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

“Katee, get your ass out there and give me a full report and plan of action.”

King looked from Sigrah to me, me to Adisa, clearly torn.

“A moment, please,” Adisa said. “We need to speak to your crew first, yeah?” The conciliatory Martian uptalk was back; I had no doubt now that it was deliberate. “We can’t risk anybody else getting hurt until we have more information. The array is part of the investigation now.”

“You don’t have the authority—”

“We’ll start with those who knew him best,” he went on, “and we’ll need a place to talk to them—a private room, aye?”

A series of increasingly unhappy expressions crossed Sigrah’s face. “I am going to contact HQ.”

“As you should, aye? We’ll talk to the crew while you do that.”

Sigrah was gritting her teeth so hard I expected to hear them crack. After a long, long pause, she said, “Use the quartermaster’s office by the galley. You can talk to one crew member at a time, provided you are not interrupting work that cannot be rescheduled. This whole shitshow has already taken up too many active hours. And the second HQ gives the go-ahead, my people are repairing the array.”

“Of course,” Adisa said, but Sigrah was already stomping away into Ops. When she was gone, he looked at me. “Are you hurt?”

“Oh. No, no. Avery got the brunt of it. I’m fine.”

If fine meant that I could taste blood in my throat from the panic that was only now fading, and my heart still felt like a quivering, shuddering, gelatinous sea creature trapped in my chest, and my skin was clammy all over from sweat I hadn’t realized I was shedding beneath the suit. I wanted out of it so badly I started to undo the fasteners right there in the junction.

Adisa took the pieces of David’s device and looked them over. “Only one transmitter was altered?” he said.

“Yes. According to the maintenance logs, it was taken offline months ago.” I glanced at King, who nodded.

“Was it twelve? I haven’t worked on that one since I’ve been here. Perry—the old engineer—he said it was missing a data translator.” She looked apologetic and sheepish. “I should have double-checked his work. I know. But I’ve had so much else to do. And the array works most of the time. I really did think it was a power supply problem upstream in the system.”

“I think number twelve works fine—or it did, until now.” I opened my vac suit to pull off the sleeves and let the top hang from my waist. The cool air was a relief. “I think David paid off your predecessor to help set up this device. It probably redirected power from the other transmitters every time he used it.”

“I feel so stupid for missing it,” King said. “What was he doing?”

“We don’t know yet. Only that he’s been doing it regularly for several months.”

“Right under my nose.” King tossed her helmet up and caught it. “She’ll find some way to . . .” She trailed off, but I knew she was thinking exactly what I had been thinking moments ago: Sigrah would find some way to blame her for this. “Okay, I’ll wait for your say-so to go out there. I don’t fancy being zapped. I hope Safety Officer Ryu will be okay.”

She went back into Res, stepping out of her vac suit as she did so.

“Yes, I know,” I said, before Adisa could speak. “I’ll check the logs to make sure she really did miss it.”

The door to the systems room opened at the end of the corridor, and van Arendonk walked toward us, pausing briefly to glance at the closed door of the comms room.

“Who is she yelling at?” he asked, eyebrows raised.

“HQ,” said Adisa. He turned the scorched piece of metal over in his hands thoughtfully. “How certain are you that this is Prussenko’s work?”

“Pretty certain, especially that outer shell. I didn’t get a good look at whatever it was covering up.” I was leaning against the wall for balance as I bent down to remove my boots and peeled off the rest of the suit. “He could have built or modified a bot to get the communications hardware in place.”

Adisa ran his finger along the crooked edge of the casing. He looked troubled, but he only said, “We’ll need to find out if he built it here.”

“I know. I can check the manufacturing and printing logs.”

Van Arendonk leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed over his chest. “So the dead man was hijacking a transmitter for his own uses.”

“Could be an accomplice wanted a bigger cut for themselves, aye? Arranged a meeting in the warehouse to renegotiate the terms of their agreement,” Adisa said.

“Or maybe . . .” I folded up the vac suit and straightened my own clothes, now damp with sweat. They lied, David had said. They lied about everything. I only wished I had the first fucking idea what his message was trying to tell me. “Maybe he found something that somebody didn’t want him to find.”

“And he tried to blackmail them?” said van Arendonk. “It’s a possibility. A small crew like this gets to know each other’s business a lot more than anybody is comfortable with. But a monitored cargo airlock is a bloody stupid place to have a clandestine meeting about a criminal enterprise. Why not use private quarters like everybody else?”

“I don’t know yet,” I said.

“And what was he stealing?”

I gritted my teeth. “I don’t know.”

“You’d probably know if you’d managed to grab the evidence rather than blow it up,” van Arendonk said.

“Stop it, Hugo,” Adisa said, without looking at him. To me he said, “We’ll interview the crew and—”

Van Arendonk pushed away from the doorframe. “Let me do it.”

“No need.” Adisa turned abruptly and started walking. “Marley, with me.”

“Mohammad, wait. You don’t have to—”

“Find out what Sigrah is shouting to HQ about.”

“She’s probably shouting about the communications array your analyst just exploded.”

“I didn’t explode it,” I muttered. “The radio array obviously still works fine.”

“Besides that,” Adisa said. “She knows