Emissaries from the Dead

3. VICTIMS

First they told me all they knew about Christina Santiago.

Lastogne rattled off the facts, in a contemptuous drone that failed to betray any sympathy. Santiago, he said, had been a second-year diplomatic indenture, just out of training: specialty, exopsychology, the product of some industrial hell somewhere in the ass end of Hom. Sap space.

The feudal economy that kept the darker corners of the Confederacy going had seized a particularly savage grip on her people. The colonists who’d settled the place seventeen generations back had so badly mortgaged their lives and their children’s lives, just for the funding to establish their infrastructure, that the entire population lived as the de facto debt slaves of the sponsoring Bettelhine Corporation. The world has one major industry, the construction of components for starship quantum dampeners. With perhaps one-third of the population engaged in providing food and housing and other support services, the other two-thirds spend their days working endless shifts in Bettelhine’s factories, struggling and failing to meet the quotas that would bring their world’s struggling millions a few percentage points closer to solvency.

Sometimes, they almost break even.

Mostly, as management intended, they fall much further behind. They have to give up more and more of their own agricultural and industrial systems just to make up lost time, which obliged the company, in its infinite generosity, to supply an ever-increasing percentage of their basic necessities, at an ever-increasing markup. Christina Santiago’s people have been forced to mortgage three additional future generations, just during her lifetime alone.

The situation failed to shock me. The Confederacy doesn’t provide its citizens with any redress against that kind of local corporate rapaciousness. What little political clout exists is external, a mere façade of species unity between us and the other sentient powers; internally, it’s never been able to come up with a constitution all of our bickering subcultures have been willing to get behind. It’s why any voyager through human space will encounter every political and economic system from green cults to fascism, why some of our more contentious worlds have as many as fifty or sixty separate governments happily bombarding each other from orbit, why we still have to deal with internal genocides in this day and age, and why debt-slavery like Santiago grew up with continues to flourish when the people benefiting from it should be lined up against the wall and shot.

Don’t get me started. But it’s one reason, of many, why I sometimes hate my own species.

To Lastogne and Gibb, I affected boredom. “So? Half the Dip Corps must come from some depressed background or another. It’s what makes indentured servitude such an attractive alternative.”

“It explains who she was,” Lastogne said. “Gives you a special feeling for her character.”

“Special feeling for her character doesn’t matter unless you believe that where she came from and who she is has some bearing on how she died. That her murderer targeted her in particular. Is that what you believe?”

“I have no reason to believe anything. I’m just being thorough.”

Gibb just looked weary. “Get to the good stuff, Peyrin. She can fill in the personalities later.”

Nobody could have blamed Santiago for indenturing herself to the Dip Corps as soon as possible. There, at least, she would have had a chance at a better life. But that better life had not materialized. Her murder had taken place during One One One’s dark hours, when the glowsphere suns were dimmed to provide the cylinder’s inhabitants with some semblance of a normal planetary night. But because witnesses had reported that Santiago’s assigned hammock was still aglow, she was probably still awake, and working, at the moment of the crime.

The culprit or culprits had sliced through every cable anchoring one side of her hammock to the Uppergrowth. The partial collapse transformed the hammock from a tent to a flapping banner. All its loose contents, including Santiago herself, had tumbled into the darkness below, trailing her scream.

The young indenture may have remained conscious and terrified for long minutes, as she plunged toward the fatal high-pressure regions far below.

How must it have felt, falling all that distance, knowing even as the temperature rose all around her that all her striving had been futile?

The drink hadn’t calmed me as much as Gibb had promised. It had heightened my awareness of the many subtle vibrations that resonated in the flexible material of the hammock—some the product of three human heartbeats transmitting their rhythms through flesh and bone and clothing into the material that supported us; others, and many more no doubt, the final vibrating manifestations of the winds outside. Christina Santiago’s screams as she fell had contributed to those winds, and were probably still echoing elsewhere in this impossible place.

The thrum I felt, when I placed my palm against the hammock, was all that remained of her dying cry. I shuddered. “It couldn’t have been done by somebody with a normal cutting edge.”

Gibb’s grimace was almost as embittered as Lastogne’s. “That’s so obvious it’s almost a joke.”

“Those cables were reinforced microfilament weave,” Lastogne said. “They were designed to take fifty times the load. None of the tools we’re permitted in-habitat are capable of slicing it. We brought the segments still left hanging from the Uppergrowth to our ship berthed in the station hub. We examined them to rule out faulty manufacture, only to find clean, precise breaks marked only by microscopic signs of heat-scoring—no-brainer indicators that whoever committed the crime had industrial capability.”

“I was told that you suspected the AIsource themselves.”

“It only makes sense,” Gibb said. “They set the conditions here. The Brachs are pre-tech. Hammocktown gets by with minimal tech: a few floaters, some midrange skimmers, and of course full linkup to the hytex network. Just enough to zip around, do what we do, and report our daily findings to New London. Nothing like what was done to those cables.”

I said, “How big is your ship?”

“Intersleep accommodations for fifty, waking accommodations for four. Brought our building materials and the bulk of the our del…” He stopped himself from saying delegation. “Research party.”

“Building materials would include the tools you used to build this outpost, correct?”

“True.”

“Which would have to include something capable of trimming cables.”

“Of course.”

“Then, I trust you’ve confirmed that those tools remain locked up aboard your vessel?”

“Of course,” Gibb said. “I know where you’re going with this, Counselor. You’re thinking I should look at my own people before accusing our hosts.”

“It seems a reasonable first step,” I said.

“Unfortunately, the AIsource permitted the restricted tech inside the Habitat only during a limited construction window, and required us to return everything to our cargo hold afterward. The shipboard systems track everything that’s removed and replaced, and confirm that it’s all accounted for. The AIsource remain the only sentients with the proper tools at the proper time.”

“Unless somebody on your staff hacked the inventory to hide a little unauthorized appropriation.”

“A possibility. History’s shown that human beings can hack anything. But even if this presumed hacker beat our systems, the AIsource have their own monitors recording everybody who enters or leaves the hangar. Nobody holding proscribed tech would get outside the hangar, let alone all the way inside the Habitat. Nobody could even try without the AIsource alerting me—and they have every reason to do so, since it’s the lack of any alternate explanation that makes them look so guilty.”

I chewed on a fingernail. “Maybe they don’t care about looking guilty.”

“We can’t assign them human motivations, but it makes a lot more sense for them to be guilty and not care that we know than innocent and not care that they’re under suspicion.”

“There’s also a human safeguard,” Lastogne said. “We have a full-time staff in the hangar, three indentures who couldn’t handle the conditions in-habitat. They’re assigned for repairs, accounting, and hospitality during down-time, but they would report anybody who tried to get into the tools.”

“Any reason they’re above suspicion?”

“Below suspicion,” Gibb said, with palpable contempt. “Working in-habitat almost killed them as it is. It’s expecting too much to imagine any of them overcoming their paralysis long enough to hack the inventory system, select their equipment, somehow get it past the AIsource security systems, pilot a transport into the Habitat, and conduct a pointless little act of murder-sabotage for no reason other than they somehow figured out how.”

I wondered why the height-sensitives were still on-station. It couldn’t have been all that difficult to transfer them to another assignment. “What if your culprit was only faking height-sensitivity in order to set the stage for a murder he planned to commit later?”

“That would require a ridiculous amount of advance planning. All three were judged unfit months ago Mercantile: one a full two years ago, before Santiago was even assigned here.”

“I’ll still need to speak to them.”

“It’s a waste of time.” Gibb’s fatuous superiority, so similar to the hated Bringen’s, was beginning to infuriate me. “But not unexpected. We expect you to speak to them and everybody on-site. We have no doubt that when you’re done you’ll come to the same conclusion we have.”

“The AIsource have the only real power aboard this station,” Lastogne said. “They have remotes all over the place. Flatscreens, fliers, maintenance bots, surveillance cams. They range in size from heavy construction equipment to nanotech. You can’t spend five minutes here without seeing something of their manufacture zip by on one mission or another, which means that they had the means and every possible opportunity.”

My thumbnail crunched between my teeth. “But they still deny involvement?”

“Of course.”

“What about knowledge? Even if they’re not involved, they must have observed—”

Gibb grew more glum with every answer. “But they don’t seem interested in testifying.”

“I’ll still have to interview them too.”

“They expect you to,” Lastogne said. “In fact, they asked to see you tomorrow morning. I’ll be flying you to that meeting first thing.”

I wasn’t sure I’d heard that correctly. “Flying me?”

“That’s right. Same way they flew you in.”

Aghast, I demanded, “Do you seriously mean to tell me that with all the remotes they have flying around this station—one zipping by every few seconds, you said—they won’t connect one to their main system and save me a trip?”

“No,” Gibb said. “They want you back at the Hub.”

This was their oddest, most counterintuitive behavior so far. Distance wasn’t the issue. I’d dealt with AIsource remotes, as embodied by their ubiquitous floating flatscreens, on two dozen worlds. It seemed downright silly for them to change the rules inside this station they owned, and pretend they needed to drag me to and fro for private audiences.

Maybe a show of arrogance was the whole point.

Lastogne showed teeth. “Don’t look so upset, Counselor. You need to go to the Hub, anyway, to talk to our exiles. You can take care of that after you deal with our landlords. And you’ll find the Interface system they have here pretty special.”

And that had the sound of an unpleasant private joke.

It could be a simple local eccentricity. We may treat the AIsource like they’re all one big monolithic entity, but they’re really billions of separate linked intelligences, operating in an imperfect consensus. There were probably millions of linked programs on this station alone—which meant that proving their involvement still left me with the problem of isolating the individual software that committed the crime. And from there, determining whether the murder was the aberrant act of an individual or an assassination committed as a matter of policy.

All in all, it was enough to make me grin. The death of a young Dip Corps indenture wasn’t funny. But the malice of those who’d drafted me was. It was a) an impossible investigation, b) on unfriendly territory, c) without the protection of official standing, d) but with the legal status of an entire sentient species potentially at stake, e) involving a practically infinite number of intangible possible suspects, f) none of whom could be isolated from the others, g) but all of whom could at any moment eliminate me with as little warning as the culprit had previously eliminated the unfortunate Christina Santiago, h) all in an environment taking full advantage of my well-known distaste for heights, i) in service of a case I’d been specifically warned I shouldn’t pin on the most likely suspects.

Thank you so very much, Artis Bringen. “And the second victim? The one from seventy-two hours ago?”

Gibb’s wince tightened. “Cynthia Warmuth. Twenty-three years old. A third-year diplomatic indenture, specialty exo-linguistics.”

Cynthia Warmuth had hailed from an agricultural colony within the Confederacy, but not of it. The details of her life on that world were a sick portrait of deprivation for deprivation’s sake, of a barbaric religious conformity enforced with a medieval level of discipline. They had not been allowed music, or hytex connections, or more than minimal education. They might not even have been permitted to know that other worlds existed if the Confederacy hadn’t considered the dissemination of such basic information the bare minimum expected from any world hoping to engage in mutual trade. It was not an educational requirement the people in charge pursued with any special vigor, and though Warmuth had grown up perfectly aware that there was a greater universe, she had assumed it to be comprised of a hundred worlds or less, all of which she supposed to be pretty much a direct copy of her own. She had still been among the one-third of that world’s young people who indentured themselves offworld as soon as possible, her educational background so deficient at the start that she’d needed to sign up for an additional ten years just so five could be dedicated to remedial training.

“She turned out to be a prodigy,” Gibb said. “Very gifted. Handled her remedials in less than half the assigned time. Scored top marks on all of her qualifiers. Excellent physical conditioning as well; a gymnast. Uppergrowth navigation was downright easy for her. I put three separate notes in her file recommending her for the leadership track.”

Once certified, Warmuth had enjoyed an uneventful year as Dip Corps liaison to the dance pilgrims on Vlhan, achieving marks for efficiency if not for unusual level of achievement. Some unspecified conflict with her fellow indentures had led to an official request for a transfer.

“Whatever it was,” Gibb said, “it wasn’t serious enough to be written up in her Corps files. Personal chemistry, most likely. Warmuth got on people’s nerves. But indentures come from so many cultures that you have to expect some of that kind of thing.”

“Did she request the transfer or was it requested for her?”

“As far as I know, it was her idea. I once heard her claim to have been the only Dip Corps indenture on Vlhan with any real interest in the indigenes, but that was just her. She liked the mantle of sainthood.”

Whatever the explanation, Warmuth had been sent to One One One. At the time of her death she had been on-station for six months Mercantile, working in a support capacity before being cleared for direct contact. Until the day of her death, she’d never ventured any distance from the hammocks without an escort.

Gibb said, “She had minimal contact with the Brachs, I assure you; just a few introductory sessions. And a few with our exosociologist Mo Lassiter and a cylinked couple called Oscin and Skye Porrinyard. She was on her first overnight when what happened…happened.”

I noted the man’s shudder, found no reason to doubt it now, but tucked it away in case further developments gave me reason to consider it feigned. “I’ll still want to speak with Lassiter, these Porrinyards, and any Brachiators she encountered.”

“The Porrinyards will be glad to help. If you get anything useful out of the Brachiators, you’re better than me.”

Still studying the non-ambassador’s eyes, I found more sadness, more regret, a level of grief that verged on the personal…and something else, something reticent, something hiding away secrets the man would have preferred me not to see. “Did you like her, Mr. Gibb?”

Gibb averted his gaze. “I really do prefer people to call me by my first name, Counselor. But, dammit, yes, I liked her. She was one of the sunnier people around here: compassionate, friendly, dedicated, and, above all, giving to a fault, the kind of person who becomes the emotional center of an outpost like this.”

Lastogne’s eyes burned with mockery. “A born idealist.”

I picked up the insult, as I was meant to. As far as I could tell, Gibb did not. Lastogne seemed to enjoy firing verbal missiles under his superior’s radar.

I said, “You just made her an angel. You also said that she had a way of getting on people’s nerves. Which is true?”

“Both,” Gibb said. “She tried too hard.”

“Was her hammock sabotaged too?”

“No.” Gibb’s pale eyes seemed to turn obsidian with despair. “Like I said, she was out on her first overnight. We found her hanging from the Uppergrowth.”

“Tell her how, Stu,” Lastogne said.

Gibb held back the words, as if the mere act of speaking them brought the terrible facts into being. But he managed: “There were Brachiator claws driven through her wrists and ankles. Another, the killing blow through the heart.”

“Brachiator what?”

“Claws.” His voice broke. “The Brachiators have very sharp curved claws. They’re constantly growing, and break loose when they get too long. Usually they just freefall into the murk and are never seen again. But many Brachiators keep a few cuttings tangled in their fur as subsidiary tools. These claws looked like they’d been carried around for months.”

Silence fell, with nobody in the hammock willing to say the next part.

Lastogne’s words arrived in a bitter explosion. “She was crucified.”