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

Nimue made Parthenope’s investors nervous. Our job was to get here, name the culprit, and haul them away.

I knew all of that, had known it since the day I took the job, but sometimes I forgot. When I was looking at a body, when there was evidence to collect and data to search through, when I started wondering about motives and reasons, I let myself forget that I was asking questions for which nobody really cared to hear the answers.

“Trust me, Marley,” van Arendonk said, his voice as dry as dust. “Nobody knows what this company is capable of better than those of us who have to shovel their shit and pretend it’s gold. So who fucked with the Overseer’s commands?”

“I don’t know yet. I have to check some things.”

I was already working on it. The packet had arrived during the scheduled transfer from Hygiea, but it had not been implemented right away. This was because in the data transfer there was also an auxiliary command with an alert to Nimue’s Overseer to hold off implementation pending sysadmin approval for minor adjustments. I looked to see who had approved it. Then I looked again.

A deep pit of dismay formed in my gut.

David was the sysadmin who had received the request. He had altered the commands to fix the supposed minor errors. He had inserted the command for the surveillance blackout. He had done all of this between nine and ten in the morning the day before he died.

David had covered up his own murder hours before it even happened.

FIVE

It was, at least, an answer to van Arendonk’s question.

“David shut down the surveillance himself,” I said. “He had help from somebody on Hygiea, someone who has the access necessary to alter the command packet. But he did it himself.”

Van Arendonk sat back in his chair and frowned. “That makes no sense. Are you certain?”

“As certain as I can be at this stage, yes.”

“Why? Was he meeting someone? What was he hiding?”

I closed my eyes briefly and rubbed my temples. “I don’t know yet.”

“Who was he working with? Who has that kind of access?”

“I don’t know.”

“How the fuck did this not get flagged by the goddamned machine?”

“I don’t know,” I said again, biting out each word. “I’ve only just started digging.”

“But you knew him,” van Arendonk retorted. “What was he into? Data theft? Corporate espionage? Black market tech?”

I almost laughed. Almost, but it caught in my throat, awkward and strangling, and I could only shake my head. Why the hell would I steal other people’s shit when my own is so much better? David had said, laughing, one evening aboard Symposium. One of the food scientists had made a crack about David’s robots, something about how he had incorporated UEN weapons designs into his own rovers, and how could anybody believe we were a mission of exploration and discovery if we were deploying weapons of attempted genocide on a distant world? Nothing we hadn’t heard before. Ethics committees and governmental agencies alike had asked again and again, digging into our research every time we so much as sneezed, to make sure we were not in violation of the postwar disarmament treaty. The autonomous weapons used by the UEN during the war had been so horrific, so clever and deadly, that outlawing them became nearly universally popular in the years afterward, when the true extent of destruction became clear. A more temperamental man might have let that comment lead to a fight, could have raised tempers to boiling and set research teams against each other. But David, with all the ease of a bloke ribbing his friends about football scores, had only laughed, said he believed himself an agent of peace by turning the horrors of war toward pure exploration, said he was a pacifist to the bone and took joy from melting swords into plowshares. The laughter was gone by the time he finished speaking, but so too was the tension. David had believed in what we were doing. He had believed in it so deeply and so completely that no careless accusations or snide comments could ruffle him.

But that was David from before. The David who had sent me a halting, mysterious message hours before his murder was a mere shadow of the friend who had laughed in the mess aboard Symposium. I didn’t know the man he had become.

“Nothing like that, when I knew him,” I said quietly. “I don’t know what he’s been into lately.”

The briefest grimace crossed van Arendonk’s sharp face. I didn’t know if it was annoyance or shame, and I didn’t much care. He stood abruptly and turned toward the door, then hesitated.

“How long will it take you to find out?” he asked.

We had been in the room for barely fifteen minutes. From where he stood, to my left, he was looking only at my damaged side, my scars and my prosthetics, and I met his eyes only long enough to see if he would flinch away. If he did—I probably would have said something, tongue sharpened and patience worn thin. But he didn’t, so I kept quiet, and I did not have to find out what would spill out when I opened my mouth.

“Very well,” he said, as though I had given him an answer. “I have to talk to Mohammad and HQ. Report as soon as you find anything.”

The Overseer unlocked and opened the door to let him out. It’s hard to stride purposefully in gecko boots in low gravity, but he made a good try at it, his footsteps peeling noisily down the corridor. The door slid closed behind him.

I sat back in my chair and rubbed my hands over my face. It should have been a relief, to have the systems room to myself, so I could dig into what David had been up to.

They lied about it, he had said. They lied about everything.

He had reached out to