Being dead and frozen does tend to be a rather effective preserving agent.
I tear my gaze away from the dead woman floating above me in an endless orbit and try to regulate my breathing.
Okay, okay. Get it together, Claire. This isn’t Ferris.But my brain isn’t buying it, flashing me memories of dark hab rooms lit only by a battery-operated portable work light I’d pried off the wall in one of the labs in desperation. Dark forms slumped over furniture, collapsed on the floor. The acrid scent of vomit and the coppery smell of blood. They’d coughed up the lining of their lungs. That’s what I’d overheard some of the Verux scientists saying later. The emergency generator had kept the air and heat on just long enough for me to be rescued.
I exhale deliberately, counting to myself, until the panic recedes slightly.It’s not the same. You’re not the same.
“They’ve been dead awhile, it looks like,” I say when I can manage it. “Definitely not recent.” My voice has a faint tremor in it, despite my best efforts. “None of them look like they were starving or scrambling for survival out here. Must have happened pretty close to when the ship disappeared.” Or, perhaps this event, whatever it was, is what caused the ship to disappear. It does seem to be too large of a coincidence, otherwise.
“There’s no way to know that for sure. Stay where you are. I’m already through the airlock,” Kane says. He must have been standing by, suited up and ready just in case.
“Negative,” I say sharply. “We have no idea what we’re dealing with, and I won’t risk anyone else. I need someone to be able to get the LINA home.”
“We’re not leaving you behind,” Kane says in disbelief.
“I wasn’t suggesting that you should,” I say as close to steady as I can manage.Not yet, anyway.But if there’s even a chance that whatever happened here could spread…
Somehow, I always knew it was going to come back to this. Me. Alone with the dead.
A mocking whisper rises up at the back of my brain, like a pointed nudge in my shoulder blade.Got you.
“Uh, TL? I’m replaying your footage,” Nysus says. “I’m not seeing anything that looks like natural causes on those bodies. A lot of wounds. Stabbing, blunt force trauma, strangulation. That security guy’s got a belt wrapped around his neck. Another passenger’s still got the other end in his hand.”
I flinch at the memory of the electrical cord noose that we’d seen floating by. Nysus could be right. I hadn’t been looking for those details in my first glimpse of what remained of theAurorapassengers.
“Definitely hypothermia and oxygen deprivation from when the environmentals went down…” Nysus continues.
I ignore the shiver skittering down my sweaty skin, fighting the urge to look up again. I’m half-afraid the woman above me will still be there, only closer. Face-to-face, her filmy eyes unblinking but somehow still staring directly at me. Then her mouth will open, with the sound of ice cracking, and…
Awkwardly, I turn away from the post, deliberately putting my back to the atrium. “Voller, do you copy? Repeat, Voller, can you hear me?” I can’t leave—Iwon’tleave—without him.
“His vitals spiked a few minutes ago,” Nysus says in my ear. “But he’s still alive. I’m trying to switch to his feed.”
I’m half expecting only more silence, so Voller’s reply, after a moment, startles me.
Voller clears his throat. “I copy, TL.” He sounds shaken, which is alarming in and of itself.
I angle myself to face the direction he went, looking for his return. “What the fuck just happened? Where are you? Did you see anyone?” He’d taken off for the bridge, so if anyone was alive and cycling up the engines, he’d surely have seen something.
“Captain and first officer.” Voller coughs, and the noise makes my nerves twang.
I open my mouth to ask, but he beats me to it.
“Dead. Outside the bridge. A lot of blood. It looks like they attacked each other,” he says, sounding a little more like himself, but with a thin wire of tension underlying his words. “The first officer, he… I don’t know. There’s a hole in the side of his head that you could put your fist through.”
I wince.
“He’s, uh, still holding the gun. Suicide, I guess.” He pauses. “But you need to see this, TL. On the bridge. I went to pull the black box… you just need to see it.”
I tense. “Voller, we have to get out of here and—”
“Hell no,” he says flatly. “You need to see it because I’m not taking heat later for tampering with evidence or making this up when someone decides not to believe me.”
“I’m almost to the atrium,” Kane says.
Son of a bitch.I turn and moments later, across the room on the level below me, I see movement at the door. Kane, in his suit with his name emblazoned in bright orange lettering across his chest, emerges from the darkened hallway. His helmet light is a brightpinprick of familiarity in this sunny and expensive corpse-filled courtyard.
At the sight of him, relief blooms in my chest with such intensity, I’m ashamed of it and myself. I shouldn’tneedhim that much. Not for this, not anything.
