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

at that point, and most of what happened—most of what the UEN did—was already public knowledge. The teacher knew he was repeating lies. He just didn’t care.

I said nothing. Adisa wasn’t finished.

“They would send a nest of these into crowds of protesters outside military bases. Food banks. Water plants.” Adisa pried another one of the legs out from beneath the round little body, watched the way it bent and twisted almost freely. “Refugee camps. Hospitals.”

I had seen footage of those attacks, the ones the UEN had blamed on Martians until they couldn’t deny the truth anymore. Hundreds or thousands of desperate, frightened people gathered together, asking for food or medicine or for somebody to hear them, and an explosion would go off, and another, another, a whole series of them like fireworks popping through the crowd, and people would panic, run, crush each other in an attempt to get away. I didn’t ask Adisa if he had seen those attacks in person. I already knew what he would say.

“This is quite a bit more advanced than what they had then. Your friend was a roboticist.”

“David wouldn’t build weapons. He hated even the idea of them.”

I stared at the spider, trying to decide if any part of it looked familiar. The legs. The metal plates on the body. The way it had moved. I didn’t know. I couldn’t imagine David re-creating UEN weapons. Even when he used weapons tech, he worked so hard to leave the deadly purpose behind. He had never built elegant little machines solely to kill people. That wasn’t David. That wasn’t the man I had known.

“People often abandon their principles in desperate times, aye?”

I felt sick even thinking about it. “I’m not saying it’s impossible. Only that . . .” I didn’t know what I was saying. I kept thinking about that teacher lying to a roomful of children because he could not admit he had supported atrocities. “Hunter is a roboticist too. She has resources. She could build something like that. There was the mech suit too, and I know David never worked on anything remotely like that. It might have been . . . I don’t know. An advanced worksuit of some kind?”

Adisa closed his hand around the spider’s little body, held it tight for a second. Then he flung it into the corner of the carriage, where it broke apart. I flinched as the parts skittered across the floor.

“It shouldn’t be here,” he said. He spoke so quietly I could barely hear him. “It shouldn’t be anywhere.”

I had to look away from the combination of anger and dismay on his face. It was too raw, too intense. I felt embarrassed to see it, and ashamed of my embarrassment, and suddenly, brightly angry at David—for this, for being involved, for bringing me here, for dying. I checked the map with the tracking data again: Hunter had not moved from Level 8. We were moving through sections of the station, through areas for fuel manufacturing, volatile processing, water purification, and more. The whole facility extended just over three kilometers down the long axis of Nimue.

It was a long distance to cover, even for a fast lift. It was hard to imagine how Hunter could have traveled so quickly through the station, but perhaps the transport tunnels had cargo movers that weren’t bound by the rules of human comfort.

Adisa cleared his throat. “Tell me what happened, aye?”

He meant it was time to include what I had left out when we were standing in front of Sigrah and Delicata. I quickly told him about Mary Ping finding me in the warehouse and what she had said.

“She killed David,” I said. “She admitted it to me. She knew David and Hunter were working together. I don’t know exactly what they were doing, but I know David found power usage that’s not being reported, cargo shipments that aren’t tracked, fuel that’s produced but never transported off-site. Probably a lot more. That’s why he spent so much time looking at other people’s work. The facility’s supposed to be self-sufficient. He knew something wasn’t adding up, and he wanted to find out why. And what he found out is that Parthenope is lying about how successful Nimue is. All those glowing reports they’re sending out to their investors and partners are bullshit. The station is nowhere near self-sustaining.”

Adisa was quiet for a second. “What was he going to do with this information?”

“Pass it along to whoever was paying him to spy, I guess. Maybe that’s Neeta Hunter’s family. I don’t know, but I bet tracing his contact on Hygiea would tell us more.”

“Where does Mary Ping fit into it?” Adisa asked. “Why attack Prussenko? She doesn’t strike me as somebody with any company loyalty.”

“I don’t think she cared about protecting the company at all. It sounded more like she was trying to protect herself. She wanted to make David understand, so maybe she was afraid of being implicated? Or scapegoated. Or she had her own side project going on that she didn’t want him to find.” I exhaled in frustration. “I don’t know. I don’t know what she wanted to tell me. I’m not sure she was entirely in her right mind.”

The lift began to slow. We were approaching Level 8.

“She’s likely still armed. And won’t be happy to see us.” He drew his electroshock weapon and powered it on.

“Right. Great. You know that won’t be much use if she’s suited up.”

Still, I wished I had taken Ryu’s weapon before running into the lift, even if I hadn’t the first idea how to use it.

“She didn’t kill you before, when she had the chance, aye?”

“I guess she didn’t,” I said.

“We try to talk to her first. Just talk.”

Where the previous levels had been roughly cubic, Level 8 was a massive disk capped onto the deepest end of the massive cylinder. Catwalks radiated from the lift like spokes of a bicycle wheel, and below our feet, visible through the mesh walkways and an incomprehensible jumble of machinery, was the