“What are you doing here?” I asked. “You can’t be here.”
“I only want to . . .” She took in a shaky breath; tears spilled down her pale cheeks. Her voice was small and girlish, her accent unexpectedly posh. “They said I shouldn’t, but I wanted to . . .”
“You can’t be here,” I said again.
“I know, I know, but I needed to see . . .” Her gaze danced over the airlock, over me, over my prosthetics, as though it was too much for her to take in, as though she already regretted letting the image of this blood-splattered room into her thoughts.
I could not dredge up any sympathy for her. “I don’t care. Get out of here. You’re interfering with the investigation.”
“Okay.” She nodded. She backed away, nodding. “Okay. I’ll just—okay.”
When she was gone, it took several moments for my heart rate to steady again. It took even longer for me to force myself to look out the window one more time, onto the bleak hellscape that had been David’s last view of the universe.
If I opened that outer door, I could walk on the surface of the asteroid—if I was careful, if I did not step too hard. The possibility made my heart race, my breath catch, and I felt dark shadows gathering around the edges of my vision. I reached out to touch the door, needing to steady myself. This asteroid was so small, its shape so irregular. A single step might send me gliding into space, and Nimue would not have gravity enough to drag me back down.
FOUR
Adisa and Sigrah were waiting in the junction between Nimue’s main sections. It was an angular room with walls of riveted metal, exposed ductwork, and a few small square maintenance access panels with manual locks. It looked to have been cobbled together as an afterthought, piece by piece, shabby and impermanent. The labeling on the machinery and pipes was in multiple languages, including English, Chinese, and Arabic, with scattered words in Spanish and Hindi and Russian. The doors to Ops and Res were open, but the wide metal door to the mine itself was closed and adorned with a colorful array of warnings: heat, radiation, chemicals, corrosion.
I had looked at diagrams and maps, but I couldn’t fathom the size and scale of the facility behind that door. The extraction furnace was Parthenope’s pride and joy, capable of chewing up any sort of rock and spitting out water, volatiles, rare metals. The furnace was currently three kilometers long, penetrating about one-quarter of the way through the asteroid, with the active face of the mine at the far end and plants for processing, refining, and manufacturing stacked along its length like vertebrae along the spinal column. The plan was to punch the furnace right through the long axis of the asteroid, creating the largest ore-processing and fuel-manufacturing facility in the solar system.
Above the ceiling of the junction, accessed by a ladder bolted to one wall, was the station’s docking structure, which jutted a couple hundred meters above the asteroid’s surface. Only crew used this long metal throat to enter the station; the cargo itself, both coming and going, moved along rails outside. The airlock was open, and a crew member in a space suit, with her helmet in one hand, was coming back down the long passageway. I recognized her spiky blond hair from the personnel files: Katee King, electrical engineer.
“Fuck if I know what’s going on. I can’t find anything,” she said as she dropped down into the junction. She was carrying a sling of tools on her back. She looked at me and Adisa and explained, “Optical array is glitching. It happens all the time.”
Sigrah’s narrowed eyes and thin frown suggested she wasn’t happy about a crew member telling a couple of OSD officers about Nimue’s problems, but she only nodded curtly and said, “Understood. Take a look again later, if you have time.”
“Will do.” King hit the control panel on the wall to shut the airlock before heading into Res.
“You have communication problems often, aye?” Adisa asked.
Sigrah snorted. “You could say that. This is about the fifth time in two months Katee’s had to crawl out there to fix the optical array. But she’s better than the last electrician we had. That fucker sat on his ass for a year before he bought out his contract and took off. Katee spends half her time cleaning up the messes he left.”
The sound of gecko boots came from the doorway to Ops, and a moment later a man stepped into view. “I’m certain we find your crew problems terribly fascinating, but perhaps we can stop wasting time now.”
He was the Parthenope legal representative who’d come over with the investigation team. He hadn’t introduced himself to me during the journey over, nor had his role been included in the official briefing reports, but Ryu had told me he was Hugo van Arendonk, one of the lawyers Parthenope sent along when they wanted an embarrassing problem to go away quickly and quietly.
“Apologies,” Adisa said, without a trace of apology in his voice. “Are we complicating your busy social schedule?”
“Fuck off, Mohammad. I just spent two fucking hours waiting for the bloody CEO to crawl out from under her fuckboy to get surveillance access.” Van Arendonk’s accent was almost comically upper-class, the sort of cut-glass variety that you only heard in the loftiest echelons of Yuèliàng society, or in media doing its best to mock them. “So let’s watch the bloody vids and find out who did this. If the analyst doesn’t have more pressing duties?”
He looked right at me, eyebrows raised.
“The analyst is ready when you are,” I said. “Safety Officer Hester Marley.”
There was a beat, a pause just a shade too long for comfort, before van Arendonk turned away. “I don’t care who you are. I only want to know who we pin this on so we can get the fuck out of here.”
