Emissaries from the Dead

14. RETREAT

The Porrinyards half escorted, half carried me to the communal tent where I’d conducted the bulk of the day’s interviews, applied a buzzpatch sedative that didn’t alleviate the residual aftereffects of terror so much as wrap them in soft, sweet-smelling flowers, and stayed beside me for the two minutes it took to summon Gibb and Lastogne.

When Lastogne showed up, he paused at the tent flap to drive back the small mob of indentures attempting to enter with him. I heard men and women, some of whom I recognized by voice, peppering him with questions. Some had to do with whether I was okay, others had to do with what the hell had happened, and still others had to do with whether the danger was over. He told them to take it easy and give him room. They did both with minimal protest. He may have been an irritating son of a bitch, but he knew how to make his authority stick.

As he came in, sealing the flap behind him, I saw that he’d donned a pair of long-sleeved gray pullovers, covering everything but his hands and feet. Puffy, sleep-deprived eyes, and a circle of bare, pale skin at the site of his ROM prosthesis, furthered the impression that he’d come in a hurry. He slid down the canvas to Oscin’s side and demanded, “Is she all right?”

“You can try asking her,” I said.

He didn’t quite manage to hide surprise. “Forgive me, Counselor. You looked a little catatonic there.”

“I’m in shock, which isn’t even remotely the same thing.”

His lip curled, in a combination of annoyance and admiration. “My apologies. Do we have any idea what happened?”

I resisted making a snide comment over his use of the pronoun we. “Some kind of dissolving agent turned my hammock to confetti.”

“How fast?”

“Minutes.”

The Porrinyards, bracketing me on both sides, moved a little closer. “She almost didn’t make it out.”

“I didn’t make it out at all,” I said. “You pulled me out.”

That glimpse I’d caught of them, jumping off the edge of the rope bridge, had proven only the first step in an insanely intricate trapeze-act manuever they’d plotted and executed at the very instant they’d seen me about to fall. Oscin had clung to the bridge by his knees and ankles, securing Skye so she could wrap her arms under mine on her upswing.

Coordinating their movements with such instant perfection had been easy enough, given their abilities. Holding on to me and my bag during my ten seconds of full-tilt, convulsive panic had been considerably more difficult.

They’d almost lost me.

Worse, at least from their point of view—Oscin had almost lost Skye.

I’d thrashed so hard that Oscin had lost his grip on one of Skye’s ankles. They’d had only a second to decide whether to drop me or keep holding on.

I tried to imagine what it would have been like for them, if Skye had fallen. Oscin’s body would have remained safe, but he would have felt every sensation she felt as she plummeted through the clouds, just as she would have felt every sensation he felt as he remained safe high above her. Both halves of their shared personality would have felt safety and damnation at the same time, as half of everything they were died. Turning away would not have been an option.

Oscin would have known every single moment of Skye’s agony.

And yet they’d held on to me anyway.

The worst of the things I didn’t know, at this moment, was just how I felt about that.

Lastogne rubbed his jaw with a dark amusement that simultaneously acknowledged and mocked the gravity of the moment. “Good work, people. I’ll speak to Gibb, and make sure he takes some time off your contract.”

“No need, Peyrin. I wasn’t doing it for extra credit.”

“Too bad. You’re getting it anyway.” He turned to me. “And you, Counselor. You do know what you’re describing, don’t you?”

I resented having to think. “I could be describing any number of things. A lone human being could arrange an effect like that with a chemical agent.”

“But you don’t seriously believe that.”

“No, sir, I don’t. Even if somebody could smuggle a large quantity of a dangerous substance on-station, and apply it without anybody noticing, our postmortem investigation would be all too likely to identify it from traces on the hammock superstructure. Our culprit doesn’t strike me as the type to leave that kind of obvious footprint.”

“We’ll still have to check,” Lastogne said.

“I expect you to. But I’m pretty certain you’ll only be eliminating it from possibility.”

“Me too. So, you suspect—”

I spoke the damning word without inflection. “Nanotech.”

It was hard to avoid noticing how completely Lastogne’s glance at Oscin ignored Skye. “You saw it?”

“The last few seconds,” the Porrinyards said.

“And you concur?”

“Yes. That’s what it looked like.”

Nobody said the obvious. The low-tech conditions constraining Gibb’s people specifically excluded access to microdisassemblers. Within the Habitat, only the AIsource were supposed to command that kind of tech. This incident incriminated them even more clearly than the Santiago killing, even without considering the unseen Heckler, who I wasn’t ready to mention.

Another flurry of raised voices later, the hammock flap opened again, this time admitting the flushed and sweaty Gibb, who was wearing an open vest and a pair of shiny silver briefs tight enough to display his personal assets in extreme detail. I would have liked to believe that the emergency had interrupted him during some personal down-time, and that in rushing to my side he’d been in too much of a hurry to change into something less ludicrous, but this was Hammocktown and we were talking about Gibb. Either way he slid down the canvas to the knot of us congregated at its lowest point, and immediately made the same mistake Lastogne had: “Is she all right?”

I said, “I must look downright brain-damaged.”

His reluctance to address me directly was so palpable that when he jerked his head in my direction, it was hard not to imagine the snap of invisible strings. “So? Speak.”

“Bottom line?” I said. “There’s been more sabotage, by an enemy you can’t predict or identify, whose attacks on your facility have been growing more frequent, more elaborate, and more contemptuous of your authority. You don’t have the knowledge or the tools you need to protect your people, and there’s every reason you believe that your lives will be in more danger tomorrow and in even more danger the day after that. Remaining in Hammocktown, at this point, leaves everybody at risk and complicates my investigation for no good reason. It could only be sanctioned by an obstinate fool, driven more by his own self-destructive pride than any vestigial concern for the lives of the people who depend on his good judgment. I have problems with your management style I haven’t even mentioned yet, sir, but you’re not the person I just described. We both know what you have to do.”

I’d seen looks just like Gibb’s from any number of people who wanted to hit me. The length of time they hold the look has always been inversely proportional to the chances of them acting on the impulse. Gibb held his for close to a minute. “Do you know what retreat means, for someone in my position?”

I did. If the Dip Corps later judged the retreat avoidable, the black mark on his record could very well stigmatize him for the rest of his career. I could only counter, “How many people are you willing to sacrifice to keep your reputation?”

More silence. And then all the air went out of him at once, draining away his anger and leaving a man resigned, defeated and old. “Peyrin?”

“Yes, sir?”

“Go out and count heads. Make sure we didn’t lose anybody else while we were in here babysitting the Counselor.”

“And?”

“Tell them to collect their essentials. We’re leaving.”

Hammocktown didn’t have enough skimmers to carry out a full evacuation, but once contacted the AIsource were happy to supply us with a fleet of ten. It was hard not to see the sudden wealth of free transportation, on this station not designed to accommodate a human presence, as more evidence that they’d been trying to get rid of us all along. Gibb was not the only person who muttered a few angry words to that effect as we boarded the vessels and left the sad, hanging corpse of his outpost behind.

I don’t know how many others imagined every gleaming carrier in that fleet obeying AIsource orders to simply discard us from a height, but that image occurred to me early, and dominated the nastier side of my imagination long enough to give me serious second thoughts as I boarded a skimmer that already held Lastogne, the Porrinyards, and a purple-haired, saucer-eyed female I hadn’t questioned yet. But bugging out had been my idea in the first place. So I took my place beside the Porrinyards, and made room for the final two passengers, including another young man unknown to me, and Oskar Levine, who didn’t sit until he was satisfied that I was all right.

As we pulled away, the Skimmer itself called my name. Andrea Cort.

I said, “Yes?”

I don’t blame you for not recognizing me, but I’m the same skimmer that conversed with you on your arrival. I was concerned about you then and I’m concerned about you now. Has your stay here been as difficult as this sudden mass departure implies?

I glanced at the Porrinyards, who for once reacted as individuals: Oscin with an encouraging smile, Skye with a charming little shrug. Levine, sitting behind them, just shook his head. Nobody else seemed available for comment.

Might as well. “Don’t you know?”

One of the many ways we preserve individuality among our components is by restricting some of us to limited perspectives. To put it in terms you might respect, nobody ever tells me anything.

Levine muttered, “Sounds like a true brother under the skin.”

Lastogne murmured something about finally, at long last, meeting an AIsource program he could get along with.

The suns were still out, but the skimmer was equipped with lights for the convenience of its organic passengers, and provided a moving spotlight on the Uppergrowth a few meters above us. Our poky rate afforded us clear views of any Brachiators we passed; most were moving at a pace so deliberate that human eyes interpreted it as the next best thing to complete immobility. I couldn’t tell whether they noticed us or not, and after a moment decided that I preferred not. They were like many pre-technological races we’d encountered, in that they had been perfectly comfortable without us.

Once we left, they’d forget us in a generation. Maybe earlier. We were “Ghosts,” after all. Some of us more than others.

The skimmer persisted in its delusions of helpfulness. Do you need any special assistance, Andrea Cort?

I said, “Can you get a message to the entities in charge?”

Of course.

“Fine,” I said. “Tell them that I want another private audience, at their earliest convenience. And while you’re at it, tell them I’m tired of their fucking games.”

The hangar may have been a vast open space, dwarfing the Dip Corps transport, but human frenzy is large enough to fill any empty room known to sentient life, and the overwhelming impression Gibb’s evacuees inflicted on their surroundings was indeed frenzy. Indentures ran in and out of the hangar, using flats and freight drivers to ferry salvaged supplies to a makeshift storage area between the ship and the hangar bulkhead. Robin Fish and Nils D’Onofrio occupied themselves inflating an array of emergency sleepcubes along the opposite wall. D’Onofrio worked at twice Fish’s speed, moving with a swift, confident efficiency that spoke well of his willingness to work when work was provided. Fish just seemed to drag herself from place to place, expending minimal effort to minimal effect. It didn’t strike me as laziness so much as adherence to a different time scale: she didn’t seem to feel the passage of minutes at the same rate the rest of us did, instead adopting a rate the Brachiators might have appreciated. I wondered again just what drugs might have been coursing through her veins, in addition to any blood she still had room for.

Some of the indentures wobbled as they walked, reflecting what may have been a long interval since their last walk on solid ground. Others bore the shell-shocked, disbelieving expression common to all refugees. Still others seemed defiant or even amused. I saw tears, hugs, jokes, more than a few stolen kisses, and a couple of minor shoving matches. When Cif Negelein ambled unseen in the midst of it all, fluttering his hands like doves, I thought him in the midst of a major emotional breakdown until I glimpsed the light in his eyes and realized that he was virtually sketching the scene, filtering the unbearable through the lens of his own beloved art.

A few minutes into the general chaos Gibb called out for attention, his voice a lost thin note that went unnoticed until Lastogne provided his own sharp “All right, people! Listen up!”

Everybody stopped.

Gibb winced, shot Lastogne a look, and cleared his throat in an unsuccessful attempt to pretend that hoarseness was the only reason he hadn’t been heard. “Right. I just want to say that, as far as I’m concerned, this situation here, this…retreat…is just temporary. We’re not leaving One One One, nor are we abandoning our duties here. We’ll use skimmers to continue our observations inside the Habitat, and with any luck return to Hammocktown upon the conclusion of this investigation.” He licked his lips, cast about for something else to say, found nothing, and looked to me. “Counselor? Do you have anything to add to that?”

I shook my head. “That covers it.”

He seemed dismayed by my failure to provide a dramatic closer. “Well, uh, all right, then. Everybody, go back to setting up.”

The only notable reaction was a gradual return to the previous noise level.

Gibb stood at the center of it, wearing the look you’d expect from a man who had just blown the most important speech of his life.

Oskar Levine, his arms fully laden with material I failed to recognize, stopped by my side. “Not exactly the most inspiring of leaders, eh?”

I found myself casting about for something to do with my hands. “That may be his greatest advantage right now.”

He raised an eyebrow. “I honestly can’t wait to hear how you figure that.”

“An inspiring leader would have amped their emotions. He’d have blistered the air with rhetoric and shown enough courage, defiance, and self-confidence to make them eager to follow wherever he led. And, just like Gibb right now, he’d then have absolutely nowhere to go from there: not a game plan, not an exit strategy, nothing; not even the vaguest of ideas. He’d have set them on fire and then given them nothing to do with it. But treating this like just another bureaucratic inconvenience that we all just have to buckle down and muddle through, the way he just did, accomplishes something more.”

“What?”

I looked him in the eye. “It makes the crisis boring.”

“And that’s good?”

“It is if it makes them look forward to whatever happens next.”

Levine shifted his packages under one arm so he could scratch his head with the other. “You’ve got a great way of thinking, Counselor.”

I spotted Skye in the entrance to the transport. She’d changed into a full-body jumpsuit, too loose and all-concealing to have been one of her own. Her face was flushed and her bristled hair shiny with sweat.

Excusing myself to Levine, I avoided three or four collisions with other bustling indentures just rushing to her side. “What’s wrong?”

She wiped her forehead with the back of one hand. “Beyond the obvious?”

“Please.”

“Some of the Intersleep crypts need cleaning. Nothing serious, but there’s one in the back that looks like it hasn’t been flushed since the trip in.”

I remembered Gibb telling me that the ship only had waking accommodations for four. “I thought D’Onofrio and the others were supposed to be in charge of that.”

“They were, but this one’s caked with dry bluegel.”

I revised my previous complimentary estimate of D’Onofrio’s work ethic. “Is that going to be a problem?”

“As long as we’re not in a hurry to get out.”

I’d done the grim math. The current complement of human beings on One One One included not only those who’d arrived on this vessel, but also a substantial number who had arrived on subsequent supply ships. The total population exceeded this ship’s entire capacity by about twenty. If a full evacuation became necessary, I could squeeze in another couple of people in my own transport, but that still left a tragic number of people behind.

Of course, if it came to that, we’d all be dead anyway.

Because the only possible reason for us to leave here in such a hurry would be confirmation that the AIsource wanted us dead.

And if that was true, I couldn’t come up with a single scenario that didn’t end with those binary-code bastards reducing us to floating debris in space.

Which made it something not worth talking about. “Where’s your other half?”

“On a flight back to Hammocktown. Some supplies got left there. We don’t want to lose anything to the lower atmosphere if any more hammocks collapse. But, you know, he’s here with us, too, as long as I am. Do you need something?”

“Just a few minutes of your time.”

“Goodie.” She ran her blue-stained fingers through her scalp-bristles and cocked her head toward the ship interior.

I followed her inside, through a cramped exit corridor, to a circular command hub containing two display consoles and bracketed by a quartet of private rooms just large enough to house fold-down beds, sonic lavatories, and narrow shelves. All four were open, but only one looked occupied, the bed down and bearing a folded blanket. Whoever lived there had installed a holo graffito, more distracting than clever: LOST LOST LOST ON ONE ONE ONE. A sack of personal items sat on the counter. I took the liberty of inspecting them and saw a name tag marking the bundle as the property of Robin Fish.

The cramped, sparse accommodations for passengers not stored in Intersleep were more than enough to explain why the height-sensitives preferred to erect sleepcubes in the relative vastness of the outer hangar. Confinement to the ship would feel more like prison.

An open hatchway at the rear of the command hub revealed only a green wall across on the other side of another narrow corridor, no doubt the route to cargo, ship’s systems, the real-water shower Lastogne had mentioned, and the Intersleep crypts. Awake or asleep, it was nobody’s idea of luxurious travel, but then I’d known luxurious travel once or twice in my life and found it just got me places at the same speed while forcing me to interact with the kind of people who could afford such passage.

We sat at the swivel-seats. Skye rested her left arm on the console, tilting her head to prop her temple against her index finger. Her smile was unforced, but quietly infuriating. “Shoot.”

“I want to talk about what you did.”

She fluttered her free hand. “No need.”

“I’m afraid there is.”

“Um. This isn’t about thanking me, is it?”

“No. I hope to get around to that, sooner or later. But right now I can’t afford to. There’s too much about tonight that still needs to be explained.”

Her tiny smile remained where it was. But she lifted her head off her index finger, and lowered that hand to her lap, where it joined the other in uncharacteristically prim repose. “No offense taken, Counselor. You have a job to do. What would you like to know?”

“How come you were the only ones who saw me?”

“The only one,” she corrected me, showing absolutely no impatience at my refusal to retain this one essential point. “It was dark.”

“Not all that dark. Hammocktown is lit at night.”

“Yes, it is. But once the suns go out, and everybody’s back from wherever they’ve flown off to, there’s less reason to be up and about. People tend to settle in, alone or with friends. Traffic from tent to tent goes way down.”

I remembered the Brachiator term for human beings. “A Ghost town.”

The reference amused her. “A Half-Ghost town anyway.”

I grinned back, despite the seriousness of the moment, but forced myself to drop it at once. “But that didn’t stop you from showing up just in time.”

Now she looked more than just insolent. She looked downright knowing. “That does strike me as convenient. Are you complaining?”

“No. But before we move on from here, I need to eliminate the possibility that the entire incident wasn’t staged just to make me trust you.”

Her smile didn’t falter, but for a moment it turned absent. “Did you notice how close Oscin came to dropping us both?”

“I also know how effortlessly you caught me in the first place.”

“It was far from effortless, Counselor. At the moment I decided to go for you, reaching you and bringing you back alive were already far from sure things. Catching untrained people, in situations like that, never is. There’s no way to know how they’re going to react. They seize hold when you need them to go limp, go stiff when you need them to grab hold, faint when you need them to react, or at the very worst treat you like something they have to climb instead of somebody trying to help. Had your need been any less immediate, I would have preferred to tell you to hang on while I summoned help. That would have been easier for me and safer for you. But instead I arrived at the last second and didn’t have time to measure the chances of you reacting in some manner that would doom us both. I had to act then, right then, or lose you. And even then, I think the chance of success was, maybe, one out of three.”

I didn’t know what appalled me more: her estimate being that low, or that high. “Which is, again, convenient. If you like dramatic rescues.”

She chuckled. “I prefer dull rescues. Less stressful.”

Something was off, here. I wasn’t rattling her at all. At the very least I’d expect her to be angry. “I’ve been rescued from other dangerous situations. I know how they tend to be spur-of-the-moment improvisations. But if we consider what almost happened to me, in light of what happened to Warmuth and Santiago, we see that all three incidents show a certain preference for theatricality. And rescuing me, in the way that you did, very much fits that overall pattern. To believe it real, I need more. Like what you were doing up and around, and that close to my hammock, in the first place?”

Her lips curled, turning that secretive smile into a broad one, all teeth and gums and unforced hilarity. “Hallelujah. At long last, we come to the relevant line of questioning.”

I waited for her to elaborate, but no go: she was going to make me ask. “What were you doing there?”

“I was coming to surprise you with a visit.”

“Why?

“Because,” she said, slowly and clearly and without a trace of hurt or sarcasm, “there seemed precious little chance of you inviting me.”

Running an investigation like this would have been a lot easier had I possessed some kind of mystical, infallible sense separating truth from fiction. The truth is that I have no such gift. It’s a good thing I’m talented at piecing together the bits that corroborate each other, because I usually can’t tell the truth just by listening. I could now, because I found myself connecting the way Skye was looking at me with the way Oscin had looked at me yesterday.

It wasn’t something I’d ever been comfortable with. I’d tried to live my life without it. But I had seen it before, and I did know what it looked like.

I said something stupid. “Both of you?”

Skye had corrected me on the same point, only two minutes ago. But she indulged me one more time. “There is only one of me.”

It still didn’t make any rational sense. This was, after all, me we were talking about, and I knew exactly how unlikable I was. It made even less sense when I considered that the Porrinyards had been treating me this way since the very first moment I’d met them.

But for once, I knew the truth just by hearing it.

Well.

This was interesting.

I didn’t want it to be interesting. But, damn. It was.

I’d already noticed how beautiful they were.

I pivoted my seat away from the console, rose, tugged a wrinkle out of my jumpsuit, and stood there feeling stupid while Skye just sat there, damnably calm, her confident smile not wavering a millimeter.

Not knowing what else to say, I ventured, “Thank you for saving my life.”

She said, “We’ll work out the terms later.”

I offered a queasy smile, and left in a hurry, emerging from the transport just in time to see the hands closed tight on Gibb’s neck.