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

was a mine, but not like this one. An older one. Big operation, active twelve or fifteen years, and a lot of the work was exterior—you know what that means for a mine?” I shook my head. “It’s more dangerous work, needs a lot more attention, so they need more crew. They can’t just send borers into the rock to chew it up, aye? Thirty were assigned to the site, plus another thirty on temporary assignment to upgrade the dock. The company never considered it a security risk.”

“How did anybody even get a virus into an Overseer?”

It was supposed to be impossible; that was part of why Parthenope guarded its Overseers and their design so closely. The easiest way to infect an AI would be to get into its brain directly, but that was no easy task for anybody. Only a sysadmin with a specific reason could access the AI directly, and only under very particular circumstances. I thought about the locked door in the systems room, the one that van Arendonk and I hadn’t been granted permission to open. I wondered if David had ever gone through that door. Or Mary Ping. I should have asked her.

I added, “Was it somebody on the station?”

“We never found out,” Adisa admitted. “If it was, they’re gone now, yeah?”

“What did the virus do?”

“It caused systems failures that cascaded until the Overseer shut itself down.”

“It shut itself down? But that’s—they shouldn’t do that. Why is that even possible?”

He shrugged slightly, made a vague gesture with one hand. “Ask Mary Ping. She investigated it afterward. The crew sent out distress calls requesting help, but Hygiea didn’t know it was serious until a cargo ship got there and . . . They were too late. The water recycling and atmospheric control systems had broken down, so when the fires started, there was nothing to . . . We had to use ID chips to identify them. Sixty people. It took days.”

I didn’t want to imagine it. I had spent too much of the past few years trying not to imagine what fire could do to the human body. How helpless people were in the confines of a ship or station. How hard it must have been, how very painstaking and gruesome it must have been, to identify every single body. I didn’t want to picture it, but the images were there in my mind. Twisted and blackened corpses in dark corridors. Smoke that smelled of meat and melted rubber. Flashing lights. Alarms. The alarms I heard were from Symposium. The corridors I saw were aboard Symposium. I didn’t know what Aeolia had looked like. When I tried to imagine it, I only came up with the corridors of Nimue, rooms like this room, beds like the one David had left behind, and thinking about that filled me with so much dread I could scarcely breathe.

“Is that what you wanted to know?” Adisa looked so terribly uncomfortable that I almost regretted asking. I had wanted to know—needed to know—but that didn’t make me feel any less of an asshole for making him tell me. I should have read the reports.

“Did anybody ever claim responsibility?” I asked.

“No.” Adisa started to say something, but he changed his mind, shook his head slightly. “It’s worth looking into, I suppose. Come on. Ryu’s waiting.”

He left. I looked over David’s berth one more time before following.

Except for the map of Titan, that empty room could have been anybody’s quarters. It could have been my quarters on Hygiea, marked just as little, every bit as easy to abandon. Even the map seemed sapped of color and contrast in the weak, muddy light. I closed and locked the door behind me.

The infirmary was a small room slotted alongside the galley and mess, up against the curved wall of what had once been the ship’s inner hull. It seemed like hygienically questionable placement to me, a feeling that was not helped by how easily the pervasive scents of reheated food drifted through the thin door. One of the most fun parts of undergoing months of medical treatment that included a significant amount of organ repair and nerve rewiring was that my body had come out of it with some exciting new opinions about what I could not bear to smell and taste. Cheap long-storage meals were one of the things that turned my stomach most often—which was great and not at all annoying for a person living in space and surviving on such meals.

And that was before adding in the faintly sweet scent of decay.

The infirmary was narrow, with rows of cabinets on either side of the single table, and everything was scrupulously clean. Adisa and van Arendonk were already there, standing on one side of the table; Ryu sat on a stool at the head of the exam table. I shuffled in, last to arrive, and shut the door.

David lay on the table. His skin was waxy and pallid. Ryu had cleaned away the blood, but somehow that only made the wounds more hideous. His one remaining eye was closed. I wondered at how pale his eyelashes were, how fine his thinning hair. I remembered that hair being soft gold when the sun shone through it. It looked colorless now.

“He was fairly healthy,” Ryu said. Their voice was rough, their movements a bit unsteady, and overhead lights weren’t doing their pale complexion and rising bruises any favors. They looked very much like they ought to be lying down, not presiding over a corpse in the middle of a medical exam. “About as healthy as could be expected. He kept up with his radiation and osteo meds. He did his resistance exercises. No addictions, no flags on the mental health assessments. The only thing the medic was keeping an eye on was his lungs.” Ryu flicked a glance at me, quick and apologetic. “He had some scarring and diminished lung capacity from the Symposium incident, but HQ decided it wasn’t serious enough to keep him from a station assignment.”

When the