"Carbon monoxide poisoning," Jonathan said, his voice flat. "Isn't that the thing that people used to do to kill themselves when they would redirect the exhaust from their old-fashioned cars into the cabin?”
"Pretty much,” Gaby said. “People also used to die in poorly heated rooms, with unsafe stoves. It’s caused by incomplete combustion. Basically, oxygen and carbon together are much happier being carbon dioxide, so where a chance arises, carbon monoxide changes into carbon dioxide.”
“And we even measured a higher concentration of that,” Jonathan said.
Gaby added, “Which could have been caused by any number of recycling processes gone wrong.”
True.
Jonathan grabbed his coffee in both hands. "So, how would people die from carbon monoxide poisoning in a space station?"
"You're the recycling specialist, you tell me."
“I looked at the recycling plant, but I didn’t see anything that I wouldn’t expect. The process has pretty much stopped now because there is no supply of material. How would carbon monoxide form in the plant anyway? Do you really think that is it? I have never heard of a faulty recycling process producing carbon monoxide. It's a product of incomplete burning, and we're not burning anything in recycling. I really don't understand how this could have happened."
“I’m keeping an open mind. I want to rule things out. Most of the time, when the habitat becomes unstable, it’s something to do with the recycling.”
“I normally agree, but what we have here is not the habitat becoming unstable. I think it’s still quite stable. Not healthy, but there are reasons for that. I can’t see how those reasons have anything to do with the operation of the recycling plant. If you’re certain that the people died from carbon monoxide poisoning, we need to find out how it entered that room. Was it just that room or the whole station?”
“The habitat monitors don’t measure carbon monoxide.”
“But they would have seen a rise in carbon dioxide.”
“Slowly, yes, but we already established that could have many causes, not the least of which that things started rotting.”
Things, like dead bodies.
“We need to go back to basics,” Jonathan said. “Tell me what you know about what happened in that room."
Gaby took a sip from her drink. Jonathan thought he could see a shudder go through her. It would have been horrendous to deal with death on that kind of scale.
"All we can tell is that it happened very suddenly. Based on the positions where we found the victims, some of them may have attempted to leave the room, but most of them were taken completely by surprise. There must have been a quick rise of the carbon monoxide levels in that room.”
“How would it have entered?”
“The door was shut, so probably through the air vents.”
Which led back to the recycling plant where he’d seen nothing unusual. But something had happened in that storage room. And that brought him back to previous thoughts.
He asked, “How certain are you that everyone at the station is accounted for?”
“We have three hundred and twenty-seven bodies. One staff member is in the hospital at Ceres station. The personnel list numbers three hundred and twenty-eight.”
“But what if there was a visitor to the station, or two, and the same number of people are still at large?”
Gaby frowned. “Why would you hide if rescuers turn up?”
“If you were guilty of the deaths of the other residents.”
Gaby gave him a wide-eyed look. “You mean, one of the crew called a meeting for all inhabitants and then killed everyone?”
“I don’t know, but it could have happened like that. And that person is still hiding.”
“Do you have a reason to suspect that? Don’t you think that’s speculating too much?”
“I might have heard footsteps. Lance said it was just expansion of metal, and he might be right. But we also came across a room where something has happened. Not sure what, but there was broken stuff on the floor and doors hanging open as if someone violent had gone on a rampage.”
“But why would that have anything to do with the auditorium?”
“I don’t know, but first we should make sure that we’ve identified all the victims properly so that there is no one missing.”
“We have a list of people who were wearing uniforms with their ID tags. It still leaves about a third of the victims who weren’t wearing uniforms.”
“I haven’t even looked at the staff list yet. Who was in charge of this place?”
“The station director was a scientist by the name of Richard Shelton.”
Jonathan stared at her. “You’re kidding. The Richard Shelton?”
“Uhm… I don’t know any Richard Sheltons.”
“I guess you wouldn’t know. He was professor of robotics at Johnson when I was a student. Everyone looked up to him.”
“I thought you studied exo-biology.”
“I did. And I studied on Earth, not at Johnson Lunar Base. But we took his courses because we all had to do robotics subjects. He was very well-known in those days.”
“Oh. Seems odd for someone like that to have become a director of a small commercial space station. A step backwards, I would say.”
“Yeah. Maybe it’s a different Richard Shelton. It’s not a terribly unusual name. Have you identified him as one of the victims?”
“Not yet, but we have a lot of work still to be done.”
He asked, “The victims need to be DNA matched?”
“They will be, but that’s going to take some time. That’s not a quick procedure and I don’t have any of the equipment I’d need to do that. We will have to wait.”
“But we don’t have the time to wait, if we suspect there may be a mismatch and a person still at large in the station.”
“You keep saying that, but is this a hunch or an actual theory we could argue with the captain. Because he’s been at my back wanting to get all these bodies wrapped up so we can continue on our way.”
The captain had not been too keen to render assistance to the station in the first place.
Some people could be outright arses.
Jonathan breathed out heavily through his nose. “It’s not a hunch and I don’t have clear evidence. But this disaster is also not caused by a fault in the recycling plant, nor does it have a bacterial origin. I’m willing to declare this a crime. A murder-suicide or just straight up murder.”
Gaby looked uneasy. “So what do you want to do?”
“Gather the facts. In the first place, I want to be certain that everyone who was in that auditorium is accounted for and that the names match with the personnel files. We need positive ID, visitor logs. In the second place, we need to know how the carbon monoxide entered the auditorium and where it came from.”
Gaby said, “I’d like to know what all the inhabitants were doing in the auditorium in the first place.”
“That, too.”
Gaby blew out a breath. “I don’t know why we always get caught up in this stuff. I was looking forward to hopping from asteroid to asteroid and taking samples. I was looking forward to testing that theory where if you’re on an asteroid of a certain size, you can throw a rock into orbit so it will travel around the asteroid and hit you in the back of the head.”
They’d spent many a hilarious hour in the canteen on the transport ship working out these, and occasionally somewhat more lewd, theories.
“Well, we did offer to do this job.”
“Only because you’re such a sook.” She grinned.
“Also because neither of us expected to walk into a scene from the zombie apocalypse.”
She looked over her shoulder. The canteen was open to all staff and passengers.
A group of middle-aged passengers had settled behind them.
Part of the group was a man Jonathan had noticed was quite demanding, and another was the company representative in the “Incident Mitigation Team” that had met with them yesterday. He didn’t think they were sitting in that position by accident.
“Let’s go somewhere else,” he said, his voice low.