The bundle was still warm, and rich with the scents of foods I must have tasted and liked, at some point in the distant past. My stomach growled. I put the bundle aside without opening it. “Thank you. That was considerate.”
He waited for me to attack my dinner and saw that I wouldn’t. “Alternatively, you could save it for later and join me. I haven’t had dinner, either.”
“Thank you,” I said, “but no. I prefer to eat alone.”
Somewhere in Hammocktown, an intoxicated woman exploded in a helpless, delighted peal of laughter. A man said something arch and she laughed again. Love, or at least passion, seemed in the air. Somebody else, a little farther away, argued a deeply felt point. Somebody muttered an obscenity. The wind changed, the network of nets and cables shifted, and the story behind all those random sound fragments vanished, lost behind other atmospheric static.
Gibb, trapped with me when he could have visited any of these other more interesting places, could only look forlorn. “I really wish you’d loosen up, Counselor.”
“You wouldn’t be the first.”
“Ah.” He cast about for something else to say, and settled on being the voice of authority. “Well, if you’re determined to eat alone, maybe you should go back to your quarters. I am responsible for your safety, after all, and I wouldn’t want you to have an accident or something—”
“I understand. But if you don’t mind clearing up some things, first—”
The shift to official business, however grim, freed him from any further need to figure out just what the hell else to do with me. “Go ahead.”
“First,” I said, ticking off three names on my fingers, “Robin Fish, Nils D’Onofrio, and Li-Tsan Crin.”
“Yes.”
“Why haven’t they been transferred?”
He became a martyr, unjustly accused. “Have they been complaining?”
“Answer the question.”
“I’ve answered it many times before,” he said, which was giving away more than he intended, since none of those occasions had involved me. “There’s no reason to transfer them. Confinement to the hangar may not be pleasant for their respective egos, but we do need a full-time staff to maintain those shipboard facilities, and those free do an excellent job providing support for those of us who have proved we can perform the job out here.”
“Yes,” I said, “I’ve heard that. But none of the busywork you assign them actually requires three people—not when Fish, who was stuck there alone for almost a full year, was able to handle those responsibilities, and others you’ve since taken from her, all by herself before Crin or D’Onofrio were ever sent there to help her.”
“Yes, she was,” Gibb said, with the kind of heat that came from repeating an old and familiar argument. “But only just. Her morale has never been exactly high. I didn’t curtail her duties because of overwork, but because she wasn’t performing satisfactorily at the few jobs she had. Her performance has deteriorated even further since Nils and Li-Tsan showed up; from what I gather, even they consider her worse than useless.”
“So you don’t need her.”
“We could survive without her, but we do the best we can with the people we have.”
“You arranged her assignment here in the first place,” I said.
“That’s right. I met a young, ambitious, and determined indenture, trapped in what she considered assignments without a future, who begged, at length, for my help getting her a posting more in line with her self-proclaimed talents. I was impressed with her and remembered her when I needed people to staff my facility here. It turned out that she was much better at self-promotion than she was at delivering on her promises, but what could I do? She was already here by then.”
I’d just been fed about fourteen different flavors of self-contradictory bullshit and told it was all the same shade of vanilla. “So are they necessary, or not? Do you need all three of them, or not? Do they do an excellent job, or are they worse than useless, or what?”
Gibb was getting fed up with this line of questioning. “Let’s just say we might be a little overstaffed in that area, though not entirely by choice.”
More bullshit. In the absence of any other agenda, refusing to transfer them was vindictive, wasteful, and stupid. But only in the absence of any other agenda.
“Second question. Peyrin Lastogne. The man has no Dip Corps file. He has no Confederate file. He’s not even an official member of your delegation. But his authority, here, seems second only to your own. Who the hell is he?”
Gibb showed teeth. I don’t think I could call it a smile. “That’s classified.”
“I’m cleared for that kind of information.”
“I’m sorry, Counselor, but I’m afraid you’re not.”
This was outrageous. “In any investigation of this kind, the Judge Advocate’s office has total access to—”
“—to less than the Judge Advocate imagines,” Gibb said. He did smile then, the kind of unsympathetic smile customer service representatives of major transport lines use to hide their schadenfreude when dealing with troublesome passengers whose belongings have been accidentally dumped into the coldest regions of deep space. “I’m sorry, Counselor. But this comes from the very top. Mr. Lastogne is off limits.”
One of my earliest assignments, about a decade ago, had been to support a task force investigating allegations of high treason in the Confederate Executive Branch. We’d questioned Cabinet members on a daily basis. Nobody, not even the president, had been off limits to us then, which had turned out to be a good thing, since we soon discovered a link to the whereabouts of the fugitive terrorist, Magrison, among the members of the first family. (He still remains at large.) My authority now was at least as high as that shared by the task force then. But sometimes bureaucrats of middling rank, like Gibb, put up more of a fight than the people at the top, who know what their limits are. “All right, then. Without giving up any particulars, is information about his background in your own possession?”
Here came that apologetic smile again. “I only know what I’m cleared to know.”
“You can’t even tell me if you’ve been informed?”
“I’m saying that my knowledge is far from total, and that I’m not cleared to answer that kind of question.”
To hell with this. “Fish told me you’ve taken control of all communication in and out of this Habitat.”
“Yes, but that’s just a security concern. Our position here is such that—”
His last three words were obliterated as I spoke over him. “I don’t need to know your position here to make this particular point, sir. I intend to issue a report to New London tonight. I will send it through you, because that’s the way you’ve set yourself up here, but I will send it coded. Any attempt by you to read that communication before transmission, or to censor its content, will be detected and taken by the Advocate’s office as obstruction of justice. Do I need to advise you of the seriousness of that charge?”
Gibb’s face was a portrait of repressed anger. “You don’t have to act like this, Counselor. I’ve been nothing but cooperative.”
“You’ve been nothing, period,” I said.
Which was excessive. I regretted saying it the second the words left my mouth.
But if you must make enemies, you might as well make make sure you can expect them to stay that way.
Making Gibb escort me to my hammock may have amounted to salting the wound, but I had no choice. The route was vertiginous enough in daylight and might have killed me after dark.
Dropping dead of fear or falling off a rope bridge would have amounted to a cruel practical joke on any investigators who replaced me. They’d no doubt think I was the latest victim of this increasingly murderous conspiracy, and neglect any number of reasonable explanations for the deaths of Warmuth and Santiago that failed to account for my own.