After a moment, I said, “Whatever he was doing, he wasn’t . . . He wasn’t a bad person, and he definitely wasn’t stupid or rash. He must have had a reason.” I cleared my throat delicately. “Um, so. What was that about before? Van Arendonk said you don’t have to talk to somebody? Did he mean Sigrah?”
Adisa let out a slow breath. “Ah, no. He meant Mary Ping. The other sysadmin.”
“Okay.” I had absolutely no idea what that had to do with anything. “But why? We really do need to talk to her, obviously. Do you know her?” All I knew about Ping was that she had switched shifts with David—which was why she was first on our list, but it didn’t explain Adisa and van Arendonk’s weirdness.
“She was on the Aeolia investigation before she moved here,” Adisa said.
The name Aeolia rang a bell. I tried to dredge up the details from memory. It had been on the company news while I was bedridden in the Parthenope hospital on Badenia. Mass casualty incident. Something about terrorists using a virus to infiltrate the station’s Overseer. That was supposed to be impossible, but it happened anyway, and a lot of people died. By the time I started work with my newly signed contract binding me to Parthenope for five years, there was a plaque on Hygiea commemorating the employees who had lost their lives on Aeolia. I couldn’t remember who the company and OSA had blamed. Not Black Halo or any of the groups sympathetic to their antiexpansionist cause. That I would have remembered. Still something about it tugged at the back of my mind.
It took a few seconds for me to remember. “Oh, right. I think David was reading something about Aeolia before he died.”
“He was?” Adisa looked like this was the exact opposite of what he wanted to hear.
“I think so. Let me check.” I reached for my PD and asked the Overseer for a summary of David’s activity on the day he died.
There it was: Parthenope’s unclassified internal reports about the Aeolia incident, which had taken place about nine months after the Symposium disaster. David had already been working for Parthenope by then.
“Right. Here it is. He looked at the incident reports, but only for a few minutes. I don’t know what they say. I haven’t had a chance to look yet. I can get them now, if you want?”
Adisa started to say something, then changed his mind. “Do it later. Right now, I think we need to talk to Mary Ping.”
NINE
Mary Ping was a few years past forty, pretty, with pale skin, straight black hair, and golden-brown eyes. She wore a standard gray Parthenope jumpsuit with a belt cinched tight around her waist and gloves dangling from one pocket.
“Hello,” she said, pausing in the doorway. “You wanted to speak to me?”
“We do. Have a seat,” said Adisa.
“I apologize for keeping you waiting. I was down in Level 5, trying to convince the Overseer and the manufacturing module to stop arguing.”
Ping moved into the room with effortless grace, her steps dancer-like and smooth and silent; she had no gecko soles on her boots. She sat across from us and smiled.
“It’s good to see you again, Safety Inspector,” she said to Adisa. “I didn’t realize you were once again investigating violent incidents. But I suppose you couldn’t stay away forever, however much you might want to.”
“We need to talk to you about David Prussenko,” he said.
“I’m happy to help in any way I can.” Ping rested her hands on the table, fingers laced, relaxed. “But I don’t know if any of it will help. I liked David, but I didn’t know him very well.”
“You worked with him for eleven months, yeah?” Adisa said.
“Well, yes, but you know what I mean. Work and friendship are very different things, even in a crew this small.” Ping’s appearance suggested a mixed Asian Earth ancestry in her family tree, and her accent was clearly from somewhere off-planet, odd and hard to identify. Not posh like Yuèliàng, in spite of her mannered word choice, and forced in a way that made me certain she was pitching her voice lower than its natural register. It was the voice of somebody trying to sound more serious and more upper-class.
“Who did know him well? Who were his friends?” Adisa asked.
“He was close to Neeta. He also spent a lot of downtime with Miguel. They knew him best, I suppose.”
I looked at the personnel roster. Miguel Vera, fuel tech. Neeta Hunter, station roboticist. I recognized the latter’s employee photo: she was the young woman with the silver hair who had come to see where David died.
“Why are there two sysadmins here, aye?” Adisa asked. “There aren’t normally, on a station this size.”
“Most stations this size don’t have multiple concurrent operations. The mine is only one part of it. There is also the construction of the furnace and the processing facilities. The Overseer can handle it—they’re quite clever minds, you know—but on a human scale it is a lot of work for a crew this size,” Ping said. She separated her hands, tapped her fingers on the table, clasped them together again. “So if you’re asking if I was resentful that they sent David along to take over half my job, the answer is a resounding no. I welcomed his help. David was very good at his job.”
I didn’t think Ping was being completely honest, but I couldn’t quite figure out why I felt that way. There was nothing cagey about the way she spoke, no hesitation or darting eyes. If anything, she seemed far too calm. She looked directly at Adisa, as though I wasn’t in the room at all. I was used to that—a lot of people didn’t like to look at
