by Kali Wallace
Sigrah pushed Adisa’s hand away. “Get that out of my face.”
On the map, the crew was gathering in Res. There was nobody in the cargo tunnels near the warehouse. Nobody had passed through the exits into other parts of the station. The security system wasn’t scanning the killer’s ID anywhere. The suit had to be blocking the chip—that was the only thing that made sense. I was going to have to find them the old-fashioned way.
“Overseer, are the ID scans in the tunnels working? Show me the live surveillance. Every camera in the tunnels.”
The Overseer answered with a flash of the words: Data access restricted.
Right. Fuck. I needed to be back in the systems room—I needed access beyond what I had already been granted. Without that, all I had to go on was the map of the station, and the map wasn’t telling me anything. I focused again on Ops and Res. There were only eleven crew on the station, and Ping was dead, and Sigrah had been with Adisa, so that left nine to account for. Delicata was in the junction. Melendez was leaving the assay laboratory as van Arendonk approached in the Ops corridor. Yee was in her quarters, as was Vera. King, Balthazar, and Dietrich-Yun were in the common room. Dolin was in the exercise room.
I looked again. Counted heads.
He and his little friend, Ping had said.
“Hunter,” I said. “It’s Hunter.”
Adisa cut off whatever he was saying. “You’re certain?”
“She was in her quarters. She’s not anymore.”
“Hugo, do you have eyes on Neeta Hunter?” Adisa said. “Has anybody seen her?”
Neeta Hunter, with her expensive blue eyes and her expensive silver hair, her tears that flowed so freely. With her powerful connections and her friendship with David even she hadn’t seemed to understand. It was so fucking obvious in retrospect. If anybody on Nimue had the contacts that would make corporate espionage lucrative, it was her. And she had already blamed Mary Ping for David’s death.
“She’s not here,” van Arendonk said.
“Where the fuck is she?” I asked. “Where is she? Overseer, show me Hunter, for fuck’s sake.”
I was expecting another restricted access warning, but instead the Overseer answered: the map shifted to show Neeta Hunter as a solitary dot amid a bewildering labyrinth of lines.
“Where is that?”
Sigrah leaned over for a look. “Level 8. She just stepped off the lift. Why the hell would she be down there? She’s not authorized—”
“Marley, with me,” Adisa said. He turned on his heel and started walking.
“You’re not authorized!” Sigrah said, rushing after him. “You can’t just go into the facility without escort. It’s an active mine. The safety bond does not cover—”
“Can we secure the level to make sure she doesn’t leave?” Adisa asked, talking right over her.
She kept trying. “I have to go with you. This is a liability. You can’t—”
Adisa whirled to look at her as we all reached the door. “You are going to stay here with the rest of your crew. Can you secure the level to keep her there?”
“You do not have the authority to make such a demand,” Sigrah said.
“Add it to your list of complaints for HQ.” Adisa stepped into the junction, where van Arendonk was waiting. “The crew— and the foreperson—are restricted to this section. Get Ryu to watch them.”
Van Arendonk hesitated for only a second. He was looking at Adisa. “Right. And you’re going to . . . ?”
“We’re going to go find Neeta Hunter,” Adisa said. “Marley?”
I was already entering the security access code to enter the mine.
FIFTEEN
Only when the lift doors closed and the carriage began to move did I realize Adisa was still holding the crushed bot.
“Is that safe?” I said. I could see my blood staining the ends of its thin legs.
He plucked at one of the legs, twisted it, broke it free. “It’s harmless now.”
“Um. Okay. What is it?”
“We used to call them spiders.” He dropped the first leg and twisted another off. His voice was strangely flat, and he didn’t look up from the bot as he spoke. “Or Sorrells, sometimes, because they were built by Sorrell-Larkin and used by their mercenaries. Haven’t seen one in years. The UEN used them during the war.”
Sorrell-Larkin was, these days, yet another company mining the asteroid belt, but I had some vague recollection that they had gotten their start as an arms manufacturer and private security firm during the war. “What for? For bombing? Or starting fires?”
“Oh, they’re much more versatile than that, yeah? Good for fires and explosions, aye.” He turned it over. “Poisoning food and water supplies.” Peeled off the thin metal carapace on the underside. “Contaminating medical aid shipments.” Ripped the insides out with a single smart tug. “Burning fuel reserves.”
Adisa gripped another leg and snapped it off. It was disconcerting to watch. He was so focused, like a child with a bug he had captured under a glass. I hadn’t realized until that moment how calm his gestures usually were, not until I saw his hands now in constant, nervous motion.
“Assassinations,” he added, after a moment’s pause. He did not raise his voice, but there was a tightness in his words that made me tense, made me want to edge away from him in the lift.
A memory from my childhood on Earth: a thin-lipped teacher at the front of the classroom, his mustache trembling as he sniffed and said, The UEN did not conduct assassinations. Most of those events were false flag operations carried out by Martian suicide bombers. The war had been over for a few years at that point, and most of what happened—most of what the UEN did—was already public knowledge. The teacher knew he was repeating lies. He just didn’t care.
I said nothing. Adisa wasn’t finished.
“They would send a nest of these into crowds of protesters outside military bases. Food banks. Water plants.” Adisa pried another one of the legs out from beneath the round little body, watched the way it bent and twisted almost freely. “Refugee camps. Hospitals.”
I had seen footage of those attacks, the ones the UEN had blamed on Martians until they couldn’t deny the truth anymore. Hundreds or thousands of desperate, frightened people gathered together, asking for food or medicine or for somebody to hear them, and an explosion would go off, and another, another, a whole series of them like fireworks popping through the crowd, and people would panic, run, crush each other in an attempt to get away. I didn’t ask Adisa if he had seen those attacks in person. I already knew what he would say.
“This is quite a bit more advanced than what they had then. Your friend was a roboticist.”
“David wouldn’t build weapons. He hated even the idea of them.”
I stared at the spider, trying to decide if any part of it looked familiar. The legs. The metal plates on the body. The way it had moved. I didn’t know. I couldn’t imagine David re-creating UEN weapons. Even when he used weapons tech, he worked so hard to leave the deadly purpose behind. He had never built elegant little machines solely to kill people. That wasn’t David. That wasn’t the man I had known.
“People often abandon their principles in desperate times, aye?”
I felt sick even thinking about it. “I’m not saying it’s impossible. Only that . . .” I didn’t know what I was saying. I kept thinking about that teacher lying to a roomful of children because he could not admit he had supported atrocities. “Hunter is a roboticist too. She has resources. She could build something like that. There was the mech suit too, and I know David never worked on anything remotely like that. It might have been . . . I don’t know. An advanced worksuit of some kind?”
Adisa closed his hand around the spider’s little body, held it tight for a second. Then he flung it into the corner of the carriage, where it broke apart. I flinched as the parts skittere
d across the floor.
“It shouldn’t be here,” he said. He spoke so quietly I could barely hear him. “It shouldn’t be anywhere.”
I had to look away from the combination of anger and dismay on his face. It was too raw, too intense. I felt embarrassed to see it, and ashamed of my embarrassment, and suddenly, brightly angry at David—for this, for being involved, for bringing me here, for dying. I checked the map with the tracking data again: Hunter had not moved from Level 8. We were moving through sections of the station, through areas for fuel manufacturing, volatile processing, water purification, and more. The whole facility extended just over three kilometers down the long axis of Nimue.
It was a long distance to cover, even for a fast lift. It was hard to imagine how Hunter could have traveled so quickly through the station, but perhaps the transport tunnels had cargo movers that weren’t bound by the rules of human comfort.
Adisa cleared his throat. “Tell me what happened, aye?”
He meant it was time to include what I had left out when we were standing in front of Sigrah and Delicata. I quickly told him about Mary Ping finding me in the warehouse and what she had said.
“She killed David,” I said. “She admitted it to me. She knew David and Hunter were working together. I don’t know exactly what they were doing, but I know David found power usage that’s not being reported, cargo shipments that aren’t tracked, fuel that’s produced but never transported off-site. Probably a lot more. That’s why he spent so much time looking at other people’s work. The facility’s supposed to be self-sufficient. He knew something wasn’t adding up, and he wanted to find out why. And what he found out is that Parthenope is lying about how successful Nimue is. All those glowing reports they’re sending out to their investors and partners are bullshit. The station is nowhere near self-sustaining.”
Adisa was quiet for a second. “What was he going to do with this information?”
“Pass it along to whoever was paying him to spy, I guess. Maybe that’s Neeta Hunter’s family. I don’t know, but I bet tracing his contact on Hygiea would tell us more.”
“Where does Mary Ping fit into it?” Adisa asked. “Why attack Prussenko? She doesn’t strike me as somebody with any company loyalty.”
“I don’t think she cared about protecting the company at all. It sounded more like she was trying to protect herself. She wanted to make David understand, so maybe she was afraid of being implicated? Or scapegoated. Or she had her own side project going on that she didn’t want him to find.” I exhaled in frustration. “I don’t know. I don’t know what she wanted to tell me. I’m not sure she was entirely in her right mind.”
The lift began to slow. We were approaching Level 8.
“She’s likely still armed. And won’t be happy to see us.” He drew his electroshock weapon and powered it on.
“Right. Great. You know that won’t be much use if she’s suited up.”
Still, I wished I had taken Ryu’s weapon before running into the lift, even if I hadn’t the first idea how to use it.
“She didn’t kill you before, when she had the chance, aye?”
“I guess she didn’t,” I said.
“We try to talk to her first. Just talk.”
Where the previous levels had been roughly cubic, Level 8 was a massive disk capped onto the deepest end of the massive cylinder. Catwalks radiated from the lift like spokes of a bicycle wheel, and below our feet, visible through the mesh walkways and an incomprehensible jumble of machinery, was the mining equipment. Thirteen huge, toothed boring machines to gnaw away at the solid rock. The wide conduits to transport the material to the center of the wheel. The series of crushing drums and filters at the center. The cone where crushed rock was shunted into the furnace to be scorched to ash, where the intense heat would extract all the water, volatiles, and metals.
The mine was quiet for now. Nimue was in a stabilization phase, prepping for the next stage of expansion. The mining machines were due to fire up within a few days, according to Sigrah; that was why she had refused to stop work.
So much closer to the physical center of the asteroid, gravity did not tug us much in any particular direction, and the cluster of lights around the lift did little to illuminate the vast space. The air smelled of metal and tasted of grit. It felt at first like an abandoned station, or a mausoleum, misted with rock dust and so dim the distant outer edges faded into darkness. It was hard to imagine how different it would be when the mine was fully operational.
But there was movement in the darkness. I became aware of the noise first: metal on metal, faint clatters and clanks, the momentary hum of an engine that revved and faded. I looked around frantically, searching for glints of silver in the darkness, bracing for another hateful little spider—then realized the source was an army of inspection and repair bots crawling over the machinery. I spotted about ten, maybe fifteen, glimpsed through gaps in the machines and in shafts of light in the distance; they were the same dull metal hues as the equipment and darted in and out so swiftly it was impossible to know where they might emerge. It reminded me of roaches swarming a refuse heap.
“Marley.” Adisa’s voice was quiet. “There.”
He nodded toward the left. Along one of the catwalks, about thirty meters from the lift, a bright ring of light surrounded a solitary figure. With his electroshock weapon in hand, Adisa went first. Hunter’s silver hair caught the light. She wasn’t trying to hide—but neither was there any way for us to approach her unseen. As we neared, I saw that she was on her hands and knees beside a control console. She had the front panel popped open as she rooted around inside. There was a tool bag clipped to the walkway railing beside her.
She noticed our approach when we were about halfway to her. She looked up and sat back on her heels.
“Oh, hello,” she said. “Did you need something?”
She reached for her tool bag, and Adisa said, “Don’t.”
“I was only—is my radio not working? What is it?” she asked.
“Put the tools down and stand up, please.” Adisa didn’t raise the stun weapon, although he was now close enough to use it. “Slowly.”
“I don’t understand.” Hunter rose to her feet, brushing her hands on her jumpsuit. I saw the exact moment she noticed the weapon in Adisa’s hand. Her eyes widened. “What’s going on?”
“What are you doing down here?” Adisa asked.
“I’m only trying to finish some work.”
“Alone? At this time?”
“I know it’s not smart, but . . . What’s wrong? Did something happen?”
“Something’s not right,” I said quietly.
Adisa didn’t respond, but I knew he heard me. He had to feel it too. She was afraid, she was confused, but there was nothing in her demeanor that suggested guilt. It had taken us several minutes to get here on the lift, but she had obviously been working for some time. There was no sign of the black mech suit.
Before any of us could say anything else, our radios clicked on.
“You have a problem, Mohammad,” said van Arendonk.
Adisa grabbed his radio. “What?”
“The Overseer has been able to track Hunter since she left her quarters. She was never out of range of an ID scan.”
“I don’t understand. Why are you looking for me?” Hunter asked.
Van Arendonk continued, “She went straight from Res to the lift. Stopped at Level 2 for a few minutes. Went back to the lift. Stopped at Level 5. Back in the lift. Her ID chip was scanned every time.”
“I told you, I’m finishing some work,” Hunter said.
“Oh, fuck,” I said. My heart began thumping anxiously. I clicked on my own radio. “Was she—”
“No,” van Arendonk said. “She was not. She hasn’t been scanned at any of the warehouse entrances since several hours ago.”
Hunter’s expre
ssion was baffled. “What are you talking about?”
“Then who the hell was that?” I asked.
Van Arendonk said, “I have no fucking idea, Marley.”
“Check the surveillance in the tunnels,” I said. “You can get permission for that, can’t you? Where did they come from? How did they get there?”
“Please tell me what’s going on,” Hunter said.
“And,” van Arendonk said, “the rest of the crew are accounted for. All the tracking data is solid. None of them were in the warehouse when Mary Ping died.”
“What?” Hunter’s mouth dropped open. “Mary is dead?”
“For fuck’s sake.” Adisa ran a hand through his hair, then looked at me. “How is that possible?”
“How is what possible? Please!” Hunter’s voice rose to a shout, but she looked abashed when we both stared at her. “What’s going on?”
Adisa clipped his stun weapon to his belt. “Mary Ping was killed in the cargo warehouse about half an hour ago. You were the only crew member not accounted for at the time.”
Hunter put her fingers to her lips. “Oh, no. I didn’t do anything. I swear. I was here.”
“Somebody has to be fooling the surveillance system,” I said to van Arendonk. “Where did the killer go? Are they still in the transport tunnels?”
“Oh, you’ll love this,” van Arendonk said. There was a slight waver in his voice: he was rattled. “There is no surveillance in the cargo transport system. None at all, no matter what permission we get.”
“Bullshit. There has to be. Ask the—” Shit. There was no sysadmin to help him, because both sysadmins had been murdered. “There has to be.”
“The system hasn’t been operational for months.”
“It’s been broken forever,” Hunter put in. “David filed about fifty reports asking for a surveillance specialist to come fix it.”
I had never heard of a Parthenope surveillance system being down for so long, in any part of any station, without the company jumping to fix it. I wondered why Sigrah hadn’t mentioned it. It seemed like a rather important detail to leave out when we were supposed to be identifying a killer.
