Emissaries from the Dead

by Adam-Troy Castro

  “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.

  15

  ARRESTS

  I heard the fight before I saw it.

  A pair of angry voices, one male, one female, were both lost in the kind of argument where being heard was no longer as important as making sure the opponent was not. Both participants had passed well beyond the border that separates shouting from screaming, their voices distorted past intelligibility, their words reduced to bursts of concentrated rage.

  I didn’t recognize either voice. They were too distorted by volume. But in that instant before my eyes tracked the disturbance to its source, I was able to put faces to some of the other participants. I heard Oskar Levine cursing in disgust, Cif Negelein crying something I couldn’t make out, and Robin Fish screaming for intervention.

  Then I spotted the crowd across the hangar and caught the unmistakable sound of somebody’s palm smacking somebody’s face.

  Then half a dozen people fell to the ground as two hurtling forms bowled over the line of spectators. A few just stumbled backward, some went to their knees, but two who caught the full brunt of the impact went down hard.

  I broke into a run just as the two combatants joined those two unlucky bystanders on the floor.

  Li-Tsan Crin had landed on top, screeching hatred and bile as her knees slammed hard into Stuart Gibb’s abdomen. She’d wrapped her hands around his neck and dug both thumbs into the vital soft spot separating Adam’s apple from windpipe. Gibb had grabbed her wrists, first attempting to break her stranglehold and, then, failing that, digging his nails into her tendons in an instinctive attempt to make his murder too painful a job for her to finish.

  Before I could reach them, Negelein and Lassiter both seized Li-Tsan by her left arm and two others I didn’t recognize took her right. Their combined efforts succeeded only in lifting Li-Tsan and Gibb off the deck together, in a fused ball of hate. The combined weight proved too much, and Li-Tsan took advantage of that as she once again drove the back of Gibb’s head against the deck.

  With Negelein, Lassiter, and the others continuing to hold on to Li-Tsan’s arms, two more indentures, including a woman I’d spoken to briefly and a man I hadn’t encountered at all, went in on their hands and knees to pry Li-Tsan’s thumbs from Gibb’s neck.

  The woman yelled, “Don’t make me break them, Li!”

  Li-Tsan cried something so incoherent that the only word I recognized was “bastard.”

  The crack of bone and the sickened gasps of the crowd fought each other for the title of ugliest sound.

  The two indentures responsible for snapping Li-Tsan’s thumbs joined the others in pulling her off Gibb. She called them all bastards and slime-sucking sacks of shit and put all her strength into a single, two-legged, gravity-defying kick that impacted with nothing but air.

  Gibb, still purple despite the release of his windpipe, pushed away a woman who had rushed to his aid and stood up, his teeth pink and his lips gleaming with blood.

  “I’ll fucking murder you!” Li-Tsan screeched, her fury overwhelming the mob struggling to hold her.

  A woman with a shaved head went to restrain Li-Tsan’s legs and was sent flying, with a freshly bruised jaw for her trouble. Another two went in low and wrapped themselves around those legs, weighing them down.

  The eight people restraining Li-Tsan now comprised three on each arm and two hugging her legs like koalas clinging to tree trunks. Even rage couldn’t lend Li-Tsan enough strength to overcome that many people. But though effectively helpless, she hadn’t given up; she was still thrashing, still rippling every muscle, still making her captors work for every instant they held her in check. Even as half a dozen voices in the crowd called her name, trying to cut through this moment of insanity with compensating reason, she still pelted Gibb with ab
use, passing from the relatively dull epithets available in Mercantile to the more vivid images afforded people who can bare to fit their tongues around the harsh consonants of Grechilissh.

  I don’t know much of that second tongue, a minor dialect spoken by the settlers of an industrial world not worth visiting unless you have an overbearing craving for sulfur and soot. But the very harsh and very hard-to-pronounce epithet Li-Tsan had just spat with perfect intonation was a notorious adjective applying to the practitioners of a rare, possibly extinct and most probably apocryphal perversion involving the surgical removal of visual organs to facilitate the sexual exploitation of the empty eye sockets.

  You can describe the practice in Mercantile, just as in any other language, and it will always be nasty. But in Grechilissh, the word sounds a lot like what it’s describing. It’s nasty, painful, demeaning, and, worst of all, evocative—the kind of name you don’t apply to another human being unless you really want to risk an immediate fight to the death.

  Gibb’s purpled complexion went a shade darker.

  He went for her.

  Despite the provocation, there was no way to look on what happened next as fair. Li-Tsan was being restrained by all four limbs. Gibb was free to act. Nobody made any special effort to stop him as he leaped forward and delivered a roundhouse punch to her jaw. The onlookers were still gasping from that one as he followed up with a left that shattered her nose.

  At his current rate of attack he might have had time to hit her another two or three times before anybody in the crowd thought of intervening.

  Long before any of them had a chance, I stepped forward and tapped my index and middle fingers to the base of his jaw.

  The jolt made his muscles spasm, the eyes roll back in his head, and his bladder release. He stumbled backward, conscious but unable to regain his balance. Somewhere along the way his feet tangled up and he began to fall.

  Lastogne caught him under the arms.

  Everybody else froze, including Li-Tsan, whose bruised and bleeding face joined all the others now staring at me.

  Gibb focused, broke from Lastogne’s grip, and managed to stand. “What the hell was that, Counselor?”

  I brandished the shiny metal cap I wore over both fingertips, removed it, and replaced it at my collarline, where it turned liquid and became a Dip Corps insignia again. “Insurance.”

  He fingered the swelling blister on his jaw. “That’s not exactly standard issue, Counselor. Do you have any idea how many treaties you just broke, carrying a concealed weapon into another government’s territory?”

  I raised an eyebrow. “If you can prove that the device I just used has no purpose other than weaponry, quite a few. But everything’s a weapon, sir. Including tools, blunt objects, and, as we’ve just seen, our own arms and legs. Short of amputating our limbs every time we cross a border, and being wheeled around on hand trucks by the natives, we can only assure our hosts that the items we carry with us are not weapons at the moment, and won’t be used as weapons unless we find ourselves forced to improvise with the materials we have at hand.”

  Gibb’s blister popped. He glanced at a fingertip now glistening with blood. “That’s a lovely argument, Counselor. Does it ever work for any of the people you prosecute?”

  “No. When I prosecute, you’ll have to do a whole lot better than that.”

  Give Gibb credit for recognizing the implied threat. His injured jaw may have trembled as he bit back half a dozen angry responses, but he did bite them back. Li-Tsan also calmed; her captors didn’t trust her enough to let her go, but she followed the exchange with a certain dry-eyed, grim-faced fascination. The lower half of her face glistened with blood from her shattered nose.

  I turned my attention to the silent figure behind Gibb. “Mr. Lastogne?”

  His curled lips flashed his usual amount of sardonic amusement. “Yes, Counselor?”

  “Order these two people placed under arrest. Don’t do it yourself, I’ll want to talk to you. Make sure they’re separated from each other and, as much as possible, from anybody who saw the incident from the beginning. Have them restrained if necessary. I’d rather have them isolated and in chains than closely guarded by anybody whose testimony needs to remain free of their influence.” I almost wound down, but then another thought occurred to me. “Skye Porrinyard’s in the transport. She couldn’t have seen anything. Draft her to watch Li-Tsan. And have Oscin help with Gibb, once he gets back.”

  “Will do,” Lastogne said.

  Gibb’s hands curled into fists. “You don’t have to do this, Counselor. All I did was react to being attacked.”

  “A few short hours after an attempt on my own life,” I said. “Forgive me for feeling some academic interest in matters involving violence.”

  The stories offered a consistent, if not very helpful, picture.

  Gibb had been spot-checking the move, offering the usual pointless managerial suggestions to professionals who didn’t need his help knowing how to erect sleepcubes on a flat surface. Li-Tsan had emerged from the one where she’d been living all these months, spotted Gibb, and intercepted him before he could bother someone else. The two had discussed something, their voices low and their body language reflecting mutual antagonism, for somewhere between thirty seconds and three minutes, with more estimates weighted toward the higher end of that range. Li-Tsan had begun shouting, and Gibb had shouted back, the substance of their argument forgotten as it degenerated into two-way abuse.

  Most of the witnesses said they’d missed the actual moment when words gave way to violence.

  Of the few witnesses I deemed credible, three out of four agreed that Gibb had initiated the physical stage of the confrontation by slapping Li-Tsan’s face. The fourth, a lithe, orange-haired indenture named Hannah Godel, refused to commit to an opinion, saying that her angle had been bad and that she couldn’t be sure. I asked her if she had any special reason for not taking a stand and she said that she just didn’t want to condemn somebody without being sure.

  Her story had the ring of somebody with a definite opinion who didn’t want to make her own situation more difficult by sharing.

  Lastogne also claimed to have seen nothing, which seemed too convenient for words. But the facts bore him out. A number of witnesses placed him just outside the hangar, helping with the supply ferries, at the moment the argument began. He had heard the raised voices, rushed in to investigate, and arrived just in time to catch the reeling Gibb.

  His inability to testify to the actual event didn’t excuse his failure to be any more forthcoming regarding the backstory. “I think we’ve already covered this, Counselor. We know why they have problems with one another.”

  “But isn’t this the first time that’s spilled over into violence?”

  “Sure it is. At least as far as I know. But when you take two people who can barely contain their dislike for one another, and add a crisis, that’s what you get.”

  It was all he had. Or at least all he offered.

  I didn’t question either combatant until after I was satisfied that I’d gotten all I could from everybody else. I approached Li-Tsan first for no reason nobler than the opportunity to keep Gibb waiting. Lastogne had ordered her escorted to the ship, where she’d been confined to one of the berths and fitted with a paralytic neural tap as one of the vessel’s AIsource medbots, a whirring little gnat of a thing that seemed to prefer zipping back and forth between her hands and face to finishing each job one at a time, performed a quick patch-and-repair on her injuries. The tap, a routine measure to deaden her pain during the surgery, had been turned to a setting significantly stronger than the procedures warranted. It left her lying on her back, a temporary quadriplegic so infuriated by her imprisonment that I feared for the medbot’s safety every time it buzzed past her mouth on its way to and from the fading injury to her nose. I kept suspecting her of wanting to grind it to foil between her teeth.

  Skye Porrinyard, who I found sitting at the command console, a comforta
ble distance from Li-Tsan’s direct line of sight, was all business as designated guard. She confirmed that Li-Tsan had said nothing of value and reported that Oscin was expected to return within forty-five minutes.

  I thanked her, asked her to leave, then activated my hiss screen and turned to Li-Tsan. There was no place to sit except for the bunk itself, and I refused to kneel, so I just stood in the hatchway and regarded her from a height. “Anything you want to say to me?”

  The stoniness of Li-Tsan’s expression went well beyond anything that could have been explained away by mere paralysis. “Only that you must be thankful.”

  “Why?”

  “You wanted a suspect. You needed an excuse for it to be me. I gave you both.”

  I was in no mood to defend my impartiality. “That was thoughtful of you.”

  “It was selfish. I couldn’t leave this place without throttling that smug son of a bitch at least once.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “So you think you’re leaving?”

  “Aren’t we all?”

  Give her credit for that one. “What were you and Gibb talking about?”

  “Just how much I hate his stupid ass.”

  “Some of the witnesses said that the two of you were arguing for three full minutes.”

  “It wasn’t that long.”

  “So let’s compromise,” I said. “Let’s say the argument lasted a minute and a half. Let’s say you bypassed all your actual reasons to be upset with him and just told Gibb you hated his stupid ass. Let’s say he showed the proper degree of supervisory patience and said, that’s fine, bondsman, but I don’t have the time to have my stupid ass hated at this very moment. Let’s go on to concede you came up with the worst insult your little mind could concoct and he slapped you. That’s still accounts for less than thirty seconds. What happened during the rest of the conversation?”

  She grimaced. “Does it really matter? He’s still a pig, you’re still letting him set us up as scapegoats, and you’re still what you are. I looked you up, Counselor. And you have no business behaving like you’re morally superior to anybody.”