Harry got as comfortable as he could, grabbing some cargo webbing from the wall and entangling himself in it. He was inside a cramped, titanium spheroid only a few feet across. A tiny spun diamond circle in the center of the forward curve of the orb served as his only glimpse of what lay outside the drone. Right now it was a tiny circle of blackness ringed in light coming from somewhere along the station’s exterior.

Harry waited, the only sound his own breathing. He realized he had no idea when the automated hopper would launch. One minute into his confinement he felt a bump and a jolt as the hopper launched, followed by the sudden sensation of weightlessness. If he’d had room to move around, Harry would have bonked his helmet against a protruding piece of equipment as he tumbled around inside the orb like a sock in a dryer.

He had strapped his slate to the left arm of his suit, and used it to track the hopper’s trajectory. It was moving away from the station to curve down toward the massive blue gas giant below. As the hopper got close to the planet’s upper atmosphere Harry had the sensation of falling.

The view port filled with roiling blue haze. Harry watched the gaseous atmosphere dance outside his tiny orb, feeling like a seed tossed on the wind. Clouds larger than Valhalla stacked up, hydrogen, helium, methane, and trace amounts of other deadly gases gathered, closing in on the minute hopper. Kilometers long lightning flared an impossible distance away.

Harry had not expected to feel this small. Valhalla was vast and huge. It was impossible for anyone to see all of it, and little need. Nieflheim was many orders of magnitude more vast than that. Hundreds of thousands of times larger than the planet that birthed his species. And he was only seeing one tiny speck of it, was in fact himself a tiny speck within its clutches, storm-tossed.

The unending blueness made his eyes hurt, so Harry concentrated instead on his slate with its tiny blip moving toward the larger in comparison but still tiny triangle of the floating platform. He imagined Honey was there in the dark with him, smiling, the expectation of justice assured.

It was another hour until he saw his destination, a tiny metallic speck tossed about on methane seas. It grew larger in the view port, appearing more and more solid even as it was buffeted occasionally by hurricane-force winds. Living on Valhalla gave one the illusion of safety and solidity, but being out here, inside a fragile bubble surrounded by poisonous gases and crushing gravity, made Harry realize just how small and insignificant they really were. He wondered if the immortals in their palaces on the luxury level learned to appreciate this salient fact when they had held parties on these floating platforms.

The platform grew until it filled the small view port, a wide flat platform the size of a football field on Earth, with a pyramidal pylon jutting up from the center like an enormous tent topped with red warning lights, instrumentation, and a small docking clamp. Harry’s pod had indeed departed, and he hoped he was still here somewhere waiting on his ride.

Harry squeezed his eyes shut while the pod initiated its automated docking sequence, attaching itself to the pylon with a jarring jolt that sent him careening painfully into a protruding panel filled with instrumentation.

Harry checked his life support indicator. He had roughly two hour and forty-five minutes of air left, and there was no pumped-in atmosphere on the pylon. Whatever his suit held had to last him long enough to retrieve Rigel Bennett and return to Valhalla. He would be cutting it close. Harry hoped someone had left behind an extra air bottle on the platform, but he doubted it.

Harry squeezed through the opening as soon as the hatch cycled open and moved as quickly as he could down a utility ladder. Nnedi had been right about the added gravity. He felt like he had another Harry on his back as he descended, and he wondered how he would have the stamina to find and restrain his murder suspect, then realized that his prey would be experiencing the same effects. It would level the playing field, or so he hoped.

Harry found himself inside a vast open space with triangular walls that went up and up into darkness. The only light was from a few telltales on various pieces of equipment and his helmet lights, which cast strange shadows over the place. He pulled his gun from the belt of his suit and started walking slowly, looking behind instrument banks and peering through layers of conduit for his suspect. The place was big, but it was mostly empty. He’d find him.

A few minutes into Harry’s search, his radio chirped.

“You shouldn’t have come here.”

Harry froze, his head turning frantically before realizing the futility of the move. They were communicating over radio; he could be anywhere on the platform.

“You’re the one who shouldn’t have come here,” Harry replied. “I know you killed Honey.”

A sigh, then silence. “I didn’t mean to. It just kind of happened. Things got out of hand.”

“Tell it to your company-appointed advocate,” said Harry.

“I’m not going back. I’d never get a fair trial. Not on Valhalla. Not anywhere in corporation space.”

“Let’s find out.”

“No. My ride will be here any minute.”

“And if they don’t show?” asked Harry.

“This platform is failing. It is scheduled to fall into the atmosphere within the hour. Two hundred thousand miles below this cloud layer, the gravity is so strong that it will crush this little graphene fortress like it was tinfoil, and me with it, if I’m still here. And you too, if you’re still here. Either way, I’m not going back.”

“You’ll be a martyr then,” said Harry.

“Better a martyr than a murderer.”

“Oh, you’ll still be that too.” Harry moved to aim his gun behind some ductwork. Nothing. “You got them talking, though. The bigwigs and the others. They might work something out. Wouldn’t want to miss that, would you?”

“It’s enough to know it’s happening,” said Rigel Bennett. “But Valhalla is just one station. There are others. And mining colonies. And comet cities. Everywhere the corporation holds sway. They all need to start treating people like human beings instead of lines on a balance sheet, or they all deserve to fall.”

Harry sneered. “So you’re like a traveling agent provocateur.”

“Something like that. Heads up.”

Harry stepped back as something flew out of the darkness to land at his feet with a loud metallic ringing he heard through his helmet and felt through his boots. He reached down to pick it up.

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It was a short metal implement half a foot long with a padded handle on one end and three blunt prongs on the other. Harry’s helmet lights illuminated dark, dried blood on the prongs.

“That’s what I did it with,” Rigel said. “It was an accident. A crime of passion, as they say. I don’t even know what that tool does. I found it, down there when I was arguing with Honey. I wanted her to join my cause, but she wouldn’t. Even though she had turned against her family she still wouldn’t rise up to stop them, to hurt them like they’ve hurt us. I was…angry.”

“So you bashed her skull in,” said Harry, shoving the implement into his belt. “I get it. Can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs, am I right?”

“It wasn’t like that!”

Harry thought he heard clunky footsteps somewhere in the darkness.

“That tool has her blood, my DNA. It’s enough to close the case. You can record my confession too if you’d like. But I’m not going back up there.”

Harry heard a deep groan as of metal under incredible pressure, and the platform seemed to rock. It shivered like it was in the throes of an earthquake.

“You’d better go now. You don’t have much time. Remember your oxygen.”

“What about you?”

“I brought an extra bottle just in case,” said Rigel Bennett. “If my ride doesn’t show, I’m gonna ride this thing down into the lower atmosphere, where no one—no bot or drone—has ever gone. I’m gonna stand outside on the edge of the platform and watch my fate coming toward me. It really is beautiful out there, you know. The immortals, the mining company big shots, don’t see it. They just see another resource they can exploit for profit. But there’s beauty here.”

The kid sounded wistful, delving into maudlin. He was unburdening himself, a deathbed confession, a rambling, oral suicide note.

“Come on, Bennett. You don’t really want to do this. Live to fight another day and all that?”

“That was the plan until you showed up. You’re like a dog with a bone, Detective. I read about you. You’re not so bad. For a corporate cop. Did you know we used to have nation states? Before we left Earth, started exploring space. Before the Vossoff-Nimmitz drive. Before the Articles of Incorporation. Everyone was a citizen then, not an employee. Autonomous entities. We had rights. Now we have Rules of Conduct. The police were there to serve and protect the public, who paid their salaries. Now you protect the company from damage and liability.”

“You’re breaking my heart, kid,” Harry said, spinning around to aim his weapon at a suspicious-looking shadow. But nothing hunched within it.

“But they screwed up,” Rigel said, ignoring Harry’s jibe. “They started letting the corporations hold sway more and more. Writing laws. Making rules. Getting out of paying taxes. They tricked everyone into thinking what was good for them was also good for the common man. Going to space made their ascendancy all the more enticing. Exploiting something as big as a solar system is beyond the capacity of most world governments ran by ailing politicians who will die before their pet projects pay off, so they turned to private industry. Now we have functionally immortal executives ready to plunder until the heat death.”

“What do you want me to do about it?” Harry said.

“I suppose there’s not much you can do. I’m more interested in what you’re going to do about me, in this moment. Since your arrival I’ve been wondering something. Is bringing me in worth your life? I’d like to find out.”

Their was a thunderous concussion from somewhere beneath his feet, and the platform shook once more, this time listing to one side. Harry toed on his magnetic boots to keep from falling.

“It’s going soon,” said Rigel Bennett when the shaking had subsided. “Are you going with it? You don’t have to, you know. I’ve given you the murder weapon and my full confession.”

Harry opened his mouth to speak, closed it. An ominous thought occupied his mind.

“You don’t have a ride coming, do you?”

“You know the suicide fetishists?” Rigel said by way of an answer. “In the early days of this mining outfit some of the younger immortals would gather on these platforms and jump off. When they reached crush depth, it would send a signal to their skull rigs to trigger an upload right at the moment of death. It would beam their patterns back to their ship or whatever, and they’d get brand new bodies, being born again with the memory of their death. But do you want to know what’s really fucked up? What those immortals up there on Valhalla don’t realize, or talk about even if they do?”

Harry sighed, realizing the guy was stalling. “What’s that, kid?”

“The person they were, the person who jumped, still died. All that’s left are force-grown clones who only think they are that person because they have all of their memories up to the point of death. They are not the same people, just fleshy ghosts who think they are. You see? No one can escape death. Not even the immortals. Honey told me that. It’s why she never uploaded.”

The platform rocked once more.

“You’d better get out of here. No reason for both of us to die for Honey’s death.”

Harry’s eyes widened. Was this what this was? The kid exacting his own punishment? He supposed it was profoundly prophetic, but his superiors wouldn’t see it that way. They would see it as escaping justice. The only kind that counted anyway.

And what of himself? Why was he doing this? Was this some selfless act for the good of the station? Or was he giving himself up to possibly die because he watched a woman on a video and he feels like he knew her?

“There’s no reason for you to die, either,” Harry said. “Come with me. I’ll tell them you cooperated. It’ll make things…easier.”

“You’re a terrible liar, Detective. I wish we could have met under better circumstances.”

The platform rocked again, this time moving rapidly back and forth. Harry’s vision blurred as the screeching of metal reached him through his suit.

“You should go. You won’t have enough ox to make the return trip if you don’t. Neither would I, for that matter. I lied about the extra O. And I wouldn’t make it easy on you.”

Another concussion from beneath rocked the platform. Harry would have lost his footing if it wasn’t for his boot magnets. Rigel Bennett was apparently not so fortunate. He cried out through the suit radio as some big bank of equipment came loose from its moorings and slid down the now angled floor right toward Harry. He couldn’t disengage his boot mags in time, and the heavy mass slammed into him, pinning him against a support.

Harry grunted in pain, checking his suit’s limited diagnostics. The skin of the suit was still intact and nothing was broken, but the force of the blow had knocked the wind out of him. He tried to breath slowly, resisting the urge to gulp breath to save his vanishing oxygen. He looked around in the dimness, alert for any sign of Rigel Bennett. Now was the time to strike, when he was helpless. It’s what he would do.

“Are you all right, Detective?”

Harry saw no need for subterfuge. “Yeah. I think so.”

“Good.”

Harry saw movement then, and a lean, suited and helmeted figure detached itself from the surrounding shadows. His face was illuminated by his helmet lights, making him resemble a floating, glowing disembodied head. He wore a grim smile on his face, looking resolute.

He moved to the other side of the equipment and leaned into it with a grunt. With a bit of effort he slid it away just enough so that Harry could extricate himself.

Another shift of the platform and the piece of equipment slid screeching into another support strut, crumpling as it folded around it.

“This place isn’t gonna last much longer,” said Harry. “Come on. Enough of this noble martyrdom. Let’s both get the hell out of here.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” said Rigel as another convulsion sent him falling backward as the whole structure begin tilting sideways.

Harry shouted at him, but it did no good. Following his helmet lights, he saw Honey’s murderer sprawled against a tangle of metal conduit a hundred feet away, a scowl on his face. “Go,” he called through the radio. “Save yourself.”

Harry started toward him, then stopped. From the corner of his eye he imagined he saw Honey. She wasn’t wearing an environmental suit. She wasn’t wearing much of anything. She smiled at Him.

Let him go, she seemed to be saying. It isn’t worth it.

“You’re worth it,” Harry whispered, wondering if his words had carried over the radio. Tears welled in his eyes. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

Honey smiled that soul-melting smile and shook her head. It’s all right. Go.

Harry glanced in Bennett’s direction, then back at Honey’s position in his periphery. She was gone.

The platform shook once more, and Harry decided that was as good a message as he was going to get. He turned and walked up the platform’s surface, which was now a wall he had to climb. Even with his mag boots it was tough. His back ached and his abdominal muscles were sore from the effort.

Harry reached the first rung of the access ladder that led back to his waiting pod. He paused just long enough to take one last look at Rigel Bennett, who had positioned himself atop the mass of conduit. He gave Harry a half-hearted salute as the platform shook out from under them.