David stayed in Ops for several hours. He spoke to no one. He received no personal communications, alerts, or unscheduled reports. He read the news about Karl Longo, but he didn’t linger over it. He accessed a few internal Parthenope reports about an Overseer virus attack on another mine a couple of years ago. He spent some time searching for a selection of Parthenope project names: Sunset, Sunshine, Sunburn, Sundown, working through about a dozen related words before giving up without finding anything. He looked at a few personal messages from home. His mother, his sister. His focus was scattered; his mind was clearly somewhere besides his work. The surveillance camera was placed in a high corner above his workstation. It captured him in profile, working sporadically throughout the night, interrupting brief minutes of activity with long breaks in which he seemed to do nothing at all. When he did work, he was accessing data from the station’s records. I read through the lists of actions and files; I had to ask the Overseer to translate a number of file names for me. Cargo transport lists. Fuel conversion efficiency data. Station-wide energy usage. A few shutdown and maintenance reports from the past few months.
At 2256, David logged out of his terminal and rose from his seat. He rubbed his hand tiredly over the back of his neck. He left Ops and passed through the junction. He looked directly at one surveillance camera for a few seconds. I held my breath, waiting for him to say something, but he remained silent. He provided his access code to enter the cargo warehouse at 2258. There was nobody else in that part of the station. Not in the warehouse, not in the airlock, not anywhere. Everybody else was in their personal quarters.
At 2300, the surveillance went dark.
When the blackout ended at 2400, the lights in the cargo warehouse airlock were on. The hexagonal window was a hole of darkness rather than a faint source of light, and there was David, dead on the floor, surrounded by blood. He lay there alone for seven hours before Sigrah thought to look for him.
I didn’t know I was crying until I tasted salt at the corner of my mouth.
I wiped the tears from my face. It was so unfathomably unfair that somebody so clever and bright and full of life should end like that, but crying about it didn’t help. There was no help for David now, nothing to change the sad bloody end of a life that could have been so brilliant. All I could do was find out who had killed him, and why, and what he had been trying to tell me before the end.
I got to work tracing David’s hidden message. If I could figure out how he had reached out to me without leaving a trace, I could also find out if he had been communicating with anybody else, like a contact on Hygiea or elsewhere.
Nimue had both optical and radio communications arrays, each with multiple transmitters and antennae. The radio array was for broadcasts, live conversations with nearby ships or stations, emergencies, rare real-time back-and-forths between company execs when a lawyer needed to beg favors of a CEO, that sort of thing. Low data capacity, encrypted but still easy to intercept. It was never used for things like superoperational command packets or operations reports, or for moving large chunks of data around, so it was not what I was looking for. David would have used the optical array to hide his video message.
Because of Nimue’s elongated shape, its slightly wobbling rotation, and the fact that it had communications infrastructure only on one end, Nimue and Hygiea had line of sight to exchange optical data bursts every seven hours. The command packet had arrived at 0917, and the next scheduled data exchange was at 1613 that afternoon—which correlated with when the message to me had arrived on Hygiea.
Immediately I saw that something was wrong.
The 1613 data burst from Nimue had not been successfully completed.
My pulse quickened. The data from Hygiea had arrived on schedule and without problem, but the reverse was not true. When Nimue tried to send its own data burst, there had been a power failure in the transmitters of the optical array. By the time the array was back online, Nimue had rotated out of its window of opportunity. There had been an encrypted radio query about the failure from Hygiea; Sigrah had responded with an update regarding ongoing repairs on the optical array. The data packet was successfully transmitted seven hours later.
Hygiea hadn’t received anything from Nimue at 1613. But I had.
Sigrah had said the optical array had ongoing problems. I checked the maintenance logs and found numerous reports from Katee King, Nimue’s electrical engineer, recording her increasing frustration. Several times over the past few months, power surges in the array had caused transmissions to fail. King had been taking the optical transmitters offline one by one in an attempt to isolate the cause, so far without success. A few of the transmitters had been removed from service entirely. But no matter what she tried, no matter how many parts she replaced, no matter how many requests she and Sigrah sent to Parthenope for new transmitters, every couple of weeks another data transmission failed because of a power surge in the array.
But now I knew the transmitters weren’t failing entirely. They were just being hijacked for unofficial use, and the power surges were likely designed to cover up David’s hidden, unauthorized transmissions.
Katee King was diligent about filing her reports; the pattern was easy to spot. The problems had started abruptly ten months ago. David had been on Nimue for eleven months.
Nobody hijacked a transmitter for legitimate reasons. Nor did they do it just
