“Oh,” I said quietly. I swallowed. My voice was thick in my throat. “I know—I recognize this. David made this.”
“You’re sure?”
I withdrew my hand. “I spent years working with him. I recognize the style.” I let out a choked little laugh. “Always so much prettier than it needed to be.”
“It’s not that I doubt you, but . . . what is it?”
“Probably exactly what we think it is,” I said. “Something to take power from the array to use this transmitter. I assume David paid the previous electrical engineer to come out here and install it to hijack the transmitter. Or he could have directed the installation remotely, using a bot. That would be trivial for him.”
Ryu leaned to one side, then the other, bumping their shoulder into mine as they examined the device. “It’s possible, I guess. We should check the station’s machine and printing facilities to see when he made or modified this thing here. If it was him.”
They were right, of course. We had to check. But I had no doubt that the silver device was David’s work.
“We should bring it in for a better look,” Ryu said. Behind their faceplate, their expression was thoughtful. They tapped the radio control on the arm of their suit to switch frequencies. “Hey, Mohammad, we found something. Marley says it looks like the victim’s handiwork. I want to bring it inside to take it apart.”
“If you can do that without damaging it, yeah?” Adisa said.
“That’s the idea. Can you see how it’s attached down there?” Ryu said to me. “I can’t see much at this end.”
I lowered myself down to another bracket to get a look at the bottom of the device, where the data and power cables would have entered the original system. The space beneath the silver carapace was very narrow, and the reflective surface made it hard for me to see into the darkness. The device moved slightly when Ryu gripped it, and the gap widened just enough for me to see the angular lines of four braces holding it in place.
“Can you see anything?” Ryu asked.
“I can see how it’s fixed in place, but I can’t see how it’s attached to the power or data lines.”
“Can you dislodge it?”
“Just a sec.”
I reached for the most accessible leg—using my left hand, the one that could be replaced if it got smashed or zapped—and felt along its length to the mechanical clamp at its end. The gap was so narrow my space-suited forearm barely fit, and the angle put an uncomfortable twinge of pain in my left shoulder. I changed my position and reached again. There was a whir of noise from within the device. Light sparked from some unknown source and a crackling sound filled my ears.
“Hester,” Ryu said, “get your arm out of there.”
“I’ve almost got it.”
“Hester.”
Their voice was low and tight. I looked up to see sparks arcing outward from the wrench, the tool kit, the radio antennae on their suit. Their eyes were wide, and in the faceplate of their helmet I saw mirrored sparks from my own suit reflected. I felt nothing; the suits were nonconducting, our bodies safe and sealed inside. But the effect was deeply unsettling. I withdrew my arm, careful not to jostle anything. The static grew louder. The sparks spread all around us, dancing down the maintenance shaft.
“Not good,” Ryu said, their voice almost lost in the radio’s crackle. “We should—”
A blinding flare erupted around us, so bright my prosthetic eye glitched and my natural eye seared with pain. All I could see was Ryu’s silhouette surrounded by light, engulfed in light, gone. There was a furious roar, a sudden pressure all around, and the maintenance shaft exploded into a storm of lightning.
SEVEN
I couldn’t see anything except fiery white light.
My prosthetic eye began to glitch uncontrollably, sending a rainbow of colors across my vision. The roar in my ears was constant and mechanical: the discharge had fried the radio. Beyond that constant, grinding static, I heard popping and clapping all the way down the maintenance shaft in small bursts of thunder. Every instinct was telling me to run, run, run—but I couldn’t run, I was hanging like an idiot in a vertical shaft, with only a company-issued nonconductive worksuit between me and death by electrocution. If the suit wasn’t damaged. If it had been tested recently. If Parthenope had bothered to stock Nimue with functional suits in the first place. In one of the first extortion cases I’d worked, I’d come across documents detailing exactly how much the company paid out in negligence lawsuits every year and how little it was compared to how much they saved by ignoring OSA safety regulations and trusting that only a tiny fraction of the people who died had family who could afford to sue. I didn’t need to think about that right now. I needed to get the fuck out of there.
My left eye was still glitching, but I could at least look around without risking giving myself a seizure. The first thing I saw was Ryu’s boots about ten centimeters from my helmet.
“Avery,” I said. “Hey, Avery.”
The radio threw my voice back at me as a painful squeal. I switched it off. That stopped the static and the feedback, but not the clanks, sparks, a distant thumping sound—what the fuck was that?—and my own breath, ragged and too fast. I grabbed Ryu’s foot to get their attention.
“Hey, come on, we need to get out of here.”
No response. I shook their foot again.
“Avery! Come on. The radios are fucked. Look at me.”
David’s beautiful device was, unsurprisingly, a charred and smoking mess. The silver shell was distorted; the whole thing belched gray smoke and blue sparks.
As a self-destruct mechanism, the power surge had been devastatingly effective. We had sealed the device’s fate the moment we tried to move it. If
