omitting my usual furrowed-brow seriousness. The portrait was also a little softer than it needed to be around my chin, but its cheekbones were the proper height, its nose the proper thinness, its features at rest the familiar, damnable, unwanted combination of elements adding up to unwanted beauty.
It was an outdated image, depicting me with short-cropped hair on all sides, when I now indulged an appreciation of things asymmetrical by allowing one thin lock to descend all the way to my right shoulder. But it was recognizable enough, and would have passed muster as an image to send the media if I’d died, gone missing, or fallen so far out of favor that I could be disappeared with impunity.
It looked me in the eyes and said, “Hello.”
Just that:
Then it exploded from the inside out.
It threw back its head and opened its mouth wide and stood before me twitching as tremors rippled down its cheeks. Its mouth yawned wider than human anatomy allowed, then further still, and then further yet. Soon the underside of the jaw was almost flat against the neck, the skin and flesh around it drawn so papery-taut that they split open in a garish scarlet wound that exposed teeth turned pink from the sudden hemorrhages at the back of its throat. Then its insides geysered from that impossibly huge mouth as if fired from cannons somewhere deep inside; not just blood and bile but black, glistening, organic shrapnel, desperate to escape whatever was happening inside. There was more fluid than my body could have contained. The simulacrum was soon painted in it. Then something unspeakable happened to its chest, caving it in, splintering the ribs, leaving curved white daggers of bone emerging from its flesh like scalpels.
I’m an expert in hate mail. My past has earned me an extensive personal collection of death threats, from representatives of various species. Most have been voice messages, colored with bile and transmitted my way via hytex. A few have been written with real ink on real paper. A few had been imaginative and vivid, and a number had been animated. Among the animated, I’d seen images simulating my torture, my strangulation, my rape, and my willing, enthusiastic participation in sexual acts so depraved that even my most exhaustive research hasn’t been able to uncover more than a dozen worlds where such perversions are even theorized.
Most of this stuff is laughable. I’m sometimes amused at how little my correspondents know about female anatomy.
The unknown parties responsible for the inside-out image had programmed a state-of-the-art simulation, outdated or inaccurate in some particulars but persuasive in every other way.
It felt real.
It felt sincere.
It felt like a promise.
It was the kind of threat sent only by a genuine monster.
I should have been terrified.
But I was also a monster. And as I thought about the unseen sender, I tapped a fingernail against my teeth and murmured a silent promise in return.
Lastogne rattled off the facts, in a contemptuous drone that failed to betray any sympathy. Santiago, he said, had been a second-year diplomatic indenture, just out of training: specialty, exopsychology, the product of some industrial hell somewhere in the ass end of Hom. Sap space.
The feudal economy that kept the darker corners of the Confederacy going had seized a particularly savage grip on her people. The colonists who’d settled the place seventeen generations back had so badly mortgaged their lives and their children’s lives, just for the funding to establish their infrastructure, that the entire population lived as the de facto debt slaves of the sponsoring Bettelhine Corporation. The world has one major industry, the construction of components for starship quantum dampeners. With perhaps one-third of the population engaged in providing food and housing and other support services, the other two-thirds spend their days working endless shifts in Bettelhine’s factories, struggling and failing to meet the quotas that would bring their world’s struggling millions a few percentage points closer to solvency.
Sometimes, they almost break even.
Mostly, as management intended, they fall much further behind. They have to give up more and more of their own agricultural and industrial systems just to make up lost time, which obliged the company, in its infinite generosity, to supply an ever-increasing percentage of their basic necessities, at an ever-increasing markup. Christina Santiago’s people have been forced to mortgage three additional future generations, just during her lifetime alone.
The situation failed to shock me. The Confederacy doesn’t provide its citizens with any redress against that kind of local corporate rapaciousness. What little political clout exists is external, a mere facade of species unity between us and the other sentient powers; internally, it’s never been able to come up with a constitution all of our bickering subcultures have been willing to get behind. It’s why any voyager through human space will encounter every political and economic system from green cults to fascism, why some of our more contentious worlds have as many as fifty or sixty separate governments happily bombarding each other from orbit, why we still have to deal with internal genocides in this day and age, and why debt-slavery like Santiago grew up with continues to flourish when the people benefiting from it should be lined up against the wall and shot.
Don’t get me started. But it’s one reason, of many, why I sometimes hate my own species.
To Lastogne and Gibb, I affected boredom. “So? Half the Dip Corps must come from some depressed background or another. It’s what makes indentured servitude such an attractive alternative.”
“It explains who she was,” Lastogne said. “Gives you a special feeling for her character.”
“Special feeling for her character doesn’t matter unless you believe that where she came from and who she is has some bearing on how she died. That her murderer targeted her in particular. Is that what you believe?”
“I have no reason to believe anything. I’m just being thorough.”
Gibb just looked weary. “Get to the good stuff, Peyrin. She can fill in the personalities later.”
Nobody could have blamed Santiago for indenturing herself to the Dip Corps as soon as possible. There, at least, she would have had a chance at a better life. But that better life had not materialized. Her murder had taken place during One One One’s dark hours, when the glowsphere suns were dimmed to provide the cylinder’s inhabitants with some semblance of a normal planetary night. But because witnesses had reported that Santiago’s assigned hammock was still aglow, she was probably still awake, and working, at the moment of the crime.
The culprit or culprits had sliced through every cable anchoring one side of her hammock to the Uppergrowth. The partial collapse transformed the hammock from a tent to a flapping banner. All its loose contents, including Santiago herself, had tumbled into the darkness below, trailing her scream.
The young indenture may have remained conscious and terrified for long minutes, as she plunged toward the fatal high-pressure regions far below.
How must it have felt, falling all that distance, knowing even as the temperature rose all around her that all her striving had been futile?
The thrum I felt, when I placed my palm against the hammock, was all that remained of her dying cry. I shuddered. “It couldn’t have been done by somebody with a normal cutting edge.”
Gibb’s grimace was almost as embittered as Lastogne’s. “That’s so obvious it’s almost a joke.”
