Obsolescence, by Martha Wells, from the Take Us To A Better Place anthology, free to read online: Get the official free PDF in English and Spanish.
Jixy heard the yelling and crying and headed down toward the maintenance bay with vengeance on her mind. She didn’t know what those kids were doing, but this time somebody was going to get sent back to Mommyland with a note reading “I’m disruptive and a danger to myself and others” seal-taped to their forehead.
When she dropped into the bay, Arnie smacked right into her, and in the light gravity knocked her back into the bulkhead. She thought he’d leapt on her to play-fight while mistaking her for one of his friends, but then it registered that he was the one doing the sobbing.
Jixy hugged him automatically, looking past his wiry shoulders to see who the culprit was. She spotted Lilly’s hair first, a big dark pouf secured with a purple band, bouncing as Lilly rapidly climbed up the light gravity bay toward her. But she couldn’t imagine Lilly doing anything to make Arnie cry like this. Then the incident response alarm jolted Jixy in the shoulder where her comm was secured. All the kids knew better than to hit it for something as minor as a play-fight-turned-real. Jixy demanded, “What the fu— What the hell happened?”
“It’s Greggy, he’s hurt—” Lilly reached her, catching the overhead handlebar. Her dark eyes were big with shock, and her throat moved like she was swallowing back the urge to vomit. “He— Something— Something hurt him—”
Jixy’s heart sunk through her stomach as her adrenaline ramped up. An accident, then. A bad one. She disentangled Arnie and pulled the comm off her shoulder to check that Lilly had also hit the code for a medical emergency. She had, smart kid. “Where is he?” Jixy swung forward. “No, baby, you stay here with Arnie, just point.”
Lilly pointed, down and back toward the entrance of the second-level tech storage compartments.
Jixy pulled herself along the ladder, her feet floating behind her. This was spoke four, and she was moving toward the end that connected with the center shaft, well away from the gravity created by the spin of the station’s outer ring. She reached the first storage compartment and looked inside.
Blood floated in the air, but there wasn’t much of it. Most of the globules were the light gray augment fluid. Then she saw Greggy, drifting in the center of the compartment.
Gashes marred the metal cage of his chest, his limbs had twisted, the flesh ones still covered by the sleeves of his uniform coverall, but the three metal appendages that had replaced his legs were broken into bits. As he drifted, Jixy found herself staring into a terrible wound on the side of his head. The bone shattered, the metal peeled open, broken through to his brain...
Something happened to his old bot parts, Jixy thought, even as her stomach tried to surge right up her throat. Something exploded. That shouldn’t be possible. Augments didn’t explode, even augments as old as Greggy’s. Something near him must have exploded, or broken free and hit him. But there was nothing like that in the compartment, no blast damage, no floating debris...except for Greggy.
Jixy had Dubarre, their general fixer, go over the bay to figure out the cause of the accident while she and Shen Jean the medic took care of poor Greggy.
This meant retrieving all the bits of him that were floating in low gravity, and using a vacuum tool to suck up the blood and fluid. Jixy had done a lot of jobs in her life, but she’d never had to clean up the body of a friend like it was floating garbage. She kept shaking, and her fingers were freezing. It wasn’t cold in the bay, so it had to be shock. Shen Jean kept wiping her face on her sleeve, her tears unable to fall in the light gravity. “You okay?” Jixy asked her, and her voice came out as a raw rasp.
“Yeah. This just happened, Jixy. He was still warm.” Shen Jean didn’t usually look anywhere near seventy-two, but at the moment you could see every year on her face. “He told me the other day he thought he needed another component refit.”
“He did?” Greggy had been an exploration rover for the Luna government for over eighty years and had helped build the early settlements on Luna and Mars. When all the surviving rovers had been pensioned off twenty-two years ago, Greggy had spent a month in a hospital, having many of his outdated specialized augments replaced. At that point, Greggy could have used his pension to settle down in a cushy habitat somewhere, but he had kept working and ended up on Kidland Station as a teaching assistant. He had told Jixy he had been a teacher back on Earth, in his first life before the rover program. He was great—had been great with the kids.
Jixy felt her throat getting tight again. Shen Jean, sadly studying the photo on Greggy’s torn ID badge, wasn’t helping. Jixy added, “You think it was something internal then?” Maybe her first impression had been right; a power source in one of Greggy’s old augments had malfunctioned.
“No,” Shen Jean said, then frowned. She carefully tucked the badge into a pocket and sealed the flap. “So much damage, it had to be—”
Then from the other end of the compartment, Dubarre said quietly, “This wasn’t an accident.”
“Huh?” Jixy grabbed a support and turned.
Dubarre was holding a bolter used for heavy construction, studying Greggy’s head, still attached to his floating body. Jixy couldn’t look at the body so she focused on the tool. She wasn’t sure exactly what kind of bolter it was, but she knew a category three safety violation when she saw one. It shouldn’t be here, not on a completed, occupied station. Where the hell did that come from? Jixy wondered. Had Greggy brought it in and it had somehow misfired and killed him? No, that was stupid. One misfire wouldn’t do that, and she could see from here its cartridge was empty. And where would he have gotten it? It couldn’t have come in on a supply run without being flagged in the inventory system as a hazardous item.
Dubarre’s expression held growing consternation and disbelief. He said, “You’re going to need to do an autopsy, Shen Jean.”
“What?” Shen Jean said. Then in horror and dismay she grimaced, wrinkles deep at the corners of her mouth. “No one did this. Don’t tell me that.”
“Huh?” Jixy said again, then her brain slammed back into gear. I’ve been stupid, stupid. I should have thought of this first. She pulled on the support to draw herself closer to the body. “Show me.”
Dubarre gently turned Greggy’s head and held up the bolter. Right on the sharp end was a clot of blood and brain matter, mixed with short strands of Greggy’s faded blond hair. Jixy had seen the gash and hadn’t understood what she was looking at. With the tool for comparison, now she saw. Her heart dropped. “Oh, not this.”
Shen Jean whispered, “Who would— Why would—”
Jixy thought about all of them, the adult staff and the kids of assorted ages, and her heart just wouldn’t have it. It was impossible.
The alternative, that it wasn’t one of them, was equally impossible.
Except it obviously wasn’t, because there was Greggy’s dead body. She swallowed back bile. “Bag the rest. We got to get to command.”
Jixy ordered everyone to the command module. Most were there already, since it was standard training to go there in an emergency and wait for instructions. All the modules were along the ring in the gravity zone, and Jixy felt heavier than usual as they took the lift up the spoke into the ring. While Dubarre and Shen Jean took poor Greggy to the infirmary, Jixy asked the education admin Tia Joi to do a headcount to make sure everyone was here, then she ducked into the admin center.
The first thing they taught you in station admin emergency response was the phrase, “Hull integrity, life support, communication.” Jixy was in uncharted territory here but decided communication needed to go first. She initiated an emergency call to Base Admin and recorded a brief description of what they had found and what they were afraid it meant. She knew she sounded shaken, but for once she didn’t care; somebody who knew what they were doing needed to get the hell here and take charge.
With the transmission lag, it would take time for Base to respond. It was going to be a nerve-racking wait. She planted her hands on the console. Right, what’s next?
Safety. She had to make sure they were secure up here before she command-sealed everything. She called Sully and asked them to take a group to search the module. “Okay, uh, what are we searching for?” Sully replied.
That was a good question. Reluctant to admit what she thought was happening out loud, Jixy said slowly, “Do a rescue search.”
There was a long silence. That was the search protocol for a missing person, someone who was hurt and stuck somewhere. It meant looking in every spot a person could conceivably conceal themselves in, intentionally or not. Then Sully took a sharp breath. “Will do, Jixy.”
Jixy signed off. The command module wasn’t very big, so it shouldn’t take them long. Now she needed to figure out how this had happened. If something small had managed to slip in past the scan buoys and attach to the hull, it might show up on the maintenance stats. She pulled the log and checked it, once hurriedly then again slow and careful.
No anomalies on the hull. “Of course not,” Jixy muttered aloud. Why should anything about this be easy? But the sensors were meant to look for leaks and damage. A small vehicle or even a powered suit might go unnoticed, and the operator could get in through one of the locks while it was in an open cycle for an automated delivery.
Stations weren’t made to be impregnable because there was no reason to be. You assumed anybody showing up and wanting in would either have scheduled their arrival in advance or be desperate for help and trying to draw as much attention as possible. What was happening now was just weird and creepy and...Jixy had never seen anything like it. Maybe in the bigger stations like Mommyland, the central hospital station, and the Io and Titan mining depots, but Kidland was part school and part work center for staff who needed low-impact assignments due to age or medical reasons. They helped the kids do their education courses, taught them station jobs, and did the light work that kept the station running as a supply transfer point. This kind of thing—pretty much any kind of thing at all—never happened here.
Her comm beeped, and Tia Joi said, “Headcount’s complete, everyone’s here.” There was a hesitation, then she admitted, “Sorry for the delay. I was coming up one short, and then remembered the total included Greggy.”
Jixy rubbed her face. “I think we’re all going to be doing that for a while. Thanks, Joi.”
Joi signed off. Jixy was glad her first impulse had been to order everyone up here; maybe part of her brain had been working despite the shock. Now that she was certain nobody was off somewhere working and ignoring comms, she put the station in emergency mode. Every hatch outside the command module would be sealed and alarmed, and it would take an admin code to get through.
Jixy braced herself for a second, then pasted a calm, confident expression on her face. She pushed away from the console and stepped out of the admin center.
From the foyer platform, she could see down into the big lounge, where the bench seats along the walls, the floor, and the couches in the two entertainment kiosks were mostly full of kids, with a few adults scattered through. There was a smaller secondary lounge off the mess hall where the others would be gathered. Everyone seemed confused, upset, restless.
Greggy had told her how comfortable he found it here, as opposed to the new habitats. Rovers were few and far between now, and people just weren’t used to seeing them anymore. But most of the adults on Kidland were old enough to have worked exploration or construction in the Mars tunnels, and just about everybody had prostheses or internal medical augments of some kind. None were as old as Greggy, of course, but they were old enough to remember watching news stories about the heroic rovers founding the first bases on Luna and Mars. Jixy wasn’t, but she’d been born on Mars and studied them as history. At thirty-five, she was also the youngest adult on Kidland Station.
Tia Joi, standing near the entrance to the lounge, spotted Jixy and stepped into the foyer. Sully and Aarti came in from the other direction. Both looked worried, but Sully told her, “We searched, there’s nothing out of the ordinary.”
Keeping her voice low, Tia Joi cut right to the chase and said, “Did someone get aboard and do this? How could that happen?”
Jixy hadn’t expected to keep it quiet, but she had hoped for a little more time than this. She said, “That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”
“It’s happened before,” Sully said. As Joi and Aarti turned to look at them, they added, “On Juno Outremer Three-four, thieves got aboard and stole supplies.” They shrugged uncomfortably. “We didn’t find out till they were gone, though, and no one got hurt.”
“Greggy must have stumbled onto them, tried to stop them,” Aarti said, sick at the thought.
Sliding in between Sully and Aarti, Lilly said, “We need to be detectives.” Her expression was determined.
“Lilly, I told you not to speculate about this,” Tia Joi said, firm but kind. “You need to sit down and finish your juice.”
“I drank the juice,” Lilly protested. “That’s for shock. I don’t have shock.”
Jixy wished she didn’t have shock. She hoped her competent admin expression was convincing as she said, “Base will send somebody soon.” She told Joi, Aarti, and Sully, “Just...make sure the others stay calm.”
She got their grim nods and went on through the hatch into the infirmary. Greggy was laid out on the med table, Shen Jean bending over him. Jixy told Dubarre, “You’ve got to find out if that bolter is on our inventory somewhere.”
His expression said that he knew that as well as she did. “I’ve started a query. It’s class three hazardous equipment; if it was here before today, it’ll be on the list.”
“They came at him from the front,” Shen Jean said. She indicated the impact points in Greggy’s chest components. “They killed him, then they started trying to take his parts, then got mad and just...” She made a helpless gesture. “Went off on him.”
“Take his parts?” Jixy repeated. “What kind of sick—” Then she caught an expression on Shen Jean’s face. “Shen Jean?”
“There’s a story,” Shen Jean said. She straightened up. “Scary story told in the Mars tunnels, you know.”
“Yeah.” Dubarre nodded for her to go ahead. “I heard that story in the Juno stations, too.”
Jixy thought this was not the moment for a scary story, not when they were standing over pieces of their friend and coworker laid out on the med table. Until Shen Jean said, “Something or someone goes after the helper robots and people with prostheses and augments.” She nodded to Dubarre’s prosthetic arm. He hadn’t liked the dark brown options since none quite matched his skin tone, so he had gone for red and silver instead. The effect was quite stylish, and he tended to wear tank tops to show it off. Shen Jean continued, “Lots of prostheses and medical augments in the tunnels, right, from all the construction accidents.” She tapped her chest, where her heart augments were. “This story used to scare us enough to make us pee.”
Jixy remembered her first thought when she had seen Greggy’s body. The thought she hadn’t wanted to express. That it had looked like someone had tried to break him up for salvage while he was still alive—“But it was just a story.”
“Yeah,” Shen Jean agreed and looked down sadly at the remains.
“No. In the Juno stations it was more than a story.” Dubarre unconsciously cradled his arm. “I saw hazard bulletins that mentioned it from Juno Central, and it showed up in one of those true crime shows from Earth. They called whoever was doing it the Piecework Killer.”
Jixy didn’t have time for this. “We’re supposed to teach critical thinking on this station, folks.” Lumping what was probably a bunch of unrelated assaults and bar-fight murders together and then coming up with a serial killer theory to explain it was what the entertainment media did best, and Jixy enjoyed it as much as anybody, but this was the real world they were dealing with here.
Dubarre lifted his brows. “Augments do get stolen.”
“Sure, but from morgues and medical storage.” Augments were usually so tailored to an individual’s medical profile that there was no point in stealing them, except for their parts. It wasn’t like you could take one from one person, stick it in someone else, and expect it to work. Not that that would stop someone who wanted one so much they would kill to get it, Jixy guessed. “I’m sure someone’s got killed for a medical augment before because people are terrible and anything can happen. But let’s not tell everybody there’s a serial killer aboard, okay?”
Shen Jean grimaced and said, “When we get done here, I’m gonna do a news search on it.”
Dubarre said, “Jixy, you don’t have Greggy’s comm in your pocket, do you?” He was looking over the debris from the scene laid out and sorted into piles on the other med table.
“What? No.” Jixy lifted her brows. That was solid evidence, something she could work with. “It’s gone?”
He studied the fragments of what was left of Greggy’s augments. “I’m not even seeing any pieces here.”
Shen Jean turned with a frown. “We got all the debris, I’m certain. So whoever did it must have took Greggy’s comm.”
Dubarre glanced up, thoughtful. “If they’re dumb enough to leave it on, I can scan for it.”
Jixy didn’t think whoever did this was dumb. Mean and angry, but not dumb. “You try that, I need to check with the kids.”
Jixy called Lilly and Arnie into the little compartment Dubarre used as an office. They sat down on the deck in front of her because there wasn’t anyplace else to sit. Arnie looked nervous, but Lilly seemed more determined than anything else. She said, “Blood splatters. The murderer will have blood splatters on their clothes. We need to search the station.”
“Lilly, it’s not—” That easy, Jixy meant to say, because obviously this had come straight from the true crime or mystery thrillers in the entertainment kiosks. But it wasn’t a bad idea at all. “Hold on.” She keyed her comm and said, “Shen Jean, can you give everybody a little DNA scan for Greggy’s augment fluid? Just to make sure.”
“Oh, good idea,” Shen Jean replied.
Jixy signed off and said, “That was a good idea, Lilly.”
Lilly nodded seriously. Arnie elbowed her in approval.
Jixy got straight to the point. “I need to ask you two, did you see, or pick up, Greggy’s comm when you found him?”
She got nearly identical head shakes and “No, Commander.” Jixy added, “Think carefully. You didn’t see the comm anywhere?”
Arnie swallowed hard. “We thought—” he began, and stopped.
Lilly’s jaw hardened and she lifted her chin. “We didn’t know it was Greggy, or even a person. We thought somebody was joking us, had made a dummy out of garbage to scare somebody.” Her voice broke on the last word. She sniffled but didn’t cry. “That’s what we thought.”
Arnie was going green under the light brown of his skin. Jixy edged the waste container closer to him in case he vomited. These kids were going to need therapy. Half the station was going to need therapy after this. Jixy pushed, “But you didn’t see the comm.”
“No, Commander.” Lilly was serious. “The murderer must have taken it. To use it to listen in on our communications.”
Arnie frowned. “They’d have their own comm, though.”
Lilly gave him a withering look. “Wasn’t one of us. A stranger did this.”
Arnie scoffed, but he looked worried. “But nobody could just get on the station without us knowing.”
Lilly shrugged. “Somebody did.”
Missing comm and a class 3 bolter appearing out of nowhere. It wasn’t proof, but it was sure as hell evidence. “Well, Lilly, I can’t say I think you’re wrong.”
Shen Jean’s DNA sweep came up negative, which was a relief. Having an unknown intruder on the station was bad enough, but having someone you knew and worked with turn out to be a murderer was a whole other horror show. But Dubarre’s search for Greggy’s comm ID came up negative too. Whoever had it must have removed the power supply.
Then the call from Base came in, and Jixy went to the admin center to answer it.
When it was done, she managed to send a terse acknowledgment without swearing, closed out the call, and did not slap the console. The next patrol was twelve hours out, twelve hours until real help—people who knew what they were doing—could get here.
Shen Jean and Tia Joi poked their heads through the doorway. Shen Jean said, “What’s the ETA?”
Jixy tried not to look like someone who had a half-dozen kids watching old episodes of Criminal Investigation Mars: S. Meridiani trying to figure out what the hell she should do. “Twelve hours.”
Shen Jean snorted in dismay. Tia Joi’s eyes widened as she bit back whatever curse tried to come out. Then she said, “The hatches are command-sealed, so if they’re still here, they can’t get to us.”
Shen Jean said slowly, “Eh, I don’t know. Someone who got aboard like this might be able to code break or jimmy our hatch seals. Stations are designed to be safe; they’re not meant to keep people in or out.”
Tia Joi gave her a look. “That does not help, Shen Jean.”
Jixy rubbed her temples, wincing. Shen Jean was right, and it was scaring the crap out of her. Someone who would do that to Greggy might do anything: stay around hoping for another victim, set off a bomb, or even destroy their life support. But the station’s diagnostics read normal, so they hadn’t messed with any systems yet and hadn’t tried to break into the command module, if they were still here. They were just sitting here somewhere.
And the fact remained that if they had come here looking for people with augments to attack, this was an excellent place to do it.
It struck Jixy suddenly that she had been thinking of someone getting onto the station, immediately attacking Greggy, and then leaving or hiding somewhere aboard. Maybe her brain had gotten stuck there because the more likely alternative was terrifying: Someone had gotten on days ago, just waiting until they could get to Greggy while he was alone.
Jixy knew she had to find out; she couldn’t just sit here.
She pushed to her feet. “I need to go down the spoke and check something.”
“What?” Tia Joi stared. “No!”
Shen Jean demanded, “You lost your mind?”
Jixy made the mistake of stepping out of the admin center, and some of the kids heard. Lilly jumped up and ran to join Shen Jean and Joi. “You’re going to look for clues, Commander?”
Dubarre frowned at her from across the lounge and mouthed the word “clues?”
“Yeah, clues, that’s right. Everyone just sit tight while I check the supply ship. I’ll be back.”
Tia Joi shook her head slowly. She started to speak, then glanced at the listening kids.
Shen Jean was staring at Jixy, the color drained out of her paper-thin cheeks. She said, “I’ll go with you.”
“We both will,” Dubarre said.
If whoever this was had some kind of fixation for prostheses and augment tech, she didn’t want them anywhere near any of the others. Especially people like Shen Jean, or Tia Joi with her kidney augments. Or Dubarre’s arm, or Sully’s knees. Jixy was the youngest adult and the only one here without any kind of an augment. She’d been told at her last medical that she’d need one for her hearing eventually, but that was some ways off. “No, you’ve got to stay. I’ll be fine.” Everyone took a breath to object, and she said, “That’s an order.”
She eyed them all. This was a training community, but it fell under station regulations, and Jixy was still the commander. When it came down to it, this was her job, her responsibility. After a moment, everybody subsided reluctantly. Lilly had already disappeared, probably back to the entertainment kiosk.
Dubarre followed her through the short passage toward the hatch. Keeping his voice to a whisper, he said, “You’re doing the dumb thing people do in horror stories.”
“I know. But I have to check. We have to know.” The automated supply shuttle that had arrived five station-days ago was the best possibility. And whoever it was might have gone back there to hide. If Jixy knew for certain where they were, she could comm for help and trap them. “You go back and act calm for everybody.”
Dubarre stopped at the hatch. “If you get killed, I’m making a formal complaint.”
“Ha, ha,” Jixy said, and walked briskly down the corridor before she lost her nerve.
Jixy entered her command code at the lift station so the system would let her in. As the door slid open, Jixy stepped through and entered spoke six for the destination, which was closest to the shuttle ports in the shaft.
She stepped back to grab the steadybar. As the module hatches and the lift hatches started to close, a small figure flung itself through. The safety protocols squawked, and the hatches hesitated just long enough to let the figure pass, then closed and sealed, and the lift moved smoothly along the ring. Jixy stared incredulously at Lilly. “What the hell?”
Lilly’s little face was set in a stubborn glare. “I want to come with you. You need backup.”
“For the love of God—” Jixy gritted her teeth. She started to push the emergency stop to return, but that would have set off a stationwide alarm. It would have warned the intruder that someone was messing around in the lift system. “I don’t have time for this, Lilly. Now I have to wait till we get there and take you all the way back and—”
Lilly glared. She breathed hard, like she was running a race. “You need help! That’s rule 1: don’t do anything dangerous alone, don’t go places alone, take someone who can call for help!”
“Lilly, do not throw my own rules back in my face! You are a kid. You are my responsibility. Your safety is more important than mine.”
“I found him! They killed him and I found him! He was my friend!” Lilly shouted.
Jixy shut up, and they stared at each other. The lift reached spoke six and started down it toward the shaft. Jixy felt her feet start to leave the deck as they began to lose gravity.
“He was my first friend here.” Lilly choked the words out and swallowed back tears. She gripped the rail as she started to float. “No one liked me because I was from Earth. He told the others he was from Earth too, to be nice to me. And they did. He said he knew what it was like, being alone. He said when the first Luna rover exploration program ended and the support crew he worked with got old and retired and died, he was alone. He said the new people didn’t remember him from before he got the bot parts. They acted like he was just a machine.”
Jixy let her breath out and rubbed her eyes. Greggy had called Earth his “first life,” but he hadn’t given many details about his family or his teaching career there. She knew rovers had had a hard time after the first exploration phases ended and the habitat constructions began, that the rover program had budget cuts and lost personnel, but he had never talked about that. Rovers going from heroic figures who made the news all the time to just outdated curiosities would have been hard to live through.
He had never said what had caused him to volunteer for a work program that meant giving up his legs and arms and most of his insides for augments. Whether it was illness or a terrible accident, she knew it must have been bad. Nobody had agreed to become a rover unless the only other choice was dying. But that had been eighty years ago, back in the bad old days, when good medical augments had been too expensive for anybody but the super-rich.
It figured Greggy would share more about his life with the kids, especially if he caught them bullying a newbie like Lilly. Jixy said, “He was my friend too, honey. That doesn’t mean I should let you risk your life following me.”
“I’ll be careful. I’ll do whatever you say,” Lilly promised. “And I know a lot about mysteries. Books and videos both. I can help. We need to catch whoever snuck aboard before they do something to the station.”
“I know. That’s why I sealed the command module, so whoever it was wouldn’t sneak in and kill all my kids.”
Jixy thought that might scare Lilly, at least as much as it was currently scaring her, but Lilly only subsided a little. “It’s got to be the last supply ship, right? That’s how the murderer got aboard.”
“Probably.” Jixy wasn’t going to ask at what point Lilly had figured that out. If Lilly had twigged to it long before Jixy had, it would just be embarrassing.
Part of Jixy was glad Lilly was here, because doing this alone would be so much worse, and the rest of her was angry at herself for the cowardice. Not as angry as she was at the intruder for killing Greggy, for coming into their home and making it strange and frightening.
“But they won’t still be there,” Lilly said. “They’re in the station somewhere.”
They might still be there. And if they were, Jixy might be able to seal the shuttle and jettison it, so Base could easily pick up the intruder when they arrived. “Yeah, but I need to make sure that’s how they got in, before I do anything else.”
Lilly nodded. “There’ll be clues. When we figure out who they are, where they came from, we’ll know why they killed Greggy and what they’re gonna do next.”
“Well...yeah.” It did sound reasonable when you put it like that. The lift slowed, nearing the dock. “Stay in here, okay? And if I tell you to hit the return—”
“I’ll do it,” Lilly promised as the lift thunked to a stop and locked itself into place.
Jixy looked out at the hatch window, but nobody seemed to be lying in wait in the corridor, unless they were flattened up against the wall, which was hard to do in the light gravity. She opened the hatch.
Everything seemed normal, all the indicators in the wall panel reading good, and nothing out of place in the row of air locks. Jixy eased out into the corridor and pulled herself along the rack. She checked the locks of the two empty slots first, making sure the hatches were still command-sealed. Nothing looked tampered with. Both were used by construction/repair skids, which were small vehicles that moved around the outside of the station for repairs, though neither lock had a skid docked now. Jixy hesitated. A skid would be handy for an intruder, who could use it to hide in, move between various locks on the station’s hull. But the logs hadn’t shown any anomalous movements. She needed to ask someone up in command to check on the skids’ locations.
Then she went to the supply shuttle’s lock. A quick check of the status console showed everything looked all right, that the hatch hadn’t been tampered with since the lockdown. Jixy tapped in the entry code, and the lock released a hiss of air as it opened. Air. Jixy frowned and checked the panel again. It was reading a level of atmosphere inside the shuttle that was for a live transport, not for the lower levels of vacuum-sealed supplies and equipment. Relief hit her first, bringing on a wave of internal heat. It really wasn’t one of us. We’ve been right all along, it’s an intruder. Then renewed fear. Oh hell, it really wasn’t one of us.
Before this, Jixy might have wondered what was worse: imagining there might be a violent stranger aboard the station or knowing it for certain. Knowing for certain was definitely worse.
She moved back until she was sure she was out of earshot and clicked her comm. Trying to keep her voice as low as possible, she whispered, “Emergency Priority.” Her voice came out hoarse, and she cleared her throat self-consciously.
“Jixy?” Shen Jean replied. “You okay?”
“Fine. Is Dubarre sure Greggy’s comm is off?”
“He’s sure. You found something?”
“Yeah, someone’s tampered with the shuttle. Looks like that’s how our unauthorized visitor got here.” She made herself sound calm. The comm recording would go on the official report, if the intruder killed her.
“Oh, shit,” Shen Jean breathed.
“Yeah,” Jixy agreed. A thought occurred to her, and she added, “This shuttle’s last stop was Station Titan. Can you check the news reports and see if there were any disturbances there?”
“I’ll check,” Shen Jean promised.
“Also, we need to make sure all the repair skids are where they’re supposed to be.” Jixy glanced down the corridor and saw Lilly in the hatchway of the lift, watching intently. Lilly flashed her a thumb’s up. Jixy sighed and added, “And Lilly snuck into the lift after me, and I can’t get her to go back.”
Shen Jean swore a lot, the only non-profane word of which was “kids.” She added, “You both come back up here. We’ll seal in until Base arrives.”
Jixy had already thought of that. “Can’t, whoever this is...” Whoever it was had hijacked an automated shuttle and modified it to allow for atmosphere on a pre-programmed trip. And Shen Jean had been right, the intruder might be able to get past the command code seals, if they were that good with jacking systems. Rampaging around the station, nothing to stop them from altering or just bashing the hell out of any equipment. Maybe trying to breach the station’s hull. “I got to try to pinpoint where they are.” Jixy heard the words come out of her mouth and felt sick.
“Oh, Jixy,” Shen Jean said. Then after a moment, her voice hardened. “If you catch them, kick their arse.”
It was just words, but weirdly it helped. “Will do.” Jixy signed off and muted the comm to make sure it didn’t beep when she least wanted it to.
The shuttle’s interior lights had come on automatically, and Jixy saw it was safe enough for the moment. With Lilly holding the lift in place, no one else could get down here. Yeah, I should have brought someone, she thought. It would have given Lilly less of an excuse to follow her, at least.
She pulled herself inside the shuttle hatch.
As she drew herself into the first compartment, she felt like her eyes and ears were enlarging, trying to detect any hint that someone had been in here. The shuttle had been designed as an un-crewed ship, hauling supplies from station to station, but it had facilities for people if needed. Jixy checked the lockers next to the hold that could fold out into bunks, with a tiny toilet facility and a tiny galley, but it didn’t look like any of it had been used. Was she wrong about this?
Then she grabbed the next locker handle and felt the sticky residue along the inside. She jerked her hand back and cautiously sniffed it. Sugar in liquid form. She felt down the side of the locker and found another sticky patch near the bottom, this one with a tiny bit of plastic food-wrapper stuck to it. A package of liquid ration had broken against this locker at some point. Somebody had been in here, and they had been neat and careful, except for these traces of spillage left behind. Hah! Jixy thought, and went to check the intake vent.
Lilly bounced excitedly as Jixy approached. Jixy held out her hand, showing Lilly the clear scrap baggie she’d used to collect the fragments she’d found in the intake vent. “Clues.”
Lilly leaned close to examine the bits and pieces of shattered component. She said, “We need to check where that shuttle came from, see if anybody got murdered there before it left.”
“Shen Jean’s on it,” Jixy told her, pulling herself into the lift. “Why aren’t you on the station leadership track?” She thought Lilly might be wasted in the standard school. Jixy had gone to station school on Mommyland. Being from Earth, Lilly wouldn’t have had that advantage. Still, somebody should have done an evaluation at some point and noticed the kid was this smart.
“I don’t know.” Lilly shrugged that off, obviously too focused on the current problem to think about her future education. “Motive will tell us where the murderer is. We know the motive, we know what they want.”
“Lilly, this is real, this is not like videos and books....” The stories about the tunnel and station Piecework Killer that stole prostheses for fun might be mostly myth, but Jixy was willing to believe the
intruder had a need to steal augments. The vivid image in her head of Greggy’s torn body, the missing parts, the way something had hacked at his head to get to the interfaces... Jixy took the envelope back from Lilly, flattening it to examine the tiny fragments more closely.
Lilly folded her arms. “They get the videos and books from real stuff, Commander Jixy. There’s certain ways people solve mysteries and it’s always—”
Jixy waved at her, distracted. “I’m sorry, honey, I think you’re right. I think this person did want something from Greggy. They wanted his interfaces.” She remembered it had been her first impression when she had seen the horror that was left of Greggy’s head. Those were the most complicated of his components, the ones that made the rest of his augments work like he had been born with them. “These broken pieces, these are from an interface. One that came apart when it was being worked on.”
Lilly frowned and looked at the bag again. “Did the murderer get Greggy’s interfaces?”
“Yeah, I think so,” Jixy said slowly. “So why aren’t they down here, hiding on the shuttle, waiting until it leaves?”
“Maybe they know we know about the shuttle. Or maybe they want something else before they escape.” Lilly nodded thoughtfully. “See, we’re figuring it out.”
Maybe they were. “Let’s see.” Jixy pulled the system access off her belt and flicked through the opening screens to find the general inventory. If someone needed the tools and other equipment to install interfaces, there was at least one place aboard the station where they would go. “I need to seal off the mech workshop on the spoke three engineering module.”
Jixy called Dubarre on the comm to see if he had a lock that could keep anybody from hacking their way through a command-sealed hatch. He had something he thought might work, so Jixy’s first stop was the command module. She handed over a mutely protesting Lilly to Dubarre and took the hard-lock in exchange. “That basically makes the hatch inert, so just slap it in place and get out of there,” he told her.
“Got it,” Jixy said and stepped back into the lift. She could have taken the access corridor from here, but the lift was faster. She entered the address for spoke three, and the lift slid away. If she—and Lilly—had reasoned this right, the intruder would be several compartments deep in the module, where the workshop was. What they were doing in there—whether working on their stolen interfaces or trying to insert them into themselves—Jixy didn’t know.
The lift reached the engineering module foyer, and Jixy peered cautiously through the hatch. This module was a different design, mostly because it had been the original module brought here and used as a platform, while the rest of the station was built around it. The foyer was long and deep to accommodate monitoring stations that had been used for construction pods. What she could see of it was innocently empty.
She stepped out of the lift. The lights were on, and the air hissed through the vents, and everything seemed normal, but the back of her neck itched, and her teeth hurt, and some primal part of her brain was
hissing quietly, “bad idea.” All she had to do was slap the lock on the sealed hatch, that was all. Then run back to the command module and wait for Base to get their asses here. She’d leave the security issues to the experts and put Lilly in for some advanced station management courses.
She moved quickly through the foyer toward the hatch. It was closed, and she felt a sharp spike of relief. She stopped at the panel a meter from the door and quickly hit the sequence to check the command seal. The hatch’s handle blinked confirmation, and she stepped close to put her palm on the biometric scanner just to be certain.
It didn’t beep. And there was something coating the sensor. She pulled her hand back, feeling the sticky substance that had transferred to her palm. Baffled, she rubbed at it. She realized it was gray augment fluid, partially dried, mixed with blood. Then someone behind her said, “Too late.”
Jixy’s throat went dry. As she turned, she tightened her arm against her side three quick times, activating the emergency panic button in her comm strap.
The person had been standing in the shadows, so still and quiet they had blended into the bulkhead and the conduit running along it. They were taller than her by more than a head, dressed in gray, their skin so pale it was almost translucent, cheeks and eyes sunken. Everything about them was colorless, except the brown of their eyes.
Jixy had studied deescalation, talking down people who were desperate or ill. She knew all the right ways to begin this conversation, but what she said was, “You killed Greggy, you fucker.”
The person stared down at her, unblinking, then said, “Oh, you gave it a name?”
Jixy’s jaw hurt from trying not to scream obscenities. “He was my friend! He was a teacher.”
The person cocked their head. “It was a rover.”
Jixy swallowed back spit. “That doesn’t mean he wasn’t a person, you sick piece of shit.”
They loomed over her. “When they make you a rover, they murder the person.”
“That’s bullshit. You murdered the person.” Becoming a rover had just extended Greggy’s life and given him different parts. Saying it had somehow made him inhuman was obscene.
The intruder stared down at her for a long hard moment. Jixy felt a weird sense of disassociation, like she was watching this on video or reading it in a book. No, you’re here, she reminded herself. You may not be here much longer, but you’re here. And she was going to get some answers. “Tell me why you think you need his interfaces.”
They stepped back, watching her. “For me.”
“But why?” This close, Jixy could see the painful-looking rash creeping out from under their collar, the scabbed patches on the gray-haired skull. This person was badly ill, maybe dying. “Do you have augments? Is something wrong with them? Greggy’s interfaces will only work for another rover. If you know anything about rovers, you have to know that...”
“If I know anything about rovers.” The intruder took two long steps back, making Jixy’s heart thump. They pulled open their jacket.
Their whole torso was an augment, with no attempt made to make the finish look like skin, or like a decoration or anything that was meant to be there. She said, “Why did...” What wanted to come out was:
Why did you do this to yourself? What a stupid question that was. “What happened?”
“I was murdered,” they said, watching her coldly.
Jixy suddenly realized what she was looking at. “You were a rover.” Nobody had made rovers in over seventy years. All the Luna and Mars rovers had died, or were living out their retirement somewhere. She had seen the rover monument on Mars, all the names and their stories, where they were now. The kids had done an assignment on it because of Greggy. “How can you be a rover? They’re all accounted for.” And they had no reason to let themselves suffer like this, with failing augments.
The person sneered, and she saw they had no teeth. “Yes, the heroic volunteers. I was a corporate rover.”
Oh, shit! Jixy thought. She had read about the early corporate off-Earth expansion, unregulated, unsafe. Surely those corporations hadn’t been allowed to make rovers. But there was no other way this person could be a rover and not be on the Luna or Mars government lists. “Corporations made private rovers and no one knew.”
Their sneer was tinged with pity. “Of course. To work the outer asteroid belt, where the precious elements were, away from the cameras and the cheering crowds.”
Jixy felt sick. “But why do you need Greggy’s interfaces? Can’t you just go to a hospital, go somewhere for help?” What had those corporate bastards done to this person to make them think they couldn’t get help? What had been done to their brain? Was she dealing with someone who had been so isolated and brutalized that murder seemed like a good idea, or were they so ill that they didn’t know what they were doing?
“I needed a refit. When I need something, I take it. Augments, interfaces.” They grinned at her. “Your friends called me Piecework.”
Now Jixy felt dumb as well as terrified. “You found a way to use Greggy’s comm to listen to us without it showing on our system.”
Their expression twisted in contempt. “I didn’t need his comm. I can get into any system.”
Jixy needed to take control of this conversation. She was all over the place, and it wasn’t helping. Had this person really killed people and stolen augments for years, or had they gotten that from using the comm to eavesdrop on the Piecework Killer conversation? About the only thing she was certain of was that this person had killed Greggy because they thought they could repair their own failing systems with his interfaces. She steeled herself and said, “You don’t need to steal interfaces. We can get you help—”
They stepped closer again. “Lies.”
“I’m not lying,” she said. “The Luna government, the Mars med/health agency—”
“The Luna government didn’t murder me. Vision Space Dynamics murdered me.” Their voice was a whisper of fury. “They said the contract would be for twenty years. Do you know how long ago that was? Vision Space Dynamics went bankrupt, and their assets went to Io Explorations, and then they were bought by Sideral, and then they went bankrupt. And then they sent the old equipment to recycling and told me to leave. It has been seventy-six years.”
Who let this happen? Jixy wanted to say. Who does a thing like that? No wonder Piecework had thought being made a rover was like being murdered. The Luna and Mars government rovers had gotten support and refits and eventually pensions. Piecework had been discarded like an outdated appliance.
Regardless, they killed Greggy, Jixy thought, and maybe other people. They came here because they knew Greggy was an updated former rover and they had been waiting to catch him alone. But this was illness, caused by deliberate negligence, by the rotting technology that some shitty, irresponsible corporation had left in this person’s brain. It was monumentally unfair. If they had just been given the treatment they needed, this would never have happened. Greggy would want me to stop this, fix this. She said, “Tell me your name.”
She knew immediately she had said the wrong thing. Their expression turned cold. “Call me Piecework.”
“That’s not your name, that’s from an entertainment video.” She tried to make her voice firm and reasonable. “We can help you. You need a hospital. You need a lawyer.”
“Promises, promises. Corporation promises.”
Their voice had changed in a way that sent ice through Jixy’s chest. This conversation was almost over, and she hadn’t done anything but make the person—Piecework—mad.
Then behind Piecework, in the faint light from the lift foyer, Jixy caught a dark flash. It took a second for her brain to process that it had been a brief glimpse of someone’s dark hair. Somebody was in the access corridor adjacent to the lift, and they had just risked a quick peek through the hatch.
The others had gotten the panic button transmission, they were nearby, and a flush of relief and renewed fear made her skin turn cold. If they were going to do something, she had to get out of Piecework’s reach. “I’m not a corporation. This isn’t a corporation station. We can get you help, real help.” Piecework watched her with narrowed eyes, and she thought her momentary freeze must have been obvious. She added, “That’s what Greggy would want.” It was true, and it distracted Piecework, making their mouth twist in fury.
She stepped back and sideways, away from the foyer. She knew she couldn’t talk Piecework into surrendering. She and the others would have to trap Piecework, wait for Base to get here, then get Piecework sedated and taken to a hospital. She said, “You didn’t know Greggy, he would have wanted to help you. He never would have—”
Whether Jixy overplayed it or someone in the corridor made a noise, Piecework whipped around toward the foyer as Dubarre and Sully charged in. They both brandished cutters. Dubarre said, “You’re trapped! Give up and we’ll—”
But Piecework lifted up, legs and arms extending, looming up over them. Dubarre and Sully pulled closer to each other but didn’t back down. Jixy ducked around and stood beside them, facing Piecework again. “Just let us help you!”
Jixy thought Piecework was going to attack, and Dubarre would have to hit them with the cutter. Then there would be a melee here in the foyer that would go very badly for all four of them. But Jixy saw Piecework’s eyes change for just a second, their expression going from anger to confusion. They looked down at her, and the confusion cleared. They spun, slammed a hand down onto the biometric panel, and the hatch slid open.
Jixy shouted, “Hey!” which she was well aware was a dumb thing to do under the circumstances. But Piecework dove through and the hatch slid shut behind them even as Dubarre and Sully surged forward.
Dubarre swore and Sully said, “How’d they do that? That was a biometric—”
“They hacked the panel somehow,” Jixy said, remembering the fluid on the plate. “Get it open!” She elbowed past Sully to the monitoring station and booted it.
“Where are they going?” Sully said.
“I don’t know. There’s nothing—” Jixy swore as the schematic appeared on the screen. “There’s a construction skid docked on the module!”
Dubarre stepped up beside her. “Can’t be. I checked, they’re all docked on the shaft—”
Jixy grimaced in dismay. “Piecework was good enough to get through our command seals, hack our comm system. Moving a skid without leaving a log entry is nothing.”
“Eject the skid off the station before they get aboard,” Dubarre urged her.
Others were coming into the foyer behind her, but Jixy didn’t look around, frantically running through the sequence to eject the skid. The monitors blinked into life above the panel, and a glance showed her Piecework, climbing through the foyer, one compartment away from the pod’s hatch.
“If they get to the skid,” Dubarre was explaining to someone, “they can take it around to the shuttle dock.”
Jixy’s fingers flew, and just as Piecework reached the outer lock, the disengage sequence started. The hull monitor showed the skid detach from the station and drift away.
Jixy hit the all-ship comm. “Please, it’ll be okay. We can help you.” She kept her voice calm. “Please.”
Piecework looked toward the camera and said, clearly, “I won’t come back.” Then they stepped through the hatch, and the lights blinked for the open cycle.
Dubarre swore, and Jixy stabbed the override frantically, but it didn’t respond. Seconds later, the lock flushed, and she saw a figure tumble out into space.
Jixy’s breath froze in her chest. Then she slammed her hand on the console.
Some of the others were glad Piecework was dead, because of Greggy, others were just upset about everything. Jixy felt like she’d failed Greggy again.
And failed Piecework. Somewhere among all the failing technology in Piecework’s brain was a person who knew that what they were doing to survive was wrong. Jixy was sure of it. There was no way she, Dubarre, and Sully could have won that fight, and Piecework had run to keep from having to hurt them.
But then the Base patroller showed up, and the first thing they did was send a security group to search the station top to bottom, and another to search the area outside the station for the body.
Except they didn’t find the body, or the repair skid.
Jixy discussed this with Dubarre and Shen Jean, while sitting in the admin center with the door locked, nursing contraband cups full of gin that Sully had smuggled in from their last trip to Io Station. Later, when things had calmed down, Jixy talked to Lilly.
Sitting across from her in the admin center, Jixy explained what Piecework had said and done. Lilly listened quietly, and then said, “Greggy would never have done that. If he hadn’t been able to come live here and get his refits, he would still never have done that.”
Jixy agreed, but said, “Greggy had advantages, like his retirement from the Luna government. I don’t think we can understand what Piecework went through.” They still didn’t even know the rover’s real name; and even if Vision Space Dynamics had left behind any public records online, they weren’t likely to include anything about a private rover program that would have been illegal in most Earth jurisdictions. “It doesn’t excuse what they did to Greggy and anybody else they might have hurt—”
“I know.” Lilly stood up, her expression thoughtful and troubled. “How many more rovers like that do you think there are, Commander? Could we find them and help them?”
Jixy had been hoping Lilly wouldn’t ask that. If one old space exploitation company had had a rover program they had kept quiet about, it stood to reason there had been others. The fact that none had ever come forward to ask for help didn’t bode well for their survival. “Probably not, honey. But I don’t know how we can ever find out.”
Lilly considered that for a moment. “Maybe I can think of a way. One day.”
Jixy wouldn’t bet against it. “Maybe you can. When you do, come tell me.”
Lilly nodded, and went to join the other kids.
