Emissaries From the Dead by Adam-Troy Castro

Author:Adam-Troy Castro
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fantasy
ISBN: 9780061851995
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2008-02-26T08:00:00+00:00

16

WAR

I didn’t want to turn in for the night. I didn’t think I could afford to. But I’d already put off a crash for hours, and sleep deprivation was starting to make me stupid.

Even so, I imagined I’d spend hours flat on my back, staring at darkness, the frayed ends of my investigation refusing to permit me rest. It wouldn’t be the first time an assignment had done that to me. But I enjoyed pure oblivion, broken only by the briefest of dream-flashes: my human mother kissing me on the forehead as I lay in bed pretending to be asleep. It felt so real I woke, blinking my eyes at the disorientation that always comes from sleeping in a strange place.

Much later, I sat up.

I’d assigned myself one of the four berths aboard the Dip Corps ship, feeling safer there than I would have in a sleepcube among my suspect pool. The irony of sharing quarters with one of the two people I’d arrested did not escape me, but I’d endured worse. I used a hand sonic to wash, changed into a fresh black outfit, ate breakfast, and logged on.

The key was a phenomenon Lastogne had alluded to the other day. Indentures sign up for five or ten or twenty years, depending on just how desperate they are and just how much the Corps values their services. They essentially sign their lives away in exchange for a ticket off their homeworlds and a retirement package that includes free passage anywhere they want to go, in perpetuity.

Still, nobody wants to wait that long for gratification, so there’s an incentive system. Those who excel, for one reason or another, earn time bonuses. A hard-working diplomat with twenty years on her contract can complete her obligation in half that time by consistently performing above and beyond the call of duty. Most people don’t quite manage that feat, as most people are not prodigies. Some, like the space-holders and drug-addled who make up too great a percentage of the Dip Corps rolls, just put in their time like automatons, accomplishing only the bare minimum expected of them. But the majority do take advantage of the system to some extent, shaving their time accounts by an hour here or a day there, looking for every advantage as they wait for their clocks to run down.

The major plus of this is the way it encourages the talented and the dedicated to work harder. The major minus is that it enables them to leave the service earlier, with full benefits, while preserving the jobs of the dull and apathetic.

The Dip Corp’s middle management is infested with functionaries with all the talent of concrete blocks, who rose to their current positions of power out of sheer longevity but have nothing else to offer.

It’s never affected my own performance, as my contract is permanent and working at any level beneath my absolute best can only make things worse for me. But I’ve also had to deal with any number of human zeroes who stuck around long enough to become number ones.

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