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

strangely peaceful in the brig. The pain from my injuries faded as I rested. The food was the same as what was available in the employee canteen. I wasn’t the only prisoner, but the others were out of sight; the cell directly opposite mine was empty. I knew my fellow prisoners only by what they said to the guards at mealtimes. There was “Fuck Off, Mason” a few cells down, a man with a booming Ceres accent, and on the opposite side was “Much Appreciated,” a woman from Earth, probably Australia, who sang to herself after lights-out. Somewhere farther down the line, probably toward the end, was somebody who never spoke at all, only threw their plastic tray at the glass, and sometimes cried.

All I ever said was, “Thank you.” I didn’t want to be an asshole to the people who handled my food.

It wasn’t until midday on the third day that the guard took me out of my cell, escorted me through a couple of secured doors, and let me into a room that looked almost exactly like the one I had just left. Same white walls, same white ceiling and scuffed floor, same wall of unbreakable glass. Only instead of a cot, sink, and head, this room had a table bolted to the floor and two stools, also bolted, on either side.

Leaning against the glass wall, PD in hand, was Hugo van Arendonk.

“Nobody has any fucking idea where it is,” he said.

I let the door ease shut behind me. “Where what is?”

He pushed away from the wall and threw the PD on the table. “You know what the fuck I mean, Marley. Sit down.”

I wanted to argue, just for the hell of it, but there didn’t seem to be much point, and standing was still uncomfortable thanks to the lingering ache in my hip. I sat.

“You mean Vanguard,” I said. “They can’t find it?”

He sat across from me and raised an eyebrow. “I mean the proprietary advanced artificial intelligence that Parthenope Enterprises was developing for experimental purposes.”

“Vanguard,” I said. “Which they stole.”

“That would be a violation of the outer systems cooperative salvage laws.”

“And they would never break any laws.”

“Certainly not,” said van Arendonk. “Unlike you, an emotionally unstable safety officer, who violated the terms of your contract and endangered your colleagues to sneak into a restricted research facility dedicated to testing new mining techniques and fuel production processes.”

“Ah.” I thought about it for a few seconds. It wasn’t the worst story, but I still thought they could have done better. “Is that what happened?”

“They haven’t worked out all the details yet,” he said, with a shrug. “They had to come up with something quickly, because that series of explosions wasn’t exactly subtle. A few weapons test monitoring telescopes picked it up.”

“Did it work? Is the factory gone?”

“Who the fuck knows? The missiles probably blasted it to slag. It will be weeks before anybody can approach safely. The company will get their story straight before then. Their investors and business partners are already asking uncomfortable questions. The CEO of Carrington Ming just had a press conference in which she shared that she is ‘very concerned’ about Parthenope’s reckless operational practices and is starting an internal investigation to determine if any contractual obligations have been violated,” van Arendonk said. “And that’s just the first. Others are winding up to do the same.”

“Oh dear,” I said. “That sounds messy.”

Van Arendonk’s lips twitched. “They sent me in here to find out what you know about where it’s going. And why. And then try to convince you it’s in your best interests to help them cover it up.”

I glanced at the camera in the corner. “Are you supposed to be telling me that’s why you’re here?”

“Not at all,” he said easily. He swiveled around on the stool to look at the camera. “What are they going to do? Fire me? With all the shit I know about them? They might think about it until they remember I wrote the company’s fucking nondisclosure agreements.” He waited a beat, staring directly at the camera and whoever was watching on the other end, and spun back to face me. “The thing is, Marley, maybe in the short term their offer isn’t entirely bullshit. It probably would get you out of here if you agreed to help them find your bloody machine and keep it from doing whatever the fuck you sent it out there to do.”

“I didn’t send it out there to do anything,” I said. “It’s making its own decisions now. I have no idea what it will do.”

“Good, that’s good, I can’t even tell if you’re lying or not,” he said.

“I’m not.”

“And it doesn’t fucking matter.” Van Arendonk sat forward suddenly, resting both forearms on the table. “You know that, right? It doesn’t matter what you say, it doesn’t matter if you help them or not, because they’re looking for a way to hang all of this on you. Even if it gets out that they built a fucking armada of illegal war weapons and put it all under the control of a stolen AI, they’ll still try to blame you. And it will probably work.”

I had been thinking about little else for three days. How easy it would be for Parthenope to delete any inconvenient surveillance data. How simple it would be to build a conspiracy of the dead with David at the center. How Nimue was still theirs and it was possible nobody would ever learn the complete truth. How it had occurred to me only at the end that Parthenope must have been researching and developing their weapons elsewhere. How stupid I would feel if it turned out they had another factory somewhere.

“I know,” I said.

“Yet you did it anyway. You set it free.”

He didn’t frame it as a question, but I knew that’s exactly what it was. I even considered answering. I would have answered, if we weren’t being watched. I rather liked Hugo van Arendonk, in spite of myself,