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

my torch. The bot had latched onto Vera at his shoulder. His entire arm, half his chest, and his neck and the lower part of his face were a bloody ruin. Two spindly legs of the bot remained embedded in his slack cheek.

I checked for a pulse anyway. There was none. His skin was cool to the touch. He had been David’s friend. He had been saving up to go back to Earth.

His was the only corpse I found. Every other room was empty.

The last room I checked was David’s. It looked exactly as it had before: tidy, empty. Nothing personal except the map of Titan on the wall. I turned to leave again.

And stopped. Slowly turned around.

I won that bet after all, David had said in his message. That lake should have been mine.

He had mentioned Kristin to warn me about the Overseer. He had brought up Excelsior to warn me about the weapons. But the lake—I didn’t know why he would bring up the lake. Nothing in his message had been incidental. I stepped closer to the map.

Kraken Mare was the biggest body of liquid on Titan, a huge sea of hydrocarbon that spanned over four hundred thousand square kilometers. It wasn’t our landing site, but it was one of our primary research goals. I couldn’t remember why we had been wagering on it that particular weekend. There had probably been a meeting with the microbiologists that week; they were always wide-eyed with excitement about what they hoped to find. I did remember that at some point after learning the name of Titan’s known features, Vanguard had spent a few test cycles forming its aquatic bots into the shape of a giant squid. It did that sometimes, with concepts it was only just learning: took them in, looked them up, tried out a hundred or a thousand different variations of what they might mean. The kraken shape turned out to have the best propulsion system in certain environments.

I touched the map, ran my fingers around the ragged edge of the lake—and felt something behind the smooth material. The raised edges of an irregular shape. No more than a few millimeters thick.

I peeled the corner of the map away from the wall to find a small patch of thin film the exact same gray color as the walls; if I had looked without first touching it, I wouldn’t have noticed it. I had to use my fingernails to pry it up.

Underneath the gray patch was a piece of metal about fifteen centimeters long, smooth and rectangular on one end but notched with a complex series of peaks, pits, and striations on the other end. I held it between my thumb and forefinger, turning it in the light of my flashlight; the hair-thin lines and tiny pockmarks gleamed. It was a circuit key. A physical key with an electronic component: both the irregular shape and the complex insets of copper would match its keyhole precisely. The physical shape could be forged easily, but the electronic connections created by the circuitry were much harder to mimic without access to the inside of the lock itself. It was the sort of thing you might use for access to a location that needed a layer of security in addition to embedded ID chips and manual codes.

Like, say, for entering the brain of an Overseer from inside an already-secure systems room.

I stared at the key for a long, long moment, and I thought: damn you, David, and this shitshow you got yourself into.

I pocketed the key and rejoined the others in the junction. Hunter had managed to calm herself down a little bit, although she was still sniffling and crying. Adisa stepped out of the Ops corridor just as I returned.

“There’s nobody in there except Vera, and he’s dead,” I told them. Hunter’s breath hitched at the news. “The others took vac suits and some supplies from the lockers.”

“There’s nobody in Ops either,” Adisa said. “Not that I could find. I couldn’t access the systems room.”

Hunter looked toward the cargo warehouse, shuddering slightly when her gaze passed over Delicata. “I guess they did go to the base? Because they thought it would be safer?”

I looked to where she was looking, toward the dead man crushed in the doorway, and a sickly, cold unease came over me. I understood the uncertainty in Hunter’s voice. It didn’t make sense. Why would the Overseer lock down the station, then attack the crew? What was it trying to stop us from doing? Why didn’t it just kill all of us, if it wanted us gone? And why would Sigrah flee with the others when she already knew what danger they were running into?

We had something wrong. We were missing something, still, something important. My head ached.

I had to ask the Overseer. I reached into my pocket to touch the key.

I said, “I found—”

We all heard the noise at the same moment. It was faint, but sharp, like the tinkle of glass shattering in a distant room—but it wasn’t glass. I recognized that sound. I had heard it before, in the warehouse, when Mary Ping died.

I spun to face the door to Res, but that wasn’t where the noise was coming from. Instead it seemed to be coming from all around, echoing and clattering with chaotic unpredictability. The sound grew louder, but not much; it was still too faint to pinpoint.

“You said there was no one here,” Hunter whispered. She was looking around frantically, her eyes wide as she stepped uneasily toward the center of the junction.

“There wasn’t,” I said, also whispering. “There isn’t.”

I backed away from the door to Res. The sound came again, a little bit louder, and only then did I realize it wasn’t coming from any of the four open doors around us.

It was coming from above.

We all looked up at the same time.

The airlock to the docking structure was open, and the long passageway was dark. We hadn’t noticed. We hadn’t even looked. I