by Kali Wallace
Even with no real idea what to expect, the answer still surprised me.
“Um,” I said. I double-checked the result. “The surveillance blackout command arrived in a superoperational command packet.”
“What the fuck?” van Arendonk said. “It came from Hygiea?”
“Well, it looks like that,” I quickly amended, “but it could be a false command, or somebody piggybacking on the commands from HQ, or altering it after the packet arrived but before the Overseer executed it, or . . .”
I was getting ahead of myself. Superoperational commands were how the company told the Overseers what to do. They were normally things like “produce more fuel” or “mine rock faster” or “make the crew less depressed and more productive.” The company higher-ups decided what they wanted, the master AI on Hygiea turned those demands into high-level commands and sent them out to all the mines and facilities, and the Overseers interpreted the orders as they saw fit. I didn’t work with the Overseers directly, but I knew the commands were not generally concerned with operational micromanaging.
They were sure as fuck never supposed to shut down surveillance. But there it was, inside the command packet from the master AI, a clear instruction to Nimue’s Overseer to black out surveillance. The command packet in question had arrived on the day David died, hours before his murder. It had come directly from Hygiea.
“So which is it?” van Arendonk said. “Is somebody on this miserable rock making it look like the company is covering up a murder? Or is the company actually covering up a murder?”
I had been wondering the same thing, but I hadn’t expected the Parthenope legal rep to come right out and say it.
“They sent us here to investigate it,” I pointed out.
The look van Arendonk gave me was amused. “Did they?”
Of course they hadn’t. I knew as well as anybody that we were here to clean up a mess and file a report that wouldn’t ruffle any feathers. It was unlikely anybody in the Operational Security Department had even consulted anybody in management before responding to Sigrah’s report of a suspicious death. If news got out while the higher-ups in OSD were dragging their feet and covering their asses, they would be the ones to catch the blame if anybody higher up started to get nervous—or, worse, if word of a violent death on Nimue made Parthenope’s investors nervous. Our job was to get here, name the culprit, and haul them away.
I knew all of that, had known it since the day I took the job, but sometimes I forgot. When I was looking at a body, when there was evidence to collect and data to search through, when I started wondering about motives and reasons, I let myself forget that I was asking questions for which nobody really cared to hear the answers.
“Trust me, Marley,” van Arendonk said, his voice as dry as dust. “Nobody knows what this company is capable of better than those of us who have to shovel their shit and pretend it’s gold. So who fucked with the Overseer’s commands?”
“I don’t know yet. I have to check some things.”
I was already working on it. The packet had arrived during the scheduled transfer from Hygiea, but it had not been implemented right away. This was because in the data transfer there was also an auxiliary command with an alert to Nimue’s Overseer to hold off implementation pending sysadmin approval for minor adjustments. I looked to see who had approved it. Then I looked again.
A deep pit of dismay formed in my gut.
David was the sysadmin who had received the request. He had altered the commands to fix the supposed minor errors. He had inserted the command for the surveillance blackout. He had done all of this between nine and ten in the morning the day before he died.
David had covered up his own murder hours before it even happened.
FIVE
It was, at least, an answer to van Arendonk’s question.
“David shut down the surveillance himself,” I said. “He had help from somebody on Hygiea, someone who has the access necessary to alter the command packet. But he did it himself.”
Van Arendonk sat back in his chair and frowned. “That makes no sense. Are you certain?”
“As certain as I can be at this stage, yes.”
“Why? Was he meeting someone? What was he hiding?”
I closed my eyes briefly and rubbed my temples. “I don’t know yet.”
“Who was he working with? Who has that kind of access?”
“I don’t know.”
“How the fuck did this not get flagged by the goddamned machine?”
“I don’t know,” I said again, biting out each word. “I’ve only just started digging.”
“But you knew him,” van Arendonk retorted. “What was he into? Data theft? Corporate espionage? Black market tech?”
I almost laughed. Almost, but it caught in my throat, awkward and strangling, and I could only shake my head. Why the hell would I steal other people’s shit when my own is so much better? David had said, laughing, one evening aboard Symposium. One of the food scientists had made a crack about David’s robots, something about how he had incorporated UEN weapons designs into his own rovers, and how could anybody believe we were a mission of exploration and discovery if we were deploying weapons of attempted genocide on a distant world? Nothing we hadn’t heard before. Ethics committees and governmental agencies alike had asked again and again, digging into our research every time we so much as sneezed, to make sure we were not in violation of the postwar disarmament treaty. The autonomous weapons used by the UEN during the war had been so horrific, so clever and deadly, that outlawing them became nearly universally popular in the years afterward, when the true extent of destruction became clear. A more temperamental man might have let that comment lead to a fight, could have raised tempers to boiling and set research teams against each other. But David, with all the ease of a bloke ribbing his friends about football scores, had only laughed, said he believed himself an agent of peace by turning the horrors of war toward pure exploration, said he was a pacifist to the bone and took joy from melting swords into plowshares. The laughter was gone by the time he finished speaking, but so too was the tension. David had believed in what we were doing. He had believed in it so deeply and so completely that no careless accusations or snide comments could ruffle him.
But that was David from before. The David who had sent me a halting, mysterious message hours before his murder was a mere shadow of the friend who had laughed in the mess aboard Symposium. I didn’t know the man he had become.
“Nothing like that, when I knew him,” I said quietly. “I don’t know what he’s been into lately.”
The briefest grimace crossed van Arendonk’s sharp face. I didn’t know if it was annoyance or shame, and I didn’t much care. He stood abruptly and turned toward the door, then hesitated.
“How long will it take you to find out?” he asked.
We had been in the room for barely fifteen minutes. From where he stood, to my left, he was looking only at my damaged side, my scars and my prosthetics, and I met his eyes only long enough to see if he would flinch away. If he did—I probably would have said something, tongue sharpened and patience worn thin. But he didn’t, so I kept quiet, and I did not have to find out what would spill out when I opened my mouth.
“Very well,” he said, as though I had given him an answer. “I have to talk to Mohammad and HQ. Report as soon as you find anything.”
The Overseer unlocked and opened the door to let him out. It’s hard to stride purposefully in gecko boots in low gravity, but he made a good try at it, his footsteps peeling noisily down the corridor. The door slid closed behind him.
I sat back in my chair and rubbed my hands over my face. It should have been a relief, to have the systems room to myself, so I could dig into what David had been up to.
They lied about it, he had said. They lied about everything.
He had reached out to me for a reason. V
an Arendonk had to be right. There had been something going on in David’s life, something that led to both his message to me and his murder, and I had to find it.
I fed the Overseer a rapid-fire series of queries to collect all the data I could from the months David had been on Parthenope. He would hardly be the first Parthenope employee to pad their income with a bit of data theft or extortion or some other criminal endeavor. I set the Overseer to analyzing everything it would give me. I only had twenty-four hours of visual and audio recordings, but surveillance wasn’t the only way to learn something. Employee ID tracking data. Terminal usage. Data request logs. Active work time and inactive downtime. Internal and external communications. It was a huge amount of data, far more than I could ever hope to go over, and it would take even a machine as powerful as the Overseer a little chunk of time to process. I wanted to look for patterns in David’s behavior: who he spoke to in public areas, who he met in private quarters, who he communicated with off-station, how often, about what, and whether those were even real people. Where he spent most of his time and where he went only rarely. What he did when he was alone.
I added another query: a pattern-recognition query on all of David’s communications, personal and professional, for the entire time he had been on Nimue. I told it to search for anything to do with Symposium, Black Halo, those who had died, those who had survived. For news reports about Karl Longo and his sentencing. For messages he had sent to anybody else that fell outside his normal pattern of behavior. Questions he asked, answers he received.
And anything he might have said or searched or discovered about his fellow crew members. Anything. Everything. I wanted to see all of it. We had missed Kristin Herd before, and scores of people had died. David had not been responsible for that, not to the same extent I had been, but I knew he would not have forgotten. He would be ever aware that those sitting next to him in the mess, working beside him on every shift, sharing tools, swapping stories, were not to be trusted.
While the AI was chewing on that, I watched the surveillance of David’s last day.
Twelve months with Parthenope Security and I had grown used to watching people do all manner of things in every imaginable place. People who lived under constant surveillance either forgot or stopped caring that they were being watched at all times. The only supposed privacy Parthenope employees had was in their personal quarters, but even then the company had a record of everybody who went in and out. On a normal day I spent my working hours watching drug deals, physical fights, clumsy threats, embarrassingly bad attempts at extortion, far too many sexual encounters, and more than a few incidents that were some inexplicable combination of all those things.
This was different. This felt like standing outside myself— the person I had become, uniform and security access and prosthetic limbs I couldn’t pay for and all—and looking back across the divide between this hollow simulacrum of a life and my real life, the one I had lost, because that was where David belonged. That was where he lived and breathed and thrived, on the other side of that invisible curtain. It made my chest ache to watch him move through his last day, to see him so settled into the depressing reality we were never meant to endure. It made my skin feel dirty, my throat tight. I did not want to be there.
I watched anyway. I would not let myself turn away.
David worked in Ops for most of the day. He was there at 0917 when the data transfer from Hygiea arrived with the superoperational command packet. He implemented the changes. He went on to other tasks. The other sysadmin, Mary Ping, was in and out of their shared workspace in the room next to this one; they spoke about work when they spoke at all. It was a quiet day. David left Ops to eat lunch in the mess, and afterward he went to his quarters for a few minutes. When he returned to Ops, he uploaded an encrypted file from his PD.
That had to be the message for me. It didn’t look like a video comm; David had disguised it as an operations report. There was no trace of it in the system anymore. If I hadn’t been looking for it, I would have never known it existed. He had recorded it a few hours after he arranged for the surveillance blackout.
After he left Ops in the evening, David returned to the mess. He spoke with a few crew members during the meal. The conversation was perfectly mundane. Complaints about the workday. Complaints about the company. Plans to watch a media serial that evening—apparently Rachel Returned was in its fifth series and the main character was finally about to land on New Earth. More complaints about work. More complaints about the company. There had been a snag in calculating holiday travel time; HR was dragging its feet.
After the meal was finished, the crew drifted away from the mess. Some back to work, some to their quarters, some to the other side of the common room to exercise or watch Rachel discover a new world, same as the old world. David headed into his private quarters. He was in his bunk for about twenty minutes before Mary Ping approached his door. She stepped into David’s room, out of sight and sound of the surveillance system. They both emerged a couple of minutes later.
Ping touched David’s arm, smiled, and said, “I owe you one.”
David answered, “No problem.”
She retreated to her own quarters; David returned to Ops.
I checked the crew roster. As Sigrah had said, Ping had been on duty that night but had switched with David last minute for medical reasons. I checked her actions earlier in the evening; she had asked the station medic for migraine meds and a sleep aid.
David stayed in Ops for several hours. He spoke to no one. He received no personal communications, alerts, or unscheduled reports. He read the news about Karl Longo, but he didn’t linger over it. He accessed a few internal Parthenope reports about an Overseer virus attack on another mine a couple of years ago. He spent some time searching for a selection of Parthenope project names: Sunset, Sunshine, Sunburn, Sundown, working through about a dozen related words before giving up without finding anything. He looked at a few personal messages from home. His mother, his sister. His focus was scattered; his mind was clearly somewhere besides his work. The surveillance camera was placed in a high corner above his workstation. It captured him in profile, working sporadically throughout the night, interrupting brief minutes of activity with long breaks in which he seemed to do nothing at all. When he did work, he was accessing data from the station’s records. I read through the lists of actions and files; I had to ask the Overseer to translate a number of file names for me. Cargo transport lists. Fuel conversion efficiency data. Station-wide energy usage. A few shutdown and maintenance reports from the past few months.
At 2256, David logged out of his terminal and rose from his seat. He rubbed his hand tiredly over the back of his neck. He left Ops and passed through the junction. He looked directly at one surveillance camera for a few seconds. I held my breath, waiting for him to say something, but he remained silent. He provided his access code to enter the cargo warehouse at 2258. There was nobody else in that part of the station. Not in the warehouse, not in the airlock, not anywhere. Everybody else was in their personal quarters.
At 2300, the surveillance went dark.
When the blackout ended at 2400, the lights in the cargo warehouse airlock were on. The hexagonal window was a hole of darkness rather than a faint source of light, and there was David, dead on the floor, surrounded by blood. He lay there alone for seven hours before Sigrah thought to look for him.
I didn’t know I was crying until I tasted salt at the corner of my mouth.
I wiped the tears from my face. It was so unfathomably unfair that somebody so clever and bright and full of life should end like that, but crying about it didn’t help. There was no help for David now, nothing to change the sad bloody end of a life that could have been so brilliant. All I could do was find out who had killed him, and why, and what he had been trying to tell me before the end.
I got to work tracing David’s hidden message. If I could figure out how he had
reached out to me without leaving a trace, I could also find out if he had been communicating with anybody else, like a contact on Hygiea or elsewhere.
Nimue had both optical and radio communications arrays, each with multiple transmitters and antennae. The radio array was for broadcasts, live conversations with nearby ships or stations, emergencies, rare real-time back-and-forths between company execs when a lawyer needed to beg favors of a CEO, that sort of thing. Low data capacity, encrypted but still easy to intercept. It was never used for things like superoperational command packets or operations reports, or for moving large chunks of data around, so it was not what I was looking for. David would have used the optical array to hide his video message.
Because of Nimue’s elongated shape, its slightly wobbling rotation, and the fact that it had communications infrastructure only on one end, Nimue and Hygiea had line of sight to exchange optical data bursts every seven hours. The command packet had arrived at 0917, and the next scheduled data exchange was at 1613 that afternoon—which correlated with when the message to me had arrived on Hygiea.
Immediately I saw that something was wrong.
The 1613 data burst from Nimue had not been successfully completed.
My pulse quickened. The data from Hygiea had arrived on schedule and without problem, but the reverse was not true. When Nimue tried to send its own data burst, there had been a power failure in the transmitters of the optical array. By the time the array was back online, Nimue had rotated out of its window of opportunity. There had been an encrypted radio query about the failure from Hygiea; Sigrah had responded with an update regarding ongoing repairs on the optical array. The data packet was successfully transmitted seven hours later.
