Dead Space

by Kali Wallace

  My left eye was still glitching, but I could at least look around without risking giving myself a seizure. The first thing I saw was Ryu’s boots about ten centimeters from my helmet.

  “Avery,” I said. “Hey, Avery.”

  The radio threw my voice back at me as a painful squeal. I switched it off. That stopped the static and the feedback, but not the clanks, sparks, a distant thumping sound—what the fuck was that?—and my own breath, ragged and too fast. I grabbed Ryu’s foot to get their attention.

  “Hey, come on, we need to get out of here.”

  No response. I shook their foot again.

  “Avery! Come on. The radios are fucked. Look at me.”

  David’s beautiful device was, unsurprisingly, a charred and smoking mess. The silver shell was distorted; the whole thing belched gray smoke and blue sparks.

  As a self-destruct mechanism, the power surge had been devastatingly effective. We had sealed the device’s fate the moment we tried to move it. If we hadn’t been wearing vac suits, we would have been killed instantly.

  “Fuck you, David,” I muttered. “Fuck you so fucking much with every one of your own fucking machines. Avery, get out of my way. I need to see if there’s anything we can salvage.”

  I shook their ankle insistently and dislodged their gecko soles from where they were perched. They slumped toward me in an awkward tangle of limbs.

  “Shit. What the fuck? Can you hear me?”

  That was wrong. That was not fucking okay. Even without the radios, I should hear their reply. They should be moving.

  With my heart racing and my breath coming in short, painful gasps, I shoved Ryu to one side and stomped my foot into the wall to propel myself upward. There were still little arcs of electricity darting outward from David’s device, leaping down the shaft in a chaotic dance. I tried to ignore it—tried to tell myself that if I wasn’t electrocuted yet, I probably wasn’t going to be—and twisted around to get a look at Ryu’s face.

  Their headlamp was smashed, their faceplate cracked. Scorch marks spiderwebbed over the top of their helmet. On the inside of their faceplate was a smear of blood.

  “Shit. Shit. Avery!” I shook them frantically. The blood was coming from their nose and their eyes were narrow slits, but they did not respond. “Fuck. Okay. I’ll get you—fuck, I’ll get you out of here. Come on.”

  No response, but I kept talking, kept spitting out that nonsense stream of babble and reassurances. I needed help, but I couldn’t call for it. I squeezed up beside Ryu and began the clumsy, painstaking process of getting us out of there.

  The descent felt endless. The only light came from my headlamp, and the sound of my own breath was loud in my ears. My fear grew with every second. The crack in Ryu’s helmet, those scorches—they had been shocked, but I didn’t know how bad it was. It looked like their nose was still actively bleeding. It took a hell of a blow to smash your nose into the front of a space suit helmet. Their neck could be damaged too. I could be making everything worse by moving them. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t check for a pulse—couldn’t risk removing the suit, not with the remnants of David’s light show still sparking and snapping around us. Which had to be exactly what he had wanted, the ratfucker. He had designed rovers to operate on a hostile moon that spent the vast majority of its time within Saturn’s magnetosphere. Nothing he did to create death rays of electricity was an accident.

  If he weren’t already dead, I would have murdered him myself, just for being such a raging asshole as to build a self-destruct trigger like that to protect his shitty criminal scheme. After asking him who the trap was for. And why. I would only murder him after he answered my damn questions.

  “You are going to wake the fuck up,” I said.

  My chest hurt. It was the kind of hurt that came from the inside, the kind of hurt you didn’t know was possible until you had your body blown up and replaced with spare parts, and sometimes your parts and those parts didn’t quite know how to cooperate in situations of high physical stress—situations that were, according to my doctors, supposed to happen never. I was having trouble steadying my breathing. My heart rate was out of control.

  I stopped for a few seconds to breathe. Ryu slumped against me, limp and unconscious. I tugged one of their arms out of my way. “Avery, you piece of shit. You are going to wake the fuck up and this is going to be so bloody awkward.”

  It had always been awkward between us, even when we were in our ill-defined relationship. I told myself it was because I didn’t want to make any attachments on Hygiea. I told myself it was because they weren’t my usual type. I usually went for short, femme, more than a little mean, smarter than everybody and well aware of it. Not warm and wiry and friendly and unburdened by excessive ego. I told myself it was because I had no time for a relationship when I needed every spare minute to extract myself from Parthenope’s clutches. I told myself I could never be sure if they were looking at me or my shiny new body parts. I told myself a lot of things, so many that I hadn’t noticed right until Ryu stopped coming by my quarters that I was the only one who cared about my endless litany of excuses. Then I told myself it was better that way. I had more important things to deal with. I didn’t care. I couldn’t care.

  “I am going to be so fucking annoyed with you if you don’t wake up,” I muttered, and I started moving again, down and down and down.

  It couldn’t have been more than five or ten minutes before light filled the shaft around us, but it felt like so much longer. The electrical sparks and ribbons had been so searing, so bright, my eyes, both artificial and not, were still smarting from the onslaught. I only noticed the new light because I saw my shadow move when I was still, and it startled me so much I thought, for a second, it was another surge of lightning. Somebody touched my foot.

  I jerked in surprise and looked down. I couldn’t remember the name of the crew member who waited below us. A woman, dark hair, worried expression. She was saying something I couldn’t hear. I only understood when she gestured for me to let her take Ryu. I had some trouble getting out of the way and jostled Ryu in my clumsiness.

  “Sorry, sorry,” I muttered, trying to make myself small, trying to be gentle. “We’re getting you out of here. We’re getting you help.”

  Ryu gripped my wrist suddenly. I yelped in alarm. They were awake, their eyes wide, their mouth open. They reached up to touch their face, remembered they couldn’t only when their glove struck the faceplate. They said something; the words were muffled by the helmets.

  I was so relieved I let out a giddy, hysterical laugh. I leaned in to touch my helmet to theirs. “You stupid fuck, you scared me.”

  I didn’t know if they could hear me. I would worry about being embarrassed later. I pressed myself into the narrow space between two conduits and let the woman tug Ryu toward her. Yee, I remembered, as I got a good look at her face. Elena Yee, station medic. She moved much more deftly in Nimue’s microgravity than I ever could, carefully ferrying Ryu down the shaft and toward the exit before I could orient myself to follow. She looked up at me for a second, and I gestured awkwardly with my thumb.

  “I have to go get . . . I’ll be right there.”

  I didn’t know if she could hear me or understand what I was saying, but she nodded and left me to it.

  Back up the maintenance shaft, back to the sabotaged transmitter. Back to David’s wicked little device. Most of it had been destroyed, and what hadn’t been was now fused to the machines around it. I was able to loosen the charred metal casing, one bent brace with half a clamp still attached, and a few circuit boards probably beyond recovery. I collected what little I could and got out of there.

  EIGHT

  Yee was loading Ryu onto a carry-board with the help of another crew member when I climbed out of the hatch. She had their helmet off, their arms and torso strapped to the board, and she was speaking very quickly, a flurry of words
I couldn’t understand through my helmet. Ryu’s eyes were fluttering, their chest rising and falling, their hand moving at their side, and I was so relieved my eyes stung with unexpected and humiliating tears. I grabbed the edge of the hatch to steady myself. They were awake. Breathing. Moving. Fuck. I swallowed back sudden nausea and tried to breathe before following them to the junction.

  As soon as I climbed down the ladder, Sigrah was in my face. I backed away from her to tug my helmet off, then immediately regretted it.

  “—did you do to my array? We’ve got nothing now! This is why we don’t let fucking data analysts go digging around in valuable systems. I did not approve of this and I will not let you continue to damage my station or crew.”

  She stepped toward me, lurching with the cling of her gecko boots, and raised one hand. She was pointing at me, finger extended in the very best angry schoolteacher fashion. My ears were already ringing and my head was pounding, but I didn’t get the chance to snap back at her because Adisa stepped up, not quite between us, but near enough to give Sigrah pause.

  “Safety Officers Marley and Ryu did have authorization,” he said, his voice so mild there wasn’t the faintest hint of anger, “because they are investigating a murder. A murder that somebody in your crew committed.”

  “That’s not—” Sigrah closed her mouth abruptly.

  I wondered what she had been planning to say. That’s not possible? That’s not true? Not relevant? Perhaps it was a reflexive reaction, an automatic defense without anything behind it. Perhaps it was something more. She knew as well as we did that somebody on Nimue had killed David.

  She scowled and lowered her hand. “What the hell is that?”

  She was staring at the pieces of David’s device as I removed them from my tool bag. I held up the twisted sheet of metal like an offering, not so Sigrah might take it, but so that she could look at it carefully and I could see her reaction.

  “This is what David used to hijack your transmitter,” I said. “Well, part of it. The rest has been destroyed.”

  “Destroyed?” Another crew member was watching from the doorway. I recognized her as Katee King, electrical engineer. She was wearing a vac suit; the helmet was tucked under her arm.

  “A massive power surge,” I said. “It was booby-trapped for when it was discovered.”

  King’s eyes widened. “Fuck me. I guess that explains the total array failure. How do you know where it came from?”

  I turned the distorted metal casing over. I had to admit it didn’t look like much, not anymore, scorched black with only glimmers of the polished silver still shining through. “It looks like David’s work. He liked to . . . liked to make things shiny, even when they didn’t need to be.” It sounded like a weak justification, now that I had to say it out loud, but I was certain.

  Sigrah was scowling. “I don’t care if it looks like the governor of Vesta’s hairy asshole. You were not supposed to do anything except assess the surveillance data, and now you have completely disabled our optical array.”

  I tried not to wince. It wasn’t my fault the power surge had burned out the entire array, but I very much doubted anybody would see it that way. I could easily imagine how Parthenope would justify adding the repair expense to my endlessly compounding debts.

  I tried, “It’s not like I meant—”

  She spoke right over me. “I will talk to HQ about the damage you’ve caused. This is not acceptable. Your investigation is not supposed to interfere with station operations at all. Our entire schedule will be thrown off. How soon can you get the optical array back online?”

  King answered, a bit hesitantly, “I need to know the extent of the damage first.”

  “There might be another booby trap,” I said. I didn’t really believe that, but I was not about to make Sigrah’s life any easier while she was blaming me for David’s little party trick. “It’s dangerous. You’ll be risking your crew to send them out there before we know more.”

  “Shut the fuck up,” Sigrah said. “Katee, get your ass out there and give me a full report and plan of action.”

  King looked from Sigrah to me, me to Adisa, clearly torn.

  “A moment, please,” Adisa said. “We need to speak to your crew first, yeah?” The conciliatory Martian uptalk was back; I had no doubt now that it was deliberate. “We can’t risk anybody else getting hurt until we have more information. The array is part of the investigation now.”

  “You don’t have the authority—”

  “We’ll start with those who knew him best,” he went on, “and we’ll need a place to talk to them—a private room, aye?”

  A series of increasingly unhappy expressions crossed Sigrah’s face. “I am going to contact HQ.”

  “As you should, aye? We’ll talk to the crew while you do that.”

  Sigrah was gritting her teeth so hard I expected to hear them crack. After a long, long pause, she said, “Use the quartermaster’s office by the galley. You can talk to one crew member at a time, provided you are not interrupting work that cannot be rescheduled. This whole shitshow has already taken up too many active hours. And the second HQ gives the go-ahead, my people are repairing the array.”

  “Of course,” Adisa said, but Sigrah was already stomping away into Ops. When she was gone, he looked at me. “Are you hurt?”

  “Oh. No, no. Avery got the brunt of it. I’m fine.”

  If fine meant that I could taste blood in my throat from the panic that was only now fading, and my heart still felt like a quivering, shuddering, gelatinous sea creature trapped in my chest, and my skin was clammy all over from sweat I hadn’t realized I was shedding beneath the suit. I wanted out of it so badly I started to undo the fasteners right there in the junction.

  Adisa took the pieces of David’s device and looked them over. “Only one transmitter was altered?” he said.

  “Yes. According to the maintenance logs, it was taken offline months ago.” I glanced at King, who nodded.

  “Was it twelve? I haven’t worked on that one since I’ve been here. Perry—the old engineer—he said it was missing a data translator.” She looked apologetic and sheepish. “I should have double-checked his work. I know. But I’ve had so much else to do. And the array works most of the time. I really did think it was a power supply problem upstream in the system.”

  “I think number twelve works fine—or it did, until now.” I opened my vac suit to pull off the sleeves and let the top hang from my waist. The cool air was a relief. “I think David paid off your predecessor to help set up this device. It probably redirected power from the other transmitters every time he used it.”

  “I feel so stupid for missing it,” King said. “What was he doing?”

  “We don’t know yet. Only that he’s been doing it regularly for several months.”

  “Right under my nose.” King tossed her helmet up and caught it. “She’ll find some way to . . .” She trailed off, but I knew she was thinking exactly what I had been thinking moments ago: Sigrah would find some way to blame her for this. “Okay, I’ll wait for your say-so to go out there. I don’t fancy being zapped. I hope Safety Officer Ryu will be okay.”

  She went back into Res, stepping out of her vac suit as she did so.

  “Yes, I know,” I said, before Adisa could speak. “I’ll check the logs to make sure she really did miss it.”

  The door to the systems room opened at the end of the corridor, and van Arendonk walked toward us, pausing briefly to glance at the closed door of the comms room.

  “Who is she yelling at?” he asked, eyebrows raised.

  “HQ,” said Adisa. He turned the scorched piece of metal over in his hands thoughtfully. “How certain are you that this is Prussenko’s work?”

  “Pretty certain, especially that outer shell. I didn’t get a good look at whatever it was covering up.” I was leaning against the wall for
balance as I bent down to remove my boots and peeled off the rest of the suit. “He could have built or modified a bot to get the communications hardware in place.”

  Adisa ran his finger along the crooked edge of the casing. He looked troubled, but he only said, “We’ll need to find out if he built it here.”

  “I know. I can check the manufacturing and printing logs.”

  Van Arendonk leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed over his chest. “So the dead man was hijacking a transmitter for his own uses.”

  “Could be an accomplice wanted a bigger cut for themselves, aye? Arranged a meeting in the warehouse to renegotiate the terms of their agreement,” Adisa said.

  “Or maybe . . .” I folded up the vac suit and straightened my own clothes, now damp with sweat. They lied, David had said. They lied about everything. I only wished I had the first fucking idea what his message was trying to tell me. “Maybe he found something that somebody didn’t want him to find.”

  “And he tried to blackmail them?” said van Arendonk. “It’s a possibility. A small crew like this gets to know each other’s business a lot more than anybody is comfortable with. But a monitored cargo airlock is a bloody stupid place to have a clandestine meeting about a criminal enterprise. Why not use private quarters like everybody else?”

  “I don’t know yet,” I said.

  “And what was he stealing?”

  I gritted my teeth. “I don’t know.”

  “You’d probably know if you’d managed to grab the evidence rather than blow it up,” van Arendonk said.

  “Stop it, Hugo,” Adisa said, without looking at him. To me he said, “We’ll interview the crew and—”

  Van Arendonk pushed away from the doorframe. “Let me do it.”

  “No need.” Adisa turned abruptly and started walking. “Marley, with me.”

  “Mohammad, wait. You don’t have to—”

  “Find out what Sigrah is shouting to HQ about.”

  “She’s probably shouting about the communications array your analyst just exploded.”