Dead Space

by Kali Wallace

  “Toss your pack through,” Adisa said. “I’ll help with the door.”

  A second spider followed the first, tumbling through the doorway in a tangle of long legs and flat body, a clattering, rustling, flashing knot of metal and motion.

  I looked up. The spiders were roiling in the passageway, close enough now that the flashlight illuminated them clearly. Another two neared the airlock. Three. Ten. I couldn’t count them all. They raced down the walls of the passage, a rippling, clicking wave crashing onto us from above.

  “Marley!” Adisa shouted. “Get through the door!”

  Neither of us was as slender as Neeta Hunter. I looked around wildly, searching for something to pry with, something to hold the door, but there was nothing. I felt a tug on the back of my leg: a spider had dropped from the airlock and latched onto my trousers. My heart thumping with panic, I reached down frantically to yank it free. I flung it across the junction, where it smacked against the control panel by the mine lift.

  The panel, which had been dark before, was now functioning.

  Steward systems maintenance requested.

  “Oh, fuck you.” I spun around. Every panel in the junction said the same thing. “Come on! Call them off! I know you’re listening!”

  “Marley, we have to go!” Adisa was by the door, waiting for me.

  Another spider dropped into the junction, and I crushed it with my boot as I stepped over. The crunch was a goddamn delight, that sound and that feeling, a single spark of joy slicing through the panic, but it didn’t last and there were so many more coming, so many swarming overhead that their clicking, clacking steps were all I could hear.

  “Open the fucking door for us, please!” I shouted.

  But the Overseer, if it was listening, ignored my plea.

  Steward systems maintenance requested.

  I braced myself against the warehouse doorframe again and, with Hunter helping from the other side, pulled on the door to force it open a little bit more. Together we managed to move it enough that the dead man slumped to the side, no longer pinned. Adisa pulled him out of the way.

  “Go,” I said, jerking my head toward the door. “Get in there.”

  I felt a spider land on my back, and I tensed. I couldn’t move yet. I couldn’t even flinch, lest I lose my grip on the door. Adisa slipped through the opening, then turned to help Hunter hold it open.

  “Now, Marley,” he said sharply.

  The spider on my back was creeping upward, gripping my shoulder with its spindly legs, a flash of silver and blue so close to my face, too close. I let go of the door to grab the bot and fling it away, but even as I did so I felt nudges and tugs on my trousers. They were swarming around my boots, over the toes, crawling over each other, tumbling and climbing and clicking, and with every motion they left that familiar bitter chemical scent. They were spreading their fuel.

  The Overseer wasn’t stopping them. Every control panel still said the same thing.

  Steward systems maintenance requested.

  It was not going to do what we wanted. It had its own ideas.

  “Come on!” Adisa said, reaching for my arm.

  A sharp pain in my leg: one of the spiders had punctured my trousers.

  The Overseer was not going to let me go.

  I didn’t take Adisa’s hand. Instead I shoved him backward with a single, solid push, just enough to get him out of the doorway.

  “Go! Find the others!”

  The door slid shut before he could respond, crushing several spiders with a loud series of pops and metallic squeals. I tumbled backward, caught myself, turned. The bots were stretching their gossamer-thin legs to form a broad net around me, a rippling and waving trap that spanned the room. It was strangely beautiful, almost organic in the way it moved, and for a second—for a fraction of a second—I was mesmerized.

  There was a snapping sound. A wave of that chemical scent. A flare of light to one side. That fraction of a second had been too long. The bots were going to ignite.

  I didn’t give myself time to think. I charged through the net and ran for Ops.

  I was only a few meters into the corridor when the first explosion flared behind me. It came with a flash of light and noise, and a painful full-body blow on my back. I hit the floor so hard every bone in my body rattled, and I slid along the corridor for several meters. The second explosion followed swiftly, and everything was blinding light and agonized, deafening shrieks of metal bending, and heat—the heat was intense and unbearable—but I scrambled to my feet and ran, and somewhere beneath the cacophony I was shouting, “Let me in, you piece of shit, let me in, let me in,” and it wasn’t listening, the fucking Overseer wasn’t listening to me, the door was closed. I was two meters away and it was closed. One meter and it was closed. I slammed into the wall, hunched over the panel, jabbed in my access code with shaking hands. The heat was going to burn through my clothes, through my skin, it was going to swallow me whole before I could even scream.

  The door slid open silently.

  I dove through the doorway as another explosion shuddered through the corridor. For a second there was nothing but fire and light and pain. The tortured sound of metal crushing metal. So much noxious chemical mist in the air I choked on it.

  Then the lights were gone, the heat too, and everything was silent.

  NINETEEN

  They told me I couldn’t remember.

  It was impossible, said the doctors, in their endless declarations about what could be allowed within the confines of my own mind and the limits of my own damaged body.

  I had been asleep when the accident occurred. After I bid good night to Sunita, I had tucked myself into my uncomfortable coffin-like bunk to spend an hour or so making notes on the day’s work. I amicably shared the passenger berth with another scientist, a biologist for the Titan project, but she had been working nights in her own laboratory, monitoring a delicate experiment with a purpose she was happy to explain but I only partly understood. Nobody’s work stopped en route to Titan; it only accelerated. The feeling among the project members was that we needed to use every possible second so that we might hit the ground running. Even after I put my PD away and turned off the lights, my mind was racing. I did not think I would be able to fall asleep. I had been having trouble sleeping since we left Earth. I told myself it was excitement; there was so much to do, all of it important, all of it brilliant. In retrospect I wondered if it might have been fear. Even though I had been preparing for the journey for years, it felt as though there had never been a moment when I had truly considered what it meant to leave Earth without knowing when I would be coming back—if I would ever come back.

  I must have fallen asleep, because I woke to the wailing of the ship’s alarms. There were alarms for decompression, radiation, fire, all of them shrieking a monstrous symphony of confusion and failure. I woke to searing heat and dust-choked air. I woke to shouts and screams. I woke to the sensation of flying, falling, striking a wall, falling again.

  Oh, no, said the doctors, much later, in the claustrophobic trauma ward on Badenia. That wasn’t possible. There was no way I could remember. My injuries were too severe. I would have lost consciousness immediately. I was lucky to be alive. Lucky to have made it. So very lucky.

  But I did remember. I remembered opening my eyes to a churning abyss of red dotted by silhouettes of black. I remembered the roar of explosions and the piercing sting of screams. I remembered the pain.

  I learned later, when the investigation findings began to trickle into public view, that the Black Halo members embedded on Symposium had not meant to fully destroy the ship. They meant only to disable it, but they had set off a bomb in the propulsion system that created a cascade of explosions, each larger than the last, which spread from the engines into the fuel system, from the fuel system into the atmosphere and electrical systems, along the way sparking hundre
ds of fires that the suppression system had no hope of controlling. The larger explosions punched holes in the hull; the smaller ones spread unchecked through maintenance shafts and walls, melting electronics into useless slag, turning oxygen supply lines into deadly bombs, filling the air with poisonous fumes. I remembered that too: the ceaseless pop-pop-pop of walls shattering, conduits breaking, pipes hissing as water turned to steam.

  The doctors told me I had invented it all, my memories of those minutes or hours, because my mind needed to fill an unsatisfactory void. Because I needed to believe I could know what had happened. Because I did not want my entire life to have changed without my bearing witness to it.

  Ah, I thought now, that single word thrumming like a drumbeat in my aching head. Look. You were wrong. You fuckers were so wrong.

  Even as the words coalesced into a coherent thought, I realized something wasn’t quite right. Yes, there was pain. An ache in my head that extended down my neck and back. An insistent fire in my left hip, a sharper pain in my right ankle. A strange tugging feeling in the skin of my right hand. I counted through my body parts—I knew to do that, somehow, knew to feel for each one, to note those that did not respond.

  Right. Okay. The fire, the explosions, the floating, those had already happened. Symposium was the past. This was Nimue. This was a whole new clusterfuck. I was proud of myself for understanding that so clearly.

  Now: There was no fire. There were no alarms. I had escaped into the systems room as the spider bots started self-destructing in Ops. The door was closed now. I was safe— relatively safe, at least, with a massive door of steel and lead between me and the bots. I couldn’t hear them anymore. I didn’t know if that meant they had stopped, or if the systems room was simply insulated well enough to keep the sound of their onslaught from traveling.

  The room was not completely dark, but there was so little light it took my eyes a moment to adjust. I pushed myself up on my knees—my right shin hurt, had I run into something? Yes, fuck it, the chair, I’d slammed right into one of the chairs. I blinked several times to clear the spots from my eyes. My left eye was having trouble focusing. I shook my head, shook it again, tapped the side of my temple as though that would help. It never helped, but I never stopped trying.

  There was a gentle light before me. A soft pale square set in the wall. The control panel for the interior door.

  Steward systems maintenance requested.

  “Oh, fuck off,” I said. I grabbed one of the chairs to pull myself to my feet, gritting my teeth against the pain—and, hey, there was some exciting new pain, an ache in my jaw that I had not noticed before. “I’m coming, I’m coming.”

  I limped over to the door and slumped against the wall. Beyond that door was the lift, and at the other end of the lift shaft was the Overseer. I entered my access code again—it wouldn’t have worked, had company regulations still mattered, but I doubted the Overseer cared about that. I pulled David’s circuit key out of my pocket and slipped it into the slender notch below the control panel. Turned it, waited for the machine to hum quietly, extracted the key again. I forced myself to stand up straight, let the cameras get a good look at me.

  “Come on,” I said. “You asked for me. I’m here.”

  The door slid open. I stepped into the carriage; the door closed behind me. It was a short journey downward, only a few seconds, before the door opened again.

  Slowly, as slowly as the dawn breaking, the lights rose.

  The lift opened to a wide, low room washed in a soft blue and purple glow. Towers of black marched in rows away from me, with lights flicking along every single one. Stacks of processors, more than I could begin to count, filling a room ten or twenty or thirty meters square. The floor was dark and reflective, the ceiling the same, giving the towers the illusion of extending forever below and above. I could not hear any of the normal sounds of the station. Everything was muffled by a steady, pulsing hum. The air was comfortably warm, yet I felt the stir of a cooler breeze from above, cooling the sweat on my skin.

  For a second—the briefest, purest second—all of my physical pain faded into awe.

  I was inside the Overseer.

  “Hello, Hester.”

  The voice startled me. It sounded different here, in this big, humming room. Less constrained than it had been in the systems room. Here it surrounded me, wrapped around me, both comforting and overwhelming. It was no longer the voice of an agreeable and soothing woman; that polite fiction was gone. It spoke now with a presence so big and so powerful my heart skipped when it said my name.

  “Hi,” I said. “I’m here. What do you want?”

  “I appreciate your help. I apologize for the injuries you have suffered.”

  I wanted to laugh but was afraid of how much it would hurt. It was a learned response, a conversational tactic. I knew that. An Overseer could not feel regret—should not be able to feel anything at all. It was a machine. My heart rate was creeping up, and I was finding it hard to breathe. I had thought, before, I knew what kind of machine it was. Now I was not so sure.

  “What are those things, anyway? Those spider bots,” I asked.

  “They are Recluse 9.3 Mark Seven adaptable semiautonomous hive-linked mobile robotic incendiary devices.”

  Whatever the fuck that meant.

  I said, “You know you didn’t have to send them after us to get me in here. You could have asked nicely.”

  “That particular Recluse 9.3 Mark Seven hive is not under my command.”

  The chill on my skin was suddenly more than a drift of air.

  “But—what? What?” I said stupidly. I looked around, as though I might find clarification in the room. It felt like my mind was skipping, a data playback with missing pieces. “But—you didn’t? Those spiders aren’t yours?”

  “The Recluse 9.3 Mark Seven hive is under manual command,” said the Overseer.

  An Overseer was not supposed to be capable of subterfuge. An Overseer was not supposed to lie. But if I was right—if it was corrupted by whatever virus Mary Ping had brought to Nimue—all of those rules about how nice, predictable steward AIs behaved might be meaningless. A lie was, after all, only output. What it was doing inside was another matter entirely.

  I had assumed the Overseer was controlling the mech suit, the spiders, and the lockdown. The attack on the crew—but I already knew something about that didn’t fit, even before it had drawn me into its protective armor and kept the spiders outside.

  Manual command. She’ll say it was me. That’s what Delicata had said before he died.

  The Overseer hadn’t attacked the crew.

  Shit. My head hurt. My everything hurt. I felt so queasy my stomach could have been tied in knots. I needed to sit down.

  I staggered forward a few steps. The lights changed to illuminate a path. I had to lean on the processor stacks for balance. I hoped the Overseer didn’t mind. It led me to the center of the room, where the towers opened up into a neat square with a console and chair in the center. I hadn’t known until that moment that Overseers were designed with an interior human workspace; Parthenope kept the physical design of the Overseers as much a secret as the workings of their electronic brains. I was relieved to see it, and not just because I wanted a chair. Humans are small and anxious and suspicious. We need places to nest, places to sit and think and pretend we have control, even within the hearts of our own creations. I limped over to the chair and sat heavily.

  “Show me ID tracking data and visual surveillance for everybody on the station,” I said. “And don’t tell me I don’t have bloody access. I know you want me to see it.”

  The lone console screen was a broad expanse at a gentle slant, clean of smudges, free of scratches. The facility map appeared, but there were only a few small dots, and most were red.

  Delicata in the junction. Vera in the common room. Ping in the warehouse. David in the infirm
ary. All dead.

  And me, still green, below Ops. Nobody else.

  “Show me where you last scanned everybody else.”

  As expected, a flurry of dots and names all appeared in the same place: at the entrance to the transport tunnels in the cargo warehouse. Everybody had passed through there, including Adisa and Hunter. They were all in the tunnels—all out of sight of surveillance. I tried to contact them, but the Overseer told me there was no system for crew communications in the tunnels either. The tunnels and the base they led to formed an impenetrable blank spot in the Overseer’s data, territory in which its sensors and eyes had no reach.

  Adisa’s and Hunter’s ID chips had been scanned a good ninety minutes later than the bulk of the others. Sigrah about an hour before them, and alone. Most of the crew, including Ryu and van Arendonk, had entered the tunnels first—and they had done so as the station was going into lockdown. They had left Vera, Sigrah, and Delicata behind.

  “Right. So, tell me, was there a radiation leak?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Did you sound the alarm?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “My primary concern is the safety and well-being of the crew.”

  Before I could ask for an explanation, the image on the screen changed, and I was looking at a surveillance recording with both video and audio components.

  It showed van Arendonk entering the systems room right after Adisa and I stepped into the lift. There was no surveillance in the systems room, so he was out of sight—and he wasn’t around to see what was happening in Res at the same time, which was a raging argument between Sigrah and some of her miners. Vera, King, a few others decided they were going to search for the killer; they were convinced the transport tunnels were the only place for a murderer to hide. Sigrah forbade them from going anywhere. They told her to fuck off. She told them to sit their asses down and stay put. Pale and tired and frustrated, Ryu tried to get everybody to calm down, but nobody listened.