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

more than she’s telling us and it’s getting on my nerves. And ask your office what kind of data’s been stolen from Nimue lately.”

Van Arendonk tried again. “I can—”

“You can make yourself useful. We have crew to interview. Marley. Now.”

“You don’t have to talk to her,” van Arendonk said. “You don’t.”

Adisa didn’t turn, didn’t respond, didn’t give any sign he had heard. I looked at van Arendonk, but he was watching Adisa walk away with an unreadable expression.

“Talk to who?” I said.

Van Arendonk barely glanced at me. “Just do your job, Marley, and try not to fuck anything else up.”

He turned and headed back into Ops to join Sigrah.

“Right,” I said to the empty junction. “I’ll do that.”

The Residential section of Nimue was built into the remains of an old United Earth Navy vessel. It looked like the ship had been a creaking old bucket even before the war, which made for a stark contrast with the shabby luxury of Ops. There were no decorative tiles and polished sconces here, only utilitarian angles, unnecessary hexagons, and the pervasive smells of rehydrated soy protein, industrial cleaner, and sweat. Parthenope had made, at best, a half-hearted attempt at transforming the interior from a deeply depressing military transport into a mildly depressing crew habitat. There was a common recreation area, an exercise room, an infirmary, a galley and mess, and private quarters arranged along a corridor with shared heads at the end. The proportions were all wrong: the ceilings too high, the walls too close, the doors wider and shorter than they ought to be, as though built for people who moved about in a permanent crouch. During the war, the hold would have been stacked full of troops in temporary stasis, sleeping the sleep of the clueless and terrified as they shipped off to die in some pointless battle. Everything was gray, grimy, and blocky.

I checked on Ryu in the infirmary before going after Adisa. They were woozy but awake, with a broken nose, two puffy red eyes, and a headache. They promised to get back to work on the medical exam of the corpse as soon as they could.

“Don’t be stupid,” I said, relief making me gruff.

“You don’t be stupid,” they retorted, and something tight and painful eased in my chest. “I’m fine. I just hit my head.”

“They will be fine, I promise,” said the medic, smiling.

“You actually hit your entire face,” I said to Ryu. “You’re going to look like a raccoon.”

“I think that’s probably an insult, but since I didn’t have your fauna-rich Earth childhood, I’ll pretend it’s a compliment. Now go.” Ryu shoved me away. “You’ve got work to do.”

Before joining Adisa, I grabbed another PD to replace the one David’s device had fried.

The room Sigrah had offered for our interviews was a cramped space attached to the galley. The faded sign on the door confirmed it had been the quartermaster’s office, but it was currently being used as pantry storage and, surprisingly, a small garden. A sprightly selection of hydroponic herbs looked to be thriving beneath full-spectrum lights. Their spicy, earthy scents almost helped disguise the overriding odor of stale instant coffee, food preservatives, and the lingering memory of something burned. Almost.

There was just enough space for a few chairs around the metal table that was bolted to the floor. Adisa was already sitting in one chair facing the door; I slid in to sit beside him.

“Is it normal for a foreperson to be this unwilling to help?” I asked.

The question was somewhat flippant, but Adisa considered it seriously before answering. “I don’t know that she’s unwilling to help, yeah? I think she knows it won’t look good for her that she’s had a thief operating under her watch for the better part of a year. She doesn’t want it to blow back on her or the station.”

“If she’s not involved,” I said.

His sleeves were rolled up to just below his elbows, and for the first time I saw the tattoos on his forearms: a series of words written in Arabic on the left, a line of numbers on the right. The only word I recognized on the left was planet; my Arabic was mostly nonexistent and I couldn’t guess at the rest. The numbers I had learned about in school: they were for identification. The UEN had imprisoned so many Martians during and after the war, and had so little interest in sorting out the peculiarities of Martian names and families and lineages, they had decided numbers were easier. Most Martians had the tattoos removed after they were released. Some kept them, I’d heard, because they wanted their bodies identifiable should the war ever start again.

Adisa shrugged and tapped his fingers idly on the metal tabletop. “Aye, that too. Maintaining productivity is probably her only chance at keeping her job, yeah? It’s a good job. She doesn’t want to throw it away just because her crew has its share of fuckups.”

“David wasn’t a fuckup,” I said.

I looked down at my PD, glanced over the list of personnel, unsure of what else to say. I tended to do everything I could to avoid thinking of a position with Parthenope as a good job. It felt too much like giving up, like accepting something I had never wanted and settling into a routine that would draw me in and wrap around me and never let me go, and all the while telling myself it was good for me. I hadn’t considered the situation from Sigrah’s point of view. How it must feel for her to be in charge of one of Parthenope’s most important stations, but still stuck out here alone, without any help except what Hygiea provided, with one crew member dead and another responsible, and a team of security officers coming in to stomp around and break the optical array and insist that a brutal murder was only one of her problems. I didn’t feel sympathy for her, exactly, because she was still alive and David