Nimue was a C-type asteroid in the shape of an elongated ellipsoid, giving it the look of a gray, lumpy potato. It was about twelve kilometers in diameter on its long axis, five at most on its short axes, which put it on the larger size for rocks in the Hygiea family. Most of the exterior components of Parthenope’s mine were clustered at one end of the ellipsoid; the docking structure jutted outward like a long, spindly stamen of a flower, with the facilities for cargo, operations, and crew quarters forming three petals at its base. The Operations and Residential sections were decommissioned ships that had been parked on Nimue, buried in the loose rock, and adapted into a permanent station to serve out the remainder of their useful years. There was also an abandoned Unified Earth Navy base on the asteroid. Nimue was too far from the inner system to have been useful during the Martian rebellion, and now the base was nothing more than a few empty bunkers and missile silos, stripped of useful parts, indistinguishable from the gravel and dust.
The heart of the facility—the reason that bleak little chunk of rock was so valuable to Parthenope—was not visible from the outside. Nimue was home to a massive unfinished ore-processing furnace that, when completed, would stretch along the entire longitudinal axis of the asteroid.
The station had twelve crew members—eleven now—and an Overseer. Cargo ships visited twice a month; Nimue was remote, but not so remote as to make it wholly inaccessible. For a good portion of its orbit, it was within cosmic spitting distance of major outer systems shipping routes. There were worse places to be stationed. There were better places too.
Data, maps, names, reports. I read them all hungrily. I wanted to be ready. I thought it might prepare me for what I would find.
I was wrong. Nothing could have prepared me for the sight of David’s dead body.
They had left him where they found him: lying on his side in an airlock in the cargo warehouse. The interior door of the airlock was open. David was on the floor, with one hand outstretched and his fingers curled into claws on the cold metal floor. His face and the visible side of his head were a mess of blood and matted hair and pulped tissue. Somebody had beaten him viciously. Blood was splattered all over the walls of the airlock, over the control panel, over his clothes. Two fingers on his left hand were broken backward—he had tried to fight back. The murder weapon lay on the floor beside him: a long metal bar, with dried blood and bits of tissue on one end.
It had been nearly thirty hours since David had died. The inside of the airlock was cold; decay was encroaching slowly. I pressed my lips together and swallowed. I tried to look away, but I couldn’t take my eyes off of David’s body.
“We haven’t touched him. This is how I found him.” Yevgenya Sigrah, Nimue’s foreperson, spoke with the clipped accent of a Vesta native and the undisguised annoyance of a site manager whose operation had been inconvenienced.
“You found him yourself, yeah?” Safety Inspector Adisa asked. He was the ranking Safety Officer on the OSD incident team and my immediate boss for the duration of this investigation.
“That’s what I said.” Sigrah was a stocky, gray-haired woman of about fifty, with a permanent scowl and a long scar down the left side of her face. There was a notable sharpness in the way she answered, but I couldn’t tell if it was because she had something to hide or just didn’t want security officers fucking around in her station. “Checked his room in the morning, about 0700. He wasn’t there, so I checked the ID tracking and access logs.”
“Do you know why he was out here?” Adisa asked. He wasn’t looking at Sigrah. He was standing in the doorway, hands in his pockets, looking down at the corpse. Part of me wanted him to move to the side so I could get a better look. Most of me wanted to turn away so I didn’t have to see anything else.
“No,” Sigrah said shortly. “He was on third shift. He wouldn’t be the first to use the quiet shift for personal business. I tell them to keep their lovers’ quarrels and petty arguments out of the work.”
From the first moment we’d stepped off the transport ship and onto Nimue, Sigrah had been telling us that David’s death was clearly the result of a personal argument. I wanted to ask her what she meant by that—who could have hated David that much, how did she know, who was that violent, why would they do this—but I kept my questions to myself for now and tried not to flinch every time Adisa asked something that felt completely unrelated or irrelevant.
“What do you use this airlock for?” Adisa asked.
This was the first assignment I’d worked with Mohammad Adisa. I knew him by sight and reputation, partly because Operational Security was a chummy clique of eager gossips, but mostly because there weren’t many Martians working on Hygiea in any department. Adisa was average height, on the thin side of average build, brown skin, black hair turning to gray at the temples. Fifties, divorced, burned-out—so claimed the gossip mill—should have left OSD a few years ago, kept going instead. I had expected to have a fight on my hands when I asked to join the investigation. Personal connections between officers and victims made for messy reports, after all, especially if private lawyers ever got involved and started making noise about company liability. But Adisa had only shrugged and approved the request without asking why.
Sigrah glanced at the bloodied room, looked away. “Not a lot. Routine maintenance on the cargo system.” She jerked a thumb upward. “There’s a fuel line up there that’s broken down a few times. Needs a walkabout every few months. But David
