Dead Space

by Kali Wallace

  We decided, naturally, to see if there was some way to access the lift instead. I was thinking about bypassing the lockdown again, about Adisa’s helpful youthful skills, but that all turned out to be unnecessary.

  As we approached the lift, its control panel, which had been dark before, blinked on. A single word appeared.

  Ready.

  I stopped short.

  “What? Is it functional?” I said.

  Our radios crackled, making us all jump in surprise, and a woman’s voice came through. “Hello? Are you out there?”

  “That’s Katee,” Hunter said excitedly. She grabbed her radio to answer. “Katee! Is the lockdown lifted?”

  A pause, then Katee King replied, “We’ve got the lift working. You should come back.”

  “Is everybody okay? What happened?” Hunter asked.

  “You should come back,” King said again, her voice strangely flat.

  She was upset, I thought. Still scared. Wary about something.

  Adisa spoke into his own radio. “We’re on our way.”

  The lift doors slid open.

  EIGHTEEN

  The lift carried us swiftly upward. There was no more radio communication from Level 0, and the Overseer was completely silent and unresponsive for the entire journey. No vocalization, no messages on the control panel, no reaction to our repeated attempts to access the controls or comms. It felt incredibly risky, to be riding a lift without knowing if the AI that controlled it was functioning or not, but the choice between remaining deep in the mine with no idea what was happening or rejoining the others to face it head-on was no choice at all.

  The lift glided to a stop when we reached Level 0. The doors opened to reveal the junction. The lights were on.

  The first thing I saw was the body.

  “Shit. Fuck,” Adisa breathed. “Fuck.”

  In the doorway to the cargo warehouse, Ned Delicata was jammed between the door and the frame. The door was crushing his upper chest and left shoulder as it tried to close; the mechanism ground and strained as it pressed into him.

  “Oh, no. No, no, no.” Hunter darted forward and dropped to her knees beside the man. “Can you hear me? Ned?” Her voice rose to a near shout. “Is he— I can’t tell if he’s— Can you hear me? Ned!”

  Clinging to Delicata’s burned skin and shredded jumpsuit were the mangled remains of a silver spider bot. His head lolled when Hunter gently shook his shoulder.

  “No, no, no,” Hunter said. She was growing hysterical now. She stood up, turned around, dropped to her knees again. “What happened? Where is everybody? Katee? Katee!”

  Adisa reached for his radio. “Avery? Hugo? Do you copy?”

  There was no answer. I couldn’t tell if the comms system was picking up the radio or not. I leaned around Hunter and over Delicata to try to stop the door from squeezing him, but the control panel was unresponsive. The cargo warehouse beyond the doorway was dark. I could not see or hear anybody. No voices, no footsteps, no crackle of radio. A black storm cloud of doubt filled my mind.

  Adisa stepped closer and put a hand on Hunter’s shoulder. She started, cut off her babbling at once with a sharp inhale.

  “Is he breathing?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. I can’t tell. I can’t—I can’t—” Hunter sucked in another breath, clearly trying to get ahold of herself. With a shaking hand, she reached out to touch the pulse point at Delicata’s wrist, then at his neck. “I can’t, I can’t feel anything. I can’t.”

  Adisa tried his radio again. “We’ve returned to Ops. Avery? Do you copy? If anybody in the crew can hear me, please answer.”

  “Radio range isn’t very long here, with the shielding,” I said. He knew that. I knew he knew that. But I felt like I had to say something, offer something, to fill the suffocating quiet around us. The higher Hunter’s voice went, the more frantic her breathing, the more numb I felt, as though her growing panic was draining the possibility of reaction out of me. The door to Ops was open. “We need to look for—”

  Delicata let out a wet, crackling cough. Hunter squeaked and reeled backward, caught herself with one hand before she fell. Bloody spittle flew from Delicata’s lips, staining his chin and splattering the door that held him in place. There was a horrible sound, like the grinding of bones, from deep within his chest.

  Delicata’s eyes opened. His lips moved, as did his one visible hand.

  Adisa crouched beside him. “We’re going to get you help. What happened? Where are the others?”

  Delicata exhaled the shaky, jagged beginning of a word: “Sh-sh-she, she—”

  “She?” Adisa prompted. “Where did the others go?”

  Delicata’s mouth twisted into a grimace, showing red teeth behind red lips, a gory mimicry of a smile. “T-t-too late. They’re walking right—think they can escape it.” He broke off coughing again, until the cough turned into a high-pitched wheeze of pain. “Too late.”

  “Where are they going? Why is it too late?”

  Hunter touched Delicata’s shoulder. “Ned, where are they? Where’s Katee? She called us.”

  “I don’t think she did,” I said, very quietly. I didn’t know if Hunter heard me, but Adisa acknowledged my words with a glance and a nod.

  For a few seconds, Delicata only breathed, sucking in desperate breaths with ragged and pained sounds. “The old base,” he said. “Think they’re running away to where it can’t—to where it can’t see them. I didn’t—I didn’t send it. It’ll find them. It has—it has eyes.”

  “They’re going to the UEN base to escape the Overseer?”

  “Stupid plan. Don’t like to go there anymore. Not—not now, not since it—it changed.”

  “Changed? What do you mean?”

  “Won’t—won’t work. Sig—Sigrah will . . .”

  “What will she do?” Adisa said, more urgently. “Do you know where she is?”

  That time there was no mistaking Delicata’s expression. It was a twisted, angry scowl.

  “Fuck her. She’ll say it was me.”

  “You mean Sigrah? What will she say?” Adisa said.

  Delicata started coughing then, a horrible tearing sound, and bloody spittle sprayed from his lips, stained his chin, until the cough caught up to itself and he gurgled suddenly—his eyes widened—and he tried to say something, tried to force a word out—and stopped. He just—stopped.

  “Ned? What are you talking about? Ned?” Hunter’s voice rose to a shout. She was shaking her head, her silver hair swinging, and she looked so unsteady on her feet I worried she would faint. “What the fuck is going on? Where is everybody?”

  She tried to push past Adisa, but he rose to his feet and held her back. As soon as he gripped her arms, she burst into tears. “We need to check for other injured crew,” he said to me over Hunter’s shoulder. “Can you—”

  “Right,” I said. It was eerie how calm I felt. I was waiting for Hunter’s panic to infect me, for her tears and shouts and gasping breath to spread, but it didn’t happen. “On it.”

  As I left, Adisa was murmuring to Hunter, explaining to her what we should have figured out before we stepped into that lift: Katee King had not contacted us. The crew had not gotten the lift working. It was the Overseer, both times. Mimicking King’s voice. Drawing us in.

  We would have been safer in the mine.

  I passed through the door to Res to find the common area illuminated by only a few lights from the galley and the media playing on the wallscreen—they had traded Rachel Returned for Andromeda Sunsets, but had thankfully muted the swooping orchestral score. That and my flashlight were enough for me to see that the crew lockers near the entrance were open, boots and jackets and gear tumbling onto the floor. I cast my light around and spotted a few belts and cases opened with the contents spilling out. There was a half-finished tray of food on one of the
sofas in the media area. A blanket lay rumpled on the floor beside a chair, as though somebody had left it there when they jumped to their feet.

  The crew had left in a hurry, but there was no sign they’d had to force the door to get out. I checked a few of the lockers, consulting their content checklists to figure out what each had contained before. The bulky heat suits and powered work boots were still there, but the emergency vacuum suits such as the ones we had carried into the mine with us were gone. They had left expecting depressurization or radiation. For the old base, as Delicata had said. They had gone prepared.

  I moved through the common area slowly. The sound of my gecko boots on the floor seemed impossibly loud, with only the hum of the station’s ventilation and the galley appliances to accompany me, and with every step I grew more tense, more aware of the heavy silence, more certain that in the next second I would hear the rain-soft clink of metal on metal and glimpse a silver bot racing toward me.

  The only thing I didn’t recognize in the common room was a metal box with a hinged lid, sitting open on one of the mess tables. I stepped over to look inside. It was empty.

  When I moved back, something else caught my eye.

  There was a body tangled around the legs of the table. It hadn’t been visible from the door; it was obscured by the benches and deep shadows. It was Miguel Vera. His eyes, still open, blankly reflected the light from my torch. The bot had latched onto Vera at his shoulder. His entire arm, half his chest, and his neck and the lower part of his face were a bloody ruin. Two spindly legs of the bot remained embedded in his slack cheek.

  I checked for a pulse anyway. There was none. His skin was cool to the touch. He had been David’s friend. He had been saving up to go back to Earth.

  His was the only corpse I found. Every other room was empty.

  The last room I checked was David’s. It looked exactly as it had before: tidy, empty. Nothing personal except the map of Titan on the wall. I turned to leave again.

  And stopped. Slowly turned around.

  I won that bet after all, David had said in his message. That lake should have been mine.

  He had mentioned Kristin to warn me about the Overseer. He had brought up Excelsior to warn me about the weapons. But the lake—I didn’t know why he would bring up the lake. Nothing in his message had been incidental. I stepped closer to the map.

  Kraken Mare was the biggest body of liquid on Titan, a huge sea of hydrocarbon that spanned over four hundred thousand square kilometers. It wasn’t our landing site, but it was one of our primary research goals. I couldn’t remember why we had been wagering on it that particular weekend. There had probably been a meeting with the microbiologists that week; they were always wide-eyed with excitement about what they hoped to find. I did remember that at some point after learning the name of Titan’s known features, Vanguard had spent a few test cycles forming its aquatic bots into the shape of a giant squid. It did that sometimes, with concepts it was only just learning: took them in, looked them up, tried out a hundred or a thousand different variations of what they might mean. The kraken shape turned out to have the best propulsion system in certain environments.

  I touched the map, ran my fingers around the ragged edge of the lake—and felt something behind the smooth material. The raised edges of an irregular shape. No more than a few millimeters thick.

  I peeled the corner of the map away from the wall to find a small patch of thin film the exact same gray color as the walls; if I had looked without first touching it, I wouldn’t have noticed it. I had to use my fingernails to pry it up.

  Underneath the gray patch was a piece of metal about fifteen centimeters long, smooth and rectangular on one end but notched with a complex series of peaks, pits, and striations on the other end. I held it between my thumb and forefinger, turning it in the light of my flashlight; the hair-thin lines and tiny pockmarks gleamed. It was a circuit key. A physical key with an electronic component: both the irregular shape and the complex insets of copper would match its keyhole precisely. The physical shape could be forged easily, but the electronic connections created by the circuitry were much harder to mimic without access to the inside of the lock itself. It was the sort of thing you might use for access to a location that needed a layer of security in addition to embedded ID chips and manual codes.

  Like, say, for entering the brain of an Overseer from inside an already-secure systems room.

  I stared at the key for a long, long moment, and I thought: damn you, David, and this shitshow you got yourself into.

  I pocketed the key and rejoined the others in the junction. Hunter had managed to calm herself down a little bit, although she was still sniffling and crying. Adisa stepped out of the Ops corridor just as I returned.

  “There’s nobody in there except Vera, and he’s dead,” I told them. Hunter’s breath hitched at the news. “The others took vac suits and some supplies from the lockers.”

  “There’s nobody in Ops either,” Adisa said. “Not that I could find. I couldn’t access the systems room.”

  Hunter looked toward the cargo warehouse, shuddering slightly when her gaze passed over Delicata. “I guess they did go to the base? Because they thought it would be safer?”

  I looked to where she was looking, toward the dead man crushed in the doorway, and a sickly, cold unease came over me. I understood the uncertainty in Hunter’s voice. It didn’t make sense. Why would the Overseer lock down the station, then attack the crew? What was it trying to stop us from doing? Why didn’t it just kill all of us, if it wanted us gone? And why would Sigrah flee with the others when she already knew what danger they were running into?

  We had something wrong. We were missing something, still, something important. My head ached.

  I had to ask the Overseer. I reached into my pocket to touch the key.

  I said, “I found—”

  We all heard the noise at the same moment. It was faint, but sharp, like the tinkle of glass shattering in a distant room—but it wasn’t glass. I recognized that sound. I had heard it before, in the warehouse, when Mary Ping died.

  I spun to face the door to Res, but that wasn’t where the noise was coming from. Instead it seemed to be coming from all around, echoing and clattering with chaotic unpredictability. The sound grew louder, but not much; it was still too faint to pinpoint.

  “You said there was no one here,” Hunter whispered. She was looking around frantically, her eyes wide as she stepped uneasily toward the center of the junction.

  “There wasn’t,” I said, also whispering. “There isn’t.”

  I backed away from the door to Res. The sound came again, a little bit louder, and only then did I realize it wasn’t coming from any of the four open doors around us.

  It was coming from above.

  We all looked up at the same time.

  The airlock to the docking structure was open, and the long passageway was dark. We hadn’t noticed. We hadn’t even looked. I aimed my flashlight into the passage; Adisa did the same with his. The two unsteady beams caught glints of silver and blue in the darkness, some stationary, others moving restlessly and unpredictably, a starfall of reflections accompanied by the rain-like patter of metal feet on metal walls. The light was not strong enough to illuminate the entire passage. I could not see how many spiders there were up there, swarming down toward us. I could only hear the growing chorus of their clinking, clattering steps.

  Adisa said, “Ops.”

  I was already turning toward the door. We raced for it, all three of us jamming through in a heartbeat. I slammed my hand onto the control panel to shut the door—but the panel remained dark and unresponsive.

  “Fuck!” I tried again, tapping frantically at the panel, but there was nothing. “Shut the fucking door, you asshole!”

  The Overseer, if it was listening, did not bother to respond. I glanced over my shoulder, down the lon
g hallway toward the systems room. It was too far. The clatter of the spiders was growing closer, and I had no way of knowing if the Overseer would even let us in.

  The others realized the same thing. Hunter was the first to dart back into the junction and run for Res. Adisa and I were right behind her, but when we were through that door, we ran into the same problem: the panel was unresponsive. The Overseer would not let us close the door.

  “The mine? Should we go back down?” I said, my breath already short and pained. The spiders were growing louder and louder. A couple were close enough that I could see their long, thin legs whipping as they scurried.

  Adisa considered my suggestion for only a second. “No. The warehouse.”

  Right. He was right. The warehouse door was already trying to close. All we had to do was climb over Delicata’s body, then pull it out of the way and let the door slam shut.

  “Go,” I said, shoving Hunter toward the warehouse door. “Over him!”

  She first shrugged off her tool bag and tossed it through the gap, then turned sideways to follow—or she tried to, but even with Delicata’s arm holding the door open she could not squeeze through. She braced herself against the frame, right above Delicata’s body, but it didn’t budge. The gears were grinding somewhere in the wall, trying to close. I ran over to help her, and the two of us together were able to shove the door open another few centimeters, enough for her to fit.

  As soon as she was through, I lost my grip on the edge of the door—my fucking metal fingers—and it crushed against the body again. Delicata’s flesh split with a wet sound.

  “Overhead!” Adisa shouted.

  The first of the spiders dropped through the airlock. It hit the floor, rolled its long legs into a cage, and tumbled toward the wall. It unfolded again and ran up the wall alongside the door to Res.

  I lunged for it without thinking, throwing myself into the wall to crush the spider before it could reach the warehouse door. There was a burst of acrid chemical scent, a snap of electricity against my metal shoulder. When I moved away, the crumpled bot fell to the floor.