Eshel found the drone’s record before Mara found the compartment.
He had his slate connected to the station’s maintenance line through a port in the side passage’s wall, and he was reading the station’s own logs as they walked: what the station had done, room by room, while it was sealed. The cooling pumps. The radiators. And a maintenance drone, one of the small automated machines that every station kept for moving supplies and clearing debris, which had kept working after the supply runs stopped, doing what it was programmed to do.
“Here,” Eshel said. He stopped. He held the slate out.
Mara read the drone’s log aloud. Why she read it aloud she could not have said; she found her voice doing it, the flat level voice she used for figures, the voice she had used to read the coolant ratio back to the dark console.
“Cold room. Life signs absent. Timestamp.” She read the figures. Plain numbers. A date and an hour. “Procedure: remove to storage. Body placed in service compartment seven. Compartment sealed. Timestamp.” A second date and hour. A few hours after the first.
She looked at the second timestamp. Then at the pump log, which Eshel had left open on the slate’s other panel. The pumps had stopped eleven hours after the last sentence in the recording. The drone’s first timestamp, life signs absent, was nine hours after the last sentence.
