Dead Space

by Kali Wallace

  I said, “The Overseer should also have been throwing warnings to HQ constantly.”

  Van Arendonk made a frustrated noise. “I can only see what the Overseer is showing me, but it doesn’t appear to have been a priority. It’s a low-shielding zone that’s off-limits to crew, so nobody has reason to spend much time there.”

  That wasn’t good enough. There had to be something else going on to make the Overseer dismiss the danger of leaving a large portion of the station, a dangerous potion of the station, unwatched. But the lack of tunnel surveillance was only one part of the problem. “Somebody had to be in the wrong place during the attack. Maybe it looks like they were in their private quarters or taking a fucking piss or—fuck me, or anywhere surveillance doesn’t reach.”

  “Marley,” van Arendonk said, “listen to me. I have tracking data for everyone at the time of the attack. Everyone.”

  Fuck. That wasn’t possible. He had to be missing something. He might only have access to the tracking data, but the Overseer had a whole lot more than that, and it would flag any inconsistencies. There were ways to falsify surveillance and tracking data with a deepfake, but it was basically impossible to do quickly or with little notice. I had never heard of it being done successfully in a station run by an Overseer. There would be evidence that the ID scans or cameras or data lines had been tampered with. There would likely be glitches all over any audio and visual recordings. Parthenope’s stations had too many cameras, too many audio recorders, too many sensors, too many ID trackers for convincing fakery. There would always be something the Overseer could flag as suspicious. A footstep where none should be. A shadow with no source. Complete silence in a room where a person should be breathing.

  I was grasping at straws. “So who was alone and not moving? In a room by themselves? Where does the Overseer pick up any audio-video misfit?”

  “I am quite far out of my depth here,” van Arendonk said.

  “There has to be something. Look again.”

  “By all means, Safety Officer Marley, please come back here and look for yourself. This is a task better suited to an analyst, don’t you think? I should contact HQ for expanded data access.”

  I started to snipe back at him, even though he was right, but Adisa spoke first.

  “There’s another possibility,” he said. “There could be somebody else here.”

  For a long moment, nobody reacted.

  Hunter let out an uneasy laugh. “What? You mean, on Nimue?”

  “A stowaway? Doing, what? Sneaking around the station?” I wanted to laugh too, but Adisa was not joking. His suggestion was completely serious. I started to shake my head. “That’s not possible. There’s too much surveillance. Even the transportation . . . it’s not possible.”

  “It’s not likely, but it’s always possible,” Adisa said. “It’s something we have to consider.”

  It wasn’t as though a stowaway could have just happened by, parked a ship, and sneaked inside. Nimue was eighteen hours from the nearest station. Nobody could approach unnoticed. There was only one place for a ship to dock, and it was under constant surveillance. Even getting from the ship to the cargo transport tunnels, if that’s where somebody meant to hide, would have them passing by countless points of Overseer security and surveillance. And that was before they reached the tunnels, where they would have to remain inside a protective suit constantly to avoid the radiation. They would need food, water, warmth. They would need a way to communicate.

  Mary Ping had asked, What are you doing here? Not Who are you? or What do you want? The person in the mech suit was not a stranger.

  It had to be one of the ten crew members left on Nimue. A sophisticated surveillance hack, maybe, but behind it would be a face we already knew. Somebody we could identify and confine. Somebody we could find and stop before they killed again.

  “I need to get back to the Overseer,” I said.

  “Please do,” said van Arendonk. “It’s growing impatient with my clumsiness.”

  Adisa said, “Hugo, get over to Res to help Ryu keep an eye on the crew. Sigrah and Delicata especially. We’re heading back now.”

  “Good. I’ll—”

  Van Arendonk’s voice cut off abruptly.

  “Hugo?” Adisa said.

  There was no reply. Silence. Not a chirp, not a crackle, nothing.

  “Hugo? I didn’t catch that.” He lowered his radio slowly. “If he’s right—”

  An earsplitting wail interrupted him. It was so loud and so high it made my prosthetic ear squeal in protest. Lights flashed with startling, searing brightness. There was another blast of sound before the Overseer’s voice came from the radios and nearest control console.

  “Warning. The station is being placed on lockdown due to the potential for exposure to harmful radiation.” The words echoed in stereo, just a beat offset from one another. “Warning. All personnel must find their way to a safe room immediately.”

  “What?” I said. “What the fuck is happening?”

  “Warning. The station is being placed on lockdown due to the potential for exposure to harmful radiation.”

  My hand went to the radiation sensor at my belt. The values were still within the safe range. On the high side of the safe range, but not high enough to trigger a warning. The station alarm screamed again.

  “Nearest safe room,” Adisa said to Hunter. “Where is it?”

  “Warning. All personnel must find their way to a safe room immediately.”

  “Shit, shit.” Hunter unsnapped her tool bag from the railing and slung it over her shoulder. “The furnace control room is closest. Over there, there’s a ladder. All the way up. Come on.”

  We ran to the end of the catwalk and made a left turn to approach the base of a tall ladder. Hunter climbed first, with me right behind her. I grabbed the rungs and pulled myself up, fear making my motions awkward, unsteady, my nerves jumping every time the alarm wailed. I was shaking so much that I missed a rung with my boots and swung free. My heart skipped wildly and I let out a startled yelp—I was only holding on with one hand, my left hand, and that felt like holding on with nothing at all. Something caught my leg—Adisa, grabbing my ankle—and moved my right foot back to the rungs.

  “We have time,” he said. I hated how calm he sounded, how frantic I was in comparison. “You’re okay, yeah?”

  The ladder was a good fifteen or twenty meters long, but we finally, finally, reached the top. Hunter pushed the hatch open and climbed inside, then turned to help me up. Adisa was right behind me. He scrambled into the room and slammed the hatch shut. In the space between the alarms came the solid clank of the locks engaging.

  SIXTEEN

  The furnace stretched before us, a glowing red throat of impossible size. The cylinder was largely empty, but in the distance little bursts of light appeared and vanished, like matter and antimatter meeting at the dawn of the universe. Each light sketched a faint tail of dust, a phantom track through the fierce red space, hundreds of meters above us.

  A wave of vertigo made the room spin around me. We were below the furnace—this room was turned the wrong way—we had to be looking up from the floor—we weren’t even in the center of the level—it wasn’t a window. Fuck. I closed my eyes to reorient my brain. Stupid, stupid, stupid. It wasn’t a window. This was a shielded control room; the walls probably contained two meters of solid lead. I was looking at a wallscreen that provided a view down the long axis of the furnace. It helped to know that, but only a little. I was still dizzy and nauseated, and the room was so warm sweat sprung to my brow.

  I tore my gaze away from the red furnace and looked around for the room’s main terminal. I asked the Overseer to identify the location of the high radiation levels. Asked for the report on what had triggered the lockdown. Asked for an assessment of station-wide danger. I asked again. And again, and again.

  I got nothin
g. To every query, the Overseer simply replied in text what it had been saying aloud: The station is being placed on lockdown due to the potential for exposure to harmful radiation. The stubborn answer made no sense. The Overseer should be providing unrestricted information about the source of the danger to anybody who asked. All personnel must find their way to a safe room immediately.

  Nothing else.

  “There’s no internal report on what triggered the lockdown or where it happened. None of the radiation sensors are showing high readings.”

  “What? No, that can’t be right. Let me look,” Hunter said.

  But even as I moved aside, the terminal stopped responding. The warning was frozen on the screen: The station is being placed on lockdown due to the potential for exposure to harmful radiation. All personnel must find their way to a safe room immediately. I checked the next terminal over, where the comms were patched through, and found the same thing.

  Adisa tried his radio again. “Hugo, Avery, what’s happening on your end?”

  “I don’t understand,” Hunter said. “What’s wrong with it?”

  “They can’t hear you,” I said. The room’s comms didn’t even acknowledge the radio signal, much less pick up and transmit it.

  Normal lockdown procedure did not include disabling comms. Not ever, not in any circumstance. No Overseer or station designer wanted to prevent people from communicating during an emergency. But that was our reality: we had no way of contacting the others. We could not see what was happening outside the room. We were stuck in the furnace control room with no way out. My chest felt tight; my heart was racing. There wasn’t enough air. It was too hot. I needed to breathe. It was a small room, and completely sealed. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think of anything to do. There was nothing we could do, not without a way to make the Overseer listen to us. Not deep in the mine, three kilometers from help.

  The red light from the furnace faded as the image on the wallscreen vanished.

  A second later, all the screens around us went dark. The overhead lights went out. Every indicator light in the room, on every panel, switched from green or blue or white to red. Aside from the glow of my PD screen—now registering an error as it tried and failed to talk to the station—that faint red glow, from so many tiny specks, was the only light in the room.

  A bright light flared across the room. I flinched, then recovered to see Adisa brandishing a small flashlight. He aimed it up and around, searching for something, before finally settling on a ventilation panel near the ceiling. He boosted himself up on one of the terminals to reach upward. I didn’t understand what he was doing—my fear was clouding every thought—until he held his hand in front of the panel for a few moments.

  “The air’s still flowing, aye?”

  As soon as he said it, I could hear it: the faint, steady hiss of the ventilation trundling along uninterrupted. Relief washed over me, followed by embarrassment for letting myself spiral into panic. I made myself think about it logically. The life support systems were still functioning; they wouldn’t stop working because the Overseer engaged a lockdown. Even if the Overseer was shut down or destroyed—and I had no reason to think it was—there were multiple fail-safes to keep vital systems running, including everything from less advanced AIs to take over the primary tasks all the way down to purely mechanical backups. It was the first thing every student of artificial intelligence learned on their first day in class: never leave your ability to breathe up to a thinking machine. Followed, always, by a shocking list of catastrophes that had occurred because people neglected that lesson. I had been told by a friend once that the first thing every station engineer learned on their first day was to never trust an AI programmer to remember that people need to breathe.

  We still had air. I wiped my right hand on my trousers. The ache in my chest did not ease.

  Adisa lowered himself to the floor again. “Has a lockdown like this happened before?”

  Hunter searched through her tool bag and brought out her own flashlight. “No. Not station-wide, not since I’ve been here.” She swiped and tapped frantically at the terminal. “It’s never been this unresponsive before. I don’t know. Mary will have to—oh, god. Mary.”

  I felt another pang of panic with her words. The station had no sysadmin. Whatever was going on, there was nobody up there who had the access or ability to fix it.

  Hunter drew in a shaky breath. “I don’t know what’s going on. Is there really somebody— How can there be somebody here? Somebody we don’t know? What do they want?”

  Adisa leaned back against the terminal, with his hands resting on the edge. “I doubt it’s a coincidence the alarm sounded when it did, aye?”

  “You think this . . . this person set it off on purpose?” Hunter said.

  I glanced at my PD before remembering it was momentarily useless. I dropped it onto the terminal. “Just because the crew were all in Level 0 when the alarm sounded doesn’t mean one of them couldn’t have set up a trigger earlier. This doesn’t prove there’s an infiltrator.”

  Adisa nodded slightly. “True enough. What sort of damage would cause a station-wide lockdown?”

  We both looked at Hunter, who chewed on her lower lip before answering. “There are parts of the facility where damage would leak enough radiation for a station-wide alarm. If there was an explosion or something . . . well, depending on where it was, we wouldn’t have heard it, right?” She dropped her hand to check the radiation sensor at her belt. “There’s no effect in here, but if there’s damage to the furnace shielding or the fuel processing plant or the hot waste disposal . . . that’s bad. I don’t know the details—that’s Miguel and Sonya’s area, and they’re doing tests all the time—but I know it’s bad. That’s really, really bad.”

  “Could you build a remote explosive?” I asked.

  “Me?” Hunter looked at me in surprise. “Why?”

  “You’re the only one in the mine. You build robots.”

  “Not like that,” she said, incredulous. “I build repair bots. Maintenance bots. Not bombs. I wouldn’t even—I’ve never made anything like that. We don’t even know it was a bomb. That’s just the first thing I thought of.”

  “But you could build something like that if you wanted to, couldn’t you?”

  “Why would I want to?”

  “That’s how Mary Ping died,” I said. “An explosive bot. Probably autonomous or semiautonomous.”

  Hunter gaped at me. “But that’s—that’s illegal,” she said. She seemed to realize the foolishness of her words a second later, because she cringed, but she was also shaking her head. “I would never do that. I swear, I would never build a bot that would kill someone.”

  “I think,” said Adisa calmly, “you should tell us why you’re down here in the mine.”

  Hunter looked at him, but she didn’t answer right away.

  “Two of your crew are dead. The station is on lockdown. And,” he added, looking around, “we’re a bit stuck here for the moment, yeah?”

  Still Hunter said nothing.

  “You were helping David, weren’t you?” I said. “The two of you have been spying on Nimue and selling information to your family. Were you looking for leverage? Your family wants to expand into the asteroid belt, but Parthenope is trying to get all the shipping under its control before they can. Is that what this is all about? It’s all just more fucking corporate money?”

  Hunter let out a sigh and slumped onto a stool. She rested her elbows on the console and buried her face in her hands. Adisa and I waited.

  “You have it backwards,” she said finally, her words muffled by her hands. She rubbed her face with her palms; there were tears on her cheeks. “I wasn’t helping David. He was helping me. I know I should have told you. I know, but I was hoping—before you even got here, Sigrah told us all to not let an obviously personal crime get in the way of our operation
, and it was easier to just . . . let her say that. I mean, nobody ever expects OSD to dig that deep into anything, you know?” She flinched. “Sorry. You know what I mean. I’m sorry.”

  “Tell us what you and David were doing,” Adisa said.

  “I set it all up before we even started here. David just figured out how to make the transmissions and access the data without the Overseer noticing. But he only did it because I wanted to, and he was desperate for money. He has—had—so many debts from the accident. As soon as I realized that, I knew . . . He was easy to persuade. But it wasn’t his idea. It’s my fault.”

  “What did you steal?” Adisa asked.

  “Data. Designs. Schematics. Operational stats. But not to sell to my family. I’m not working for them.” Hunter’s voice turned sharp as she looked at me. “Hunter-Fremont doesn’t need me spying for them. They’ve got their own sources for that.”

  “Then who?”

  A shrug. “Anybody who wants to buy. We don’t handle that part. We have a contact on Hygiea—and no, I don’t know who it is. We’ve never met. It’s probably somebody in systems operations, but who knows. I’m pretty sure they finessed the personnel assignment algorithm to get both of us here at the same time. But maybe it’s a bloody maintenance plumber.”

  Probably not a maintenance plumber, I thought, if this was the same person altering the superoperational commands that let David black out the surveillance. It had to be somebody with high-level access and little oversight, somebody the company trusted to work with the master AI. That was a question we couldn’t answer until we returned to Hygiea.

  “We took it in bits and pieces. We tried to be careful.”

  “You wanted the buyers to keep wanting more, aye?”

  Hunter gave Adisa a wobbly smile. “Exactly. That was David’s idea. I wanted to grab everything we could and take the big payday, but he convinced me it was too risky. I know he was right, but I keep thinking, if I had argued with him, if we had bought out our contracts and gotten away from here . . .”