Adam-Troy Castro - Emissaries from the Dead

Even before the women spoke a word, they both radiated wariness. They’d both been hurt badly, and at length: the kind of hurt that still bled. Was it just the professional upset of failing in One One One’s upside-down environment? Or something more?

Li-Tsan, looking me up and down, said, “So you’re the grand inquisitor.”

“No inquisition,” I said. “Just a few questions.”

“Oh, certainly,” Li-Tsan said. She had the clipped accent of a woman whose Mercantile was a second tongue learned late in life: all exaggerated vowels and stressed consonants. “And when you’ve asked all your questions, just who will you choose for scapegoat? Not one of Gibb’s infallible supermen, dangling from the Uppergrowth like monkeys. Not somebody Gibb wants to use. Just one of the expendables, fit to be taken out like a spare part the first time his creature Lastogne needs someone to condemn to the Corps—”

Fish barely raised her eyes. “That’s not fair, Li—”

“Nothing’s fair, sweetmeat. Not in the Corps, not on this world, and certainly not in front of this piece of Tchi shit.”

Anger not just between these three and the rest of this station’s human contingent—anger between those two. Their life as internal exiles must have been as interesting as the booming local industry in comparing things to Tchi shit. I asked Li-Tsan, “Would you be more comfortable answering questions without Mr. Lastogne present?”

Li-Tsan snorted. “I’d be happier still with him pushed out an airlock, but yeah, why not, as long as you’re giving me a choice. While you’re at it I’d prefer the unison twins gone too. I don’t trust anybody who works for the lord of that upside-down madhouse.”

“No offense taken,” said the Porrinyards.

“Go fuck yourself some more ,” Li-Tsan told them, with special emphasis.

Lastogne’s smile didn’t falter, less the amiability of a man refusing to take offense than the arrogance of one who considered these enemies beneath his contempt. “You first, bondsman.”

The Porrinyards gave me a look which they must have considered eloquent but which I found totally opaque. There was a shared-joke element to it, which seemed more or less inevitable with these two, except that I was somehow supposed to be included in it. Again, I didn’t have the slightest idea what they were getting at, and again my denseness didn’t seem to bother them all that much.

Only after all three of my guides exited the hatch at the far end of the hangar did I address the height-sensitives again. “I don’t know if it means anything to any of you, but I don’t believe it’s accurate to call Lastogne Gibb’s ‘creature.’ It seemed the other way around, to me. Lastogne’s even accused Gibb of incompetence.”

Li-Tsan rolled her eyes. “And you’ve been here how long, all of a cycle or two? Wow, Counselor, I’m impressed how completely you’ve managed to analyze the true nature of their relationship.”

“If I’m being hasty, I’m more than willing to stand corrected.”

She adopted the tone of a frustrated teacher repeating basic lessons for an idiot. “He doesn’t consider Gibb incompetent. He considers Gibb a mediocrity. He thinks Gibb is a nothing, a void, a space-holder. And that’s exactly what he wants Gibb to be. He wants it so much that he’s willing to support all of Gibb’s sordid little corruptions, in exchange for the freedom to be an even bigger ass.”

D’Onofrio raised a hand, cutting Li-Tsan off before she could further elaborate on her distaste for all matters related to Lastogne. “I’m sorry, Counselor. Nobody likes to feel useless for as long as we have. It’s made the three of us a little bitter, I’m afraid. The fact is that we’re not sure how we can help you. None of us have been allowed inside the Habitat for months—in poor Robin’s case, for almost two years Mercantile. We can’t tell you anything about the way those women died.”

I said, “Fair enough. I’ll be satisfied with hearing how the three of you got mustered out.”

Li-Tsan’s silence, provisional at best, failed her. “See, Nils? She doesn’t a give a damn about the truth! She’s just trying to make this about us!”

Whenever I question three or more people at the same time, one of them takes the role of the volatile hothead who serves as the self-appointed keeper of all of their shared paranoia. Only sometimes does it indicate that the hothead’s hiding something. Just as often, the amount of truly relevant data being huffed about equals zero. Either way, the hothead needs to be cuffed down. I heaved a deep breath, took my sweet time sitting down on the one of the crates the three height-sensitives had drafted into use as chairs, and said, “You know, bondsman, I don’t claim any great dedication to the truth. I don’t even have all that much empathy for the problems of the unjustly accused. No, I’m afraid my only real objection to concocting transparently flimsy cases against innocent people has always been that I prefer to look like I have some talent for my job. Picking unlikely suspects at random means looking capricious and incompetent and sloppy. Doing the job right the first time, and finding the actual guilty party, is just a lot less work in the long run.”

The three height-sensitives stared at me.

Li-Tsan spat. “Next you’ll be telling us you don’t bite.”

I’ve long reserved my sweetest smiles for my nastiest moments. “Oh, I bite, all right. And once I clamp down, I’m like a snake. You have to cut my head off to get me to let go. Please don’t test me, Li-Tsan. I promise you, I leave marks.”

The height-sensitives consulted each other in silence, then came to a mutual decision and joined me at the round table. Even then, they pulled their crates together so they could sit elbow to elbow, presenting a united front. D’Onofrio and Li-Tsan wore attitudes of bored defiance, Fish a darker form of beaten resignation. I couldn’t tell whether the other two were supporting Fish or simply bracketing her. I did notice that Fish didn’t seem to want to face either one of them. It wasn’t fear, but something else: A recent argument? An old one? Even an old-fashioned love triangle? “Why would you believe the Corps wants to make this about you?”

“No reason,” Li-Tsan growled. “Except for treating us like Tchi shit for something we can’t help, holding us prisoner in this hole for months on end, and refusing to transfer us out of here to another assignment where we could make ourselves useful instead of going slowly insane from boredom, the Dip Corps has always been scrupulously fair to us. I can’t possibly imagine why we wouldn’t expect more of the same. Not at all.”

“So you don’t think they have any actual evidence against you.”

Li-Tsan’s eyes went small and dangerous. “You’re the investigator. You’d know what they have and don’t have.”

I was really beginning to hate her. “I arrived yesterday, Li-Tsan. Assume I know nothing.”

“They have worse than nothing. They have actual, genuine impossibility. They may think we’re lower than Tchi shit, but they also know we’re stuck here and never have anything to do with anything that’s going on. But they’ll make this about us. They’ll do it just to see the looks on our faces.”

The other woman’s intensity was a little bit like being jacked into a pleasure node at full voltage. I rubbed my temples. “Gibb says he considers the AIsource responsible, and never gave me any other impression.”

She made a rude noise. “You know he can’t let the AIsource take the blame for this. It would mean a major diplomatic incident, even war. Better to strut around looking tough and then come up with some solution that inconveniences nobody but the trio of likely suspects you keep preserved in cold storage.”