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

spider leg emerged from the box. A choked cry escaped my throat. Nobody saw it. They weren’t paying attention.

That was when the Overseer triggered the radiation alarm.

The scene in Res exploded into absolute chaos. The spiders burst from the box as the alarm sounded, and the crew didn’t know what they were reacting to, not at first. The spiders spread around them, scrambling to the doorways as though they intended to corral the crew, dodging out of the way every time somebody tried to grab or stop one. Vera was the first to succeed—he caught one of the bots in his hand—and another leapt to his chest and ignited.

It didn’t kill him right away. He screamed and fell, crawled across the floor, flailing in pain. More spiders swarmed after that one, keeping the crew away when they tried to help him. Melendez and Dolin had to pull Elena Yee back from Vera, but they weren’t fast enough and one of the spiders attached itself to her hand. Melendez pulled it free—Yee shrieked in pain—and threw it across the room. Ryu had their electroshock weapon drawn, but there was nothing to aim it at. Van Arendonk had run into Res when the attack started, but Delicata remained in the junction, motionless, watching through the open doorway with an expression somewhere between nausea and fear. The spiders were too small, too fast. They leapt and crawled and scurried through the common room, swarming toward the crew as they fled. The bots’ method seemed to have shifted from encircling the crew to isolating and attacking them, but it was all changing so fast, evolving so fast, every moving piece hard to follow in all the chaos.

It was King who shouted for the others to follow her, grab their gear and follow, for fuck’s sake, hurry.

When the first of the spiders raced out of Res and into the junction, Delicata spun around and ran toward the comms room—but the door was locked against him. He pounded and shouted and cursed, his angry pleas lost beneath the wail of the station alarm. One bot followed him, then another. His shouts grew louder.

Inside, Sigrah leaned against the door, and she waited.

Delicata hadn’t expected the bots to turn on him. He hadn’t realized that he was, to Sigrah, every bit as disposable as everybody else on Nimue.

In the end, it only took a few minutes, but through those few minutes Sigrah waited, and listened, and did nothing. She waited while Delicata pounded on the door and begged her to let him in. She waited while the others fled Res in a panic, racing into the cargo warehouse with the spiders following them. Only when the Overseer gave its final lockdown warning did she emerge from the comms room. From the Ops corridor, she watched as Delicata tried to follow the others, but a spider caught him first, caught him and attacked him just as the Overseer was closing the door to the warehouse.

Several of the spiders crawled over Delicata to chase the others into the warehouse, but only a few caught up before the crew reached the ladder to the cargo transport tunnels. King and Melendez kept guard at the bottom of the ladder, kicking away any spider that got close enough, as the others climbed the ladder one by one. Only a couple of spiders managed to keep up with them. They vanished into the tunnels, charging toward the old UEN base.

They didn’t know about the weapons factory. They didn’t know they had been herded into a trap.

Neither did the Overseer. It shut the tunnel doors behind them, and they disappeared from its tracking data.

In Ops, Sigrah watched the device in her hands. She cursed sharply—disappointed her bots had let so many people get away, I guessed, but it was hard to tell because she had no expression on her face except annoyance and boredom. It felt too big and too terrible to believe, for all that the proof was right before me. She had been expecting a slaughter when she brought the spiders out of their box. And if the Overseer hadn’t triggered the lockdown, if the alarms hadn’t sent everybody into a flurry of action, a slaughter was exactly what she would have achieved.

She tapped the spider control device a few times. All the spiders stopped their pursuit and headed back to Res. They crawled again over Delicata, who was struggling to free himself from where he was trapped in the door. Blood trickled from his mouth. He tried to call for help, but all he managed was a wet wheeze.

Sigrah pocketed the device and returned to the comms room. She sat down before the radio. She made another encrypted call.

“This is Nimue. I am requesting immediate armed assistance from the vessel Wellfleet. Repeat: I am requesting immediate armed assistance from the vessel Wellfleet. Sunburn has been infiltrated and overtaken by hostile crew. I couldn’t stop them. They’ve taken hostages—I don’t know if they’re still alive. They are armed and extremely dangerous.”

She left Ops without waiting for a reply. She had to squeeze through the warehouse door over Delicata. He pleaded for help. She didn’t even look at him. He tried to grab her leg, and she kicked him away; the door crunched closed on his shoulder. He screamed, but Sigrah was already walking away.

“How did she get into the transport tunnels?” I asked.

“Station forepersons have access to manual overrides,” said the Overseer.

“And you’ve got nothing in the tunnels or in the UEN base? No comms? No security logs?”

“I have no management or oversight access in that facility.”

“None at all?”

“No, Hester.”

It could be lying. But I didn’t think so, not anymore. I had been thinking that the same virus that had infected Aeolia’s Overseer was at work here, brought over by Mary Ping for her own twisted reasons, making Nimue’s Overseer effectively dishonest, twisting its stewardship actions into violence. The truth, I realized now, was far simpler.

“I am so fucking stupid,” I said softly.