Emissaries from the Dead ac-1

by Adam-Troy Castro

  The one advantage of Lassiter’s malicious little move was that it once again brought the skimmer’s local gravity in synch with the environment’s. Down was down. So I could vomit over the side without any fear of baptizing myself with breakfast. It was a good thing she’d flipped a 180 and not 360, as by that point I had no choice.

  I accepted a water bottle from Skye. “So how are we going to do this?”

  Lassiter ascended to within three meters of the struggling Brachiators, positioning the flat cargo platform at the rear beneath the combatant about to surrender to the inevitable. Drops of bright pink blood, leaking from the wounds of both combatants, already specked the flatbed. “I’ll have to get close. An object the size and weight of a Brachiator doesn’t need all that much time in free fall to become a missile capable of knocking us out of its sky.”

  “We’re safe at this distance, though?”

  Lassiter flashed me a look of utmost contempt. “I wouldn’t agree to this otherwise, with or without your authority. No, the average human male weighs more than the average Brachiator, and showoffs among our people have been known to jump down from higher distances. But we should all scooch as far from that platform as possible. Nobody’s ever had the gall to suggest this before, and I don’t know what’s going to happen when we do.”

  All five of us crowded against the forward hull, with the bulky Lassiter taking up more than her fair share of the available room. Godel, Lassiter, and Oscin Porrinyard stood with their backs against the Interface console. Skye and I crouched at their feet, making ourselves as small as possible. Above us, the Brachiator losing his battle for life screamed in what must have been agony and despair—all the more heartbreaking for its failure to express the obvious in human terms. Alien mind or not, we all knew it was thinking what any sentient creature, in its position, would have been thinking. This can’t be happening. Not to me. My life can’t be ending. I don’t want to die.

  The soft ripping noises, above us, seemed to go on forever. I have no idea whether the Brachiator sense of time comes close to being as protracted as their fighting style, but would like to think not. I’d prefer to believe they perceived themselves as moving quickly. Otherwise the dying one would have felt every instant of the long minutes between one slash and the next.

  Whatever else I could say about the stupidity of Brach warfare, including that it made human warfare look like a sensible endeavor, the losing Brach did have one hell of a will to live.

  Then Lassiter said, “There he goes.”

  I hadn’t seen anything that distinguished this particular moment from the agonizing wait that preceded it, but she was right. The losing Brach plummeted from the Uppergrowth and dropped the two meters between the site of its final battle and our flatbed, taking the bulk of the impact on its back. It didn’t convulse or roll, as we’d feared. It just lay there, the remains of its arms still reaching out toward the roof of its world.

  The Porrinyards gave my shoulders a synchronized squeeze. “One second, Counselor. I want to make sure this is safe first.” They went aft, stood at the back of the passenger compartment looking over the body, then returned, their shared expression grim. “It’s alive, but it won’t be for long. I don’t think we have anything to fear.”

  “This is cruel as hell,” Lassiter muttered.

  “I don’t see how,” the Porrinyards said. “It’ll be dead in minutes, whatever happens. It will spend that time in pain and terror, whatever happens. We can’t help it, whatever happens. We’ve only arranged for it to spend its last minutes with us, instead of in free fall.”

  Lassiter was still resentful. “For all we know, that’s worse.”

  “If so we’ll do the humane thing and drop it over the side once Counselor gets what she needs. All the more reason to let her get on with it. Counselor?”

  My knees cracked as I stood. Suddenly uncharacteristically hesitant in the face of violent death, despite the many I’d seen in my time, I wasted a second or two flexing my back before leaving the others to join the Brachiator for its last moments.

  It lay on its back, all four limbs splayed, its bright pink blood pooled beneath it like a sheet. Its face was striped with deep, oozing gashes, one of which crossed an eye socket now containing an unrecognizable soup that might have been an eye. The other eye, which looked disturbingly human, turned toward me as I approached, widening with what might have been terror or simple incomprehension. The rest of its body, beyond the face, had been ripped open so savagely that some of the unidentifiable organs revealed by the wounds were also open and leaking various fluids. But it was the eye that bothered me, the eye that made me feel a criminal. The Brachiator may have had no idea who I was, but the eye recognized me.

  “You are one of the New Ghosts.” It closed its mouth, swallowed, then spoke more clearly. “I have never seen a New Ghost, but I have heard of them.”

  I sounded like I’d left all my wind in New London. “Do you know where you are?”

  The Brachiator swallowed again. “I am among the Dead.”

  I began to understand Lassiter’s resentment. Requiring anything from this creature right now was arrogant and wrong. “You are not among the Dead. You are alive. You may not have much life left, but you’re still breathing, still looking at me, still talking. Do you understand?”

  The Brachiator swallowed again. “I am a Ghost in a land of Ghosts.”

  “Why? Please! I know there’s no reason this should matter to you, but there’s a great evil that will continue killing if you can’t answer this question. How can you be among the Dead if you can still talk and breathe?”

  The Brachiator’s single remaining eye rolled upward, allowing its owner one last look at the carnage still tearing apart its tribe and family. Did it have the equivalent of a spouse up there? Friends? Young? Things it felt passionate about? Things it wanted to change? “The hand is gone,” it managed. “How could I still be alive?”

  One last ragged breath later its eye closed, and did not open again.

  I didn’t realize I was shaking until the Porrinyards came up behind me, one on either side. They did not touch me or put their hands on my shoulders, as they had before, but they did make their presence known, and they did refrain from comment as I returned to my seat.

  It wasn’t the thing’s sad end that had gotten to me. But its confusion, its blindness, its helplessness in the face of forces beyond its comprehension felt familiar. Mo Lassiter had been right. I wished I’d just let the poor thing be.

  Behind me, she said, “Was that worth doing? Did you learn anything at all?”

  I kept my eyes on the dead Brachiator.

  “Yes. Yes, I did.”

  17. DESCENT

  Its funeral was not much to speak of.

  My first thought had been that we could just flip the skimmer again and let it fall, but that was just stupid, as our local gravity naturally included its cargo deck. Lassiter had to scramble onto the cargo deck and shove the corpse over the edge. Free of our interference, it tumbled into the distance, becoming a speck and then a memory long before it was swallowed by the clouds. By the time Lassiter came back, her coveralls were glossy with pink gore, and her attitude toward me had chilled another ten degrees I couldn’t afford.

  Nobody provided a eulogy. There would have been no point. What could we have said? That it had been brave? Noble? A fine upstanding representative of its species? We didn’t know it. It could have been hero or villain or anything in between. To us, its only notable attribute was that it had been alive and was now dead, better off by far than it had been during the few fleeting seconds it had spent in our company. Maybe the best possible eulogy was spoken by Lassiter, when she wiped the pink from her cheeks and grumbled that single, eloquent, “Shit.”

  ***

  Before deciding what to do next I called the hangar, to see if I’d heard from Bringen. He’d sent a reply with random-inverse coding, keyed to a phrase only used for matters of extreme secrecy. I don’t think we’d
used it more than once or twice outside of drills, and though it slowed translation by less than thirty seconds I still found the gesture a serious pain in the ass. After all, there was nobody around to inconvenience except for me and the AIsource, and expecting any code to successfully hide anything from the AIsource was an exercise in self-delusion.

  Once the signal was descrambled, it revealed an image of Bringen slumped at this desk in a manner that suggested either extreme depression or extreme sleep deprivation. I guessed the latter, as his cheeks were stubbled and random strands of hair formed swooping helixes at odds with all the others. I not only felt some satisfaction over his bad day but also wasted a few seconds contemplating the existence of an algorithm that would take the sleep cycles on different planets, factor them through the cosmic distances that usually separated me from the man, and provide me with the most advantageous times to burden him with urgent messages capable of disturbing his circadian rhythms. Were there a place to buy such a glorious thing, I’d have been first in line.

  Except that—I remembered now—I’d misjudged him.

  “Andrea. Good morning, or whatever the hell you’re having. I hope you’re seeing some progress. Regarding your questions: first, your involvement was requested by both Ambassador Gibb and the AIsource consensus aboard that station. Gibb made the request personally, in a second transmission that followed the original sent by Lastogne. I’ve seen the holo; he was quite insistent on it. If he won’t admit to it now, then maybe he’s changed his mind. The AIsource also recommended you, claiming that they respected your gifts and knew that you’d bring a, quote, ‘unique personal perspective,’ to the problem. If they won’t own up to it now, then I’m as confused as you are.

  “Lastogne’s another issue. He does have a listing on the mission specs, confirming his position as Mr. Gibb’s second-in-command, but it doesn’t offer any other information of any kind. If there’s a bio or résumé, I’m not cleared to look at it. Neither are any of my superiors. I tried to press the matter and was told, by people whose names you’d recognize, to back off.” His shoulders sagged. “I’m telling you, Andrea. The last time I saw anything even remotely like this, the individual in question pretty much qualified as a sovereign nation all by himself, and that guy’s name didn’t slam doors nearly as hard as your guy’s does. Whoever Lastogne is, he’s well outside the Constitution, and if you’ve been warned off, then maybe you should listen. He shouldn’t be the main focus of your investigation.”

  I hate being told where not to look, or for that matter what the main focus of an investigation should or should not be.

  Bringen hesitated again. “We need somebody to blame, Andrea. Somebody other than the AIsource, and somebody other than Peyrin Lastogne. And we need it soon. I trust you’ve been introduced to the local malcontents? Can’t you—”

  I blanked the message mid-sentence. Why not? The relevant part was already over.

  Getting in touch with Gibb took a minute, but once he was patched in and informed that my superiors had named him as the party who had requested my presence, he provided the answer I already expected. “That’s ridiculous, Counselor. I never even heard of you before the other day. And if I’d known your background ahead of time, I would have requested anybody but you. Are you sure you didn’t garble the message?”

  “I don’t garble.”

  “Then somebody’s lying to you.”

  Gibb had lied to me about any number of things, but there was no reason to suspect him, here. He had nothing to gain by misleading me on this one small point. Nor could I come up with a motive for Lastogne. And too much had been made of them being the only two humans with direct access to the lines of communication for me to want to point fingers at anybody else. That left several possibilities, all unsatisfactory: one, that Bringen had lied in order to dump a dangerous and politically sensitive crisis in my lap; two, that Gibb and Lastogne had lied for reasons too subtle for me to fathom; and three, that Gibb and Lastogne weren’t as much in control of their own outgoing messages as they both liked to think.

  The third possibility was by far the most likely.

  But on this station, that could only bring me back to the AIsource.

  The untouchables among my suspects.

  I felt that maddening tingle, familiar by now, of an impulse denied. Something I wanted to do but could not identify.

  I dropped the hiss screen, prompting Lassiter to ask, “What’s next?”

  I said, “Down.”

  ***

  We descended. Soon the wormy surface of the Uppergrowth lost the rich detail revealed in closeup and became an undifferentiated field of gray, shining here and there wherever the suns caught concentrations of moisture on the vines. By comparison, the clouds looked fluffier, darker, extruding swirls of mist and heavy weather that from here looked like tentacles too blind to realize that we were still far out of their reach. Every few seconds a new dragon rose out of the muck, disturbed the clouds with a single beat of its wings, and then plunged back below the surface, as if content with being seen.

  Lassiter said, “We should stop here. Much farther down and the air gets so choppy the skimmer might not be able to climb out again.”

  I discovered I’d dug my fingers into the seat. “But where we are is safe?”

  “Could we drop another thousand meters? Possibly. We could even enter the cloud cover. There’s no line of clear demarcation. But the farther down we go, the less safe we are, and this is as low as I feel comfortable.”

  I said, “Then make yourself a little more uncomfortable.”

  She looked doubtful, but told the skimmer to descend.

  It was hard to gauge the rate of our descent. Little wisps of vapor passed us from time to time, but the clouds below didn’t seem to get any larger.

  After a minute or two, Lassiter leveled off. “This is as low as I’ve ever gone.”

  My fingers hurt. “Is this as low as anybody’s ever gone?”

  “We’ve had some daredevils. Went down a thousand meters lower. One or two had trouble climbing out.”

  “Any actual fatalities?”

  “Not from skimmer failure, no.”

  “What, then?”

  “I should have said none at any point during our two years on-station, before Santiago. Considering our work conditions, we’ve been very lucky.”

  “Or very capably led,” I said.

  Lassiter’s lips went tight. “Yeah, well, Mr. Gibb’s very good at running the machine. He doesn’t let people take pointless risks.”

  Another compliment damned by how much it galled the speaker. They seemed abundant, in conversations regarding Mr. Gibb. “Can you go as low as those daredevils did?”

  “I didn’t sign up for that,” Godel said, the first time she’d opened her mouth since the Brachiator’s death.

  “Neither did I,” said Lassiter.

  I glanced at the Porrinyards. “And you?”

  “For once,” they said, their shared voice rich with forced merriment, “I’m of two minds on a subject.”

  I fought off a spasm of dizziness with multiple inner chants of Unseen Demons, gripped the seat tighter, and said, “Descend those thousand meters.”

  “There’s no possible reason—”

  “So I’m insane,” I said. “I issue dangerous orders for the most whimsical of reasons. Nevertheless, they are orders. Descend.”

  Grumbling resentful odes to bureaucrats who think they know what they’re doing, Lassiter complied. The skimmer descended. Wisps of vapor fluttered past us like butterflies, rising toward an Uppergrowth now granted the indistinct texture of sky. Some irregularity in the local airflow shook our undercarriage. The skimmer’s local gravity prevented us from feeling any actual turbulence, but the nearest of the two suns seemed to shake, and a light in the instrument panel blinked red, assuring everybody who cared to heed it that Lassiter was right and the witch from New London was indeed putting everybody in danger.

  “This is as far as any
body’s ever descended.”

  My throat was so dry, by now, that I had to concentrate on making spit before attempting speech. “How are we doing?”

  “The stabilization systems are working overtime, holding us against the winds here. We’re using about four times as much power, just idling, as we do up near the Uppergrowth. I wouldn’t want to stay here for long, but we’re handling it.”

  “Can we handle more?”

  Lassiter made a face. “I expected you to ask that.”

  “Then you should have an answer ready. A few minutes ago you told me that we could, conceivably, descend as far as the clouds. You also said that it had never been attempted. I would like you to do so now. Can we handle it?”

  “I’m not sure it’d be safe to get too close to those dragons.”

  “Safety wasn’t part of the question.”

  Godel thumped the back of my seat. “It sure as hell is part of my question!”

  The Porrinyards spoke in a voice mostly Skye, deepened by only a little of Oscin’s masculine grit. “Are you sure about this, Counselor?”

  “Yes.”

  The Porrinyards didn’t sound happy. “All right.”

  Lassiter was far from mollified. “I’m not going to kill us all, Counselor. I’ll descend, if you really think it’s so important, but I’ll also stop every hundred meters or so to assess local conditions, and our own—”

  “No,” I said.

  She stopped in mid-sentence. “What do you mean no?”

  “I mean that I need to test something, and I can’t do that if you insist on taking baby steps. I need you to descend, regardless of local conditions or signs of vehicle failure, until I tell you to stop.”