Emissaries from the Dead

19. KNOTS

We returned to the skimmer, where Godel and Lassiter were stewing in resentful silence, and from there flew back to the hangar, where I spent the rest of the day in the transport, conducting more interviews with the indentures of Hammocktown.

I didn’t need to know much, just confirm what I already suspected. Most of what I found out confirmed information already given, as always amazing me with how insistent truth can become, once uncovered. A couple of the younger indentures even laughed at me for not figuring it out before. They’d been certain I already knew.

Interviewing Li-Tsan again didn’t take any longer than expected; the woman was still paranoid and abusive and wrapped up in her victimhood. She didn’t answer any questions. But her reactions, when I told her what I knew, proved interesting indeed. As did Nils D’Onofrio’s, when I spoke to him. He was just as embittered and almost as defensive.

Robin Fish was lost, distant, and filled with a sadness that might have overwhelmed me had I been any more receptive to pity. She actually wept. But I expected that. She’d already established herself as maudlin and sloppy. She was also relieved to get the truth out in the open. She gave me more names, some of whom gave up the truth at once, some of whom I had to threaten, and some of whom I just didn’t bother speaking to at all, because by then the picture was clear and I was able to infer the continuation of the pattern from their individual files.

It all comprised one hell of a large domino.

Now all I had to do was topple it onto the next one.

Before I went I composed another coded message to Artis Bringen. It could have been the longest; part of me wanted to start with an essay, explaining why I wanted to know or conceding that I might have been wrong. But everything I added to the question kept distorting its intent. Eventually I just went with what I needed to know, and fired off the shortest dispatch I’d ever sent him. It was a question that could translate as, Are you my enemy, or not? The words were different, but the meaning was the same.

I did not know whether I’d have the guts to send it.

When I emerged from the transport into the brighter but no more cheerful light of the hangar, I found that the mood among Gibb’s delegation had degenerated further since the events of the previous night. The same people who had shown determination and defiance during the evacuation had now enjoyed a full day of inactivity and gathering tension. Many sat around outside the sleepcubes, lost in conversations ranging from grim to ribald.

Some glanced at me and muttered comments to friends: no doubt the fortieth or fiftieth distorted conversation about my insane, suicidal behavior on the skimmer. A snatch of laughter attracted my attention and turned out to be a number of indentures indulging in buzzpops. I saw a deeply inebriated Cif Negelein, looking like he’d rubbed himself in every patch of organic matter between here and New London, pulling the woman with purple hair into a sloppy kiss. But the numbers were off. Whenever I passed an open sleepcube, there were indentures lying asleep, indentures sitting on the edge of cots with their heads in their hands, indentures who looked as if they expected the very deck beneath their feet to open up and swallow them at any moment.

Peyrin Lastogne sat with two men and one woman beside a storage crate drafted into service as a table, playing a game involving little silver spheres, golden pyramids, and a tiny holographic hoop that revolved around the center of the table, flashing red whenever it faced one of the players. I didn’t know the rules, but the body language of the players was enough to establish Lastogne himself as the runaway winner.

His mood rose a notch the instant he saw me. “Counselor. You’ve had quite an adventurous day, haven’t you?”

He made the word adventurous sound like a curse. “Interesting. And you?”

“Anything but. My duties at the moment seem limited to cheerleading. I have enjoyed watching that steady stream of people, going in and out of that transport, and trying to guess just what you’ve determined.”

The three indentures at the table all joined him in waiting expectantly for my answer.

“Would you like to discuss it?” I asked.

“Alone?”

“Of course.”

“All right.” He stood, deactivated the game, apologized to the others, and escorted me to a sleepcube a short distance away. The practically narcoleptic Cartsac was already sleeping in there, but when he saw who needed the space he pulled himself upright and shuffled out the door, wearing the expression of a man who only wanted another place to lie down. Lastogne sealed the flap, sat on one of the cube’s two cots, gestured at the other, and said, “I know what you’re thinking. Is all this intoxication wise?”

I didn’t sit. “I was about to say.”

He shrugged. “Trust me, they’ve recovered from worse. They’ll hop to attention if we need them to.”

I just nodded. “It is all about down-time, isn’t it?”

The silence that followed was not broken when I activated the hiss screen.

Every external indication marked Lastogne as a calm, measured professional, determined to avoid the appearance of any reaction, either good or bad. But on this one point, at least, there were no secrets between us. “It’s a little outside the stated goals of your investigation, isn’t it, Counselor? I wouldn’t have considered you the type to indulge in that kind of silly witch-hunt.”

“It’s not silly,” I said, “but you’re right. It is beneath my notice.”

“Then why go so far out of your way to ruin a man?”

“Why risk your own career by protecting him?” When he failed to answer, I lowered my voice in pretend-conspiracy. “I know it’s not respect. You’ve already indicated what you think of him. So what is it? What hold does he have on you?”

He surprised me by laughing out loud: a rich, hearty laugh filled with affection for both Gibb and myself. “Is that what you think, Counselor? That he pulls my strings? I’m sorry, but you’re way off. I could leave this station tomorrow and forget his name by the middle of next week.”

“Then why protect him?”

“Because he’s a mediocrity. And I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for mediocrities.”

Li-Tsan had intimated as much, just yesterday. “Come on—”

“No, no, no, I’m serious. Do you have any idea how unbearable life would be if everybody excelled? If everybody was noble, perceptive, courageous, and selfless? If everybody had open eyes and saw the forces that really ran things? It would be a madhouse. You need a few empty-calorie people like Gibb just to dilute the mix.”

The man actually seemed to be serious. “In my experience, mediocrity in life-or-death situations gets people killed.”

He looked knowing. “Read your history. Greatness kills more.”

There was nothing I could say to that.

He shrugged. “So I take care of Gibb, like a pet. As long as the work gets done, or as close to done as the circumstances here allow him to accomplish, and nobody gets hurt by any moments of actual incompetence, I see no harm in just letting him have his way.”

“Except that’s the whole point,” I said. “People have been hurt.”

His eyes widened. “Oh, come now. You can’t seriously blame what happened to Warmuth and Santiago on Gibb’s stupidity.”

“I’m not. His actions may have contributed, but I wasn’t referring to them.”

“Who, then?”

“To start with: Robin Fish.”

For the first time he averted his eyes from me, focusing instead on his hands, which closed into fists before opening again, just as empty as they’d been before: “She’s a little bit below mediocre, isn’t she? And the worst kind of below-par personality at that: the kind who believes herself destined for great things. Give the Dip Corps credit for knowing what she was. They wanted to tuck her away in a cozy little nowhere post, where she could serve out her time without ever being subjected to any challenges beyond her capabilities. She could have stayed there and been just as unhappy as she is now, but at least then she would have been able to comfort herself by blaming everybody else for not giving her a chance. Here, she has no such illusions.”

“And the others? Li-Tsan? D’Onofrio? Anybody else, hurt in ways that just don’t happen to show yet?”

He emitted a bitter laugh. “Do you honestly feel sorry for Li-Tsan?”

“My own soft spot is for people who have good reason to be angry.”

He nodded, accepting that, and examined his hands again, his demeanor not so much sad or afraid as simply expressively silent.

I leaned in close. “Here’s the thing, Peyrin. I have no sympathy for Gibb at all. Not as a mediocrity, or as anything else. Not after what he’s done. But I can’t afford to continue wasting my time with issues outside the scope of my investigation. I need these less pressing matters out of the way. So if you have any regard for him at all, you’ll stop withholding information. Tell me who you are. Because, otherwise, I will be forced to go through him, which might entail ruining more lives than just his.”

For a heartbeat I thought I’d gotten to him. He lowered his head, opened his mouth, seemed about to give secrets voice, and then slumped, the lines on his forehead mapping more genuine pain than his eyes had ever communicated. “I’m sorry. But I can’t.”

There was no point in further discussion. I stood up, and stared at him for several heartbeats, discerning arrogance, regret, damnation, and a peculiar form of triumph among the ingredients of the emotional stew brewing behind his dark, penetrating eyes.

The bastard was going to let this happen.

I turned to leave, but he stopped me before I could. “He’s not here.”

My spine rippled with a certain undefined dread. “Where is he?”

“He flew back to Hammocktown an hour ago.”

The words might as well have been nonsense syllabification, for all the sense that made. “What?”

Lastogne went back to looking at his hands. “He insisted. He said that people look to him to set an example, and that he wasn’t going to sit around like a symbol of failure when he could go back and in that way show everybody that we’re not defeated yet. He said he knew he was supposed to be under arrest, but that if we left him there without a means of transportation back he would be just as much a prisoner there as he could be here. He said that as long as he was prisoner anywhere he might as well make himself a living reminder that we still have a job to do.” He looked up, his eyes uncharacteristically pained, and his grin uncharacteristically apolgetic. “You should have heard him, Counselor. He was inspiring. As inspiring as a nonentity can be.”

I still couldn’t believe it. “You let him go? Alone?”

“I repeat: he was inspiring.”

“Goddamn you,” I said.

Lastogne moved faster than anybody I’ve ever seen. Faster than the Porrinyards leaping to my rescue, faster than any acrobat or assassin, faster than any unenhanced human being has the right to move. I had just enough time to register the blur of motion, and flinch, certain that all my reconstructions were in error, and that he was the murderer come to finish what the Porrinyards had managed to stop. Then he was before me, his hand on my arm, his eyes still sad, but his lips curled once again into his trademark wry grimace. “Counselor—”

My mouth was dry. “What?”

“Before you do what you have to do to him, I just want you to think about this gesture of his. And remember the one thing worth admiring about mediocrities.”

His eyes were so black with knowledge now that I had to look away. “What?”

“Every once in a while,” he said, “they’re not.”

I was looking at Peyrin Lastogne, but I saw Artis Bringen’s face.

That made up my mind.

I told Lastogne, “There are two documents in my hytex folder, both coded. I need you to free both for transmission. One will go right away, the other is timed to go in twenty-four hours. If either one of them remains locked, you’ll be cited for Obstruction.”

“Which one’s about Gibb and which one’s about me?”

“None of your business,” I said, and turned my back on him.

There was no point in making sure he’d do it…because if he didn’t, I was in even more trouble here than I thought I was.

I found Gibb on one of the net bridges that formed the boulevards of Hammocktown. Like the platform where we’d met before the attempt on my life, it hung close to the Uppergrowth, so near that oppressive ceiling that a tall standing man might have had to slouch.

Gibb lay on his side, stripped to his waist, wearing only a pair of silver briefs; as intoxicated as he seemed, when I climbed the net to his level, he resembled nothing so much as a lonely Bacchus, all dressed up for an orgy where he held the only invitation.

It was as clear a night as One One One ever enjoys. The fruity smell of Uppergrowth was clearer and sharper than it had been, on either of my prior visits; I was almost nauseated by it, until I recognized that nervousness played a hand and did my best to counteract it. The usual storm layer below had thinned, revealing another layer of angry lightning. I glanced down at one of the flashes and, knocked off balance by the inevitable attack of vertigo, immediately scolded myself for doing such a silly thing. Even with the power that lit Hammocktown shut off, my own lights, pulled from the bag I’d left with the Porrinyards and secured to my wrists and forehead, were more than enough to guide me. I didn’t need distant weather to remind me of the altitude.

But Gibb seemed to find the perspective comforting, and the open spaces liberating. He seemed to belong here more than he’d belonged anywhere else, and was able to grin when I finally made it to his level. “You’re getting better at this, Counselor. I’m impressed.”

“Thank you, Ambassador. I wish I could say the same about this stupid gesture of yours.”

He didn’t remind me I wasn’t allowed to call him Ambassador. “It’s not a gesture. Oh, I gave some noble-sounding excuses, but the truth is, I was getting a little claustrophobic in there. At least here, I’m able to look after the place, and pretend I’m accomplishing something. “He rolled over on the bridge, setting off ripples that left me bobbing up and down in seasick rhythms. “At the very least I’m showing those bastards they can’t scare me. Those soulless, game-playing strings of code. Anything that shows those blips I’m not afraid is worth doing.”

“You’re wrong, you know. Risking your life this way doesn’t do anybody any good.”

He closed his eyes, gripped the netting with hands curled into claws, and for just a heartbeat seemed ill. “No, maybe not. But it preserves the illusion.”

I slid the rest of the way toward him, stopping only when we touched, the brief moment of contact as distasteful to me as our first encounter had been.

His smile was the wholly unpersuasive kind that only a professional diplomat could carve. Damned if there wasn’t some pretense of compassion in his voice, some veneer of fatherly understanding that gave every word out of his mouth an extra, oily sheen. “I didn’t like you from minute one, Counselor, even before I knew what you were. The way the air just chilled around you. Nobody can carry that much hostility around with them without a damn good reason.”

It would have been much nicer to have this particular conversation from opposite sides of a conference table. Having it in an abandoned and frequently sabotaged Hammocktown, with nothing but open space awaiting me if he snapped, was far from my own idea of favored conditions. “You should come back to the hangar with me, sir. We’ll be more comfortable there.”

“No, you’ll be more comfortable there. I’m fine where I am.”

That’s when I knew. He needed me scared because he was scared and he didn’t want to be the only one. Strangely enough, I respected that. It meant his diplomatic instincts were still at play, leading him to do whatever he could to ensure a level playing field.

A man who still thought he could win was not as dangerous as a man without hope.

I scuttled back up the slope to place more distance between us, and said, “It didn’t take me long to find out that you’d slept with Cynthia Warmuth.”

He chuckled, with a sad little shake of his head to convey his regrets over the small-mindedness he found himself having to confront. “Is that the extent of your findings, Counselor? That I’ve had consensual sex with some of the women under my command? Is that even considered a crime, in this day and age?”

“Not in and of itself. But it was an odd omission. I’m sure you know what murder investigators call a man in your position who fails to disclose his sexual relationship with a murder victim.”

“What?” he asked.

“The most likely suspect.”

His eyebrows knit. “First: you didn’t ask. Second, it didn’t occur to me that it might be relevant. Third, and most importantly: what Cynthia and I had is hardly worth calling a relationship. We slept together a few times. She didn’t make anything special out of it, and neither did I.”

“People have been known to get violently obsessed over the slightest things, Mr. Gibb.”

Gibb was the very portrait of a man confronted by total lunacy. “There wouldn’t have been any point, logical or otherwise, in getting obsessed over Cynthia Warmuth. You’ve heard what she was like. She wanted total immersion in everything and everyone. If anybody woke up in a bad mood, she wanted to be the therapist. If anybody received bad news from home, she wanted to be mother confessor. If somebody wanted privacy, she considered herself the exception. She wanted to be in everybody’s skin, all the time.”

“Did she get under yours, Mr. Gibb?”

“Mildly. I liked her, had fun with her, but didn’t give up any deep dark secrets. I didn’t like the way she always tried to figure out my whole life afterward. It gave me the impression she considered sex just a tool for picking emotional locks.” Thinking about it, for just this moment reliving a past encounter in his head, he could only tsk in remembrance. “She certainly used it enough. I think she must have offered herself to every man and woman in the outpost. I know she went after your friends the Unison Twins, that’s for certain. And she was also with D’Onofrio, for a while. Lastogne, too, but you must know that.”

My surprise, regarding Warmuth and Lastogne, took some of the edge off a reply intended to be cold, staccato, and relentless. “You know what murder investigators call the ex-lover who says the dead woman slept around?”

“I think I can guess.”

“The most likely suspect.”

He projected waves of unjust aggravation. “If I’d wanted to kill her I wouldn’t have had to call attention to the crime by crucifying her. In this habitat, all I would have had to do was drop her from a height, and call it an accident.”

“Which is, conveniently enough, close to what had happened to Santiago.”

He sighed. “And nobody’s about to claim I ever slept with Santiago.”

“Why not?”

His weariness was no longer the performance of a man determined to show himself rising above a series of unjust accusations, but the deep, abiding exhaustion of one who really had taken everything he could stand. “If you’ve researched what Warmuth was like, you know what Santiago was like. She was angry, suspicious, walled-off, paranoid, almost inhuman in her determination to repel others. In short, she was a lot like you—and very much poor Cynthia’s opposite. Trust me, I didn’t want her any more than she would have wanted me. And you won’t find one person on-station who’d say anything different.”

That was true too. “Most of the people I’ve spoken back you up. They say she wouldn’t have wanted anything to do with you.”

“Fine.” Gibb was more tired than ever. “I don’t have to be loved by every woman I deal with. I can afford to be disliked by a few.”

“True. And it’s also true that I don’t think you had anything to do with any of the sabotage aboard this station.” And then I took a deep breath and pushed on. “But by not getting involved with you, Santiago provided an excellent career baseline against which we can measure the performance evaluations of the other female indentures under your supervision.”

Gibb straightened, his eyes as wary as an animal’s who had just sensed a predator entering his woods. “What?”

“Once I discerned the pattern, it only took me a few minutes to run a hytex analysis that isolated the names of several women assigned to this outpost whose performance evaluations exceeded any reasonable measurement of their professional accomplishments. Warmuth was only the most obvious. You gave her a number of substantial time bonuses not long after her arrival on station—before she’d even completed her local training and experienced her first doomed overnight with the Brachiators. That bothered me the first time I saw it. What could she have done to distinguish herself so dramatically that she earned rewards long before she even accomplished anything?”

Now he’d popped a substantial sweat. “I can’t believe you’re implying—”

“I don’t imply, sir. I just come out and say. Santiago’s one of the ones you didn’t sleep with. You praised her memory. You called her work exemplary. You said she had a fine future. Given your predilection for generous time-bonuses, one would normally expect her to have worked off her contract at least as efficiently as Warmuth. But she wanted nothing to do with you. So there were no unusually large bonuses for her. She had to work off her debt at something approaching real time.”

“I hadn’t gotten around to evaluating her records yet—”

“Warmuth and Santiago establish the pattern. Robin Fish cements it. There was nothing at all special about Fish, was there? By her own admission, she was stuck in a dead-end position, doing scut work for the Corps, when she approached you begging for something a little meaningful. You befriended her and imported her for a difficult, sensitive mission in a Habitat so difficult that the Dip Corps had trouble staffing it. I can only wonder how she persuaded you to give her, out of all other possible candidates, a chance. Why you had her rushed through the program with minimal training. Or why you kept her around, and continued to reward her with big bonuses, long after she proved unsuitable. Could it have been that she was that convenient combination of attractive and desperate?”

“This is disgusting—”

“Tell me about it.” I pressed on. “The truth is, her inability to function inside the Habitat had nothing to do with the job you actually brought her here to do. And she wasn’t about to complain, demeaning or disgusting as she might have found her true purpose here, when all she had to look forward to if she left here was another no-future position, earning out her contract at real time. Under the circumstances, earning high bonuses for just making herself available to you was the best professional option open to her. And she was no doubt real cooperative at first, accepting your explanation that you needed a full-timer in the hangar anyway. You even gave her the responsibility of managing all off-station correspondence, which went a long way toward allowing her the illusion that she was a meaningful, productive member of your team. But once she realized how trapped she was, and how long she was likely to exist as a glorified concubine, the self-loathing kicked in, her already weak personality fractured, and she began to self-medicate—a process you happened to encourage by allowing intoxicants inside the hangar.

“Maybe you thought that would keep her quiet. Or maybe, somewhere deep inside, you were tired of her and hoped she’d drink herself to death. But your precise motives there don’t matter. The results do. And as a result it’s not hard to see how she became the woman she is today.

“Then Li-Tsan had her own little breakdown, which was a little harder to deal with. After all, unlike Fish, she’d come from a high-altitude environment and was actually qualified for the job—though, she admitted to me, already suffering from a serious loss of nerve. I don’t know whether you slept with her in the Habitat, but once she broke down, you made the mistake of trying to strike the same deal with her. And that was a mistake. Oh, you probably thought you had to, because transferring somebody like Li-Tsan off-station, while holding on to the even more useless and unstable Fish, would have been so inconsistent that even the dullest of your people would have had to notice. But though Li-Tsan did agree to the deal, it was only because she was a person emotionally invested in her own strength, who must have hated herself for a time for turning out to be so weak. She wasn’t broken, just broken at doing one particular thing. If she ever said yes to you, it was only because she was hoping she’d get over her problem and return to the Habitat before long.

“But when that didn’t happen, a tough, qualified, assertive professional like Li-Tsan, trapped in a position that was utterly beneath her, naturally reacted a little differently to her exile than somebody like Fish. Somebody like Li-Tsan would eventually remember who she was and start resenting you. Oh, she’d try to keep quiet, for a while, because those bonuses were a good deal, and she wouldn’t want all that extra time she’d earned added back to her contract. But sooner or later it would get to her. She’d look at the state of the other woman she’d have to share her exile with, a woman she’d inevitably come to see as a more pathetic version of herself, a woman who was just the convenient receptacle she was in danger of becoming, and start to boil over, the bulk of her rage directed at the man she’d come to despise as a pimp.

“That’s the funny part, Mr. Gibb. When the two of you had your little fight, she came right out and used the word to your face. Oh, it’s not exactly the right word, in that you weren‘t selling these women to anybody else, as far as I know. Rapist might have been closer, at least in Fish’s case, but I recognize that charge as even more inexact. We may have to devote some thought, later, to coming up with the right terminology. I’m sure Mercantile has a word that communicates the precise degree of sleaziness involved, and I’m just as sure that it qualifies as a crime.

“In any event, the more resentful Li-Tsan became, the riskier it became to ship her out, because she was more than angry enough to slip up and tell her story to somebody in authority. So you offered her more bonuses to keep her quiet. She accepted them, but became more and more hostile toward you. So you did the only thing you could do, to protect yourself for even a little while. You placed some more barriers between Li-Tsan and any opportunity she might have to communicate with your superiors at New London. And you did this by telling Robin Fish that all further correspondence was going to go through you, an arrangement that would enable you to censor anything Li-Tsan wrote.

“But even so, you had to be feeling a little trapped yourself by now. Because now you were holding on to two people who had no excuse to be here, who you couldn’t release without fear that they’d exercise the prerogative to expose you.

“Then a third person had a height-related breakdown, and this time, you heaved a sigh of relief, because this time the victim was a man, capable of providing you some protective cover. You couldn’t ship him out either, because it would be even more suspicious to ship out unfit men while keeping unfit women, but you could keep him on-station, in the spirit of gender consistency, and even feed him some time-bonuses matching what you’d already given Robin and Li-Tsan, to keep him quiet. The best thing about this plan was that it camouflaged your malfeasance and made him an accomplice, but didn’t even require his active consent. He didn’t have even the slightest idea what was going on until Robin and Li-Tsan told him what was going on. And by then he was as trapped as they were, because he couldn’t expose you without implicating himself and them.”

Gibb trembled. “That’s…a hell of a theory, Counselor.”

“Oh, please,” I said. “Do you really think I’d be confronting you like this if this were just an unsupported assumption? Once I saw the pattern, it wasn’t hard to pick out two or three other indentures whose records I found especially suspicious. They were happy to testify in exchange for immunity and a promise that they’d be able to keep the bonuses earned. I offered the same deal to Fish, Crin, and D’Onofrio, and they gave you up in no time at all. Indeed, once she found out she was immune from any consequences, Li-Tsan was downright relieved. We’re friends now. I’ve already uploaded the depositions, and somehow I don’t think it’ll be hard to get more.” I now moved close enough to smell the acrid fear-sweat popping out on his cheeks. “I know this from grim personal experience, Mr. Gibb. Nobody likes to be owned. Some hate being indentured so much that they’ll do anything to shorten their service. You used that fact to turn an outpost of critical diplomatic importance into your own personal brothel.”

“I never forced anybody—” Gibb began.

I ran over him. “Is it your belief that I intend to charge you with exploiting these people? Please. Be serious. You’re absolutely right. You didn’t force them. They all knew exactly what they were doing, and since I don’t particularly believe prostitution to be a crime I very much respect the industriousness of any woman willing to use all her assets to work off her time-debt as soon as possible. I also appreciate the good taste of any woman who requires regular bribes to get anywhere near you. Had you paid those two in any other form of legal tender, I would shrug and say, well, more power to you, more power to them. Consenting adults, and all that.

“I’m considerably less tolerant about the way you held three people as virtual prisoners, holding their futures hostage. That I recognize as disgusting, and that erases any possibility that I might show you a little understanding.

“Still, sir, that’s not your crime.

“Your crime,” I said, making the word explosive, “was the embezzlement of time-debt owed to the Dip Corps. That belonged to all humanity. You misappropriated it and spent it extravagantly, for your own pleasure, overpaying for the services being provided.”

I held the next thought as long as I could, letting it take shape in the air between us.

His mouth jerked without sound, forming protests that wouldn’t have done him much good.

I said, “Unless I cancel a certain dispatch already in the hytex net, and set to be transmitted to the Dip Corps tomorrow, New London’s going to want all of that time repaid. Now, they could just apply it back to the contracts of all the women involved, but I’ll make sure they realize that this presents a tremendous bookkeeping headache and a source of all sorts of potential legal arguments involving the best way to distinguish your unauthorized little incentives from any legitimate time-bonuses the indentures involved might genuinely deserve. I’ll also point out that going after everybody involved would just create the kind of scandal better off avoided, without providing sufficient deterrent to other administrators capable of selling out their responsibilities to satisfy their hormones.

“No,” I concluded, “once I’m done presenting the case, they’ll probably just add all that stolen time to your own contract. Years. Probably decades, by the time the punitive fines, and any evidence of similar misbehavior at your prior postings, are properly tallied. Possibly more than you can ever live to pay back with the normal kind of assignment, even with regular rejuvenation. The Dip Corps will want every minute of that value returned, so they’ll select some unpleasant high-risk/low-prestige assignment nobody else wants, someplace much worse than One One One, and force you to pay back as many as those wasted years as you can earning hardship and hazard bonuses. Break your back and your health and you might be able to return to someplace offering the comforts of civilization in as little as ten to twenty years Mercantile. Personally, I don’t think you’re likely to make it that far, unless you’re lucky enough to find yourself working for a horny administrator, male, female, or neut, who finds you attractive enough for extra credit. Depending on the awfulness of the environment where you find yourself working, you might find yourself volunteering for services far removed from your own personal preferences. I don’t think you’ll be finicky.”

Gibb had become dangerously calm. “You’re a vindictive little bitch, aren’t you?”

“I’m surprised you have to ask.”

The non-ambassador was now just a vessel holding a massive potential explosion, held inside him by the thinnest layers of skin and civilization. A little more prodding and he might have assaulted me, even tried to throw me off the bridge. But he was a diplomat, well versed in the science of subtle nuance; and he’d caught the escape route I’d mentioned in passing. “You said ‘Unless.’”

“Correct. Your career’s over in any event, but I’m still willing to contain this. You can forgo the disgrace and move on to a nice quiet retirement on the world of your choice.”

He growled. “What do you want?”

“You can start with everything you know about Peyrin Lastogne.”

He stared at me for the longest time, as if hoping for a more difficult assignment. And then he slumped. “Long before you got here, I tried to figure him out and failed.”

“He’s no legal advocate. If he was he’d be listed in the Dip Corps files.”

Gibb didn’t look at me again. “That’s right. He would be. But there’s no background for him at all. I can’t even find anybody who’ll confess to cutting his orders.”

“What is he, then?”

There was no bitterness in his laugh, but no joy, either—just contempt at my pretense of naïvetè.

“Come on, Counselor. This can’t be your first embassy.”

I left him there, the sole remaining inhabitant of the installation he had commanded, surrounded by nothing but darkness and uncertainty and the vain hope that I’d reward his cooperation with mercy. He didn’t call after me as I descended the net, or as I made my way alone across the network of bridges.

Leaving Gibb alone with the possible wreckage of his career, his reputation, and his life, could be seen as the moral equivalent of murder. After all, the vast abyss below Hammocktown had always offered the easiest of all possible exits. Between now and dawn it wouldn’t take much more than a single dark impulse to drive him toward the easy out. It would take a lot more to make him reject that option in favor of an unpromising dawn.

Some might say I’d acted irresponsibly, by leaving him here to face the consequences alone. But I had left him with that ounce of hope, and a man capable of doing the things he had done was a man too full of himself to believe he could be betrayed by that ounce of hope. In the next few hours he’d plot exit strategies, denials, defenses, and deals he could broker with everybody capable of testifying against him. He’d persuade himself a thousand times that he had it all in hand and he’d tell himself a thousand and one times that he did not.

His long night journeying between hope and despair would not be an easy one. He’d spend it with nothing but recriminations and rationalizations for company.

I didn’t believe he’d jump.

But he did deserve to come damn close.

A voice called up out of the darkness. “Ready, Andrea?”

“Whenever you are,” I said.

A telescoping ladder emerged from the darkness down below, entering the empty space that had been my tent, and offering me an escape from the empty nets of Hammocktown. I grabbed a rung with both hands and, planting a heel against each riser, slid down to the skimmer’s cargo platform.

Gibb had been right about one thing: I was getting better at this kind of maneuver. Not that I found it any more fun. Though my gait remained steady as I climbed over the rail and joined the Porrinyards forward, my hands were still shaking.

They said, “He didn’t take that at all well.”

“No, he didn’t.”

I’d asked them to monitor the questioning. On the off-chance Gibb had turned violent, or my friend the Heckler had made another attempt on my life, they would have been near enough to intercede. I can’t claim that having them down below, looking out for me, had made me feel any more secure. I had no problem believing them capable of protecting me against Gibb. I wasn’t nearly as complacent about their chances against the Heckler. But returning to their side came as a relief anyway. I was beginning to need them.

“Where to?” they asked.

“Circle. I’ll figure out where we’re going in a minute.”

I don’t know how long we wandered in darkness. It could not have been more than a few minutes. But my mind pored over the same ground from so many different angles that I would not have been surprised to open my eyes on a new world, millennia hence, where all my problems had entered the realm of history.

In the meantime I thought of Lastogne.

I was pretty sure I knew what he was. That, I’d suspected for some time. I’d dealt with people like him many times before. They were spawned by the very nature of the human animal. And Gibb’s grudging testimony had only confirmed my own educated guesses. But what kind of spy advertises his place in the order of things? A saboteur from some faction inside the Confederacy would have equipped himself with an exhaustively forged identity or risked being expelled back to New London by now. Was he some kind of political officer? Or had the sabotage itself been part of his assignment?

Gibb had provided me with what little he could. New London keeps telling me he’s authorized to be here, but they refuse to give me any particulars. The only thing I know for sure is that he’s dangerous.

There was something else that bothered me. One of the little personal credos I’d shared with Gibb: Do you know what murder investigators call a man like you who upon questioning fails to mention his sexual relationship with a murder victim? The most likely suspect.

Gibb had thrown it back in my face, with that bombshell about a relationship between Warmuth and Lastogne.

Lastogne hadn’t said a damned thing. He’d criticized Warmuth’s idealism, said she’d had an excessive hunger for novelty, even expressed dismay when told of her relationship with D’Onofrio…but when asked what he felt about her personally, he’d said it wasn’t a matter of personal like or dislike. He’d managed to give the impression he was answering the question while in fact he was doing nothing of the kind.

He’d played me very well. He’d sensed my misanthropy and played up that aspect of his own personality. He’d even accused the Porrinyards of the same failing. But was that just the typical gamesmanship of a habitual manipulator, or the obfuscation of a sociopath?

The sense of something undone, that had bothered me for days now, flared yet again. My fingers trembled. I looked down at my hand, covered as it was by Skye’s own, and saw the cords in my wrist twitching, as if urging immediate action but unable to relate exactly what they had in mind.

I pulled my hand out from under Skye’s, and studied it the way I’d study an alien form of life. The lined palm, the thin hairline scar at the wrist, and the abused fingertips, complete with raw skin where I chewed the skin at moments of deep concentration.

It was remarkable how much the chewed places were healing.

What had that Brachiator I’d spoken to called the AIsource?

The Hand-in-Ghosts.

The Porrinyards said, “Are you all right?”

I wasn’t sure. The blood was pounding in my ears so hard that I could barely hear anything else. But then I managed, “Lastogne’s going to have to wait.”

They said, “What?”

“I need to become a Half-Ghost.”