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?
he drink hadn’t calmed me as much as Gibb had promised. It had heightened my awareness of the many subtle vibrations that resonated in the flexible material of the hammock—some the product of three human heartbeats transmitting their rhythms through flesh and bone and clothing into the material that supported us; others, and many more no doubt, the final vibrating manifestations of the winds outside. Christina Santiago’s screams as she fell had contributed to those winds, and were probably still echoing elsewhere in this impossible place.
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.”
“Those cables were reinforced microfilament weave,” Lastogne said. “They were designed to take fifty times the load. None of the tools we’re permitted in-habitat are capable of slicing it. We brought the segments still left hanging from the Uppergrowth to our ship berthed in the station hub. We examined them to rule out faulty manufacture, only to find clean, precise breaks marked only by microscopic signs of heat-scoring—no-brainer indicators that whoever committed the crime had industrial capability.”
“I was told that you suspected the AIsource themselves.”
“It only makes sense,” Gibb said. “They set the conditions here. The Brachs are pre-tech. Hammocktown gets by with minimal tech: a few floaters, some midrange skimmers, and of course full linkup to the hytex network. Just enough to zip around, do what we do, and report our daily findings to New London. Nothing like what was done to those cables.”
I said, “How big is your ship?”
“Intersleep accommodations for fifty, waking accommodations for four. Brought our building materials and the bulk of the our del…” He stopped himself from saying delegation. “Research party.”
“Building materials would include the tools you used to build this outpost, correct?”
“True.”
“Which would have to include something capable of trimming cables.”
“Of course.”
“Then, I trust you’ve confirmed that those tools remain locked up aboard your vessel?”
“Of course,” Gibb said. “I know where you’re going with this, Counselor. You’re thinking I should look at my own people before accusing our hosts.”
“It seems a reasonable first step,” I said.
“Unfortunately, the AIsource permitted the restricted tech inside the Habitat only during a limited construction window, and required us to return everything to our cargo hold afterward. The shipboard systems track everything that’s removed and replaced, and confirm that it’s all accounted for. The AIsource remain the only sentients with the proper tools at the proper time.”
“Unless somebody on your staff hacked the inventory to hide a little unauthorized appropriation.”
“A possibility. History’s shown that human beings can hack anything. But even if this presumed hacker beat our systems, the AIsource have their own monitors recording everybody who enters or leaves the hangar. Nobody holding proscribed tech would get outside the hangar, let alone all the way inside the Habitat. Nobody could even try without the AIsource alerting me—and they have every reason to do so, since it’s the lack of any alternate explanation that makes them look so guilty.”
I chewed on a fingernail. “Maybe they don’t care about looking guilty.”
“We can’t assign them human motivations, but it makes a lot more sense for them to be guilty and not care that we know than innocent and not care that they’re under suspicion.”
“There’s also a human safeguard,” Lastogne said. “We have a full-time staff in the hangar, three indentures who couldn’t handle the conditions in-habitat. They’re assigned for repairs, accounting, and hospitality during down-time, but they would report anybody who tried to get into the tools.”
“Any reason they’re above suspicion?”
“Below suspicion,” Gibb said, with palpable contempt. “Working in-habitat almost killed them as it is. It’s expecting too much to imagine any of them overcoming their paralysis long enough to hack the inventory system, select their equipment, somehow get it past the AIsource security systems, pilot a transport into the Habitat, and conduct a pointless little act of murder-sabotage for no reason other than they somehow figured out how.”
I wondered why the height-sensitives were still on-station. It couldn’t have been all that difficult to transfer them to another assignment. “What if your culprit was only faking height-sensitivity in order to set the stage for a murder he planned to commit later?”
“That would require a ridiculous amount of advance planning. All three were judged unfit months ago Mercantile: one a full two years ago, before Santiago was even assigned here.”
“I’ll still need to speak to them.”
“It’s a waste of time.” Gibb’s fatuous superiority, so similar to the hated Bringen’s, was beginning to infuriate me. “But not unexpected. We expect you to speak to them and everybody on-site. We have no doubt that when you’re done you’ll come to the same conclusion we have.”
“The AIsource have the only real power aboard this station,” Lastogne said. “They have remotes all over the place. Flatscreens, fliers, maintenance bots, surveillance cams. They range in size from heavy construction equipment to nanotech. You can’t spend five minutes here without seeing something of their manufacture zip by on one mission or another, which means that they had the means and every possible opportunity.”
My thumbnail crunched between my teeth. “But they still deny involvement?”
“Of course.”
“What about knowledge? Even if they’re not involved, they must have observed—”
Gibb grew more glum with every answer. “But they don’t seem interested in testifying.”
“I’ll still have to interview them too.”
“They expect you to,” Lastogne said. “In fact, they asked to see you tomorrow morning. I’ll be flying you to that meeting first thing.”
I wasn’t sure I’d heard that correctly. “Flying me?”
“That’s right. Same way they flew you in.”
Aghast, I demanded, “Do you seriously mean to tell me that with all the remotes they have flying around this station—one zipping by every few seconds, you said—they won’t connect one to their main system and save me a trip?”
“No,” Gibb said. “They want you back at the Hub.”
This was their oddest, most counterintuitive behavior so far. Distance wasn’t the issue. I’d dealt with AIsource remotes, as embodied by their ubiquitous floating flatscreens, on two dozen worlds. It seemed downright silly for them to change the rules inside this station they owned, and pretend they needed to drag me to and fro for private audiences.