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
“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 resume, 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?”
