Dead Space by Kali Wallace (e novels to read online .TXT) 📗

I wasn’t entirely sure how to answer. “We were colleagues for a while. Friends, I guess. But not recently.” My voice sounded high and thin to me. My lungs were a honeycomb of scar tissue and the doctors had warned me against exposure to low-oxygen environments, one of the hundreds of warnings they had given me, the hundreds of ways they had scolded me for surviving in such an inconvenient fashion, with so many ongoing systems failures.

“Have you kept in touch?” Adisa asked.

I hadn’t told him or anybody else about David’s message to me. I wasn’t going to, not until I understood what it meant.

“No,” I said. “I haven’t seen him since we gave our final statements to the OSA.”

“Why not, aye?”

I glanced at him. “Because we don’t keep in touch. It’s not like we have a little survivors’ club where we get together and talk about what shit luck we have. We’re all just . . . bad reminders to each other.”

“But you still wanted to be here.”

“Of course I did,” I said. “David survived a bunch of terrorists trying to blow him up. He survived that, only to die here, like—like . . . It’s fucking unfair that he should die like this. He deserved better.”

The force went out of my words at the end. I was clenching my left hand again. I didn’t like that I couldn’t always feel it, didn’t know what signals my own brain was sending until they were sent. My heart was racing. My skin was tight and itchy all over.

“Aye, all right,” Adisa said.

I couldn’t look at him. “You could have asked before we got here.”

He shrugged, unconcerned. “I checked with Jackson, yeah? She said you’re good at your job and could use the field experience. What was he like?”

“David? I just told you, we haven’t been in touch.”

“Before,” Adisa said. “When you did know him. What was his work?”

“Oh. He was—well, he was a roboticist. A brilliant one. You know about the Titan project?”

“A bit, aye,” Adisa said. “What was in the news.”

I knew what that meant. The news was only ever about how nearly everybody had died in a horrific terrorist attack, not about what they had been living for.

“We were going to Titan to establish a permanent research base to study . . . well, everything, but mostly to search for life. But Titan’s a strange place, so it isn’t—” I gestured helplessly. It had been a long time since I’d had to explain this to anyone. “It wasn’t going to be like all the Europa projects, where the biggest obstacle is drilling through kilometers of ice and sending autonomous submarines down to look around. We were going to use autonomous bots, of course—there’s no way people could just, I don’t know, walk around doing field mapping. Titan has liquid hydrocarbon lakes. Rivers of methane and ethane. Multiple cryovolcanoes. The atmosphere is this thick organic haze of nitrogen. It has storms and weather and rain and—and it’s cold as fuck, obviously, just over 90 kelvin or so. It’s dangerous as hell, so bots would have to do most of the exploring.”

I had thought I was over it, the yearning I felt when I described that hellish, beautiful world. I had thought the fires aboard Symposium had burned it out of me, the same way it had burned away my skin, my cells. Nobody asked me about Titan anymore. My heart felt light and fluttery, my breath shallow, to be talking about it again.

“And Prussenko built those bots?” Adisa said.

“Trained them to design and build themselves, for the most part. I worked on the AI that was going to control them. It was called Vanguard,” I said, although he had not asked. “That was the brain. David was head of the team that built the rovers and drones and all that.”

Adisa didn’t say anything, just kept looking mildly curious, so I went on.

“It’s, um, it’s a lot more complicated than it sounds, because we weren’t going to know exactly what kinds of sensors and instrumentation Vanguard needed on its rovers until we were actually on Titan. We couldn’t send the bots out there with hardwired expectations for what they would find, because then they would miss anything truly interesting. Like, if we told Vanguard to look for DNA and RNA, it could easily miss evidence of life that was built on different macromolecules or . . .”

I trailed off. I was rambling now, saying far more than Adisa cared to hear. I felt like I needed to defend David’s legacy, to make Adisa realize how talented he had been, how clever and innovative, and how bloody unfair it was that he had been stuck doing tech support in this miserable place. None of it mattered anymore. David, Vanguard, our mission, our future, it was all gone.

“He was brilliant,” I said finally. Everywhere I looked there was blood on the walls. The stale metallic smell of it filled every breath. “He was wasted on a station like this. He deserved so much better.”

Adisa looked at me for a moment, then he said, “Let’s get the surveillance and talk to the crew, aye?”

God, I hated the way he said the words, not heavy with pity but carefully avoiding it, like casual professionalism was going to make this any less humiliating. I was used to being talked about. The whispers, the glances, the murmurs that followed me everywhere I went. I knew how that conversation with Jackson must have gone. She’s fine with data, sure, but she’s touchy and sensitive, thinks she’s smarter than us, thinks she deserves better than this job. Get her out of here for a few days. She’s such a drag on the mood.

I nodded, then swallowed painfully. “Right.”

I didn’t move. If I took a step, I would stumble, and the last thing I needed was my superior making a note of how clumsy I was. For anybody else, that might mean teasing about my lack of space legs, but for me it would mean