Dead Space

by Kali Wallace

  “Did David make anybody angry lately? Any fights?” Adisa asked.

  Vera shook his head. “No way, man. Shit. That’s sick. There’s no reason. Even the people he annoyed weren’t, like, annoyed, you know?”

  “What kind of annoyance was that, aye?”

  “No big. His shitty taste in music. Okay, seriously, don’t look at me like that.” Vera’s grin was quick and strained. “Like, he was good at his job, I mean, really good, yeah? So sometimes he’d get bored and start sticking his nose into other people’s work.”

  “How so?” I asked.

  “He spent two weeks once riding my ass about fuel leakages in the dead-ended lines that run to the old UEN base. The Overseer has no control out there. I doubt it even knows the base is there except as a blank spot on the map—there’s nothing functional left for it to know about. But David wanted to see for himself.”

  “Did he? Did he go and check the fuel lines?” I asked.

  Vera shrugged. “No idea, but I doubt it. There’s no point. The Overseer isn’t sending fuel and power out to an empty base. If there are leaks, they’re somewhere else.”

  “What other problems was David asking about?”

  “Let me think. Oh, yeah, he was always hassling Ned about errors in the cargo manifests, like a facility this size isn’t going to have errors. Shit nobody gives a fuck about, but that was David.”

  We heard much the same from the remainder of the crew. David had been well-liked, good at his job, and got along with everybody. There were minor complaints, petty squabbles, ordinary crew disputes, but no fights, no simmering resentments, and absolutely nobody who would admit to having any idea that David or anybody else was involved with anything shady.

  Sonya Balthazar, the furnace engineer, had asked Sigrah to intervene when David kept inviting himself into the mine to nitpick her work, never mind that he had absolutely no fucking idea how to bore a half-kilometer-wide tunnel through an asteroid. Sigrah had scolded David, but it hadn’t done much good.

  “It’s too dangerous,” Balthazar said, tapping her fingers on the table to emphasize each word. “But he never seemed to care. He wouldn’t even tell me what he was looking for, and honestly, I didn’t have time to figure it out.” She sat back in the chair and crossed her arms over her chest. “I don’t have time to deal with David’s shit. I don’t have time for this.”

  Lashawna Melendez, the geologist, told us that David did the same in her assay lab on more than one occasion, but she never bothered running to Sigrah because she didn’t need help dealing with unwanted interruptions. Ned Delicata, the docking and cargo tech, confirmed that David gave him grief about discrepancies in cargo manifests, but he added that he had turned right around and passed that grief along to Parthenope, because the mistakes all originated elsewhere. He had never fought with David, he said, and he was more than happy to tell us—at length—his thoughts on how likely each and every one of his crewmates was to be a murderer, what method they were most likely to use, what secrets he suspected were hidden in their pasts.

  “We don’t even have the right to defend ourselves,” Delicata said. He leaned over the table while he spoke, mostly ignoring me to address his words toward Adisa. “We should have that, at least, but thanks to your fucking people, we’re stuck out here with our thumbs up our asses every time some psycho decides to fuck things up.”

  Adisa didn’t bother pointing out that it had been the overwhelmingly powerful UEN, not the starving and desperate Martian rebels, whose use of weaponry had led to the postwar disarmament treaties. His only reaction was to tilt his head slightly and say, without trying to soften his accent in the slightest, “You think Prussenko should have been able to defend himself, aye?”

  “I think a lot of things would be different if we weren’t expecting the likes of you and your little security shits to keep us safe.”

  “So who do you think is responsible? Given the nature of the murder, aye?”

  Delicata didn’t hesitate. “It was the Hunter brat. Lovers’ quarrel. You know how rich kids get when they don’t get what they want.”

  “Yeah? What did she want?”

  With a look of confusion, Delicata said, “Why don’t you ask her?”

  Adisa thanked him for his help and asked him to send the next crew member in. Delicata, still red in the face, stormed away. I nudged Ned Delicata upward on my list of crew members to look into more closely.

  Katee King, the electrical engineer, confirmed that David had told her not to bother repairing the offline transmitters until they figured out the cause of the power surges, but she swore once again she’d had no idea he was hiding something. Bitsy Dietrich-Yun, the facilities engineer, disagreed with Vera about David’s taste in music but confirmed what the others had said about David looking for off-assignment work; he had helped her reprogram some of the cargo loaders a month or so ago, and they were supposed to meet up in a day or two to fix some more. Ivan Dolin, the mining engineer, confirmed what Balthazar had said about David sometimes wandering about the station where he wasn’t supposed to be, but like everybody else, he didn’t think there was much to it and didn’t mind. He welcomed the company whenever David ended up out in the mine during long, dull shifts of fixing this machine or that. Sometimes they played cards on their breaks.

  They were all edgy and anxious, every person we talked to, if not outright scared. A few had theories, a few had suspicions, but not one of them admitted to knowing anything that might have gotten David killed.

  After the last crew member was gone, Adisa rolled his shoulders tiredly and rubbed the back of his neck. “Either this is the cleanest crew in the whole fucking system or they’re all so scared of being implicated they can’t see what’s in front of them. And that includes Sigrah.”

  “Whatever David was doing, it will be in the data somewhere. I just need time to look. And access.” I hoped I sounded more confident than I felt. I had been expecting some guidance from the interviews—stories about crew conflict, hints of black market trades, suspicions of shady contacts—but all we’d learned was that whatever David was doing, he had kept it to himself.

  Adisa tapped his fingers on the table. “Maybe Hugo has learned something from HQ.”

  There was a shout from the common room. We both jumped to our feet and moved toward the door. Neeta Hunter’s voice rang out, high-pitched and furious. “What did you do to him? What did you do to him?”

  Adisa and I emerged from the galley just in time to see Hunter launch herself at Mary Ping, who was walking through the main room. Hunter grabbed the front of her jumpsuit and shoved her against the wall; Ping’s head struck with an audible thump.

  “What the fuck did he ever do to you?”

  Ivan Dolin, who was closest, grabbed Hunter’s shoulder to try to pull her back. “What the fuck, girl? Stop.”

  Hunter ignored him. She was fixated on Ping. She had one hand fisted in the front of Ping’s shirt; with the other she struck Ping hard across the face.

  “Why? Just tell me why! Why would you hurt him?”

  “All right.” Adisa darted forward to catch Hunter’s wrist before she could hit Ping again. He pried her fingers from Ping’s shirt and tugged her away, with Dolin’s help. “Back off, yeah? Don’t do this.”

  “I know it was you.” Hunter’s voice was wet with tears. “Everybody knows it was you.”

  “I’ll take her to her room,” Dolin said, putting his arm around Hunter’s shoulders.

  The other miners stared as they left, half-risen from their chairs, mouths open. Their expressions were caught between abashed amusement and genuine fear.

  I didn’t notice Sigrah in the doorway until she spoke.

  “We’re not doing this,” Sigrah said. Her voice was strident and loud enough to carry. “Do you hear me? We are not fucking doing this. We are not that kind of crew. We are not going to make accu
sations. We are not going to treat each other with suspicion. We are going to let the security team do their jobs, and we are going to get back to work. Is that clear?”

  A ringing silence filled the room. None of the miners reacted.

  “Is that fucking clear?”

  Mumbles of assent. Narrowed eyes. One or two obedient nods.

  Through all of this, Mary Ping said nothing. She sat at the end of a mess table. She smoothed down the front of her shirt and touched her cheek gingerly. The blow had left a red mark on her pale skin. She looked over to see me standing just outside the galley. She smiled, whisper-soft and quick as a flash, and turned away.

  ELEVEN

  By the time we finished interviewing the crew, it was technically the end of the day, and we all sat down to a demoralizing meal of rehydrated noodles and indistinguishable plant protein smothered in a sticky, too-sweet sauce. I finished my own food quickly and slipped away to look around the crew quarters.

  I found David’s berth about halfway down the long corridor. My security access code let me in.

  The room was barren and impersonal. David had little clothing aside from standard-issue jumpsuits and work boots. He didn’t even have an extra pillow or blanket from the station stores. It was such a contrast to what I recalled of David’s previous homes that it made my heart ache. He had once surrounded himself with pieces of every aspect of his life. Jewelry made by his nieces, images and videos from his travels, little bots he tooled and trained in his spare time. His laboratory had been a whirlwind of organized chaos. He had always known exactly where to find everything he needed.

  I thought, inexplicably, of my brother’s home in the Cotswolds, his ancient cottage with its low doorways and big wooden beams, teacups in the sink and children’s toys everywhere. I always told Devon that so much clutter would drive me mad, and he always told me I was welcome to clean for him, if I wanted, while he took the kids to the playground. In truth I loved Devon’s house, loved how rooted he and his children were in that place, loved how the door creaked but never loud enough to hide the sound of Michael and Renee shrieking that Auntie Hester was here. Little Phoebe would be able to shout it along with them soon—but she didn’t know her aunt. She would probably never know me. I would never know what her voice sounded like calling my name just as the sun was setting and the scent of something rich and hearty drifted from the kitchen.

  In that moment I wanted very much to answer Devon’s latest letter. I wanted to tell him about David. I wanted to tell him about the doctors’ appointments I was postponing because I was afraid to hear how little progress I was making. I wanted to tell him how much debt I had to pay off and how much every message, every video, every contact with Earth set me back. I wanted him to tell me that it was okay, my being so far from home and missing so much. It was okay that I was so different, so broken, so alone.

  The only sign that monastic room belonged to David was a map on the wall. It was old-fashioned, printed on some kind of archival-quality polymer, stuck to the metal surface with black electrical tape. The image was a geomorphic map of Titan, with the moon’s landforms rendered in vivid colors and patterns and light. David had had one just like it aboard Symposium, right above his bunk, so that he might fall asleep every night gazing at it.

  When Symposium had sailed past Mars’s orbit, we celebrated that milestone of our voyage with a tremendous party for all the crew and passengers. I had not thought about that day since before the disaster, but it came to me now, clear and vibrant. The festivities had been briefly interrupted when Kristin Herd got herself locked out of the laboratory again—third time since the voyage began, seventh since she’d joined the project—and her hurt, mulish reaction had only made the rest of us laugh. It made us laugh every time, which was callous, but we only laughed because she never did. We were never cruel enough to deserve what she did to us later.

  I had ended the night in David’s quarters, drunk and giddy, lying beside him on his narrow bunk and pointing to all the places we were going to explore. All we did was talk and laugh and plan—our friendship was never sexual—but that night we spent lying side by side, fully clothed with our shoulders and hips touching, planning for a future we craved so much the wanting was a constant hunger. It was warm and intimate and comfortable, and I remembered thinking, perhaps saying aloud, that it was worth everything, all the years of work, all the sacrifice, all the tearful goodbyes, for a chance to know a world nobody had known before.

  It hurt, like a blade right between my ribs, to remember how happy we had been.

  Gecko boots squeaked on the floor behind me. I turned to find Adisa in the doorway.

  “I’ve searched it already,” he said. “Nothing here. No contraband. Not even moonshine.”

  “I know.” My voice was hoarse. I blinked quickly and made a show of looking around the barren little room. I did not want him to see the tears stinging my eyes. “I only want to see . . .”

  How he had lived. Who he had become. I didn’t know how to explain. There was nothing here.

  Adisa made a sound in his throat, like he was on the verge of speaking, and for one horrifying second I thought he might say something comforting. I didn’t think I could bear that.

  Perhaps my discomfort showed on my face, because he only said, “Ryu has found something in the medical exam, yeah? They want to fill us in.”

  “Right. Okay.” I followed him for a few steps, then stopped. “Wait.”

  Adisa looked back. “Yeah?”

  “What happened on Aeolia?” When he didn’t say anything, I went on, nerves making me ramble. “I know I can look it up and read the reports and everything. But it’s just that . . . David was reading about it before he died. And he was also reading about Symposium. And trying to find information about this Project Sunshine or whatever it’s called. Those three things, right before he died. And Mary Ping was obviously trying to needle both of us.” And succeeding—but I kept that thought to myself. “Maybe it’s just a coincidence, because Symposium was in the news that day, but . . .”

  “You think Prussenko saw some connection?”

  “He might have.” I shifted my position, trying to ease the growing ache in my left hip. I needed to sit down. “Aeolia was also a terrorist attack, wasn’t it? A virus infected the Overseer?”

  Adisa rubbed his hand over his face. “Aye, it was. Aeolia was a mine, but not like this one. An older one. Big operation, active twelve or fifteen years, and a lot of the work was exterior—you know what that means for a mine?” I shook my head. “It’s more dangerous work, needs a lot more attention, so they need more crew. They can’t just send borers into the rock to chew it up, aye? Thirty were assigned to the site, plus another thirty on temporary assignment to upgrade the dock. The company never considered it a security risk.”

  “How did anybody even get a virus into an Overseer?”

  It was supposed to be impossible; that was part of why Parthenope guarded its Overseers and their design so closely. The easiest way to infect an AI would be to get into its brain directly, but that was no easy task for anybody. Only a sysadmin with a specific reason could access the AI directly, and only under very particular circumstances. I thought about the locked door in the systems room, the one that van Arendonk and I hadn’t been granted permission to open. I wondered if David had ever gone through that door. Or Mary Ping. I should have asked her.

  I added, “Was it somebody on the station?”

  “We never found out,” Adisa admitted. “If it was, they’re gone now, yeah?”

  “What did the virus do?”

  “It caused systems failures that cascaded until the Overseer shut itself down.”

  “It shut itself down? But that’s—they shouldn’t do that. Why is that even possible?”

  He shrugged slightly, made a vague gesture with one hand. “Ask Mary Ping. She investigated it afterward. The crew sent out dis
tress calls requesting help, but Hygiea didn’t know it was serious until a cargo ship got there and . . . They were too late. The water recycling and atmospheric control systems had broken down, so when the fires started, there was nothing to . . . We had to use ID chips to identify them. Sixty people. It took days.”

  I didn’t want to imagine it. I had spent too much of the past few years trying not to imagine what fire could do to the human body. How helpless people were in the confines of a ship or station. How hard it must have been, how very painstaking and gruesome it must have been, to identify every single body. I didn’t want to picture it, but the images were there in my mind. Twisted and blackened corpses in dark corridors. Smoke that smelled of meat and melted rubber. Flashing lights. Alarms. The alarms I heard were from Symposium. The corridors I saw were aboard Symposium. I didn’t know what Aeolia had looked like. When I tried to imagine it, I only came up with the corridors of Nimue, rooms like this room, beds like the one David had left behind, and thinking about that filled me with so much dread I could scarcely breathe.

  “Is that what you wanted to know?” Adisa looked so terribly uncomfortable that I almost regretted asking. I had wanted to know—needed to know—but that didn’t make me feel any less of an asshole for making him tell me. I should have read the reports.

  “Did anybody ever claim responsibility?” I asked.

  “No.” Adisa started to say something, but he changed his mind, shook his head slightly. “It’s worth looking into, I suppose. Come on. Ryu’s waiting.”

  He left. I looked over David’s berth one more time before following.

  Except for the map of Titan, that empty room could have been anybody’s quarters. It could have been my quarters on Hygiea, marked just as little, every bit as easy to abandon. Even the map seemed sapped of color and contrast in the weak, muddy light. I closed and locked the door behind me.