At least, I should have been able to.
Something strange happened when I asked the Overseer for David’s time of death.
The time it reported loss of contact with his internal tracking chip was 2400:00:00.
Midnight. Exactly midnight. To within hundredths of a second.
“That can’t be right,” van Arendonk said.
I was glad I didn’t have to explain to him how improbable it was. I asked for the tracking and surveillance data for the time and location of David’s death.
The Overseer answered: Data unavailable.
“What? Why the fuck not?” I said, and my hands were already moving again, asking for a full surveillance report on David’s motions. My access only allowed me twelve hours of data prior to the recorded time of death, so I worked backward to find out what was available.
The Overseer was quick with a reply.
Just before 2300, David was tracked moving from Operations to the junction, from the junction into the cargo warehouse. That was the last recorded confirmation of his presence prior to his death at 2400.
Between 2300 and 2400, there was no security, surveillance, or tracking data.
Data unavailable.
There was no medical data. There was no door or terminal access data. No cameras anywhere on the station had recorded anything during that time. No audio recorder had registered a single sound. There was nothing. Every possible record was nonexistent.
A buzzing sound grew in my ears. This should not be possible. I had the required access; the Overseer was not hiding anything from me. I checked and double-checked. Asked the Overseer to check. It was completely fucking impossible. Data unavailable, every time I asked, for every source I searched between the hours of 2300 and 2400 on the night of David’s death. It was all empty, empty, empty. Not only in Ops and Res, not only in the cargo warehouse, not only in the airlock, but everywhere throughout the facility. There were no surveillance and security data files from that hour. None. Even the exterior cameras positioned on the docking structure recorded nothing. The entire security subsystem had stopped recording at precisely the same moment, and one hour later it had picked up again as though nothing had happened.
There was nothing but an hour-long gap of darkness and silence.
“How is that possible?” van Arendonk asked. He leaned forward in his chair, staring intently at the Overseer’s output. “Is that possible?”
I didn’t want to admit it, but I had no idea. Overseers did not stop monitoring their stations for any reason. It simply didn’t happen. The whole purpose of putting the surveillance system under the control of an AI rather than a fallible human crew vulnerable to threats and extortion was to protect it from such tampering. I didn’t even know how somebody might go about blinding an Overseer for a single second, much less an entire hour. Even station sysadmins weren’t supposed to have that kind of power.
But the first step was to ask the Overseer itself, so that’s what I did. I didn’t know how the Overseer would interpret a direct query, so I dug into the commands that led to the surveillance and security blackout. I wasn’t terribly surprised to find that the command itself had been erased within microseconds of the system returning to fully operational, so I traced the origin of the deletion order. I looked specifically for any actions taken by Mary Ping, the other sysadmin. There were only twelve people on Nimue, and arguably only the two sysadmins would have even the slimmest chance of convincing the Overseer to close its eyes for an hour.
Even with no real idea what to expect, the answer still surprised me.
“Um,” I said. I double-checked the result. “The surveillance blackout command arrived in a superoperational command packet.”
“What the fuck?” van Arendonk said. “It came from Hygiea?”
“Well, it looks like that,” I quickly amended, “but it could be a false command, or somebody piggybacking on the commands from HQ, or altering it after the packet arrived but before the Overseer executed it, or . . .”
I was getting ahead of myself. Superoperational commands were how the company told the Overseers what to do. They were normally things like “produce more fuel” or “mine rock faster” or “make the crew less depressed and more productive.” The company higher-ups decided what they wanted, the master AI on Hygiea turned those demands into high-level commands and sent them out to all the mines and facilities, and the Overseers interpreted the orders as they saw fit. I didn’t work with the Overseers directly, but I knew the commands were not generally concerned with operational micromanaging.
They were sure as fuck never supposed to shut down surveillance. But there it was, inside the command packet from the master AI, a clear instruction to Nimue’s Overseer to black out surveillance. The command packet in question had arrived on the day David died, hours before his murder. It had come directly from Hygiea.
“So which is it?” van Arendonk said. “Is somebody on this miserable rock making it look like the company is covering up a murder? Or is the company actually covering up a murder?”
I had been wondering the same thing, but I hadn’t expected the Parthenope legal rep to come right out and say it.
“They sent us here to investigate it,” I pointed out.
The look van Arendonk gave me was amused. “Did they?”
Of course they hadn’t. I knew as well as anybody that we were here to clean up a mess and file a report that wouldn’t ruffle any feathers. It was unlikely anybody in the Operational Security Department had even consulted anybody in management before responding to Sigrah’s report of a suspicious death. If news got out while the higher-ups in OSD were dragging their feet and covering their asses, they would be the ones to catch the blame if anybody higher up started to get nervous—or, worse, if word of a violent death on
