Dead Space

by Kali Wallace

  I returned to my box and played David’s message one more time. He was right that we could not speak in true privacy without careful preparation from both sides. I couldn’t set up a live, untraceable conversation from my personal quarters; I wasn’t even certain I could set it up from HQ without being caught. Maybe David was cracking. Maybe he was addicted to narcotics that scrambled his brain. Maybe the strain of being stuck on an asteroid mine had broken him. It happened. A couple of months ago I had investigated a man who had snapped midshift and slowly, deliberately, methodically impaled himself with twelve iron rods before anybody noticed. He had missed all of his major organs and survived. He said afterward he did it because he was bored. That was what life in space could do to people. I wanted to talk to David anyway.

  I shoved my dirty clothes into a ball and wondered if the kid with the bleeding eyes would survive the night, if his brain was already mush, if he would wake to regret how breathtakingly stupid he’d been. I turned off the lights. I spent half the night trying to get to sleep, the other half dreaming about fire and darkness and phantom pains shooting through my prosthetic parts.

  I finally gave up, rose, and watched David’s message again and again until morning.

  I had to talk to him. If only to get him help. If only to ask my questions and hear his answers.

  My stomach was churning with an anxious, acidic queasiness when I slumped into HQ just before 0600. I had a plan forming in my head for how to respond without our correspondence being detected. Part of that plan involved pretending everything was normal, so I sat at my desk and focused on my work. I compiled the results from the biohacked kid’s devices. As I’d expected, he’d been reading the usual forums and chatter from groups across the system predicting the joining of man and machine, the neural singularity, the evolution of humankind any day now, any moment, just wait for it, soon the AIs would awaken and lift us all from our primitive self-imposed misery, blah blah blah, the usual garbage. There was a new countdown to supposed singularity every few years, because the assholes who wanted to be ruled by machines never seemed to find anything more interesting to do with their time. It took only a cursory glance at the kid’s personal data to figure out who had most likely fucked up his head: a black market doctor from Ceres operating out of a cargo container on various transport ships since losing his license a few years ago. The doc’s current transport was already gone from Hygiea, his butchering practice with it, and Parthenope’s Operational Security Department had no jurisdiction anymore. The Outer Systems Administration was supposed to handle criminal matters outside of corporate territories, but the chances of that amounting to anything was nil. They didn’t have the resources to go after rogue surgeons and wouldn’t waste their time even if they did. I sent the conclusions over to Jackson and struck the file off my action list.

  My next task was to look at the new investigations and see if I had been assigned any actions during the night. The morning’s haul included some minor data theft, a spot of drug trade, a bit of light embezzlement among station concessioners— all threats to the health and safety of Parthenope employees, or so we pretended to believe. Everybody in the outer system was trying to rip off everybody else. I kept reading down the list. Physical altercation on Dock 7 nobody would admit to witnessing. Terminated employees squatting in their quarters when they were supposed to be shipping out—which had never made sense to me, because who the fuck would want to stay here longer than they had to? Jackson had explained that people did the delicate calculus of deciding whether staying until they were arrested and turned over to the OSA would cost less overall than paying for transport off Hygiea. The OSA was wise to the scam and had started billing holdovers for their voluntary jail time, but everybody knew OSA’s enforcers couldn’t compete with Parthenope when it came to collecting debts. It still seemed like a shitty way to live to me, but maybe after another year or two on Hygiea I would consider jail the least awful of innumerable awful options.

  A flash of red at the top of the list caught my eye: new investigation had just been added to the system.

  Location: Nimue

  Event: Suspicious death

  Deceased: Prussenko, David

  THREE

  I did my homework during the eighteen-hour flight from Hygiea to Nimue. I wanted to know what I was getting into.

  Nimue was a C-type asteroid in the shape of an elongated ellipsoid, giving it the look of a gray, lumpy potato. It was about twelve kilometers in diameter on its long axis, five at most on its short axes, which put it on the larger size for rocks in the Hygiea family. Most of the exterior components of Parthenope’s mine were clustered at one end of the ellipsoid; the docking structure jutted outward like a long, spindly stamen of a flower, with the facilities for cargo, operations, and crew quarters forming three petals at its base. The Operations and Residential sections were decommissioned ships that had been parked on Nimue, buried in the loose rock, and adapted into a permanent station to serve out the remainder of their useful years. There was also an abandoned Unified Earth Navy base on the asteroid. Nimue was too far from the inner system to have been useful during the Martian rebellion, and now the base was nothing more than a few empty bunkers and missile silos, stripped of useful parts, indistinguishable from the gravel and dust.

  The heart of the facility—the reason that bleak little chunk of rock was so valuable to Parthenope—was not visible from the outside. Nimue was home to a massive unfinished ore-processing furnace that, when completed, would stretch along the entire longitudinal axis of the asteroid.

  The station had twelve crew members—eleven now—and an Overseer. Cargo ships visited twice a month; Nimue was remote, but not so remote as to make it wholly inaccessible. For a good portion of its orbit, it was within cosmic spitting distance of major outer systems shipping routes. There were worse places to be stationed. There were better places too.

  Data, maps, names, reports. I read them all hungrily. I wanted to be ready. I thought it might prepare me for what I would find.

  I was wrong. Nothing could have prepared me for the sight of David’s dead body.

  They had left him where they found him: lying on his side in an airlock in the cargo warehouse. The interior door of the airlock was open. David was on the floor, with one hand outstretched and his fingers curled into claws on the cold metal floor. His face and the visible side of his head were a mess of blood and matted hair and pulped tissue. Somebody had beaten him viciously. Blood was splattered all over the walls of the airlock, over the control panel, over his clothes. Two fingers on his left hand were broken backward—he had tried to fight back. The murder weapon lay on the floor beside him: a long metal bar, with dried blood and bits of tissue on one end.

  It had been nearly thirty hours since David had died. The inside of the airlock was cold; decay was encroaching slowly. I pressed my lips together and swallowed. I tried to look away, but I couldn’t take my eyes off of David’s body.

  “We haven’t touched him. This is how I found him.” Yevgenya Sigrah, Nimue’s foreperson, spoke with the clipped accent of a Vesta native and the undisguised annoyance of a site manager whose operation had been inconvenienced.

  “You found him yourself, yeah?” Safety Inspector Adisa asked. He was the ranking Safety Officer on the OSD incident team and my immediate boss for the duration of this investigation.

  “That’s what I said.” Sigrah was a stocky, gray-haired woman of about fifty, with a permanent scowl and a long scar down the left side of her face. There was a notable sharpness in the way she answered, but I couldn’t tell if it was because she had something to hide or just didn’t want security officers fucking around in her station. “Checked his room in the morning, about 0700. He wasn’t there, so I checked the ID tracking and access logs.”

  “Do you know why he was out here?” Adisa asked. He wasn’t looking at Sigrah. He was standing in the doorway, hands in his pockets, looking down at
the corpse. Part of me wanted him to move to the side so I could get a better look. Most of me wanted to turn away so I didn’t have to see anything else.

  “No,” Sigrah said shortly. “He was on third shift. He wouldn’t be the first to use the quiet shift for personal business. I tell them to keep their lovers’ quarrels and petty arguments out of the work.”

  From the first moment we’d stepped off the transport ship and onto Nimue, Sigrah had been telling us that David’s death was clearly the result of a personal argument. I wanted to ask her what she meant by that—who could have hated David that much, how did she know, who was that violent, why would they do this—but I kept my questions to myself for now and tried not to flinch every time Adisa asked something that felt completely unrelated or irrelevant.

  “What do you use this airlock for?” Adisa asked.

  This was the first assignment I’d worked with Mohammad Adisa. I knew him by sight and reputation, partly because Operational Security was a chummy clique of eager gossips, but mostly because there weren’t many Martians working on Hygiea in any department. Adisa was average height, on the thin side of average build, brown skin, black hair turning to gray at the temples. Fifties, divorced, burned-out—so claimed the gossip mill—should have left OSD a few years ago, kept going instead. I had expected to have a fight on my hands when I asked to join the investigation. Personal connections between officers and victims made for messy reports, after all, especially if private lawyers ever got involved and started making noise about company liability. But Adisa had only shrugged and approved the request without asking why.

  Sigrah glanced at the bloodied room, looked away. “Not a lot. Routine maintenance on the cargo system.” She jerked a thumb upward. “There’s a fuel line up there that’s broken down a few times. Needs a walkabout every few months. But David isn’t involved with any of that work.”

  “Could he have been helping someone else, yeah?” Adisa said.

  “Don’t know. It’s not in the work logs.”

  “Any trouble lately? Disagreement among the crew?”

  Sigrah hesitated, then shook her head. “Not that they brought to me. They keep their personal problems personal.”

  That meant nothing coming from a station foreperson. The kind of trouble that caused real problems among the crew rarely reached the boss’s ears, even on a crew as small as Nimue’s, and that was mostly by design. Sigrah knew the rules for succeeding as a Parthenope foreperson: everything good that happened on the station was her doing, whereas everything bad was the fault of troublemaking crew.

  “Should I get started?” The question came from the third member of our team, the security tech Avery Ryu. They waited just outside the airlock with a crime scene kit and medical carry-board.

  “Go ahead,” Adisa said.

  Ryu bobbed their head quickly, such an easy and familiar thing for them to do, in this unfamiliar place, that I felt a pang of fondness. Ryu and I had become friends, in a way, right after I’d started working for Parthenope, the kind of friends who used each other for company and sex and never talked about it. We hadn’t spoken in several months—my fault, I supposed, although we had never talked about that either. When we had been hanging out together, Ryu’s constant nodding, agreeing, affirming had driven me crazy, but it was a comfort now.

  They stepped into the bloody chamber, avoiding the pooled blood on the floor, and got to work securing the murder weapon, documenting the scene, collecting physical evidence, scanning for fingerprints. All of which would be unnecessary once we had the surveillance recordings, but it was part of the OSD routine of acting like we served a purpose besides sweeping Parthenope’s problems out of sight. Nothing we did ever made it into an Outer Systems Administration court. In the asteroid belt, corporate security was the only law that mattered.

  I tried to look away. I didn’t need to watch. The blood, the ruin of David’s face, the exterior door so close and the barren asteroid visible beyond, it all felt like a painful weight pressing on my chest. I could not look away. I could not even blink.

  The dead man looked nothing like the David I knew. He didn’t even look like the man in the message. There was a small part of me, numb with denial, that wanted to believe it wasn’t him. The David I remembered had been always in motion, tall, lanky in the way of men who run and swim and climb with enthusiasm well into adulthood, his white skin always tanned, with blue eyes and floppy blond hair and a ready smile. This man’s face was too soft, his hair too thin, his hands too aged for the passage of so little time. But he had the same bald patch on the top of his head, the same faint shunt scars on his left arm, just below the cuff of his sleeve, where osteoregenerative drugs had been injected when he first left Earth. That had happened years ago, long before I met him; David had spent part of his childhood in an orbital habitat, with diplomat parents who negotiated treaties between Earth and the independent stations. He was forty-five years old, eight years my senior, but in death he looked so much older.

  “Was he the only one working that shift?” Adisa asked.

  “Far as I know,” Sigrah said. “He swapped with Mary. It was her night on.”

  I recalled the personnel files: a woman named Mary Ping was Nimue’s other sysadmin. I had never before heard of a mining facility with two sysadmins for its Overseer, but Nimue was a particularly valuable chunk of rock with a deep well of stakeholders and investors. No doubt Parthenope counted the extra crew member on-site as another way of safeguarding its operation.

  “Was that normal, switching shifts?”

  “It happens.” Sigrah shrugged. “The surveillance will show everything.”

  There was nothing in her voice except impatience. No regret. No fear. No grief.

  I turned away from the corpse to look around. The warehouse was a couple hundred meters long by about eighty meters wide, crammed from floor to ceiling with shipping containers. The tracks of the cargo crane formed a network of oiled metal about fifty or sixty meters above our heads. The containers bore insignia from numerous outer systems corporations and took up most of the available space, creating a labyrinth of narrow, shadowy canyons between tall, rectangular stacks.

  I couldn’t see any security cameras with a clear view of the airlock, but I wouldn’t be sure until I got a look at the surveillance. Parthenope didn’t like letting anyone dig around in their surveillance data, not even their own security officers. Not even when an employee has been beaten to death by another employee. They claimed it was to remain in compliance with OSA privacy laws; everybody knew it was because a data set that extensive was more valuable than all the water and rocks in Parthenope space combined. On Hygiea, obtaining permission to access the data was easy, but on Nimue it was proving to be a little more complicated. The Parthenope lawyer who had come along with the security team was currently in Ops firing off demands to a team of execs in the corporate offices on Hygiea, who needed approval from the legal team on Vesta, who in turn needed approval from an executive at the corporate headquarters on Yuèliàng. But Earth and its Moon were currently on the other side of the Sun, with the Yuèliàng capital city of Imbrium in the middle of its local night, so even on the best company relay network it took about an hour for encoded radio messages to go back and forth between Hygiea and the Earth-Yuèliàng system, and that didn’t account for all the corporate ass-covering that would be happening at every step of the process.

  “Was there any sort of alert during the night?” I asked. “Like a maintenance alarm? Something he might have come to check?”

  Sigrah did not want to look at me. Her gaze kept skating over my face, straying to my left shoulder and down my arm, sliding back when she realized she was staring. “No,” she said. “He wasn’t here for work. It was personal.”

  I decided to take a cue from Adisa and pretend she didn’t keep saying that.

  “Was there anything in particular he was working on lately?”
I asked.

  “Nothing he brought to me. Mary might know, or one of his friends.” She said this to a point somewhere below my left ear. I wanted to tell her to stare, to just bloody keep on staring until she’d looked her fill, but I’d learned from experience that only made things more uncomfortable.

  “We’ll also have to talk to the crew, aye?” Adisa said.

  It wasn’t a question. It was only his gratingly Martian way of ending every sentence like a question, seeking agreement even when stating a fact or giving an order. His accent was the only thing that marked him out as obviously Martian. All the other common signs—the evidence of childhood malnutrition, the scars from Mars’s infamously terrible radiation treatments, whatever rebel tattoos he might have acquired during a misbegotten youth—were well hidden under his slightly rumpled uniform. But the accent was unmistakable. It was English spoken by somebody who was more used to the singsong rhythms of the Martian patois, that odd amalgam of the many languages carried to the red planet by early waves of colonists.

  “Why?” Sigrah demanded. “You’ll have the surveillance.”

  “Just following the rules, aye,” Adisa said.

  Sigrah narrowed her eyes. She wanted to argue with him, but she knew better. Her apparent disinterest in identifying who among her crew was a murderer wasn’t all that surprising. If she pointed the finger at the wrong person, before anybody saw the surveillance, she would put herself in a position that raised more questions than it answered. No matter what she wanted to say, no matter who she wanted to blame, she had to know that playing along would get OSD off her station that much faster.

  “Right. Second shift ends in about an hour. They’ll be available then.”