Adam-Troy Castro - Emissaries from the Dead

I remembered Bringen’s briefing, with its unsubtle agenda. Whatever the evidence, whatever your senses tell you… find the AIsource innocent. Even if they’re guilty, find them innocent. We need a guilty party we can cage .

Did he already have these three in mind?

It was possible. He must have read Gibb’s reports from on-site and found references to three people whose fates would not be mourned, if a case could be made against them.

But I didn’t want any part of it. I’d already done more than enough to merit the Monster label, thank you. I was in no hurry to add any additional interest to that account. So I treated Li-Tsan to my most unpleasant grin. “Well, before I officially make up my mind to accuse you of multiple murders and have you shipped off for trial, I should at least go through the motions. Maybe we should just start with how you developed your respective problems with high places.”

She studied me with resentful, half-lidded eyes. “Why would that make a difference?”

“It got you where you are. You were chosen for this assignment because the Corps thought you could function under local conditions. Now, for whatever reason, you can’t. That makes it an interesting subject. So tell me. What made you such good recruits? And what changed you?”

The three height-sensitives stewed in silence: D’Onofrio slumping in disgust, Fish staring at her hands, Li-Tsan stewing at the edge of another explosion.

There was no questioning which of the three had the most volatile temper, but that meant nothing, not when the murders would have required too much cold planning to be believable as crimes of sudden passion.

I pointed at D’Onofrio, who seemed the most even-tempered. “You first.”

He relaxed. “Yeah, might as well. You can read my records and find out the same thing, right? I come from a planet called Agali Vespocci. You know it?”

“Sorry. No.”

“Not surprised. It’s only borderline habitable, and nothing of any importance ever happened there. The thing is, it resembles this nasty hellhole. One One One, I mean. The lower atmosphere is hot as hell and contaminated with caustics that make the surface next to unlivable, but the temperatures drop and the poisons thin to traces as you get to the higher latitudes, so we do most of our living on the mountaintops.”

It did sound a lot like One One One. “I don’t see why you had a problem.”

“It’s not exactly what you’d expect, is it? But even on Vespocci we had solid ground to walk on, when we needed it. There were terraces, cliff dwellings. You could turn your back on the heights whenever you needed to. There were times of year, brief times, when the weather was almost pleasant. Here, there’s nothing. I was fine here for more than a year, but after a while I started thinking of all the things that could go wrong. Then one day, on the Growth, I froze up, started crying, and couldn’t stop. Gibb pulled me in, called me every possible name for coward, and sent me out here to stay with Robin and Li-Tsan.”

“They were already here, then?”

“Yes. This was only about six months ago Mercantile.”

“Was there anything in your past, at any point, to indicate that such a breakdown was possible?”

“No.” He spread his hands. “But I guess we don’t know our limits until we reach them.”

It had been a while since I’d seen anybody quite as defeated, and in this chamber I didn’t have to look far to see another one. “Who was the first to arrive here? Robin or Li-Tsan?”

“Robin.”

“All right,” I said. “Li-Tsan, you’re next.”

She started. “Not Robin?”

“No, I’ll work my way back. What’s your story?”

“Like Nils just told you, you can get all this from our records—”

“I want to hear it from you. Go on.”

Li-Tsan rolled her eyes again, just to stress that she still considered this all a tremendous waste of her time, but warmed up as she began to talk. “I worked in orbital construction for a Bursteeni company producing wheelworlds for the Tchi holdings. It’s tough going. Everything’s free fall to start with, of course, but the silly ass-backwards way the Bursteeni do it, the rotation starts up before the project’s half finished, and you have to work in and out of the skeleton while the spin’s trying to fling you against the outer walls. The third time a friend of mine got reduced to a fine red paste I contacted the Dip Corps to have them buy out my contract. They figured my background made me a perfect match. They didn’t know I sold out because I was losing my nerve already. I made it all of three months before I made a mistake serious enough to get me banished to this gulag, and I still don’t know what the hell this has to do with anything.”

“How long have you been confined to the hangar?”

“Almost nine months Mercantile. Could have had a grotting baby by now, come to think of it.”

I turned to Robin. “Now, you.”

Fish made even the moment of eye contact look like a backbreaking effort. “Do you really need to hear this from me, Counselor? I’m not feeling well today. I really need to go inside and lie down for a while.”

She did look awful, more a physical shell of what she must have once been than either Li-Tsan or D’Onofrio. I took another look at the bagginess of her clothes and, for the first time, registered the muscular atrophy. Confinement here was killing her. Confinement, or something else.

I said, “The faster you answer me the faster you see me leave.”

Fish held the silence for so long that I had to restrain myself from prodding her. That’s never a good idea. Sometimes people hesitate because they don’t have the courage to come out with whatever needs to be said; other times they desperately want to speak but can’t find the words. Jabbing them prematurely tends to shut them up. Outwaiting them gives them the time to say more than they intend. When she finally spoke, it was without any noticeable energy. “I wasn’t ever much. Just a clerical worker on New Kansas. No special skills or education, just crushing boredom and a thirst to get the hell out.”

“So you joined the Corps.”

“Which assigned me to the same kind of work I’d done back home. I met Mr. Gibb for the first time when I was at a records center on Hylanis. He was the big name doing administrative work as he waited for his next posting, and I was the frustrated kid begging him to remember me if he got sent somewhere with a possibility of advancement. Not long after he left I was pulled into special training for this project. I did thirty days of height-desensitization, before they shipped me in.”

“And you mustered out.”

“Almost as soon as I got here,” she said.

“How did it happen?”

“Everybody except Gibb knew how useless I was from day one, but he kept insisting I’d adjust. Then one day during remedial training, one of the Uppergrowth vines snapped and left me screaming my stupid head off at the tail end of a dangling ten-meter cable.” Her hand spasmed at the thought. She examined it without much surprise, then placed it flat on the table. “I couldn’t blame anybody for not wanting to work with me after that.”

“And that was two years ago Mercantile.”

“Not quite two years. We’re still a few weeks away from my anniversary.”

She used the celebratory word without any apparent irony.

I said, “You’ve received supply shipments. New indentures, now and then. In two years Gibb never talked about sending you home? Or transferring you out, to someplace where you could still do some good? There had to be opportunities.”

Li-Tsan, who fronted many of her statements with rude noises, made another one. “Mr. Gibb thinks failures among his staff reflect poorly on his leadership. So it’s safer to just tuck us out of the way and let us rot.”