Dead Space

by Kali Wallace

  “I didn’t explode it,” I muttered. “The radio array obviously still works fine.”

  “Besides that,” Adisa said. “She knows more than she’s telling us and it’s getting on my nerves. And ask your office what kind of data’s been stolen from Nimue lately.”

  Van Arendonk tried again. “I can—”

  “You can make yourself useful. We have crew to interview. Marley. Now.”

  “You don’t have to talk to her,” van Arendonk said. “You don’t.”

  Adisa didn’t turn, didn’t respond, didn’t give any sign he had heard. I looked at van Arendonk, but he was watching Adisa walk away with an unreadable expression.

  “Talk to who?” I said.

  Van Arendonk barely glanced at me. “Just do your job, Marley, and try not to fuck anything else up.”

  He turned and headed back into Ops to join Sigrah.

  “Right,” I said to the empty junction. “I’ll do that.”

  The Residential section of Nimue was built into the remains of an old United Earth Navy vessel. It looked like the ship had been a creaking old bucket even before the war, which made for a stark contrast with the shabby luxury of Ops. There were no decorative tiles and polished sconces here, only utilitarian angles, unnecessary hexagons, and the pervasive smells of rehydrated soy protein, industrial cleaner, and sweat. Parthenope had made, at best, a half-hearted attempt at transforming the interior from a deeply depressing military transport into a mildly depressing crew habitat. There was a common recreation area, an exercise room, an infirmary, a galley and mess, and private quarters arranged along a corridor with shared heads at the end. The proportions were all wrong: the ceilings too high, the walls too close, the doors wider and shorter than they ought to be, as though built for people who moved about in a permanent crouch. During the war, the hold would have been stacked full of troops in temporary stasis, sleeping the sleep of the clueless and terrified as they shipped off to die in some pointless battle. Everything was gray, grimy, and blocky.

  I checked on Ryu in the infirmary before going after Adisa. They were woozy but awake, with a broken nose, two puffy red eyes, and a headache. They promised to get back to work on the medical exam of the corpse as soon as they could.

  “Don’t be stupid,” I said, relief making me gruff.

  “You don’t be stupid,” they retorted, and something tight and painful eased in my chest. “I’m fine. I just hit my head.”

  “They will be fine, I promise,” said the medic, smiling.

  “You actually hit your entire face,” I said to Ryu. “You’re going to look like a raccoon.”

  “I think that’s probably an insult, but since I didn’t have your fauna-rich Earth childhood, I’ll pretend it’s a compliment. Now go.” Ryu shoved me away. “You’ve got work to do.”

  Before joining Adisa, I grabbed another PD to replace the one David’s device had fried.

  The room Sigrah had offered for our interviews was a cramped space attached to the galley. The faded sign on the door confirmed it had been the quartermaster’s office, but it was currently being used as pantry storage and, surprisingly, a small garden. A sprightly selection of hydroponic herbs looked to be thriving beneath full-spectrum lights. Their spicy, earthy scents almost helped disguise the overriding odor of stale instant coffee, food preservatives, and the lingering memory of something burned. Almost.

  There was just enough space for a few chairs around the metal table that was bolted to the floor. Adisa was already sitting in one chair facing the door; I slid in to sit beside him.

  “Is it normal for a foreperson to be this unwilling to help?” I asked.

  The question was somewhat flippant, but Adisa considered it seriously before answering. “I don’t know that she’s unwilling to help, yeah? I think she knows it won’t look good for her that she’s had a thief operating under her watch for the better part of a year. She doesn’t want it to blow back on her or the station.”

  “If she’s not involved,” I said.

  His sleeves were rolled up to just below his elbows, and for the first time I saw the tattoos on his forearms: a series of words written in Arabic on the left, a line of numbers on the right. The only word I recognized on the left was planet; my Arabic was mostly nonexistent and I couldn’t guess at the rest. The numbers I had learned about in school: they were for identification. The UEN had imprisoned so many Martians during and after the war, and had so little interest in sorting out the peculiarities of Martian names and families and lineages, they had decided numbers were easier. Most Martians had the tattoos removed after they were released. Some kept them, I’d heard, because they wanted their bodies identifiable should the war ever start again.

  Adisa shrugged and tapped his fingers idly on the metal tabletop. “Aye, that too. Maintaining productivity is probably her only chance at keeping her job, yeah? It’s a good job. She doesn’t want to throw it away just because her crew has its share of fuckups.”

  “David wasn’t a fuckup,” I said.

  I looked down at my PD, glanced over the list of personnel, unsure of what else to say. I tended to do everything I could to avoid thinking of a position with Parthenope as a good job. It felt too much like giving up, like accepting something I had never wanted and settling into a routine that would draw me in and wrap around me and never let me go, and all the while telling myself it was good for me. I hadn’t considered the situation from Sigrah’s point of view. How it must feel for her to be in charge of one of Parthenope’s most important stations, but still stuck out here alone, without any help except what Hygiea provided, with one crew member dead and another responsible, and a team of security officers coming in to stomp around and break the optical array and insist that a brutal murder was only one of her problems. I didn’t feel sympathy for her, exactly, because she was still alive and David was dead and somebody on Nimue had killed him. But I did have to acknowledge that maybe Adisa was right. Maybe she wasn’t stonewalling on purpose.

  After a moment, I said, “Whatever he was doing, he wasn’t . . . He wasn’t a bad person, and he definitely wasn’t stupid or rash. He must have had a reason.” I cleared my throat delicately. “Um, so. What was that about before? Van Arendonk said you don’t have to talk to somebody? Did he mean Sigrah?”

  Adisa let out a slow breath. “Ah, no. He meant Mary Ping. The other sysadmin.”

  “Okay.” I had absolutely no idea what that had to do with anything. “But why? We really do need to talk to her, obviously. Do you know her?” All I knew about Ping was that she had switched shifts with David—which was why she was first on our list, but it didn’t explain Adisa and van Arendonk’s weirdness.

  “She was on the Aeolia investigation before she moved here,” Adisa said.

  The name Aeolia rang a bell. I tried to dredge up the details from memory. It had been on the company news while I was bedridden in the Parthenope hospital on Badenia. Mass casualty incident. Something about terrorists using a virus to infiltrate the station’s Overseer. That was supposed to be impossible, but it happened anyway, and a lot of people died. By the time I started work with my newly signed contract binding me to Parthenope for five years, there was a plaque on Hygiea commemorating the employees who had lost their lives on Aeolia. I couldn’t remember who the company and OSA had blamed. Not Black Halo or any of the groups sympathetic to their antiexpansionist cause. That I would have remembered. Still something about it tugged at the back of my mind.

  It took a few seconds for me to remember. “Oh, right. I think David was reading something about Aeolia before he died.”

  “He was?” Adisa looked like this was the exact opposite of what he wanted to hear.

  “I think so. Let me check.” I reached for my PD and asked the Overseer for a summary of David’s activity on the day he died.

  There it was: Parthenope’s unclassified internal reports about the Ae
olia incident, which had taken place about nine months after the Symposium disaster. David had already been working for Parthenope by then.

  “Right. Here it is. He looked at the incident reports, but only for a few minutes. I don’t know what they say. I haven’t had a chance to look yet. I can get them now, if you want?”

  Adisa started to say something, then changed his mind. “Do it later. Right now, I think we need to talk to Mary Ping.”

  NINE

  Mary Ping was a few years past forty, pretty, with pale skin, straight black hair, and golden-brown eyes. She wore a standard gray Parthenope jumpsuit with a belt cinched tight around her waist and gloves dangling from one pocket.

  “Hello,” she said, pausing in the doorway. “You wanted to speak to me?”

  “We do. Have a seat,” said Adisa.

  “I apologize for keeping you waiting. I was down in Level 5, trying to convince the Overseer and the manufacturing module to stop arguing.”

  Ping moved into the room with effortless grace, her steps dancer-like and smooth and silent; she had no gecko soles on her boots. She sat across from us and smiled.

  “It’s good to see you again, Safety Inspector,” she said to Adisa. “I didn’t realize you were once again investigating violent incidents. But I suppose you couldn’t stay away forever, however much you might want to.”

  “We need to talk to you about David Prussenko,” he said.

  “I’m happy to help in any way I can.” Ping rested her hands on the table, fingers laced, relaxed. “But I don’t know if any of it will help. I liked David, but I didn’t know him very well.”

  “You worked with him for eleven months, yeah?” Adisa said.

  “Well, yes, but you know what I mean. Work and friendship are very different things, even in a crew this small.” Ping’s appearance suggested a mixed Asian Earth ancestry in her family tree, and her accent was clearly from somewhere off-planet, odd and hard to identify. Not posh like Yuèliàng, in spite of her mannered word choice, and forced in a way that made me certain she was pitching her voice lower than its natural register. It was the voice of somebody trying to sound more serious and more upper-class.

  “Who did know him well? Who were his friends?” Adisa asked.

  “He was close to Neeta. He also spent a lot of downtime with Miguel. They knew him best, I suppose.”

  I looked at the personnel roster. Miguel Vera, fuel tech. Neeta Hunter, station roboticist. I recognized the latter’s employee photo: she was the young woman with the silver hair who had come to see where David died.

  “Why are there two sysadmins here, aye?” Adisa asked. “There aren’t normally, on a station this size.”

  “Most stations this size don’t have multiple concurrent operations. The mine is only one part of it. There is also the construction of the furnace and the processing facilities. The Overseer can handle it—they’re quite clever minds, you know—but on a human scale it is a lot of work for a crew this size,” Ping said. She separated her hands, tapped her fingers on the table, clasped them together again. “So if you’re asking if I was resentful that they sent David along to take over half my job, the answer is a resounding no. I welcomed his help. David was very good at his job.”

  I didn’t think Ping was being completely honest, but I couldn’t quite figure out why I felt that way. There was nothing cagey about the way she spoke, no hesitation or darting eyes. If anything, she seemed far too calm. She looked directly at Adisa, as though I wasn’t in the room at all. I was used to that—a lot of people didn’t like to look at me—but she didn’t seem uneasy. Quite the opposite. She seemed to be enjoying herself.

  “How did you divide up your duties?” Adisa asked.

  “We’ve never had a very rigorous division. I handle most of the Overseer’s cooperation with the subsidiary and auxiliary systems, such as the mining and manufacturing, power generation, intrastation transport. David handles—handled—most of the higher-level and external functions. He was better with the big picture than with the details. He took care of the efficiency algorithms. And the communications arrays,” she added pointedly, after the briefest pause. “What happened to the optical array? All we’ve been told is that it’s out of commission for now.”

  “That’s part of what we’re looking into. Who handles the security system?” Adisa asked.

  “David, mostly, but there have never been many security threats.” A pause. “Until now.”

  “And surveillance?”

  “David, again, but he didn’t spend much time with it. The surveillance system is not meant to have a lot of human interference—as you well know. The Overseer handles anything that comes up.”

  “Did David ever ask you about Aeolia?” he asked.

  Ping raised her delicate eyebrows. The question surprised her. “Why would you ask that?”

  “Did he?”

  “Not for some time, I don’t think. We spoke about it briefly when he first came here—professional curiosity only. There wasn’t much I could tell him that’s not in the official reports.”

  “What was he curious about, specifically?” I asked.

  Ping looked at me for the first time since she had sat down, and when she answered, it was with the air of someone who was consciously humoring me. “Like everybody else, he mostly wanted to know how a virus could infect an Overseer. It’s not supposed to be possible, but I think we all know that Parthenope going around telling everybody it was impossible was an irresistible challenge to the wrong sort of people.” She paused thoughtfully. “If we’re being honest, I do wonder if David’s concern was a bit more personal. I think he wanted to understand how Aeolia’s Overseer could have made such terrible mistakes. I did everything I could to assure him we had learned quite a lot from the incident and those mistakes wouldn’t happen again, but . . .” She shrugged slightly. “I understood his worry, because I’ve shared it. I can still smell them, do you know? All those people. The smell lingers.”

  She was looking at Adisa again, waiting for him to respond, but he remained quiet.

  So I asked, “Does Nimue’s Overseer make mistakes?”

  “Goodness, no. Nimue is terribly reliable. It’s quite set in its ways. But that can be its own problem, can’t it?”

  “How so?” I asked.

  “The Overseers are powerful AIs, but they’re very predictable, so they can be tricked. That’s what happened on Aeolia. And now it’s happened here, as well? You can tell me the truth, Inspector.” She was still smiling as she spoke to Adisa. Mary Ping smiled too much for somebody who had lost a colleague all of thirty hours ago and was now being interrogated by OSD officers. She smiled too much for anybody. “Not to the same extent, obviously, but the responsible party must have circumvented the surveillance system, or you wouldn’t be here talking to me. You would have identified the murderer as soon as you arrived, and that handsome lawyer would be drafting a statement that firmly absolved Parthenope of any liability or culpability in the matter—tell me, Safety Inspector Adisa, what is Mr. van Arendonk doing here anyway? This is hardly a matter that requires his presence. If you had surveillance, you would already be on your way back to your husband. Oh.” Ping pressed her fingers to her lips. She was looking at Adisa with dancing bright eyes. “I forgot. He’s gone back to Earth, hasn’t he?”

  Adisa didn’t acknowledge her questions. He asked, “When did you last speak to David Prussenko?”

  “You don’t already know? Is the surveillance gap that extensive?”

  “We’d like to hear it from you, yeah?”

  “Very well. It was just after dinner, the night before he died. I asked him to swap overnight shifts with me.”

  “Why?”

  “I had a bit of a headache. I was overtired from a late shift the day before. It was nothing serious. We traded shifts all the time.”

  “Was there anything unusual abo
ut his behavior that night?”

  “No. Nothing.”

  “Was he upset? Happy? Nervous? That day or anytime in the days before?”

  “No, not at all. But you really should ask his friends. They’ll know more. You have to understand.” She sat forward; her expression turned earnest. “I had absolutely no reason to want David dead. I liked him. We worked well together. I had no personal or professional quarrel with him.” She turned to meet my eyes. “This must be so hard for you. David spoke about you sometimes. He didn’t like to talk about Symposium, but he was a great admirer of your work.”

  Her easy words felt like a weight in the center of my chest. She was still smiling.

  “As am I,” she went on. “I followed your work on the Titan Vanguard AI for years. Tell me—did you choose that name intentionally? The Vanguard satellites of the twentieth century weren’t terribly successful. The first one crashed as soon as it launched. Seems an unlucky name to choose.”

  I swallowed; my throat was dry. I didn’t know how to answer. I decided to try to match her calm. “It was chosen by committee. They decided that ruling out mission names simply because they coincided with unsuccessful American projects from centuries ago would eliminate rather too much of the English language.”

  “How very typical. I confess I am a bit flustered right now. It’s not every day you get to meet the creator of such an innovative AI.”

  She did not look remotely flustered. I was the one who felt a nervous twitch in my fingers, the smallness of the room around us, the urge to shift in my seat and lean away.

  “I didn’t create Vanguard alone,” I said. “We had a large team. Sunita Radieh was the lead scientist.”

  “Oh, but everybody knows that when a leader takes credit for a major achievement, it means the underlings have done all the hard work.” Ping kept looking at me with that unnerving, unblinking stare. “I mean no offense. It’s only that I understand how it must be so hard for you, to be working at a job like this, in a place like this, when you were meant to have so much more.”