Emissaries from the Dead ac-1 Read online

  Gibb disappeared with the bag and a few seconds later lowered a ladder. Loose as it came down, flapping in the high-altitude breeze, it solidified at full extension. I grabbed hold, testing its ability to hold my weight, wondering what it would be like to slip and tumble into that storm-tossed hell.

  A relief. The old death wish, speaking up again.

  I took a deep breath, forced calm calm calm into my limbs, muttered my personal mantra, Unseen Demons, and began to climb.

  As I pulled myself through the slit, entering warmer air and murkier light, Gibb grabbed my upper arm to steady me. His very touch was immediate annoyance. I let him guide me to a resting place about a meter away from the opening, and was not at all comforted by the way the soft rubbery canvas sagged beneath my added weight.

  The interior of the hammock was a large round chamber, sagging at its center. A molded circular spine around its widest point, bearing a variety of tightly bound cloth bundles, allowed it to maintain a shape approximately like that of a teardrop, but the material below that spine was loose, settling into a shallow bowl beneath our weight.

  Gibb was not the only man here. The other was a compact, grimacing figure with a shaved head, a prosthetic memory disk clinging to one temple, and eyes that glowered like lasers. Both men were dressed in loose-fitting gray pants and many-pocketed open vests that seemed designed to show off impressive gymnastic physiques. There was no way of telling whether those physiques had been earned the hard way via intensive training or installed by dealers in extreme physical enhancements.

  The air inside the hammock was stale, redolent with liquor and body odor. But my relief at no longer needing to contemplate the long drop into One One One’s stormy atmosphere almost made the murk intoxicating.

  On the other hand, Gibb was still holding my arm.

  I tugged. “Let go.”

  “You looked like you were having trouble—”

  “I was.”

  “There’s nothing to be ashamed of. As you can imagine, I’ve seen height-sensitivity before—”

  “I can imagine. Let go.”

  Still he didn’t. “I know the signs, Counselor. You’re about ten seconds away from hysterics.”

  “You’re about five from losing your hand. Let go.”

  An odd little look passed between Gibb and the grimacing man. I didn’t need psi enhancements to note that all the questions seemed to come from Gibb’s side of the hammock.

  The self-proclaimed chief asshole in charge didn’t seem to be as much in charge as he liked to claim. That was okay. I was willing to believe the rest of the description accurate. In my personal experience, people who tell you how awful they are, the first time they meet you, are just trying to defang your own inevitable reaction by beating you to the punch.

  I know this. It’s something I do myself.

  Gibb released me and scrambled back half a meter up the canvas. “Forgive me, Andrea. Some of our newcomers have a major problem with vertigo. They’re so scared of falling that they make it happen. Whenever I see somebody in trouble, I tend to be extra careful until I know we won’t have a problem.”

  “As long as you don’t call me Andrea again, we won’t have a problem.”

  “Oh,” he said, “we’re generally informal here—”

  “I’m not.”

  Another shared glance. “There’s really no need to be so upset. We know this place isn’t easy for some people to deal with. Most people just take some time to adjust—”

  “Understood. And I’ll appreciate anything you can do to help me adjust. But I’m still not interested in informality.”

  “Come on. There’s no reason we shouldn’t at least pretend to be friendly—”

  “There is if I’m not looking for friends.” I made this announcement without any special heat and without any special chill. “Counselor’s fine. And if I can’t call you Ambassador—”

  Gibb stammered. “A-As I started to tell you, the AIsource don’t recognize this as an official embassy. They’ve promised to evict us if I give myself that title. So you can call me Stuart if you like. Or Stu.”

  “No,” I said. “I believe I’ll call you Mr. Gibb.”

  The grimacing man rolled his eyes in contempt. It was not contempt for me, which I’m used to. It was contempt for this man he worked with, contempt he wanted to share with me.

  Interesting. I’d been here less than two minutes and I was already being made privy to a power struggle.

  Gibb’s eyes broadcast waves of warmth and compassion but engaged my sincerity detector not one bit. “Have I done something to offend you, Counselor?”

  “Not yet, Mr. Gibb. Are you hoping to?”

  Gibb seemed taken aback yet again, displaying a most undiplomatic lack of skill at dealing with unpleasant people like myself. “All right, then, Counselor. If that’s the way you prefer to play it. We’ll keep this on a strictly professional level.” He gestured toward the grimacing man. “This is Mr. Peyrin Lastogne, our special consultant on-site. My second-in-command, if you prefer. He’ll be providing you with any help you need in your investigation.”

  Lastogne’s nod was minimal. “Counselor.”

  Even that single word was tinged with an anger he contained but made no attempt to hide. He’d been through hell, somewhere, sometime; maybe several hells.

  I nodded at Lastogne, then asked Gibb, “So why wouldn’t the AIsource want to recognize your diplomatic status?”

  He fluttered a hand. “They classify this entire habitat as a commercial installation rather than sovereign territory. They call everything inside it, including their precious engineered sentients, assets still in the process of being developed. As such, they claim exemption to the usual treaties involving diplomatic exchange.”

  “That’s outrageous,” I said. “It doesn’t matter who administers the real estate. It matters who lives on it. The Brachiators have the right to speak for themselves.”

  “You know that and I know that. The AIsource contend that the Brachiators are a special case. They’re not indigenous to this environment, after all. They were engineered elsewhere, and transplanted here. They were also all supposedly provided AIsource citizenship at the moment of their creation, which in theory gives the AIsource the right to speak for them.”

  That was transparent and familiar nonsense. Subjugated peoples are always subsets of the societies claiming to speak for them. Sometimes they’re even called citizens. It doesn’t mean they’re one iota less subjugated.

  Gibb’s shrug prevented me from lecturing him on legal principles he already knew. “You can save your breath, Counselor. I’m just reporting the AIsource line.”

  I chewed a thumbnail—another of my many runaway tics that I’d spent years struggling to control. “How did this even have the opportunity to become a diplomatic issue of any kind? This is a sealed station, well hidden from anybody capable of looking for it. The AIsource didn’t have to let anybody in. They didn’t have to show anybody the Habitat. There’s no way anybody from outside could have even known the Brachiators existed, unless the AIsource told them.”

  “Which is exactly what happened,” Gibb said. “About three years ago Mercantile, they sent word to all the major governments that they wanted to show us something. Not long after that, a mixed delegation including Riirgaans, Bursteeni, Hom. Saps and Tchi arrived here, and were shown the Brachiators in their, you should only excuse the expression, natural habitat. Once the delegation realized that AIsource had engineered their own sentients, and better still professed to own them, it ignited a diplomatic firestorm.”

  “The AIsource must have expected that.”

  Gibb rolled his eyes. “Gee, you think?”

  I’d been involved in a number of such diplomatic cluster-fucks over the years. They were always nightmares, as you’d expect of sustained arguments between creatures defined not only by their differing cultures but differing psychological models. It’s never erupted into all-out interstellar war, that being such
an impractical and expensive prospect that only idiots and madmen see any point in it (and that’s a damned good thing all by itself, since the hundreds of bickering, warring, and self-obsessed governments that make up the Hom. Sap Confederacy have never gotten along well enough to stand up against any concerted war of conquest or annihilation, from a truly determined enemy from outside). But there’s been plenty of petty harassment and high moral dudgeon, plenty of brushfires over small matters of economic sovereignty, and plenty of wrangling over the Interspecies Covenant that allegedly keeps everybody nice to one another.

  It’s that very Covenant, with its provisions permitting diplomatic immunity, that both gives me my reputation as war criminal and places me outside the reach of the several races that would like to prosecute me for what I did as a child. And it’s that very Covenant, with its provisions against the breeding of slave races, that the AIsource was so deliberately flouting now. What were they thinking?

  My thumbnail clicked against teeth. “So how large is this ‘unofficial’ delegation of yours?”

  “About seventy on-site, here under AIsource invitation, at their sufferance and under their designated limitations. We were able to set up this home base about two years ago Mercantile. We can interact with the Brachiators, find out what they’re like, make friends with them, and catalogue their behaviors, but only for the purposes of study. As soon as we cross the line into actual diplomacy, we’re expelled.”

  “My own main purpose here,” Lastogne said, “is enforcing those guidelines. Making sure none of our people ever accomplish anything of note.”

  I studied the man’s eyes for signs of mockery. “Must be frustrating work.”

  His appraisal of me was equally frank. “Diplomats don’t need my help to avoid accomplishing anything.”

  Even more interesting. I began to suspect I could actually approve of the man.

  But his attitude bothered Gibb. “That’ll be enough of that, Peyrin. You’ll have more than enough time for your facile nihilism. It’s far from a waste, Counselor. We’re here to combat a precedent that would tolerate the use of engineered sentients as slaves. Gathering the ammunition we need may be the most important agenda the Dip Corps ever had.”

  “How much longer do you think it’s going to take you?”

  “This is a permanent installation,” Gibb said. “Barring a dramatic breakthrough, some of my indentures can expect to stay here for the entire length of their twenty-year contracts.”

  I could think of no better definition of hell.

  And speaking of hell, Gibb’s knee brushed against mine. Maybe it wasn’t his fault. The soft surface beneath us sagged so much it took vigilance to avoid sliding toward the lowest point of the hammock’s gravity well. On the other hand, Lastogne didn’t seem to have any trouble maintaining his own position higher up the slope. And without being able to point to anything in particular, I could still sense an unwanted sexual charge coming from Gibb.

  I attempted a deep breath and tried to focus on the matter at hand: “So what do you make of the Brachiators? Are they slaves?”

  “They don’t seem to do any real work, except for whatever niche they fill in One One One’s ecosystem, but they’re still sentient property, with no right of self-determination. There are right now eleven separate spacefaring races, ours included, involved in the legal battle to bring the issues here before an interspecies tribunal.”

  Wonderful. With eleven sentient races, from the amicable Riirgaans to the downright unpleasant Tchi, all bringing their special kinds of diplomacy to the fray, the higher math necessary to determine the lifespan of this litigation was beyond me.

  Gibb read my expression. “It’ll happen eventually. But the AIsource are tricky. It took a year of heavy negotiation before they even agreed to let one race, which when the dust settled turned out to be us, send a minimal force of observers into this habitat just to make sure the Brachs weren’t in immediate distress.”

  That couldn’t have sat well with the other races, considering how many of them have less-than-salutory opinions of humanity. “And nobody complained about that?”

  “Oh, they all complained about it. And from what I hear they’re still complaining. We’re fortunate in that we’re locked away in here and don’t have to listen to them. I should mention that one race, the Riirgaans, managed to send along their own rep, in the form of a human being with Riirgaan citizenship, but he’s still, for all intents and purposes, one of us, under my command.”

  I grunted. “Which means little without diplomatic status.”

  “Right. We have no official standing, no authority, and no immunity.”

  “Not the best circumstances for a murder investigation.”

  Gibb’s eyes flickered. “No.”

  “So tell me about this victim, Christina Santiago. How did she die?”

  Gibb excused himself, scrambled up the sloping floor, made his way to a bundle strapped to the hammock spine, and removed a pair of cylinders with built-in straws. Scrambling down was an undignified slide on his rump, which ended only when his knees were once again pressed against mine. “Drink this, please.”

  I didn’t often take food or drink in the presence of my fellow human beings, communal meals implying a social connection I preferred to avoid. But I obliged, gasping when the stuff hit my throat.

  “Understand this, Counselor: that cloud layer below us is sixteen kilometers straight down; the ocean layer many kilometers below that; the atmosphere is unbreathable for most of that distance and only gets more caustic the farther you fall. There’s nothing between us and a nasty drop but the layer of flexible fabric holding us right now. It’s hard not to spend most of your time here thinking about the dangers of a misstep. I keep intoxicants around for newcomers who need to be pacified while they get used to the idea and while I figure out if they’re going to have a problem with the heights. You’ve been looking dizzy since you got here. So I need to ask you: Are you going to have a problem?”

  I felt the canvas sag beneath my weight, and reminded myself that if there were any chance of it tearing, Gibb and his fellow diplomats would have long since tumbled through the clouds. “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m not likely to change my answer based on repetition.”

  Gibb studied me for longer than I would have liked. “I hope you’re right. Because this is no longer a single murder investigation.”

  He hesitated, as if afraid to speak the next words.

  Lastogne spared him the trouble. “We had a second killing the day before yesterday.”

  2. HATE MAIL

  I wish I could say that the news surprised me, but even before I arrived I’d suspected that the single murder was likely to become a multiple.

  I’d received fair warning just out of Intersleep, when I was least primed to process it. It’s a lot like being wakened from a coma with a tap from a hammer: a moment of crystal shock, so unpleasant in and of itself it made me want to sink back into the murk.

  I don’t even like waking from normal sleep. There’s always a first, terrible moment when I remember who and what I am; and every morning, my heart convulses tight around the knowledge, like a blister forming around a wound.

  I drove the kres into his back, not to protect myself, though he would have killed me if he’d had the chance, but because I wanted to see him die. I watched myself do it and I enjoyed doing it. He had been my Vaafir. He had been like a father. I didn’t care. I wanted to see him die.

  No, regular sleep is bad enough, if like me you shun the implants that allow controlled dreaming.

  Intersleep is worse.

  In Intersleep, the conscious mind is shut down for weeks or months, Mercantile reckoning, defying actual flatline with a few rebellious bursts of mental static. It’s not so much thought or memory as the lint thought and memory left behind.

  This may be an enjoyable thing for people predisposed to dream of pleasant memories or erotic interludes.

 
I’ve never been.

  So I sat upright in the translucent bluegel, my eyelids still sticky with it, my knees curled tight against my chest, my eyes burning as acid tears carved paths through the caked goo on both cheeks.

  I felt loss, shame, self-hatred, rage, and the need to make something bleed.

  I shuddered. Sobbed.

  Wanted to die.

  Closed my eyes and cursed myself for not being able to rise above it.

  Held my breath, felt the heart pound in my chest, and willed it to quiet down before it burst like a bomb inside me.

  Good morning, Andrea. Welcome to your waking day.

  ***

  Sanity, or as close as I ever came to it, returned in pieces. I remembered where I had been and where I was supposed to be now.

  I’d been on a world called Grastius, working a case that had been one of the most colossal wastes of time in a long career spent investigating colossal wastes of time.

  I was supposed to be heading back to New London. I should have found myself on a Dip Corps loading dock, being fussed over by the sleeptechs whose most substantial contributions to my well-being would have been a few comforting words and an offer of something sweet to drink. I didn’t exactly miss having them flutter about, but their absence meant that something had gone wrong. “Shit.”

  Once upon a time, before I fed it a personality capable of getting along with me, the wakeup monitor would have advised me in the most syrupy tones imaginable that everything was all right. “Yeah. Shit.”

  I prized the irritation value of that craggy, long-suffering voice. “Why aren’t we home? We’re not about to crash into anything big, are we?”

  The monitor replied with an audible grimace. “We wouldn’t be that lucky.”

  “Then what?”

  “New London had us diverted.”

  “What do you mean, diverted?”

  “Diverted,” it repeated, with a level of annoyance that matched my own. “Detoured. Shanghaied. Assigned a different destination. Ordered to pursue the wild gooses. You know. Diverted.”