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

He glanced over his shoulder as he opened the door. “Please do come along, if you’re not too busy?”

He strode into Ops without waiting for an answer.

“I’ll be searching the victim’s personal quarters,” Adisa said. “Let me know if you find anything, yeah?”

“Right. Of course.”

“Don’t worry,” he added, when I hesitated. “He’s every bit as insufferable once you get to know him.”

Sigrah laughed shortly. “They grow ’em that way on purpose.”

Oh. Oh, shit. I hoped my face did not show my surprise. I had recognized the surname when Ryu mentioned it, but I hadn’t realized he was a van Arendonk of those van Arendonks. One of the wealthiest and most powerful families in the solar system. The van Arendonks had been among the first to colonize the Moon a handful of centuries ago, when Earth was roiling under a constant onslaught of floods, storms, droughts, plagues, and all the wars such disasters brought with them, and those with the means fled for their own private cities in orbit and beyond. The first families to claim territory on the Moon had tried a few different names for their nation before finally settling on Yuèliàng, with the city of Imbrium as its capital. Decades passed, then centuries, and the founding oligarchs still controlled nearly all of the lunar nation. Some of the old families faded away; others blended together; but the core group remained essentially unchanged.

Which was, after all, precisely what they wanted. They wanted to remain as they were, ruling over their pale kingdom for as long as they could manage. They invested heavily in medical research for prolonging their lives, cloning themselves, genetically improving their children—all firmly outlawed on Earth. Rumors spread about experiments gone wrong. Employees being trapped in indentured servitude as broodmares and sperm donors. Babies stolen from their parents. Children designed to replace their forebears in every way.

Eventually Earth took notice. New treaties and laws tried to put a stop to Yuèliàng’s medical experimentation industry, and the last few children to come from the shady old practices were born into the middle of an intense legal battle. But it all became irrelevant when rebellion broke out on Mars. The hungry Martian rabble became the enemy, the oligarchs of Yuèliàng allies once again, and everybody was busy making war.

I wasn’t born when the war began. I came along after it had already been going for a few years, and my parents were academic pacifists who believed in Whole System governance. So I learned about those genetically altered lunar children as a sort of political footnote, a cautionary tale of territorial independence and the failure of scientific communities to ethically self-regulate. I never thought about the so-called Children of Yuèliàng beyond that.

Not until I found myself standing next to one and wondering what bot had crawled up his ass and died.

Hugo van Arendonk was tall, but not too tall, white, blue-eyed, fair-haired, and handsome enough in that bright-eyed, sharp-cheekboned way that probably appealed to people who were attracted to men, or lawyers. He was wearing tailored clothing that would have cost me six months’ salary; even his gecko boots were bespoke rather than standard-issue. His family was the power behind both the oldest financial institution and the oldest university on Yuèliàng. Their name was on the Artificial Intelligence wing of the Lunar Museum of History, where I had, as a schoolchild on an extravagant spring holiday trip, encountered my first true Zhao-type AI. Their influence was all over every law, every treaty, every agreement that regulated how governments and corporations interacted in the system. One of the family’s oldest living members—Charlotte van Arendonk, still the unrivaled grande dame of Yuèliàng politics in the beginning of her second century—had written key sections of the Outer Systems Disarmament Treaty, which had permanently banned private entities, corporations, and organizations from building their own personal armies since the end of the Martian rebellion.

Which made me wonder why her great-great-whatever-grandson was working as a legal errand-boy and fixer for Parthenope in the ass-end of the asteroid belt. I wondered, but I didn’t even think about asking.

“Why are you here?” van Arendonk asked, when I caught up to him in the corridor. “You knew the dead man. You’re a conflict of interest.”

So he did care about who I was after all. “You’ll have to ask Safety Inspector Adisa. He approved the assignment.”

“But you made the request.”

“Yes, I did,” I said.

Van Arendonk looked at me. He probably had a pleasant face when he smiled; he had let the skin around his eyes wrinkle, let the line of his fair hair creep back a bit, keeping him from falling into the uncanny valley that plagued both the genetically engineered lunar children and people rich enough to pay for new faces twice a decade. He was certainly not smiling now.

I stared right back and waited. I had spent most of my academic life working alongside people who believed their ancestors had been shat directly out of William the Conqueror’s ass. I wasn’t about to let a snotty lawyer from Yuèliàng intimidate me.

He didn’t challenge my answer. He just turned away and spoke as he kept walking. “We have approval to access surveillance for twelve hours before and after the time of death. Secondary Overseer contact through the systems room only. Any problems with that?”

“No,” I said. “No problems.”

In truth I was a little disappointed. The twenty-four-hour window I had expected, as it was standard in instances of suspicious death, but I had been hoping I might get a chance to look inside the brain of Nimue’s Overseer. It wasn’t necessary, not for reviewing surveillance data, nor would it have been normal procedure; only sysadmins had that kind of physical access. Just getting into the lift required a onetime access code, permission from HQ, full biometric scan and identification, and a unique circuit key that was itself kept under lock on the station. It also required, in many cases, agreement from the Overseer itself; they always had some degree