I knew what I needed to do next. I couldn’t ask King or anybody else from the crew to do it for me. One of them had killed David. I wasn’t the most devoted OSD Safety Officer, but even I knew it was bad investigative practice to send a potential suspect out to collect evidence. I was going to have to check the optical array myself.
“Fuck,” I said, and I stood up, and I went to find Adisa and Ryu.
I really did not want to go outside.
SIX
The good news was I didn’t have to go outside.
The bad news was I had to get close enough that I wasn’t sure the precise details mattered much in the deepest recesses of my lizard brain, where all my instincts were screaming at me about my inevitable, imminent death in the vacuum.
“You can wait here, you know,” Ryu said. Their voice was tinny over the helmet radio, their eyes behind the faceplate wide and concerned. The lightweight vacuum suits were just a precaution, supposedly, but it was the kind of precaution that only made me more worried. “Just tell me what to look for. You can talk me through it. You don’t have to—”
“Avery,” I said sharply. “Not helping.”
The concern in their expression melted away to amusement. “You are so fucking stubborn. Are we going?”
We were going. The optical array was located on Nimue’s docking structure, accessible via a long, enclosed maintenance shaft. Sigrah wasn’t happy about us going out there; she seemed to think that if her engineer hadn’t found anything, we had no chance of doing better. Adisa had ignored her objections and told us to take a look. He was currently sitting down with Sigrah to ask about what various criminal enterprises might be running under her nose on Nimue.
Ryu turned the manual wheel that secured the hatch to the maintenance shaft. “No electronic lock, but there is an ID tracker. Did your dead man ever come through here?”
“He’s not my dead man,” I said. “And not according to the security logs.”
They moved to the side as the lock disengaged, and they tugged the hatch open, revealing a dark space beyond. There was a slight exhale as the pressure equalized; I felt a nudge of air from behind, like the station was trying to push me out. Ryu switched on their headlamp and leaned through the hatch.
The only crew the Overseer had logged passing through this hatch were Katee King and the man who had been the electrical engineer before her. Her predecessor had left Nimue eight months ago, a few months after David arrived. The man had bought out the remaining three years on his contract with a sudden windfall, moved back to Earth, took a job fixing radio telescopes somewhere in western Australia. I had a query out to HQ regarding where that sudden windfall had come from, but I rather doubted I would get an answer more useful than “inheritance from previously unknown rich uncle” or similar. Nobody ever put “payment for participation in lucrative black market scheme” on their company exit interview forms.
“Well.” Ryu glanced back at me. “Ready?”
“I’m not the one who keeps stalling.”
“I mean, I know you’re not used to this hands-on shit, so I can get Mohammad to help if—”
“Yeah, okay, ask the superior officer to do the grunt work.”
“He would. He’s not so bad to work with, when he decides to give a fuck. And he’s Martian,” they added. “Crawling through tight spaces to find illegal tech is basically his entire heritage.”
“Problematic stereotypes aside, I’m fine. Let’s go.”
“If you’re sure—”
“For fuck’s sake, just move.”
They gave me a grin and a cheeky thumbs-up and climbed through the hatch. I switched on my own headlamp and followed.
Because Nimue was relatively small, shaped like a potato, actively being hollowed out on the inside, and rotating with a weird wobble, its gravity was less a reliable force and more a matter of politely agreeing where the floor ought to be. That worked well enough to trick the mind in Ops and Res and parts of the facility designed with human concepts of up and down, where one was surrounded by such luxuries as floors, ceilings, and waste hatches where one could deposit vomit from a sudden wave of vertigo.
It did not work when decoupled from those elements. It really, really did not work.
There was no floor in the maintenance shaft, no ceiling. Everything was walls, and everything was crowded with so many conduits, pipes, and ducts that climbing into the shaft felt rather like being swallowed by a mechanical beast. I was instantly disoriented, with my head telling me I was upside down, the tug on my muscles telling me I was falling, and my vision telling me the rest of my body was lying.
I squeezed my eyes shut to give my brain a chance to adjust. When I opened them again, Ryu was already several meters away, the beam of their headlamp filling the shaft with a kaleidoscope of shadow and light. I decided to think of it as climbing, if only to keep the disorientation at bay, and followed.
“It would help if we knew what we were looking for,” Ryu said.
“Oh, certainly,” I agreed. “That would help a lot. Why didn’t I think of that?”
I couldn’t see the look they sent my way—all I got was a flash of their headlamp—but I understood the tone of their voice well enough. “What I mean,” they said, with exaggerated patience, “is that I’m going to take a look at one of the working transmitters before we head up to the ones that aren’t working.”
“We have the schematics from the Overseer,” I said.
“Right, right. Station engineers are well-known for following
