his ROM prosthesis, furthered the impression that he’d come in a hurry. He slid down the canvas to Oscin’s side and demanded, “Is she all right?”
“You can try asking her,” I said.
He didn’t quite manage to hide surprise. “Forgive me, Counselor. You looked a little catatonic there.”
“I’m in shock, which isn’t even remotely the same thing.”
His lip curled, in a combination of annoyance and admiration. “My apologies. Do we have any idea what happened?”
I resisted making a snide comment over his use of the pronoun we. “Some kind of dissolving agent turned my hammock to confetti.”
“How fast?”
“Minutes.”
The Porrinyards, bracketing me on both sides, moved a little closer. “She almost didn’t make it out.”
“I didn’t make it out at all,” I said. “You pulled me out.”
That glimpse I’d caught of them, jumping off the edge of the rope bridge, had proven only the first step in an insanely intricate trapeze-act manuever they’d plotted and executed at the very instant they’d seen me about to fall. Oscin had clung to the bridge by his knees and ankles, securing Skye so she could wrap her arms under mine on her upswing.
Coordinating their movements with such instant perfection had been easy enough, given their abilities. Holding on to me and my bag during my ten seconds of full-tilt, convulsive panic had been considerably more difficult.
They’d almost lost me.
Worse, at least from their point of view—Oscin had almost lost Skye.
I’d thrashed so hard that Oscin had lost his grip on one of Skye’s ankles. They’d had only a second to decide whether to drop me or keep holding on.
I tried to imagine what it would have been like for them, if Skye had fallen. Oscin’s body would have remained safe, but he would have felt every sensation she felt as she plummeted through the clouds, just as she would have felt every sensation he felt as he remained safe high above her. Both halves of their shared personality would have felt safety and damnation at the same time, as half of everything they were died. Turning away would not have been an option.
Oscin would have known every single moment of Skye’s agony.
And yet they’d held on to me anyway.
The worst of the things I didn’t know, at this moment, was just how I felt about that.
Lastogne rubbed his jaw with a dark amusement that simultaneously acknowledged and mocked the gravity of the moment. “Good work, people. I’ll speak to Gibb, and make sure he takes some time off your contract.”
“No need, Peyrin. I wasn’t doing it for extra credit.”
“Too bad. You’re getting it anyway.” He turned to me. “And you, Counselor. You do know what you’re describing, don’t you?”
I resented having to think. “I could be describing any number of things. A lone human being could arrange an effect like that with a chemical agent.”
“But you don’t seriously believe that.”
“No, sir, I don’t. Even if somebody could smuggle a large quantity of a dangerous substance on-station, and apply it without anybody noticing, our postmortem investigation would be all too likely to identify it from traces on the hammock superstructure. Our culprit doesn’t strike me as the type to leave that kind of obvious footprint.”
“We’ll still have to check,” Lastogne said.
“I expect you to. But I’m pretty certain you’ll only be eliminating it from possibility.”
“Me too. So, you suspect—”
I spoke the damning word without inflection. “Nanotech.”
It was hard to avoid noticing how completely Lastogne’s glance at Oscin ignored Skye. “You saw it?”
“The last few seconds,” the Porrinyards said.
“And you concur?”
“Yes. That’s what it looked like.”
Nobody said the obvious. The low-tech conditions constraining Gibb’s people specifically excluded access to microdisassemblers. Within the Habitat, only the AIsource were supposed to command that kind of tech. This incident incriminated them even more clearly than the Santiago killing, even without considering the unseen Heckler, who I wasn’t ready to mention.
Another flurry of raised voices later, the hammock flap opened again, this time admitting the flushed and sweaty Gibb, who was wearing an open vest and a pair of shiny silver briefs tight enough to display his personal assets in extreme detail. I would have liked to believe that the emergency had interrupted him during some personal down-time, and that in rushing to my side he’d been in too much of a hurry to change into something less ludicrous, but this was Hammocktown and we were talking about Gibb. Either way he slid down the canvas to the knot of us congregated at its lowest point, and immediately made the same mistake Lastogne had: “Is she all right?”
I said, “I must look downright brain-damaged.”
His reluctance to address me directly was so palpable that when he jerked his head in my direction, it was hard not to imagine the snap of invisible strings. “So? Speak.”
“Bottom line?” I said. “There’s been more sabotage, by an enemy you can’t predict or identify, whose attacks on your facility have been growing more frequent, more elaborate, and more contemptuous of your authority. You don’t have the knowledge or the tools you need to protect your people, and there’s every reason you believe that your lives will be in more danger tomorrow and in even more danger the day after that. Remaining in Hammocktown, at this point, leaves everybody at risk and complicates my investigation for no good reason. It could only be sanctioned by an obstinate fool, driven more by his own self-destructive pride than any vestigial concern for the lives of the people who depend on his good judgment. I have problems with your management style I haven’t even mentioned yet, sir, but you’re not the person I just described. We both know what you have to do.”
I’d seen looks just like Gibb’s from any number of people who wanted to hit me. The length of time they hold the look has always been inversely proportional to the chances of them acting on the impulse. Gibb held his for close to a minute. “Do you know what retreat means, for someone in my position?”
I did. If the Dip Corps later judged the retreat avoidable, the black mark on his record could very well stigmatize him for the rest of his career. I could only counter, “How many people are you willing to sacrifice to keep your reputation?”
More silence. And then all the air went out of him at once, draining away his anger and leaving a man resigned, defeated and old. “Peyrin?”
“Yes, sir?”
“Go out and count heads. Make sure we didn’t lose anybody else while we were in here babysitting the Counselor.”
“And?”
“Tell them to collect their essentials. We’re leaving.”
Hammocktown didn’t have enough skimmers to carry out a full evacuation, but once contacted the AIsource were happy to supply us with a fleet of ten. It was hard not to see the sudden wealth of free transportation, on this station not designed to accommodate a human presence, as more evidence that they’d been trying to get rid of us all along. Gibb was not the only person who muttered a few angry words to that effect as we boarded the vessels and left the sad, hanging corpse of his outpost behind.
I don’t know how many others imagined every gleaming carrier in that fleet obeying AIsource orders to simply discard us from a height, but that image occurred to me early, and dominated the nastier side of my imagination long enough to give me serious second thoughts as I boarded a skimmer that already held Lastogne, the Porrinyards, and a purple-haired, saucer-eyed female I hadn’t questioned yet. But bugging out had been my idea in the first place. So I took my place beside the Porrinyards, and made room for the final two passengers, including another young man unknown to me, and Oskar Levine, who didn’t sit until he was satisfied that I was all right.
As we pulled away, the Skimmer itself called my name.
