Dead Space

by Kali Wallace

  Parthenope Enterprises cargo ships were the nearest vessels to the Symposium at the time, so it was Parthenope rescue crews who picked us up and Parthenope doctors who patched us back together. There were thirty-one survivors: seventeen crew and fourteen members of the Titan project. Some were relatively unscathed. Six died over the next few months. Me, I got some shiny new limbs to show off. All of us earned a crushing mountain of rescue, transport, and medical bills. With no way to pay our way back to the inner system, no help from the Outer Systems Administration, no employment, and no convenient riches to our names, we were economic refugees, in Parthenope’s debt until we worked our way out of it.

  TERRORIST LEADER EXPRESSES NO REGRETS

  VICTIMS ISSUE JOINT STATEMENT ON SENTENCING

  I did not know Karl Longo, the man who had ruined my life, killed my friends and colleagues, and destroyed an incomprehensible amount of scientific research and irreplaceable technology. He had been safely on Earth, protected by the high walls of a private compound, when members of his group destroyed Symposium. I had not attended the trial; I had provided my testimony, what little there was of it, via a series of remote recorded interviews and depositions, first from my hospital bed, later from offices on Hygiea.

  The people who had actually carried out the attack, the members of Black Halo that Longo had sent to infiltrate Symposium, had all died when their plan spiraled out of control— including Kristin Herd, who had been a friend and colleague of mine. She had joined our team when another member had to withdraw from the project. I had been on the committee that reviewed her application. None of us had suspected a thing. We had all approved of her research and her enthusiasm. Our vote had been unanimous. She had been planning all the while to murder us.

  She was dead. They were all dead, and now Longo would spend his life rotting away in a Martian prison. I supposed that was what he deserved.

  SYMPOSIUM SENTENCING: HAS JUSTICE BEEN SERVED?

  MEMORIAL CEREMONY TO HONOR SYMPOSIUM VICTIMS

  I shut off the news feeds. I didn’t care. I couldn’t care. This was my life now, such as it was. Picking grubby PDs off the floor in personal quarters, trawling through endless data, looking for petty extortionists, for corporate spies, for black market biohackers, even for snakes like Kristin, should they make themselves sufficiently troublesome to Parthenope. This isolated rock in the outer system, this thankless job helping a rich company make itself richer, the pain in my joints where metal met flesh, the medical debt that grew every day, this was it, this was all I had, until I could work my way out.

  My heart was still thumping uncomfortably. I could still smell that dank, foul room.

  I set up the confiscated PDs for a full data sweep and analysis, and I got out of there. I needed to scrub the bloody fingerprints from my boots.

  TWO

  It was a relief to slip into my private quarters and lock the door behind me.

  The housing Parthenope provided to lowly Safety Officers like me was a box-like room two meters wide and three long, with a narrow bunk bolted to the wall on one side, an uncomfortable chair and a fold-down table beneath it, a toilet and sink behind a flimsy wall, and a wallscreen that only worked about half of the time. There was no port looking out on anything, not even into the gray, underlit corridor. I hadn’t done much to decorate. There didn’t seem to be any point in making an impersonal box look less like a box. I preferred to remind myself every morning and every evening why I needed to get away from here as soon as possible.

  My quarters had about as much charm as a coffin, but I relished the privacy. Hygiea was very much a company town: company owned, company operated, company surveilled and secured. Parthenope was one of the largest corporations in the outer system, with its tendrils in every industry from mining to processing to fuel production to transport. There were fifteen thousand people living full-time on Hygiea, another two thousand or so moving through in a constant ebb and flow of ships through the busy port. It was such a small number compared to the population of the system, but when I had first arrived, it had been overwhelming. After nearly a year aboard Symposium and months in the hospital on Badenia, an asteroid under Parthenope’s control that held both a shipyard and a medical complex, even the possibility of encountering strangers had been uncomfortable.

  The showers down the corridor were busy at the end of shift; I decided to wait for the line to go down. I sat in my uncomfortable chair and pulled off my boots. I couldn’t remember if I had laundry credit for the week, so I did my best to scrub away the bloody fingerprints myself. I used yesterday’s shirt, which was already stained with a yellowish-green smudge of contraband a narcotics chemist had thrown at me.

  While I was at it, I called up my personal messages to play on the wallscreen. I hadn’t checked them in a few days; there was never anything urgent. But thanks to the news of Longo’s conviction, there were a shit-ton of new requests for interviews from reporters—I deleted them all. A reminder for mandatory security analyst training. A reminder for a doctor’s appointment I had been putting off for weeks. A reminder for mandatory port and transport safety training. A statement from the Parthenope employee bank. Another reminder for mandatory training. A note from my brother, Devon, who was living a safely mundane life on Earth.

  I braced myself before opening his message. He wrote to me regularly, with photographs of his kids, updates about our parents, news he knew I would find interesting. I only replied some of the time, but not because I didn’t appreciate the messages. I craved his letters with a hunger I scarcely understood, like an addict itching for a fix.

  I had left them—my family, Earth, all of it—purposefully and without doubt. I had planned to be away for years. Even so, on the lonelier nights, in the quiet of my grim residential cell, I pored over every sentence, watched every clip of video, studied every picture until I had every face and landscape memorized. Tonight was no different. I took a breath and held it while I read about how much Devon’s son, Michael, loved his dance classes, how disappointed his daughter Renee was to be second in her class rather than first, how little Phoebe was already walking—Devon had included a still photo, so much cheaper to send than a video, and I told myself it was almost as good as seeing her toddle recklessly through the garden, a whirlwind of curly brown hair and big brown eyes and freckles dotted across her nose. From the day of her birth our parents had claimed Phoebe looked so much like me as a baby it was uncanny, but all I could see in her rosy little face was my brother’s eyes and my brother’s smile. Devon did not mention the woman he had been dating, so I assumed that was over and retroactively decided I had never liked her anyway. He asked me how I was doing in a way that suggested he wasn’t expecting an answer. I read all about the spat Mum had recently gotten into with her longtime academic rival about which foreign scholar would be invited to spend a year in their department. Dad was, apparently, experimenting in the kitchen again, this time with recipes based on ancient Greek texts and involving a great deal of garum.

  That, more than anything else, stuck in my chest like a fistful of glass shards. I missed Dad’s meals, the good and the awful. I missed our noisy family dinners. I missed stepping into the too-warm kitchen to see our parents’ heads tilted together conspiratorially, Dad’s ginger hair and Mum’s long dark plait both alight in the evening sun. I missed inhaling the scent of spices, crowding around the table with knees bumping and elbows jostling, and gratefully accepting leftovers before the walk home.

  I dropped my mostly clean boot to the floor. I should have gone to the canteen for a beer. I should have surrounded myself with people, with pointless conversation, with food that at least pretended to be something other than a tasteless meal bar. I closed Devon’s message, knowing I would read it again later, and opened the next.

  It was a private video message, which was enough to make me wary. Nobody I actually wanted to hear from had the finances to splurge for a video message to Hygiea. Th
e lack of identified sender meant it was probably another reporter, another doctor, another lawyer trying to get past Parthenope’s filters and offer miracles to the survivors of the Symposium disaster. Or, worse, Black Halo sympathizers spitting empty threats across space, or the families of survivors begging me to join some pointless activist group. It could be another pervert wanting to tell me about their implausible cybernetic fantasies or another scientist wanting to redefine humanity. Those with avarice in their eyes were bad enough; those whose soggy expressions glistened with pity were worse. I hated them all. I had stopped telling them to go fuck themselves months ago. Answering only made them more persistent.

  “Hey, Hester.”

  With a swoop in my gut like falling from a great height, I paused the message in shock.

  Pale face, pale hair, blue eyes. His name was David Prussenko. Former head robotics engineer for the Titan Research Project. His life, like mine, had been ruined with the destruction of Symposium.

  David was paler than I remembered, his hair thinner, his face more gaunt. The past two years had not treated him well. He would likely say the same of me.

  I let the message play.

  “Haven’t heard from you in a little while. I know you’re busy, as always. What’s up?”

  I frowned. I had not spoken to David since the day we had given our final statements to a trio of Outer Systems Administration officials in a lofty corporate office here on Hygiea, some eighteen months ago. Like me, he had endless medical debts and no way to afford a journey back to Earth, so he had also taken Parthenope’s offer of employment. But we didn’t keep in touch. We never talked. We never contacted each other at all. I had always assumed he agreed it would be too painful.

  David paused, fidgeted a little, glanced quickly to the side. It looked like he was alone in his private quarters; I could see an unmade bed behind him. On the wall above the bed, its corner just visible over David’s shoulder, was an image that made my breath catch again. It was a map of Titan, identical to the ones David had always used to decorate his living spaces both on Earth and aboard Symposium. I couldn’t see it clearly, but I would have recognized it anywhere.

  “I’m still on Nimue.” He cleared his throat. He was nervous about something; every time he hesitated I grew more tense. I had no idea why he would be contacting me in an anonymous message. He went on, “You know, the shining jewel in the company’s crown and all that shit. It’s all sysadmin stuff. Overseer wrangling. I still think you’d be better at this job than I am—but these machines would bore you, I think. Maybe not. Maybe they’re your style after all.”

  He smiled quickly, a twist of the lips, and I felt a pang of something that was half anger, half jealousy. Nimue was one of Parthenope’s asteroid mines in the Hygiea family. I only knew its name because the company was building a huge facility there, and there were constant press releases, official communications, and progress reports going around. The Overseer I knew a bit more about. That was the name for Parthenope’s station management artificial intelligence. Overseer AIs kept the mines, plants, and factories running smoothly with minimal human crew. They were advanced and powerful but not terribly innovative, but working with them would still be more interesting than trawling through data for petty crimes and misdemeanors—and definitely more my area of expertise, once upon a time, than David’s. I was an AI expert, one of the best in the field, but the Parthenope personnel managers had never seemed to care, no more than they had cared that David could build the most beautiful robots.

  I don’t know what kind of job David had asked for when he first started at Parthenope, but every time I had asked for an Overseer-adjacent position they had always brushed me off. There were too few positions available. My medical needs were too great. Be patient. Work toward promotion. Engage positively in Parthenope corporate culture and you will be rewarded.

  “The thing is, um . . .” David paused again. I did not remember him being so hesitant to speak, and it made me uneasy to see him stammer and stall when I didn’t even know what he wanted. “Hey, remember that time we went to Kristin’s gran’s place down on the Jurassic Coast? I keep thinking about that weekend. I went looking for photos and vids. All that stuff. I’ve been looking, and I found something I wasn’t looking for. That was a good time.”

  A hollow feeling opened up inside of me. David kept speaking, but his words slipped around me, too distant and too loud all at the same time, indistinguishable through the buzzing in my head. I remembered. A few years ago. A lifetime ago. A sweeping beach on the Jurassic Coast, beneath crumbling sandstone cliffs. We were on a retreat for the Titan tech team, those of us who would be responsible for making all our stubborn machines get along. I remembered lying on the sand on a clear, cold night, the day’s work satisfying and exciting, all of us buzzing with the potential of our own brilliance. The taste of whisky, the taste of salt, the bite of the wind, the way the stars turned and turned. The wreck of the smuggling ship Excelsior offshore, dashed by waves, its massive metal hull dark and lonely, its ghosts silent for over a hundred years.

  My chest ached. I rubbed at the scar tissue over my sternum. I had missed a few words of David’s message. I played it back again.

  “I just realized that you never settled up that bet you lost to me, the one about Excelsior. About what happened when it crashed.” He leaned forward, his face growing large on the wallscreen. “I was right. You were wrong. They lied about it. They lied about everything.”

  He shook his head and sat back in his chair. He laughed, but it was forced, empty.

  “You hear me? I was right. I won that bet after all. That lake should have been mine. I’d love to catch up. Let’s do it, okay? I can set up from my end, but you need to handle your side. You know how tetchy the OSD gets about personal comms. Hey, fuckheads!” He made a face at the camera. “I know you’re listening. Fuck off. Miss you, Hester. Let’s talk. Do this one thing for me. Please?”

  I sat for a long time after the message ended. I sat and stared at the comms menu on the wallscreen and did nothing at all.

  Eighteen months since I had spoken to David, and now this. I couldn’t recall when he had last asked anything of me. When we had been working together, he would wheedle and whine for silly reasons, sure, for a cup of fresh coffee, programming help, introductions to somebody he had his eye on. But he had not asked for anything after Symposium, after we learned we were stranded out here in the asshole of the solar system. There was a tremor in his voice when he said please, an unsteadiness he was trying so hard to hide. That was grief, I thought. That was fear.

  I remembered the weekend he was talking about, but not as he described it. That had been before Kristin Herd joined the Titan project. The cottage had belonged to Jay Knox’s grandmother, not Kristin’s. We had argued about the Excelsior that night on the beach. David had believed the cause of the crash was a fault in the navigational system; I was certain it was human error. And I remembered clearly that David had been in the wrong. We had looked it up the next morning, over a hangover breakfast of toast and eggs. It had been the captain’s fault all along: she had been smuggling weapons from Earth to an orbital station, and her attempts to evade notice had led her into the busy traffic around the Calais spaceport, where she collided with a small unmanned cargo ship. Her ship, her crew, all the illegal weapons they were carrying, they had all crashed into the sea. Over a hundred people had died when Excelsior’s impact sent a tsunami over the southwest of England, cresting seawalls from Exeter to Bournemouth. The rebelling orbital that Excelsior had been carrying weapons to had surrendered to Earth forces only a few weeks later.

  We hadn’t been mourning any of them, the smugglers or soldiers or freedom fighters, or even thinking of them at all, when we argued. That had happened over a century ago, during the meaningless rebellion of a minor orbital habitat. I couldn’t even remember which one had tried to declare its independence that time around. It had noth
ing to do with us. It was only a curiosity. David had promised to pay up what we had bet—first dibs on exploring Kraken Mare, Titan’s largest hydrocarbon sea—and we had laughed about it, laughed and drank and dreamed of the future. We had been so certain tomorrow, all of our tomorrows, would be splendid. I could not remember anymore what that certainty had felt like, if it had tasted of salt and bitter wind, if there had been room for fear beneath the wheeling stars.

  I had no idea what David’s message was meant to tell me. He hadn’t mentioned Karl Longo’s sentencing, which was the only thing I could think of that would spur contact after a year and a half of silence. If he meant to obliquely suggest that somebody had lied about Symposium, it was a bit late for that. Black Halo had taken full credit, and all the evidence substantiated their claim. Longo had written a very lengthy manifesto. The day’s news articles reported he had been proud and unrepentant all through the trial and sentencing.

  David had sent the message anonymously but still seemed to think the Parthenope comm monitors were watching. He hadn’t said anything that would flag the message as suspicious.

  And he had gotten so many details of our shared past wrong.

  I sat there for so long my hip ached and the grime of the day was itching all over my skin. I shuffled to the washrooms and suffered through the tedious process of bathing in Hygiea’s low gravity—a shower in name only, a damp contortionist’s routine in reality. I scrubbed my scalp-buzzed hair and my fingernails and my skin until my shower credits ran out.