Adam-Troy Castro - Emissaries from the Dead

But Gibb seemed to find the perspective comforting, and the open spaces liberating. He seemed to belong here more than he’d belonged anywhere else, and was able to grin when I finally made it to his level. “You’re getting better at this, Counselor. I’m impressed.”

“Thank you, Ambassador. I wish I could say the same about this stupid gesture of yours.”

He didn’t remind me I wasn’t allowed to call him Ambassador. “It’s not a gesture. Oh, I gave some noble-sounding excuses, but the truth is, I was getting a little claustrophobic in there. At least here, I’m able to look after the place, and pretend I’m accomplishing something. “He rolled over on the bridge, setting off ripples that left me bobbing up and down in seasick rhythms. “At the very least I’m showing those bastards they can’t scare me. Those soulless, game-playing strings of code. Anything that shows those blips I’m not afraid is worth doing.”

“You’re wrong, you know. Risking your life this way doesn’t do anybody any good.”

He closed his eyes, gripped the netting with hands curled into claws, and for just a heartbeat seemed ill. “No, maybe not. But it preserves the illusion.”

I slid the rest of the way toward him, stopping only when we touched, the brief moment of contact as distasteful to me as our first encounter had been.

His smile was the wholly unpersuasive kind that only a professional diplomat could carve. Damned if there wasn’t some pretense of compassion in his voice, some veneer of fatherly understanding that gave every word out of his mouth an extra, oily sheen. “I didn’t like you from minute one, Counselor, even before I knew what you were. The way the air just chilled around you. Nobody can carry that much hostility around with them without a damn good reason.”

It would have been much nicer to have this particular conversation from opposite sides of a conference table. Having it in an abandoned and frequently sabotaged Hammocktown, with nothing but open space awaiting me if he snapped, was far from my own idea of favored conditions. “You should come back to the hangar with me, sir. We’ll be more comfortable there.”

“No, you’ll be more comfortable there. I’m fine where I am.”

That’s when I knew. He needed me scared because he was scared and he didn’t want to be the only one. Strangely enough, I respected that. It meant his diplomatic instincts were still at play, leading him to do whatever he could to ensure a level playing field.

A man who still thought he could win was not as dangerous as a man without hope.

I scuttled back up the slope to place more distance between us, and said, “It didn’t take me long to find out that you’d slept with Cynthia Warmuth.”

He chuckled, with a sad little shake of his head to convey his regrets over the small-mindedness he found himself having to confront. “Is that the extent of your findings, Counselor? That I’ve had consensual sex with some of the women under my command? Is that even considered a crime, in this day and age?”

“Not in and of itself. But it was an odd omission. I’m sure you know what murder investigators call a man in your position who fails to disclose his sexual relationship with a murder victim.”

“What?” he asked.

“The most likely suspect.”

His eyebrows knit. “First: you didn’t ask. Second, it didn’t occur to me that it might be relevant. Third, and most importantly: what Cynthia and I had is hardly worth calling a relationship. We slept together a few times. She didn’t make anything special out of it, and neither did I.”

“People have been known to get violently obsessed over the slightest things, Mr. Gibb.”

Gibb was the very portrait of a man confronted by total lunacy. “There wouldn’t have been any point, logical or otherwise, in getting obsessed over Cynthia Warmuth. You’ve heard what she was like. She wanted total immersion in everything and everyone. If anybody woke up in a bad mood, she wanted to be the therapist. If anybody received bad news from home, she wanted to be mother confessor. If somebody wanted privacy, she considered herself the exception. She wanted to be in everybody’s skin, all the time.”

“Did she get under yours, Mr. Gibb?”

“Mildly. I liked her, had fun with her, but didn’t give up any deep dark secrets. I didn’t like the way she always tried to figure out my whole life afterward. It gave me the impression she considered sex just a tool for picking emotional locks.” Thinking about it, for just this moment reliving a past encounter in his head, he could only tsk in remembrance. “She certainly used it enough. I think she must have offered herself to every man and woman in the outpost. I know she went after your friends the Unison Twins, that’s for certain. And she was also with D’Onofrio, for a while. Lastogne, too, but you must know that.”

My surprise, regarding Warmuth and Lastogne, took some of the edge off a reply intended to be cold, staccato, and relentless. “You know what murder investigators call the ex-lover who says the dead woman slept around?”

“I think I can guess.”

“The most likely suspect.”

He projected waves of unjust aggravation. “If I’d wanted to kill her I wouldn’t have had to call attention to the crime by crucifying her. In this habitat, all I would have had to do was drop her from a height, and call it an accident.”

“Which is, conveniently enough, close to what had happened to Santiago.”

He sighed. “And nobody’s about to claim I ever slept with Santiago.”

“Why not?”

His weariness was no longer the performance of a man determined to show himself rising above a series of unjust accusations, but the deep, abiding exhaustion of one who really had taken everything he could stand. “If you’ve researched what Warmuth was like, you know what Santiago was like. She was angry, suspicious, walled-off, paranoid, almost inhuman in her determination to repel others. In short, she was a lot like you—and very much poor Cynthia’s opposite. Trust me, I didn’t want her any more than she would have wanted me. And you won’t find one person on-station who’d say anything different.”

That was true too. “Most of the people I’ve spoken back you up. They say she wouldn’t have wanted anything to do with you.”

“Fine.” Gibb was more tired than ever. “I don’t have to be loved by every woman I deal with. I can afford to be disliked by a few.”

“True. And it’s also true that I don’t think you had anything to do with any of the sabotage aboard this station.” And then I took a deep breath and pushed on. “But by not getting involved with you, Santiago provided an excellent career baseline against which we can measure the performance evaluations of the other female indentures under your supervision.”

Gibb straightened, his eyes as wary as an animal’s who had just sensed a predator entering his woods. “What?”

“Once I discerned the pattern, it only took me a few minutes to run a hytex analysis that isolated the names of several women assigned to this outpost whose performance evaluations exceeded any reasonable measurement of their professional accomplishments. Warmuth was only the most obvious. You gave her a number of substantial time bonuses not long after her arrival on station—before she’d even completed her local training and experienced her first doomed overnight with the Brachiators. That bothered me the first time I saw it. What could she have done to distinguish herself so dramatically that she earned rewards long before she even accomplished anything?”

Now he’d popped a substantial sweat. “I can’t believe you’re implying—”

“I don’t imply, sir. I just come out and say. Santiago’s one of the ones you didn’t sleep with. You praised her memory. You called her work exemplary. You said she had a fine future. Given your predilection for generous time-bonuses, one would normally expect her to have worked off her contract at least as efficiently as Warmuth. But she wanted nothing to do with you. So there were no unusually large bonuses for her. She had to work off her debt at something approaching real time.”