“Obviously. Private service, such a pain in the ass,” Voller mutters.
It’s a small, but elegant room with an imposing maître d’ lectern just inside the threshold. Bolted-down tables and curved sofa seating in subtle but expensive-looking hues of purple, blue, and silver dominate the space. Cream-and-silver-striped wallpaper reflects our lights back at us, from between artwork in gilded frames. Fluted columns that don’t appear to support anything—they don’t even reach the ceiling—further add to the exclusive air; they mark the boundaries of each table, giving the illusion of a separate dining area. The Platinums didn’t have to share even in shared space. It looks like a slightly larger version of a rich person’s dining room, or so I would guess, never having seen one in real life.
Except, of course, for the black metal gate pulled down from the ceiling and latched to the floor. The gate is scraped and bowedinward, to the point of pressing against the maître d’ stand, as if someone—or something—large tried to break in.
I reach down to confirm that the plasma drill is still tethered to my suit.
“Let’s keep moving,” I say.
Finally, after one last flight of stairs, we reach an open level at the top.
“Wow,” Voller says.
And I have to agree. The Diamond Level Atrium is an expansive, multilevel space, covered by a domed ceiling that disappears into darkness. The floor is pale-veined marble. Expensive-looking couches and chairs, bolted into place and made out of what appears to be real leather, lounge together in conversational groups. Frozen plants, trapped forever in a moment of decay, wave their green-and-brown-splotched strands from built-in planters all around us, in what once must have been a gardenesque setting. When the ship was fully functional, there must have been a light setting for imitation sun.
Even in its current condition, it’s more luxurious than any place I’ve ever set foot in. Setting aside the expensive and hard-to-find materials, like leather and the marble, it’s more that everything is soclean. And nothing darker than a pale shade of gray or a dark cream. Colors that would never withstand heavy use. Unless, of course, you have a full-time staff to clean up after everyone.
In one of my last group homes, the chipped tile floor still had the sticky black residue from the glue where the indoor-outdoor carpeting had been glued down and then torn out years before.
Shops and other establishments circle the outer perimeter, along with directional signs for the Crystalline Ballroom, Star-Swimming, and The Green. The latter two are surely the infinity pool and the putting green.
The Peaceful Reverie Spa offers massages and an aesthetician consultation,NO APPOINTMENT NECESSARY,according to the script on the windows out front. But its glass doors are firmly closed and a metal security bar blocking the entrance is visible. Small, brightlycolored bottles, tubes, and jars drift through the space behind the closed doors, endlessly tumbling.
A casino lies silent at the far end—aCLOSEDsign attached haphazardly to the craps table closest to the front. Not one but three different jewelry stores stand proud behind their gated security enclosures, their glittering wares drifting through sealed glass displays. A smoking room promising real—and illegal—tobacco products holds court on the other side of the casino. A Parisian-style café still has umbrellas up at its tables, each tilted at a jaunty angle, the metal framing inside the fabric holding the shape in place.
But the bake case out front has been ravaged. Glass sparkles in the air around the case, and one of the café chairs is sticking out of the spiderwebbed and cracked remains of the enclosure, wedged in by the force of the attack.
And from what I can see, the case is empty. Food is gone.
“So something happened at night,” I say. “They weren’t open. Shops closed like normal and never got a chance to reopen.”
Or, the empty bake case might have happened days after the initial event, when survivors became desperate. One of the perks of working and traveling on theAurorawas to have been real food from trained chefs. But there should have been standard food printers on board in case of an emergency. And by the time those ran out, the bakery items would have been long gone to dust or mold.
None of this makes any sense.
“Mutiny, like Nysus said?” Kane asks. “Or maybe riots?”
Next to me, Voller shifts, changing his grip on the wall at the threshold to the atrium, where we’re hovering. “Maybe,” Voller says. “But where the fuck is everybody? Even if all the escape pods that got out of here left with a full load, we’re still looking at, what, a couple hundred bodies here somewhere?”
I wince, but he has a point, much as I’m loath to admit it. In the lower levels, it was easy to assume that the passengers had taken cover (and subsequently died) in their rooms. But up here? The atrium has doors, it could be sealed off, but it wasn’t. What are the odds that no one was here when whatever happened happened?
Looking more closely now, it’s easier to see smaller signs of disorder and disruption. The marble floor is chipped and pitted in several places as though someone took a heavy object to it. One of the pale leather couches is adorned with a dark smear that might be another bloody handprint or just blood in general. An electrical cord knotted into a noose floats by, followed by the shattered remains of a wooden chair and one of the putters from the green, broken in half with the metal end sticking out like a shiv.
“We’re not here to figure out what happened,” I say, reminding myself as much as the others. It’s hard not to wonder, not to speculate, when you’re standing in the middle of one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of the century and it’s not getting any more solved, despite your proximity. “That’ll be up to Verux when they take it back.”
“Bullshit,” Voller mutters. “It’s ours.”
I ignore him. “Come on. Let’s go.”
“Wait, TL. Stop,” Nysus says excitedly. “Look to your left. The stairway.”
I do as directed and notice, for the first time, a set of steps in roughly the center of the atrium. The stairway is a perfect gold-and-white spiral, arcing upward to levels above. It looks like it’s floating in midair, an optical illusion, obviously, but even more impressive in zero grav.
“Okay,” I begin. “What am I—”
“The Tratorelli sculptures,” Nysus says.
“The what now?” Voller asks.
