Dead Space by Kali Wallace (top romance novels txt) 📕

the night?” I asked. “Like a maintenance alarm? Something he might have come to check?”

Sigrah did not want to look at me. Her gaze kept skating over my face, straying to my left shoulder and down my arm, sliding back when she realized she was staring. “No,” she said. “He wasn’t here for work. It was personal.”

I decided to take a cue from Adisa and pretend she didn’t keep saying that.

“Was there anything in particular he was working on lately?” I asked.

“Nothing he brought to me. Mary might know, or one of his friends.” She said this to a point somewhere below my left ear. I wanted to tell her to stare, to just bloody keep on staring until she’d looked her fill, but I’d learned from experience that only made things more uncomfortable.

“We’ll also have to talk to the crew, aye?” Adisa said.

It wasn’t a question. It was only his gratingly Martian way of ending every sentence like a question, seeking agreement even when stating a fact or giving an order. His accent was the only thing that marked him out as obviously Martian. All the other common signs—the evidence of childhood malnutrition, the scars from Mars’s infamously terrible radiation treatments, whatever rebel tattoos he might have acquired during a misbegotten youth—were well hidden under his slightly rumpled uniform. But the accent was unmistakable. It was English spoken by somebody who was more used to the singsong rhythms of the Martian patois, that odd amalgam of the many languages carried to the red planet by early waves of colonists.

“Why?” Sigrah demanded. “You’ll have the surveillance.”

“Just following the rules, aye,” Adisa said.

Sigrah narrowed her eyes. She wanted to argue with him, but she knew better. Her apparent disinterest in identifying who among her crew was a murderer wasn’t all that surprising. If she pointed the finger at the wrong person, before anybody saw the surveillance, she would put herself in a position that raised more questions than it answered. No matter what she wanted to say, no matter who she wanted to blame, she had to know that playing along would get OSD off her station that much faster.

“Right. Second shift ends in about an hour. They’ll be available then.”

“Aye, we’ll be ready for them before that.”

“They won’t be ready for you.”

“Thank you for your help. We need to process the scene now, yeah?”

It took Sigrah a moment to understand that it was a dismissal. “This is my station. I’m required to supervise all activity.”

“You are, aye,” Adisa said, with a bob of his head that was not quite a nod, “except in security matters in which you are directly involved.”

“I’m not—”

“You have twelve people on this station and one of them is dead,” Adisa said. “We’ll talk to your crew as soon as we’re done in here.”

Sigrah glowered at him but decided, in the end, not to argue. As she strode away, each step punctuated by the sticky sound of her gecko boots detaching from the floor, I heard her mutter, “Fucking smug Martians.”

Ryu covered up a startled laugh, but Adisa didn’t even blink. Even after a year on the job, it still shocked me to hear how open people in the belt were about hating Martians. Back on Earth everybody tended to be more polite about their bigotry. The war had ended thirty years ago, after all, so their civilized scorn went into discussing the Martian problem over tea: worrying about refugees straining the system, fretting over the corporate militarization of space, wondering if the PM would push her party toward another vote on the resettlement matter. It was all politics about faraway places and nameless people who couldn’t survive on Earth without extensive and expensive medical procedures, people who wouldn’t even need help if they hadn’t started a hopeless rebellion in the first place.

Not so in the asteroid belt. There were too many people out here who remembered being forced to choose between Earth and Mars. The war was still too close, even though the last missiles had been dismantled twenty-five years ago.

Ryu cleared their throat. “I need some help turning him and getting him on the board.”

I didn’t know if they were speaking to me, but Adisa moved to help before I had to figure it out. I stayed out of the way. I couldn’t begin to guess how many times David had been struck. He must have been surprised—it would be easy to take him by surprise, if one meant him harm. He was not suspicious by nature. He didn’t pick fights, didn’t throw punches. The first blow would have been a shock. Every blow after—only pain.

They rolled David, and I saw his face properly for the first time. One of his eyes and most of his nose were a mangled mess, the socket collapsed by blows from the metal bar, but the other eye was wide open and red with burst capillaries. The injuries looked like the result of a wild, uncontrollable rage. I averted my eyes quickly. Breathed through my mouth and counted to ten. The rest of David’s body, save the two broken fingers, was intact.

“Ready,” Ryu said. “On three we lift. One, two, three. Good.”

The two of them maneuvered the corpse onto the board. I looked away as Ryu sealed the body bag over David’s face. Adisa helped unfold the wheels of the carry-board, and Ryu left to take David to the infirmary. The warehouse grew quiet as their sticky gecko-boot footsteps faded.

I had to do something, so I stepped into the airlock to look at the interior control panel. The screen was dim and old, with dust ground into the corners and scratches over the surface. Above the screen was a small glass eye: a surveillance camera.

Adisa came into the airlock beside me. “Anything?”

“The camera doesn’t look damaged.” I tapped the panel to bring up the commands and quickly confirmed there was no way to access the security camera from there. “It should have recorded—” My voice caught. “Everything.”

“How well