Dead Space
Page 1
PRAISE FOR KALI WALLACE AND SALVATION DAY
“Kali Wallace, the world needs you—and this book. Salvation Day is a taut thriller, a near-future look at where we’re headed next, a mirror reflecting the best and worst of humanity. It is all that, and so much more. I’d follow the rebellious heroine Zahra anywhere—especially into another nail-biter of a story like this.”
—James Rollins, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Last Odyssey
“Salvation Day is a masterful story set at a screaming pace. It had me holding on for dear life all the way through. I loved it.”
—Mur Lafferty, Hugo Award–winning author of Six Wakes
“Breakneck pace with real thrills and chills—plus lots of meaty stuff to think about. One of the major science fiction debuts of 2019. Kali Wallace is a force to be reckoned with.”
—Robert J. Sawyer, Hugo Award–winning author of The Oppenheimer Alternative
“A smart, gripping thriller you just can’t put down. Explosions, betrayals, morally gray choices, and twisty secrets; all set in the world that comes after the end of ours. Perfect for fans of Aliens and locked-spaceship murder mysteries.”
—Kameron Hurley, Hugo Award–winning author of The Broken Heavens
“More than a science fiction novel, it’s a good old-fashioned thriller set in the future—every page filled with breadth and scope and twists and turns. An exciting, dangerous, magical quest for truth.”
—Steve Berry, New York Times bestselling author of The Kaiser’s Web
“A suspenseful journey with complex characters and a riveting universe that is as bold as it is fascinating, Salvation Day is a space thriller that will infect you with its gripping narrative as much as its mind-bending viruses.”
—Peter Tieryas, author of Cyber Shogun Revolution
“Wallace delivers an exciting science fiction thriller that shines a light on government secrets, shifting blame, and elitism and class in a future society. The tight plot and well-developed characters create an engrossing read.”
—Library Journal
“Salvation Day is a terrific space thriller. Wallace is an excellent writer, and she maintains tight control over her story as it progresses.”
—New York Journal of Books
BERKLEY TITLES BY KALI WALLACE
SALVATION DAY
DEAD SPACE
BERKLEY
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
penguinrandomhouse.com
Copyright © 2021 by Kali Wallace
Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.
BERKLEY and the BERKLEY & B colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Wallace, Kali, author.
Title: Dead space / Kali Wallace.
Description: First Edition. | New York: Berkley, 2021.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020036159 (print) | LCCN 2020036160 (ebook) | ISBN 9781984803726 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781984803733 (ebook)
Subjects: GSAFD: Science fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3623.A4434 D43 2021 (print) | LCC PS3623.A4434 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020036159
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020036160
First Edition: March 2021
Cover images courtesy of Shutterstock
Cover design by Adam Auerbach
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
pid_prh_5.6.1_c0_r0
For Link and Mochi, for being very good company in a very bad year
CONTENTS
Cover
Praise for Kali Wallace and Salvation Day
Berkley Titles by Kali Wallace
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Acknowledgments
About the Author
ONE
The kid was bleeding from his eyes, but he hadn’t noticed yet. He sat on the edge of the narrow lower bunk, hunched over and swaying slightly, as though every one of Jackson’s questions was a gust of wind he could not withstand.
“Where’d you get it? Who did the work?” Jackson leaned her shoulder against the upper bunk, made a face, thought better of it, and pulled away. Everything in the room was filthy. The air was filthy. “Just give us a fucking name and we’ll be gone.”
The kid didn’t answer. He wasn’t looking at her, wasn’t looking at me, wasn’t looking at anything at all. Scabs and pus had crusted around the wounds where the black market augment was drilled into his head. His artificial eye was already glitching like hell; the muscles of his face, from his eyebrows down to his chin, twitched with waves of tremulous spasms. He was completely naked but for his tattoos, which showcased a brief, angry history of joining just about every outer systems political group that had ever gathered in a grubby station canteen to rail against one thing or another.
The lack of clothes also gave us a good look at the freshly sealed surgical scar that snaked down his spine. Whoever had done the surgery was worse than a hack. The kid would be lucky if he knew his own name after the doctors got the tech out of his brain. Every time he blinked, another droplet of blood squeezed from his tear ducts and rolled down his cheek.
“Can’t have been cheap,” Jackson said. “You sure as shit don’t have the money for that. Who paid? Who sent you here?”
I read through his file while she worked through the script. The kid was a contractor, one of several brought to Hygiea for a six-month stint upgrading the industrial water filtration system. His anticorporate tendencies were more boastful talk than meaningful action, and mostly subsided now that he was making good money. He had a weakness for sexy new tech. As far as I could tell, four or five days ago he’d paid somebody to give him an illegal neural augment and ocular prosthetic. Stupid and dangerous, but not exactly unusual among contractors with too much money and too few brains.
“For fuck’s sake.” Jackson raised her hand like she wanted to smack the kid, but she changed her mind. “This is useless. Take what you need and get the medics in here.”
That was directed at me with an impatient scowl. We’d been called out from HQ a
t the very end of the shift, and Jackson had a wife and family waiting with supper on the table. I had no supper ahead of me except standard-issue canteen slop and nobody waiting in my single quarters three levels down, but I wanted out of that room too. I got to it. Sterile gloves, evidence box, and a deep breath of the relatively fresh corridor air before ducking into the room.
“Hey.” Jackson snapped her fingers in front of the kid’s face. “Hey. Listen. Parthenope Enterprises Security Protocol 17, Sections G through K, gives us the authority to confiscate and investigate your personal devices. Do you understand?”
The kid blinked. Swayed. Blinked.
“Your PDs will be returned to you after we’ve verified that you have not used them for any activities in violation of Parthenope regulations while residing on Hygiea. If you have any questions about Parthenope’s investigation process, refer to your residential contract or contact your company representative. Okay?”
I stepped gingerly through the messy room. There were three devices, one on the table and two on the floor, all smudged and unpleasantly sticky. I slid them into the evidence pouch and looked around to make sure I’d found them all. I didn’t look too closely. My contractual commitment to ensuring the safety and security of Parthenope Enterprises and its facilities, operations, and employees did not extend to searching through fluid-stained sheets beneath the bare ass of a twentysomething kid reckless enough to think that paying somebody to drill into his head was a good idea.
Jackson saw me glancing around. “You done, Marley?”
“I’m done.” I was already making for the door. I could feel the stench of the room clinging to my uniform. I would have to use a week’s worth of water rations to scrub it off. “I’ll get the analysis to you in an hour or two.”
“And I won’t look at it until morning,” she said. “As soon as this fucker’s out of my hands, I’m off the clock. You should be too.”
Which told me she wasn’t actually worried the kid was a terrorist or spy. I silently removed several items from my action plan for digging into this kid’s questionable life choices. When it came to low-level criminals and cranks, we didn’t get overtime for pretending to be especially eager Operational Security officers.
“Right. Yeah. Morning, then,” I said.
I had one foot out of that fetid chamber when the kid on the bunk made a sound.
It sounded like a choking cough, like he was swallowing his tongue—and wouldn’t that be the perfect end to the day—but he hacked wetly, then groaned out something that sounded like a word.
“What’s that?” Jackson said warily. “You have something to say?”
“Wait,” said the kid. His voice was so rough he could have been rolling nuts and bolts around in his mouth. The blood on his face was drying into twin crusted lines that stretched down his nose, over his lips, to the bottom of his chin. “Silver lady. Wait. Wait and tell me, tell me how—”
He broke off coughing; blood-pinked spittle flew from his lips. When the coughs subsided, he lifted his head, and for the first time since we’d come into the room, his bloodshot natural eye focused on something.
That something was me.
“Silver lady,” he said. “It’s time. It’s time. Tell me how.”
“Fuck this. Let’s get him—”
Before Jackson could finish, the kid lunged from the bed to throw himself at my feet. He scuttled toward me, reaching with both hands. I jerked back and bumped into the doorframe. The kid’s fingers, slick with his own blood, slid over the smooth surface of my boot. I kicked his hand away.
“Tell me how, it’s time, I’m ready, I’m so ready, tell me how, tell me how,” he was saying, over and over again, the words slurring together as they tumbled from his mouth.
“Don’t move.” Jackson had her stun weapon at the kid’s back, pressed into the nape of his neck. Electroshock weapons weren’t meant to be lethal—corporate security was subject to the disarmament treaty like everybody else—but I wasn’t sure this kid could survive the jolt. “Do you hear me? You don’t move a centimeter. Marley, get the hell out of here before this piece of shit gives himself an aneurysm.”
I was already backing out of the room. I squeezed past the medics in the corridor and ignored their snickers, their raised eyebrows, their questions. I felt the prickle of their attention as I strode away, heard the murmur of their voices as I turned the corner at the end of the hall. Whatever they were saying about me, I had heard it all before. I didn’t take an easy breath until I was on the lift and on my way up to HQ. I leaned against the wall for balance. I closed my eyes.
Hygiea was a loosely consolidated, carbonaceous chunk of rock and ice well out in the ass-end of the belt, with a diameter of over four hundred kilometers. Nowhere on the surface was the gravity any higher than one-tenth of Earth’s, which was a drag for lifelong belters, but for people like me, born and raised on Earth, it was light and strange and required constant adjustment. Even with gecko soles on my boots keeping me anchored to the floor, I felt unstable, unsteady, convinced the wrong move or the wrong step would send me hurtling toward the ceiling. The feeling got worse at the end of the day, when the joint where my prosthetic leg attached to my hip was aching and I was trying to favor it, because my ancient animal instinct was telling me there was more weight than what physics actually provided, and my gait turned into an awkward, stilted limp that did nothing to convince me or my doctors that I was well on my way to being fully healed.
I was used to the stares: hungry and envious from a nauseating few, horrified and fearful from everybody else. I was used to the invasive questions: what does it feel like, does it hurt, can you still feel this, did you let them change your brain, why did you let them do that? Yes, it hurt. Yes, I could feel it. No, they hadn’t altered my brain, only my body, and I never had a choice. I was used to it. At least they hadn’t fucked me up in the process.
I had been working for Parthenope’s Operational Security Department for just over a year, one of the so-called Safety Officers whose job it was to make criminals, malcontents, and all manner of other inconveniences vanish before any of them had a chance to impact the company’s profits. There were a few hundred security officers on Hygiea, a small enough community that I had grown accustomed to being the one with all the metal parts, the security analyst who was half tech herself, the unlucky disaster survivor who’d been pieced back together. Nobody talked about it to my face anymore, but neither did they ever bother to disguise how glad they were not to be me. I kept my head down and did my job and stayed away from people like that kid with the bleeding eyes and festering wounds in his head.
I was used to all that. But I never got used to being touched. Strangers grabbing my hand, jabbing their fingers at my eye, slapping my shoulder to feel the metal beneath my clothes. I could not get used to that.
My prosthetics—left arm, left leg, left ear and eye, a scattering of partial organs—took signals from my brain, which was still a squishy, whole, purely human brain. Together they functioned as a close approximation to how a human body was supposed to function, most of the time. This was my body now. Nothing more, nothing less, and never what the biohackers and transhumanists and weird fetishists wanted to hear.
That didn’t stop people from looking at me and seeing only the metal.
The lift let me out at Operational Security HQ. I skirted around the edge of the central office, smiles and nods and see-you-laters doled out where necessary. When some colleagues invited me down to the canteen for a beer, I made my excuses. A few gave me sideways glances, looks that hinted at questions they weren’t asking, and I wondered how word of the biohacked kid could have spread so quickly. I retreated to my cubicle. They weren’t bad people, my colleagues. The older officers were mostly ex-military, shuffled into private contracts when it became apparent nobody was starting a fresh war anytime soon; the younger ones were all career corporate types who wore t
he uniform as though it actually meant something. They all knew I was on Hygiea for exactly as long as it took to pay down my medical bills and get out of there. Mostly they didn’t hold it against me. Normally I would have accepted the invitations, eager for any reason to get out of HQ, desperate to talk about anything except shitty days and petty crimes.
I only realized the questioning glances had nothing to do with the biohacked kid when I saw the evening news scrolls.
TERRORIST LEADER SENTENCED TO LIFE
BLACK HALO MASTERMIND HEADS TO HELLAS PRISON
SYMPOSIUM VICTIMS REACT TO SENTENCING
The headlines blurred together as I read. Every news feed was covering it, naturally, not as the top story but five or six items down the list. A rhythmic tapping set my teeth on edge—I was doing it myself, drumming my fingers on my desk. I stilled both hands and pressed them flat. Left hand, metal hand. Right hand, flesh hand.
Two years ago, the spaceship Symposium had been on its way to Titan with two hundred people aboard. One hundred seventy-five of those people, the passengers, made up the full complement of the Titan Research Project. I was one of them. We were some of the finest scientists and engineers in existence, experts in every field, people who had devoted their entire lives to advancing the frontiers of human knowledge. We were going to establish the first permanent human settlement near Saturn and the outermost in the solar system. It was to be a research colony, dedicated to scientific exploration and discovery.
We never made it. The antiexpansion terrorist group called Black Halo infiltrated the passengers and crew of Symposium before we left Earth’s orbit. They waited until we were several months into our journey before enacting their plan: to disrupt the mission with a catastrophic series of explosions in the ship’s fuel systems. Symposium was destroyed and most of the people on board died instantly. My friends, my colleagues, the people with whom I had planned to build a home and a community for the next several years, all reduced to atoms in a flash of fire and noise. Among the dead was my longtime mentor and idol, Sunita Radieh, whose loss I still felt like a physical pain whenever I thought of her. Sometimes I wondered if it might not hurt so much if Vanguard, the AI we had created together, had survived, if some part of her genius, her heart, her courage had survived in the machine we had built. But Vanguard had been destroyed as well. Every piece of it, from its breathtakingly complex mind to its uncountable lifetimes’ worth of learned experience to its favorite physical expression, the praying mantis shape we affectionately called Bug, it was all gone. Everything was destroyed.