“I didn’t mean we should trust them.”
“And they certainly don’t have a reputation for changing things randomly and never documenting it.”
“I only meant we have something to check against.” Distracted, I angled a kick badly and ended up shoving myself into a rubber-encased cluster of wiring hard enough to jar my left shoulder. I let out a soft grunt of pain.
Another flash of light as Ryu glanced back at me. “You okay?”
“Fine.”
“If you need to—”
“I’m fine.”
I knew I was being too sharp and had very little reason for it. Ryu was not quite a friend anymore, nor were they exactly an ex, as we had never defined the time we spent together, but they certainly weren’t an enemy. They were only being considerate—which was part of what had drawn me to them in the first place, that gentle warmth and easygoing calm that felt so out of place in the every-asshole-for-themselves corporate culture of Hygiea. It was also what had made me back away. That was my problem, not theirs. I didn’t want to be a beast to them.
But I couldn’t bring myself to apologize. The words were there, caught in my throat like a cough I could not expel. I was afraid I would only say something worse.
We climbed along that metal throat for what felt like an eon. Our headlamps barely penetrated the darkness, reaching no more than five or ten meters ahead. We took a few minutes to look over the first transmitter on the array. Identifying where the power came in, where the data came in, where it differed from the schematics. After that, Ryu started talking again. Maybe the darkness was getting to them, or the proximity to open space, or maybe they were only tired of the awkward silence. Whatever it was, they started telling me about all the ways in which criminals of investigations past had sabotaged, altered, or hijacked comms systems for various purposes. They knew of lawyers piggybacking Hygiea’s surveillance system to find potential clients in class-action lawsuits, drug designers mining personal communications to learn which work crews and stations were best targeted by their on-station dealers, hackers feeding false data sets into stations to retrain AIs to be less restrictive or more biased, extortionists sending deepfake evidence of high-level executives committing anticorporate actions, smugglers inventing false proprietary designs to auction on the black market, and so much more.
“If there’s a way to make money doing it, somebody’s figured it out,” they said. “You really don’t have any idea what your friend was into?”
Your friend, now, instead of your dead man.
“I really don’t,” I said. “If you’d asked me three years ago, I would have said David would never bother with anything illegal, because he was good enough at his work that he could find a well-paying job anywhere.”
I couldn’t see Ryu’s face, but I heard their soft, amused snort over the radio. “Doesn’t always work that way.”
“Yeah. I know.”
If it did work that way, I sure as fuck wouldn’t be crawling-climbing through a claustrophobic maintenance shaft on a corporate asteroid mine looking for proof that somebody I had very much liked and respected had gotten himself beaten to death over some harebrained moneymaking scheme. But if I said that, Ryu would give me that look, the one that asked without really asking if that meant I thought some people did belong here, just not people like me and David, people who deserved better.
So I didn’t say it. I just had the silent argument with Ryu in my head, let it play out for a few seconds, then said, “I have no idea what he would do if he was desperate enough. He was smart enough to figure out just about anything, but what he could do seems kinda limited by being stuck here.”
“Right, right. Limited data transmissions, extremely limited transport, very small crew . . .”
“But a valuable location,” I added.
“So the company likes to say.”
“Oh, I know. I’ve seen all the press reports. The jewel in Parthenope’s crown.” David had used those words in his message to me. “I’m not particularly impressed with what I’ve seen.”
“Only because you haven’t seen many asteroid mines. These facilities are a fucking palace compared to the shitholes most people are stuck in. What’s the first offline transmitter?”
“Uh, seven. Seven and twelve are both offline. Seven should be the next one.”
We didn’t find anything suspicious on number seven. It had been disconnected and partially cannibalized for parts, but there was no sign of alteration or tampering, nothing to indicate that it was routing power or data anywhere it wasn’t supposed to go.
Number twelve was different.
“Huh,” Ryu said. They looked down at me, headlamp briefly blinding me, then back at the machinery. “Come look at this.”
I climbed up beside them and rested my heels on the edge of a bracket. “What is it?”
They pointed at scratch marks on a metal panel. “These brackets have been removed, and whoever put them back in was careless, or in a hurry. None of the others have that.”
It didn’t look like much to me, but Ryu pulled out their wrench to remove the bolts. They handed them to me one by one, then slid the panel out of the brackets.
“Oh, hello,” they said. “That’s different.”
Where the other transmitters had a neatly packed cluster of parts and wiring behind their panels, this one had a shiny silver device. It was lightly curved and shaped something like a leaf, with thin metal plates overlapping like scales, broadly at the top and tapered below. The overall effect was of a shimmering beetle’s carapace, protecting its soft underbelly as it clung to the side of the shaft. The edges were polished on a clean, smooth bevel, without the faintest trace of imperfection or marring. The metal itself was silver with a bluish sheen to it, which almost gave it the look of water. It was beautiful and elegant and terribly out of place in that cramped maintenance shaft.
I wanted to touch it, to brush my
