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

I had no idea what David’s message was meant to tell me. He hadn’t mentioned Karl Longo’s sentencing, which was the only thing I could think of that would spur contact after a year and a half of silence. If he meant to obliquely suggest that somebody had lied about Symposium, it was a bit late for that. Black Halo had taken full credit, and all the evidence substantiated their claim. Longo had written a very lengthy manifesto. The day’s news articles reported he had been proud and unrepentant all through the trial and sentencing.

David had sent the message anonymously but still seemed to think the Parthenope comm monitors were watching. He hadn’t said anything that would flag the message as suspicious.

And he had gotten so many details of our shared past wrong.

I sat there for so long my hip ached and the grime of the day was itching all over my skin. I shuffled to the washrooms and suffered through the tedious process of bathing in Hygiea’s low gravity—a shower in name only, a damp contortionist’s routine in reality. I scrubbed my scalp-buzzed hair and my fingernails and my skin until my shower credits ran out.

I returned to my box and played David’s message one more time. He was right that we could not speak in true privacy without careful preparation from both sides. I couldn’t set up a live, untraceable conversation from my personal quarters; I wasn’t even certain I could set it up from HQ without being caught. Maybe David was cracking. Maybe he was addicted to narcotics that scrambled his brain. Maybe the strain of being stuck on an asteroid mine had broken him. It happened. A couple of months ago I had investigated a man who had snapped midshift and slowly, deliberately, methodically impaled himself with twelve iron rods before anybody noticed. He had missed all of his major organs and survived. He said afterward he did it because he was bored. That was what life in space could do to people. I wanted to talk to David anyway.

I shoved my dirty clothes into a ball and wondered if the kid with the bleeding eyes would survive the night, if his brain was already mush, if he would wake to regret how breathtakingly stupid he’d been. I turned off the lights. I spent half the night trying to get to sleep, the other half dreaming about fire and darkness and phantom pains shooting through my prosthetic parts.

I finally gave up, rose, and watched David’s message again and again until morning.

I had to talk to him. If only to get him help. If only to ask my questions and hear his answers.

My stomach was churning with an anxious, acidic queasiness when I slumped into HQ just before 0600. I had a plan forming in my head for how to respond without our correspondence being detected. Part of that plan involved pretending everything was normal, so I sat at my desk and focused on my work. I compiled the results from the biohacked kid’s devices. As I’d expected, he’d been reading the usual forums and chatter from groups across the system predicting the joining of man and machine, the neural singularity, the evolution of humankind any day now, any moment, just wait for it, soon the AIs would awaken and lift us all from our primitive self-imposed misery, blah blah blah, the usual garbage. There was a new countdown to supposed singularity every few years, because the assholes who wanted to be ruled by machines never seemed to find anything more interesting to do with their time. It took only a cursory glance at the kid’s personal data to figure out who had most likely fucked up his head: a black market doctor from Ceres operating out of a cargo container on various transport ships since losing his license a few years ago. The doc’s current transport was already gone from Hygiea, his butchering practice with it, and Parthenope’s Operational Security Department had no jurisdiction anymore. The Outer Systems Administration was supposed to handle criminal matters outside of corporate territories, but the chances of that amounting to anything was nil. They didn’t have the resources to go after rogue surgeons and wouldn’t waste their time even if they did. I sent the conclusions over to Jackson and struck the file off my action list.

My next task was to look at the new investigations and see if I had been assigned any actions during the night. The morning’s haul included some minor data theft, a spot of drug trade, a bit of light embezzlement among station concessioners— all threats to the health and safety of Parthenope employees, or so we pretended to believe. Everybody in the outer system was trying to rip off everybody else. I kept reading down the list. Physical altercation on Dock 7 nobody would admit to witnessing. Terminated employees squatting in their quarters when they were supposed to be shipping out—which had never made sense to me, because who the fuck would want to stay here longer than they had to? Jackson had explained that people did the delicate calculus of deciding whether staying until they were arrested and turned over to the OSA would cost less overall than paying for transport off Hygiea. The OSA was wise to the scam and had started billing holdovers for their voluntary jail time, but everybody knew OSA’s enforcers couldn’t compete with Parthenope when it came to collecting debts. It still seemed like a shitty way to live to me, but maybe after another year or two on Hygiea I would consider jail the least awful of innumerable awful options.

A flash of red at the top of the list caught my eye: new investigation had just been added to the system.

Location: Nimue

Event: Suspicious death

Deceased: Prussenko, David

THREE

I did my homework during the eighteen-hour flight from Hygiea to Nimue. I wanted