Emissaries from the Dead ac-1

by Adam-Troy Castro

  Emissaries from the Dead

  ( Andrea Cort - 1 )

  Adam-Troy Castro

  Two murders have occurred on One One One, an artificial ecosystem created by the universe’s dominant AIs to house several engineered species, including a violent, sentient race of sloth-like creatures. Under order from the Diplomatic Corps, Counselor Andrea Cort has come to this cylinder world where an indentured human community hangs suspended high above a poisoned, acid atmosphere. Her assignment is to choose a suitable homicide suspect from among those who have sold their futures to escape existences even worse than this one. And no matter where the trail leads her she must do nothing to implicate the hosts, who hold the power to obliterate humankind in an instant.

  But Andrea Cort is not about to hold back in her hunt for a killer. For she has nothing to lose and harbors no love for her masters or fellow indentures. And she herself has felt the terrible exhilaration of taking life….

  Adam-Troy Castro

  EMISSARIES FROM THE DEAD

  For Christina Santiago-Peterson,

  who wasn’t satisfied with the way

  I killed her off the first time

  PROLOGUE

  When the Monster sleeps, she dreams of Bocai.

  Bocai had been an unremarkable world, of the usual unremarkable beauty. There had been deserts of towering red spinestalks, mountains lined with spongiform trees that remained tall and unyielding despite the softness of their bark, oceans that glowed with dancing phosphorescence at night, and a day and night approximately half the length of the normal human sleep cycle, allowing the human beings who had leased one small island from the natives two sunsets and two sunrises for every day they stood upon its generous fertile earth.

  A beautiful world, yes. A remarkable beautiful world, no. Those who’d traveled to many all agreed that they’d seen better.

  Following the usual behavior pattern of their species, the tiny human community had found the exotic sights and scents a fine subject for overwrought poetry. They had composed several hundred volumes, in no time at all, before something happened to all of them that lent those works a dark undercurrent they had never been meant to possess.

  These days, on the rare waking occasions when the Monster permits her thoughts to dwell on that damned place, she wonders how she ever endured life there.

  It was, after all, a world.

  And as a grown woman, she hates worlds.

  As a grown woman, she has never been able to understand why so many technologically advanced species continued to prefer natural environments when artificial ones are much safer and so much easier to control.

  As an eight-year-old child, she had not known that even the happiest worlds could end with her curled in a dark narrow space between a bed and a wall, breathing dust and the sweat-soaked smell of her own fear.

  She knows this now, and reminds herself anew every time she dreams of Bocai: not the lush and colorful landscape but that cramped space, her ragged breath, the distant smells of burning flesh, the distant cries of sentients killing or being killed.

  She dreams about this night when hide-and-seek was no longer just part of a familiar childhood game. She dreams of thoughts that did not belong in her head and feelings that did not belong on her skin.

  She dreams of seeing a mob of neighbors smash her mother’s head against a wall again and again until everything the kind, somewhat distracted woman had been was reduced to a stain on the mortared walls.

  She dreams of seeing her father, armed with a shovel, smash the skull of a Bocaian child she had considered a sister.

  She dreams of seeing two sentients who had until this night been best friends to one another, one human, one Bocaian, tearing and scratching at each other in the dirt, too frenzied to scream from the wounds that have already blinded both.

  And all of this was horrible and all of this was terrifying, but none of it affected her, at least on that night, the way it should have.

  On that night it thrilled her.

  On that night it made her heart pound and her blood race and her flesh tingle with the thrill of a game more delicious than any she had ever known.

  On that night she regretted only being too small to participate.

  Because she also wanted to kill something.

  It’s an odd thing for an eight-year-old Hom. Sap girl to want, and the part of the child that still remained sane had been entirely aware of that. There had never been any violence in her life, up until those last few hours—and there seemed no reason beyond simple self-defense for her to feel the urgency she felt now.

  But she did hunger for it. She wanted to feel something alive turn to something dead. She wanted to stand above it at the moment of its dying, and feel the satisfaction of knowing that she’d been the one who drove it from the world of things that live and breathe and feel into the world of things that merely rot.

  She wanted it so much that the grown-up Monster, reliving these moments from the vantage point of a survivor, is amazed that the little girl’s sense of self-preservation was powerful enough to keep her in hiding for so long. Amazed that the little girl managed to keep quiet, that she’d managed to hide from the adults-turned monsters before they could have done to her what they’d already done to her father, her sister, her neighbors, and her friends.

  If only she’d remained in hiding.

  She might have avoided getting any blood on her own hands.

  She might have.

  In dreams, anything can happen. History can be rewritten. Fates can be argued with. Things set in stone can be remolded like putty.

  But this dream follows real historical events.

  This dream bears an inevitability that has tortured the Monster all her life.

  This dream carries with it the knowledge that all these events have already taken place and therefore cannot be changed.

  This dream commemorates the moment that transformed the little girl from innocent into the Monster.

  The little girl in this dream is frightened not because she knows she might die tonight, but because she holds the knowledge of the Monster, watching through the same adult eyes, seeing that death might have been better.

  Trapped in the dream that never changes, the little girl hears a rustling sound, and she knows that there is someone else in the room with her.

  She knows it is someone she loves.

  She knows he is here to kill her.

  She knows she will kill him first.

  She knows that at the moment of his death she will feel a rush of sick pleasure unmatched by any other joy her life will ever offer.

  And she knows that she will live the rest of her life missing it.

  1. HABITAT

  I’ve never been a fan of natural ecosystems.

  I know they’re romanticized. They’re great for people who like to swat bugs, step on feces, and catch strange diseases, an odd subsection of humanity that has never included myself. I grew up in urban orbital habitats and pretty much know better. But even I must admit that natural places evolve by accident and therefore can’t be blamed for their high level of unpleasantness.

  Artificial ecosystems, engineered by sentients who know we’re better than that now, are just plain perverse.

  The cylinder world One One One was an eloquent case in point.

  It was so wrong, in both concept and execution, that it exalted even the most appalling messes arranged by Nature. Like most constructs of its kind, it rotated at high speeds to provide to the internal environment a simulated gravitational pull away from its axis of rotation. That’s just basic engineering, so old that dumb old Mankind considered it a brilliant idea long before we went into space and put the basic idea into
practice. But most cylinder worlds orbit planets, or hang around inside solar systems, and are built by sentients who evolved on planets to support life that likes to walk around on a solid surface, even when that solid surface has a horizon that curves up on both sides. As a result, they house their habitats on the surface that best approximates planetary notions of up and down: that is, the outermost “floor.”

  On One One One, the independent software intelligences known as the AIsource had turned that usual model upside down. The station itself was situated in deep interstellar space, a good twenty light-years from the nearest inhabited world, and far from any of the territories claimed by any of the major spacefaring species. We never would have known about it if they hadn’t given us the address. Its habitable interior centered on an Uppergrowth of knotty vegetation clinging to the interior station axis. The crushingly dense lower atmosphere was a poisonous soup of thick toxic gases above a sludgy organic sea. Only in the upper atmosphere, near the central hub, was there a thinner oxygen–nitrogen blend of the sort congenial to the life-forms the AIsource had engineered.

  The AIsource determination to get into the God-in-a-bottle business struck me as quixotic at best and insane at worst. And pointlessly grandiose, as well. The average human cylinder world is about ten kilometers long by two kilometers in diameter, which strikes me as a compact, manageable size that shows a little sense of humility in matters of cosmic scale. There are some leviathans, like my base of operations, New London, of up to ten times that size. All right, so we need big cities. But this place, One One One, was approximately a thousand times longer and some fifty times fatter than even New London: pretty excessive for the housing of a few brachiating apes who had to spend their entire lives clinging to bioengineered vines. It defined the concept of inexact fit.

  Either way, it was an upside-down hell.

  Even as the sleek AIsource transport ferried me into the habitat, I mentally catalogued everything I found disturbing here. The storm clouds far below were like a roiling brown cauldron, flashing with sudden light whenever charged by the violent forces at their heart. The giant winged things who sometimes ventured above those were like dragons out of a bad fairy tale: their wingspans up to two kilometers across, the force of their flight leaving entire storm systems in their wake, their sudden screeching dives into the opaque clouds acts of epic predation on creatures nobody flying at my current altitude had ever seen.

  I’d been assured that the dragons never ascended as high as the Uppergrowth latitudes. I’d also been advised not to bother thinking about them, as they had nothing to do with the reason I was here.

  It was like that old joke: Don’t think about the elephant.

  (But it’s there.)

  Don’t think about it and it’ll go away.

  (But it’s there.)

  You’re still thinking about it.

  And so on.

  The Uppergrowth, dotted here and there with the sluggish forms of the Brachiators, was a vast gray surface of compact, knotted vines that loomed over this world like a hammer waiting for the best opportunity to fall. The thick black pylons that every hundred kilometers or so descended from that Uppergrowth into the cloudscape were anchored at their apparent midpoints to the glowspheres that served as One One One’s suns, and looked far too flimsy to hold such balls of corruscating fusion. The glowspheres themselves cast a light harsh enough to burn purple afterimages on my retinas, and there were so many of them that my transport cast multiple, competing shadows on the Uppergrowth above me.

  I regarded it all with my usual grim reserve, dimly aware that I’d fallen back into a nervous habit that had plagued me for years: one index finger twirling the single lock of long, black hair that dangled from the right side of my head. Since the rest of my hair is cut very short, the many people who hate my guts like to say I keep that lock long to feed the tic and for no other reason. I know the habit drives people to distraction and therefore practice it whenever I can. I’m too uncomfortable in the presence of others to tolerate their comfort in mine.

  The flight might have been bearable if the transport had been properly enclosed; but, no, it was a roofless model, protected against precipitation and wind shear by ionic shielding, offering a ride so smooth that had I closed my eyes I wouldn’t have experienced any sense of motion at all. But I knew I was not enclosed. I knew that given just one moment’s suicidal madness, it would have been all too easy to hop over the waist-high bulkhead and plunge to my death. I knew it and I could not ignore it.

  Just as I knew that somebody in this Habitat was a murderer.

  Excuse me. Somebody else.

  I always forget to count myself.

  The transport interjected: Andrea Cort: are you suffering distress?

  “Yes. How did you know?”

  Your blood pressure, heartrate, and respiration all reflect tension levels consistent with the early stages of panic.

  “I didn’t know you were paying such close attention.”

  You are our guest and your health, when in our care, is paramount. Would you like some medication?

  “No.”

  Some therapeutic conversation, then?

  I’d spent years enduring therapy I didn’t want, receiving medications that didn’t help, having my brain mapped at every scale down to the molecular in search of answers that didn’t exist. If it accomplished anything at all, it was instilling a lifelong aversion to sentients who meant well. “No. Maybe later.”

  You would not be the first human being to experience difficulty in this environment. Help is available.

  “No, thank you.”

  The transport respected my wishes enough to shut up, thus demonstrating one major difference between software intelligences and human beings.

  Human beings intrude whether welcome or not.

  ***

  The facility housing One One One’s human contingent was a network of pendulous canvas shapes, dangling from the Uppergrowth like gourds. Colored as gray as the network of vines that supported them, they seemed so organic a part of the landscape that I didn’t recognize them as human structures until we drew near.

  There must have been fifty hammocks, dangling in bunches, with only a few set off in relative isolation. They were linked by bridges of flexible netting, which crawled with the forms of human beings. Some traveled the Uppergrowth itself, brachiating along its roots and vines without safety lines. One lithe young woman with flaming orange hair hurled herself away from even that precarious haven, hung in mid-space for a second, and landed on one of the nets, bouncing up and down in total disregard of the deadly fall that would have awaited her if she’d missed.

  The transport slowed, picked an angle of approach, and moved in underneath the hammocks, so close now that it was possible to discern the prone shapes of human beings in the lowest distensions of dangling canvas. Some of the humans traversing the net bridges paused to study me as I arrived. Their clothing styles ranged from skintight jumpsuits to, in a few cases, full nudity. Male, female, and a few identifiable neuters, they were all built like gymnasts at peak physical condition. Most were compact, though I noticed a few long-limbed spidery physiques among them. Their expressions managed odd combinations of hope, terror, resentment, and defiance, sometimes all at once.

  I’d seen looks like that before.

  They were people under siege.

  ***

  The skimmer slowed to a stop beneath one of the central hammocks. As it dropped the shields, I felt wind: a light, warm breeze, carrying with it a scent midway between ocean water and the sugar-saturated air outside a candy shop I frequent in New London. Despite the terrifying environment, my mouth watered. Addiction to sweets is one of my few humanizing vices.

  The fabric above me shifted and bulged from the weight of human movement. A narrow slit appeared where there had been no visible seam, revealing the face of a man in his late thirties. He had close-cropped shiny brown hair, eyes of a blue so pale they vanished against the whites, thin p
ink lips, and a lantern jaw that made his tentative smile look like a fissure on the face of an edifice. “Hello there! Welcome to Hammocktown! I gather you’re the J.A. rep?”

  I object to such snappy abbreviations on principle, but my complete title was Associate Legal Counsel for the Homo Sapiens Confederacy Diplomatic Corps Judge Advocate, hardly the kind of thing anybody could be reasonably expected to rattle off in a single breath. “Yes, I’m Counselor Andrea Cort. Are you the ambassador?”

  His thin lip twisted. “That’s not a title our esteemed landlords allow me to use.”

  “The AIsource object to the title Ambassador?”

  “They object to it here.”

  If the software intelligences were getting pissy about job titles now, it either meant a major shift in the nature of their relationship with our species, or something unprecedented about the rules of life on One One One. But that was largely what I’d been led to expect. “Have they given you a reason?”

  His smile faltered. “You couldn’t have gotten much of a briefing on your way here.”

  “I’m only seven hours out of Intersleep.” And still awaiting the energy crash that always struck like a club, within twenty-four hours of waking. “You haven’t answered my question.”

  “I think I can answer your question inside. In the meantime, if you want to call me something, my name’s Gibb, Stuart Gibb. You can consider me the chief asshole in charge.” The slit opened wider, and he reached down with both arms. “Let’s get you up here so we can get you up to speed. Do you have anything you want to pass up?”

  I had a soft cylindrical bag containing three changes of clothes, a few toiletries, and a significant amount of contraband. I’ve never had any qualms about handing it to anybody. The bag was of Tchi manufacture, and as such was designed to satisfy a people who spent their days and nights taking offense at imagined improper liberties. Gibb could have examined every centimeter of the bag for days without finding access to my goods.