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

if this was the same person altering the superoperational commands that let David black out the surveillance. It had to be somebody with high-level access and little oversight, somebody the company trusted to work with the master AI. That was a question we couldn’t answer until we returned to Hygiea.

“We took it in bits and pieces. We tried to be careful.”

“You wanted the buyers to keep wanting more, aye?”

Hunter gave Adisa a wobbly smile. “Exactly. That was David’s idea. I wanted to grab everything we could and take the big payday, but he convinced me it was too risky. I know he was right, but I keep thinking, if I had argued with him, if we had bought out our contracts and gotten away from here . . .”

“Why were you down here today?” Adisa asked.

“Cleaning up,” Hunter said. She reached into her tool bag and brought out a small gray box, held it up for us to see. “We have data recording devices all over the station. We designed them to simulate crew access, so the Overseer would never be able to find a pattern. I figured you would start looking soon.”

She was giving us more credit than we deserved. A full search of the mine had never been on our action list.

I asked, “When did you first realize there were inconsistencies in the station data?”

Hunter looked surprised by the question. “That was all David. He noticed some weird stuff a few months ago, but I just blew it off. I didn’t think it was a big deal.”

“Did he ever mention a company project with a name like Sunshine? Or Sunset?”

“Not that I know of. What he talked about, it was all a lot more vague than any particular project. Nothing out of the ordinary. Companies lie about stuff like this all the time. Like, if they’re claiming to produce more fuel than they are, that’s part of the business. Carrington Ming Quartet did that a few years ago, remember? All they got was a fine. It doesn’t mean the power’s being diverted off-grid. But David wouldn’t let it go. I thought he was just . . .” She glanced toward me, her expression apologetic. “He was traumatized, you know? He didn’t like to talk about it, but I knew he was always worried about sabotage, always worried what everybody in the crew was up to. He was afraid he would miss something. I don’t know what he thought would happen, exactly, but I don’t think it was this.” She sniffled and wiped her nose with her sleeve. “He never deserved this. I’m sorry. I keep forgetting that you and David went through so much together.”

I didn’t say anything. There wasn’t really anything to say. I knew the fear she was describing, because it was one I shared. I understood all too easily how worried he would have been about missing something important, something obvious. Something as dangerous as Kristin Herd and all the other Black Halo operatives on Symposium. I understood exactly what he was afraid of.

Adisa knelt down to rummage through the kit of things he’d brought into the mine. He brought out a tube of water and offered it to her. She accepted it gratefully. I hadn’t even thought about bringing water with us. Three years since I left Earth and I still didn’t remember how important it was to always carry even the most obvious things for survival. I wondered, fleetingly, if maybe I just wasn’t very good at living in space.

Hunter passed the water to me next. It was lukewarm and faintly metallic but a balm to my dry throat. I handed the tube back to Adisa. “Thanks.”

Adisa hopped up onto a terminal to sit with his back against a screen. “Go back a moment, aye? David thought the data discrepancies happened because power was being diverted?”

“That’s what he said,” Hunter said. “That’s why he spent so much time nosing around. He was trying to figure out what didn’t fit.”

“Oh,” I breathed. “Oh, shit.”

“What is it?” Adisa said.

I shook my head to avoid answering. My face warmed. Fuck. Fuck. I had been so sure that the data discrepancies were what Parthenope wanted to hide. I had interpreted Mary Ping’s deflection as confirmation.

But she hadn’t been confirming my theory at all. She had been laughing at me, because I had done exactly what I was terrified of doing, exactly what David had been trying to avoid. I had missed the obvious.

David had been searching the facility, shadowing the crew, asking questions, sticking his nose where it was not invited. If all he had been looking for were data discrepancies, he wouldn’t have needed to leave the systems room. Fuck, he probably could have done it all from his quarters without getting out of bed. He hadn’t only been looking at the data and reports and the claims the company was making. He had been looking into every square meter of the station itself. He had been looking for something. Not in the data, but in the facility.

Mary Ping had known what he was looking for, even if he hadn’t known it himself. She had killed him to keep it hidden. Sigrah had to know as well. This was her station. She had been reluctant to help from the start, eager to dismiss David’s death as a personal quarrel turned violent.

I thought about the faceless mech suit in the darkness. Flinging the spider bots. Jumping backward—such an uncanny motion, against every instinct, yet so well balanced.

I thought of the surprise and anger on Delicata’s face when I told him and Sigrah what I’d seen.

I thought again of Mary Ping’s last words before the screams.

“Marley?” Adisa said.

I was staring at one of the red indicator lights beside the hatch in the floor. We were surrounded by them, in that dark room lit only by our own flashlights, a dozen or more tiny red eyes.

“What exactly did David find?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Hunter said. “I already told you everything I know. He didn’t