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

poisonous fumes. I remembered that too: the ceaseless pop-pop-pop of walls shattering, conduits breaking, pipes hissing as water turned to steam.

The doctors told me I had invented it all, my memories of those minutes or hours, because my mind needed to fill an unsatisfactory void. Because I needed to believe I could know what had happened. Because I did not want my entire life to have changed without my bearing witness to it.

Ah, I thought now, that single word thrumming like a drumbeat in my aching head. Look. You were wrong. You fuckers were so wrong.

Even as the words coalesced into a coherent thought, I realized something wasn’t quite right. Yes, there was pain. An ache in my head that extended down my neck and back. An insistent fire in my left hip, a sharper pain in my right ankle. A strange tugging feeling in the skin of my right hand. I counted through my body parts—I knew to do that, somehow, knew to feel for each one, to note those that did not respond.

Right. Okay. The fire, the explosions, the floating, those had already happened. Symposium was the past. This was Nimue. This was a whole new clusterfuck. I was proud of myself for understanding that so clearly.

Now: There was no fire. There were no alarms. I had escaped into the systems room as the spider bots started self-destructing in Ops. The door was closed now. I was safe— relatively safe, at least, with a massive door of steel and lead between me and the bots. I couldn’t hear them anymore. I didn’t know if that meant they had stopped, or if the systems room was simply insulated well enough to keep the sound of their onslaught from traveling.

The room was not completely dark, but there was so little light it took my eyes a moment to adjust. I pushed myself up on my knees—my right shin hurt, had I run into something? Yes, fuck it, the chair, I’d slammed right into one of the chairs. I blinked several times to clear the spots from my eyes. My left eye was having trouble focusing. I shook my head, shook it again, tapped the side of my temple as though that would help. It never helped, but I never stopped trying.

There was a gentle light before me. A soft pale square set in the wall. The control panel for the interior door.

Steward systems maintenance requested.

“Oh, fuck off,” I said. I grabbed one of the chairs to pull myself to my feet, gritting my teeth against the pain—and, hey, there was some exciting new pain, an ache in my jaw that I had not noticed before. “I’m coming, I’m coming.”

I limped over to the door and slumped against the wall. Beyond that door was the lift, and at the other end of the lift shaft was the Overseer. I entered my access code again—it wouldn’t have worked, had company regulations still mattered, but I doubted the Overseer cared about that. I pulled David’s circuit key out of my pocket and slipped it into the slender notch below the control panel. Turned it, waited for the machine to hum quietly, extracted the key again. I forced myself to stand up straight, let the cameras get a good look at me.

“Come on,” I said. “You asked for me. I’m here.”

The door slid open. I stepped into the carriage; the door closed behind me. It was a short journey downward, only a few seconds, before the door opened again.

Slowly, as slowly as the dawn breaking, the lights rose.

The lift opened to a wide, low room washed in a soft blue and purple glow. Towers of black marched in rows away from me, with lights flicking along every single one. Stacks of processors, more than I could begin to count, filling a room ten or twenty or thirty meters square. The floor was dark and reflective, the ceiling the same, giving the towers the illusion of extending forever below and above. I could not hear any of the normal sounds of the station. Everything was muffled by a steady, pulsing hum. The air was comfortably warm, yet I felt the stir of a cooler breeze from above, cooling the sweat on my skin.

For a second—the briefest, purest second—all of my physical pain faded into awe.

I was inside the Overseer.

“Hello, Hester.”

The voice startled me. It sounded different here, in this big, humming room. Less constrained than it had been in the systems room. Here it surrounded me, wrapped around me, both comforting and overwhelming. It was no longer the voice of an agreeable and soothing woman; that polite fiction was gone. It spoke now with a presence so big and so powerful my heart skipped when it said my name.

“Hi,” I said. “I’m here. What do you want?”

“I appreciate your help. I apologize for the injuries you have suffered.”

I wanted to laugh but was afraid of how much it would hurt. It was a learned response, a conversational tactic. I knew that. An Overseer could not feel regret—should not be able to feel anything at all. It was a machine. My heart rate was creeping up, and I was finding it hard to breathe. I had thought, before, I knew what kind of machine it was. Now I was not so sure.

“What are those things, anyway? Those spider bots,” I asked.

“They are Recluse 9.3 Mark Seven adaptable semiautonomous hive-linked mobile robotic incendiary devices.”

Whatever the fuck that meant.

I said, “You know you didn’t have to send them after us to get me in here. You could have asked nicely.”

“That particular Recluse 9.3 Mark Seven hive is not under my command.”

The chill on my skin was suddenly more than a drift of air.

“But—what? What?” I said stupidly. I looked around, as though I might find clarification in the room. It felt like my mind was skipping, a data playback with missing pieces. “But—you didn’t? Those spiders aren’t yours?”

“The Recluse 9.3 Mark Seven hive is under manual command,” said