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

“Could he have been helping someone else, yeah?” Adisa said.

“Don’t know. It’s not in the work logs.”

“Any trouble lately? Disagreement among the crew?”

Sigrah hesitated, then shook her head. “Not that they brought to me. They keep their personal problems personal.”

That meant nothing coming from a station foreperson. The kind of trouble that caused real problems among the crew rarely reached the boss’s ears, even on a crew as small as Nimue’s, and that was mostly by design. Sigrah knew the rules for succeeding as a Parthenope foreperson: everything good that happened on the station was her doing, whereas everything bad was the fault of troublemaking crew.

“Should I get started?” The question came from the third member of our team, the security tech Avery Ryu. They waited just outside the airlock with a crime scene kit and medical carry-board.

“Go ahead,” Adisa said.

Ryu bobbed their head quickly, such an easy and familiar thing for them to do, in this unfamiliar place, that I felt a pang of fondness. Ryu and I had become friends, in a way, right after I’d started working for Parthenope, the kind of friends who used each other for company and sex and never talked about it. We hadn’t spoken in several months—my fault, I supposed, although we had never talked about that either. When we had been hanging out together, Ryu’s constant nodding, agreeing, affirming had driven me crazy, but it was a comfort now.

They stepped into the bloody chamber, avoiding the pooled blood on the floor, and got to work securing the murder weapon, documenting the scene, collecting physical evidence, scanning for fingerprints. All of which would be unnecessary once we had the surveillance recordings, but it was part of the OSD routine of acting like we served a purpose besides sweeping Parthenope’s problems out of sight. Nothing we did ever made it into an Outer Systems Administration court. In the asteroid belt, corporate security was the only law that mattered.

I tried to look away. I didn’t need to watch. The blood, the ruin of David’s face, the exterior door so close and the barren asteroid visible beyond, it all felt like a painful weight pressing on my chest. I could not look away. I could not even blink.

The dead man looked nothing like the David I knew. He didn’t even look like the man in the message. There was a small part of me, numb with denial, that wanted to believe it wasn’t him. The David I remembered had been always in motion, tall, lanky in the way of men who run and swim and climb with enthusiasm well into adulthood, his white skin always tanned, with blue eyes and floppy blond hair and a ready smile. This man’s face was too soft, his hair too thin, his hands too aged for the passage of so little time. But he had the same bald patch on the top of his head, the same faint shunt scars on his left arm, just below the cuff of his sleeve, where osteoregenerative drugs had been injected when he first left Earth. That had happened years ago, long before I met him; David had spent part of his childhood in an orbital habitat, with diplomat parents who negotiated treaties between Earth and the independent stations. He was forty-five years old, eight years my senior, but in death he looked so much older.

“Was he the only one working that shift?” Adisa asked.

“Far as I know,” Sigrah said. “He swapped with Mary. It was her night on.”

I recalled the personnel files: a woman named Mary Ping was Nimue’s other sysadmin. I had never before heard of a mining facility with two sysadmins for its Overseer, but Nimue was a particularly valuable chunk of rock with a deep well of stakeholders and investors. No doubt Parthenope counted the extra crew member on-site as another way of safeguarding its operation.

“Was that normal, switching shifts?”

“It happens.” Sigrah shrugged. “The surveillance will show everything.”

There was nothing in her voice except impatience. No regret. No fear. No grief.

I turned away from the corpse to look around. The warehouse was a couple hundred meters long by about eighty meters wide, crammed from floor to ceiling with shipping containers. The tracks of the cargo crane formed a network of oiled metal about fifty or sixty meters above our heads. The containers bore insignia from numerous outer systems corporations and took up most of the available space, creating a labyrinth of narrow, shadowy canyons between tall, rectangular stacks.

I couldn’t see any security cameras with a clear view of the airlock, but I wouldn’t be sure until I got a look at the surveillance. Parthenope didn’t like letting anyone dig around in their surveillance data, not even their own security officers. Not even when an employee has been beaten to death by another employee. They claimed it was to remain in compliance with OSA privacy laws; everybody knew it was because a data set that extensive was more valuable than all the water and rocks in Parthenope space combined. On Hygiea, obtaining permission to access the data was easy, but on Nimue it was proving to be a little more complicated. The Parthenope lawyer who had come along with the security team was currently in Ops firing off demands to a team of execs in the corporate offices on Hygiea, who needed approval from the legal team on Vesta, who in turn needed approval from an executive at the corporate headquarters on Yuèliàng. But Earth and its Moon were currently on the other side of the Sun, with the Yuèliàng capital city of Imbrium in the middle of its local night, so even on the best company relay network it took about an hour for encoded radio messages to go back and forth between Hygiea and the Earth-Yuèliàng system, and that didn’t account for all the corporate ass-covering that would be happening at every step of the process.

“Was there any sort of alert during