Emissaries from the Dead

by Adam-Troy Castro

  “I’m not. His actions may have contributed, but I wasn’t referring to them.”

  “Who, then?”

  “To start with: Robin Fish.”

  For the first time he averted his eyes from me, focusing instead on his hands, which closed into fists before opening again, just as empty as they’d been before: “She’s a little bit below mediocre, isn’t she? And the worst kind of below-par personality at that: the kind who believes herself destined for great things. Give the Dip Corps credit for knowing what she was. They wanted to tuck her away in a cozy little nowhere post, where she could serve out her time without ever being subjected to any challenges beyond her capabilities. She could have stayed there and been just as unhappy as she is now, but at least then she would have been able to comfort herself by blaming everybody else for not giving her a chance. Here, she has no such illusions.”

  “And the others? Li-Tsan? D’Onofrio? Anybody else, hurt in ways that just don’t happen to show yet?”

  He emitted a bitter laugh. “Do you honestly feel sorry for Li-Tsan?”

  “My own soft spot is for people who have good reason to be angry.”

  He nodded, accepting that, and examined his hands again, his demeanor not so much sad or afraid as simply expressively silent.

  I leaned in close. “Here’s the thing, Peyrin. I have no sympathy for Gibb at all. Not as a mediocrity, or as anything else. Not after what he’s done. But I can’t afford to continue wasting my time with issues outside the scope of my investigation. I need these less pressing matters out of the way. So if you have any regard for him at all, you’ll stop withholding information. Tell me who you are. Because, otherwise, I will be forced to go through him, which might entail ruining more lives than just his.”

  For a heartbeat I thought I’d gotten to him. He lowered his head, opened his mouth, seemed about to give secrets voice, and then slumped, the lines on his forehead mapping more genuine pain than his eyes had ever communicated. “I’m sorry. But I can’t.”

  There was no point in further discussion. I stood up, and stared at him for several heartbeats, discerning arrogance, regret, damnation, and a peculiar form of triumph among the ingredients of the emotional stew brewing behind his dark, penetrating eyes.

  The bastard was going to let this happen.

  I turned to leave, but he stopped me before I could. “He’s not here.”

  My spine rippled with a certain undefined dread. “Where is he?”

  “He flew back to Hammocktown an hour ago.”

  The words might as well have been nonsense syllabification, for all the sense that made. “What?”

  Lastogne went back to looking at his hands. “He insisted. He said that people look to him to set an example, and that he wasn’t going to sit around like a symbol of failure when he could go back and in that way show everybody that we’re not defeated yet. He said he knew he was supposed to be under arrest, but that if we left him there without a means of transportation back he would be just as much a prisoner there as he could be here. He said that as long as he was prisoner anywhere he might as well make himself a living reminder that we still have a job to do.” He looked up, his eyes uncharacteristically pained, and his grin uncharacteristically apolgetic. “You should have heard him, Counselor. He was inspiring. As inspiring as a nonentity can be.”

  I still couldn’t believe it. “You let him go? Alone?”

  “I repeat: he was inspiring.”

  “Goddamn you,” I said.

  Lastogne moved faster than anybody I’ve ever seen. Faster than the Porrinyards leaping to my rescue, faster than any acrobat or assassin, faster than any unenhanced human being has the right to move. I had just enough time to register the blur of motion, and flinch, certain that all my reconstructions were in error, and that he was the murderer come to finish what the Porrinyards had managed to stop. Then he was before me, his hand on my arm, his eyes still sad, but his lips curled once again into his trademark wry grimace. “Counselor—”

  My mouth was dry. “What?”

  “Before you do what you have to do to him, I just want you to think about this gesture of his. And remember the one thing worth admiring about mediocrities.”

  His eyes were so black with knowledge now that I had to look away. “What?”

  “Every once in a while,” he said, “they’re not.”

  I was looking at Peyrin Lastogne, but I saw Artis Bringen’s face.

  That made up my mind.

  I told Lastogne, “There are two documents in my hytex folder, both coded. I need you to free both for transmission. One will go right away, the other is timed to go in twenty-four hours. If either one of them remains locked, you’ll be cited for Obstruction.”

  “Which one’s about Gibb and which one’s about me?”

  “None of your business,” I said, and turned my back on him.

  There was no point in making sure he’d do it…because if he didn’t, I was in even more trouble here than I thought I was.

  I found Gibb on one of the net bridges that formed the boulevards of Hammocktown. Like the platform where we’d met before the attempt on my life, it hung close to the Uppergrowth, so near that oppressive ceiling that a tall standing man might have had to slouch.

  Gibb lay on his side, stripped to his waist, wearing only a pair of silver briefs; as intoxicated as he seemed, when I climbed the net to his level, he resembled nothing so much as a lonely Bacchus, all dressed up for an orgy where he held the only invitation.

  It was as clear a night as One One One ever enjoys. The fruity smell of Uppergrowth was clearer and sharper than it had been, on either of my prior visits; I was almost nauseated by it, until I recognized that nervousness played a hand and did my best to counteract it. The usual storm layer below had thinned, revealing another layer of angry lightning. I glanced down at one of the flashes and, knocked off balance by the inevitable attack of vertigo, immediately scolded myself for doing such a silly thing. Even with the power that lit Hammocktown shut off, my own lights, pulled from the bag I’d left with the Porrinyards and secured to my wrists and forehead, were more than enough to guide me. I didn’t need distant weather to remind me of the altitude.

  But Gibb seemed to find the perspective comforting, and the open spaces liberating. He seemed to belong here more than he’d belonged anywhere else, and was able to grin when I finally made it to his level. “You’re getting better at this, Counselor. I’m impressed.”

  “Thank you, Ambassador. I wish I could say the same about this stupid gesture of yours.”

  He didn’t remind me I wasn’t allowed to call him Ambassador. “It’s not a gesture. Oh, I gave some noble-sounding excuses, but the truth is, I was getting a little claustrophobic in there. At least here, I’m able to look after the place, and pretend I’m accomplishing something. “He rolled over on the bridge, setting off ripples that left me bobbing up and down in seasick rhythms. “At the very least I’m showing those bastards they can’t scare me. Those soulless, game-playing strings of code. Anything that shows those blips I’m not afraid is worth doing.”

  “You’re wrong, you know. Risking your life this way doesn’t do anybody any good.”

  He closed his eyes, gripped the netting with hands curled into claws, and for just a heartbeat seemed ill. “No, maybe not. But it preserves the illusion.”

  I slid the rest of the way toward him, stopping only when we touched, the brief moment of contact as distasteful to me as our first encounter had been.

  His smile was the wholly unpersuasive kind that only a professional diplomat could carve. Damned if there wasn’t some pretense of compassion in his voice, some veneer of fatherly understanding that gave every word out of his mouth an extra, oily sheen. “I didn’t like you from minute one, Counselor, even before I knew what you were. The way the air just chilled around you. Nobody can carry that much hostility around with them without a damn good reason.”

  It would have been much nicer to have this particular conv
ersation from opposite sides of a conference table. Having it in an abandoned and frequently sabotaged Hammocktown, with nothing but open space awaiting me if he snapped, was far from my own idea of favored conditions. “You should come back to the hangar with me, sir. We’ll be more comfortable there.”

  “No, you’ll be more comfortable there. I’m fine where I am.”

  That’s when I knew. He needed me scared because he was scared and he didn’t want to be the only one. Strangely enough, I respected that. It meant his diplomatic instincts were still at play, leading him to do whatever he could to ensure a level playing field.

  A man who still thought he could win was not as dangerous as a man without hope.

  I scuttled back up the slope to place more distance between us, and said, “It didn’t take me long to find out that you’d slept with Cynthia Warmuth.”

  He chuckled, with a sad little shake of his head to convey his regrets over the small-mindedness he found himself having to confront. “Is that the extent of your findings, Counselor? That I’ve had consensual sex with some of the women under my command? Is that even considered a crime, in this day and age?”

  “Not in and of itself. But it was an odd omission. I’m sure you know what murder investigators call a man in your position who fails to disclose his sexual relationship with a murder victim.”

  “What?” he asked.

  “The most likely suspect.”

  His eyebrows knit. “First: you didn’t ask. Second, it didn’t occur to me that it might be relevant. Third, and most importantly: what Cynthia and I had is hardly worth calling a relationship. We slept together a few times. She didn’t make anything special out of it, and neither did I.”

  “People have been known to get violently obsessed over the slightest things, Mr. Gibb.”

  Gibb was the very portrait of a man confronted by total lunacy. “There wouldn’t have been any point, logical or otherwise, in getting obsessed over Cynthia Warmuth. You’ve heard what she was like. She wanted total immersion in everything and everyone. If anybody woke up in a bad mood, she wanted to be the therapist. If anybody received bad news from home, she wanted to be mother confessor. If somebody wanted privacy, she considered herself the exception. She wanted to be in everybody’s skin, all the time.”

  “Did she get under yours, Mr. Gibb?”

  “Mildly. I liked her, had fun with her, but didn’t give up any deep dark secrets. I didn’t like the way she always tried to figure out my whole life afterward. It gave me the impression she considered sex just a tool for picking emotional locks.” Thinking about it, for just this moment reliving a past encounter in his head, he could only tsk in remembrance. “She certainly used it enough. I think she must have offered herself to every man and woman in the outpost. I know she went after your friends the Unison Twins, that’s for certain. And she was also with D’Onofrio, for a while. Lastogne, too, but you must know that.”

  My surprise, regarding Warmuth and Lastogne, took some of the edge off a reply intended to be cold, staccato, and relentless. “You know what murder investigators call the ex-lover who says the dead woman slept around?”

  “I think I can guess.”

  “The most likely suspect.”

  He projected waves of unjust aggravation. “If I’d wanted to kill her I wouldn’t have had to call attention to the crime by crucifying her. In this habitat, all I would have had to do was drop her from a height, and call it an accident.”

  “Which is, conveniently enough, close to what had happened to Santiago.”

  He sighed. “And nobody’s about to claim I ever slept with Santiago.”

  “Why not?”

  His weariness was no longer the performance of a man determined to show himself rising above a series of unjust accusations, but the deep, abiding exhaustion of one who really had taken everything he could stand. “If you’ve researched what Warmuth was like, you know what Santiago was like. She was angry, suspicious, walled-off, paranoid, almost inhuman in her determination to repel others. In short, she was a lot like you—and very much poor Cynthia’s opposite. Trust me, I didn’t want her any more than she would have wanted me. And you won’t find one person on-station who’d say anything different.”

  That was true too. “Most of the people I’ve spoken back you up. They say she wouldn’t have wanted anything to do with you.”

  “Fine.” Gibb was more tired than ever. “I don’t have to be loved by every woman I deal with. I can afford to be disliked by a few.”

  “True. And it’s also true that I don’t think you had anything to do with any of the sabotage aboard this station.” And then I took a deep breath and pushed on. “But by not getting involved with you, Santiago provided an excellent career baseline against which we can measure the performance evaluations of the other female indentures under your supervision.”

  Gibb straightened, his eyes as wary as an animal’s who had just sensed a predator entering his woods. “What?”

  “Once I discerned the pattern, it only took me a few minutes to run a hytex analysis that isolated the names of several women assigned to this outpost whose performance evaluations exceeded any reasonable measurement of their professional accomplishments. Warmuth was only the most obvious. You gave her a number of substantial time bonuses not long after her arrival on station—before she’d even completed her local training and experienced her first doomed overnight with the Brachiators. That bothered me the first time I saw it. What could she have done to distinguish herself so dramatically that she earned rewards long before she even accomplished anything?”

  Now he’d popped a substantial sweat. “I can’t believe you’re implying—”

  “I don’t imply, sir. I just come out and say. Santiago’s one of the ones you didn’t sleep with. You praised her memory. You called her work exemplary. You said she had a fine future. Given your predilection for generous time-bonuses, one would normally expect her to have worked off her contract at least as efficiently as Warmuth. But she wanted nothing to do with you. So there were no unusually large bonuses for her. She had to work off her debt at something approaching real time.”

  “I hadn’t gotten around to evaluating her records yet—”

  “Warmuth and Santiago establish the pattern. Robin Fish cements it. There was nothing at all special about Fish, was there? By her own admission, she was stuck in a dead-end position, doing scut work for the Corps, when she approached you begging for something a little meaningful. You befriended her and imported her for a difficult, sensitive mission in a Habitat so difficult that the Dip Corps had trouble staffing it. I can only wonder how she persuaded you to give her, out of all other possible candidates, a chance. Why you had her rushed through the program with minimal training. Or why you kept her around, and continued to reward her with big bonuses, long after she proved unsuitable. Could it have been that she was that convenient combination of attractive and desperate?”

  “This is disgusting—”

  “Tell me about it.” I pressed on. “The truth is, her inability to function inside the Habitat had nothing to do with the job you actually brought her here to do. And she wasn’t about to complain, demeaning or disgusting as she might have found her true purpose here, when all she had to look forward to if she left here was another no-future position, earning out her contract at real time. Under the circumstances, earning high bonuses for just making herself available to you was the best professional option open to her. And she was no doubt real cooperative at first, accepting your explanation that you needed a full-timer in the hangar anyway. You even gave her the responsibility of managing all off-station correspondence, which went a long way toward allowing her the illusion that she was a meaningful, productive member of your team. But once she realized how trapped she was, and how long she was likely to exist as a glorified concubine, the self-loathing kicked in, her already weak personality fractured, and she began to self-medicate—a process you happened to encourage by allowing intoxicants inside the hanga
r.

  “Maybe you thought that would keep her quiet. Or maybe, somewhere deep inside, you were tired of her and hoped she’d drink herself to death. But your precise motives there don’t matter. The results do. And as a result it’s not hard to see how she became the woman she is today.

  “Then Li-Tsan had her own little breakdown, which was a little harder to deal with. After all, unlike Fish, she’d come from a high-altitude environment and was actually qualified for the job—though, she admitted to me, already suffering from a serious loss of nerve. I don’t know whether you slept with her in the Habitat, but once she broke down, you made the mistake of trying to strike the same deal with her. And that was a mistake. Oh, you probably thought you had to, because transferring somebody like Li-Tsan off-station, while holding on to the even more useless and unstable Fish, would have been so inconsistent that even the dullest of your people would have had to notice. But though Li-Tsan did agree to the deal, it was only because she was a person emotionally invested in her own strength, who must have hated herself for a time for turning out to be so weak. She wasn’t broken, just broken at doing one particular thing. If she ever said yes to you, it was only because she was hoping she’d get over her problem and return to the Habitat before long.

  “But when that didn’t happen, a tough, qualified, assertive professional like Li-Tsan, trapped in a position that was utterly beneath her, naturally reacted a little differently to her exile than somebody like Fish. Somebody like Li-Tsan would eventually remember who she was and start resenting you. Oh, she’d try to keep quiet, for a while, because those bonuses were a good deal, and she wouldn’t want all that extra time she’d earned added back to her contract. But sooner or later it would get to her. She’d look at the state of the other woman she’d have to share her exile with, a woman she’d inevitably come to see as a more pathetic version of herself, a woman who was just the convenient receptacle she was in danger of becoming, and start to boil over, the bulk of her rage directed at the man she’d come to despise as a pimp.