Dead Space

by Kali Wallace

  “Aye, we’ll be ready for them before that.”

  “They won’t be ready for you.”

  “Thank you for your help. We need to process the scene now, yeah?”

  It took Sigrah a moment to understand that it was a dismissal. “This is my station. I’m required to supervise all activity.”

  “You are, aye,” Adisa said, with a bob of his head that was not quite a nod, “except in security matters in which you are directly involved.”

  “I’m not—”

  “You have twelve people on this station and one of them is dead,” Adisa said. “We’ll talk to your crew as soon as we’re done in here.”

  Sigrah glowered at him but decided, in the end, not to argue. As she strode away, each step punctuated by the sticky sound of her gecko boots detaching from the floor, I heard her mutter, “Fucking smug Martians.”

  Ryu covered up a startled laugh, but Adisa didn’t even blink. Even after a year on the job, it still shocked me to hear how open people in the belt were about hating Martians. Back on Earth everybody tended to be more polite about their bigotry. The war had ended thirty years ago, after all, so their civilized scorn went into discussing the Martian problem over tea: worrying about refugees straining the system, fretting over the corporate militarization of space, wondering if the PM would push her party toward another vote on the resettlement matter. It was all politics about faraway places and nameless people who couldn’t survive on Earth without extensive and expensive medical procedures, people who wouldn’t even need help if they hadn’t started a hopeless rebellion in the first place.

  Not so in the asteroid belt. There were too many people out here who remembered being forced to choose between Earth and Mars. The war was still too close, even though the last missiles had been dismantled twenty-five years ago.

  Ryu cleared their throat. “I need some help turning him and getting him on the board.”

  I didn’t know if they were speaking to me, but Adisa moved to help before I had to figure it out. I stayed out of the way. I couldn’t begin to guess how many times David had been struck. He must have been surprised—it would be easy to take him by surprise, if one meant him harm. He was not suspicious by nature. He didn’t pick fights, didn’t throw punches. The first blow would have been a shock. Every blow after—only pain.

  They rolled David, and I saw his face properly for the first time. One of his eyes and most of his nose were a mangled mess, the socket collapsed by blows from the metal bar, but the other eye was wide open and red with burst capillaries. The injuries looked like the result of a wild, uncontrollable rage. I averted my eyes quickly. Breathed through my mouth and counted to ten. The rest of David’s body, save the two broken fingers, was intact.

  “Ready,” Ryu said. “On three we lift. One, two, three. Good.”

  The two of them maneuvered the corpse onto the board. I looked away as Ryu sealed the body bag over David’s face. Adisa helped unfold the wheels of the carry-board, and Ryu left to take David to the infirmary. The warehouse grew quiet as their sticky gecko-boot footsteps faded.

  I had to do something, so I stepped into the airlock to look at the interior control panel. The screen was dim and old, with dust ground into the corners and scratches over the surface. Above the screen was a small glass eye: a surveillance camera.

  Adisa came into the airlock beside me. “Anything?”

  “The camera doesn’t look damaged.” I tapped the panel to bring up the commands and quickly confirmed there was no way to access the security camera from there. “It should have recorded—” My voice caught. “Everything.”

  “How well did you know him, yeah?” Adisa said.

  I wasn’t entirely sure how to answer. “We were colleagues for a while. Friends, I guess. But not recently.” My voice sounded high and thin to me. My lungs were a honeycomb of scar tissue and the doctors had warned me against exposure to low-oxygen environments, one of the hundreds of warnings they had given me, the hundreds of ways they had scolded me for surviving in such an inconvenient fashion, with so many ongoing systems failures.

  “Have you kept in touch?” Adisa asked.

  I hadn’t told him or anybody else about David’s message to me. I wasn’t going to, not until I understood what it meant.

  “No,” I said. “I haven’t seen him since we gave our final statements to the OSA.”

  “Why not, aye?”

  I glanced at him. “Because we don’t keep in touch. It’s not like we have a little survivors’ club where we get together and talk about what shit luck we have. We’re all just . . . bad reminders to each other.”

  “But you still wanted to be here.”

  “Of course I did,” I said. “David survived a bunch of terrorists trying to blow him up. He survived that, only to die here, like—like . . . It’s fucking unfair that he should die like this. He deserved better.”

  The force went out of my words at the end. I was clenching my left hand again. I didn’t like that I couldn’t always feel it, didn’t know what signals my own brain was sending until they were sent. My heart was racing. My skin was tight and itchy all over.

  “Aye, all right,” Adisa said.

  I couldn’t look at him. “You could have asked before we got here.”

  He shrugged, unconcerned. “I checked with Jackson, yeah? She said you’re good at your job and could use the field experience. What was he like?”

  “David? I just told you, we haven’t been in touch.”

  “Before,” Adisa said. “When you did know him. What was his work?”

  “Oh. He was—well, he was a roboticist. A brilliant one. You know about the Titan project?”

  “A bit, aye,” Adisa said. “What was in the news.”

  I knew what that meant. The news was only ever about how nearly everybody had died in a horrific terrorist attack, not about what they had been living for.

  “We were going to Titan to establish a permanent research base to study . . . well, everything, but mostly to search for life. But Titan’s a strange place, so it isn’t—” I gestured helplessly. It had been a long time since I’d had to explain this to anyone. “It wasn’t going to be like all the Europa projects, where the biggest obstacle is drilling through kilometers of ice and sending autonomous submarines down to look around. We were going to use autonomous bots, of course—there’s no way people could just, I don’t know, walk around doing field mapping. Titan has liquid hydrocarbon lakes. Rivers of methane and ethane. Multiple cryovolcanoes. The atmosphere is this thick organic haze of nitrogen. It has storms and weather and rain and—and it’s cold as fuck, obviously, just over 90 kelvin or so. It’s dangerous as hell, so bots would have to do most of the exploring.”

  I had thought I was over it, the yearning I felt when I described that hellish, beautiful world. I had thought the fires aboard Symposium had burned it out of me, the same way it had burned away my skin, my cells. Nobody asked me about Titan anymore. My heart felt light and fluttery, my breath shallow, to be talking about it again.

  “And Prussenko built those bots?” Adisa said.

  “Trained them to design and build themselves, for the most part. I worked on the AI that was going to control them. It was called Vanguard,” I said, although he had not asked. “That was the brain. David was head of the team that built the rovers and drones and all that.”

  Adisa didn’t say anything, just kept looking mildly curious, so I went on.

  “It’s, um, it’s a lot more complicated than it sounds, because we weren’t going to know exactly what kinds of sensors and instrumentation Vanguard needed on its rovers until we were actually on Titan. We couldn’t send the bots out there with hardwired expectations for what they would find, because then they would miss anything truly interesting. Like, if we told Vanguard to look for DNA and RNA, it could easily miss evidence of life that was built on different m
acromolecules or . . .”

  I trailed off. I was rambling now, saying far more than Adisa cared to hear. I felt like I needed to defend David’s legacy, to make Adisa realize how talented he had been, how clever and innovative, and how bloody unfair it was that he had been stuck doing tech support in this miserable place. None of it mattered anymore. David, Vanguard, our mission, our future, it was all gone.

  “He was brilliant,” I said finally. Everywhere I looked there was blood on the walls. The stale metallic smell of it filled every breath. “He was wasted on a station like this. He deserved so much better.”

  Adisa looked at me for a moment, then he said, “Let’s get the surveillance and talk to the crew, aye?”

  God, I hated the way he said the words, not heavy with pity but carefully avoiding it, like casual professionalism was going to make this any less humiliating. I was used to being talked about. The whispers, the glances, the murmurs that followed me everywhere I went. I knew how that conversation with Jackson must have gone. She’s fine with data, sure, but she’s touchy and sensitive, thinks she’s smarter than us, thinks she deserves better than this job. Get her out of here for a few days. She’s such a drag on the mood.

  I nodded, then swallowed painfully. “Right.”

  I didn’t move. If I took a step, I would stumble, and the last thing I needed was my superior making a note of how clumsy I was. For anybody else, that might mean teasing about my lack of space legs, but for me it would mean a barrage of doctors’ appointments to check my balance, check my coordination, assess my mental and emotional acceptance of my prosthetic limbs, upgrade and adjust, reprogram and rewire, a hungry glint in the doctors’ eyes as they told me to try again, again, again. I could never simply lose my balance. I did not have that luxury. For me every stumble was a whole fucking science experiment for the ghouls who had pieced me back together.

  “Take a minute,” Adisa said.

  He walked away, footsteps withdrawing into the warehouse, and I was alone.

  It took three times, three times telling myself to just ratfucking do it, to grow a bloody spine, to get the fuck over it, three times before I was able to turn around. I could take a minute, but it wasn’t going to help. I could take an hour, a day, a whole accursed year, and it wouldn’t help. There was no exercise in counting to ten or breathing deeply or soothing my nerves that would put me anywhere other than in space, on a lifeless rock in the outer system, in the room where David had died.

  I made myself move. Not out of the airlock, but across it, toward the outer hatch. I stepped over the dark stain of David’s blood and felt a suffocating rush of helplessness and aching, bitter sadness.

  There was a window on the outer hatch, about twenty centimeters tall, hexagonal in shape, and a small slot beside the door for an emergency physical override, lest anybody be caught on the wrong side of depressurization. It was such a clumsy and old-fashioned gesture toward safety. The entire hatch was a bulky old unit obviously repurposed from the defunct UEN base; the door had been built to withstand Martian missiles or worse. It had kept the vacuum outside for more than thirty years. It wasn’t going to snap open or crumple outward or vanish or any of the innumerable, impossible failures I could imagine, and did imagine, far too easily, every time there was only a single door between me and open space. The United Earth Navy loved its hexagon symbolism: one strong side for each of the six superpowers that had joined together to fight for Earth and crush the Martian rebellion. To keep the solar system safe from chaos. To show the upstarts who was boss. That level of ostentatious militarism had fallen out of fashion after the armistice, although crushing upstart Martians never really went out of style. The disarmament treaty and system-wide weapons test monitoring meant there wasn’t any military weaponry or infrastructure within a million kilometers of Nimue, not anymore, not since the UEN had decommissioned the base. Only the geometry of the war remained firmly stamped on the ruins left behind, even out here, so far from Earth and Mars.

  I was still making a fist. Still doing it without thinking. Left hand, metal hand. I took a breath and forced myself to relax. Brain, nerves, muscles. Signal and response. If I clenched that one too tightly, too often, without letting the joints open, the delicate engineering and responsive alloy that made up the phalanges and metacarpals would stiffen and glitch. It didn’t hurt, exactly, because my prosthetic parts couldn’t feel pain, but it was awkward as fuck when I tried to grasp something and my hand responded like a squeaky set of gears on an old bicycle. I dropped things. People stared. Everybody felt embarrassed for me.

  I had to take a breath before I could look through the window. Two breaths. My throat was tight.

  The view surprised me. I had somehow expected—even knowing that the airlock floor was oriented toward Nimue’s center—that the airlock would open to space, and all that I would see would be stars and darkness. That was the view that haunted all my nightmares: the stars, the nothingness, and fuck you very much, doctors, for telling me how irrational it was.

  But what I saw outside that window was Nimue’s gray and pockmarked surface, sweeping out toward a startlingly close horizon. A line of old transport rails, probably unused since the UEN days, led away from the hatch. The curvature of the asteroid made the rails look as though they ended abruptly only tens of meters away, like a diving board into nothingness, but for all I knew they could wrap all the way around Nimue’s lumpy, elongated body.

  “What the hell did you get into out here, David?” I said quietly.

  On the flight over, I had watched countless press reports and interviews with Parthenope execs in which they extolled Nimue’s many profitable virtues; analyses from outer systems economists who said the company was betting its entire existence and the fortunes of a great many very powerful investors on the success of Nimue; projections questioning whether consolidation of ore-processing and fuel-manufacturing facilities was going to be more effective in future asteroid mining than the current distributed model; and many, many, far too many quarterly reports in which Parthenope proudly enumerated the ways in which Nimue was exceeding expectations when it came to productivity and efficiency.

  Nimue was important to Parthenope Enterprises. It was no secret that their long-term plan was to absolutely dominate this bleak corner of the belt. Water for everyone. Fuel for everyone. Rare metals for everyone. Opportunity for everyone—provided they could pay for it.

  Sigrah wanted David’s murder to be personal. The company wanted it to be personal. Mining crews got into personal altercations all the time. They were a discontented, easily agitated group of people. A disagreement over something petty. Drugs or sex or money. Tempers flaring. One furious blow that turned into dozens. It wasn’t a stretch. It was what everybody wanted to believe.

  There was a small sound behind me, a choked little gasp. I spun around, heart racing, to find a young woman standing in the doorway. Her shimmery silver hair was so bright it provided a disorienting contrast to the grim warehouse behind her. She had one hand pressed to her lips. Tears shone in her eyes.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked. “You can’t be here.”

  “I only want to . . .” She took in a shaky breath; tears spilled down her pale cheeks. Her voice was small and girlish, her accent unexpectedly posh. “They said I shouldn’t, but I wanted to . . .”

  “You can’t be here,” I said again.

  “I know, I know, but I needed to see . . .” Her gaze danced over the airlock, over me, over my prosthetics, as though it was too much for her to take in, as though she already regretted letting the image of this blood-splattered room into her thoughts.

  I could not dredge up any sympathy for her. “I don’t care. Get out of here. You’re interfering with the investigation.”

  “Okay.” She nodded. She backed away, nodding. “Okay. I’ll just—okay.”

  When she was gone, it took several moments for my heart rate to steady
again. It took even longer for me to force myself to look out the window one more time, onto the bleak hellscape that had been David’s last view of the universe.

  If I opened that outer door, I could walk on the surface of the asteroid—if I was careful, if I did not step too hard. The possibility made my heart race, my breath catch, and I felt dark shadows gathering around the edges of my vision. I reached out to touch the door, needing to steady myself. This asteroid was so small, its shape so irregular. A single step might send me gliding into space, and Nimue would not have gravity enough to drag me back down.

  FOUR

  Adisa and Sigrah were waiting in the junction between Nimue’s main sections. It was an angular room with walls of riveted metal, exposed ductwork, and a few small square maintenance access panels with manual locks. It looked to have been cobbled together as an afterthought, piece by piece, shabby and impermanent. The labeling on the machinery and pipes was in multiple languages, including English, Chinese, and Arabic, with scattered words in Spanish and Hindi and Russian. The doors to Ops and Res were open, but the wide metal door to the mine itself was closed and adorned with a colorful array of warnings: heat, radiation, chemicals, corrosion.

  I had looked at diagrams and maps, but I couldn’t fathom the size and scale of the facility behind that door. The extraction furnace was Parthenope’s pride and joy, capable of chewing up any sort of rock and spitting out water, volatiles, rare metals. The furnace was currently three kilometers long, penetrating about one-quarter of the way through the asteroid, with the active face of the mine at the far end and plants for processing, refining, and manufacturing stacked along its length like vertebrae along the spinal column. The plan was to punch the furnace right through the long axis of the asteroid, creating the largest ore-processing and fuel-manufacturing facility in the solar system.

  Above the ceiling of the junction, accessed by a ladder bolted to one wall, was the station’s docking structure, which jutted a couple hundred meters above the asteroid’s surface. Only crew used this long metal throat to enter the station; the cargo itself, both coming and going, moved along rails outside. The airlock was open, and a crew member in a space suit, with her helmet in one hand, was coming back down the long passageway. I recognized her spiky blond hair from the personnel files: Katee King, electrical engineer.