Emissaries from the Dead

10. LASTOGNE

As our transport reentered the Habitat, the first fresh view of that great empty space was enough to reintroduce me to the digestive effects of soul-searing vertigo. That and the sheer organic smell of the biosphere almost got the better of me. I would have vomited over the side, but the ionic shields would have repelled it back at me. So I just closed my eyes, counted to one hundred by primes, and entertained myself with yet another inner recitation of all the reasons I hated ecosystems.

The Porrinyards had enough decency not to mention my discomfort, but Lastogne called attention to it. “You’re turning colors, Counselor. Would you like some medication?”

I hadn’t heard so many people intent on medicating me since my days as a guest of the state. “No. But I would appreciate it if you wiped that amused grin off your face.”

“Not an option,” Lastogne said, with friendly malice. “Nausea may not be all that fun to experience, but among unaffected travelers it bears a long and honorable history as a spectator sport.”

I tasted stomach acid. “I’m beginning to understand your attitude about making friends.”

“Oh?”

“It’s self-preservation. Whenever you say something like that, a stranger just considers you an asshole. A true friend would be obliged to kill you.”

“You’re right. It must be why I’ve always avoided making true friends.” He hesitated, weighed the moment, and plunged in: “So how have you found your interviews so far?”

This exemplified the truism that local liaisons exist to funnel information in both directions, not just one. Lastogne wasn’t here just to help me. He was here to make sure my investigation didn’t go anywhere embarrassing. I urped. “Incomplete.”

“Nothing helpful at all?”

“Nobody confessed to a massive conspiracy, if that’s what you mean. I found more interest in the things people left unsaid.”

“Oh?”

I called the Porrinyards. “Oscin, Skye.”

Skye was too occupied on the freight deck, tending to one of the packages we were ferrying from the hangar, to look up. But both Porrinyards answered, their shared voice once again a neutral compromise between them. “Yes?”

“I’m about to have a screened conversation with Mr. Lastogne. Please don’t disturb us.”

“Understood,” the Porrinyards said.

I unclipped my hiss screen from my belt, setting it for a radius that included Lastogne and myself. A pleasant murmur filled the air around us. I waited for the murmur to reach full volume and said, “Point one. Robin Fish.”

Lastogne seemed surprised. “What about her?”

“The other two came from high-altitude environments. They were trained and experienced and excellent prospects for One One One. When they failed, it was against all reasonable expectations. But Fish was assigned here despite minimal qualifications, given brief and inadequate training in what seems a transparent attempt to justify her posting to this facility, removed from the environment at the first sign of trouble and condemned to literally years of performing busywork in virtual isolation. Her very presence is an anomaly. Why is she here?”

Lastogne shrugged. “No big mystery. The Corps had a number of slots to fill and filled as many as they could with qualified people. The rest had to be chosen off the rack, in the hope that they could be tailored to fit.”

“It seems an awful leap from people as completely suited for the job as the Porrinyards, to somebody as completely unsuited, physically and psychologically, as Robin Fish. Weren’t there any more candidates from the middle ground?”

His sideways grimace proved no more mirthful than the one requiring both sides of his face. “What makes you think there weren’t?”

“Were there?”

“This isn’t exactly a typical environment, Counselor. If we’d staffed it with nothing but people trained in climbing and high-altitude gymnastics, we would have fallen short on every other skill set we needed. We would have no linguists, no biologists, no environmental analysts; nobody capable of maintaining the hammocks, nobody qualified to assess the well-being of the Brachiators. So we have several dozen other indentures on-site whose backgrounds offered no special indication of any talent for functioning here. There are even one or two who spent their formative years living on planetary flatlands, without so much as a low rise between them and the horizon, and who never once enjoyed a view from any kind of height until they joined the Corps. I would be lying if I said that everybody found the going easy, but just about everybody adjusted to the conditions better than those three did.”

“It still seems excessive to keep a mere clerk like Fish on-site, doing nothing of any real importance, for two full years. Especially since Mr. Gibb arranged her presence here himself.”

He shrugged again. “Gibb has a thing about quitters, and about admitting a mistake. I think he believes that if he keeps Fish and her friends penned up long enough, they’ll stop being silly, pull themselves together, and rejoin the rest of us.”

“Do you believe that?”

“For what it’s worth, no. People who fall apart can be put back together again, but they’re usually more fragile not less.”

“But you still support what Gibb’s doing.”

Lastogne’s grimace became a smirk. “I may not like the man, and I may think he has his head so far up his ass on this subject that he may never live to breathe fresh air again, but he is in charge, and I have to support his decisions, regardless of my own personal feelings.”

I couldn’t buy Lastogne’s portrait of himself as a man who backed up the boss no matter what. “You gave me the impression that you hate them.”

“Hate’s a strong word,” Lastogne said. “I don’t feel sorry for them. I don’t think they deserve any special sympathy, and I don’t think they have any call to sit there, in their little do-nothing world, feeling persecuted because they failed.”

I nodded, to support the impression that I accepted his response without question. “Which brings us to point two: the strange dynamic between them. Both Li-Tsan and D’Onofrio behaved protectively toward Fish, even as they both seemed to look down on her.”

He seemed astonished that I would even see fit to ask. “Well, she’s low dog in their pack. They’ll piss on her all night and day, but rip out the throat of anybody else who tries.”

“She seemed ill.”

Now he gave me an actual smile. “She does look like shit, doesn’t she? I think she spends her days dosing herself sick on buzzpatches and manna wine. No particular reason to punish her for indulging, since she has nothing else to do and, confined to the hangar the way she is, can’t fall any farther than the floor she’s walking on. Of course, the worse she gets, the less likely it is that Gibb will ever feel comfortable about sending her elsewhere.”

Terrific. Abandon the woman, then do nothing as she destroys herself. “Where does she get manna juice, if the only place to get it is inside the Habitat?”

“Gibb has no problem with our people drinking the fermented stuff as long as they do it outside the Habitat and detoxify before they return to work. So she gets it from indentures on leave. There are some awfully wild parties, going on in that hangar deck.”

“I’m told Cynthia Warmuth went there a lot.”

“Everybody goes there a lot. Even Santiago went. It’s the only place to go if you want a break away from the Habitat.”

“But Cynthia Warmuth especially.”

“Maybe a little more than average. She used to talk about how sorry she felt for them.”

Backing up what the exiles had said about the self-serving nature of her affections. “Did you know she slept with D’Onofrio?”

That got him. His jaw worked as he considered four or five separate responses, and rejected them all. “No. But I’m not surprised. It’s just the kind of stupid-ass thing you would expect the silly quiff to do.”

“Empathy addict, right?”

“To a fault,” he agreed, with more bile than he actually needed.

There comes a point, in some Dipcrime investigations, when I begin to see my suspect pool as a nest of rabid animals, clawing and sniping at one another in a constant effort to inflict scars. It was especially difficult here, as the nearly universal disdain for both victims was beginning to get on my nerves.

Except it wasn’t universal, was it? Gibb and Lastogne both claimed affection for Warmuth. Gibb had even slept with her. Maybe I was just getting a skewed sample.

I glanced up at the blur of Uppergrowth just a few short meters above my head. “Point three. Christina Santiago. Putting yourself in her position: what would you do if your hammock collapsed?”

He smiled. “If I was lucky enough to be somewhere else, I’d get nice and irritated about all the belongings I’d just dumped.”

I think I managed to smile back. “I mean if you happened to be inside it at the time.”

A shrug. “I’d fall.”

“And?”

“What do you mean and? What other and could there be? I’d fall and die, just like anybody else.”

“You’re sure?’

“Counselor,” Lastogne said, with infinite patience, “please don’t tell me you think Santiago’s still alive. I’d be very disappointed in you. It’s not a possibility.”

“Why not?”

“Let’s forget that the fall itself would take her past heavy weather, poisonous clouds, and an acid rain layer before she ever hit anything solid enough to make her splatter. She’d be bones, and then bone fragments, long before hitting the soup. You’re really wondering if anything could have rescued her on the way down. The answer is no. The Brachiators would need to fly, and they can’t, so that lets them out. Not us either; we didn’t have any skimmers in flight when she fell, and wouldn’t have been able to get one launched in time to make a difference. And while the AIsource provide us all the taxi service we want, they express zero interest in playing lifeguard. As far as they’re concerned, any attempt at a rescue would compromise the stark integrity of this place.”

“Have they actually said that?”

“They said it when they agreed to allow a human presence here. They said, Brachiators stay alive by holding on, and any human beings intent on studying them need to learn the same skill.”

This added yet another wrinkle to the game. A longstanding Interspecies Covenant, to which both humanity and the software intelligences were charter signatories, required all participating races to offer reasonable protection to alien diplomatic personnel within their territories. The AIsource’s evident refusal to honor that treaty would have been seen as a massive breach of interstellar law…were it not for their prior refusal to grant our outpost diplomatic status.

Their failure to recognize Hammocktown as an embassy made it a lot easier for human beings to die here.

Which led to the most troubling issue so far, at least as far as Lastogne was concerned.

“Point four. Peyrin Lastogne, who the hell are you?”

If that offended him at all, he did not show it. Instead, he simply flashed a sideways grin, much warmer than his usual grimace, and squeezed me once on my upper arm. It was a different kind of intrusive touch than I’d endured from Gibb. That one had felt sexual. This one? More like affection, for sharing a secret joke. “I was wondering how long it would take you to just come out and ask.”

“You have no Dip Corps listing. You have no bio on the hytex.”

The grin remained. “It could be that my background is nobody’s business. Look at yourself, Counselor. Your own life would be a hell of a lot easier if it wasn’t accessible to anybody with sufficient curiosity. Somebody like myself wouldn’t be able to look you up and find all those voices yowling for your extradition. The Tchi really want you, don’t they? And the Bocaians—”

The Tchi just wanted me because they wanted anything that would embarrass the Confederacy; it had rendered them predictable in a manner that ended up saving me once or twice. And the Bocaians, who rarely ventured off their own world, were no real threat to me either. “This is not about me. It’s about you. Why are your records a closed book? What is it we’re not supposed to know?”

“If I told you,” he said, “you would know it.”

“Have you been sending me any messages?”

“No more than the usual, Counselor.”

“Meaning?”

“Nonverbal messages,” he said, batting his eyes. “Some involuntary, but all defensible.”

“Nothing by hytex?”

“Why would I do that? I can talk to you any time I want.”

His answers were driving me crazy. “Did you kill Warmuth or Santiago?”

And instead of a yes or no, he laughed—not with hysterical glee, or superiority, or even with malice, but with a level of bemused affection I found a hundred times more infuriating. “Oh, really. Counselor. What answer could I possibly give, aside from a full confession, that you would ever be willing to believe?”

Now I knew it for a fact. The son of a bitch was teasing me. “Tell me anyway. Did you kill Warmuth or Santiago?”

“No,” he said. “I did not. But you have to keep something in mind.”

“What’s that?”

“That if I was the killer, I’d be saying the same thing.”