by Kali Wallace
Hygiea hadn’t received anything from Nimue at 1613. But I had.
Sigrah had said the optical array had ongoing problems. I checked the maintenance logs and found numerous reports from Katee King, Nimue’s electrical engineer, recording her increasing frustration. Several times over the past few months, power surges in the array had caused transmissions to fail. King had been taking the optical transmitters offline one by one in an attempt to isolate the cause, so far without success. A few of the transmitters had been removed from service entirely. But no matter what she tried, no matter how many parts she replaced, no matter how many requests she and Sigrah sent to Parthenope for new transmitters, every couple of weeks another data transmission failed because of a power surge in the array.
But now I knew the transmitters weren’t failing entirely. They were just being hijacked for unofficial use, and the power surges were likely designed to cover up David’s hidden, unauthorized transmissions.
Katee King was diligent about filing her reports; the pattern was easy to spot. The problems had started abruptly ten months ago. David had been on Nimue for eleven months.
Nobody hijacked a transmitter for legitimate reasons. Nor did they do it just to send cryptic secret messages to former friends and reminisce about old times. Van Arendonk was right to be suspicious. David had gotten himself into some kind of trouble—probably very illegal—and that had gotten him killed.
I knew what I needed to do next. I couldn’t ask King or anybody else from the crew to do it for me. One of them had killed David. I wasn’t the most devoted OSD Safety Officer, but even I knew it was bad investigative practice to send a potential suspect out to collect evidence. I was going to have to check the optical array myself.
“Fuck,” I said, and I stood up, and I went to find Adisa and Ryu.
I really did not want to go outside.
SIX
The good news was I didn’t have to go outside.
The bad news was I had to get close enough that I wasn’t sure the precise details mattered much in the deepest recesses of my lizard brain, where all my instincts were screaming at me about my inevitable, imminent death in the vacuum.
“You can wait here, you know,” Ryu said. Their voice was tinny over the helmet radio, their eyes behind the faceplate wide and concerned. The lightweight vacuum suits were just a precaution, supposedly, but it was the kind of precaution that only made me more worried. “Just tell me what to look for. You can talk me through it. You don’t have to—”
“Avery,” I said sharply. “Not helping.”
The concern in their expression melted away to amusement. “You are so fucking stubborn. Are we going?”
We were going. The optical array was located on Nimue’s docking structure, accessible via a long, enclosed maintenance shaft. Sigrah wasn’t happy about us going out there; she seemed to think that if her engineer hadn’t found anything, we had no chance of doing better. Adisa had ignored her objections and told us to take a look. He was currently sitting down with Sigrah to ask about what various criminal enterprises might be running under her nose on Nimue.
Ryu turned the manual wheel that secured the hatch to the maintenance shaft. “No electronic lock, but there is an ID tracker. Did your dead man ever come through here?”
“He’s not my dead man,” I said. “And not according to the security logs.”
They moved to the side as the lock disengaged, and they tugged the hatch open, revealing a dark space beyond. There was a slight exhale as the pressure equalized; I felt a nudge of air from behind, like the station was trying to push me out. Ryu switched on their headlamp and leaned through the hatch.
The only crew the Overseer had logged passing through this hatch were Katee King and the man who had been the electrical engineer before her. Her predecessor had left Nimue eight months ago, a few months after David arrived. The man had bought out the remaining three years on his contract with a sudden windfall, moved back to Earth, took a job fixing radio telescopes somewhere in western Australia. I had a query out to HQ regarding where that sudden windfall had come from, but I rather doubted I would get an answer more useful than “inheritance from previously unknown rich uncle” or similar. Nobody ever put “payment for participation in lucrative black market scheme” on their company exit interview forms.
“Well.” Ryu glanced back at me. “Ready?”
“I’m not the one who keeps stalling.”
“I mean, I know you’re not used to this hands-on shit, so I can get Mohammad to help if—”
“Yeah, okay, ask the superior officer to do the grunt work.”
“He would. He’s not so bad to work with, when he decides to give a fuck. And he’s Martian,” they added. “Crawling through tight spaces to find illegal tech is basically his entire heritage.”
“Problematic stereotypes aside, I’m fine. Let’s go.”
“If you’re sure—”
“For fuck’s sake, just move.”
They gave me a grin and a cheeky thumbs-up and climbed through the hatch. I switched on my own headlamp and followed.
Because Nimue was relatively small, shaped like a potato, actively being hollowed out on the inside, and rotating with a weird wobble, its gravity was less a reliable force and more a matter of politely agreeing where the floor ought to be. That worked well enough to trick the mind in Ops and Res and parts of the facility designed with human concepts of up and down, where one was surrounded by such luxuries as floors, ceilings, and waste hatches where one could deposit vomit from a sudden wave of vertigo.
It did not work when decoupled from those elements. It really, really did not work.
There was no floor in the maintenance shaft, no ceiling. Everything was walls, and everything was crowded with so many conduits, pipes, and ducts that climbing into the shaft felt rather like being swallowed by a mechanical beast. I was instantly disoriented, with my head telling me I was upside down, the tug on my muscles telling me I was falling, and my vision telling me the rest of my body was lying.
I squeezed my eyes shut to give my brain a chance to adjust. When I opened them again, Ryu was already several meters away, the beam of their headlamp filling the shaft with a kaleidoscope of shadow and light. I decided to think of it as climbing, if only to keep the disorientation at bay, and followed.
“It would help if we knew what we were looking for,” Ryu said.
“Oh, certainly,” I agreed. “That would help a lot. Why didn’t I think of that?”
I couldn’t see the look they sent my way—all I got was a flash of their headlamp—but I understood the tone of their voice well enough. “What I mean,” they said, with exaggerated patience, “is that I’m going to take a look at one of the working transmitters before we head up to the ones that aren’t working.”
“We have the schematics from the Overseer,” I said.
“Right, right. Station engineers are well-known for following schematics exactly.”
“I didn’t mean we should trust them.”
“And they certainly don’t have a reputation for changing things randomly and never documenting it.”
“I only meant we have something to check against.” Distracted, I angled a kick badly and ended up shoving myself into a rubber-encased cluster of wiring hard enough to jar my left shoulder. I let out a soft grunt of pain.
Another flash of light as Ryu glanced back at me. “You okay?”
“Fine.”
“If you need to—”
“I’m fine.”
I knew I was being too sharp and had very little reason for it. Ryu was not quite a friend anymore, nor were they exactly an ex, as we had never defined the time we spent together, but they certainly weren’t an enemy. They were only being considerate—which was part of what had drawn me to them in the first place, that gentle warmth and easygoing calm that felt so out of place in th
e every-asshole-for-themselves corporate culture of Hygiea. It was also what had made me back away. That was my problem, not theirs. I didn’t want to be a beast to them.
But I couldn’t bring myself to apologize. The words were there, caught in my throat like a cough I could not expel. I was afraid I would only say something worse.
We climbed along that metal throat for what felt like an eon. Our headlamps barely penetrated the darkness, reaching no more than five or ten meters ahead. We took a few minutes to look over the first transmitter on the array. Identifying where the power came in, where the data came in, where it differed from the schematics. After that, Ryu started talking again. Maybe the darkness was getting to them, or the proximity to open space, or maybe they were only tired of the awkward silence. Whatever it was, they started telling me about all the ways in which criminals of investigations past had sabotaged, altered, or hijacked comms systems for various purposes. They knew of lawyers piggybacking Hygiea’s surveillance system to find potential clients in class-action lawsuits, drug designers mining personal communications to learn which work crews and stations were best targeted by their on-station dealers, hackers feeding false data sets into stations to retrain AIs to be less restrictive or more biased, extortionists sending deepfake evidence of high-level executives committing anticorporate actions, smugglers inventing false proprietary designs to auction on the black market, and so much more.
“If there’s a way to make money doing it, somebody’s figured it out,” they said. “You really don’t have any idea what your friend was into?”
Your friend, now, instead of your dead man.
“I really don’t,” I said. “If you’d asked me three years ago, I would have said David would never bother with anything illegal, because he was good enough at his work that he could find a well-paying job anywhere.”
I couldn’t see Ryu’s face, but I heard their soft, amused snort over the radio. “Doesn’t always work that way.”
“Yeah. I know.”
If it did work that way, I sure as fuck wouldn’t be crawling-climbing through a claustrophobic maintenance shaft on a corporate asteroid mine looking for proof that somebody I had very much liked and respected had gotten himself beaten to death over some harebrained moneymaking scheme. But if I said that, Ryu would give me that look, the one that asked without really asking if that meant I thought some people did belong here, just not people like me and David, people who deserved better.
So I didn’t say it. I just had the silent argument with Ryu in my head, let it play out for a few seconds, then said, “I have no idea what he would do if he was desperate enough. He was smart enough to figure out just about anything, but what he could do seems kinda limited by being stuck here.”
“Right, right. Limited data transmissions, extremely limited transport, very small crew . . .”
“But a valuable location,” I added.
“So the company likes to say.”
“Oh, I know. I’ve seen all the press reports. The jewel in Parthenope’s crown.” David had used those words in his message to me. “I’m not particularly impressed with what I’ve seen.”
“Only because you haven’t seen many asteroid mines. These facilities are a fucking palace compared to the shitholes most people are stuck in. What’s the first offline transmitter?”
“Uh, seven. Seven and twelve are both offline. Seven should be the next one.”
We didn’t find anything suspicious on number seven. It had been disconnected and partially cannibalized for parts, but there was no sign of alteration or tampering, nothing to indicate that it was routing power or data anywhere it wasn’t supposed to go.
Number twelve was different.
“Huh,” Ryu said. They looked down at me, headlamp briefly blinding me, then back at the machinery. “Come look at this.”
I climbed up beside them and rested my heels on the edge of a bracket. “What is it?”
They pointed at scratch marks on a metal panel. “These brackets have been removed, and whoever put them back in was careless, or in a hurry. None of the others have that.”
It didn’t look like much to me, but Ryu pulled out their wrench to remove the bolts. They handed them to me one by one, then slid the panel out of the brackets.
“Oh, hello,” they said. “That’s different.”
Where the other transmitters had a neatly packed cluster of parts and wiring behind their panels, this one had a shiny silver device. It was lightly curved and shaped something like a leaf, with thin metal plates overlapping like scales, broadly at the top and tapered below. The overall effect was of a shimmering beetle’s carapace, protecting its soft underbelly as it clung to the side of the shaft. The edges were polished on a clean, smooth bevel, without the faintest trace of imperfection or marring. The metal itself was silver with a bluish sheen to it, which almost gave it the look of water. It was beautiful and elegant and terribly out of place in that cramped maintenance shaft.
I wanted to touch it, to brush my fingers over the clean metal. My heart was pounding and my breath was short.
“Oh,” I said quietly. I swallowed. My voice was thick in my throat. “I know—I recognize this. David made this.”
“You’re sure?”
I withdrew my hand. “I spent years working with him. I recognize the style.” I let out a choked little laugh. “Always so much prettier than it needed to be.”
“It’s not that I doubt you, but . . . what is it?”
“Probably exactly what we think it is,” I said. “Something to take power from the array to use this transmitter. I assume David paid the previous electrical engineer to come out here and install it to hijack the transmitter. Or he could have directed the installation remotely, using a bot. That would be trivial for him.”
Ryu leaned to one side, then the other, bumping their shoulder into mine as they examined the device. “It’s possible, I guess. We should check the station’s machine and printing facilities to see when he made or modified this thing here. If it was him.”
They were right, of course. We had to check. But I had no doubt that the silver device was David’s work.
“We should bring it in for a better look,” Ryu said. Behind their faceplate, their expression was thoughtful. They tapped the radio control on the arm of their suit to switch frequencies. “Hey, Mohammad, we found something. Marley says it looks like the victim’s handiwork. I want to bring it inside to take it apart.”
“If you can do that without damaging it, yeah?” Adisa said.
“That’s the idea. Can you see how it’s attached down there?” Ryu said to me. “I can’t see much at this end.”
I lowered myself down to another bracket to get a look at the bottom of the device, where the data and power cables would have entered the original system. The space beneath the silver carapace was very narrow, and the reflective surface made it hard for me to see into the darkness. The device moved slightly when Ryu gripped it, and the gap widened just enough for me to see the angular lines of four braces holding it in place.
“Can you see anything?” Ryu asked.
“I can see how it’s fixed in place, but I can’t see how it’s attached to the power or data lines.”
“Can you dislodge it?”
“Just a sec.”
I reached for the most accessible leg—using my left hand, the one that could be replaced if it got smashed or zapped—and felt along its length to the mechanical clamp at its end. The gap was so narrow my space-suited forearm barely fit, and the angle put an uncomfortable twinge of pain in my left shoulder. I changed my position and reached again. There was a whir of noise from within the device. Light sparked from some unknown source and a crackling sound filled my ears.
“Hester,” Ryu said, “get your arm out of there.”
“I’ve almost got it.”
“Hester.”
“Not good,” Ryu said, their voice almost lost in the radio’s crackle. “We should—”
A blinding flare erupted around us, so bright my prosthetic eye glitched and my natural eye seared with pain. All I could see was Ryu’s silhouette surrounded by light, engulfed in light, gone. There was a furious roar, a sudden pressure all around, and the maintenance shaft exploded into a storm of lightning.
SEVEN
I couldn’t see anything except fiery white light.
My prosthetic eye began to glitch uncontrollably, sending a rainbow of colors across my vision. The roar in my ears was constant and mechanical: the discharge had fried the radio. Beyond that constant, grinding static, I heard popping and clapping all the way down the maintenance shaft in small bursts of thunder. Every instinct was telling me to run, run, run—but I couldn’t run, I was hanging like an idiot in a vertical shaft, with only a company-issued nonconductive worksuit between me and death by electrocution. If the suit wasn’t damaged. If it had been tested recently. If Parthenope had bothered to stock Nimue with functional suits in the first place. In one of the first extortion cases I’d worked, I’d come across documents detailing exactly how much the company paid out in negligence lawsuits every year and how little it was compared to how much they saved by ignoring OSA safety regulations and trusting that only a tiny fraction of the people who died had family who could afford to sue. I didn’t need to think about that right now. I needed to get the fuck out of there.
