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

tell me anything. I wish he had. If he had asked for help, we could have figured something out.”

Oh, but he had. He had asked for help.

He just hadn’t asked her. He had asked me.

There was a camera in the corner of the ceiling. Another in the control panel for the door in the floor. I didn’t know how many audio recorders there were. I needed to tell them what I was thinking, but indirectly, carefully.

“How hard is it to trigger a false radiation alarm?” I asked.

“You think this is a false alarm?” Hunter said. She looked at me, considering. “I guess it could be. It makes more sense than causing an actual leak.”

Adisa drew one leg up to his chest and hooked his hand around it. He had rolled his sleeves up again, once again showing his prison tattoos. “It’s not difficult, aye. A child could do it in about, ah, three and a half minutes.”

I raised my eyebrows. “That is a very specific estimate.”

Adisa hesitated a moment, but only a moment, before deciding what to say. “Have you heard of the ship Terese Hanford?”

“The prison ship?”

“Aye, that one.”

“I learned about it in school,” I said, unsure of where he was going with it.

“They teach that in Earth schools?”

“Not a lot. Nothing good.”

Terese Hanford was a massive prisoner transport used by United Earth Navy during the war. It was where they imprisoned Martian rebels indefinitely—some for years without ever being brought before a court, thanks to a deliberate loophole in system law. Because only Earth and Yuèliàng courts were considered valid, suspected war criminals could only be charged when they were brought to those courts in person. If they were never brought to Earth or the Moon, the UEN could keep them in transit for as long as it wanted. So Terese Hanford did not dock at Earth or the Moon for the entirety of the war. Humanitarian groups repeatedly demanded access to the ship and its prisoners; they were denied every time. Investigative news agencies tried to sneak aboard, protesters got themselves arrested in attempts to infiltrate, and even veterans groups spoke up, citing the extraordinarily high suicide rate among sailors who had served aboard Terese Hanford as a reason for more oversight.

The UEN denied all of it. It just kept shoving more and more prisoners into its cells until the war ended. Only then had the truth come out. I remembered news reports of children with skinny arms and open wounds, corpses jettisoned into space without even the dignity of clothing, guards with black masks covering their faces, hollow-eyed women and men who looked more like famine victims than war criminals. One particularly vivid image of an empty metal room splattered with blood was on the news for weeks. I was a child when the war ended, too young to understand, but not so young that I didn’t absorb what my parents and their academic friends argued about, what I saw on the solemn reports, what protesters in the streets screamed when politicians passed by.

It had taken years to process all of the prisoners, most of whom were Martian or spaceborn and would have trouble surviving on Earth without extensive (and expensive) medical intervention. The government of Yuèliàng set up a special court for the purpose. Historians and political scientists still argued about how many of the prisoners aboard Terese Hanford had ever been convicted of any crime. Most of them had been locked up for no reason except the bad luck of being born Martian and caught in the middle of an unwinnable war.

“You were there?” I asked, because I had no idea what else to say.

“Ah, in a manner of speaking,” Adisa said. “I wasn’t arrested, at first. I sneaked aboard.”

“You did what? Why the fuck would you do that?”

Adisa grinned quickly and crookedly. “I had this foolish idea that I could instigate a mutiny among the prisoners, aye? We were never entirely sure how many guards were aboard, only that there had to be many times more prisoners. It was a terrible plan. I made it as far as the cargo bay, and I was able to trigger a false radiation lockdown, but I was caught as soon as I tried to get into the inhabited sections of the ship. It turns out the UEN doesn’t care much about getting its sailors to safety during a lockdown, so they were still patrolling, even thinking there were deadly levels of radiation. And it’s a bloody big ship. Took too fucking long to get anywhere, yeah.”

“You tried that by yourself?”

Adisa look at me, eyebrows raised. “Working with others on such a scheme would have been a wartime conspiracy, yeah? But one young man working alone, that was merely the ordinary crime of a misguided youth. Or so my public aid lawyer convinced the court some years later, when arguing for a commuted sentence.”

“How the hell did that work?”

“You can ask him yourself, when we get out of here. He’ll be glad to tell you all about it.”

“What do you—” I stopped. “What? No. Van Arendonk? Really?”

It was impossible to imagine a corporate lawyer like Hugo van Arendonk volunteering to help Martian criminals. That was more the sort of thing my aunt and her wife used to do during their sabbaticals, when they would travel off-planet for half a year to spend the time counseling Martian survivors of the war on how to get their lives back together.

Adisa laughed. “It was a very long time ago.”

“We all know that story back home,” Hunter said. “The van Arendonks still can’t decide if they ought to be embarrassed or proud. His family’s even worse than mine when it comes to preserving appearances. Whatever happened to Terese Hanford, anyway? What does the UEN do with a ship that size when it’s done with it?”

“They sold it,” Adisa said. “It passed through a few corporate owners, I think. It’s pretty old by now, so last I heard the only buyers were