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

An Overseer was not supposed to be capable of subterfuge. An Overseer was not supposed to lie. But if I was right—if it was corrupted by whatever virus Mary Ping had brought to Nimue—all of those rules about how nice, predictable steward AIs behaved might be meaningless. A lie was, after all, only output. What it was doing inside was another matter entirely.

I had assumed the Overseer was controlling the mech suit, the spiders, and the lockdown. The attack on the crew—but I already knew something about that didn’t fit, even before it had drawn me into its protective armor and kept the spiders outside.

Manual command. She’ll say it was me. That’s what Delicata had said before he died.

The Overseer hadn’t attacked the crew.

Shit. My head hurt. My everything hurt. I felt so queasy my stomach could have been tied in knots. I needed to sit down.

I staggered forward a few steps. The lights changed to illuminate a path. I had to lean on the processor stacks for balance. I hoped the Overseer didn’t mind. It led me to the center of the room, where the towers opened up into a neat square with a console and chair in the center. I hadn’t known until that moment that Overseers were designed with an interior human workspace; Parthenope kept the physical design of the Overseers as much a secret as the workings of their electronic brains. I was relieved to see it, and not just because I wanted a chair. Humans are small and anxious and suspicious. We need places to nest, places to sit and think and pretend we have control, even within the hearts of our own creations. I limped over to the chair and sat heavily.

“Show me ID tracking data and visual surveillance for everybody on the station,” I said. “And don’t tell me I don’t have bloody access. I know you want me to see it.”

The lone console screen was a broad expanse at a gentle slant, clean of smudges, free of scratches. The facility map appeared, but there were only a few small dots, and most were red.

Delicata in the junction. Vera in the common room. Ping in the warehouse. David in the infirmary. All dead.

And me, still green, below Ops. Nobody else.

“Show me where you last scanned everybody else.”

As expected, a flurry of dots and names all appeared in the same place: at the entrance to the transport tunnels in the cargo warehouse. Everybody had passed through there, including Adisa and Hunter. They were all in the tunnels—all out of sight of surveillance. I tried to contact them, but the Overseer told me there was no system for crew communications in the tunnels either. The tunnels and the base they led to formed an impenetrable blank spot in the Overseer’s data, territory in which its sensors and eyes had no reach.

Adisa’s and Hunter’s ID chips had been scanned a good ninety minutes later than the bulk of the others. Sigrah about an hour before them, and alone. Most of the crew, including Ryu and van Arendonk, had entered the tunnels first—and they had done so as the station was going into lockdown. They had left Vera, Sigrah, and Delicata behind.

“Right. So, tell me, was there a radiation leak?” I asked.

“No.”

“Did you sound the alarm?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“My primary concern is the safety and well-being of the crew.”

Before I could ask for an explanation, the image on the screen changed, and I was looking at a surveillance recording with both video and audio components.

It showed van Arendonk entering the systems room right after Adisa and I stepped into the lift. There was no surveillance in the systems room, so he was out of sight—and he wasn’t around to see what was happening in Res at the same time, which was a raging argument between Sigrah and some of her miners. Vera, King, a few others decided they were going to search for the killer; they were convinced the transport tunnels were the only place for a murderer to hide. Sigrah forbade them from going anywhere. They told her to fuck off. She told them to sit their asses down and stay put. Pale and tired and frustrated, Ryu tried to get everybody to calm down, but nobody listened.

The Overseer split the images on the screen: I was now watching two recordings play out simultaneously.

Sigrah stormed out of Res, with Delicata right behind her. The crew began grabbing vac suits and gear from the lockers, even as Ryu pleaded with them to slow down and wait to hear from Adisa.

Delicata followed Sigrah into Ops, where they stopped just outside the comms room.

“This is getting out of hand,” he said. “What the hell is that thing—”

Sigrah whirled on him. “Shut the fuck up.”

“Did you do that? Did you kill Mary?”

“That wasn’t me. You know what that was.” She glanced up, eyes seeking out the nearest surveillance camera, and looked away quickly. “You’re not going to do anything stupid, do you understand? We’re going to be rational about this.”

“But if it’s killing—”

“We have what we need to get control of this situation.” She paused. “Do you understand? We are still in control of this situation.”

“They’re talking about the tunnels,” Delicata said. “I have to head them off.”

“It’s too late.”

“But I still have the key, I can go out and—”

“Impossible. It’s unfortunate for them that Mary set up a trap to stop them.”

They stared at each other, hard, for several seconds. I couldn’t see Delicata’s face, only Sigrah’s, and she was so tense the muscles in her jaw twitched.

“What about . . .” Delicata’s head moved slightly; he was trying to gesture toward the camera without being obvious.

“Don’t worry about that. We had no way of knowing what she left behind,” Sigrah said. Her voice was so calm, so even, I would not have heard the anger tamped down beneath the words if I couldn’t also see her fists clenching at her sides and the narrowness of her eyes. “We had no way of knowing