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
“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
“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.
“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
