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

her look even younger. “We’re all just trying to make our way out here, you know? Work our contracts and do our jobs and maybe think about finding a better position next time.”

It was surreal to hear an heiress from one of the wealthiest families in the system talk about living the life of corporate drudgery in the outer system. I couldn’t tell if it rang false to me because I knew her family history or because there was something insincere in her delivery. I didn’t like that I couldn’t tell. I let her keep talking.

“But David believed in more than that,” Hunter said. “Not in, I don’t know, a spiritual sense. Nothing like that. But I know he thought that he’d lost something really special and important after Symposium. He would talk about . . . sometimes, he would talk about how he’d had a chance to explore and discover, but it was gone now. I asked him a few times if he was going to try to get back to it, but he always said it was too late.” She sniffled and looked at me with watery eyes. “That’s a terrible thing for a person to believe, isn’t it? Nobody should ever feel like it’s too late.”

It took my breath away, to think about how lonely David must have been, stuck on this isolated rock, with nobody but this child to confide in. She was so young. She could never understand.

We asked her about the night David had died, about where she had been and who she had seen, about her programming knowledge, about the surveillance system, but none of it led anywhere useful. She had been asleep, in bed. She hadn’t seen or spoken to anyone. She didn’t know much about the surveillance system. She didn’t know much about the Overseer. Her job was to build and repair maintenance bots. She just wanted to do her job. She couldn’t believe David was dead. She kept crying throughout the interview. It was hard to imagine this young woman, with her designer eyes and shimmery hair and endless stream of tears, beating a man to death in a rage. It was hard to imagine her feeling rage about anything. She seemed too delicate for such an emotion.

Next we spoke to Miguel Vera, the fuel tech and friend of David’s. He was from Earth and pinpointed my nomadic middle-of-the-Atlantic accent right away. He was going back, he said, when he finally saved up enough to get home. He spoke with the jittery sort of nervousness of somebody who took too many stimulants and got too little sleep.

“This is insane. I can’t fucking believe one of them did this. Nobody kills people out here. What’s the point? We’re all so fucking close to dying anyway.”

“Did David make anybody angry lately? Any fights?” Adisa asked.

Vera shook his head. “No way, man. Shit. That’s sick. There’s no reason. Even the people he annoyed weren’t, like, annoyed, you know?”

“What kind of annoyance was that, aye?”

“No big. His shitty taste in music. Okay, seriously, don’t look at me like that.” Vera’s grin was quick and strained. “Like, he was good at his job, I mean, really good, yeah? So sometimes he’d get bored and start sticking his nose into other people’s work.”

“How so?” I asked.

“He spent two weeks once riding my ass about fuel leakages in the dead-ended lines that run to the old UEN base. The Overseer has no control out there. I doubt it even knows the base is there except as a blank spot on the map—there’s nothing functional left for it to know about. But David wanted to see for himself.”

“Did he? Did he go and check the fuel lines?” I asked.

Vera shrugged. “No idea, but I doubt it. There’s no point. The Overseer isn’t sending fuel and power out to an empty base. If there are leaks, they’re somewhere else.”

“What other problems was David asking about?”

“Let me think. Oh, yeah, he was always hassling Ned about errors in the cargo manifests, like a facility this size isn’t going to have errors. Shit nobody gives a fuck about, but that was David.”

We heard much the same from the remainder of the crew. David had been well-liked, good at his job, and got along with everybody. There were minor complaints, petty squabbles, ordinary crew disputes, but no fights, no simmering resentments, and absolutely nobody who would admit to having any idea that David or anybody else was involved with anything shady.

Sonya Balthazar, the furnace engineer, had asked Sigrah to intervene when David kept inviting himself into the mine to nitpick her work, never mind that he had absolutely no fucking idea how to bore a half-kilometer-wide tunnel through an asteroid. Sigrah had scolded David, but it hadn’t done much good.

“It’s too dangerous,” Balthazar said, tapping her fingers on the table to emphasize each word. “But he never seemed to care. He wouldn’t even tell me what he was looking for, and honestly, I didn’t have time to figure it out.” She sat back in the chair and crossed her arms over her chest. “I don’t have time to deal with David’s shit. I don’t have time for this.”

Lashawna Melendez, the geologist, told us that David did the same in her assay lab on more than one occasion, but she never bothered running to Sigrah because she didn’t need help dealing with unwanted interruptions. Ned Delicata, the docking and cargo tech, confirmed that David gave him grief about discrepancies in cargo manifests, but he added that he had turned right around and passed that grief along to Parthenope, because the mistakes all originated elsewhere. He had never fought with David, he said, and he was more than happy to tell us—at length—his thoughts on how likely each and every one of his crewmates was to be a murderer, what method they were most likely to use, what secrets he suspected were hidden in their pasts.

“We don’t even have the right to defend ourselves,” Delicata said. He