Dead Space

by Kali Wallace

  The infirmary was a small room slotted alongside the galley and mess, up against the curved wall of what had once been the ship’s inner hull. It seemed like hygienically questionable placement to me, a feeling that was not helped by how easily the pervasive scents of reheated food drifted through the thin door. One of the most fun parts of undergoing months of medical treatment that included a significant amount of organ repair and nerve rewiring was that my body had come out of it with some exciting new opinions about what I could not bear to smell and taste. Cheap long-storage meals were one of the things that turned my stomach most often—which was great and not at all annoying for a person living in space and surviving on such meals.

  And that was before adding in the faintly sweet scent of decay.

  The infirmary was narrow, with rows of cabinets on either side of the single table, and everything was scrupulously clean. Adisa and van Arendonk were already there, standing on one side of the table; Ryu sat on a stool at the head of the exam table. I shuffled in, last to arrive, and shut the door.

  David lay on the table. His skin was waxy and pallid. Ryu had cleaned away the blood, but somehow that only made the wounds more hideous. His one remaining eye was closed. I wondered at how pale his eyelashes were, how fine his thinning hair. I remembered that hair being soft gold when the sun shone through it. It looked colorless now.

  “He was fairly healthy,” Ryu said. Their voice was rough, their movements a bit unsteady, and overhead lights weren’t doing their pale complexion and rising bruises any favors. They looked very much like they ought to be lying down, not presiding over a corpse in the middle of a medical exam. “About as healthy as could be expected. He kept up with his radiation and osteo meds. He did his resistance exercises. No addictions, no flags on the mental health assessments. The only thing the medic was keeping an eye on was his lungs.” Ryu flicked a glance at me, quick and apologetic. “He had some scarring and diminished lung capacity from the Symposium incident, but HQ decided it wasn’t serious enough to keep him from a station assignment.”

  When the explosions in the cargo bay caused fires that cascaded uncontrollably through Symposium’s atmospheric control system, the living areas had been swamped with superheated air. The scarring in David’s lungs was from breathing. From surviving. I had the same scars.

  “He wasn’t killed by diminished lung capacity,” van Arendonk said. “What have you found that’s actually useful? Those rabid fuckers are wound so tight I wouldn’t put it past them to kill each other while we’re in here.”

  Ryu rolled their eyes and didn’t even try to hide it. “Right, sure, okay. No surprises in the cause of death. Blunt object, many blows, you can see it. But there is one weird thing. Look at his sleeves.”

  They slid from their stool and lifted one of David’s hands. I hadn’t noticed before, in the airlock, but I saw now that the cuffs of his jumpsuit were cinched tight to his wrists with soft bands of pale yellow.

  “His feet too,” Ryu said.

  Larger versions of the same bands cinched his trousers to his legs.

  “He was dressed to put on a space suit,” Adisa said.

  Ryu nodded. “That’s what it looks like. I noticed because Hester and I just went through it.”

  David’s clothes were secured at the arms and legs to make it easier to don a vac suit like the ones Ryu and I had worn in the maintenance shaft, the ones that never fit quite right and always bunched up the clothes underneath in awkward places.

  “Did he go outside? How did you miss that?” van Arendonk asked.

  “No,” I said quickly. “The airlock never depressurized. The outer hatch never opened.”

  “Not even during the blackout period?”

  I shook my head. “No. That airlock wasn’t depressurized that day. Hasn’t been for a few weeks, since the last logged maintenance check.”

  “So he was preparing to go outside, aye?” Adisa said. “There was no suit with him.”

  “Maybe the other person was supposed to bring it?” Ryu suggested.

  “What’s out there?” Adisa looked at me expectantly.

  I blinked, caught off guard. “I, uh, I’m not sure. I’d have to check. Sigrah said they only go out for—”

  “Routine maintenance on the cargo transport system, but let’s make sure she’s right about that, yeah? Who uses it, how often, why.”

  “Right. That will be in the logs.”

  “We should look for the suit too—recyclers, incinerators. We can start in the warehouse,” he said. “Hugo, what did you get from HQ?”

  “Fuck-all and jack shit,” van Arendonk said. “A whole lot of arse-covering from long-winded puckerfaces telling me to ask someone else.”

  “Sit down with Sigrah and try to scare her into telling you more.”

  “Oh, you want my help with the interviews now?” van Arendonk said. “I’m so flattered. Let me check my calendar.”

  “Threaten her with legal repercussions if she doesn’t cooperate. You’re good at that.” Adisa turned toward the door, then stopped. “What do you know about Neeta Hunter? Why is she out here?”

  Van Arendonk laughed. “I have no bloody idea. Most likely she took off on her own to prove that she isn’t tied to Mum’s purse strings. It’s practically a rite of passage among the families, as a way of feebly exerting our imaginary independence. Some of us run off to volunteer legal aid to ungrateful Martian freedom fighters, and some of us run off to rock-hop for a few years before it gets boring. She’ll crawl back to Yuèliàng when she runs out of money.”

  “Must be nice to be a Hunter,” Ryu said dryly.

  I wanted to agree, wanted to roll my eyes and nod, but all I could think was: how bloody unfair. How staggeringly fucking unfair it was that Neeta Hunter could leave anytime she wanted, but I couldn’t even venture outside of Parthenope territory without bankrupting my entire family for generations to come because my life and work and time and even my limbs didn’t belong to me anymore. How bloody unfair that life could be so easy if you were Neeta Hunter or Hugo van Arendonk, but for the rest of us, ruined by events beyond our control, there were no good paths, no safe options, only choices that hurt more and choices that hurt less.

  “Any chance she’s working for Hunter-Fremont?” Adisa said.

  Van Arendonk considered it. “I doubt Leonora would be so gauche as to use her own daughter as a spy. That’s the sort of thing she would hire out to a well-vetted professional. But it seems like a clever investigator might want to ask the girl herself.”

  “It does seem like that, yeah.” Adisa then looked squarely at Ryu. “And you’re going to get some rest.”

  “But I’m—”

  “Rest,” he said. “Find a spare bunk. That’s an order. Marley, meet me in the warehouse to dig through some garbage.”

  After Adisa and van Arendonk were gone, Ryu made a face. “I’m fine,” they said. “And I’m not finished here.”

  “You don’t really look fine,” I said. I brushed a strand of hair back from their face to get a better look at their damaged nose and black eyes. “You look like shit.”

  “Oh, wow, thanks ever so much, Safety Officer Marley.” They glared at me briefly before reaching across David’s corpse to grab the other side of the body bag. “This is your first field investigation, isn’t it?”

  I dropped my hand. “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “And the victim is someone you knew.”

  “And?”

  There was a pause that lasted just a shade too long, then they said, “It’s nothing.”

  “What’s nothing?” I said.

  “It doesn’t matter. Never mind.”

  “No, come on, what is it?”

  Ryu looked at me for a long moment. We were about the same height, but right now their slender shoulders were stooped with tiredness and pain. “I don’
t mean anything by it,” they said. “It’s just that you seem distracted. Like there’s something you’re on the verge of saying.” They spoke with a soft sort of weariness that indicated they were already sorry they’d said anything.

  They were right, of course. They knew me well enough. Every single time we spoke about what David had gotten himself into, it was there on the tip of my tongue, pressing against the back of my teeth, the urge to tell them about David’s message. I knew that by keeping it to myself I was keeping something from the investigation. I also knew I couldn’t truly trust anyone. Adisa seemed like he truly wanted to find the killer, but he had been with Parthenope for a long time, and nobody stuck around that long if they didn’t prioritize protecting the company and their own position within it above all else. I sure as hell couldn’t trust van Arendonk, a rich man making himself even richer by fucking over employees on the company’s behalf.

  And as much as I wanted to trust Ryu, I knew it was too risky. I didn’t know them that well. What they liked about their work, what kind of gossip they collected, how they laughed at their own jokes, how their dark hair always fell into their eyes, those were the little things I knew, the bits and pieces collected during the time we’d spent together. They were one of the first friends I’d made upon arriving on Hygiea, the first to help me get past spending every hour of every day lonely and angry and itching for anything to take my mind off how my life was ruined, to forget for an hour or two how hard it was to escape the stares, the questions, the leering, and worst of all the shuddering, to stop thinking about the way people looked at me and flinched because I was everything they were terrified of becoming: a broken thing far from home, a helpless victim whose future had been devoured by the serendipitous cruelty of space, a walking purgatory stuck between the promises of the past and the mind-numbing bleakness of the future. Ryu had approached me in the canteen and they had been looking at my face, not my prosthetic parts, so I hadn’t snapped at them to scare them away. What I knew about Ryu was that they came from one of the innumerable private orbital habitats owned by some toxic Christian sect, the sort of micro-society where women were chattel, binaries were rigid, shame was rampant, and regular, generous donations to the reelection campaigns of Earth-based politicians ensured that human rights inspectors stayed far, far away. Why Ryu had left, how they’d ended up in the asteroid belt, what they had left behind, whether they missed it, how they dreamed their life might go, I didn’t know any of that. All I knew was that they would never go back. Ryu didn’t like talking about their painful past and impossible future any more than I did.

  I couldn’t ask them for help. I couldn’t ask them to risk their job like that. Whatever usual parameters defined friendships, relationships, or friendly but distant exes, those rules didn’t apply anymore, not in the asteroid belt, where everybody was counting the dollars in their personal debt and the days on their corporate contracts, and information was more valuable than human life.

  “Hester,” they said, when I did not answer.

  “I am kinda messed up about it,” I said finally. “About David. I didn’t think it would be this bad.”

  “Do you need—”

  I eased away when they reached for me. “I need to find out who killed him.”

  “Yeah. Okay. Do you want me to walk you to the warehouse?”

  “Why would you do that?” I said.

  Ryu laughed, although there was little amusement in it. “Because there’s a murderer on this station?”

  “I’ll be fine. You’re supposed to be resting.” I reached out to touch their hand gently, barely a brush of my metal fingers over their skin. They had never flinched from those fingers, and they didn’t now. “I heard some asshole got you electrocuted in a maintenance shaft. You should take a nap.”

  “Fine,” they said. “I expect you’ll have the killer identified by the time I wake up.”

  TWELVE

  Nimue in the evening was quiet but not silent, filled with an encompassing industrial lullaby of flowing air and humming machines and rumbling gears, the bumps and thumps and metallic whispers of repair bots just beyond the walls, all singing their own songs to their own melodies. It was not comforting, exactly, but it was familiar. Even so, I felt a prickle of unease between my shoulder blades as I entered the cargo warehouse.

  The crew were scattered around the station, catching up on the work that had been delayed over the past few days. I didn’t like having our suspects out of sight, so I asked the Overseer to show me the location of everybody on Nimue. It wouldn’t let me look at any active visual surveillance; for that I needed permission from the company and the agreement of the Overseer, neither of which was likely at the moment. What I could access was a map with current ID tracking data. It would have to do.

  Adisa was already in the warehouse, near the airlock where David had died. Sigrah and van Arendonk were in her office in Ops. Mary Ping was in her quarters, Neeta Hunter in the robotics lab. The rest of the crew were in the living quarters or in Ops. Nobody was in the mine. It looked like Sigrah’s insistence that they keep working had not persuaded anybody to give up their night for a full shift.

  The Overseer turned on lights ahead of me and shut them off behind me, creating the uncomfortable feeling of being onstage and unable to escape an insistent spotlight. Everywhere outside of the light, down every long canyon between the stacked cargo containers and towering racks, the warehouse sank into deep gray shadows. The soft peel-tap sound of my gecko boots was disconcertingly loud. Around me long, shadowy canyons stretched between the towers of shipping containers. Even in Nimue’s slight gravity, my shoulder and hip were beginning to twinge. Every day it began as a gentle ache where the artificial limbs attached to joints that had been shattered and pieced together again; over hours of use without rest the pain grew into fiery hot spots that were impossible to ignore. That was something the smug, strutting doctors who claimed to redefine humanity with gleaming limbs and skin facsimiles never advertised: they didn’t know how to make pain go away.

  I thought about Mary Ping reaching across the table, asking to touch my hand. The hunger in her expression. How it made my skin crawl.

  I asked the Overseer for any of the investigative query results it could give me, and I read through what it provided as I walked toward Adisa. None of David’s personal communications had been flagged as suspicious; he wasn’t in contact with any known or suspected criminals or criminal enterprises. That was hardly a surprise; I already knew he was hiding his communications. He also hadn’t spent any time looking into others’ communications records or personnel files or financial records, all the things one might be expected to study if one were interested in pursuing a sideline in blackmail. I wanted to find out whether the Overseer agreed with the crew about who David spent most of his time talking to, but that would have to wait until I got back into the systems room.

  Adisa was waiting outside the airlock. He looked up from his PD at the sound of my gecko soles and said, “Once a month Ned Delicata goes out this door for a maintenance check. Supposed to be routine, but some of them take him a couple of hours or more. There’s a power station for the cargo transport system nearby, yeah?”

  “Was he alone?”

  “Aye, usually. There’s no record of Prussenko ever going out through this door.”

  I didn’t want to stand too close to the airlock. I wondered who would get the job of cleaning up David’s blood. They would probably send a bot to do it.

  “Delicata didn’t mention using this airlock when we spoke to him,” I said. We hadn’t asked either. We should have. Maybe Mary Ping was right. Maybe we were too used to relying on surveillance to tell us what we needed to know.

  “No, he didn’t.” Adisa looked to the left and right. “Where’s the nearest incinerator?”

  The Overseer answered by highlighting the locations on my PD. There were two incinerators, two recyclers, and one lar
ge-format waste disposal unit in the cargo warehouse. We split up to check the nearest two units, and when that proved fruitless, we rejoined to cross to the other side of the warehouse.

  Adisa was quiet as we walked together. I could not guess what he was thinking. I thought about what Ryu had said earlier: he wasn’t bad to work with, when he decided to give a fuck. I wondered if this was him giving a fuck or not. I honestly couldn’t tell. I knew we had to do this bit of busywork, to make sure the killer hadn’t disposed of evidence in an obvious and idiotic spot, but I also knew that we weren’t going to find a murderer by searching for the charred remains of a bloody space suit. I was going to find them by learning whatever it was that David had discovered.

  I shuffled the station map off my PD screen and went back to looking over my query results.

  “Find anything interesting in Prussenko’s data?” Adisa said.

  “Maybe,” I said slowly. “Nothing obvious. David’s communications are clean. He didn’t do any obvious snooping for blackmail material. Nothing that I can find, anyway. He could have been really good at covering his tracks.”

  “So good that you can’t find them?”

  I couldn’t tell if he was mocking me or not. “I’m still looking. I can confirm that what the crew told us is true. David did spend a lot of time getting into things that weren’t technically his job.” I consulted my PD to run down the list. “Geological reports. Three-dimensional structural maps of the asteroid. Repair requests. Fuel line leaks. Equipment breakages. Cargo manifests. Power usage stats. He even looked at plumbing issues. Why the hell would he care about plumbing issues? His tracking data patterns put him all over the facility. He flagged a whole lot of operational discrepancies, but he never wrote up any reports about what he was doing. Never summarized any results to share.”

  “All recently?”

  I scrolled to the top of the list. “Recently he’s been most focused on power and fuel numbers. And cargo manifests. He looked at a lot of those.”