He saw Gaby at breakfast the next morning, in the canteen that was buzzing with happy talk from the passengers. Apparently someone had spread a rumour that the ship would be allowed to travel on soon.

  “I don’t know where they’re getting their information,” Gaby said.

  “We probably will go on soon,” Jonathan said. “The transport vessels’s first priority is the passengers. They’re obliged to help in an emergency, but now it’s no longer an emergency. Other people will come to sort it out.”

  “I just feel that we’re missing something,” she said.

  “Definitely. I went through some of the internal correspondence. Apparently there might have been a visitor at the station. How confident are you in the identification of all victims?”

  “I wanted to talk to you about that. I was thinking about this last night.” So she hadn’t slept much either. “DNA tests take a long time, but it should be possible to do some other tests that could help us identify the people who weren’t carrying ID tags.”

  “What sort?”

  “Blood tests are quick and will reveal blood type and gender. We collected samples from each body.”

  “Is the blood type recorded in the personnel database?’

  “Yes.”

  “Then let’s do that.”

  “So what are you doing today?” she asked.

  “I want to go back to that room and see if I can find out what happened there,” he said. “I’ll make up some excuse.”

  Chapter Nine

  Two crew members arrived who said they’d been ordered to help Gaby with the samples. She called the two—both young women—her lab rats.

  After Gaby took them to start work, Jonathan learned that Kenzie was still taking other people to the station today because apparently certain automated mining-related processes needed to be shut down.

  He and Lance boarded the shuttle with three other crew members. Jonathan had seen these people before. As far as he knew, they were part of the maintenance crew at the Renae Stellaris.

  Jonathan tried to quiz them on their task at the station, but they were quite vague. He wanted to tell them: look, it’s OK, I’m well-versed in tech that works in space.

  But he also understood that certain things had to remain confidential within the company for the sake of protecting their work.

  He didn’t press for answers.

  After arriving at the station, the three went to the control room, while Jonathan led Lance to the labs. Jonathan had brought another set of sample containers.

  The first thing Jonathan did was to check the fruit bar he’d left on the shelf. It was still there. So much for that theory.

  Oh well.

  He swept some more sand off the tables and collected it into the jar.

  Then he noticed something that he hadn’t seen before: the grate to the ceiling vent hung loose.

  Jonathan got a chair and pulled the thing right out, giving him a perfect view of the inside of a very grey and very boring duct.

  He could hear voices. Where did this come out?

  Still standing on the chair, balancing awkwardly in his environment suit, he checked the map.

  Crap. This room was immediately above the auditorium. And the air flow diagram showed that cool air was forced down from the recycling plant into the residential layers, to return when it grew stale and warm.

  “Do you see anything in there?” Lance said.

  “Uhm… no.” Jonathan swiped the map away, but as he stepped off the chair, he continued looking up, wondering how someone—because this had to be deliberate—would pump carbon monoxide into the vent. And where they got the carbon monoxide.

  Could the recycling vat have something to do with it?

  It was a round container, which stood on a pallet with little sturdy wheels that had made scrape marks over the floor as first it had been moved to the bench and then across the room to its current position against the wall.

  It was made out of heavy duty plastic, and about three paces in diameter. It had an equally thick and heavy lid that would normally sit in a bracket that allowed maintenance personnel to lift it with a lever. But this mechanism had been damaged and the lid hung to one side.

  It looked like someone had tried to force the lid open or remove it entirely.

  “Help me lift this,” Jonathan said.

  He grabbed the top edge of the vat and nodded for Lance to take the other end. But the vat was so heavy that they couldn’t lift it back onto the pallet. There was no way that someone could have shifted it accidentally. It would have been moved by a machine, of which there were none in this room.

  “Sheesh, that thing weighs a tonne,” Lance said, and as he went to pick up his box of tools, the tripped over the corner of the pallet.

  He almost fell, and managed to hold himself but not without slamming his hands into the wall.

  The resulting thud blew motes of dust into the air. It also dislodged the wrapper of the fruit bar. It fluttered to the ground, empty.

  Well, holy crap.

  Jonathan stared at the hook on the wall where an environment suit was missing, his heart thudding. Yes, there was someone still alive in the station.

  Gaby.

  He had to see her. He had to ask her how she was going with the identification of the victims. Clearly, this person didn’t want to be found, or he or she would have been waiting when they first came to the station, or would have answered the calls from outside.

  Was this the person responsible for the deaths?

  And if so, it clearly happened in this room, directly above the auditorium. But how?

  He looked through every cupboard, but found nothing in there that he didn’t expect to be there. Then he opened the inner airlock door.

  Someone had stowed rubbish in there: a bunch of plastic stuck together with the blue transport tape that people used to seal parcels that were sent through space. It was said to be vacuum-proof, as in that it would still stick when exposed to space.

  He pulled it all out into the middle of the room and took photos.

  Lance was rather puzzled why Jonathan wanted to take pictures of a bunch of building rubbish.

  Jonathan didn’t explain.

  If it was warranted to make his discovery public, there would be time for that later. For now, he didn’t trust Lance’s motives.

  They continued their sweep of the labs, with Jonathan taking more samples just to make up for the effort of coming here. He had what he needed to know.

  Lance spent most of this time complaining about his job. That it was boring, that the company had promised to send him to education but hadn’t done that yet.

  Jonathan wanted to shut off from it, but he stopped himself when Lance said, “I don’t come from a rich family. My mam could barely feed me and my brother. She had no time to send us to fancy schools. We were always moving around from station to station and she was doing the cleaning and cooking. Sometimes we went to school, and sometimes we didn’t, because they wanted payment, and my mam couldn’t pay. So when the inspectors came around my brother and I would hide in the cupboard. I don’t think they believed my mam when she said she had no children. They just came back later, after work, to… you know… My mam would send us out. If she had money, we’d buy some ice cream. Otherwise we’d just wander around trying not to be noticed by people in charge.”

  “What about your dad?” There was something eerily familiar about the story.

  Lance snorted. “Oh. He took off with some hotshot from the Corps. Buff guy, shiny buttons and all that. He said to me before he left, ‘Look, son, if you want to get ahead in life, stay away from the women. They saddle you with children and will then whinge to the end of the world about paying for them.’ Like, it was any clearer he didn’t give a shit about me or my brother. I look after him now. He never got a weight harness when we were growing up. His bones are all fucked up. He can’t stub his toe without breaking it. There’s no way he can work, even if he’s much smarter than I am. He put himself through his lab assistant courses and all that. But they won’t give him a job because he’s in a wheelchair.”

  Jonathan saw himself at the table in his mother’s kitchen, wanting that just for once, she would take him some nice place where other kids seemed to go, like the park.

  “Living in space breaks people,” Gaby would often say. It was one of her soap boxes: the mental health of colonists and other people living in space long-term. Not that Jonathan’s parents fell in that category. They’d met on Earth and his mother had never gone into space. His father had just been an arsehole.

  Was the fact that so many families broke up unique to space settlements? As far as he was concerned, it happened a lot everywhere.

  Anyway, it was time to go back.

  When they returned to the dock, the three maintenance crew members had also returned.

  One of them carried a grey metal case which Jonathan assumed to contain computer equipment.

  Besides a few pleasantries, neither said much on the way back.

  Jonathan was really curious about what was in that box that one of the men had strapped into the seat next to him. It also bore the company logo and a code that said EX-473C.

  After arrival at the Renae Stellaris, Jonathan again managed to get rid of Lance by saying that he was going to clean up, but when he came to Gaby’s room, she wasn’t there.

  He went to the hospital—running the risk that he might run into Lance—but didn’t find her there either.

  “Are you looking for Gaby?” said a young woman in the hospital’s diagnostics room, who was packing away measuring equipment.

  “Yes, where is she?”

  “She went to the meeting room. She was expecting to be contacted by someone.”

  The ship had a small conference room where people could hold meetings, or talk to people on stations or other ships on a large screen.

  When Jonathan entered, Gaby sat working on her computer at the table, still wearing her borrowed hospital gown. The large screen on the wall was still dark.

  She looked up and smiled. Her expression made him feel warm inside.

  “Have you finished?” Jonathan asked.

  “We’ve done one batch. Want to see the results?”

  He sat down next to her.

  She explained, “We don’t have time to run tests for every single victim, because I had to train the assistants to do the tests, as well as do my own work. So I set aside the people who have already been identified with reasonable confidence. That left just forty-nine people who had either changed so much in recent years that they no longer look like their staff picture, or whose faces were already too decomposed to identify them properly.”

  Jonathan suppressed a shudder.

  “According to the personel records, this group should consist of fifteen women and twenty-four men, but we have sixteen women and twenty-three men.”

  “Yes, this is what I wanted to tell you. I’ve discovered that someone is likely still alive in the station, but hiding from us.”

  He told her about the fruit bar bar he’d put out and footsteps he’d heard. Also about how the store room connected directly with the auditorium below.

  Gaby stared at him. “Geez. Does that mean we have a murderer on the loose?”

  “Yup. One who likes fruit bars.”

  “Geez.” She shook her head. “Why? Who is it?”

  “Do you know which man is missing from the victims?” he asked.

  Gaby was about to answer, but then the screen buzzed into action. A rectangle in the middle said, Connecting call.

  “Who is that?” Jonathan asked.

  “That is what I wanted to tell you. I managed to get onto my ex-colleague in the hospital and he was going to talk to me about the female patient Rachael Sinclair.”

  Chapter Ten

  Gaby pressed, Accept.

  Not much later, the face of a man came to the screen. He was still wearing a surgical gown and his mask dangled down his front. In the background, Jonathan could see shelves full of the plastic boxes that hospitals tended to use for their supplies.

  "Hi, Gaby," he said.

  "Hi, Morgan. This is Jonathan Bartell, he's my colleague. Jonathan, this is Doctor Morgan Finke.”

  "Nice to meet you," the man said. "You're lucky to be working with Gaby."

  Jonathan glanced sideways at Gaby, who was laughing, out of view of the camera. “I presume Gaby has explained to you that we like to talk to you about a patient at your facility, a woman who came from Astoria Station.”

  The doctor’s face sobered.

  “It’s a difficult situation. You will be aware that Gaby and I are restricted by privacy laws. I’m not at liberty to discuss medical details of my patients.”

  “I’m not terribly interested in the medical details, but I would like to talk to her about the situation at Astoria Station before she left. It’s probably not related to her medical condition at all.”

  He hesitated. “I think you may be wrong about that.”

  “Why is that?”

  “I can’t discuss that, because it may involve reputations of people on the station.”

  “Those people are all dead.”

  He did a double-take. “What do you mean?”

  A horrible feeling settled in Jonathan’s stomach. “You haven’t heard it yet?” He’d expected the news to have travelled wide by now.

  “Heard what?”

  “Astoria Station stopped responding to all non-automated messages a week ago. Gaby and I went in, and we found all the inhabitants dead.”

  “What? Every resident of the station?”

  “Everyone we could trace.”

  He wiped his face, his eyes wide. “Jesus. Why haven’t we heard about this yet?”

  That was a very good question. Because the captain of the Renae Stellaris hadn’t released the information?

  “We’re trying to established what happened. Your patient is the only known survivor.”

  “Jesus,” he said again.

  “This is why I’d hoped to get a picture of was happening at the station when she left. I have some questions for her. I’m happy to send them along and you can vet them before she replies. Anything she can say is better than what we have now, which is nothing at all.”

  Morgan sighed, and said nothing for a while. Then he said, “I… I’m not sure the patient will be happy to answer those questions. She has indicated she wants our assistance to avoid being sent back to Astoria at all cost. She has… some personal issues, but certain things she has told me about the work environment at the station, I believe to be true, at least from her point of view. I really can’t go into too much detail. I’m already outside the boundaries of what I’m allowed to say, but my conclusion is that the work circumstances at Astoria Station were not conducive to a healthy community. If you’re there, you may be able to download message logs that support this. I really can’t go into the specifics, I’m sorry.”

  “I understand. It’s still quite helpful. Thank you for your time.”

  Jonathan signed off, and Gaby closed the connection. The screen went dark and then came up with a directory of “Video Records”, including a new one that showed today’s time and date.

  Wow, just as well the doctor had been very reluctant to share too much.

  “What did you think of that?“ Gaby asked. “I was hoping he’d be a little bit more helpful and less diplomatic, but I guess he’s afraid that someone might listen in.”

  “Hell, yes. Do you see all this?” Jonathan gestured at the list of directories. “Everything is recorded.”

  Further down the list of similar records with dates and times, there was also a list of codes. Most of them started with letters, like FJ or GR, followed by numbers and then sometimes another letter at the end. That was suspiciously like that code on that box that had been carefully strapped into the shuttle seat by those men from “the data team”—according to Lance.

  He said, “I thought he was helpful. I’ve seen small signs that there was tension in the station between the board and the workers. We need to check the internal messages again and check the bios of the board to see if we can find out more information about them. One thing I haven’t been able to find out is why all these people were in the auditorium together. You were talking, before Morgan’s call, about identification of the remaining victims to see who’s missing and who is the extra woman.”

  “Oh, yes. I checked the passenger logs. The woman is Yolanda Chee. She’s a corporate person, not a scientist.”

  “Was she one of the victims?”

  “I’m pretty sure.”

  “Do we know anything about her?”

  “Not yet. Too busy. As for the missing man, we identified a few more people based on their possessions and photos and security footage. So we haven’t identified him, but ruled out a number of people. We have a shorter list of people unidentified. These are the male names of the station’s residents still unidentified.”

  She showed Jonathan the list. Richard Shelton was on it.

  “That’s the station director. Do you have photos of him?”

  Gaby snorted. “Where do you think I’d find to time to dig those up? I’m sure you can find some.”

  “I’m still wondering if he’s the same Richard Shelton as the one I knew. The age appears about right.”

  Gaby sighed. “I don’t know about you, but I’m hungry and I haven’t even changed yet. I’m going to my room.”

  “Yeah, let’s have dinner.”

  As Jonathan got up, he again looked over the list of directories. In his mind, he saw the guys who Lance said had been from the Data Team sitting on the shuttle with them. And that box they had with them. What was the code on it again? EX-473C?

  So they had gone into the station to collect something that contained video files?

  After a quick dinner, Jonathan went back to work. He felt a bit guilty, because Gaby had done a lot of work that day that he would never like to do.

  First, he looked up Yolanda Chee. He couldn’t find that much information on her at first, but then he found some news articles that had been published outside the Asteroid Belt that mentioned she had been a headkicker for several companies and organisations. The Mars Water Authority for example, hired her when problems arose with microbial contamination. She came in after the wave of scientists had identified issues and swept a broom through the administration.

 

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