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

take over the primary tasks all the way down to purely mechanical backups. It was the first thing every student of artificial intelligence learned on their first day in class: never leave your ability to breathe up to a thinking machine. Followed, always, by a shocking list of catastrophes that had occurred because people neglected that lesson. I had been told by a friend once that the first thing every station engineer learned on their first day was to never trust an AI programmer to remember that people need to breathe.

We still had air. I wiped my right hand on my trousers. The ache in my chest did not ease.

Adisa lowered himself to the floor again. “Has a lockdown like this happened before?”

Hunter searched through her tool bag and brought out her own flashlight. “No. Not station-wide, not since I’ve been here.” She swiped and tapped frantically at the terminal. “It’s never been this unresponsive before. I don’t know. Mary will have to—oh, god. Mary.”

I felt another pang of panic with her words. The station had no sysadmin. Whatever was going on, there was nobody up there who had the access or ability to fix it.

Hunter drew in a shaky breath. “I don’t know what’s going on. Is there really somebody— How can there be somebody here? Somebody we don’t know? What do they want?”

Adisa leaned back against the terminal, with his hands resting on the edge. “I doubt it’s a coincidence the alarm sounded when it did, aye?”

“You think this . . . this person set it off on purpose?” Hunter said.

I glanced at my PD before remembering it was momentarily useless. I dropped it onto the terminal. “Just because the crew were all in Level 0 when the alarm sounded doesn’t mean one of them couldn’t have set up a trigger earlier. This doesn’t prove there’s an infiltrator.”

Adisa nodded slightly. “True enough. What sort of damage would cause a station-wide lockdown?”

We both looked at Hunter, who chewed on her lower lip before answering. “There are parts of the facility where damage would leak enough radiation for a station-wide alarm. If there was an explosion or something . . . well, depending on where it was, we wouldn’t have heard it, right?” She dropped her hand to check the radiation sensor at her belt. “There’s no effect in here, but if there’s damage to the furnace shielding or the fuel processing plant or the hot waste disposal . . . that’s bad. I don’t know the details—that’s Miguel and Sonya’s area, and they’re doing tests all the time—but I know it’s bad. That’s really, really bad.”

“Could you build a remote explosive?” I asked.

“Me?” Hunter looked at me in surprise. “Why?”

“You’re the only one in the mine. You build robots.”

“Not like that,” she said, incredulous. “I build repair bots. Maintenance bots. Not bombs. I wouldn’t even—I’ve never made anything like that. We don’t even know it was a bomb. That’s just the first thing I thought of.”

“But you could build something like that if you wanted to, couldn’t you?”

“Why would I want to?”

“That’s how Mary Ping died,” I said. “An explosive bot. Probably autonomous or semiautonomous.”

Hunter gaped at me. “But that’s—that’s illegal,” she said. She seemed to realize the foolishness of her words a second later, because she cringed, but she was also shaking her head. “I would never do that. I swear, I would never build a bot that would kill someone.”

“I think,” said Adisa calmly, “you should tell us why you’re down here in the mine.”

Hunter looked at him, but she didn’t answer right away.

“Two of your crew are dead. The station is on lockdown. And,” he added, looking around, “we’re a bit stuck here for the moment, yeah?”

Still Hunter said nothing.

“You were helping David, weren’t you?” I said. “The two of you have been spying on Nimue and selling information to your family. Were you looking for leverage? Your family wants to expand into the asteroid belt, but Parthenope is trying to get all the shipping under its control before they can. Is that what this is all about? It’s all just more fucking corporate money?”

Hunter let out a sigh and slumped onto a stool. She rested her elbows on the console and buried her face in her hands. Adisa and I waited.

“You have it backwards,” she said finally, her words muffled by her hands. She rubbed her face with her palms; there were tears on her cheeks. “I wasn’t helping David. He was helping me. I know I should have told you. I know, but I was hoping—before you even got here, Sigrah told us all to not let an obviously personal crime get in the way of our operation, and it was easier to just . . . let her say that. I mean, nobody ever expects OSD to dig that deep into anything, you know?” She flinched. “Sorry. You know what I mean. I’m sorry.”

“Tell us what you and David were doing,” Adisa said.

“I set it all up before we even started here. David just figured out how to make the transmissions and access the data without the Overseer noticing. But he only did it because I wanted to, and he was desperate for money. He has—had—so many debts from the accident. As soon as I realized that, I knew . . . He was easy to persuade. But it wasn’t his idea. It’s my fault.”

“What did you steal?” Adisa asked.

“Data. Designs. Schematics. Operational stats. But not to sell to my family. I’m not working for them.” Hunter’s voice turned sharp as she looked at me. “Hunter-Fremont doesn’t need me spying for them. They’ve got their own sources for that.”

“Then who?”

A shrug. “Anybody who wants to buy. We don’t handle that part. We have a contact on Hygiea—and no, I don’t know who it is. We’ve never met. It’s probably somebody in systems operations, but who knows. I’m pretty sure they finessed the personnel assignment algorithm to get both of us here at the same time. But maybe it’s a bloody maintenance plumber.”

Probably not a maintenance plumber, I thought,