by Kali Wallace
“Why were you down here today?” Adisa asked.
“Cleaning up,” Hunter said. She reached into her tool bag and brought out a small gray box, held it up for us to see. “We have data recording devices all over the station. We designed them to simulate crew access, so the Overseer would never be able to find a pattern. I figured you would start looking soon.”
She was giving us more credit than we deserved. A full search of the mine had never been on our action list.
I asked, “When did you first realize there were inconsistencies in the station data?”
Hunter looked surprised by the question. “That was all David. He noticed some weird stuff a few months ago, but I just blew it off. I didn’t think it was a big deal.”
“Did he ever mention a company project with a name like Sunshine? Or Sunset?”
“Not that I know of. What he talked about, it was all a lot more vague than any particular project. Nothing out of the ordinary. Companies lie about stuff like this all the time. Like, if they’re claiming to produce more fuel than they are, that’s part of the business. Carrington Ming Quartet did that a few years ago, remember? All they got was a fine. It doesn’t mean the power’s being diverted off-grid. But David wouldn’t let it go. I thought he was just . . .” She glanced toward me, her expression apologetic. “He was traumatized, you know? He didn’t like to talk about it, but I knew he was always worried about sabotage, always worried what everybody in the crew was up to. He was afraid he would miss something. I don’t know what he thought would happen, exactly, but I don’t think it was this.” She sniffled and wiped her nose with her sleeve. “He never deserved this. I’m sorry. I keep forgetting that you and David went through so much together.”
I didn’t say anything. There wasn’t really anything to say. I knew the fear she was describing, because it was one I shared. I understood all too easily how worried he would have been about missing something important, something obvious. Something as dangerous as Kristin Herd and all the other Black Halo operatives on Symposium. I understood exactly what he was afraid of.
Adisa knelt down to rummage through the kit of things he’d brought into the mine. He brought out a tube of water and offered it to her. She accepted it gratefully. I hadn’t even thought about bringing water with us. Three years since I left Earth and I still didn’t remember how important it was to always carry even the most obvious things for survival. I wondered, fleetingly, if maybe I just wasn’t very good at living in space.
Hunter passed the water to me next. It was lukewarm and faintly metallic but a balm to my dry throat. I handed the tube back to Adisa. “Thanks.”
Adisa hopped up onto a terminal to sit with his back against a screen. “Go back a moment, aye? David thought the data discrepancies happened because power was being diverted?”
“That’s what he said,” Hunter said. “That’s why he spent so much time nosing around. He was trying to figure out what didn’t fit.”
“Oh,” I breathed. “Oh, shit.”
“What is it?” Adisa said.
I shook my head to avoid answering. My face warmed. Fuck. Fuck. I had been so sure that the data discrepancies were what Parthenope wanted to hide. I had interpreted Mary Ping’s deflection as confirmation.
But she hadn’t been confirming my theory at all. She had been laughing at me, because I had done exactly what I was terrified of doing, exactly what David had been trying to avoid. I had missed the obvious.
David had been searching the facility, shadowing the crew, asking questions, sticking his nose where it was not invited. If all he had been looking for were data discrepancies, he wouldn’t have needed to leave the systems room. Fuck, he probably could have done it all from his quarters without getting out of bed. He hadn’t only been looking at the data and reports and the claims the company was making. He had been looking into every square meter of the station itself. He had been looking for something. Not in the data, but in the facility.
Mary Ping had known what he was looking for, even if he hadn’t known it himself. She had killed him to keep it hidden. Sigrah had to know as well. This was her station. She had been reluctant to help from the start, eager to dismiss David’s death as a personal quarrel turned violent.
I thought about the faceless mech suit in the darkness. Flinging the spider bots. Jumping backward—such an uncanny motion, against every instinct, yet so well balanced.
I thought of the surprise and anger on Delicata’s face when I told him and Sigrah what I’d seen.
I thought again of Mary Ping’s last words before the screams.
“Marley?” Adisa said.
I was staring at one of the red indicator lights beside the hatch in the floor. We were surrounded by them, in that dark room lit only by our own flashlights, a dozen or more tiny red eyes.
“What exactly did David find?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Hunter said. “I already told you everything I know. He didn’t tell me anything. I wish he had. If he had asked for help, we could have figured something out.”
Oh, but he had. He had asked for help.
He just hadn’t asked her. He had asked me.
There was a camera in the corner of the ceiling. Another in the control panel for the door in the floor. I didn’t know how many audio recorders there were. I needed to tell them what I was thinking, but indirectly, carefully.
“How hard is it to trigger a false radiation alarm?” I asked.
“You think this is a false alarm?” Hunter said. She looked at me, considering. “I guess it could be. It makes more sense than causing an actual leak.”
Adisa drew one leg up to his chest and hooked his hand around it. He had rolled his sleeves up again, once again showing his prison tattoos. “It’s not difficult, aye. A child could do it in about, ah, three and a half minutes.”
I raised my eyebrows. “That is a very specific estimate.”
Adisa hesitated a moment, but only a moment, before deciding what to say. “Have you heard of the ship Terese Hanford?”
“The prison ship?”
“Aye, that one.”
“I learned about it in school,” I said, unsure of where he was going with it.
“They teach that in Earth schools?”
“Not a lot. Nothing good.”
Terese Hanford was a massive prisoner transport used by United Earth Navy during the war. It was where they imprisoned Martian rebels indefinitely—some for years without ever being brought before a court, thanks to a deliberate loophole in system law. Because only Earth and Yuèliàng courts were considered valid, suspected war criminals could only be charged when they were brought to those courts in person. If they were never brought to Earth or the Moon, the UEN could keep them in transit for as long as it wanted. So Terese Hanford did not dock at Earth or the Moon for the entirety of the war. Humanitarian groups repeatedly demanded access to the ship and its prisoners; they were denied every time. Investigative news agencies tried to sneak aboard, protesters got themselves arrested in attempts to infiltrate, and even veterans groups spoke up, citing the extraordinarily high suicide rate among sailors who had served aboard Terese Hanford as a reason for more oversight.
The UEN denied all of it. It just kept shoving more and more prisoners into its cells until the war ended. Only then had the truth come out. I remembered news reports of children with skinny arms and open wounds, corpses jettisoned into space without even the dignity of clothing, guards with black masks covering their faces, hollow-eyed women and men who looked more like famine victims than war criminals. One particularly vivid image of an empty metal room splattered with blood was on the news for weeks. I was a child when the war ended, too young to understand, but not so young that I didn’t absorb what my parents and their academic friends argued about, what I saw on the solemn reports, what protesters in the streets screamed when politicians passed by.
It had taken years to process all of the prisoners, most of whom were Martian or spaceborn and would have trouble surviving on Earth without extensive (and expensive) medical intervention. The government of Yuèliàng set up a special court for the purpose. Historians and political scientists still argued about how many of the prisoners aboard Terese Hanford had ever been convicted of any crime. Most of them had been locked up for no reason except the bad luck of being born Martian and caught in the middle of an unwinnable war.
“You were there?” I asked, because I had no idea what else to say.
“Ah, in a manner of speaking,” Adisa said. “I wasn’t arrested, at first. I sneaked aboard.”
“You did what? Why the fuck would you do that?”
Adisa grinned quickly and crookedly. “I had this foolish idea that I could instigate a mutiny among the prisoners, aye? We were never entirely sure how many guards were aboard, only that there had to be many times more prisoners. It was a terrible plan. I made it as far as the cargo bay, and I was able to trigger a false radiation lockdown, but I was caught as soon as I tried to get into the inhabited sections of the ship. It turns out the UEN doesn’t care much about getting its sailors to safety during a lockdown, so they were still patrolling, even thinking there were deadly levels of radiation. And it’s a bloody big ship. Took too fucking long to get anywhere, yeah.”
“You tried that by yourself?”
Adisa look at me, eyebrows raised. “Working with others on such a scheme would have been a wartime conspiracy, yeah? But one young man working alone, that was merely the ordinary crime of a misguided youth. Or so my public aid lawyer convinced the court some years later, when arguing for a commuted sentence.”
“How the hell did that work?”
“You can ask him yourself, when we get out of here. He’ll be glad to tell you all about it.”
“What do you—” I stopped. “What? No. Van Arendonk? Really?”
It was impossible to imagine a corporate lawyer like Hugo van Arendonk volunteering to help Martian criminals. That was more the sort of thing my aunt and her wife used to do during their sabbaticals, when they would travel off-planet for half a year to spend the time counseling Martian survivors of the war on how to get their lives back together.
Adisa laughed. “It was a very long time ago.”
“We all know that story back home,” Hunter said. “The van Arendonks still can’t decide if they ought to be embarrassed or proud. His family’s even worse than mine when it comes to preserving appearances. Whatever happened to Terese Hanford, anyway? What does the UEN do with a ship that size when it’s done with it?”
“They sold it,” Adisa said. “It passed through a few corporate owners, I think. It’s pretty old by now, so last I heard the only buyers were some wealthy incorporated Exodus cult. Can’t remember the name it has now.”
“Wait. Was it Divine Immutability?” I asked. “It launched, what, about six months ago?”
Adisa shrugged with one shoulder. “Aye, that’s the one.”
“I remember seeing a documentary about them,” Hunter said. “That seems like a mission designed to fail.”
I had seen the same program. It had been all over the news, because while it wasn’t the first pioneer ship to set sail for extrasolar destinations, it was one of the largest. But that wasn’t why I remembered it.
“Avery’s family is on that ship,” I said.
Adisa was surprised. “I didn’t know.”
I felt a pang of doubt; maybe that was something Ryu preferred to keep quiet. They had never wanted to talk about the cult they had been born into or life on the orbital where they had grown up. All they had ever said to me about it was, “I left as soon as I could. They never much wanted me around anyway.” I hadn’t asked for details. All I knew was that Divine Immutability had launched with some eight hundred people on board, more than seven hundred in long-term stasis, because they believed they were divinely destined to claim and colonize a distant planet. Among those people had been Ryu’s siblings, cousins, parents, childhood friends. I couldn’t remember what exoplanet they had picked as their destination. I did remember telling Ryu, at the beginning of one of the nights we had spent together, that anybody with even passing knowledge of exoplanetary research could have told them it was a stupid fucking place to go, they would all be crushed by the planet’s gravity and roasted by its late-cycle sun, never mind what they believed their god was going to provide for them. Ryu had shut me up with a kiss and a shove onto the bunk. I had thought it was because I was being pedantic and annoying, or because neither of us was there for conversation. I hadn’t considered how cruel and thoughtless I was being, consigning their family to certain death with my arrogant certainty. I hadn’t wondered if they were hurting beneath their mask of casual amusement. They probably knew their family was seeking an impossible paradise aboard a former prison ship. That was the sort of thing Ryu would make a point of knowing, however much it hurt them.
It was also beside the point. I couldn’t worry about Ryu now. They were safe in Res. We had a much bigger problem to deal with.
“So,” I said, “you were able to trigger a false radiation alarm on what was probably one of the most heavily guarded ships ever built. As a kid.”
“A teenager. It wasn’t that impressive, really.”
“But you didn’t get caught while you were doing it, only after. Even on a UEN ship with constant surveillance.”
Adisa looked at me for a few seconds. “True, yeah. Why?”
I looked at Adisa. I looked at the closed hatch. I looked back at him. “No reason. No reason at all.”
SEVENTEEN
Adisa hopped down from the terminal. He clearly wanted to ask me what the fuck I was talking about, but instead he started wandering around the room. Locating the cameras, just as I had a few minutes ago. After a bit, he pointed at Hunter’s tool bag.
“Sure, but what are you—”
I put my finger to my lips. Hunter cut herself off and nodded slightly. She opened her mouth again, closed it, instead lifted her hands in an obvious question. Her eyes darted to the cameras as well. Good. They were both wary now of the fact that we were being watched.
“The basic mechanism never really changes, aye?” Adisa said. He searched through the tool bag until he found a screwdriver. “Every security system has local components that have to decide at every door whether it’s more dangerous outside a room than inside. That was part of why what I tried on Terese Hanford didn’t work. The UEN didn’t care if there was more danger inside the prisoners’ blocks than out. The warden made that decision.”
I understood what he was saying: he wasn’t going to try to get us out of that room until I convinced him that the danger outside wasn’t real. I didn’t know how to do that, but I did know that I needed a way to explain what I was thinking—and I needed to do it without letting whoever, or whatever, was watching know.
Just as David had done when he sent his message to me.
“So I have a confession to make,” I said. I didn’t know if Hunter was trustworthy, but I knew she hadn’t killed David, whatever other kind of trouble she was mired in. I would have to take the chance. “David contacted me before he died.”
“What?” Hunter said. “When? What did he say?”
Adisa raised his eyebrows, but he didn’t look particularly surprised.
“Did you know already?” I asked him.
“No,” he said. “But I did think you weren’t telling the truth about not having spoken to him in over a year.”
“I was telling the truth about that. Until he sent me that message, I hadn’t heard from him in eighteen months. We weren’t in contact at all.”
“He didn’t talk to any of the other survivors,” Hunter said quietly. “He said it was too painful.”
“It was. It is.” I shook my head to brush that
aside. It wasn’t important right now. “The thing is, his message didn’t make any sense. He went through all this trouble to send it anonymously and hide the transmission, but nothing he said made any sense. He was reminiscing, but he had some details wrong. He was talking about this debate we had once about the warship Excelsior. It’s, um, it’s a wreck off the coast of England. It crashed during one of the old orbital rebellions. We had an argument years ago about whether the crash was human or machine error. David insisted that he was right, that it was machine error—but that’s not what happened. He also mentioned Kristin Herd. He talked about her like she had been present for that argument, but it happened long before we met her.”
“One of the Black Halo members, yeah?” Adisa said.
“Yes. The one who joined our team. And I thought maybe by bringing up Excelsior and Kristin at the same time, David was trying to tell me he’d discovered something about her or Black Halo that we didn’t know. Like, maybe everybody had missed something about who was responsible for the Symposium attack. Or that he had learned something about somebody here on Nimue, like a crew member who was secretly involved with something dangerous, something the company screening had missed. But I looked for evidence of all that. I didn’t find anything. So maybe that’s not what it was after all.”
I took a breath, looked around the room again. Two cameras, probably only one audio recorder, but all those red lights, piercing the paler glow of Adisa’s flashlight, still looked to me like eyes. The room seemed to expand and contract whenever I turned my head, the shadows wavering, the close walls and crowded terminals blurring. I was too warm. I was tired. I was scared shitless. It was hard to wrangle my thoughts into order.
“I think maybe he was referencing something that happened before we left Earth,” I began. “Right after Kristin joined the project.”