by Kali Wallace
“Last chance,” I said. “Do you know something about David’s death or not?”
“I know why he died.”
“Sure you do. So tell me.”
“The others were talking about what you and the Martian asked them. You think David stumbled into something important and dangerous in his work.”
“It’s a possibility.”
“You’ve got it backwards. He and his little friend didn’t find something hidden in the data. What he found is the data.”
I studied her face carefully. “What does that mean?”
“Safety Officer Marley,” she chided. “We are intelligent women. You know what I mean.”
My mind was already racing. Fuel shortages. Energy fluctuations. Geological assays. Facility efficiency. Misplaced cargo. Everything David rightfully had access to as sysadmin. Boring station bullshit. Details about what Parthenope was mining. How much progress they were making. How much water they extracted. How efficiently they produced fuel. How much product they shipped away.
My heart skipped with excitement. Ping was saying that all the boring bullshit David spent his time going through wasn’t beside the point. It wasn’t the haystack in which the lone valuable needle had been hidden. All that boring bullshit was the point.
Nimue was meant to be the jewel in Parthenope’s growing crown. Its lineup of powerful investors, its decades’ worth of productivity and profit projections reaching into the future, the nonstop PR campaign to convince everybody they were reshaping commerce in the asteroid belt, it was all tied up in Nimue’s success. They had, quite literally, bet the entire company on it.
“It’s all a lie, isn’t it?” I gestured to the massive room around us; Ping’s eyes followed the track of my metal fingers. “This whole fucking facility. It’s supposed to be completely self-sufficient and so efficient that it’s already exporting fuel. But it’s not, is it? It’s not anywhere near what Parthenope is claiming it should be. That’s what David figured out. The whole facility is a huge fucking scam, and the company will collapse if anybody finds out. Does everybody know? Who else knows?”
She was so tense I could see her cheek muscles twitching, her hands trembling. “You’re thinking too small. David made the same mistake.”
“What do you mean? What mistake?”
“He thought he could reveal the truth for his own uses.”
All of my excitement turned cold and congealed in my gut.
“He told you that?” I asked.
“He couldn’t see anything outside his own life. His own selfish unhappiness.”
I felt queasy. “When did he tell you that? When did you talk to him?”
She stepped closer suddenly and grabbed my arm. I tried to pull away, but she wouldn’t let go. “I wanted him to understand. I was going to show him, make him see how beautiful it can be, if only he allowed it. But it was a mistake. He was fixated on what the company is doing—what the humans are doing. He didn’t understand that sometimes sacrifices are necessary. Some things are so much more important than one man’s ideas of right and wrong.”
I could barely speak. “What did you do?”
“I can explain. Let me show you. I can show you what I wanted to share with him. Everything’s going to change soon. I know you’ll understand when you see it. You more than anybody.” Her eyes were shining and wide. “I never expected you to come here. I didn’t even think it was possible. This is better than I thought it could be.”
“Is that—” Her fingers were wrapped tight around the prosthetic humerus of my left arm. Her voice was breathy and fast. I struggled to keep up. “Is that what you said to David? What did you say to him? When you arranged to meet him?”
“I offered to show him the truth. But he was afraid. He was not being rational.”
“What truth? Is there proof that Parthenope is lying about this facility? David was going to find it, and that’s why you attacked him?”
Mary Ping’s mouth turned in a slight frown. “It didn’t have to happen like that.”
I shoved her away from me. “You killed him.”
“He didn’t understand. You’re making the same mistake. Don’t let your small, scared little mind control you. You have to listen to me. I didn’t want to hurt him. He could have just waited. Only a few days, that was all I asked for. He was going to ruin everything. I didn’t want to—”
She stopped abruptly. She was looking past me, her eyes wide. She stumbled backward a few steps, as though I had pushed her again, but there was a good meter between us.
“No,” she whispered. “What are you doing here?”
I turned, my gecko boots squeaking faintly.
There was somebody else in the warehouse.
They were no more than a silhouette, the outline of their body traced by the sparse light: a gleam on the edge of a shoulder, a reflection on the side of a helmet. It was that reflection that held my gaze. They were wearing some sort of space suit, one that obscured their face behind a flat shield and enclosed their trunk and limbs in a hard black carapace. It was a mechanical suit, powered and armored but not as bulky as those used for cargo maneuvering or spacewalks. I couldn’t see it well enough to make out the details.
They were still, so still they might have been a statue, a slice of dark against the shadows.
Then, in a heartbeat, they were coming toward us.
They moved with such astonishing speed it took my breath away. The suit was so well balanced their loping stride wasted not a single motion, with no noise greater than a gentle whir. Within seconds they were upon us. I stumbled away, tripping over myself in my hurry to retreat, fumbling for my radio as I lost my balance and fell awkwardly into a shipping container.
There was a flash of light—a bright green blink—and Mary gasped.
That bright flash, so much brighter than anything else in that warehouse, confused the input from my prosthetic eye into a stutter of double vision. I squeezed my eyes shut, fighting back the sudden nausea and pain.
When I opened them again, there was a multilegged bot racing up Mary Ping’s leg. She yelped and batted at it, kicked her leg wildly. The bot scurried over her hip, her waist, and dodged her grasping hands to reach the center of her torso.
Her eyes widened in shock and she took in a sharp, pained breath. Her lips were parted, her hands frozen in rigid claws over the bot. Beneath her rasping breath I heard a quick snapping sound. An acrid chemical scent drifted on the air. With it came the unmistakable scent of blood.
Mary Ping screamed. Red blossomed on her chest as she grasped at the bot, but she could not tear it away.
“Get it off me!” She turned in frantic circles, batting helplessly at the bot. “Get it off, get it away, get it—”
There was a white flash—her scream stopped abruptly—and a deafening concussion of sound. The world became a storm of flashing lights as the noise faded. I staggered to the side, thrown off-balance by the confusion of my eyes and ears. My shoulder hit the side of a shipping container; my knees struck the floor.
Mary was not screaming anymore. There was a damp gurgle. A whimper.
I pushed myself upright, shaking my head to settle the flashing in my left eye. I crawled toward Mary. My right hand slipped on something warm and wet. Her blood, spreading across the floor.
FOURTEEN
She was lying on her side with her eyes and mouth open. Her chest was a ruin of scorched flesh and shattered ribs. A twist of smoke rose from the wound, and blood seeped through ragged gaps in the cauterized flesh. The remains of the bot clung to the skin just below her collarbone with two intact legs; the rest of it had been destroyed. The acrid chemical smell faded, replaced by the scent of cooked meat. Nausea roiled in my gut and I gagged, coughed, struggled against the urge to vomit.
A second bot crept along her leg, illuminated by a delicate blue internal light. Its
legs folded and unfolded elegantly, letting it cling with three one moment, six the next, constantly shifting its shape as it picked its way over the landscape of Ping’s body. The blue light flashed brighter for a second, and my heart squeezed with panic.
I grabbed the bot with my blood-smeared hand, not thinking, wanting nothing more than to pull it away from her. I felt a sting of pain and shook my hand frantically, stirring the bot into a whipping whirlwind of wire. It legs folded into its body until only two remained extended; those two grasped my palm and wrist, piercing the skin. The entire device emitted a biting chemical smell, powerful enough to make me cough.
I flung the bot away from me—tearing the legs from my hand—and sent it slamming into the side of a shipping container. One of the bot’s legs bent and worked, turning in a helpless circle as it tried to stand.
I scrambled to my feet—almost lost my balance again—and I stomped on it. It made a loud, satisfying crunch beneath my boot.
When I looked up, the person in the mech suit was still standing several meters away.
“Stop!” I shouted, although they hadn’t yet moved. My voice echoed dully from the shipping containers around us. “Don’t move!”
I reached for my radio, but I had dropped it along with my PD. I had to call for help. Blood trickled from the wounds on my hand, the metallic scent mingling with the acrid accelerant. I couldn’t take my eyes off the killer.
They remained eerily still. I could see absolutely nothing behind the blankness of their faceplate. They had no headlamp or flashlight. They stood just beyond the bright circle of the ceiling lights, not quite in shadow but not illuminated either. Everything about the suit was featureless and black, with its supple limbs blending seamlessly into hidden joints, and not a single external obvious vulnerability in its mechanical workings. I had never seen anything like it.
“I need you to identify yourself,” I said. I didn’t know if it was the right thing to say. It was never my job to bring suspects into custody. “Reach up very slowly and take off your helmet. Do you hear me? Take off your helmet and identify yourself.”
I glanced down again; my PD and radio had slid several meters away. One look at the map would tell me who was standing before me. Or one question.
“Overseer,” I said, raising my voice so it could carry. “Please summon Safety Inspector Adisa to this location and identify the crew member— Shit!”
I was expecting them to turn and run, or reach for another explosive bot to throw at me, or lunge toward me in an attack. I was not expecting them to bend their knees and jump backward, then do it again, and again, covering two or three meters with every bound, the motion so smooth and so strange I spent a few stunned seconds trying to work out how the suit helped them keep their balance.
Then I stopped staring and sprinted after them.
I bounded down the row with a wild, flailing abandon, letting my gecko soles anchor me, momentarily forgetting that I had no real practice running in gravity this low. The insistent ache in my left hip returned, but I gritted through it. I wasn’t fast enough—I didn’t think anybody would have been fast enough—and within moments the killer changed directions. They jumped again, twisting in midair, and turned a corner into an intersecting canyon of cargo containers.
I heard them land, heard the pounding of their boots on the warehouse floor. By the time I rounded the same corner, they were well ahead of me. I raced after them, running as fast as I could, my heart thumping with the effort. No extreme exertion, the doctors had said. Gentle exercise only. Let your body learn to move again. I fucking hated being scolded by doctors.
At the end of the shipping containers, I charged into a broad, open space for about two steps before my left leg slammed into a solid obstacle at exactly shin height.
There was a solid clink of metal on metal, followed by an explosion of fiery-hot pain in my hip joint.
“Ratfucker!” I stumbled and fell, dizzy with pain.
It took a moment for me to catch my breath. I had run into a stack of long metal bars, set directly across the gap between the shipping containers. I staggered to my feet, gasping for breath. The bars hadn’t been there before; they were from one of the pallet stacks several meters away, the ones I had passed while looking for the incinerator. The killer had moved them—taken them from the stack and placed them here—and they had done it quickly, breaking the metal bands on the stack and moving four-meter-long unwieldy pieces of metal in seconds. All before I caught up to them.
The killer was scrambling up a ladder on the warehouse wall, quick and agile as a spider. I stepped over the obstacle—fuck, my hip hurt—but they were already four meters above the floor, five, six. They reached the open entrance of the cargo transport tunnels and an alarm beeped. Radiation warning. They were entering a zone of low shielding.
The alarm didn’t stop them. They scrambled over the edge and disappeared into the tunnel.
“Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck.”
I couldn’t follow. Even if I could climb the ladder with a wrenched hip and a bleeding hand, I couldn’t risk going unprotected into a low-shielding zone. I sure as hell couldn’t risk chasing after an armed killer without weapons or backup.
I turned instead and limped back through the warehouse. Every step was agony. Every breath felt raw and shallow.
I staggered like a drunkard back to Mary Ping’s body. I grabbed my radio and PD, and turned my attention to the PD first. The Overseer was still showing me active tracking data for the station, so I brought up the map and panned over it quickly.
“Come on, come on,” I muttered. “Who the fuck are you?”
I found myself and Mary Ping on the map—she was a red dot indicating a medical alert—and Adisa coming toward us. Sigrah and Delicata were with him. I found the transport tunnels.
“Come the fuck on, where did you go?” I muttered, scanning over the map frantically. “Where are you?”
“Marley!” Adisa’s voice carried through the warehouse.
“Over here!” I shouted. I had no idea how to describe where I was.
The sound of noisy gecko soles slapping on the floor drew closer, and Adisa came running up with Sigrah and Delicata right behind him.
“What the hell—” He stopped abruptly when he saw Ping.
Sigrah tried to push by him. “Mary! What happened?”
Adisa held out his arm and stepped in front of her. “Don’t. Stay back.”
“What the fuck did you do to her?” Delicata said, whirling to face me.
“Nothing. It was—I don’t know who it was. I couldn’t see their face. They were wearing a mech suit—”
He made a noise in his throat, something between a gasp and a growl. “That’s not possible.”
“—and I couldn’t identify them,” I said. “They fled into the cargo tunnels. I’ve got the tracking data but we need a head count—”
“Here? Not fucking possible,” Delicata said again. He stepped up close to me. “What the fuck did you do?”
“Back off, Ned,” Sigrah said, her voice low and tight.
He whirled around to face her. “What the fuck is going on here? This isn’t fucking right. You know there’s something going on. You never said—”
“I said back off, Ned. Let the safety officers do their jobs.”
Delicata gritted his teeth; I saw the muscles working in his jaw. He was glaring at Sigrah, having apparently forgotten about me, and she was glaring right back. I would have given anything to hear whatever it was he had been about to say, the words she had cut off so cleanly.
“Go,” Sigrah said to him. “Gather the others in Res. Everybody. I don’t want anybody alone right now.”
Delicata nodded curtly. He cast one more look at Mary Ping, his expression dark and troubled, before leaving.
Adisa was already on his radio. “. . . and wake up Ryu and tell them to
get the hell out here, aye?”
“On it.” Van Arendonk’s answer was clipped. “What happened?”
“Not sure yet,” Adisa said, looking at me. He crouched beside the crushed bot, the one I had smashed with my boot. He studied it for a second before picking it up gingerly, turning it over in his hands. “Somebody attacked Mary Ping. Marley saw it but wasn’t able to identify the killer. Marley? Where did they go?”
“Into the cargo tunnels. I can’t fucking find them,” I said. “I’m looking. I’m looking.”
I was smearing blood all over the PD as I tried to navigate the maps. My hand was shaking. I wanted to slump against the container and slide down to the floor. The ache in my hip was unbearable and my head was throbbing. I wanted to close my eyes in a dark, quiet room. I wanted to erase the last hour. I could not stop hearing Mary Ping’s screams. The bitter, powerful smell of the accelerant from the bots was seared into my nostrils.
Adisa stood up and turned to Sigrah. He still had the crushed spider bot in his hand. He held it out to her; she flinched away from it.
“Did you know you had this on your station?” he asked.
Sigrah glowered at the spider. “Am I supposed to know what that is?”
Even I could tell she was lying. Adisa was even less impressed. “You have two dead crew members, a criminal operation going on for months that you never noticed, and now you’ve got somebody running around with autonomous weapons that have been illegal throughout the system for twenty-five years. Am I supposed to believe that you’re so fucking shit at your job that you know nothing about any of it?”