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

and pieced together again; over hours of use without rest the pain grew into fiery hot spots that were impossible to ignore. That was something the smug, strutting doctors who claimed to redefine humanity with gleaming limbs and skin facsimiles never advertised: they didn’t know how to make pain go away.

I thought about Mary Ping reaching across the table, asking to touch my hand. The hunger in her expression. How it made my skin crawl.

I asked the Overseer for any of the investigative query results it could give me, and I read through what it provided as I walked toward Adisa. None of David’s personal communications had been flagged as suspicious; he wasn’t in contact with any known or suspected criminals or criminal enterprises. That was hardly a surprise; I already knew he was hiding his communications. He also hadn’t spent any time looking into others’ communications records or personnel files or financial records, all the things one might be expected to study if one were interested in pursuing a sideline in blackmail. I wanted to find out whether the Overseer agreed with the crew about who David spent most of his time talking to, but that would have to wait until I got back into the systems room.

Adisa was waiting outside the airlock. He looked up from his PD at the sound of my gecko soles and said, “Once a month Ned Delicata goes out this door for a maintenance check. Supposed to be routine, but some of them take him a couple of hours or more. There’s a power station for the cargo transport system nearby, yeah?”

“Was he alone?”

“Aye, usually. There’s no record of Prussenko ever going out through this door.”

I didn’t want to stand too close to the airlock. I wondered who would get the job of cleaning up David’s blood. They would probably send a bot to do it.

“Delicata didn’t mention using this airlock when we spoke to him,” I said. We hadn’t asked either. We should have. Maybe Mary Ping was right. Maybe we were too used to relying on surveillance to tell us what we needed to know.

“No, he didn’t.” Adisa looked to the left and right. “Where’s the nearest incinerator?”

The Overseer answered by highlighting the locations on my PD. There were two incinerators, two recyclers, and one large-format waste disposal unit in the cargo warehouse. We split up to check the nearest two units, and when that proved fruitless, we rejoined to cross to the other side of the warehouse.

Adisa was quiet as we walked together. I could not guess what he was thinking. I thought about what Ryu had said earlier: he wasn’t bad to work with, when he decided to give a fuck. I wondered if this was him giving a fuck or not. I honestly couldn’t tell. I knew we had to do this bit of busywork, to make sure the killer hadn’t disposed of evidence in an obvious and idiotic spot, but I also knew that we weren’t going to find a murderer by searching for the charred remains of a bloody space suit. I was going to find them by learning whatever it was that David had discovered.

I shuffled the station map off my PD screen and went back to looking over my query results.

“Find anything interesting in Prussenko’s data?” Adisa said.

“Maybe,” I said slowly. “Nothing obvious. David’s communications are clean. He didn’t do any obvious snooping for blackmail material. Nothing that I can find, anyway. He could have been really good at covering his tracks.”

“So good that you can’t find them?”

I couldn’t tell if he was mocking me or not. “I’m still looking. I can confirm that what the crew told us is true. David did spend a lot of time getting into things that weren’t technically his job.” I consulted my PD to run down the list. “Geological reports. Three-dimensional structural maps of the asteroid. Repair requests. Fuel line leaks. Equipment breakages. Cargo manifests. Power usage stats. He even looked at plumbing issues. Why the hell would he care about plumbing issues? His tracking data patterns put him all over the facility. He flagged a whole lot of operational discrepancies, but he never wrote up any reports about what he was doing. Never summarized any results to share.”

“All recently?”

I scrolled to the top of the list. “Recently he’s been most focused on power and fuel numbers. And cargo manifests. He looked at a lot of those.”

I frowned, thinking through the possibilities. Water. Fuel. Rare metals. All valuable, sure, but I couldn’t imagine a scheme in which stealing any of those would net anybody much of a profit. Transport was too expensive in deep space. Data was so much more lucrative.

“This seems like a pretty difficult place to run black market trade,” I said. “I assumed because of the transmitter that he was only interested in data, but maybe he stumbled across somebody else stealing fuel or materials? Is that even possible? Do people steal from mines like this?”

“Aye, sometimes. Not often. They usually target stations with ports and shipyards for equipment, ship parts, if they’re going for something solid. Or hospitals, for the drugs. But if something’s not bolted down, somebody will try to take it. And Prussenko died in a cargo warehouse.”

“Yes. He did.” I looked at the list of David’s recent activities again. “What I don’t understand is why the Overseer didn’t flag any of these discrepancies that David found. The errors in cargo manifests and fuel volume, that sort of thing. That sort of boring detail is exactly what steward AIs are good at. Unless it has an exceptionally large margin of acceptable error? Which might be exactly how somebody could get away with stealing, I suppose. I’ve never looked into how Overseers learn their error margins.”

We came to the end of a row of cargo containers, and a wide space opened before us. There was cargo-moving machinery parked around the edges, as well as a few huge pallets of what looked like