Emissaries from the Dead

wanted us dead.

And if that was true, I couldn’t come up with a single scenario that didn’t end with those binary-code bastards reducing us to floating debris in space.

Which made it something not worth talking about. “Where’s your other half?”

“On a flight back to Hammocktown. Some supplies got left there. We don’t want to lose anything to the lower atmosphere if any more hammocks collapse. But, you know, he’s here with us, too, as long as I am. Do you need something?”

“Just a few minutes of your time.”

“Goodie.” She ran her blue-stained fingers through her scalp-bristles and cocked her head toward the ship interior.

I followed her inside, through a cramped exit corridor, to a circular command hub containing two display consoles and bracketed by a quartet of private rooms just large enough to house fold-down beds, sonic lavatories, and narrow shelves. All four were open, but only one looked occupied, the bed down and bearing a folded blanket. Whoever lived there had installed a holo graffito, more distracting than clever: LOST LOST LOST ON ONE ONE ONE. A sack of personal items sat on the counter. I took the liberty of inspecting them and saw a name tag marking the bundle as the property of Robin Fish.

The cramped, sparse accommodations for passengers not stored in Intersleep were more than enough to explain why the height-sensitives preferred to erect sleepcubes in the relative vastness of the outer hangar. Confinement to the ship would feel more like prison.

An open hatchway at the rear of the command hub revealed only a green wall across on the other side of another narrow corridor, no doubt the route to cargo, ship’s systems, the real-water shower Lastogne had mentioned, and the Intersleep crypts. Awake or asleep, it was nobody’s idea of luxurious travel, but then I’d known luxurious travel once or twice in my life and found it just got me places at the same speed while forcing me to interact with the kind of people who could afford such passage.

We sat at the swivel-seats. Skye rested her left arm on the console, tilting her head to prop her temple against her index finger. Her smile was unforced, but quietly infuriating. “Shoot.”

“I want to talk about what you did.”

She fluttered her free hand. “No need.”

“I’m afraid there is.”

“Um. This isn’t about thanking me, is it?”

“No. I hope to get around to that, sooner or later. But right now I can’t afford to. There’s too much about tonight that still needs to be explained.”

Her tiny smile remained where it was. But she lifted her head off her index finger, and lowered that hand to her lap, where it joined the other in uncharacteristically prim repose. “No offense taken, Counselor. You have a job to do. What would you like to know?”

“How come you were the only ones who saw me?”

“The only one,” she corrected me, showing absolutely no impatience at my refusal to retain this one essential point. “It was dark.”

“Not all that dark. Hammocktown is lit at night.”

“Yes, it is. But once the suns go out, and everybody’s back from wherever they’ve flown off to, there’s less reason to be up and about. People tend to settle in, alone or with friends. Traffic from tent to tent goes way down.”

I remembered the Brachiator term for human beings. “A Ghost town.”

The reference amused her. “A Half-Ghost town anyway.”

I grinned back, despite the seriousness of the moment, but forced myself to drop it at once. “But that didn’t stop you from showing up just in time.”

Now she looked more than just insolent. She looked downright knowing. “That does strike me as convenient. Are you complaining?”

“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.”