or the Triad might be the kinder fate.

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