Emissaries from the Dead

by Adam-Troy Castro

  “You wouldn’t be the first.”

  “Ah.” He cast about for something else to say, and settled on being the voice of authority. “Well, if you’re determined to eat alone, maybe you should go back to your quarters. I am responsible for your safety, after all, and I wouldn’t want you to have an accident or something—”

  “I understand. But if you don’t mind clearing up some things, first—”

  The shift to official business, however grim, freed him from any further need to figure out just what the hell else to do with me. “Go ahead.”

  “First,” I said, ticking off three names on my fingers, “Robin Fish, Nils D’Onofrio, and Li-Tsan Crin.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why haven’t they been transferred?”

  He became a martyr, unjustly accused. “Have they been complaining?”

  “Answer the question.”

  “I’ve answered it many times before,” he said, which was giving away more than he intended, since none of those occasions had involved me. “There’s no reason to transfer them. Confinement to the hangar may not be pleasant for their respective egos, but we do need a full-time staff to maintain those shipboard facilities, and those free do an excellent job providing support for those of us who have proved we can perform the job out here.”

  “Yes,” I said, “I’ve heard that. But none of the busywork you assign them actually requires three people—not when Fish, who was stuck there alone for almost a full year, was able to handle those responsibilities, and others you’ve since taken from her, all by herself before Crin or D’Onofrio were ever sent there to help her.”

  “Yes, she was,” Gibb said, with the kind of heat that came from repeating an old and familiar argument. “But only just. Her morale has never been exactly high. I didn’t curtail her duties because of overwork, but because she wasn’t performing satisfactorily at the few jobs she had. Her performance has deteriorated even further since Nils and Li-Tsan showed up; from what I gather, even they consider her worse than useless.”

  “So you don’t need her.”

  “We could survive without her, but we do the best we can with the people we have.”

  “You arranged her assignment here in the first place,” I said.

  “That’s right. I met a young, ambitious, and determined indenture, trapped in what she considered assignments without a future, who begged, at length, for my help getting her a posting more in line with her self-proclaimed talents. I was impressed with her and remembered her when I needed people to staff my facility here. It turned out that she was much better at self-promotion than she was at delivering on her promises, but what could I do? She was already here by then.”

  I’d just been fed about fourteen different flavors of self-contradictory bullshit and told it was all the same shade of vanilla. “So are they necessary, or not? Do you need all three of them, or not? Do they do an excellent job, or are they worse than useless, or what?”

  Gibb was getting fed up with this line of questioning. “Let’s just say we might be a little overstaffed in that area, though not entirely by choice.”

  More bullshit. In the absence of any other agenda, refusing to transfer them was vindictive, wasteful, and stupid. But only in the absence of any other agenda.

  “Second question. Peyrin Lastogne. The man has no Dip Corps file. He has no Confederate file. He’s not even an official member of your delegation. But his authority, here, seems second only to your own. Who the hell is he?”

  Gibb showed teeth. I don’t think I could call it a smile. “That’s classified.”

  “I’m cleared for that kind of information.”

  “I’m sorry, Counselor, but I’m afraid you’re not.”

  This was outrageous. “In any investigation of this kind, the Judge Advocate’s office has total access to—”

  “—to less than the Judge Advocate imagines,” Gibb said. He did smile then, the kind of unsympathetic smile customer service representatives of major transport lines use to hide their schadenfreude when dealing with troublesome passengers whose belongings have been accidentally dumped into the coldest regions of deep space. “I’m sorry, Counselor. But this comes from the very top. Mr. Lastogne is off limits.”

  One of my earliest assignments, about a decade ago, had been to support a task force investigating allegations of high treason in the Confederate Executive Branch. We’d questioned Cabinet members on a daily basis. Nobody, not even the president, had been off limits to us then, which had turned out to be a good thing, since we soon discovered a link to the whereabouts of the fugitive terrorist, Magrison, among the members of the first family. (He still remains at large.) My authority now was at least as high as that shared by the task force then. But sometimes bureaucrats of middling rank, like Gibb, put up more of a fight than the people at the top, who know what their limits are. “All right, then. Without giving up any particulars, is information about his background in your own possession?”

  Here came that apologetic smile again. “I only know what I’m cleared to know.”

  “You can’t even tell me if you’ve been informed?”

  “I’m saying that my knowledge is far from total, and that I’m not cleared to answer that kind of question.”

  To hell with this. “Fish told me you’ve taken control of all communication in and out of this Habitat.”

  “Yes, but that’s just a security concern. Our position here is such that—”

  His last three words were obliterated as I spoke over him. “I don’t need to know your position here to make this particular point, sir. I intend to issue a report to New London tonight. I will send it through you, because that’s the way you’ve set yourself up here, but I will send it coded. Any attempt by you to read that communication before transmission, or to censor its content, will be detected and taken by the Advocate’s office as obstruction of justice. Do I need to advise you of the seriousness of that charge?”

  Gibb’s face was a portrait of repressed anger. “You don’t have to act like this, Counselor. I’ve been nothing but cooperative.”

  “You’ve been nothing, period,” I said.

  Which was excessive. I regretted saying it the second the words left my mouth.

  But if you must make enemies, you might as well make make sure you can expect them to stay that way.

  Making Gibb escort me to my hammock may have amounted to salting the wound, but I had no choice. The route was vertiginous enough in daylight and might have killed me after dark.

  Dropping dead of fear or falling off a rope bridge would have amounted to a cruel practical joke on any investigators who replaced me. They’d no doubt think I was the latest victim of this increasingly murderous conspiracy, and neglect any number of reasonable explanations for the deaths of Warmuth and Santiago that failed to account for my own.

  And that’s just if their own deaths were connected. If they were unconnected, then the confusion caused by my also irrelevant passing would be even worse. Imagine anybody trying to float the theory that three different difficult women all died, one after another, from a series of stupid coincidences.

  The first person to suggest that unlikely possibility would no doubt find herself marked as a prime suspect.

  I preferred not to burden strangers with problems like that.

  Not that I’d have the luxury of feeling any guilt if the eventuality came to pass.

  The hammock smelled of the previous night’s sweat. I slid down the slope, practicing how to stop midway so I wouldn’t find myself trapped at its lowest point. My progress was minimal. Scrambling back to the circular spine, with somewhat more effort than it would have taken Gibb or the Porrinyards, I tied my bag to one of the restraining hooks, then used one of the cables there to secure myself as well. It wasn’t comfortable, but it felt more secure than coming to rest at the hammock’s lowest point.

  Temporarily satisfied, I inhaled the dinner Gibb’s people had packed for me, then activated the hytex and composed
a text message to Artis Bringen, confirming that I was on the job but leaving out any of the findings or theories I’d come up with so far. Most Advocates on my level, investigating incidents at remote locations, send obsessively detailed daily updates, documenting every single movement. I’d trained Bringen to tolerate vagueness, on the theory that the less I told him during my investigations, the less I’d have to deal with his second-guessing. I did assure him that while early inquiries seemed to support the theories he’d relayed (unspoken: that the AIsource were as guilty as sin), unforeseen developments suggested a number of other possible interpretations (unspoken: that the search for a scapegoat was proceeding without hitch, thank you). The politician in him would take comfort in that much, and I needed him happy so I could pump him for certain information I wasn’t getting here.

  I have had difficulty accessing Confederate files on a Peyrin Lastogne, who is operating as second-in-command under Stuart Gibb.

  At this juncture I have no particular basis for suspecting Mr. Lastogne of any involvement in these crimes. His reputation on-site seems to be exemplary. However, I cannot eliminate him from consideration until I am provided his background and diplomatic record. Please forward this information as soon as possible.

  I almost sent it, but then thought of something else.

  Also, you mentioned that my services were specifically requested by several parties on-site. Neither Gibb nor Lastogne will admit to making this request. As they screen all mail, there seem no other possible sources. Please clarify.

  I almost asked him another question, Why would the AIsource say I’m wrong about you? but demurred. That was an issue for a face-to-face meeting, if I even bothered bringing it up at all.

  To counter the local protocols that funneled all such messages through Gibb and Lastogne, I scrambled the text and added a subroutine that would reduce the entire message to gibberish if opened by anybody other than Bringen.

  A version of that gibberish, forwarded back to me, would provide confirmation, if necessary, that neither Gibb nor Lastogne could be trusted.

  I might have done more, but that’s when a fresh wave of exhaustion washed over me.

  The delayed-reaction systemic crash that always follows Intersleep by a couple of days is nobody’s idea of fun. I’ve been known to show up at an assignment burning with energy only to later nod off in the middle of a conversation. The supplements I took upon every waking, some of which were prohibited within the Corps, saved me from the worst of it, but I was always hit sooner or later. Between that and the environment on One One One, I was well overdue.

  I was not just slow on the uptake right now. I was downright stupid.

  Which is one main reason why I failed to be alarmed by the way the gray-green material of my hammock kept wavering in and out of focus.

  The effect reminded me of the gray spots I sometimes see in bright light. They’re almost impossible to discern, but they look like little translucent specs of gray receding toward a distant vanishing point. For a few years in my adolescence I thought they were symptoms of the same madness that overcame me on Bocai. Then I mentioned them to one of my doctors and he laughed, assuring me that they were just a common symptom of eye fatigue, experienced by all human beings and not just those guilty of war crimes. They’re maddening, because it’s futile to focus on them: the more you concentrate, the more they remain indistinct blurs, surfing the edge of the eye’s ability to perceive them.

  The material of the hammock, lit by the glowing edge of the circular spine, was alive with spots just like those, visible one second, invisible the next. I focused on the effect and found myself drifting, aware of nothing but the sight before me, my thoughts growing duller and more obscured by fog with every instant.

  I knew sleep was coming. I could feel the increasing heaviness of my eyelids and the increasing numbness of my limbs. I felt my mouth drop open and my lower jaw brush my chest. I jerked awake, with the sudden jolt of alarm that sometimes interrupts a doze, but recovered, curled my lips into a half-smile, and almost immediately began to relax again.

  I think I felt at peace.

  A hammock is a nearly perfect bed, after all. It allows the body to seek its own most comfortable position. The give of the material feels comforting, almost womblike. It may be hard for someone afraid of heights to relax on such a thing, when it’s hanging so many kilometers above the nearest solid surface, but once exhaustion takes over, the simpler instincts start to dominate. Oblivion called out to me, in a way it never had in bluegel and rarely did in sleep.

  I felt a light breeze on my skin, and stirred in sudden concern. But nothing all that terrible happened, so I fell back asleep.

  The dreams that came were not so bad.

  I was a little girl of three or four, playing with Mommy and Daddy. For once, I didn’t remember them solely in terms of the tragedy on Bocai. I remembered them sitting together at a table, laughing at some joke I was too young to understand. My father seemed happy, my mother downright merry. For the first time in many years I remembered that she’d been a little taller than my father, who had not been a short man; when they faced each other her eyes addressed his from a height advantage of several centimeters. Her arms had been tanned to a fine leather by a life of working in the sun. Her eyes had been surrounded by a starbust of little crinkles. She’d been stingy with smiles, except when I’d said or done something precocious.

  Usually, when I thought of my parents at all, it was not often with anything beyond contempt for the two reckless utopians whose experiment had damned me to spend the rest of my life carrying such a load of insupportable guilt. I almost never thought of them as Mommy and Daddy, and the novelty warmed me for a while, even as I sighed with vague concern over a certain loss of tension in the material that cradled me.

  My dreams shifted, passed through a succession of other settings, and turned to the erotic. This was even rarer, as I’d shut off that part of myself, too, after the abuses I’d suffered in isolation. For the first time in longer than I could remember, I imagined being touched by others, without recoiling in revulsion or resentment: hands that emerged from a fog I couldn’t penetrate to caress my face, my thighs, my breasts. I couldn’t tell whose hands they were, or even if they were supposed to belong to any specific person at all. I just knew that they wouldn’t hurt me, and I felt a warmth that rose from my deep, cold center to envelop every frozen part of me. Even in the vagueness of my dream, I felt a little sadness at the thought that, of course, I couldn’t see the face of the unknown lover responsible for making me feel this way, because being the monster I was meant that no such person could ever, possibly, exist. But that regret went away, too, because in a moment I felt everything that had held me back let go all at once.

  I felt like I was flying.

  The stern voice of a man I despised boomed in my ear:

  “Andrea! Wake up if you want to live!”

  I resisted the summons, thinking only, Bringen? What the hell is Bringen doing here? Bringen should be nailed to his desk at New London, pulling the wings off various species of fly. He doesn’t care about me. I could be bobbing around in vacuum with less than thirty seconds of air left and he wouldn’t work his index finger enough to push the airlock button. He certainly wouldn’t travel halfway across inhabited space to join me in upside-down land. No, he wouldn’t do that….

  I don’t know how many places my mind went after that, but sooner or later the phrase upside-down land reverberated enough for me to remind me that I was on One One One, a place where people had been known to fall from great heights.

  I woke up just in time to realize I was looking down at my own legs, dangling loose over a sky lit, for just this instant, by a faraway burst of lightning. Something else, large and shapeless and flapping, was tumbling out of sight, impossible to identify as it was swallowed up by darkness.

  Then I began to fall.

  13

  ABYSS

  The tether I’d used to connect myself to the
hammock’s solid rib pulled me up short just before I could decide that I was dead.

  It jerked taut at the base of my spine, startling the breath out of me and arresting the plunge of my midsection even as my upper torso, and limbs, attempted to continue falling. I bent over double, grunted, thrashed in panic as I spun like a toy at the end of my line, and came close to fainting in shock.

  All at once I knew someone was trying to kill me.

  I’d like to report that my rage was all by itself enough to keep away the terror.

  I can’t say that.

  I think I vomited before it occurred to me to scream.

  I’m not sure whether I did or not because I didn’t remember doing anything, and while I tasted the acid in my throat, there wasn’t anything anywhere on me. Whatever I’d lost was now well on its way to the lower atmosphere of One One One.

  I gagged, tasted blood, realized I was spinning, and only then tried to scream, without any success at summoning voice.

  Far below, the clouds of One One One rumbled from another internal storm. One formation lit up, backlighting the outline of another dragon in flight. I had the lunatic thought that it didn’t deserve to have such fine wings, almost surrendered to hysteria again, and in a single burst of sheer frenzy whipped my head around to see if anything at all remained solid above me.

  Not much did.

  The hammock’s circular spine was still intact, as were most of the bundles still attached to it; a few, containing items I’d never bothered to investigate, had gone missing. My own bag, with all its personal treasures, still hung from its tether. Everything below the circular spine was missing, and (now that I looked), much above it. The upper regions of the hammock were covered with little black spots.

  I don’t eat apples. But the black spots made me think of one, infested with worm trails.

  I found voice and screamed.

  “HELP! FOR JUJE SAKE, SOMEBODY HELP ME!”

  Silence.

  No response whatsoever.

  I screamed again, this time requesting specific people. Lastogne; no answer. Oscin and Skye; no answer. Oskar Levine, on the grounds that us outcasts needed to stick together. Nobody answered. The only sounds were my own ragged breath and the wind brushing over the sections of canvas that still remained.