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

an astonishingly clever mind from the ground up, circuit by circuit, pathway by pathway, and we understood only part of it. That mind had grown and changed, and now it was doing something we had never taught it to do. It was not unlike being a parent to a child who had heretofore been perfectly angelic, only to have the police show up on the doorstep one evening with a grinning delinquent in hand, demanding to know why we let our offspring run amok. It had been equally thrilling and unsettling.

I said, “It only made sense afterward, when Black Halo named Kristin as one of their martyrs. But by then, well, it was too late. Vanguard was completely destroyed. I couldn’t figure out what it had seen that we kept missing.”

Adisa had been quiet while I spoke, but now he asked, “What do you think David was trying to tell you by bringing that up?”

“I think he was telling me to be suspicious of the crew here. But . . .” I glanced at the camera in the corner again. I hoped they understood. “Not only the crew.”

Hunter’s eyes widened. “Oh. But that’s not possible. Is it? Oh, fuck.”

Adisa tossed the screwdriver, caught it. The look on his face suggested he had a large number of very pointed questions to ask me, but also that he knew this was neither the time nor the place for them.

“Three and a half minutes,” he said. “Grab your stuff and come close to watch, aye?”

He knelt beside the hatch and waited for me and Hunter to gather around him. Not to watch, but to block the security cameras’ views of what he was doing. Hunter leaned against the control panel; I positioned myself between the hatch and the camera in the corner. If there were others in the room that we hadn’t spotted, we might be in trouble. It would all depend on how quickly the Overseer caught on to what Adisa was doing.

Holding his flashlight in his mouth, he removed the screws from an access panel beside the hatch. He reached in to pull out first one bundle of wires, then another, tugging until he found a small plastic box of circuitry. None of it was labeled, but he seemed to know exactly what he was doing. He snapped the box open to peer inside. I felt a little bit ashamed by the surprise I felt as I watched him work. He had grown up on Mars, in a time when the oldest and poorest habitat domes were already crumbling into disrepair after decades of neglect, when starving populations were locked out of food banks, when corporate executives hoarded water in private compounds, when armed militias stockpiled weapons for use against unarmed protesters. I couldn’t imagine what living under those conditions must have been like, but it was not hard to understand how, in a place like that, learning to trick a sensor to get through a locked door could easily be a matter of life and death.

It felt like barely any time at all had passed before he said, “It’s about to get very loud in here.”

A blindingly bright warning light flashed once, twice, then came on with a steady white blaze. An alarm wailed, followed quickly by the droning voice of the security system: “Warning. High radiation detected in this area. Evacuate immediately.”

The hatch’s control panel flashed on, and between wails I heard the muffled clunk of the lock disengaging. Adisa tugged the hatch open and gestured for Hunter to climb through.

“Warning. High radiation detected in this area. Evacuate immediately.”

I followed right after Hunter, letting myself slide-fall down the ladder as quickly as I dared. Adisa was right after me; he pulled the hatch shut, cutting off the siren in midwail. When I reached the bottom of the ladder, I checked the radiation sensor on my belt, just in case I was wrong. The levels were normal, identical to what they had been before the alarm went off. I let out a sigh of relief.

“Okay,” I said, when Adisa joined us at the bottom of the ladder, “I have to admit I don’t have a plan for what to do next.”

Hunter chewed on her lip, then her expression brightened. “Oh! I do. Follow me.”

She strode quickly along the catwalk, took a turn on a passage midway down, turned again a few more times. I couldn’t see beyond the small circle of light illuminated by our flashlights, but I could still feel the vast, echoing space around us, the massive machines above and below, the mine stretching out to walls hidden in the distance. The repair bots were still working, crawling over their machinery like beetles. The warm, steady hum of the facility had not changed.

Hunter led us to the center of a catwalk and stopped abruptly. There was nothing at the spot, no console or terminal, no access panels, no machines or bots.

“We can talk here,” she said, speaking quietly. “David and I found this. It’s a security blind spot. The drum of the crusher blocks the nearest camera, and there are no audio recorders anywhere close. We just have to stay in the center of the walkway, between these seams.”

She pointed to the floor, indicating a section of metal grating. It was a bit tight, but we huddled close.

“All right, Marley,” Adisa said. “Make your case.”

“Right. Okay.” I absently rubbed my left shoulder, trying to ease the ache in the joint. “Mary Ping killed David. That much I’m sure of. He discovered something she had done, and instead of being impressed by it like she wanted, he was horrified. So he confronted her, hoping he could get her to admit it or change what she was doing, and she killed him. The question is, what did David discover? I think that goes back to Aeolia. That’s why David was reading about it right before he died.

“Mary investigated Aeolia. She must have had access to the virus that infiltrated that Overseer, the one