Adam-Troy Castro - Emissaries from the Dead

I wasn’t approaching sleep, but I was losing control, in a way I hadn’t permitted myself in years, so the sudden alarm was the same. I stiffened, sat up, and scrambled away, a fresh tightness seizing my throat. The Porrinyards made no attempt to come after me, instead choosing to remain where they knelt, watching as I curled into a ball and hugged myself with both arms.

“It’s not you,” I said. It was a sentence I’d spoken before, after other failed experiments with intimacy. It had felt just as stupid and inadequate then as it felt now.

“It’s all right,” the Porrinyards told me. “I didn’t take it personally. We have time.”

I didn’t turn to face them. “No. No, I’m sorry, but we don’t.” I straightened my collar, used the back of my hand to wipe the stray tears from my eyes, and stood, taking a moment to regard the chamber’s plain luminescent walls.

The space didn’t feel as empty as it had felt not too long ago. But nothing that inhabited it now was any kind of improvement. The things that inhabited it now were angry.

I turned back to the Porrinyards and found a pair of identical stricken expressions.

They said, “Do you mean we don’t have time now, or we won’t have time ever?”

“Please understand. I can’t get involved in… anything… until my job here is done.” More tired, physically and emotionally, than I’d been at any point since my arrival, I fought off another manifestation of the vague sense that I’d left something undone, and murmured: “The thing is, this is not just one case, but several. At least two. Maybe three or four. All unrelated, all happening to take place in the same place at the same time. The irrelevancies have gotten so jumbled up that I don’t even know what end is up anymore.”

The Porrinyards grinned. “Confusion between up and down being a pretty common complaint, on this station.”

I matched their grin, despite myself. “Well, yes.”

“So what are you going to do?”

I took my bag from Oscin, and slung it over my shoulder. “I’m going to start cutting the knots.”

We returned to the skimmer, where Godel and Lassiter were stewing in resentful silence, and from there flew back to the hangar, where I spent the rest of the day in the transport, conducting more interviews with the indentures of Hammocktown.

I didn’t need to know much, just confirm what I already suspected. Most of what I found out confirmed information already given, as always amazing me with how insistent truth can become, once uncovered. A couple of the younger indentures even laughed at me for not figuring it out before. They’d been certain I already knew.

Interviewing Li-Tsan again didn’t take any longer than expected; the woman was still paranoid and abusive and wrapped up in her victimhood. She didn’t answer any questions. But her reactions, when I told her what I knew, proved interesting indeed. As did Nils D’Onofrio’s, when I spoke to him. He was just as embittered and almost as defensive.

Robin Fish was lost, distant, and filled with a sadness that might have overwhelmed me had I been any more receptive to pity. She actually wept. But I expected that. She’d already established herself as maudlin and sloppy. She was also relieved to get the truth out in the open. She gave me more names, some of whom gave up the truth at once, some of whom I had to threaten, and some of whom I just didn’t bother speaking to at all, because by then the picture was clear and I was able to infer the continuation of the pattern from their individual files.

It all comprised one hell of a large domino.

Now all I had to do was topple it onto the next one.

Before I went I composed another coded message to Artis Bringen. It could have been the longest; part of me wanted to start with an essay, explaining why I wanted to know or conceding that I might have been wrong. But everything I added to the question kept distorting its intent. Eventually I just went with what I needed to know, and fired off the shortest dispatch I’d ever sent him. It was a question that could translate as, Are you my enemy, or not? The words were different, but the meaning was the same.

I did not know whether I’d have the guts to send it.

When I emerged from the transport into the brighter but no more cheerful light of the hangar, I found that the mood among Gibb’s delegation had degenerated further since the events of the previous night. The same people who had shown determination and defiance during the evacuation had now enjoyed a full day of inactivity and gathering tension. Many sat around outside the sleepcubes, lost in conversations ranging from grim to ribald.

Some glanced at me and muttered comments to friends: no doubt the fortieth or fiftieth distorted conversation about my insane, suicidal behavior on the skimmer. A snatch of laughter attracted my attention and turned out to be a number of indentures indulging in buzzpops. I saw a deeply inebriated Cif Negelein, looking like he’d rubbed himself in every patch of organic matter between here and New London, pulling the woman with purple hair into a sloppy kiss. But the numbers were off. Whenever I passed an open sleepcube, there were indentures lying asleep, indentures sitting on the edge of cots with their heads in their hands, indentures who looked as if they expected the very deck beneath their feet to open up and swallow them at any moment.

Peyrin Lastogne sat with two men and one woman beside a storage crate drafted into service as a table, playing a game involving little silver spheres, golden pyramids, and a tiny holographic hoop that revolved around the center of the table, flashing red whenever it faced one of the players. I didn’t know the rules, but the body language of the players was enough to establish Lastogne himself as the runaway winner.

His mood rose a notch the instant he saw me. “Counselor. You’ve had quite an adventurous day, haven’t you?”

He made the word adventurous sound like a curse. “Interesting. And you?”

“Anything but. My duties at the moment seem limited to cheerleading. I have enjoyed watching that steady stream of people, going in and out of that transport, and trying to guess just what you’ve determined.”

The three indentures at the table all joined him in waiting expectantly for my answer.

“Would you like to discuss it?” I asked.

“Alone?”

“Of course.”

“All right.” He stood, deactivated the game, apologized to the others, and escorted me to a sleepcube a short distance away. The practically narcoleptic Cartsac was already sleeping in there, but when he saw who needed the space he pulled himself upright and shuffled out the door, wearing the expression of a man who only wanted another place to lie down. Lastogne sealed the flap, sat on one of the cube’s two cots, gestured at the other, and said, “I know what you’re thinking. Is all this intoxication wise?”

I didn’t sit. “I was about to say.”

He shrugged. “Trust me, they’ve recovered from worse. They’ll hop to attention if we need them to.”

I just nodded. “It is all about down-time, isn’t it?”

The silence that followed was not broken when I activated the hiss screen.

Every external indication marked Lastogne as a calm, measured professional, determined to avoid the appearance of any reaction, either good or bad. But on this one point, at least, there were no secrets between us. “It’s a little outside the stated goals of your investigation, isn’t it, Counselor? I wouldn’t have considered you the type to indulge in that kind of silly witch-hunt.”

“It’s not silly,” I said, “but you’re right. It is beneath my notice.”