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

eyes wide, their mouth open. They reached up to touch their face, remembered they couldn’t only when their glove struck the faceplate. They said something; the words were muffled by the helmets.

I was so relieved I let out a giddy, hysterical laugh. I leaned in to touch my helmet to theirs. “You stupid fuck, you scared me.”

I didn’t know if they could hear me. I would worry about being embarrassed later. I pressed myself into the narrow space between two conduits and let the woman tug Ryu toward her. Yee, I remembered, as I got a good look at her face. Elena Yee, station medic. She moved much more deftly in Nimue’s microgravity than I ever could, carefully ferrying Ryu down the shaft and toward the exit before I could orient myself to follow. She looked up at me for a second, and I gestured awkwardly with my thumb.

“I have to go get . . . I’ll be right there.”

I didn’t know if she could hear me or understand what I was saying, but she nodded and left me to it.

Back up the maintenance shaft, back to the sabotaged transmitter. Back to David’s wicked little device. Most of it had been destroyed, and what hadn’t been was now fused to the machines around it. I was able to loosen the charred metal casing, one bent brace with half a clamp still attached, and a few circuit boards probably beyond recovery. I collected what little I could and got out of there.

EIGHT

Yee was loading Ryu onto a carry-board with the help of another crew member when I climbed out of the hatch. She had their helmet off, their arms and torso strapped to the board, and she was speaking very quickly, a flurry of words I couldn’t understand through my helmet. Ryu’s eyes were fluttering, their chest rising and falling, their hand moving at their side, and I was so relieved my eyes stung with unexpected and humiliating tears. I grabbed the edge of the hatch to steady myself. They were awake. Breathing. Moving. Fuck. I swallowed back sudden nausea and tried to breathe before following them to the junction.

As soon as I climbed down the ladder, Sigrah was in my face. I backed away from her to tug my helmet off, then immediately regretted it.

“—did you do to my array? We’ve got nothing now! This is why we don’t let fucking data analysts go digging around in valuable systems. I did not approve of this and I will not let you continue to damage my station or crew.”

She stepped toward me, lurching with the cling of her gecko boots, and raised one hand. She was pointing at me, finger extended in the very best angry schoolteacher fashion. My ears were already ringing and my head was pounding, but I didn’t get the chance to snap back at her because Adisa stepped up, not quite between us, but near enough to give Sigrah pause.

“Safety Officers Marley and Ryu did have authorization,” he said, his voice so mild there wasn’t the faintest hint of anger, “because they are investigating a murder. A murder that somebody in your crew committed.”

“That’s not—” Sigrah closed her mouth abruptly.

I wondered what she had been planning to say. That’s not possible? That’s not true? Not relevant? Perhaps it was a reflexive reaction, an automatic defense without anything behind it. Perhaps it was something more. She knew as well as we did that somebody on Nimue had killed David.

She scowled and lowered her hand. “What the hell is that?”

She was staring at the pieces of David’s device as I removed them from my tool bag. I held up the twisted sheet of metal like an offering, not so Sigrah might take it, but so that she could look at it carefully and I could see her reaction.

“This is what David used to hijack your transmitter,” I said. “Well, part of it. The rest has been destroyed.”

“Destroyed?” Another crew member was watching from the doorway. I recognized her as Katee King, electrical engineer. She was wearing a vac suit; the helmet was tucked under her arm.

“A massive power surge,” I said. “It was booby-trapped for when it was discovered.”

King’s eyes widened. “Fuck me. I guess that explains the total array failure. How do you know where it came from?”

I turned the distorted metal casing over. I had to admit it didn’t look like much, not anymore, scorched black with only glimmers of the polished silver still shining through. “It looks like David’s work. He liked to . . . liked to make things shiny, even when they didn’t need to be.” It sounded like a weak justification, now that I had to say it out loud, but I was certain.

Sigrah was scowling. “I don’t care if it looks like the governor of Vesta’s hairy asshole. You were not supposed to do anything except assess the surveillance data, and now you have completely disabled our optical array.”

I tried not to wince. It wasn’t my fault the power surge had burned out the entire array, but I very much doubted anybody would see it that way. I could easily imagine how Parthenope would justify adding the repair expense to my endlessly compounding debts.

I tried, “It’s not like I meant—”

She spoke right over me. “I will talk to HQ about the damage you’ve caused. This is not acceptable. Your investigation is not supposed to interfere with station operations at all. Our entire schedule will be thrown off. How soon can you get the optical array back online?”

King answered, a bit hesitantly, “I need to know the extent of the damage first.”

“There might be another booby trap,” I said. I didn’t really believe that, but I was not about to make Sigrah’s life any easier while she was blaming me for David’s little party trick. “It’s dangerous. You’ll be risking your crew to send them out there before we know more.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Sigrah said.