by Kali Wallace
The Overseer split the images on the screen: I was now watching two recordings play out simultaneously.
Sigrah stormed out of Res, with Delicata right behind her. The crew began grabbing vac suits and gear from the lockers, even as Ryu pleaded with them to slow down and wait to hear from Adisa.
Delicata followed Sigrah into Ops, where they stopped just outside the comms room.
“This is getting out of hand,” he said. “What the hell is that thing—”
Sigrah whirled on him. “Shut the fuck up.”
“Did you do that? Did you kill Mary?”
“That wasn’t me. You know what that was.” She glanced up, eyes seeking out the nearest surveillance camera, and looked away quickly. “You’re not going to do anything stupid, do you understand? We’re going to be rational about this.”
“But if it’s killing—”
“We have what we need to get control of this situation.” She paused. “Do you understand? We are still in control of this situation.”
“They’re talking about the tunnels,” Delicata said. “I have to head them off.”
“It’s too late.”
“But I still have the key, I can go out and—”
“Impossible. It’s unfortunate for them that Mary set up a trap to stop them.”
They stared at each other, hard, for several seconds. I couldn’t see Delicata’s face, only Sigrah’s, and she was so tense the muscles in her jaw twitched.
“What about . . .” Delicata’s head moved slightly; he was trying to gesture toward the camera without being obvious.
“Don’t worry about that. We had no way of knowing what she left behind,” Sigrah said. Her voice was so calm, so even, I would not have heard the anger tamped down beneath the words if I couldn’t also see her fists clenching at her sides and the narrowness of her eyes. “We had no way of knowing how little regard she had for her fellow crew members.”
A few seconds passed. Delicata nodded stiffly. “I understand.”
“Go. I’ll take care of the rest. I have to update HQ.”
Sigrah went into the comms room, Delicata back to Res. The argument had made little progress: Vera and King were determined to go into the tunnels, while others were still trying to persuade them to wait for more information. Ryu was sitting on the edge of a table in the mess, rubbing their eyes tiredly. They glanced up at Delicata as he passed. Without speaking to anybody, he walked straight through the common room and disappeared into his private quarters.
In the comms room, Sigrah punched in her access code for the two-way radio, then entered a second personal code. In Parthenope systems, the second layer of security would encrypt the message and disguise the identities and locations of the sender and recipient. She said, “This is an emergency update regarding Sunburn. The situation is unstable. I request immediate assistance for containment and mitigation. I repeat: the Sunburn situation has become unstable, and I request immediate assistance.”
“Who is she talking to?” I asked.
“The location is Hygiea. The recipient of the encrypted communication is unidentified,” said the Overseer.
Not really a surprise. Radio encryption like that was available only to people at higher levels in the Parthenope corporate structure. Somebody on Hygiea would probably be able to identify the recipient, if they did the right kind of digging, but Nimue’s Overseer had no way of doing so with any certainty.
“What is Sunburn?” I asked. “I’ve heard that name before.”
“That information is not available.”
On the screen, Sigrah was repeating her request. “The Sunburn situation is unstable. A Sunburn-approved crew member is disobeying direct orders and may be in possession of unauthorized material. I request immediate assistance for containment and mitigation from the nearest response team. Please respond with an ETA.”
“Response team?” I said. “What is she talking about? Are there Parthenope ships nearby?”
“The nearest vessel is Parthenope Enterprises transport Wellfleet, en route from Hygiea.”
“Really? There’s already somebody on their way here? What’s their purpose?”
“Wellfleet was dispatched to retrieve the Safety Officers at the conclusion of their investigation.”
“We didn’t request retrieval, did we?”
“There is no request on record prior to Foreperson Sigrah’s request for emergency assistance.”
Of course there wasn’t. It would have had to come from Adisa or van Arendonk, and neither of them had given any indication they were ready to leave before we figured out what was going on. It wouldn’t matter. Whoever had arranged for Wellfleet to come to Nimue would no doubt be able to offer a perfectly legitimate reason for dispatching the ship before it was requested. The time involved, the seriousness of the situation, the concern about future danger to the crew.
And Sigrah had known all along they were on their way.
Sigrah was still talking. “I’m secure for now, but I don’t know the status of the others. They might be dead already. All of them. I’ve lost control. I have no contact with other crew. I’m requesting immediate emergency and evacuation procedures for the protection of Sunburn.”
“What the fuck?” I said.
I stared at the screen. Checked the time stamps on the surveillance. Stared some more, my heart thumping with sudden fear. Sigrah was standing in the comms room, speaking into the radio, without the least trace of fear or concern on her face. Because she was not in any danger. She had not lost control of anything. She looked up at the camera in the comms room, one eyebrow raised. She knew she was being watched—she knew her lies were recorded—and she did not care.
In the mine, Adisa and I had reached Level 8 and were approaching Neeta Hunter warily. In Res, the rest of the crew were still discussing the best way to search the transport tunnels. About three minutes after he had entered his private quarters, Delicata emerged with a box in his hands, the same one I had found on the table in Res. It was gray and metal and about half a meter square. He set it on the end of a table.
I hadn’t seen the label stamped on one side before, but I could see it clearly now: R9.3.
Recluse 9.3. Those were the spiders. The spiders were right fucking there and nobody had any idea.
Delicata snapped open the latch and lifted the lid. He took something out, something small enough to fit in the palm of his hand, and closed the lid but did not latch it. He tested the lid, made sure the latch didn’t catch, and looked around. Nobody was watching him. He left the box on the table and walked out of Res and headed for Ops. He tapped on the door of the comms room. When Sigrah opened it, he handed her the small device he was carrying.
“Go keep an eye on them,” Sigrah said. “Try to keep things calm.”
Delicata nodded, but his expression showed only confusion. He turned to leave, but he stopped when van Arendonk came out of the systems room at the end of the corridor to make his radio call to Adisa and me down in the mine. He paced at the end of the corridor as he spoke, but when he saw Delicata and Sigrah, he turned and headed toward them.
I wanted nothing more than to jump to my feet to warn him, to warn all of them. It had all played out over an hour ago. There was nothing I could do. My heart was pounding and my throat was tight and every instinct was telling me to run, shout, do something. But it was too late. All I could do was watch in horror.
Van Arendonk told Delicata and Sigrah that Adisa and I were on our way back up with Hunter. Sigrah nodded at Delicata, who followed van Arendonk into the junction. She closed the door to Ops behind them and tapped at the device in her hands.
In the mess, the first long, silver spider leg emerged from the box. A choked cry escaped my throat. Nobody saw it. They weren’t paying attention.
That was when the Overseer triggered the radiation alarm.
The scene in Res exploded into absolute chaos. The spiders burst from the box as the alarm sounded, and the crew didn’t know what they were reacting to, not at first. The spiders spread around them, scrambling to the doorways as though they intended to corral the crew, dodging out of the way every time somebody tried to grab or stop one. Vera was the first to succeed—he caught one of the bots in his hand—and another leapt to his chest and ignited.
It didn’t kill him right away. He screamed and fell, crawled across the floor, flailing in pain. More spiders swarmed after that one, keeping the crew away when they tried to help him. Melendez and Dolin had to pull Elena Yee back from Vera, but they weren’t fast enough and one of the spiders attached itself to her hand. Melendez pulled it free—Yee shrieked in pain—and threw it across the room. Ryu had their electroshock weapon drawn, but there was nothing to aim it at. Van Arendonk had run into Res when the attack started, but Delicata remained in the junction, motionless, watching through the open doorway with an expression somewhere between nausea and fear. The spiders were too small, too fast. They leapt and crawled and scurried through the common room, swarming toward the crew as they fled. The bots’ method seemed to have shifted from encircling the crew to isolating and attacking them, but it was all changing so fast, evolving so fast, every moving piece hard to follow in all the chaos.
It was King who shouted for the others to follow her, grab their gear and follow, for fuck’s sake, hurry.
When the first of the spiders raced out of Res and into the junction, Delicata spun around and ran toward the comms room—but the door was locked against him. He pounded and shouted and cursed, his angry pleas lost beneath the wail of the station alarm. One bot followed him, then another. His shouts grew louder.
Inside, Sigrah leaned against the door, and she waited.
Delicata hadn’t expected the bots to turn on him. He hadn’t realized that he was, to Sigrah, every bit as disposable as everybody else on Nimue.
In the end, it only took a few minutes, but through those few minutes Sigrah waited, and listened, and did nothing. She waited while Delicata pounded on the door and begged her to let him in. She waited while the others fled Res in a panic, racing into the cargo warehouse with the spiders following them. Only when the Overseer gave its final lockdown warning did she emerge from the comms room. From the Ops corridor, she watched as Delicata tried to follow the others, but a spider caught him first, caught him and attacked him just as the Overseer was closing the door to the warehouse.
Several of the spiders crawled over Delicata to chase the others into the warehouse, but only a few caught up before the crew reached the ladder to the cargo transport tunnels. King and Melendez kept guard at the bottom of the ladder, kicking away any spider that got close enough, as the others climbed the ladder one by one. Only a couple of spiders managed to keep up with them. They vanished into the tunnels, charging toward the old UEN base.
They didn’t know about the weapons factory. They didn’t know they had been herded into a trap.
Neither did the Overseer. It shut the tunnel doors behind them, and they disappeared from its tracking data.
In Ops, Sigrah watched the device in her hands. She cursed sharply—disappointed her bots had let so many people get away, I guessed, but it was hard to tell because she had no expression on her face except annoyance and boredom. It felt too big and too terrible to believe, for all that the proof was right before me. She had been expecting a slaughter when she brought the spiders out of their box. And if the Overseer hadn’t triggered the lockdown, if the alarms hadn’t sent everybody into a flurry of action, a slaughter was exactly what she would have achieved.
She tapped the spider control device a few times. All the spiders stopped their pursuit and headed back to Res. They crawled again over Delicata, who was struggling to free himself from where he was trapped in the door. Blood trickled from his mouth. He tried to call for help, but all he managed was a wet wheeze.
Sigrah pocketed the device and returned to the comms room. She sat down before the radio. She made another encrypted call.
“This is Nimue. I am requesting immediate armed assistance from the vessel Wellfleet. Repeat: I am requesting immediate armed assistance from the vessel Wellfleet. Sunburn has been infiltrated and overtaken by hostile crew. I couldn’t stop them. They’ve taken hostages—I don’t know if they’re still alive. They are armed and extremely dangerous.”
She left Ops without waiting for a reply. She had to squeeze through the warehouse door over Delicata. He pleaded for help. She didn’t even look at him. He tried to grab her leg, and she kicked him away; the door crunched closed on his shoulder. He screamed, but Sigrah was already walking away.
“How did she get into the transport tunnels?” I asked.
“Station forepersons have access to manual overrides,” said the Overseer.
“And you’ve got nothing in the tunnels or in the UEN base? No comms? No security logs?”
“I have no management or oversight access in that facility.”
“None at all?”
“No, Hester.”
It could be lying. But I didn’t think so, not anymore. I had been thinking that the same virus that had infected Aeolia’s Overseer was at work here, brought over by Mary Ping for her own twisted reasons, making Nimue’s Overseer effectively dishonest, twisting its stewardship actions into violence. The truth, I realized now, was far simpler.
“I am so fucking stupid,” I said softly. “It isn’t you at all, is it? You’re only trying to help.”
The Overseer understood that to be a rhetorical question and did not answer.
Fuck. I needed to think. I rubbed my eyes tiredly, rolling my head to ease the tightness in my neck. I had let my disgust for Mary Ping color my conclusions. Because she had killed David, I had wanted so badly for her to be responsible for everything else as well. I had wanted her hubris to have been her downfall. And perhaps it had been, but not in the way I had imagined.
There were two AIs on Nimue. Not a single virus-infected AI acting strangely. Two AIs, one acting exactly as it should be, protecting the crew as best it could, and one acting in a way that looked wildly strange because I hadn’t known what I was looking at. They could both be Overseers, but I rather suspected that the one in charge of the facility in the UEN base was something else. It had different goals, different directives. An Overseer would never inhabit a weapons-grade mech suit and attack a crew member under its protection—but a weapons AI could do that easily, under the right circumstances.
The others were going to be caught between Sigrah and the AI—if they weren’t already. I asked the Overseer how much time I had before Wellfleet arrived. Its best estimate was just over two hours.
“Show me active visual surveillance in Residential and Operations,” I said. “Please.”
“I’m afraid some of my surveillance modules are damaged, but I will show you what I can.”
The Overseer brought up images from the station above: smoke filling the junction, the tangled ruin of spiders scattered throughout the corridor, Delicata’s body, Vera’s body. Nothing but flickering lines or darkness from at least two cameras. The explosion had been largely contained within the junction and Ops corridor. The walls were scorched, control panels cracked and smoldering, but there were no serious obstacles or obvious structural problems. At the center of the junction were the mangled remains of the bots, fused together in a gruesome tangle.
“And the cargo warehouse?” I said.
The screens changed obligingly. It was quiet, without any signs of movement. No spiders. The doors to the tunnels were still open; Sigrah hadn’t closed them after she passed through.
“The cargo airlock.”
David’s blood, nothing else.
“A map of the facility exterior, including all the remaining UEN infrastructure.” I rolled my shoulders tiredly and sat forward in the ch
air as the screen changed again. “Thank you.”
There. There it was. The transport tunnels had to follow the spine of the facility before branching off toward the UEN base. But there was also a way across the surface of the asteroid. A route fast enough that Ned Delicata could use it on his regular “routine maintenance” checks. That was what he meant when he offered to go out and head off the crew before they reached the secret factory.
“Fuck.” I sat back in the chair. “Fuck everything.”
I hauled my pack into my lap to take stock. The radio, useless for now, but probably wouldn’t be later. My PD had been cracked across the screen in the explosion but was still functional. Flashlight. Rebreather. At the bottom of the pack, the emergency vac suit was still folded up neatly. A quick check showed it had not been damaged. The radiation sensor still hung from my belt.
I hurt all over, every bloody joint throbbing with pain as I stood, but it was bearable. I would survive.
I couldn’t get out of it this time. I was going to have to go outside.
TWENTY
I limped over to the lift and waited. Standard-issue emergency suits were flimsy as hell, minimally pressurized and insulated, and relatively easy to tear, so I decided to keep it sealed up in the pack on my back until I needed it.
“I cannot protect you if you leave this place, Hester,” said the Overseer.
“I know. I need to leave anyway. Just open the doors ahead of me and shut them behind me.”
The lift doors slid open. I stepped inside.
“Be careful,” I said, then felt immensely foolish, then guilty for feeling foolish.
“You as well, Hester,” said the Overseer.
The doors shut, and the lift carried me up to Ops.
Outside the systems room, the corridor was filled with drifting smoke, pockets of heat, whirling dust. A bitter, metallic scent made my eyes water and my throat ache. I switched on my flashlight, but the air was so choked with dust the light only made it harder to see. I turned it off again and pulled the front of my shirt up to cover my mouth and nose. I paused every few steps to listen for the clatter of metal legs, but I heard nothing. I didn’t see any intact or waiting spiders, but that meant nothing. If any had survived the explosion, they could be hiding again. The explosion had done the most damage in the front part of the corridor, near the door to the junction; it took me a few minutes to pick my way over and around the ruptured wall plates and twists of metal.
