Adam-Troy Castro - Emissaries from the Dead

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.

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.