Adam-Troy Castro - Emissaries from the Dead

The most shattered by the revelation was Cif Negelein, who I spotted standing by himself in a corner of the hangar, looking like a man whose heart had shriveled to the size of a pin. I didn’t tell him about Santiago’s art gallery, and how deeply it testified to the passions he’d awakened in her. I figured he didn’t deserve to be punished with the knowledge. As for the art itself, I don’t know whether it still exists, somewhere on One One One. I don’t think any human being, other than Santiago and me, ever saw it. As the AIsource would put it, that question is well outside the scope of my investigation.

I retired from the interrogation at the midway point, returning to the Dip Corps transport for an exhausted and dreamless sleep. I remained asleep for close to twelve hours, waking only once, in darkness, to the realization that the narrow bed contained two other forms, one male, one female, both awake but content to keep me company. When I woke a second time they were gone.

When I returned to Lastogne’s sleepcube, Santiago was aping catatonia, and those demanding answers from her were not much better. The AIsource had declared the Habitat once again open for human visitors, but with Hammocktown itself plunged into the murk, and the deaths of two people still in recent memory, nobody was hurrying to reestablish a permanent presence. Besides, any reconstruction would have to wait until New London got around to shipping new supplies. So the hangar would remain the home of the human delegation for the foreseeable future.

Lastogne joined most of the delegation in declaring the matter closed, but a number of people were downright dubious. Oskar Levine was nevertheless one of several confronting me privately in the days that followed. “I don’t know, Counselor. Does this solution satisfy you?”

I didn’t look at him. “You don’t believe her confession?”

“No,” Levine said. “She’s guilty all right. You can’t look at her without feeling it.”

I refrained from pointing out that gut feelings had never qualified as evidence, because it would have been the hol-lowest of all possible denials. Santiago radiated awareness of her crimes as completely as any murderer I’d ever known. She also radiated satisfaction at her grim accomplishments, and despair at how completely they’d destroyed her.

Levine continued: “She hated Warmuth, so that part at least makes a little bit of sense. But what about the rest of it? Where did she get the tools she would have needed to sabotage those cables? Where did she hide herself afterward? How did she get from place to place inside the Habitat? What did she even think she was accomplishing, for God’s sake? It doesn’t look like we’re ever going to find out from her, and the AIsource aren’t sharing anything they know. Who’s left to ask?”

I shrugged. “The Brachiators, maybe.”

We both knew it wasn’t a serious suggestion. The Brachiators were the last sentients anybody would suspect of insight into the tangled motives behind human crimes.

“Do you have any more ideas, Counselor?”

I shook my head. “No. And I’m afraid that from here on in it’s not my job.”

Levine gave me the look of a man paddling in heavy water. “You don’t strike me as somebody satisfied with doing the bare minimum.”

“I’m not. But we’re not going to get anything more if we don’t get it from Santiago, and she’s going to hold on to what she has until she decides to break. Questioning her forever isn’t my responsibility. New London’s just going to have to take over from here.”

He was not happy about that. “I suppose so. Thank you, Andrea.”

I might have snapped at him for using my first name, but I’d gotten a little looser about such things over the last few days. “I mean what I said before. Don’t ever reclaim your Confederate citizenship without consulting with me. I’d hate to see you trade your immunity for life in a cell.”

“So would I,” he said, and sighed. “I wish I could be human without having to deal with the humans in charge. Being a traitor, if only on paper… isn’t always the easiest thing.”

“I know,” I said, leaving him to believe it was only empathy.

He was far from naïve. But it would have been nice to claim even that much innocence. In its place, I had unfinished business, some of it even heavier than what he’d just been handed.

Some of which I needed to deal with before I left One One One.

Itook care of part of it in a skimmer hovering under the ragged remains of Hammocktown.

I looked over the side, willing myself to feel every meter of open space between me and the deadly clouds far below, searching for the wave of vertigo that should have made me swoon.

But my fear of falling was gone.

Actual comfort around heights had little to do with it. I’d just found other things more deserving of my fear.

So I sighed, turned my back on the view, and cleared my throat, finding it dry from all the talking I’d already done. I’d spent the flight before this point recounting my conversations with the AIsource in as much detail as I could remember them. Now, having caught up with the present, I recounted the path I’d taken to the conclusion.

“We surprise them. That’s the key to the whole thing, you know; we surprise them. They don’t always know what we’re going to do. It’s what makes us interesting.

“And it’s what started this whole thing.

“Gibb told me all I really needed to know. Cutting the cables of Santiago’s hammock required tools only the AIsource possess aboard this station. They had to provide her with those tools, which means they had a vested interest in arranging that disaster.

“Even before I knew about their internal conflicts, I couldn’t believe they’d wanted to kill either Warmuth or Santiago. As they pointed out, even if they had something to gain by killing people, they already possessed the power of life and death over everything that lives here, and it would have been far easier to pick the human contingent off some other way.

“And I’d noticed right away that one person was definitely dead while the other, who went first, was only presumed to be.

“Which made it very likely that they were recruiting.

“And why not? Even with all their technology, and with what I later found out about their ability to control us at will, mere puppets make bad employees. They don’t bring any of their own natural gifts to the job; they don’t have enthusiasm, or the ability to learn; they don’t even have the option of coming up with their own good ideas. They just do what they’re forced to do, and nothing else.

“How much more advantageous to find sentients who have no problem with switching loyalties? Any human being who worked for the AIsource out of choice and not helpless obedience would bring a lot of personal qualities to the job. Fanaticism, for one. Self-interest, for another. Creativity, for a third. All facets of the very unpredictability the AIsource find so valuable. Such a convert would be worth any number of mind-controlled robots.

“And where would they find these qualities? Where might they discover the qualities they look for in their recruits?

“The one place with a never-ending supply of individuals motivated to indenture themselves away from their homeworlds in search of something better is the Dip Corps, an organization that in this context seems a perfect pretext for gathering people who can renounce their loyalty to the places they came from.

“In Santiago’s case, she was a debt slave to start with, eager to sell herself to a different set of owners. Why would anybody assume that she’d harbor any more loyalty to her second set of masters than she did to the first? Especially since, from all available evidence, she had few social skills and no ability to get along with her fellow human beings?