Black Man / Thirteen

CHAPTER 1

He finally found Gray in a MarsPrep camp just over the Bolivian border and into Peru, hiding behind some cheap facial surgery and the name Rodriguez. It wasn’t a bad cover in itself, and it probably would have stood standard scrutiny. Security checks in the prep camps were notoriously lax; the truth was that they didn’t much care who you’d been before you signed up. But there were still a few obvious signs you could look for if you knew how, and Carl, with a methodical intensity that was starting to resemble desperation, had been looking for weeks. He knew that Gray was up on the altiplano somewhere, because the trail led there from Bogotá, and because where else, ultimately, was a variant thirteen going to run. He knew this, and he knew it was just a matter of time before the traces showed up and someone called it in. But he also knew, with induction programs everywhere skimping and speeding up to meet increasing demand, that time was on the other man’s side. Something had to give, and soon, or Gray was going to be gone and Carl wasn’t going to get his bounty.

So when the break came, the tiny morsel of data finally fed back from the web of contacts he’d been plying all those weeks, it was hard not to jump. Hard not to dump his painstakingly constructed cover, fire up his Agency credit and badge, and hire the fastest set of all-terrain wheels available in Copacabana. Hard not to tear across the border at Agency speed, raising road dust and rumors all the way to the camp, where Gray, of course, if he had any kind of local support, would be long gone.

Carl didn’t jump.

Instead, he called in a couple of local favors and managed to blag a ride across the border with a military liaison unit—some superannuated patrol carrier with a Colony corporation’s logo sun-bleached to fading on the armored sides. The troops were Peruvian regulars, drafted in from dirt-poor families in the coastal provinces and then seconded to corporate security duties. They’d be pulling down little more than standard conscript pay for that, but the interior of the carrier was relatively plush by military standards and it seemed to have air-con. And anyway, they were tough and young, a sort of young you didn’t see so much in the Western world anymore, innocently pleased with their hard-drilled physical competence and cheap khaki prestige. They all had wide grins for him, and bad teeth, and none was older than twenty. Carl figured the good cheer for ignorance. It was a safe bet these kids didn’t know the subcontract rate their high command was extracting from its corporate clients for their services.

Sealed inside the jolting, sweat-smelling belly of the vehicle, brooding on his chances against Gray, Carl would really have preferred to stay silent altogether. He didn’t like to talk, never had. Felt in fact that it was a much-overrated pastime. But there was a limit to how taciturn you could be when you were getting a free ride. So he mustered some lightweight chat about next week’s Argentina—Brazil play-off and threw as little of it into the conversational mix as he thought he could get away with. Some comments about Patricia Mocatta, and the advisability of female captains for teams that were still predominantly male. Player name checks. Tactical comparisons. It all seemed to go down fine.

“¿Eres Marciano?” one of them asked him, finally, inevitably.

He shook his head. In fact, he had been a Martian once, but it was a long, complicated story he didn’t feel like telling.

“Soy contable,” he told them, because that was sometimes what he felt like. “Contable de biotecnologia.”

They all grinned. He wasn’t sure if it was because they didn’t think he looked like a biotech accountant, or because they just didn’t believe him. Either way they didn’t push the point. They were used to men with stories that didn’t match their faces.

“Habla bien el español,” someone complimented him.

His Spanish was good, though for the last two weeks it was Quechua he’d been speaking mostly, Mars-accented but still tight up against the Peruvian original that had spawned it. It was what the bulk of the altiplano dwellers used, and they in turn made up most of the grunt labor force in the prep camps, just as they still did on Mars. Notwithstanding which fact, the language of enforcement up here was still Spanish. Aside from a smattering of web-gleaned Amanglic, these guys from the coast spoke nothing else. Not an ideal state of affairs from the corporate point of view, but the Lima government had been adamant when the COLIN contracts were signed. Handing over control to the gringo corporations was one thing, had oligarchy-endorsed historical precedent on its side in fact. But allowing the altiplano dwellers to shake themselves culturally loose from the grip of coastal rule, well, that would be simply unacceptable. There was just too much bad history in the balance. The original Incas six hundred years ago and their stubborn thirty-year refusal to behave as a conquered people should, the bloody reprise by Túpac Amaru in 1780, the Sendero Luminoso Maoists a bare century back, and more recently still the upheavals of the familias andinas. The lessons had been learned, the word went out. Never again. Spanish-speaking uniforms and bureaucrats drove home the point.

The patrol carrier pulled up with a jerk, and the rear door hinged weightily outward. Harsh, high-altitude sunlight spilled in, and with it came the sound and smell of the camp. Now he heard Quechua, the familiar un-Spanish cadences of it, shouted back and forth above the noise of machinery in motion. An imported robot voice trampled it down, blared vehicle reversing, vehicle reversing in Amanglic. There was music from somewhere, huayno vocals remixed to a bloodbeat dance rhythm. Pervasive under the scent of engine oil and plastics, the dark meat odor of someone grilling antecuchos over a charcoal fire. Carl thought he could make out the sound of rotors lifting somewhere in the distance.

The soldiers boiled out, dragging packs and weapons after. Carl let them go, stepped down last and looked around, using their boisterous crowding as cover. The carrier had stopped on an evercrete apron opposite a couple of dusty, parked coaches with destination boards for Cuzco and Arequipa. There was a girdered shell of a terminal building, and behind it Garrod Horkan 9 camp stretched away up the hill, all single-story prefab shacks and sterile rectilinear street plan. Corporate flags fluttered whitely on poles every few blocks, an entwined g and h ringed by stars. Through the unglassed windows of the terminal, Carl spotted figures wearing coveralls with the same logo emblazoned front and back.

Fucking company towns.

He dumped his pack in a locker block inside the terminal, asked directions of a coveralled cleaner, and stepped back out into the sun on the upward-sloping street. Down the hill, Lake Titicaca glimmered painfully bright and blue. He slipped on the Cebe smart lenses, settled his battered leather Peruvian Stetson on his head, and started up the slope, tracking the music. The masking was more local cover than necessity—his skin was dark and leathered enough not to worry about the sun, but the lenses and hat would also partially obscure his features. Black faces weren’t that common in the altiplano camps, and unlikely though it was, Gray might have someone watching the terminal. The less Carl stood out, the better.

A couple of blocks up the street, he found what he was looking for. A prefab twice the size of the units around it, leaking the bloodbeat and huayno remix through shuttered windows and a double door wedged back. The walls were stickered with peeling publicity for local bands, and the open door space was bracketed by two loopview panels showing some Lima ad agency’s idea of Caribbean nightlife. White sand beach and palm trees by night, party lights strung. Bikini-clad criolla girls gripped beer bottles knowingly and pumped their hips to an unheard rhythm alongside similarly European-looking consorts. Outside of the band—jet-muscled and cavorting gaily in the background, well away from the women—no one had skin any darker than a glass of blended Scotch and water.

Carl shook his head bemusedly and went inside.

The bloodbeat was louder once he got in, but not unbearable. The roof tented at second-story height, nothing but space between the plastic rafters, and the music got sucked up there. At a corner table, three men and a woman were playing a card game that required calls, apparently without any trouble tracking one another’s voices. Conversation at other tables was a constant murmur you could hear. Sunlight fell in through the doorway and shutters. It made hard bars and blocks on the floor but didn’t reach far, and if you looked there directly then looked away, the rest of the room seemed dimly lit by comparison.

At the far end of the room, a boomerang-angled bar made from riveted tin sections held up half a dozen drinkers. It was set far enough back from the windows that the beer coolers on the wall behind glowed softly in the gloom. There was a door set in the wall and propped open on an equally dimly lit kitchen space, apparently empty and not in use. The only visible staff took the form of a dumpy indigena waitress slouching about between the tables, collecting bottles and glasses on a tray. Carl watched her intently for a moment, then followed her as she headed back toward the bar.

He caught up with her just as she put down her tray on the bartop.

“Bottle of Red Stripe,” he said, in Quechua. “No glass.”

She ducked under the hinged access section without comment and opened a cooler cabinet on the floor. Hooked out the bottle and straightened up, gripping it not unlike the criollas in the ad panels outside. Then she cracked it deftly open with a rust-spotted key that hung off her belt, and set it on the bar.

“Five soles.”

The only currency he had on him was Bolivian. He dug out a COLIN wafer and held it up between two fingers. “Swipe okay?”

She gave him a long-suffering look and went to get the machine. He checked the time display in the upper left corner of the Cebe lenses, then took them off. They’d cycled for low light anyway, but he wanted clear eye contact for what was coming. He dumped his hat on the bartop and propped himself next to it, facing the room. Did his best to look like someone who didn’t want anything, like someone fitting in.

In theory, he should have checked in with the GH site manager on arrival. It was procedure, written into the Charter. Extensive previous experience, some of it sticky with his own blood, had taught him not to bother. There was a whole shifting topography of dislike out there for what Carl Marsalis was, and it touched on pretty much every level of human wiring. At the high cognitive end, you had sophisticated dinner-party politics that condemned his professional existence as amoral. At a more emotive level there was the generalized social revulsion that comes with the label turncoat. And lower still, riding the arid terminology of the Jacobsen Report but swooping into the hormonal murk of instinct, you could find a rarely admitted but nonetheless giddy terror that he was, despite everything, still one of them.

And worse than all of this, in the eyes of the Colony corporations, Carl was bad press walking. Bad press and a guaranteed hole in finances. By the time someone like Gray was ready for shipping out, Garrod Horkan could expect to have plowed several tens of thousands of dollars into him in varied training and mesh biotech. Not the sort of investment you want bleeding out into the altiplano dust under the headline insufficient security at colin camp!

Four years previously, he’d announced himself to the site manager at a camp south of La Paz, and his target had mysteriously vanished while Carl was still filling out forms in the administration building. There was a bowl of soup still steaming on the kitchen table when he walked into the prefab, a spoon still in the soup. The back door was open, and so was an emptied trunk at the foot of the bed in the next room. The man never surfaced again, and Carl had to conclude, to himself and to the Agency, that he was now, in all probability, on Mars. No one at COLIN was going to confirm that one way or the other, so he didn’t bother asking.

Six months after that, Carl announced himself late one evening to another site manager, declined to fill in the forms until later, and was set upon by five men with baseball bats as he exited the admin office. Fortunately, they weren’t professionals, and in the dark they got in one another’s way. But by the time he’d wrested one of the bats free for himself and driven his attackers off, the whole camp was awake. The street was lit up with flashlights and the news was spreading at speed; there was a new black face, an outsider, down at the admin building, causing trouble. Carl didn’t even bother braving the streets and streets of stares to check on the camp address he had for his target. He already knew what he’d find.

That left the fallout from the fight, which was equally predictable. Despite numerous passersby and even one or two blatant spectators, there were suddenly no useful witnesses. The man Carl had managed to hurt badly enough that he couldn’t run away remained steadfastly silent about his reasons for the assault. The site manager refused to let Carl question him alone, and cut short even the supervised interrogation on medical grounds. The prisoner has rights, she iterated slowly, as if Carl weren’t very bright. You’ve already hurt him badly.

Carl, still oozing blood from a split cheek and guessing at least one of his fingers was broken, just looked at her.

These days, he notified the site managers after the event.

“Looking for an old friend,” he told the waitress when she got back with the machine. He gave her the COLIN wafer and waited until she’d swiped it. “Name of Rodriguez. It’s very important that I find him.”

Her fingers hovered over the punch pad. She shrugged.

“Rodriguez is a common name.”

Carl took out one of the hardcopy downloads from the Bogotá clinic and slid it across the bartop at her. It was a vanity shot, system-generated to show clients what they’d look like when the swelling went down. In real time, that soon after surgery that cheap, Gray’s new face probably wouldn’t have looked amiss on a Jesusland lynching victim, but the man smiling up out of the clinic print looked uninjured and pleasantly unremarkable. Broad cheekbones, wide mouth, an off-the-rack Amerind makeover. Carl, eternally paranoid about these things, had Matthew go back into the clinic dataflow that night just to make sure they weren’t trying to fob him off with an image from stock. Matthew grumbled, but he did it, in the end probably just to prove he could. There was no doubt. Gray looked like this now.

The waitress glanced incuriously down at the print for a moment, then punched up an amount on the wafer that certainly wasn’t five soles. She nodded up the bar to where a bulky fair-haired male leaned at the other end, staring into a shot glass as if he hated it.

“Ask him.”

Carl’s hand whipped out, mesh-swift. He’d dosed up that morning. He hooked her index finger before it could hit the transaction key. He twisted slightly, just enough to take the slack out of the knuckle joints. He felt the finger bones lock tight.

“I’m asking you,” he said mildly.

“And I’m telling you.” If she was afraid, it didn’t show. “I know this face. He’s in here drinking with Rubio over there, two, maybe three times a week. That’s all I know. Now, you going to give me my finger back, or do I have to draw some attention to you? Maybe notify camp security?”

“No. What you have to do is introduce me to Rubio.”

“Well.” She gave him a withering look. “You only needed to ask.”

He let go of her and waited while she completed the transaction. She handed back the wafer, beckoned, and walked casually along her side of the bar until she was facing the blond and his shot glass. He tipped a glance at her, then sideways at Carl as he joined them, then back to her. Spoke English.

“Hey Gaby.”

“Hey Rubio. See this guy here?” She’d switched to English, too, heavily accented but fluent. “He’s looking for Rodriguez. Says he’s a friend.”

“That so?” Rubio shifted his weight a little to look directly at Carl. “You a friend of Rodriguez?”

“Yeah, we—”

And the knife came out.

Later, when he had time, Carl worked out the trick. The weapon had a cling-pad on the hilt, and the blond guy had probably pressed it up against the bar within easy reach as soon as he saw the waitress talking to the stranger. Carl’s careless approach—a friend of Rodriguez, yeah right—just closed the circuit. These two were Gray’s friends. They knew he’d have no others.

So Rubio grabbed the knife loose and stabbed Carl in the same blunt rush. The blade winked once in the low light as it came clear of the bartop shadow, ripped low through Carl’s jacket, and slugged to a halt in the weblar beneath. Gene-tweaked spiderweb mail, expensive stuff. But there was too much rage and hate behind the thrust to stop easily, and it was likely a monofil edge. Carl felt the tip get through and slice into him.

Because it wasn’t really unexpected, he was already moving, and the weblar gave him the luxury of not having to cover. He hit Rubio with a tanindo move—palm heel, twice, short, stabbing strikes, broke the man’s nose, crushed his temple, sent him sprawling away from the bar to the floor. The knife tugged loose again—nasty, grainy intimacy of metal in flesh—and he grunted as it came out. Rubio twitched and rolled on the floor, possibly already on his way to dead. Carl kicked him in the head to make sure.

Everything stopped.

People stared.

Beneath the weblar, he felt blood trickle down his belly from the wound the knife had left.

Behind him, Gaby was gone through the kitchen doorway. Also pretty much expected: his source had said she and Gray were close. Carl scrambled over the bar—savage flash of pain from the newly acquired wound—and went after her.

Through the kitchen—cramped, grimy space, gas ranges with blackened pans left to sit and a door to the outside still swinging wide with Gaby’s passage. Carl caught a couple of pan handles as he shimmied the narrow clearance, left clatter and clang in his wake. He burst through the door and out into an alley at the back of the building. Sudden sunlight blasted his vision. He squinted left. Right, and caught the waitress sprinting flat out up the hill. Looked like about a thirty-meter lead.

Good enough.

He took off running.

With the combat, the mesh had kicked in for real. It flushed him now, warm as the sun, and the pain in his side dropped to memory and a detached knowledge that he was bleeding. His field of vision sharpened on the woman running from him, peripherals smearing out with the brightness in the air. When she broke left, out of line-of-sight, he’d closed the gap by about a third. He reached the turn and hooked around, into another back alley, this one barely the width of his shoulders. Unpainted prefab walls with small, high-set windows, stacked sheets of construction plastic and alloy frames leaning at narrow angles, discarded drink cans on the dirt floor. His feet tangled momentarily in a loose wrap of polythene from one of the frames. Up ahead, Gaby had already ducked right. He didn’t think she’d looked back.

He reached the new corner and stopped dead, fighting down the urge to poke his head out. The right turn Gaby had taken was a main thoroughfare, paved in evercrete and loosely thronged with people. He squatted, dug out his Cebe lenses, and peeked around the corner at knee height. With the relief of not having to squint in the harsh light, he picked out Gaby’s fleeing form amid the crowd almost at once. She was glancing back over her shoulder, but it was clear she hadn’t seen him. There was no panic-stricken bolt, only a deep-drawn breath, and then she started to jog rapidly along the street. Carl watched her go for a few seconds, let the gap open up to a good fifty meters or more, then slid out into the street and followed, bent-kneed to keep his head low. It earned him a few strange looks, but no one spoke to him and more importantly, no one made any comment out loud.

He had, he reckoned with meshed clarity, about ten minutes. That was how long it would take news of the fight in the bar to reach someone in authority, and that someone to put a chopper into the air above the rectilinear streets of Garrod Horkan 9. If he hadn’t found Gray by then—game over.

Three blocks up, Gaby crossed the street abruptly and let herself into a single-story prefab. Carl saw her dig the matte-gray rectangle of a keycard out of her jeans and swipe it in the lock. The door opened, and she disappeared inside. Too far off to make out a number or name panel, but the place had hanging baskets of yellow-flowered cactus out front. Carl loped up to the near end of the ’fab, slipped into the alley between the building and its neighbor, and circled to the back. He found a bathroom window left open, levered it up, and heaved himself over the sill. Vague pain from the stab wound, sliced muscle moving against itself in a way it shouldn’t. He narrowly missed stepping into the toilet bowl, hopped sideways instead and crouched by the door, grimacing.

Voices came through the finger-thin wall, bassy with resonance but otherwise clear. Soundproofing on ’fab shells was pretty good these days, but if you wanted the same for interior partitioning, it cost. Not the sort of thing GH were going to provide at base; you’d have to buy the upgrade, and whoever lived here, Gaby or Gray, obviously hadn’t. Carl heard the woman’s accented English again, and then another voice he knew from filed audio playback.

“You stupid fucking bitch, why’d you come here?”

“I, you,” Her voice stumbled with hurt. “To warn you.”

“Yeah, and he’ll be right fucking behind you!”

A flat crack, open hand across her face. Carl caught the sudden jump of her breath through the wall, nothing more. She was tough, or used to this, or both. He eased down the door handle, cracked the door, and peered through. A big form jerked across his sliver of vision. An upthrown arm, gesturing, there and gone too fast to see if there was a weapon in the hand or not. Carl reached under his jacket for the Haag pistol. Something weighty went over with a thump in the next room.

“He’s probably tracking you right now, probably let you go so he could do it. You empty-headed cunt, you’ve—”

Now.

Carl threw the door open and found himself facing the two of them across a tiny living room laid with brightly colored rugs. Gray was half turned away, looming over a flinching Gaby, who had backed up and knocked over a tall potted plant by the front door. The reddened handprint was still visible on her face where he’d slapped her. More plants around the room, cheap painted ceramics and Pachamama icons on shelves, a small statue of some saint or other on a shelf, and a Spanish prayer in a frame on one wall. They were in Gaby’s house.

He pitched his voice hard and calm.

“That’s it, Frank. Game over.”

Gray turned slowly, deliberately and, fuck, yes, he had a weapon, a big black cannon of a handgun that seemed welded in the fist at the end of his right hand. A tiny part of Carl, a subroutine immune to the mesh and the betamyeline flooding the rest of his system, identified it as the murder weapon, the ’61 Smith caseless. Better than forty years old, but they said you could lockvoid that gun in orbit, swing around, pick it back up, and it’d still kill things like it just came out of the factory. For the first time in quite a while, he was grateful for the chilly bulk of the Haag in his own hand.

It didn’t help when Gray smiled at him.

“Hello there, UN man.”

Carl nodded. “Put the gun down, Frank. It’s over.”

Gray frowned as if seriously considering it. “Who sent you? Jesusland?”

“Brussels. Put the gun down, Frank.”

But the other man didn’t move at all. He could have been a holoshot on pause. Even the frown stayed on his face. Maybe deepened a little, as if Gray was trying to work out how the hell it had all come to this. “I know you, don’t I,” he said suddenly. “Marceau, right? The lottery guy?”

Keep him talking.

“Close. It’s Marsalis. I like the new face.”

“Do you?” The Smith still hung loose in his grip, arm at his side. Carl wondered if Gray was meshed yet. It’d make a difference to his speed if he was, but that wasn’t the real problem. The real problem was the difference it’d make to Gray’s attitude. “Try to fit in, you know. Deru kui wa utareru.”

“I don’t think so.”

“No?” And the slow, alarming smile Carl had hoped he wouldn’t see.

“You were never going to get hammered down, Frank. None of us does, that’s our problem. And that’s an appalling Japanese accent. Want my advice, you’d be better off delivering your folk wisdom in English.”

“I don’t.” The smile became a grin. He was going, sliding into the crack. “Want your advice, that is.”

“Why don’t you put the gun down, Frank?”

“You want a fucking list?”

“Frank.” Carl stayed absolutely still. “Look at my hand. That’s a Haag pistol. Even if you get me, I don’t have to do more than scratch you on the way down. It is over. Why don’t you try to salvage something?”

“Like you have, you mean?” Gray shook his head. “I’m nobody’s puppy, UN man.”

“Oh grow up, Frank.” The sudden snap of the anger in his own voice was a surprise. “We’re all somebody’s puppy. You want to get dead, go right fucking ahead and make me do it. They pay me just the same.”

Gray tautened visibly. “Yeah, I’ll bet they fucking do.”

Carl got a grip on his own feelings. He made a slow, damping motion with his free hand. “Look—”

“Look, nothing.” A mirthless grin. “I know my score. Three Euro-cops, couple of Jesusland state troopers. You think I don’t know what that means?”

“It’s Brussels, man. They got jurisdiction. You don’t have to die. They’ll put you away, but—”

“Yeah, they’ll put me away. You ever spend time in the tract?”

“No. But it can’t be a lot worse than Mars, and you were going there anyway.”

Gray shook his head. “Wrong. On Mars, I’ll be free.”

“That’s not what it’s like, Frank.”

Gaby ran at him, screaming.

There wasn’t a lot of space to cross, and she’d come more than halfway, hands up, fingers splayed like talons, when he shot her. The Haag gun made a deep cough, and the slug caught her somewhere high in the right shoulder. It spun her completely around and knocked her into Gray, who was already raising the Smith. He got off a single shot, a sprung-sounding boom in the tiny room, and the wall blew apart at Carl’s left ear. Deafened, stung in the face and side of the head with impact fragments, Carl threw himself clumsily sideways and put four slugs into the other man. Gray staggered backward like a boxer taking heavy blows, hit the far wall, and thumped down into a sitting position on the floor. The Smith was still in his hand. He stared up at Carl for a moment, and Carl, moving cautiously closer, shot him twice again in the chest. Then he watched carefully, gun still leveled, until the life dimmed out of Gray’s eyes.

Biotech account—closed.

On the floor, Gaby tried to prop herself up and slipped on some of her own blood. The wound in her shoulder was leaking copiously down her arm and onto the gaily colored rug under her. Haag shells were designed to stay in the body—the wall behind Gray was pristine—but they made a lot of mess going in. She looked up at him, making a tiny panicked grunting in the back of her throat over and over.

He shook his head.

“I’ll go and get some help,” he said, in Quechua.

He stepped past her to the front door and opened it.

Then, in the flood of light from outside, he swiveled quietly and shot her once more, through the back of the head.

CHAPTER 2

They arrested him, of course.

Drawn by the gunfire, a squad of body-armored camp security came scuttling up the street, clinging to the cover of building edges and stopped vehicles like so many man-size beetles. Sunlight gleamed on their dull blue chest carapaces and the tops of their helmets, glinted off the barrels of the short, blunt assault rifles they carried. They were as silent as beetles, too—in all probability, their gh-stamped riot gear and weaponry came with an induction mike and coms link package. He imagined it from their point of view. Hushed, shocked voices on the wire. Goggle-eyed vision.

They found Carl seated cross-legged on the steps up to the prefab’s front door, hands offered outward, palms up. It was a tanindo meditation stance, one he’d learned from Sutherland, but he was anything but meditative. The effects of the mesh were ebbing now, and the pain from his injured side was beginning to creep back. He breathed through it and kept his body immobile. Watched intently as the security squad crept up the street toward him. He’d set out the Haag pistol and his Agency license in the street a good four or five meters away from where he sat, and as soon as the first armored form nosed up to him, assault rifle slanting down from the shoulder, he lifted his hands slowly into the air above his head. The boy in the riot gear was breathing harshly; under the helmet and goggles his young face was taut with stress.

“I am a genetic licensing agent,” Carl recited loudly in Spanish. “Retained under contract by UNGLA. That’s my authorization, lying there in the street with my gun. I am unarmed.”

The rest of the squad moved up, weapons similarly leveled. They were all in their teens. A slightly older squad leader arrived and took stock, but his sweat-dewed face didn’t look any more confident. Carl sat still and repeated himself. He needed to get through to them before they looked inside the ’fab. He needed to establish some authority, even if it wasn’t his. Inside the high-tech riot gear, these were conscripts just like the ones he’d ridden into town with. Most of them would have left school at fourteen, some even earlier. The European Court might mean next to nothing to them, and their attitude toward the UN was likely to be ambivalent at best, but the Agency license was an impressive-looking piece of plastic and hologear. With luck, it would weigh in the balance when they found the bodies.

The squad leader lowered his rifle, knelt beside the license, and picked it up. He tipped the holoshot back and forth, comparing it with Carl’s face. He stood up and prodded the Haag gun doubtfully with the toe of his boot.

“We heard shots,” he said.

“Yes, that’s correct. I attempted to arrest two suspects in an UNGLA live case and they attacked me. They’re both dead.”

Looks shuttled back and forth among the young, helmeted faces. The captain nodded at two of his squad, a boy and a girl, and they slid to the sides of the prefab door. The girl called a warning into the house.

“There’s no one alive in there,” Carl told them. “Really.”

The two squad members took the door in approved fashion, swung inside and banged about from room to room, shouting their redundant warnings to surrender. The rest of them waited, weapons still leveled on Carl. Finally, the female member of the entry team came out with her assault rifle slung, crossed to the captain, and muttered in his ear. Carl saw how the squad leader’s face darkened with anger as he listened. When the girl had finished her report, he nodded and took off his sun lenses. Carl sighed and met the customary stare. The same old mix, fear and disgust. And this young man was already unfastening a blue plastic binding loop from his belt. He pointed at Carl like something dirty.

“You, get up,” he said coldly. “Get your fucking hands behind your back.”

By the time they cut him loose again, his fingers were numb and his shoulders ached in their sockets from trying to press his wrists closer together. They’d drawn the loop savagely tight—even clenching his fists as they did it hadn’t won him much slack when he relaxed his hands again, and the tension in his arms tended to force his wrists apart so that however he positioned himself, the loop cut into flesh. On top of the stab wound in his side, it wasn’t what he needed.

They’d found the injury when they searched him, but they were more concerned with emptying his pockets than treating him for damage. They didn’t take off the binding loop. As long as he didn’t die in custody, he guessed they didn’t much care what shape he was in. At the camp security center, they cut back his clothing; a barely interested medic prodded around the wound, declared it superficial, sprayed it with antibac, glued it shut, and taped a dressing to it. No analgesics. Then they left him in a lightly piss-scented plastic holding cell while the GH director pretended for two hours that he had more pressing matters to attend to than a double shooting in his camp.

Carl spent the time going over the confrontation with Gray, looking for a way to play it that didn’t leave Gaby dead. He measured the angles, the words he’d used, the way the conversation had developed. He came to the same conclusion a dozen times. There was only one sure procedure that would have saved Gaby’s life, and that was to shoot Gray dead the moment he stepped out of the bathroom.

Sutherland would have been pissed off, he knew.

No such thing as time travel, he’d rumbled patiently once. Only live with what you’ve done, and try in the future to only do what you’re happy to live with. That’s the whole game, soak, that’s all there is.

Hard on the heels of the memory, Carl’s own thoughts came looking for him.

I don’t want to do this anymore.

Finally, two members of the security squad, male and unarmored, came and marched him out of the cell without removing the loop, then took him to a small office at the other end of the security station. The camp director sat on one corner of a desk swinging his leg and watched as they cut Carl loose without ceremony. The solvent squirt left a couple of drops on his skin that scorched. It didn’t feel accidental.

“I’m very sorry about this,” the director said, in English and without visible remorse. He was pretty much the type, a tall, midforties white guy in designer casuals that approximated light trekking gear. His name, Carl knew from previous research, was Axel Bailey, but he didn’t offer it, or his hand.

“So am I.”

“Yes, clearly you’ve been detained unnecessarily. But if you had identified yourself before running around my camp playing at detective, we might have avoided a lot of unpleasantness.”

Carl said nothing, just rubbed at his hands and waited for the pain as his hands renewed their acquaintance with blood flow.

Bailey cleared his throat.

“Yes, well, we’ve confirmed that Rodriguez was in fact who you claim he was. Some kind of slipup in vetting there, it looks like. Anyway, your office wants you to contact them with a preliminary statement on the shooting, but since we won’t contest the jurisdiction, of course, there’ll be no need for more than that at this stage. However, I would like your assurance that you will file a full report with COLIN as soon as you get back to London, citing our cooperation. If that’s agreed, you’re free to go, and in fact we can assist you with transport out.”

Carl nodded. The first traceries of pain branched spikily out through the flesh of his fingers. “Got it. You want me gone before the press come looking for the story.”

Bailey’s mouth compressed to a thin line.

“I’m having you helicoptered directly to Arequipa,” he said evenly, “so you can get a connecting flight home. Think of it as a gesture of goodwill. Your gun and your license will be returned to you there.”

“No.” Carl shook his head. Under the UNGLA mandate, he could in theory have commandeered the helicopter anyway. In theory. “You’ll give the gun and the license back to me yourself, right now.”

“I beg your—”

“The Haag pistol is UNGLA property. It’s illegal for anyone unauthorized to be in possession of one. Go and get it.”

Bailey’s leg stopped swinging. He met Carl’s gaze for a moment, presumably saw what was there, and cleared his throat. He nodded at one of the security guards, visibly reading his name off the lettering on the breast pocket of his uniform.

“Ah, Sanchez. Go and fetch Mr. Marsalis’s personal effects.”

The security guard turned to leave.

“No.” Carl peeled Sanchez a glance and watched him stop with his hand on the door. He knew he was being childish, but he couldn’t seem to stop himself. He looked back at the director. “I said you go and get it for me.”

Bailey flushed. He came off the edge of the desk. “Listen to me, Marsalis, you don’t—”

Carl closed one painfully fizzing fist up with the other hand. He grimaced. The director’s voice dried up.

“You go and get it for me,” Carl repeated softly.

The moment held, and popped. Still flushing to the roots of his carefully styled hair, Bailey shouldered past and opened the door.

“You watch him,” he snapped at the security guards, and stalked out. Carl saw a grin slip between the two men. He rubbed at his fist some more, shifted to the other hand.

“So which of you two humanitarians spotted me with the cuffmelt?”

The grin vanished into hostile watchfulness and a stiff silence that lasted until Bailey came back with his stuff and the paperwork to match.

“You’ll have to witness for these,” he said sulkily.

Camp security had bagged everything in a forty-centimeter-wide isolation strip, each item gripped tight in the vacuum-sealed plastic. Carl took the strip, unrolled it on the desk to check that everything was there. He pointed at the storage key.

“This is for a locker down by the bus park,” he said. “My pack’s in it.”

“You can collect it on your way to the helicopter,” Bailey said and flicked the release form impatiently at him. “I’ll have my men escort you.”

Carl took the form and laid it on the desk, tore the activation cover off the holorecorder decal in the corner, and leaned over it.

“Carl Marsalis, SIN s810dr576,” he droned, words worn smooth on his tongue with their familiarity “UNGLA authorization code 31 jade. I hereby state that the items on this list are the full complement of property taken from me by GH camp security on June 18, 2107, and now returned to me, date the same.”

He thumbed the disk to seal it and slid the form away from him across the surface of the desk. A curious suffocating sensation had settled over him as he recited the witness statement, as if it were he and not his personal effects vacuum-sealed in the transparent plastic.

I don’t want to do this anymore.

No, that wasn’t it. He looked up and saw the way Bailey and the two security guards were watching him.

I don’t want to be this anymore.

So.

Choppered out of camp, tilting across the brilliant blue of the lake and then on through bleak, mountainous beauty as they picked their way down from the altiplano to Arequipa. Helicopters like this had smart systems navigation that ran off a real-time satellite model of local terrain and weather, which meant the thing practically flew itself. Still, the pilot stolidly ignored him for the whole flight. He sat alone in the passenger compartment and stared out of the window at the landscape below, idly mapping it onto his memories from Mars. The similarities were obvious—it wasn’t just the thin air COLIN was up here simulating—but in the end, this was still home, with a sky-blue sky up above and the broad sweep of a big-planet horizon out ahead and the slow rolling weight of one full g pulling at your bones.

Accept no substitute. Slogans from the Earth First party political broadcasts blipped through his head. Don’t listen to the corporate hype. Keep your feet on the ground. Fight for a better life here and a better world now.

In the airport at Arequipa, he used his UNGLA credentials to hook a sleeper-class seat aboard the next direct flatline flight to Miami with Delta. He’d have preferred suborbital, but for that you still had to go to Lima, and it probably wasn’t worth the extra time and hassle the detour would take. This way at least he could get some rest. There was about an hour to wait, so he bought over-the-counter codeine, took double the advised dosage, and chased it with something generic from a departure-lounge Buenos Aires Beef Co. outlet. He munched his way through the franchise food on the observation deck, not really tasting it, staring out at the snowcapped volcanic cone of El Misti and wondering if there really, truly wasn’t something else he could do for a living.

Sure. Go talk to Zooly when you get back, see if she’s looking for doormen for the midweek slot.

Sour grin. They started calling his flight. He finished the cold remnants of his pampaburger olé, wiped his fingers, and went.

He slept badly on the flight to Miami, ticked with dreams of Felipe Souza’s silent passageways and the faint terror that Gaby’s ghost was drifting after him in the low-g quiet, face composed and miraculously undistorted by the shot that had killed her, her brains drip-drooling darkly down out of the hole he’d blown in the back of her skull. Variation on a theme, but nothing new—just it was usually another woman who came floating up behind him in the deserted spacecraft, never quite touching him, whispering sibilantly into his ear above the dead-hush whine of silence.

He jolted awake, sweatily, to the pilot’s announcement that they were starting their descent into Miami and that the airport was locked down under a security scare, so no connecting flights would be taking off for the foreseeable future. Local accommodation options could be accessed through—

Fuck.

The Virgin suborb shuttle would have put him in the sky over London forty-five minutes after it took off from Miami. He could have been home for last orders at Banners and his own bed under the tree-flanked eaves of the Crouch End flat. Could have drifted awake late the next morning to the sound of birds outside the window and cloud-fractured sunlight filtering through the bright leaves. Some British summer downtime at last—with the wound, the Agency would have no choice—and the whole Atlantic between him and the emotional topography of MarsPrep.

Instead, he carried his suitcase along broad, bright concourses lined with ten-by-two-meter holoscreens that admonished think it’s all red rocks and airlocks? think again and we only send winners to mars. Miami was a transamericas hub, and that meant a hub for every company involved in the Western Nations Colony Initiative. Some color-supplement journalist with access to more mainframe time than she deserved estimated, for a piece of inflight fluff he’d read a couple of years ago, at present every seventh person passing through Miami International does so on business related, directly or indirectly, to Mars and the COLIN program. That figure is set to rise. These days it was probably more like one in four.

He rode slideways and escalators up through it all, still feeling vaguely numb from the codeine. On the far side of the terminal complex, he checked into the new MIA Marriott, took a room with a skyline view, and ordered a medical check from the room service options. He charged it all on the Agency jack. As a contractor, he had fairly limited expense credit—working undercover in any case made for mostly wafer and cash transactions, which he then had to claim back as part of his fee—but with a worst-case couple of days left till he could get back to London and officially close the file on Gray, there was still a lot of meat on the account.

Time to use it.

In the room, he stripped off jacket and weblar mail shirt, dumped his soiled clothing in a heap on the floor, and soaked under a hot shower for fifteen minutes. The mesh was gone, back into its spinal lair, and he was a catalog of bruises he could feel through the thinning veils of codeine. The glued wound in his side tugged at him every time he moved.

He dried himself with big fluffy Marriott towels and was putting on the cleanest of his worn canvas trousers when the door chimed. He grabbed a T-shirt, looked down at the wound, and shrugged. Not much point in getting dressed. He dropped the shirt again and went to the door still stripped to the waist.

The in-house doctor was a personable young Latina who’d maybe served her internship in some Republican inner-city hospital, because she barely raised one groomed eyebrow when he showed her the knife wound.

“Been in Miami long?” she asked him.

He smiled, shook his head. “It didn’t happen here. I just got in.”

“I see.” But he didn’t get the smile back. She stood behind him and pressed long, cool fingers around the wound, testing the glue. She wasn’t particularly gentle about it. “So are you one of our illustrious military advisers?”

He switched to English. “What, with this accent?”

A tiny bend to the lips now as she moved around to face him again. “You’re British? I’m sorry, I thought—”

“Forget it. I hate those motherfuckers, too.” That he’d killed one in a bar in Caracas last year, he didn’t mention. Not yet, anyway. He went back to Spanish. “You got family in Venezuela?”

“Colombia. But it’s the same story down there, only for coca, not oil. And for longer. Been going on since my grandparents got out, and it’s never going to change.” She went to her bag where it sat on the desk and fished out a handheld echo imager. “You wouldn’t believe some of the things my cousins tell me.”

Carl thought about the uniforms he’d seen on the streets of Bogotá a few weeks ago. A summary beating he’d witnessed.

“No, I would believe you,” he said.

She knelt in front of him and touched the wound again, more gently now. Improbably, her fingers seemed warmer. She ran the imager back and forth a couple of times, then got to her feet again. He caught a gust of her scent as she came up. As it happened, their eyes met and she saw that he’d smelled her. There was a brief, flaring moment, and then she retreated to her bag. She dug out dressings and cleared her throat, raised brows and sideways-slanted eyes at what had just happened.

“There’s not much I can do for you that hasn’t already been done,” she said, a little hurriedly. “Whoever glued you up knew what they were doing. It’s a good job, should heal quickly enough. Did they spray it?”

“Yeah, they did.”

“Do you want anything for the pain?”

“The pain’s under control.”

“Well, I’ll dress it again, if you like, unless you’re planning to shower now.”

“I’ve just had a shower.”

“Okay, well, in that case I can leave—”

“Would you like to have dinner with me?”

She smiled then, properly.

“I’m married,” she said, holding up the hand and the plain gold ring on it. “I don’t do that.”

“Oh hey, I’m sorry. I didn’t notice,” he lied.

“No problem.” She smiled again, but there was disbelief etched into it, and the tone of her voice said she wasn’t fooled. “Are you sure you don’t want any painkillers? I’m going to charge you the rate minimum, they’d come as standard with that.”

“No, I’m all right,” he said.

So she packed up her bag, gave him one more smile, and left him to put his own dressings on.

He went out.

It probably wasn’t smart, but sense memory of the unattainable doctor drove him. Her fingers on him, her scent, her voice. The way she’d knelt in front of him.

An autocab took him east from the airport, cruising broad, multi-laned streets. Most places were still open—LCLS glow from the frontages beckoned, but still seemed oddly distant, like the lights of a seafront town seen from offshore. He guessed it was the codeine, maybe playing off something in the mesh. For a while he was happy to watch it roll past. Then, as the traffic started to thicken, he got out at random where the lights seemed brightest. An avenue named after some Cuban Repossession hero, bronze beachhead-and-bayonet plaque fixed into the brickwork at the corner. Remixed Zequina and Reyes classics splashing out of propped-wide doorways, tanned flesh flexing within or strutting the street around him. It was warm and muggy, and dress ran to billowing scraps of silk over swimwear for the women, linen or tight leather jeans and bared chests for the men. On skin alone, Carl would have blended in well enough—it was one of the few things he liked about Miami—but he’d blown it with his wardrobe. Canvas trousers, the lightest of his trail shoes, and a bradbury bubble ’97 T-shirt. He looked like a fucking tourist.

In the end, tired of the flickering he don’t belong glances from the local streetlife, he ducked off the main drag and sank himself in the gloom of a club called Picante. It was seedy and half empty and no closer to his fantasies of how his evening would turn out than the screen ad he’d seen outside the bar in Garrod Horkan 9 was to Caribbean reality. In the back of his mind, there’d been this vague storyboard of images in which he met the Latina doctor—well, a close substitute, anyway—in some classy salsa bar full of dance-lights glittering off cocktail glasses and good teeth. Segue to the easy, low-light surroundings of some other more intimate place, equally upscale, and then the homestretch to her place, wherever that might be. Fresh sheets on a big bed and the cries of an uninhibited woman in the throes of orgasm. Fading out, satiated, in the shadowed, temporary comfort of a strange woman’s nighttime home.

Well, you got the shadows, he admitted to himself with a sour grin. Picante ran to a couple of LCLS dance panels not much bigger across than his hotel bathroom, a traditional straight-line bar, and wall lighting that seemed designed in kindness to the handful of fairly obvious prostitutes who hung around the tables, smoking and waiting to be asked to dance. Carl got himself a drink—they didn’t have Red Stripe, he settled for something called Torero, then wished he hadn’t—and installed himself at the bar near the door. It might have been professional caution or just the odd comfort that being able to see the street outside gave him—the sense that he didn’t have to stay here if he didn’t want to.

But he was still there, nearly an hour later, when she came in and parked herself beside him at the bar. The barman drifted across, wiping a glass.

“Hi. Give me a whiskey cola. Lot of ice. Hey there.”

This last, Carl realized, was directed at him. He looked up from the dregs of his latest beer and nodded, trying to calibrate in the dim light. Trying to decide if she was working.

“You don’t look like you’re having a whole lot of fun there,” she said.

“I don’t?”

“No. You don’t.”

She was no doctora from the Marriott—her features were sharper and paler, her body curves less generous, and her mestiza hair less groomed. No wedding band, either, just a scatter of cheap and ornate silver rings across both hands. Bodice top made to look like it was sculpted metal, too, clasping her to just below the armpits, midthigh skirt in dark contrast, the inevitable wrenching heels. There was taut coffee-colored flesh on display, thighs below the skirt, shoulders and the slope of pushed-up breasts above the bodice, belly button slice between where the two garments didn’t quite meet—but no more than street standard in this heat, didn’t have to mean anything either way. Makeup a little on the heavy side, a little caked in the pores on the side of her nose. Yeah, she was working. He stopped trying to kid himself, hung for a moment over his decision like a skydiver in the hatch, then let go.

“I just got in,” he said. “Business trip, I’m still kind of wired.”

“Yeah?” She tipped her head on one side, crossed her legs in his direction. The skirt slid up her thighs. “You want some help with that?”

Later, elsewhere, and helped out of his tension like it was a tight pair of leather trousers he couldn’t take off alone, he lay slumped up against the headboard and watched her move about in the white-blasted cubic environment of the en suite. From the foot of the bed to the open bathroom door wasn’t much more than a meter, but it felt as if she’d stepped off into a parallel universe. Her actions seemed to be taking place at a profound distance; even the small bathroom noises, splash and swill of water, click of makeup utilities, were all somehow muffled as if he were staring through a thick-glassed observation panel into some cramped vivarium in an alien-world zoo.

Come see the humans.

See them mate in authentic surroundings.

A grimace twitched through him, too deeply buried to register in the muscles of his face.

See the female’s postcoital douching ritual.

Another buried tremor of intent told him to get up off the bed, get dressed, and get the fuck out. There was really nothing else left to do. She’d run his wafer as soon as they’d gotten through the door—swiped it up the crack in the reader with the same clinical competence that she’d later employed to spray-coat his swollen cock and slot it inside her. Then he got some basic pay-per-view tricks—sucking her own fingers as he thrust into her, squeezing her own breasts as she rode him—a couple of well-timed posture changes, and a crescendo of throaty moaning until he blew. Now streetlighting and a tree outside made yellowish swaying shadows across the wall and ceiling of the darkened room, the alkaline smell of recent sex seeped out of the sheets tangled around his waist, and suddenly he felt old and tired and very slightly ill. The wound in his side had started to hurt again, and he thought the dressing might be coming off.

Intention made it to his motor system. He sat up and swung his legs off the side of the bed. In the bathroom universe, the toilet flushed. For some reason, the sound speeded him up, and by the time she came out he’d found his trousers and was stepping into them.

“You going?” she asked dully.

“Yeah, I think it’s that time, you know.” He hooked his shirt off one arm of the couch and shouldered his way into it. “I’m tired and you, well I guess you got places to be, right?”

Silence. She stood there, looking at him. He heard a tiny clicking sound as she swallowed, then a wet gulp. Abruptly he realized that she was crying in the gloom. He stopped, awkward and halfway into his shirt, peering at her. The gulp became a genuine sob. She turned away from him, hugging herself.

“Listen,” he said.

“No, you go.” The voice was hard and almost unblurred by the tears, schooled by the trade he supposed. She wasn’t milking for effect, unless her method acting ran better to grief than sexual ecstasy. He stood behind her, looked at the untidy ropes of her hair where it had frizzed in the damp heat.

Images of the back of Gaby’s head coming apart.

He grimaced, put his hand on her shoulder with a hesitation that should have been broad farce after the cheap intimacy he’d purchased from her twenty minutes ago. She flinched slightly at his touch.

“I’m pregnant,” she said.

It ricocheted off the corner of his mind, and for a moment he thought he’d misheard. Then, when she didn’t repeat it, he took his hand off her shoulder. She’d fished the Trojan spray can from her bag with the professional dexterity of a blindfolded circus performer, used it on him the same way. There’d been a coolly reassuring comfort to watching her do it, a sense that he—idiot grin—was in good hands. Now the same idiot part of him felt betrayed by this admission of previous error, almost as if she were accusing him of having something to do with it himself.

“Well,” he said experimentally. “I mean, can’t you. You know.”

Her shoulders shook. “This is Florida. Been illegal down here for decades now. You gotta go to the Union or Rimside, and I don’t have the parity payments on my medicode for that. I could sell everything I own and still not have enough.”

“And there’s no one here who—”

“Didn’t you hear me. It’s fucking illegal, man.”

A little professional competence, a sense of being on his home ground, asserted itself. “Yeah, legal’s got nothing to do with it. Not what I meant. There’ll be places you can go.”

She turned to face him, palm-heeling the tears off one cheek. The streaks it left gleamed as they caught the streetlight falling into the room. She snorted. “Yeah, places you can go, maybe. Places the governor’s daughter can go. You think I have that kind of money? Or maybe you think I want to risk a back-alley scrape-bar, come home bleeding to death inside or collapse from enzyme clash because they were too cheap to run the specs right. Where you from, man? It costs a lot of fucking money to get sick around here.”

It was on the tip of his tongue to tell her to fuck off. It wasn’t his problem, he hadn’t signed on for this shit. Instead, he saw Gaby’s head come apart again and, as if from a distance, he heard himself saying quietly: “How much do you need?”

Fuck it. He derailed his rising irritation at the girl, at himself, retargeted it north and east. Let fucking UNGLA pay for something worthwhile for a change. Not like they can’t afford it. Let that piece of shit di Palma query it if he fucking dares.

When he’d calmed her down, stopped her crying, and stemmed her protestations of gratitude before they started to sound hollow, he explained that he’d need a datapoint to download the credit to wafers she could use. That might mean going back to the hotel. At that, she clutched his hand, and he guessed she was terrified that if she let him out of her sight, or at least out of the neighborhood, he’d change his mind. She knew a datapoint that was secure a couple of blocks over, one of her clients from downtown used it now and then. She could show him where it was, right now, she’d get dressed, wouldn’t take a moment.

The streets outside were pretty much deserted, the neighborhood was low-end semi-residential, and at this hour people were either inside or downtown. There was alloy shuttering on all the storefronts; bright yellow decals announced the anti-tampering charges lurking in the metal. A couple of bars were still open, showing dim neon signs over corner doorways like weak urban lighthouses. Outside one, a flock of aspiring street thugs propped themselves against walls and perched on parked vehicles, staring dangerously at the few passersby. Carl felt the mesh come gently, suggestively online. He ignored it and avoided gazes instead, put an arm around the girl’s shoulder, and picked up the pace a little. He heard the boys talking about him in a densely arcane dialect of Spanglish as they fell behind. It didn’t take much imagination to work out what was being said. Fucking tourists, fucking foreigners, fucking our women. The age-old plaint. He couldn’t really blame them. Then they were lost around a corner and instead music floated down from a window jacked open for the heat, clumpy Cuban jazz that sounded like someone playing the piano with their fists.

The datapoint was a blunt concrete outcrop two meters tall and about the same wide, swelling from the wall of a commercial unit like some kind of architectural tumor. It was fitted with a solid tantalum alloy door. Heavily grilled LCLS panels set into the top of the structure threw down a pale crystalline light. Carl stepped into the radiance and felt, ludicrously, like some kind of stage performer. He punched his general access code into the pad, and the door cycled open. Old memories and scar tissue from Caracas made him usher the girl inside and bang a fist on the rapid-lock button as soon as they were both in. The door cycled again.

The interior was much the same as secure modules he’d used the world over, an iris reader mask on a flexible stalk, a broad screen edged with an integral speaker and set above a wafer dispenser, a double-width chair molded up from the floor, presumably for obese patrons rather than courting couples. The girl, in any case, stayed discreetly on her feet, looked pointedly away from the screen. She really had been here with clients before.

“Hello, sir,” said the datapoint chattily. “Would you like to hear the customer options available to—”

“No.” Carl fitted the iris reader over his head, blinked a couple of times into the lens cups, and waited for the chime that told him he’d been read. Idly he wondered what would happen if he ever had to do this with a black eye.

“Thank you, sir. You may now access your accounts.”

He took the credit in ten limited-load wafers, reasoning that the girl wouldn’t want to trust a clandestine clinic with a single upfront payment. As he handed them to her in the cramped space, he realized that he didn’t know her name. A couple of seconds after that, the second realization hit home, that he didn’t really want to. She took the wafers in silence, looking him up and down in a way that made him think she might try to give him a gratitude blow job there in the cabin. But then she muttered thanks in a voice so low he almost missed it and he wondered if he was, after all, just one more sick-headed fuck with an overactive imagination. He thumped the lock stud again and the door cycled open on a compressed sigh. He followed her out.

“Okay, boy! Get your motherfucking hands up where I can see them!”

The yell was off to his left; the shapes that jumped him came from both sides. The mesh leapt alive like joy. He grabbed an arm, locked it, and hurled its owner toward the dying echo of the voice. Curses and stumbling. The other figure tried to grapple with him, there was some technique in there somewhere, but…he yanked hard, got a warding arm down, and smashed an elbow into the face behind. He felt the nose break. Pain wrung a high yelp from his attacker. He stepped, hooked with one foot, and pushed. The one with the broken nose went down. There was another one, coming back from the left again. He spun about, fierce grin and crooked hands, saw his target. Blocky, slope-shouldered, fading pro-wrestler type. Carl feinted, then kicked him in the belly as he rushed in. Sobbing grunt and the solid feel of a good connecting strike, but the big man’s impetus carried him forward and Carl had to dance sharply aside to avoid being taken down.

Then someone clubbed him in the head from behind.

He heard it coming, felt the motion in the air at his ear, was turning toward the attack, but way too late to get clear. Black exploded through him, speckled with tiny, tiny sparks. He pivoted and went down in the crystalline light around the datapoint. His vision inked out, inked back in. Another blunt figure came and stood over him. Through the waltzing colors that washed up and down behind his eyes, he saw a gun muzzle and stopped struggling.

“Miami Vice, asshole. You stay down or I’ll drill a hole right in your fucking head.”

They arrested him of course.

CHAPTER 3

6:13 AM.

Low strands of cloud in a rinsed-out, predawn sky. Last night’s drizzle still sequined on the black metal carapaces of the rap-rep shuttles, evercrete landing apron damp with it, and spots of rain still in the air. Joey Driscoll came out of the canteen with a tall canister of self-heating coffee in each hand, arms spread wide as if to balance the weight, eyes heavy lidded with end-of-shift drowse. His mouth unzipped in a cavernous yawn.

The siren hit, upward-winding like the threat of a gigantic dentist’s drill.

“Oh for fuck’s sake…”

For a moment he stood in weary disbelief—then the coffee canisters hit the evercrete and he was running resignedly for the tackle room. Above his head, the sirens made it to their first hitched-in breath and started the cranking whine all over again. Big LCLS panels on the hangar lintels lit with flashing amber. Off to the left, under the sirens, he heard the deeper-throated grind of the rapid-response shuttles’ turbines kicking in. Maybe a minute and a half tops before they hit pitch. Two more minutes for crew loading and then they’d be lifting, dipping and bopping on the apron like dogs trying to tug loose from a tight leash. Anyone late aboard was going to get their balls cut off.

He made the tackle room door just as Zdena darted out of it, tactical vest still not fully laced on, helmet dangling off the lower edge, XM still long-stocked in her hand from standing in the rack. Widemouthed Slavic grin as she saw him.

“Where’s my fucking coffee, Joe?” She had to shout over the sirens.

“Back there on the concrete. You want it, go lick it up.” He gestured up in exasperation at the noise. “I mean, fuck. Forty minutes to shift change, and we get this shit.”

“Why they pay us, cowboy.”

She snapped the XM’s stock down to carbine length and secured it there, shoved the weapon into the long stick-grip sheath on her thigh, and focused on pulling the buckles tight on her tac vest. Joe shouldered past her.

“They pay us?”

Into the riot of the tackle room at alert. A dozen other bodies, yelling, cursing at their superannuated gear, laughing out the tension like dogs barking. Joe grabbed vest, helmet, T-mask off the untidy piles on the counter, didn’t bother putting any of it on. Experience had taught him to do that in the belly of the rap-rep as it tilted out over the Pacific. He gripped the upright barrel of an XM in its recess on the rack, struggled briefly with it as the release catch failed to give, finally snapped the assault rifle free and headed back for the door.

Forty fucking minutes, man.

Zdena was already sitting on the lowered tailgate of Blue One, helmet fitted loosely, unmasked, grinning at him as he panted up and hauled himself, ass slithering, aboard. She leaned in to yell above the screech of the turbines. “Hey, cowboy. You ready for rock and roll?”

He could never work out if she was hamming up the Natasha accent or not. They hadn’t been working together that long; she’d come in with the new hires at the end of May. He figured—and etiquette said you never never asked—she was probably licensed outland labor, at least as legal as he was these days. He doubted she’d hopped the fence the way he had, though. More likely she was across from the Siberian coastal strip or maybe one of those Russian factory rafts farther south, part of that fucking Pacific Rim labor fluidity they were always talking about. Of course, for all he knew, she might even be West Coast born and bred. Out here, mangled English didn’t necessarily signify anything. Wasn’t like back in the Republic, where they blanket-enforced Amanglic, punished the kids in school for speaking anything else. In the Rim States, English was strictly a trade tongue—you learned it to the extent you needed it, which, depending on the barrio you grew up in, didn’t have to be that much.

“You gotta”—still panting from the sprint, no breath to yell—“stop watching all those old movies, Zed. This is gonna be a fucking punt around the deep-water mark. Scaring the shit out of some idiot plankton farmer who’s forgotten to upgrade his clear tags for the month. Fucking waste of time.”

“I don’t think, Joe.” Zdena nodded out along the line of shuttles. “Is four boats they got powering up. Lot of firepower for plankton farmer.”

“Yeah, yeah. You’ll see.”

The dust-off went pretty smoothly, for their ship anyway, last month’s practice drills paying off, it seemed, despite the groans. Eight troops in, standard deployment strength, all webbed into their crash seats along the inner walls of the shuttle’s belly, grinning tension grins. Joe had his tactical vest all hooked up by then, vital signs wired in, though he wondered if anyone bothered to look at that shit anymore now they’d downgraded cockpit command crew from three to two. But at least the automeds would look after him in a firefight, and in the final analysis the vest was somewhere to hang all the spare XM magazines and boarding tools.

Briefing came in over the comset in his ear, drummed from the speakers set in the roof of the shuttle like an echo.

This is a class-two aerial breach incursion, repeat class-two incursion, we expect no combat—

He leaned out and nodded triumphantly down the line at Zdena—Told you fucking so.

—but maintain combat alertness nonetheless. Mask and gloves to be worn throughout mission, apply anticontaminant gel as for biohazard operations. Please note, there is no reason to assume a biohazard situation, these are precautions only. We have a downed COLIN spacecraft, repeat a downed COLIN spacecraft inside coastal limits—

Zdena shot him the look right back again.

“Fucking spaceship?” someone yelped from the row of seats on the other wall.

—medical teams will stand by until Blue Squad completes a sweep. Be prepared to encounter crash casualties. Squad division in deployment teams as follows, team alpha, Driscoll on point, Hernandez and Zhou to follow. Team beta…

He tuned it out, old news. Current rotations put him at the sharp end of deployment for the next three weeks. Now he couldn’t make up his mind if he was pissed at that or glad. This was going to be a fucking trip. Outside of TV, and a couple of virtual tours of the COLIN museum in Santa Cruz, he’d never seen a real spaceship, but one thing he did know—they didn’t land those fucking things on Earth. Not since the nanorack towers went up everywhere, disappearing into the clouds like black-and-steel beanstalks from that stupid fucking story his gran used to tell him when he was a kid. The only spaceships Joe knew about outside of historical footage were the ones that occasionally cropped up at the slow end of the news feeds, docking serenely at the mushroom top flanges of those fairy-tale stalks into the sky, their only impact economic. Just returned from Habitat 9, the haulage tug Weaver’s cargo is expected to make a substantial dent in the precious metals market for this quarter. Measures requested by the Association of African Metal-Producing States to protect Earth-side mining are still before the World Trade Organization, where representatives of the Hab 9 Consortium contend that such restraint of trade is—

So forth. These days, spaceships stayed in space where they belonged, and everything they carried went up or came down on the ’rack elevators. Perfect quarantine, he’d heard some late-night talking head call it once, and extremely energy-efficient into the bargain. A spaceship coming down was the scenario from some cheap disaster flick or even cheaper paranoid alien-invasion experia show off the Jesusland channels. For it to happen for real could only mean that something, somewhere had gone superwrong.

Oh dude—this, I’ve got to fucking see…

He was still applying the biosealant gel to his face when the shuttle banked about and the tailgate cracked open. Cold Pacific air came flushing in with the scream of the turbines and the gray dawn light. He unbuckled and shuffled down the line to the cable hoist. His pulse knocked lightly in his temples. Something that was too much fun to be fear coursed in his blood. He wrapped the T-mask across his face, pulled the breathing filter down to his chin, pressed the edges of it all into the biosealant. The wind whipped in off the ocean outside, chilling the newly pasted skin of his cheeks where they were still exposed at either side of the mask. There was an illusory sense of safety behind the curve of impact-resistant one-way glass and its warm amber heads-up projected displays, as if his whole body were sitting back here instead of just bits of his face. They got warned about that shit all the time. Some crudely rendered virtual drill sergeant in the bargain-basement Texan software that was all Filigree Steel Security’s training budget ran to. Inexplicably, the badly lip-synched figure had a British accent. Whole-body awareness, you ’orrible li-uhl man, the construct was wont to bellow whenever he tripped one of the program’s stoppers. Are your legs on loan? Is your chest a temporary appendage? Whole-body awareness is the only fucking thing that will keep your whole body alive.

Yeah, yeah. Whatever.

He snapped the cable onto his vest, turned back to the belly of the shuttle and the observation camera fixed in the ceiling. He made the OK sign with finger and thumb. Coughed into the induction mike at his throat.

“Point, ready to deploy.”

I hear you, Point. On my mark. Three, two, one…drop.

The cable jolted into motion and he fumbled his XM to readiness in both hands, leaning out so he could peer down at what lay below. At first, it was just the endless roll and whitecap slap of the Pacific, outward in all directions. Then he got a fix on the ship. Not what he’d been expecting: it looked like a huge plastic packing case, awash in the water, barely floating. The hull was mostly a scorched black, but he could make out streaks of white with the remains of nano-etched lettering, some kind of corporate insignia that he supposed must have skinned off in the heat of reentry. He dropped closer, saw what looked like an open hatch set in a section that was still above water.

“Uh, Command. Are we sure this thing isn’t going to sink?”

Affirmative, Point. COLIN specs say she should stay afloat indefinitely.

“Just, I’ve got an open hatch here, and with this wind and the waves I figure she’s got to be shipping some water.”

Repeat, Point. Vessel should float indefinitely. Check the hatch.

His boots hit the hull with a solid clank about a dozen meters off from the hatch and a little downward. Ocean water swirled around his feet, ankle-deep, then sucked back. He sighed and unclipped from the cable.

“Understood, Command. Off descender.”

Will maintain.

He crouched a little and worked his way up the shallow slope toward the hatch, peered down into it. Water had sloshed into the opening; he could see it glistening wetly on the rungs of a ladder that led down to a second, inner hatch, which he assumed had to be the end of an air lock. As he watched, a fresh surge washed over the hatch coaming and rinsed down onto the ladder, dripping and splashing to the bottom of the lock. He peered a bit more, then shrugged and clambered down the ladder until he was hanging off the lower rungs just above the inner hatch. The water down there was about three fingers deep, slopping back and forth with the tilt of the vessel in the waves. Just below the surface, the moldings of the hatch looked unnaturally clean, like something seen at the bottom of a rock pool. There was a warning: caution: pressure must equalize before hatch will open.

Joe figured whatever pressure there was inside the hull must be pretty close to Earth standard then, because someone or something had already unsealed the inner hatch. It was hanging open just enough to let the water drain very slowly through the crack. He grunted.

Weren’t for that, fucking air lock’d be a quarter full already from the slop.

He tapped his mike.

“Command? I’ve got a cracked inner hatch here. Don’t know if that’s the systems or, uh, human agency.”

Noted. Proceed with caution.

He grimaced. He’d been hoping for a withdraw call.

Yeah, or failing that, some fucking backup, Command. This baby’s come from space, right, from Mars most likely. No fucking telling what kind of bugs might be loose in there. That’s what nanorack quarantine’s for, right?

For a moment, he thought about backing up anyway.

But—

You’re equipped, he could already hear the patient voice explaining to him. You’re masked and gelled against biothreat, which we don’t in any case anticipate. You have no valid reason to query your orders.

And Zdena’s voice: Why they pay us, cowboy.

And from the others, jeers.

He shook off a tiny shudder, moved down a couple of rungs, and put a boot through the water to press gingerly on the hatch. It gave, fractionally.

“Great.”

Point?

“Nothing,” he said sourly. “Just proceeding with extreme fucking caution.”

He braced one hand flat on the wall of the air lock, stamped harder on the hatch, impatient now and—

—it caved in under his foot.

Hinged heavily down to the side, dumping the water through into a darkened interior with a long, hollow splash. The sudden drop caught him unawares. He lost his grip on the rung above. Fell, grabbed clumsily with one flailing gloved hand, missed, and clouted the side of his head on the ladder as he tumbled. He went right through the opened inner hatch, had time for one garbled yell—

“Fuuuuuuahhhh—”

—and ended up in a heap on what must have been the sidewall of the corridor below.

Shock of impact, his teeth clipped the edge of his tongue. Sharp bang in his shoulder, gouge in the ribs where one end of the XM jabbed him on the way down. He hissed the pain out through gritted teeth.

For the rest, he seemed to have landed on something soft. He lay still for a moment, checking for damage reports from his tangled limbs.

Total-body awareness, right, Sarge.

He summoned a grin. Didn’t think he’d broken anything. Looking up, he figured it for not much more than a three-meter drop.

He blew a hard, chuckled breath of relief into the mask filter. Completed his expletive quietly.

“Fuck.”

Point? Command came through, yeah, finally fucking concerned now. Report your status. Are you injured?

“I’m fine.” He propped himself up on one arm, squinted around in the gloom and snapped on the helmet light. “Just took a digger. Nothing to—”

The edge of the beam clipped something that didn’t make any sense. His head jerked around, the beam hit full on what he’d seen—

“Ah, fuck man, you gotta be—”

And suddenly, with the flood of disbelieving comprehension, he gagged, vomit flooding up and into the mask, burning his nose and throat, as he saw for the first time exactly what the soft thing was that had broken his fall.

CHAPTER 4

Sevgi Ertekin awoke to the curious conviction that it was raining in dirty gray sheets all over the city.

In June?

She blinked. Somewhere outside the open window of the apartment, she heard a siren calling her. Intimate and nostalgic as the sound of the ezan she still missed from the old neighborhood, but freighted with an adrenaline significance the prayer call would never match. Rusted professional reflex surfaced in her, then rolled over and sank as memory came aboard. Not her call anymore. In any case, the melancholy caught-breath cry of the cop car, wherever it was, was distant. Noises of commerce from the street market six floors below almost drowned it out. There was shouting, mostly good-humored, and music from stall-mounted sound systems, frenetic neo-arabesque that she was in no mood for currently. The day had started without her.

Against her own better judgment, she turned over to face the window. Glare from the sun hit her in the face and drove her to squinting. The varipolara drapes billowed in the breeze from outside, incandescent with morning light. It appeared she’d forgotten to remote them down to opaque again. An empty bottle of Jameson’s was partly hidden where the curtain hem brushed the floor, someone—someone, yeah, right, Sev, who would that be?—had rolled it away across the polished wooden boards of the living room when it had nothing left to offer. The same living room where she’d apparently slept fully clothed on the couch. A moment’s groggy reflection brought in corroborative memory. She’d sat there after the party broke up, and she’d killed the rest of the bottle. Vague recollection of talking quietly to herself, the smoky warmth of the whiskey as it went down. She’d been thinking all the time, she’d just have one more, she’d just have one more, then she’d get up and—

She hadn’t gotten up. She’d passed out.

This is new, Sev. Usually, you make it to a bed.

She made a convulsive effort and heaved herself fully into a sitting position, then wished she hadn’t moved quite so rapidly. The contents of her head seemed to shift on some kind of internal stalk. A long wave of nausea rolled through her, and her clothing felt suddenly like restraints. She’d lost her boots at some point—they were keeled over on opposite sides of the room, about as far apart as the dimensions allowed—but shirt and pants remained. She had a vague memory of rolling hilariously about on her back after everyone was gone, trying to tug off the boots and then the socks. In this at least, it seemed she’d succeeded, but obviously the rest had defeated her.

And now the shirt was rucked up and bunched under her arms, and her profiler cups had peeled and worked loose from her breasts as she tossed and turned. One seemed to have ended up in her armpit; the other was gone altogether. Some way below her waist, her pants had somehow twisted about until they were no longer loose; her guts were similarly tight. Her bladder was uncomfortably full, and her head was settling to a steady throb.

And it’s raining.

She looked up, and a sudden, raw anger took hold as she traced the low hissing to its real source. In one corner of the room, the ancient JVC entertainment deck was still on. Whatever chip was in had played to its conclusion, and the temperamental default system had failed to return to bluescreen. The monitor showed a snowdance of static instead and the gentle hiss of it filled up the base of hearing, below the sounds of the city outside. Filled up everything like—

Her mouth tightened. She knew what chip she’d been watching. She couldn’t remember, but she knew.

It’s not fucking raining, all right.

She lurched to her feet and stabbed the deck to silence. For a moment then she stood in her apartment as if it weren’t her own, as if she’d broken in to steal something. She felt the steady flog of her pulse in her throat and she knew she was going to cry.

She shook her head instead, violently, trading the tears for an intense, sonar-pulsing pain. Stumbled through the bedroom to the en suite, fingers pressing to the ache. There was a plastic bottle of generic headache pills on the shelf there, and beside it a foil of syn. Or more precisely, k37 synadrive—military-issue superfunction capsules, her share of a black-market trickle into NYPD way back when and several times the strength of anything the street liked to call syn. She’d used the caps a handful of times before and found them scarily effective—they stimulated synaptic response and physical coordination, sidelined pretty much everything else, and they did it fast. Sevgi wavered for a moment, realized she had things to do today, even if she couldn’t remember right now exactly what they were.

Whole fucking city self-medicates these days anyway, Sev. Get over it.

She pressed a couple of the milissue capsules out of the foil and was about to dry-swallow them when a fragment of peripheral vision caught up with her.

She strode back into the bedroom.

“Hey.”

The girl in the bed couldn’t have been much more than eighteen or nineteen. Blinking awake, she seemed even younger, but the body beneath the single sheet was too full for the waif-like look. She sat up, and the sheet slipped off improbably thrusting breasts. From the way they moved, it was a subcute muscle web, not implants, that was pulling the trick. Pricey work for someone that young. Sevgi made her for someone’s trophy date, the whole fake-bonobo thing, but was too hungover to rack her head for faces from the party. Maybe whoever brought her had gotten too wasted to remember all his accessories when he went home.

“Who told you you could sleep in here?”

The girl blinked again. “You did.”

“Oh.” Sevgi’s anger crumpled. She rode out another wave of nausea and swallowed. “Well, get your stuff together and go home. Party’s over.”

She headed back to the bathroom, closed the door carefully, and then, as if to emphasize her own last words, hooked over and vomited into the toilet.

When she was sure she could hold them down, she took the k37 slugs with a glass of water and then propped herself under the warm drizzle of the shower while she waited for the effects to kick in. It didn’t take long. The tweaked chemistry in the drug made for rapid uptake as well as retained clarity, and the lack of anything else in her stomach sped the process even more. The throbbing in her head began to subside. She got off the tiled wall and groped for the gel, started gingerly on her scalp with it. The soaked and matted mass of her hair collapsed into silky submission, and the foam from the gel ran down her body in clumped suds. It was like shedding five-day-old clothes. She felt new strength and focus stealing through her like a fresh skeleton. When she stepped dripping out of the shower ten minutes later, the pain was wrapped away in chemical gauze and a spiky, clear-sighted brilliance had taken its place.

Which was a mixed blessing. Drying herself in the mirror, she saw the weight that was gathering on her haunches and grimaced. She hadn’t been inside a gym in months, and her home-based Cassie Rogers AstroTone—as used by real MarsTrip personnel!!—program was settling into oblivion like a deflating circus tent. The incriminating evidence of the neglect was right there. And you couldn’t take milissue slugs to make it go away like you could with pain. The ludicrously perfect flanks of the girl in her bed flitted through her mind. The jutting designer chest. She looked at the swell of her own breasts, gathered low on her ribs and tilting away to the sides.

Ah fuck it, you’re in your thirties now, Sevgi. Not trying to impress the boys at Bosphorus Bridge anymore, are we. Give it a rest. Anyway, you’re due, that always makes it worse.

Her hair was already settling back into its habitually untidy black bell as it dried out. She took a couple of swipes at it with a brush, then gave up in exasperation. In the mirror, her largely Arab ancestry glowered back at her: cheekbones high and wide, face hawk-nosed and full-lipped, set with heavy-lidded amber flake eyes. Ethan had once said there was something tigerish in her face, but Sevgi, sharp from the syn and not yet made up, suspected that today she looked more like a disgruntled crow. The idea dragged a grin to the surface and she made cawing noises at herself in the mirror. Dumped the towel and went to get dressed. Discovered a desire for coffee.

The kitchen, predictably, looked like a war zone. Every available counter was piled with used dishes. Sevgi tracked the party dishes through the debris—dark green remnants like tiny rags where the plates had held stuffed vine leaves, brittle fragments of sigara börek pastry, eggplant and tomato in oil gone cold, half a lahmacun left upside down so that it looked like a stiffly dried-out washcloth. In the sink, a small turret of stacked pans reared drunkenly out at her like some robot jack-in-the-box. Efes Export bottles were gathered in squat, orderly rows along one wall on the floor. Their slightly sour breath rose up to fill the kitchen space.

Good party.

A few of her departing guests had burbled it at her as she let them out. An abrupt avalanche of memory confirmed it, a tangle of friends throughout the apartment, sprawled on sofas and beanbags, food and drink and gesturing with mouths full, comfortable hilarity. It had been a good party.

Yeah—pity you had to murder that bottle of Irish afterward.

Why was that, Sev?

She felt how her face twitched and knew her eyes had gone flat and hard with the feeling as it rolled across her.

You know why.

The syn came on behind the thought, spiky and bright. She had a sudden insight into how easy it would be to kill someone in this state of mind.

The phone spoke, soft and reasonable, like biting into cotton wool.

“I have registered contact Tom Norton on the line. Will you accept the call?”

Recollection of what she had to do that day fell on her like a brick.

She groaned and went to fetch the rest of the painkillers.

The first wrong thing was the car.

Norton usually ran a ludicrous half acre of antique Cadillac soft-top with a front grille like a sneer and a hood you could have sunbathed on. He was grin-proud of the fucking thing, too, which was odd given its history. Built in some Alabama sweatshop before Norton was born, it was a vehicle he’d have been summarily arrested for driving in New York if he hadn’t paid almost double the auction price to have the original IC engine ripped out and replaced with the magdrive from a discontinued line of Japanese powerboats. He’d blown yet another month’s wages on having it polymered from snout to tail, immortalizing the catalog of scrapes and dents it had collected during its previous life out in Jesusland. Sevgi couldn’t get him to see that it was practically a metaphor for the idiocies of the past it came from.

Today, in an abrupt spike of syn insight, she realized it was the kind of car Ethan would have loved to own, and that was why this aberration in Norton’s otherwise flawless Manhattan male urbanity drove her time and again to a silent, waspish anger.

Today he wasn’t driving it.

Instead, as she let herself out onto the street—still settling a grabbed-at-random tailored summer jacket onto her shoulders—he unfolded from the backseat of a dark blue autodrive teardrop that was recognizably from the COLIN pool. He stood there looking as smooth and self-contained as the vehicle he’d stepped out of, a poem in groomed competence. The filaments of gray in his close-cropped hair glinted in the sun; the tanned future-presidential-candidate Caucasian features that he swore were his own crinkled around pale blue eyes.

He gave her a trademark slanted grin.

“Morning, Sev. Rise and shine.”

“Yeah, right.”

“What time’d you wind it up in the end?” He’d gone home well before midnight, chemically unimpaired as far as Sevgi could remember.

“Don’t recall. Late.”

She pushed past him and dumped herself in the car, slid over to let him in beside her. The door hinged down and the teardrop pulled smoothly away, cornered into West 118th, and kept going. Traffic surged around them. They’d cruised four blocks before Sevgi woke up to the direction and the second jarring nail in the day’s expected course. She glanced across at Norton.

“What’s the matter, you leave something at the office?”

“Not going to the office, Sev.”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought we agreed to yesterday. So why are we headed east?”

Norton grinned again. “Not going out to Kaku, either. Change of plans. No freefall for you today.”

The relief that rolled through her at the news felt like sun on her skin, suddenly warming and way ahead of any accompanying curiosity. She really hadn’t been looking forward to the gut-swooping elevator ride up the Kaku nanorack or the creeping around weightless when they got to the top. They had drugs to take the sting out of both experiences at the ’rack facility, but she wasn’t at all sure they’d mix well with the syn already coursing through her system. And the thought of starting an investigation in this state—with her abused brain and belly bleating protest at the zero g and the Earth rolling past somewhere sickeningly far below—already had her palms lightly greased with sweat.

“Right. So you want to tell me where we are going?”

“Sure. JFK suborb terminal. Got the eleven o’clock shuttle to SFO.”

Sevgi sat up. “What happened, Horkan’s Pride overshoot the docking slot?”

“You could say that.” Norton’s tone was dry. “Overshot Kaku, overshot Sagan, splashed down about a hundred klicks off the California coast.”

“Splashed down? They’re not supposed to land those things.”

“Tell me about it. From what I hear, only the main crew section made it down in one piece. The rest is wreckage along a line from somewhere in Utah to the coast or burned up on reentry. The Rim authorities are having what’s left towed back to the Bay Area, where you and I will crack it open and dazzle them all with our lucid analysis of just what the fuck went wrong. Those are Nicholson’s words, by the way, not mine.”

“Yeah, I guessed.” Norton spoke four-letter words the way a miser spends wafers—when he was utterly inescapably driven to it or when they belonged to someone else. It seemed to be a linguistic rather than a moral quirk, though, because he evinced no apparent embarrassment or distaste when he quoted other people like this, or when Sevgi swore, which was a lot of the time these days.

“So how come you didn’t phone me earlier with this shit?”

“Believe me, I tried. You weren’t answering.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, so I covered for you with Nicholson, if that’s what you were wondering. Said you were somewhere downtown chasing leads from the Spring Street bust, you were going to meet me at the terminal.”

Sevgi nodded to herself. “Thanks, Tom. I owe you one.”

She owed him more than one, quite a lot more over the last two years, but neither of them would ever acknowledge it. The debt lay unspoken between them, like complicity, like family. And Nicholson, anyway, they both agreed was an asshole.

“You think any of them are still alive?” Norton wondered.

Sevgi stared out of the window at the traffic, marshaling facts from the file. “Horkan’s Pride is a five series. They built them to survive crash-landing at the Mars end, and there aren’t any oceans there to do it in.”

“Yeah, but that’s a lot less gravity to worry about on the way down.”

An NYPD teardrop cruised up alongside them, panels at opaque except for the driver’s window, which was cranked back. A young cop up front had the system at manual and was steering idly with one tanned arm leaning on the sill. She was talking to someone, but Sevgi couldn’t make out if it was another occupant of the car or an audio hookup. Under the peak of her summer-weight weblar cap, she looked casually competent and engaged. Memory twinged, and Sevgi found herself wondering about Hulya. She really ought to get back in touch sometime, see what Hulya was doing these days, see if she took the sergeant’s exam again, if she was still hauling her tight, man-magnet ass out to Bosphorus Bridge every Saturday night. Sit down somewhere for a good do-you-remember-when session, maybe crack a case of Efes.

At the thought of beer and the smell it had left in her kitchen, Sevgi’s stomach turned abruptly over. She shunted the nostalgia hastily aside. The NYPD car switched lanes and faded in the traffic. Sevgi took an experimental stab at some engaged competence of her own.

“Cryocap fluid should absorb a lot of the impact shock,” she said slowly. “And the fact it came down in one piece at all means it was some kind of controlled reentry, right?”

“Some kind of.”

“Did we get any more out of the datahead before this happened?”

Norton shook his head. “Same request for standby at Kaku, same interval broadcast. Nothing new.”

“Great. Fucking ghost ship to the last.”

Norton lifted hands with fingers draped wide and low, made phantasmal noises to match. Sevgi curled a grin under control.

“It’s not fucking funny, Tom. Beats me why the Rim skycops didn’t just vaporize it soon as it crossed the divide. It wouldn’t be the first time those day-rate morons turned glitched air traffic into confetti when it didn’t answer nicely.”

“Maybe they were concerned about loss of life,” said Norton, with a straight face.

“Yeah.”

“Now, I hope you’re not planning to bring that attitude with you, young lady. The locals probably won’t be overfriendly as it is. This is our tin can that fell out of the sky on them.”

She shrugged. “They pay COLIN taxes just like the rest of us. It’s their tin can, too.”

“Yeah, but we’re the ones supposed to make sure this kind of thing doesn’t happen. That’s why they pay their taxes.”

“Have you talked to anyone at their end yet?”

Norton shook his head. “No one human. I tried to hook whoever caught the case just before I left. Got the machine. Standard phone interface. It said we’ll be collected at the airport by RimSec. Two of their plainclothes guys, Rovayo and Coyle.”

“You get ID?”

Norton tapped the breast of his jacket. “Hardcopy download. Want to see it?”

“Might as well.”

The Rim cops were a balanced sex and eth couple. Under the label det. a. rovayo, a dark young Afro-Hispanic woman stared out of her photo with jaw set and mouth thinned, trying rather obviously and without much success to beat a full-lipped, hazel-eyed beauty. Belying the severity of her expression, her hair coiled thick and longer than NYPD would have let her get away with. Below her on the same printout, DET. r. coyle glowered up, blunt-featured, middle-aged, Caucasian. His hair was shot with gray and shaved almost militarily short. The image was head and shoulders only, but it gave the impression of size and impatient force.

Sevgi shrugged.

“We’ll see,” she said.

They saw.

Coyle and Rovayo met them off the suborb at SFO with perfunctory greetings and an iris scan. Standard procedure, they were told. Norton shot a warning glance at Sevgi, who was visibly fuming. This wasn’t how visiting cops would have been treated on arrival in New York. Here, it was hard to tell if they were being snubbed or not; Coyle, every bit as big and laconic as his holoshot had suggested, showed them brief ID and did the introductory honors. Rovayo took it from there. She leaned in and spread their eyelids with warm, slightly callused fingers, applied the scanner, and then stepped back. It was all done with a detached competence, and among the streams of arriving passengers it had the intimate flavor of a European kiss on the cheek. Norton seemed to enjoy it, anyway. Rovayo ignored his smile, glanced at the green light the machine had given them, and put the scanner away in the shoulder bag she carried. Coyle nodded toward a bank of elevators at the end of the arrivals hall.

“This way,” he said economically. “We got the smart chopper.”

They rode up in silence, hooked a walkway across the glass-bubbled, white-girder-braced upper levels of the building, then another elevator that spilled them out onto a concrete apron where a sleek red-and-white autocopter sat twitching its rotors. Eastward, the bay glimmered silvery gray in the late-afternoon sun. A ruffling wind took the heat out of the day.

“So you guys are on the case?” Norton tried as they clambered aboard.

Coyle offered him an impassive glance. “Whole fucking force is on this case,” he grunted and tugged the hatch closed. “Badge coding 2347. Flight as filed. Let’s go.”

“Thank you. Please take your seats.”

The autocopter had Asia Badawi’s voice, low and honey-coated, unmistakable even from the half a dozen syllables uttered. Sevgi vaguely remembered reading, in some mindless magazine-space moment while she waited to see the lawyers, an article about the software contract Badawi had signed with Lockheed. Big PR smiles and clasps all around, outraged fans protest. Yawn, flick. Would you like to come through now, Ms. Ertekin? The rotors cranked in earnest, engine murmur rose to a dim, soundproofed crescendo on the other side of the window, and they unstuck from the pad. They settled into seats. The autocopter lifted, tilted, and whirled them out over the bay.

Sevgi made an effort. “You get anything from the skin yet?”

“Scanning crew are going over the hull now.” The cabin had facing seats and Coyle was opposite her, but he was staring out of the window as he spoke. “We’ll have a full virtual up and running by this evening.”

“That’s fast work,” said Norton, though it wasn’t really.

Rovayo looked at him. “They’ve been busy inside, that kind of took priority.”

An eyeblink silence.

Sevgi exchanged a glance with Norton.

“Inside?” she asked, dangerously polite. “You’ve already cracked the hatches?”

A knowing grin went back and forth between the two Rim cops. Sevgi, fed up with being the least informed person in the room all day, felt her temper start to fray.

“Horkan’s Pride is COLIN’s property,” she said thinly. “If you’ve tampered with—”

“Put your cuffs away, Agent Ertekin,” said Coyle. “Time the coastals got out to your property, someone aboard had already blown the hatches out. From the inside. Quarantine seal’s long gone.”

That’s not possible. Narrowly, she managed to stop herself from saying it. Instead she asked: “Are the cryocaps breached?”

Coyle eyed her speculatively. “It’s really better if you wait and see for yourself.”

The autocopter banked about, and Sevgi leaned forward to peer out the window. Below them in the bay, Rim Security’s Alcatraz station rose off its island base in pale gray platforms and piers. On the southern shoreline, a floating dry-dock complex was laid out like a schematic, clean lines and spaces, people reduced to dots and vehicles to toys. The bulk of the Horkan’s Pride crew section showed up clearly in the center dock. Even with the external structures ripped away, even scorched and scarred by the reentry, it leapt out at her like a familiar face in a group photo. She’d seen sister ships in the orbital yards above the Kaku nanorack from time to time, and she’d had archive footage of Horkan’s Pride itself filed on her laptop ever since the ship stopped talking to COLIN Control. In the frequent chunks of waiting room time at the lawyers’ offices, in the sleepless still of the nights she didn’t drink, she’d stared at the detail until her eyes ached. A good detective eats, sleeps, and breathes the details, Larry Kasabian had once told her. That’s how you catch the bad guys. The habit stuck. She knew the internal architecture of the vessel so well, she could have walked it from end to end blindfolded. She had the hardware and software specs by heart. The names of the cryocapped crew were as familiar as product brands she habitually shopped for, and biographical detail from each popped into her head unbidden whenever she visualized one of their faces.

It’s really better if you wait and see for yourself.

And now, at a guess, they were all dead.

The autocopter settled with machine precision onto a raised platform at one end of the dock complex. The motors wound down, and the hatch cracked open. Coyle did the honors again, levering the hatch back and jumping down first. Sevgi went next.

Badawi’s honeyed tones followed her out into the wind. “Watch your step. Please close the hatch behind you.”

Coyle led the way down the steps off the platform. There was a reception committee waiting at the bottom. Three RimSec uniforms backing a plainclothes ranking officer whose face Sevgi recognized from a couple of virtual briefings she’d attended last year on geneprint forgery. Smooth Asian features that made him seem younger than she supposed he was, thick gray hair and a rumpled way with clothes that belied the level scrutiny in the eyes. From that gaze and other general aspects of demeanor, she’d suspected he was probably enhanced—Rim officials of any rank usually were these days—but she never had more evidence than the hunch. In the social sessions after, he’d talked with quiet reservation, mainly about his family, and his eyes had barely flickered to Sevgi’s chest at all, for which she’d been quietly grateful. Now she scrabbled after a name, and the syn handed it to her.

“Lieutenant Tsai. How are you?”

“Captain,” he said drily. “Promoted back in January. And I’m as well as can be expected, thank you, given the circumstances. I presume you’d like to view your vessel immediately. What’s left of it.”

Sevgi nodded glumly. “That’d be helpful.”

“I’m told—” Tsai made gestures at his uniforms, and they sloped off across the dock. “—that we’ll have a working virtual by about seven. Crews are finishing up with the hull now, but Rovayo probably told you about the hatches.”

“That they were blown from the inside, yeah.”

“Captain,” Norton weighed in. “We’re concerned to know what state the crew of Horkan’s Pride are in. Specifically, whether the cryosystems were breached or not.”

Tsai stopped in the act of turning to follow the uniforms, and his gaze seemed suddenly to lengthen, dialing up, out across the dock and then the bay, replaying something from memory that he’d maybe prefer not to. In Sevgi, the realization hit home that behind the turf-proud cool of Coyle and Rovayo there was the same base edginess, and that driving it all was not the jurisdiction envy she’d assumed.

They’re scared, she suddenly knew. And we’re their only solution.

It was an epiphany Sevgi had had once before, back when she was still a rookie with the NYPD and dealing with a drugs-and-domestic-abuse case. Talking to the bruised and still-swelling face of the perpetrator’s mother, it hit her with the same sickening abruptness that this woman was looking at her as some kind of solution to her problem; that she expected Patrolwoman Ertekin, age twenty-three, to do something about the shitstorm state of her family and her life.

So nice to be needed.

“Breached,” Tsai said slowly. “Yes, I think you could say that.”

The outer hatches themselves were gone, blown clear by the emergency bolts—by now they’d be somewhere at the bottom of the Pacific. The blackened stub of Horkan’s Pride had been propped in the dry dock, as close to a usefully even keel as her design would allow. Still, they had to clamber down into Access Four as if it were a well cut into the top of the crew section’s hull. A zero-g assist ladder took them to the bottom of the air lock chamber within, and from there they dropped heavily through the inner lock and onto the canted surface of the main dorsal corridor. Maintenance lighting glowed in soft blue LCLS panels along the sides of the passageway, but Tsai’s uniforms had set up high-intensity incident lamps by the air lock and farther down. White glare bounced back off the grubby cream-colored walls, and teeth.

Sevgi’s gaze caught it as she came down off the last rung of the ladder, and she skidded to a halt at the sight. The ripped-to-the-gums grin of a mutilated human head where it lay only loosely attached to the limbless torso sprawled on the floor.

“You see what I mean?” Tsai climbed down beside her.

Sevgi stood, managing her stomach. Leaving aside the hangover, it had still been awhile. Even her last year with the NYPD had been mercifully short on gore; transferring from Homicide to COLIN liaison hadn’t made her any friends on the force, but it had certainly put a brake on the amount of mangled human remains she had to look at. Now she was vaguely aware that without the syn, she would have vomited up what little her stomach contained, all over Tsai’s crime scene.

Your crime scene, you mean.

This is yours, Sev.

She bent forward a little, peered at the dead man. Took possession.

“Alberto Toledo,” said Tsai quietly. “Engineer at the Stanley bubble, atmospheric nanotech. Fifty-six years old. Rotated home.”

“Yes, I know.” Biog detail bubbled up from the ruined, sneering face, whispering like ghosts. Job specs, résumé, family background. This one had a daughter somewhere. The flesh of both cheeks had been sheared off up to the cheekbone, where stringy fragments of tissue still clung. The jaw was stripped. The eyes—

She swallowed. Still a little queasy. Norton joined her, put a hand on her shoulder.

“You okay, Sev?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.” She locked onto facts. Horkan’s Pride hadn’t talked to them for almost the whole seven and a half months of its long fall back to Earth. “Captain, this…looks recent.”

Tsai shrugged. “Antibacterials in the shipboard atmospheric system, they tell me. But yeah, we’re guessing Alberto here was probably one of the last.”

“The last?”

Sevgi glanced at Norton as he said it, and was pleased to notice that he looked as shaky as she felt. Distantly, she picked out the acidic tang of someone else’s vomit in the air of the closed space around her. It was oddly comforting, the knowledge that others before her had seen and reacted in the same way she wanted to. It made it easier to hold on.

“What happened to the limbs?” she managed, almost casually.

“Surgically removed.” Tsai gestured up the corridor. “They’re still downloading the autosurgeon’s log, so we can’t be sure that’s how it was done, but it’s the obvious explanation.”

“So how did he end up here?”

The captain nodded. “Yeah, that’s a little harder. Could be the impact threw the bodies about some. We found most of the cryocaps hinged open, nutrients all over the floor and walls. Looks like whoever did this wasn’t all that tidy, at least toward the end.”

“The corridor locks should have engaged when she came down,” Norton said shortly. “These ships compartmentalize under emergency conditions. There’s no way something could get flung from one end of this hulk to the other like that. No way.”

“Well, it’s only a theory.” Tsai gestured up and down the unobstructed corridor again. “But as you’ll see. Not a lot of compartmentalization going on here. You want to look at the cryocap section?”

Sevgi peered along the passageway to where more incident lamps lit the environs of the sleeper racks. She could see figures moving about down there, heard a couple of voices. The brief rattle of a laugh. The sound carried her back, with a force that was almost physical, to her crime scene days with Homicide. Black humor and hardened camaraderie, the quiet thrum of an intensity denied to anyone who didn’t work this beat, and the layering on of a detachment that came with custom. So weird, the shit you can get nostalgic for, girl. It alarmed her a little, realizing the extent to which, despite her quailing stomach, she did suddenly want to plunge back into that world and its dark procedural workings.

“The other bodies,” she said as the syn lit up her head. “They’re all mutilated like this one, right?”

Tsai’s face was a mask. “Or worse.”

“Have you found the limbs?”

“Not as such.”

Sevgi nodded. “Just bones, right?”

Oh, Ethan, you should have been around to see this. It really has happened this time, just the way you always used to bullshit me it would.

“That’s right.” Tsai was looking at her like a teacher with a smart kid.

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding,” said Norton, very quietly.

Sevgi turned to look at him fully. It was reflex denial, shock, not objection. “That’s right.”

“Someone chopped these people up with the autosurgeon—”

She nodded, still not sure in the bright spin of the syn and the shock of the understanding, how she felt, how she should feel.

“Yes. And ate them.”

CHAPTER 5

It was like a landscape out of Dali.

The CSI virtual was a forensics standard Sevgi remembered from her time with the NYPD—pristine Arizona desert as far as the eye could see, blue sky featureless but for a ghost moon that carried the designers’ logo like a watermark. Each section of the investigation presented as a separate three-story adobe structure, distributed across the landscape in a preternaturally neat semi-circular arc. The sectional homes were open on the facing side like cutaways in an architectural model, furnished with steps so you could walk up to each level. Labels floated in the air beside each structure, neatly lettered fonts announcing data anomaly; path labs; recovered surveillance; prior record. Much of the display space was still empty, data still to come, but shelved on the exposed floors of the path lab home, the mutilated corpses from Horkan’s Pride stood on their stumps like vandalized statues in a museum. Even here, not all the organic data was in yet, but the corpses had been scanned into the system early on. Now they posed in catwalk perfection, colored and intimate enough to make your own flesh quail as you stared at theirs. Sevgi had already seen them close up, had focused with irresistible fascination on neatly sectioned bone in the densely packed meat of an arm taken off centimeters from the shoulder, and then wished she hadn’t. The syn was wearing off, leaving queasy traces of hangover beneath.

The path lab n-djinn interface, a perfectly beautiful Eurasian female in tailored blue scrubs, narrated the nightmare with machine calm.

“The perpetrator chose limbs because they represented the simplest transfer of the automated medical system’s functions from surgery to butchery.” An elegant gesture. “Amputation is an established procedure within the autosurgeon’s protocols, and it is not life threatening. After each surgical procedure, it was a simple matter to return the subject, still living, to the cryogen units, thus assuring a ready and continuing supply of fresh meat.”

“And the automed just let it all fucking happen?” Coyle was staring angrily about him, male outrage deprived of targets. “What the fuck is that?”

“That,” said Sevgi wearily, “is selective systems intrusion. Someone got into the general protocol level and closed down the ship’s djinn. For a good datahawk, it wouldn’t be difficult. All these ships have a human override option anyway, and there’s a fail-safe suicide protocol wired into the n-djinn. You just have to trick it into believing it’s been corrupted, and it shuts itself down. There are a whole series of secondary blocks to prevent that damage from seeping down into the discrete systems, but like we’re hearing, he didn’t need to worry about that. He wasn’t telling the medical systems to do anything they weren’t already programmed for.”

“He?” Rovayo. Sevgi’d already pegged her as a staunch man’s woman, and this looked like confirmation—umbrage taken at potential feminazi chauvinism. “Why’s it got to be a he?”

Sevgi shrugged. Because, statistically, that’s the way it fucking is, she didn’t say. “Sorry. Figure of speech.”

“Yeah, till we get the swab breakdowns back and find out it was a man,” drawled Norton. He stepped past Rovayo’s mutinous look, closer to the white-walled, opened architecture of the path home and its exhibits. The lab ’face gave ground and stood in deferential silence, waiting to be directly questioned. Its higher interactional functions had apparently not been enabled. Norton nodded up at the exposed grin of a female corpse, and it leapt out at them. Visual distance was elusive in the construct: it bowed and swelled like a lens according to user focus. “Thing I don’t get is the mess. I can see killing them all—you don’t want witnesses left around, with or without arms and legs. But why the blood on the walls? Why mutilate the faces like that?”

“Because he was fucking cracked,” Coyle growled. “He probably ate that stuff as well, right?”

“Difficult to say.” The lab ’face kicked in again, pointing and pulling in a bubble of data display from one of the other file houses. “Evidence gathered from the kitchen unit suggests meat scraped from the skulls may have been cooked and ingested. This does not seem to have been the case with the eyes, which were gouged out and then discarded.”

Sevgi barely glanced at the yanked-in focus. It was in any case a little too abstract for easy human digest—sketched molecular traces and a scrawled sidebar summary about microwave effect. Later she’d tramp over to the file house and review it at her own pace. Right now she was still staring up at the ruined face of Helena Larsen. Demodynamics specialist, psychiatric assessor. Divorced, signed up for Mars not long after. COLIN got a lot like this. You split from all you’ve known, why not. Your life’s columnar supports are crumbling all around you, you probably need the cash. Three years, the minimum qualified professional tour of duty, seems suddenly reasonable. On Mars you earn big, and for the short-timers at least there’s fuck-all to spend it on. You’ll come home wealthy, Helena Larsen. You’ll come home with tales of an alien skyline to tell the children you’ll someday have. You’ll have the cachet of the trip to trade off and the résumé potential it represents. You’ll have moved on. Got to be better than sitting in the ruins of your old life, right? Better than clinging to whatever fragments you—

“Investigator Ertekin?”

She blinked. She’d missed what Coyle was saying to her.

“Sorry, just thinking,” she said truthfully. “What, uh—?”

“I asked,” said the cop, with the heavy emphasis of repetition, “whether you think it’s likely that whoever did this could still be alive?”

The air in the virtuality, already a breezeless sterile cool at odds with the desert landscape, seemed to slip a couple of degrees lower. Norton looked at Sevgi, and she felt the tiny, almost imperceptible nod come up from the roots of intuition.

“Someone blew the hatches,” Rovayo pointed out.

“That could have been the automated systems.” Coyle cast a hopeful glance at the two COLIN reps. “Right?”

“It’s a possibility,” Sevgi said. “Until we see the damage to the automated systems and the n-djinn, it’s hard to know how the ship would behave on its own.”

But there was a steady thrum building in the back of her head now, like engines under decking, like the rumble of Ethan’s voice, reading to her the time she came down bad with the flu, passages out of Pynchon that came and went blurrily as she faded in and out of focus with the fever. She snapped the memory shut. Leaned into the cold sparkle of the syn, like wetting her face in a fountain. “Look, we’ll know if anyone got out alive when—”

“—the swabs come in,” Rovayo finished for her. “Right. But in the meantime, what do you think? Give us the benefit of your COLIN specialist insight. Could someone have made it down in one piece?”

“Outside of the cryocaps, it’s not likely,” Norton told her. Habitual public statement caution, the COLIN watchword. “And even if they did, that still puts them a hundred kilometers off the coast. That’s a long swim.”

“Maybe someone came to get them.” Rovayo gestured at the empty levels of the recovered surveillance adobe. “We got no satellite stream data yet, no overhead incidentals. No way to know what went on before the recovery team got there.”

Coyle shook his head. “Doesn’t make sense, Alicia. Recovery scrambled as soon as they had the coordinates.”

“Who’d they use?” Sevgi asked, trying to sound neutral. NYPD had a longstanding superiority complex when it came to the Rim’s subcontract policy on emergency services, an attitude born of, and largely borne out by, New York’s disastrous flirtation with similar schemes in the past.

Rovayo glanced at Coyle.

“Filigree Steel, right? Or, wait.” She snapped her fingers. “Did they just lose the bid to ExOp?”

“Nah, that was up in Seattle. Down here, it’s still the Filstee crew.” Coyle looked around at Sevgi and Norton. “They’re pretty good, Filigree. Did the job well over spec. Aerial cover inside twenty minutes, drop teams deployed. No way there was time for anyone to get in first. Either this guy’s dead inside with the rest of them, or he took the plunge when the hatches came off and just swam off into the sunset.”

“Wrong direction then,” said Norton drily.

Coyle peeled him a glance. “I was using a metaphor there.”

“He does that sometimes,” Rovayo said, deadpan.

“I don’t think he went into the water,” said Sevgi. “You’d have to be suicidal or clinically insane to make that mistake.”

Coyle stared at her. “Were you there earlier today, Ms. Ertekin? Did you see the in-flight cuisine? You’re trying to tell me this motherfucker might not be insane?”

Sevgi grimaced. “This motherfucker, as you put it, had spent the last several months completely alone in deep space. Alone, that is, apart from the sporadic company of fellow crewmembers revived long enough to carve edible meat from. At a minimum, he is mentally unbalanced, yes, but—”

Rovayo snorted. “No shit, he’s unbalanced. You’d have to be fucking unhinged to—”

“No.” The force in the single syllable closed the other woman down. Words marched out of Sevgi’s mouth, words she remembered Ethan saying, almost verbatim. A cold conviction was growing in her. “You wouldn’t have to be insane to do these things. You’d just have to have a goal and be determined to attain it. Let’s get this straight, early on. What we’ve seen aboard Horkan’s Pride are not the symptoms of insanity; they are only evidence of great force of will. Evidence of planning and execution shorn of any socially imposed limitation. Any mental problems this person was suffering by journey’s end are going to be a result of that execution, not a cause.”

“Speaking of planning,” said Coyle. “You going to tell me you guys don’t pack these Colony transports with emergency supplies? You know, like food? In case someone wakes up unscheduled?”

“Nobody wakes up unscheduled,” said Norton.

“Well, excuse the fuck out of me.” The big cop looked around elaborately. “I’d say on this trip someone did exactly that. Woke up unscheduled and very fucking hungry.”

“Or they stowed away,” Rovayo suggested. “Would that work?”

“That’d be next to impossible,” said Sevgi. “There’s a lot of security written into the launch protocols. You’d have to hack it all in the time between the ship’s systems being enabled and the decouple.”

Rovayo nodded. “And how long is that?”

“About forty-five minutes. It takes these older ships longer to boot up.”

“Look, about this food.” Coyle wasn’t letting go. “We all know the Colony Initiative don’t like to spend any of the cash they tax out of the rest of us on anything resembling people, but are you guys really so fucking tight you won’t spring for a box of survival rations? What happens if something goes wrong midflight?”

Norton sighed. “Yeah. Okay. All COLIN vessels have onboard contingency rations. But that’s missing the point. On each run, you’ll have two qualified spaceflight officers, cryocapped separately from the hu—the passengers.”

“The hu what?” Rovayo asked curiously.

Human freight. Sevgi finished Norton’s slip of the tongue silently for him. Yeah, we have some lovely terminology over at COLIN. Contractual Constraint. Soft Losses. Quiet Facts. Profit Drag. Public Perception Management.

She weighed in. NYPD commandments. Fuck finer feelings and circumstance, you back your partner up. Brusquely: “What we’re telling you is that there are two systems. The passenger cryocaps are wired to default into frozen. There’s no point them being awake in an emergency. They’re civilians. What are they going to do, run around screaming Oh no, we’re all going to die? Onboard air’s too expensive for that shit. They’ve got nothing to contribute in a situation like that. So anything goes wrong, the whole system locks. You can’t get it open until the ship docks.”

Coyle shook his head. “Yeah, and what if the thing that goes wrong is that it thaws out?”

“How?” Sevgi gave him one of her best only-an-idiot looks. “You’re talking about deep space. You know how fucking cold it is out there? There isn’t enough ambient heat anywhere in the vessel to bring that system up a single degree from emergency frost. The only thing that might is the reactor, and that’s programmed to jettison if it fails.”

“Yeah, okay,” Rovayo doing a little partner support of her own. Sevgi caught herself in sudden sympathy. It was like passing an unexpected mirror. “So what about this other system? The spaceflight guys. They’re wired to wake up, right?”

“They can wake up.” Norton picked up again. “Under certain circumstances. If there’s a navigational emergency. The trajectory fails or you get unscheduled activity from the drive datahead maybe. Then the ship brings those two capsules up. Your spaceflight guys fix the problem, or call in the recovery if they can’t.”

That’s spaceflight guy, singular, people. The sour voice in her head would not shut up. Because—you taxpayers don’t need to know this, of course—for about a decade now we’ve been cutting back on emergency personnel by 50 percent. It’s just so fucking expensive, you see, wasting a perfectly good cryocap berth like that, after all this stuff almost never happens, right, and even if it does who needs two pilots to fix it when one can manage. That’s just overmanning, right?

“Right,” said Coyle. “And these guys got to eat and drink, right?”

“Yes, of course.” Norton gestured. Sevgi let him get on with it. Maybe from the long stay in virtual, her head was starting to hurt. “There’s tanked water anyway, for fusion mass, for radiation shielding, for the coolant systems. Even in the backup tanks, there’s more than two guys could drink even if they stayed out there for a couple of years. And obviously there’s food. But the supplies are calculated on the assumption that these two guys aren’t going to be up and about for very long. If it’s a simple problem, they fix it and then go back to sleep. If it’s not, they’ll send an SOS and then go back to sleep until the rescue ship gets there.”

“What if the system won’t let them refreeze?” Coyle wasn’t going to be shaken loose of what was apparently an endemic lack of faith in technology. Maybe, Sevgi thought sourly, he’d grown up in Jesusland and immigrated to the Rim.

Norton hesitated. “Statistically, that’s so close to impossible that—”

“Not impossible,” said Rovayo lazily. “Because, my memory serves me right, that happened to some poor motherfucker about seven, eight years back. Exactly that. Woke up and couldn’t get refrozen, had to sit out the whole voyage.”

“Yes, I remember that, too.” Norton nodded. “The cryocap spat him out and wouldn’t reset, some kind of systems glitch. Guy had to sit out the trajectory until the recovery crew got to him. See, if the transport is close enough to point of origin, emergency systems turn it around and send it back to meet the rescue ship, which cuts the retrieval time right down. If they’re closer to the end of the journey, they burn emergency fuel to speed up. However you cut it, you don’t need that much food to keep someone alive until they’re recovered.”

Well, Sevgi parenthesized to herself, not if you luck out and get a friendly orbital configuration anyway. But we don’t like to talk about that, guys. That’s what we in the trade like to call a Quiet Fact. Sort of thing even accredited COLIN staff won’t necessarily have pointed out to them. Sort of thing you might have to dig a little for.

But as Horkan’s Pride fell silently, implacably homeward, Sevgi had done that digging. Detective Ertekin has a sound analytical approach to casework, her first-year homicide report had come back one time, and shows energy and enthusiasm in absorbing fresh background detail. She has a talent for adjusting rapidly to new circumstances. She did her homework, they were trying to say, and here, nearly a decade later in the heart of COLIN, she did it again. Did her homework and found that the distance between Earth and Mars could vary by up to a factor of six. Mars, it seemed, orbited elliptically, and that plus the different orbital velocities of the two planets meant that they could be anything between about sixty and about four hundred million kilometers apart, depending on when you chose to span the gap. Even oppositions—Mars and Earth catching up to each other, running temporarily neck and neck, so to speak—could vary by a million or more klicks. COLIN transit launches took some account of these variations, but since the cycle worked itself out over several years, you couldn’t just wait around and send all your traffic at the short end. That semi-famous unscheduled wake-up guy eight or so years back had gotten lucky, hit somewhere near an opposition with the trajectory down well under the hundred million klicks.

This time around, their homecoming guy hadn’t been so lucky. Horkan’s Pride ate the thick end of the cycle, was coming home across more than three hundred million kilometers of cold, empty space.

And no lunch stops.

“Okay,” said Rovayo. “So there’s no SOS because the n-djinn is down. But there’s got to be provision for a manual backup, right?”

Norton nodded. “Yes. It isn’t difficult to do. There are step-by-step instructions nailed up in the coms nest.”

“And our guy chose to ignore them.”

“So it appears, yes. He ran silent all the way home, and presumably from somewhere close to the Mars end. There’s not enough food on board to do that, not even for one person. You want to sit in silence and wait out the whole trajectory, you’ve got to find something else to eat.”

“So the guy is fucking cracked.” The tinge of told-you-so in Rovayo’s voice. Bending back to her original assumptions. Okay, so she’d let this be a man, but she wasn’t going to believe he could be sane. “Got to be. He didn’t need—”

“Yeah, he did,” Sevgi said it to the air, detachedly. Time to run this for everybody’s benefit. “He did need to run silent. He couldn’t call in the rescue ship, and he couldn’t get back in the cryocap, assuming that it would have let him, because both those options would have defeated his whole purpose.”

A flicker of quiet. She saw Rovayo shoot an exasperated glance at Coyle. The big cop spread his hands.

“The purpose being?”

“To get home free.”

“Seems a little extreme,” said Rovayo sardonically. “Wouldn’t you say?”

“No, it’s not extreme.” Sevgi could hear herself talking, but the words seemed suddenly heavy, hard to get out. The syn was deserting her, retreating from her speech centers, leaving her with the fading light of the inspiration but no clear way to get it across. She fumbled for clarity. “Look, spaceflight’s a closed system. You dock in orbit, that’s quarantine control, post-cryocap medical checks, ID download. A week, usually, before they let you down the nanorack elevator and out. Whoever this guy was, he didn’t want to go through all that. He couldn’t afford to arrive cryocapped with the others, and he certainly couldn’t afford to be rescued. Both those options end at the nanorack. He needed to walk away unseen, unregistered. And this was the only way he could do it.”

“Yeah, but why?” Coyle wanted to know. “Six or seven months of cannibalism, isolation, probable insanity. Risking a splashdown at the end of it all. Plus hotwiring the crycocap, that’s got to carry some attendant risk, right? I mean, come on. How badly could you want to get home free?”

A wry grin from Norton, but he said nothing. Not for public consumption. Sevgi waved the diplomacy away.

“That’s missing the point. It’s no secret that there are people on Mars who wish they’d never signed up, who’d like to come home. But they’re the grunts, the cheap labor end of the Colony effort. This man was not a grunt. We’re talking about someone who’s at ease manipulating cryogen and medical datasystems, who’s able to operate the onboard emergency landing protocols—”

“Yeah, that’s something else I don’t get,” Rovayo said, frowning. “The whole trip, this guy’s taking the passengers in and out of the cryocaps to feed off. Why not just kill one of them and stick himself in the empty freezer in their place.”

“Kind of hard to explain when they take you out at the other end,” said Coyle drily.

His partner shrugged. “Okay, so you set the cryocap to wake you up a week out from home. Then—”

Norton shook his head. “Can’t be done. The cryocaps are individually coded at nanolevel for each passenger, and they’ve got very rigid program parameters. They’d reject a different body out of hand. You’d need to be a cryogen biotech specialist to get around that, and even then you probably couldn’t do it mid-transit. That kind of coding gets done while the ship’s in dock. They take the whole system down to do it. And you wouldn’t be able to recode an early wake-up, either, for much the same reason. The whole point of what happened here is that it was all within the existing parameters of the automated systems. There’s programmed provision for bringing a passenger temporarily out of cryogen for medical procedures. There is no provision for swapping passengers around, or letting them wake up early.”

“And he was smart enough, or skilled enough to know that,” said Sevgi. “Think about that. He knew exactly which systems he could safely subvert, and he did it without tripping a single alarm in the process.”

“Yeah, yeah, and he’s a mean hand at alternative cuisine,” growled Coyle. “Your point is?”

“My point is, anyone with the skills and strengths this man has shown would have gone out on a qualpro tour, which means a three-to five-year gig, no requirement to renew. He could have waited, come home cryocapped and comfortably wealthy.” Sevgi looked around at them. “Why didn’t he?”

Rovayo shrugged. “Maybe he couldn’t do the time. Three years is a long stretch when you’re looking at it from the starting line. Ask the new fish up at Folsom or Quentin Two, and that’s just jail time here on Earth. Maybe this guy gets off the shuttle at Bradbury, takes one look at all those red rocks, and realizes he made a big mistake, he just can’t go through with it.”

“That doesn’t fit with the force of will he’d need to do this,” said Norton soberly.

“No, it doesn’t,” Sevgi agreed. “And anyway, he could have called in the rescue ships as soon as he was outside the Mars support envelope. He didn’t—”

“Support envelope?” Rovayo frowned inquiry at Norton. “What’s that?”

Norton nodded. “Works like this. If you launch a COLIN transport from Mars to Earth and something goes wrong, something that requires a rescue, then it’s only worth the Mars people coming out up to a certain point. After that point, the transport is so far along the trajectory it would make more sense to send help from the Earth end. Anyone wanting to get home would have to wait at least until the tipover point, otherwise it’s all for nothing. Mars rescue brings you back and you’re still stuck there, with whatever penalties COLIN chooses to enforce on top. You need the rescue to come from Earth, because that way, whatever else happens to you, you’ve at least made it home. They’re not going to waste the pay-load cost on sending you back again, just out of spite.”

“Just out of curiosity,” said Coyle. “What are those penalties you’re talking about? What do COLIN do to you if you step out of line on Mars?”

Norton shuttled another glance at Sevgi. She shrugged.

“It works the same as anywhere else,” Norton said with trained care. They’d all been drilled in acceptable presentation on this one, too. “There’s a suite of sanctions called Contractual Constraint, but it’s what you’d expect, the usual stuff. Financial penalties set against your contract, incarceration in some serious cases. If you’re a short-timer, your jail time gets added onto the contract length without compensation. So if you’re homesick, it doesn’t pay to act up.”

“Yeah.” Rovayo cranked an eyebrow. “And if you do make it back to Earth? Unauthorized, I mean.”

Norton hesitated.

Sevgi said it for him. “That’s never been done before.”

And she wondered vaguely why she was smiling as she spoke. Cold, hard little smile. Ethan stood there in her memory and grinned back at her.

“Oho,” said Coyle.

“What, never?” Rovayo again. “In thirty years, this has never happened before?”

“Thirty-two years,” said Norton. “Over twice that if you count the original bubble crews back before the nanoforming really kicked in. Like Sevgi says, it’s a closed system. Very hard to beat.”

Coyle shook his head. “I still don’t get it. He could have called in a rescue from the Earth end. Okay, he’d maybe do some time, but Jesus fuck, he did the time anyway, out there. How much worse could white-collar jail time be than that?”

“But he wasn’t looking at just a white-collar sentence,” said Sevgi softly.

“Look.” Coyle wasn’t listening to her. He was still looking for somewhere to dump his anger. “What I still don’t get is this: why didn’t you people send out the rescue ship on spec as soon as the n-djinn went down?”

“Too fucking cheap is why,” muttered Rovayo.

“Because there wasn’t any point.” Sevgi said evenly. “Horkan’s Pride was coming home anyway. As far as we knew, the crew were unharmed.”

“Un-fucking-harmed?” Coyle again, disbelieving.

Norton stepped into the breach. “Yeah, I know how that sounds. But you’ve got to understand how this works. It was only the n-djinn that stopped talking to us. That’s happened before on the Mars run, we just don’t like to publicize the fact. We’ve had cases where the djinn goes offline temporarily, then blips back on a few days later. Sometimes they just die. We don’t really know why.”

He spanned an invisible cube with both hands, chopped downward. Sevgi looked elsewhere, face kept carefully immobile.

“The point is, it doesn’t matter that much. The ship will run fine on automated modular systems. Think of the n-djinn as the captain of a ship. If the captain on one of those Pacific factory rafts dies, you don’t have to send out a salvage vessel to bring the raft into port, do you?” A self-deprecatory smile at the rhetorical question. “Same thing with Horkan’s Pride. Losing the n-djinn didn’t affect the ship’s fail-safe protocols. Mars and Earth traffic control were both still getting the standard green lights from Horkan’s Pride. Shipboard atmosphere and rotational gravity constant, no hull breaches, cryocap systems all online, trajectory uncompromised, pilot systems active. The baseline machines were all still working, it’s just the ship itself that wouldn’t talk to us.”

Rovayo shook her head. “And the fact that this hijo de puta was taking people out of the cryocaps and cutting them up, that didn’t register anywhere?”

“No,” admitted Norton tiredly. “No, it didn’t.”

“Without the djinn, there was no way to know what was going on.” Sevgi droned on, partly bored, partly trying to bury her own grim conviction that Rovayo had guessed right about COLIN’s real motives. Midtrajectory retrieval was still a mind-numbingly expensive call for any flight project manager to make. “The baseline system is exactly what it sounds like. It tells us if something malfunctions. There was no visible malfunction, and since the whole crew was supposed to be in cryocap, that meant—logically—there was no way for them to be harmed. We had no way of knowing any different. And the ship was on course. In a situation like that, you wait. That’s how spaceflight works.”

Rovayo took the tutorial edge on the last comment without blinking.

“Yeah? Well, if the ship wasn’t talking to you, how was it going to dock at the nanorack?”

Norton spread his hands. “Same answer. Autonomic engagement. The docking facility takes over from the pilot systems on approach. We had no reason to think that wouldn’t happen.”

“Seems to me,” said Coyle, “whoever did this knew your systems inside out.”

“Yes, they did.” And our miserable cost-cutting souls, too. Sevgi shook off the thought. Time to get back on track. “They knew our systems, because they’d studied them and they were highly skilled at planning an intrusion into those systems, which means a high degree of raw intelligence and insurgency training. And they were utterly committed to their own survival above and beyond any other concern, which takes an extreme degree of strength and mental discipline. And yet this same person was so terrified of being registered on arrival that they did this to avoid it.”

Sevgi gestured around the virtuality. Aspects of the crime leapt out at them as the systems read Focus in the wake of her sweeping arm. Outraged data, cut-and-splice code wounding marked in siren colors, frozen footage snaps of cryocap fluids spilled across pristine floors, blood spotted on walls, and stripped-skull grins.

She drew a deep breath.

“Now does anyone want to tell me what those pixels paint?”

She wasn’t that far ahead of them. Coyle’s eyes changed with the understanding, anger finally doused, damped down to something else. Rovayo went very still. Norton—Sevgi twisted to meet his eyes—just looked thoughtful. But no one said anything. Oddly, it was the path ’face that took up the challenge. It thought it had been asked a question.

“The salients you describe,” the confected woman said precisely, “are consistent with the perpetrator being a variant thirteen reengineered male.”

Sevgi nodded her thanks at the ’face.

“Yes. Aren’t they just.”

They all stood there while it sank in.

“Great,” said Coyle finally. “Just what we need, a fucking twist for a perp.”

CHAPTER 6

The humidity loop on string seventeen went down sometime on Friday night, they figured, and once again the backup protectives failed to come online. Saturday came in foggy, so at first no one noticed when the dish covers stayed dialed up to full transparency. But when the California summer sun finally burned through the fog that afternoon and hit the glass, the incubating cultures got it full force. Sirens cut loose back at the wharf. Scott and Ren roared out there at panic speed in the Zodiac, but by the time they got into their wet suits and into the water, they’d lost pretty much everything on the string. They paddled about a bit making sure, disconnected the system, and phoned the detail in to Nocera. Then they powered back to the wharf in glum and dripping silence. Scott didn’t need to voice what they both knew. Seventeen was loaded to the roots—it had about a quarter of the month’s crop on it. When Ulysses Ward got back from checking the deep trellis range and heard about this, he was going to go ballistic. It was the third time that summer.

“What happens when you buy your software out of fucking Texas,” grinned Nocera, feet up on the console while he and Scott sat waiting for some hired-down-the-wires San Diego machine consultancy to trace and fix the fault. “Ward’s never going to learn. You want Rim quality, you got to pay Rim prices.”

“It’s not the software,” Scott said, mainly because he knew it wasn’t, but also because he was getting tired of Nocera’s constant cracks. “It’s the seals.”

“It fucking is the software. Ward got cheap and cheerful from a bunch of Jesusland hicks probably think altered carbon’s what you buy for indoor barbecues. Those guys are running five years behind the stuff coming out of the valley now, minimum.”

“There’s nothing wrong with the software,” Scott snapped. “We had this same shit back in May and that was before the fucking upgrade.” Before you hired on, he didn’t add. And then his own language caught up with him and he colored with the shame. He’d never sworn like that before he started working out here.

“Yeah. Same shit, same shit software.” Nocera wasn’t going to shut up, he was on a roll. He gestured around the con room. “Ward buys his upgrades the same place he got the original system. Cow Tech, Kansas. Shat fresh out of a longhorn’s ass.”

“You said Texas a minute ago.”

“Texas, Kansas?” Nocera made a dismissive gesture. “In the end, what’s the fucking difference? It’s all—”

“Leave him alone, Emil. We all got to be born somewhere.”

Carmen Ren stood in the doorway of the control room, unlit spliff tucked into the corner of her mouth and hands in her coverall pockets. She’d stomped off as soon as she’d peeled off her wet suit, without a backward word. Scott knew by now not to go after her when she hit that mood. Not till she’d smoked it down a little, leastways.

Nocera sighed weightily. “Look, Carm, it’s not like that. I don’t get on Osborne here just ’cause he’s a fence-hopper. Lot of people would around here, but not me. I figure a man’s got to make a living, even if he has to tunnel under a fenceline to do it. But he’s not going to sit here and tell me that cheap crap they spin up in Jesusland works as well as Rimtech. Because it just ain’t fucking so.”

Ren gave Scott a weary smile.

“Ignore him,” she said. “With Ward out of sight, there’s no telling how much custom-nasty shit Emil here’s put up his nose today.”

Nocera wagged a cautionary finger at her. “You pick your chemicals, Carm. I’ll pick mine.”

“This?” Ren removed the spliff from her mouth and held it aloft for general scrutiny. “This is a cheap drug, Emil. I won’t be the one coming around begging for a sub the week before payday.”

“Hey, fuck you.”

She put the spliff back in her mouth, crushed the end to life between a callused thumb and forefinger, and drew hard. The ember flared up with a clearly audible splintering crack. She sighed out a cloud of smoke, looked at Nocera through it for a moment.

“Thanks,” she said. “I’ve had better offers this week.”

“What, like from altar boy here?”

Scott felt himself flush again, hot on hot. Carmen Ren was the most gorgeous woman he’d ever seen in the flesh, and since they’d been on field maintenance together he’d been seeing a lot of that flesh. She stripped off in the tackle room with an utter lack of self-consciousness that he knew Pastor William would have called prideful and unwomanly. Scott politely turned his back whenever she got naked that way, but he still caught glimpses as she zipped herself into the wet suit or peeled unexpectedly to the waist in the Zodiac when it was hot. Her skin was like pale honey, and the curves of her body were subtle yet unmistakable even in the shapeless Ward BioSupply coveralls they all wore around the wharf. But more than all that, Carmen Ren had long, straight hair that spilled like black water onto her shoulders whenever she unpinned it from the spiderform static clip that kept it up, and a curious, negligent way of tipping her head to one side as she did it. She had liquid dark, ironic eyes that lifted delicately at the corners and cheekbones like ledges on some Himalayan peak, and when she concentrated on something, her whole face took on a porcelain immobility that splintered his heart like the sound of that ember in the spliff.

The last few weeks, Scott had found himself thinking about Ren a lot when he went home at night, and in a way that he knew was sinful. He’d done his best to resist the urges, but it was no good. She floated into his dreams unbidden, in postures and scenarios that made him flush when he recalled them during the waking day. More than once recently he’d woken tight and hard from the dreams, his hands already on himself and the taste of Ren’s name in his mouth. Worse still, he had the feeling that when Ren looked at him, she could see right through him to that sweaty core of desire, and despised him for it.

Now she was smoking, looking down on Nocera as if he were something that had just leaked out of the mulch vats.

“You really are being a disagreeable little prick today, aren’t you.” She turned to Scott. “You want to go get a coffee up on the wharf?”

“Uh, with you, together, you mean?” Scott bounced to his feet as she nodded. “Sure. Yeah. Great.”

“Uhm, uh, with, uhm, you?” Nocera sneered, made dying-insect-leg motions with his arms. Cranked up a joke-Jesusland accent from network comedy stock. “Duh, darlin’, how kin ah refuse such a laidy. Uhm, praise, uhm, th’ everlovin’ Lord.”

Scott felt his fists clench. He’d been in enough scuffles back home to know he wasn’t much of a fighter, and to know from looking at Nocera that he was. He’d seen the scars when the older man was getting into and out of a wet suit, read it also in his stance and the blank challenge of the unkind eyes. It was like looking at a later edition of Jack Mackenzie’s older brother, the one who’d enlisted on his sixteenth birthday and come home a year later, sunburned and full of scalp tales from places none of them had ever heard of.

Still, he’d taken about as much of Nocera’s Rim superiority as he—

Ren glided into the gap almost before Scott realized he was turning to face the other man.

“I said a coffee, Scott. Not a broken nose.” She nodded at the door. “Come on. Leave this dickhead to play with himself.”

“Be a lot more fun than playing with you, Ren.” Nocera leaned past Ren’s hip, still in his chair, still grinning. “I’m telling you, kid, I know her sort inside out. Been there, eaten the pussy. You will have more fun jerking off.”

Scott surged forward, fists raised. The new flush slammed through him, itching at the roots of his hair and burning across his cheeks. He saw the grin slide off Nocera’s face, replaced with a sudden, speculative interest. The other man’s boots swung unhurriedly off the console to the floor. Scott knew then he was going to get a kicking, but fuck it—

And suddenly he was pressed up against Ren. Flash scent of her hair, still damp, warmth of skin and soft curves right underneath his eyes, and then she pushed him firmly back toward the door. The look on her face wasn’t friendly.

“Get out,” she said, firm as the hand on his chest. “Wait for me upstairs.”

He went, stumbling a little, shame and relief pulsing through him in about equal quantities. The door closed behind him, shutting down whatever Nocera was sneering to a barely audible murmur. Ren’s angry tones trod it down. He wanted to stay and listen but….

He went quietly along the bulb-lit metal corridor, up the clanking metal steps to the topside offices, and out into the late-afternoon sunlight, still breathing tightly. He crossed to the rail on one of the wharf’s access gantries and gripped the carbon-fiber weave in both fists as if he could crush it. He stared down at his whitened knuckles.

…fucking Nocera, fucking Rim assholes, fucking place…

But he’d known, a small, calm part of himself came and reminded him. He’d always known what it was going to be like. He’d known because Uncle Leland, who’d been Rimside before he was born, had told him all about it. Pastor William had told him, too, in bitten-off hellfire-tinged terms. His mother had wept and told him, again and again. His friends had jeered and told him.

Everyone had told him, because everyone knew what they thought of Republicans out on the godless Rim. Hard grind and hatred, it was all they’d offer him. They’d use him up, spit on him while they were doing it, and if the immigration bogeys didn’t get him, then debt and the gangmasters would. He’d have no rights there, no one to turn to. He’d be nothing, worse than nothing, one of the silent service underclass that were cheaper than machines and had to be as quiet, as uncomplaining and efficient or else bang, your average high-tech high-demand Rim citizen there just went right ahead and junked them for something that’d do the job faster, cheaper, better.

Still, I won’t tell you not to go. Leland, the last week before Scott skipped, parked by Scott’s side on the split-rail fence, watching sunset smear the sky up over the mountains. He didn’t know it, but Scott had already paid the handler in Bozeman the upfront half. He was due on the truck next Tuesday. I won’t tell you not to go, because there’s nothing here for you that’s better. People hate the Rim, and there’s a pot of good reasons for that, but there’ll be chances out there you won’t get here if you stay your whole God-given life. The money hasn’t settled like it has here. It’s still moving, it’s not all classed up and fossilized. You can track it out there, go where it is. Get lucky, you can maybe carve some off for yourself. And if you stay, get legal, get a family, then your kids can maybe have even more. You know, schooling’s free in the Rim. I mean, really free, and real schooling, not the bullcrap we get here.

They sat for a while, and evening deepened the colors of the sunset. The air started to chill.

Why’d you come back then, Wallace? he’d asked finally.

Wallace grinned and looked down at his work-worn hands. You always ask the good ones, Scotty. Why’d I come back? I don’t know, maybe I just wasn’t strong enough to stay away. I missed this place something grim, you know. We both did, me and your pop. We always talked about coming back, and I think that’s what helped us stay away. Then when Daniel had his accident, there was no more talk, no one to talk to, and that missing started to really gnaw at me.

Scott knew the gnawing well. Sometimes he beat it, for days at a time, especially in the early days, the early shit jobs, when work wore him down and left him no strength or time for anything but itself and sleep. But the longing always came back, and now, now he had time, and money put away, he could feel the same crumbling that must have taken Wallace. He said his prayers every night, the way he’d promised Mom he would, went to a Christian church when he could find one, but lately he was confused in the things he thought about praying for.

“You okay now?”

He started. He hadn’t heard Ren come up behind him.

“Where I come from,” he said tightly, straight off, “you don’t talk that way in front of women.”

She inclined her head, gave him a gentle smile. “Well, where I come from we don’t segregate our speech. But thanks, anyway. It was a nice thought. Especially since Nocera would have walked all over you. He’s an asshole, Scott, but that doesn’t mean he can’t handle himself.”

“I know that. I seen his type before.”

“Have you?” She examined him closely for a moment. Raised an eyebrow. “Yeah, you have, haven’t you. Well then, that was a very brave thing you tried to do.”

He felt the bloom of something inside. Felt it wither again as Ren shook her head at him.

“Pretty fucking dumb, but very brave. Shall we go and get that coffee?”

Ward BioSupply had begun life as one of several marine biotech startups working off the Kwok commercial wharf complex, but over time it had absorbed a lot of the neighboring competition and now sprawled across the north end of the complex in a patchwork collection of office prefabs, scaffolded sub docks, and newly built warehousing. To find anything that didn’t belong to Ulysses Ward, you had to walk one of the narrow linking gantries over to the south side, where a run of eateries with sea views catered to the wharf’s workers.

They ducked into a place called Chung’s, which was widely reckoned to be the best of the caffeine joints and had a set of displays running club footage from the Singapore bloodbeat scene.

“This is good,” Ren said, gesturing at the screens with her coffee mug. “Beats that saccharine shit they pipe in on site.”

“Yeah.” Gruffly—he was still smarting a little from her calling him dumb. Besides which, he quite liked the on-site music. And he didn’t really approve of the massed writhing bodies rubbing up against one another’s all-but-nakedness.

She drank, nodded appreciatively at the taste. “Yeah. Be good to be caffeinated, too, come to that. If Ward’s going to shout at us, I want to be awake when he does it. I’ve been up since four this morning.”

“Doing what?”

She shrugged. “Ah, you know how it is.”

By which he knew she meant she had another job. And was therefore illegal like him, because out here if you were legitimate, you’d get by pretty easily on a single wage. It was the standout difference between the Rim and the Republic.

The hint of solidarity softened his sulk.

“Things’ll smooth out when you’ve been here awhile,” he offered in return. “I was working every open-eye hour, three different places, till I hooked this gig. Ward likes to run his mouth when things go wrong, but he’s a pretty good boss under that.”

She nodded. “I guess things must have been pretty grim where you’re from, right?” she said shrewdly. “Where is that? I’m guessing Nebraska? The Dakotas, maybe?”

“Montana.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Water war country. Man, that must have been tough growing up.”

“They got it worse in other places,” he said defensively, though he couldn’t have named any offhand. “Just, well, you know. Hard to get paying work, you don’t know the right people.”

She nodded. “Plus ça change.”

“Excuse me?”

“Doesn’t matter.” She watched the screens. “Ward say anything to you about when he’d be back?”

“Not really. Said it might be most of the day. I figure he’s got to be aiming on some serious overhaul work. Usually, trip like that, trellis check, he’d be out and back in not much more than a couple of hours.” He hesitated. “Carmen, you mind if I ask you a question?”

“Sure.” It was said absently; she wasn’t really paying attention.

“Where are you from?”

Sudden sidelong glance. Now he had her attention.

“That’s a long story, Scott.” She sipped her coffee. “You sure you want to be that bored?”

“I won’t be. I like hearing about places I haven’t been.”

“Makes you think I’m from someplace else?”

But she grinned as she said it, in a way that said he was supposed to join in. He grinned back, flushing only a little.

“Come on, Carmen. You wouldn’t be working for Ward if you were Rim born and bred. None of us would.” He nodded around at the clientele, dropped his voice a prudent couple of notches. “Everyone in this place is from someplace else. I don’t figure you for any different.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Detective, huh?”

“I just pay attention,” he said.

“Yeah, I guess you do.”

“So come on—tell me. Where’d you swing in from?”

There was a long pause. Scott waited. He’d had these moments before with fellow illegals, the weightless gap before trust engaged, before each one shed the load of suspicion and talked together like two free Americans once would have done, back before the internationalist scum and the Chinese—political Chinese, he reminded himself, you’re not a racist, Scott—broke apart the greatest nation on the face of the Earth and cast down the fractured remnants like Moses breaking the tablets.

“Taiwan,” she said, and his heart welled up with the knowledge that yes, she did trust him. “You heard of Taiwan?”

“Right. I mean, sure.” Falling over himself in eagerness. “That’s in China, right? It’s, like, a Chinese province.”

Ren snorted. “They fucking wish. It’s an island, and it’s off the coast of China, you got that right. But we’re an independent state. Written that way into every Pacific Rim trade agreement and nonproliferation pact in the last hundred years. What you call a hothouse economy, same status as the Angeline Freeport, same hyperpowered output and no one wants to fuck with it in case they break it and the whole Rim feels the backwash. That’s where I grew up.”

“So why’d you leave?”

She gave him a sharp look, for all it had been an innocent question. Scott couldn’t see leaving a place that was doing that well for any reason on Earth, not if it was your home, not if you grew up there.

“I mean,” he stumbled. “I guess you weren’t happy there, right? But, you know, it sounds like the kind of place a person would be happy.”

She smiled a little. “Well, it has its upsides. But even in hothouse economies, you got losers as well as winners. I mean, not everyone in the Freeport’s a movie star or a nanotech licensee, right?”

“Got that right.” He’d worked in the Freeport on and off, would never go back if he didn’t have to.

“Okay, so like I said, winners and losers, if you’re the loser then—”

“You don’t want to talk like that, Carmen.” Scott leaned across the table, earnest. “You’re not a loser just on account of you gotta go somewhere else to make a better life for yourself. None of us is a loser here, we’re just looking for that opportunity to get back on the horse.”

For a moment, it got him a blank look. Then the confusion cleared from her porcelain face. “Ah, right. Culture gap. No, I’m not talking about losers the way you people do. I mean losers in the trade-off. Some win, some lose, the wheel goes ’round. That kind of thing.”

“You people?” He tried to hide the hurt. “What do you mean, you people?”

“You know, guys like you.” She gestured impatiently. “Old Americans, heart-landers. From the Republic.”

“Oh, okay. But look, Carmen.” He allowed himself a superior smile. “We’re not the old Americans, that’s the Union, that sell-out eastern scum, all their UN-loving pals. The Confederated Republic is the New America. We’re the Phoenix rising, Carm.”

“Right.”

“I mean, uhm,” he stumbled again, looking for language that wouldn’t offend. “Look, I know probably you didn’t go to a church the same way I always did, guess for you it was some kind of temple or something, but in the end it’s the same thing, right?” Pleased with himself for the way he’d eased out from under Pastor William’s unremitting hellfire and One True Christ ranting, seen a better light in the succession of more moderate churches he’d had to make do with over the last couple of years. “I mean whatever you call God, if you accept that God as your guiding principle the way the Republic does, then any nation that does that has to succeed, right? Has to rise up in the end, no matter what Satan does to lay snares in our path.”

Ren looked at him thoughtfully. “Are you really a, uh, a Christian?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“So you belie—”

Her phone blipped at them. She fished it out and put it to her ear.

“Yeah?” Features tautening, the way he’d seen it that morning when the news about the humidity loop came through. “Got it. Be right there.”

She snapped the phone off again.

“Ward,” she said. “He’s back, and he’s pretty fucking pissed off.”

Pretty pissed off was about right. Scott could hear Ward’s bellowing through the metal walls of the con room while they were still at the far end of the corridor. He followed Ren along the narrow space, hurrying to keep up with her curiously long, rapid strides. He would have tried to get ahead of her, to go first in case Nocera was still behaving like an asshole, but there was no room to pass, and anyway…

The door sliced back to admit them. Ward’s rage boiled out, suddenly on full audio. Scott was used to the sound, but this time he thought there was an edge on the voice he hadn’t heard before, something that went well beyond anger.

“…the fucking point of all this planning if we’re—”

He shut up as he saw them. Ulysses Ward was a big, bearish man, muscular from the constant sub-aqua and surface swimming time the business demanded, balding in a way you didn’t see so much of on this side of the fenceline. He flushed when he got angry, as he was now, and he punctuated his speech with aggressive motion of limbs and head. Scott had never seen him actually hit anyone, but he often gave the impression that it wasn’t entirely out of the question. Nocera, perhaps wisely, had given him center stage in the con room, and he stood there now, fists clenched.

“We’re back,” said Ren superfluously.

“So I fucking see.” Ward seemed to notice Scott for the first time. “You, get down to the sub dock and take a look at the air scrubbers on Lastman. Felt like I was breathing farts and fumes the last hour back, I nearly fucking had to surface it got so bad.”

For about half a second, before he spotted the idiocy of it, Scott thought about refusing to leave Ren until Ward had calmed down. He swallowed instead, said: “Might be a compatibility problem, all that software we took out of, uh, Fell 8 was—”

Ward pinned him with a glare. “And can you fix that for me if it is?”

“Well, no, but—”

“No, that’s right. Because I didn’t fucking hire you as a software specialist. So why don’t you get the fuck down there like I asked you to and take a fucking look at what you can fucking fix for me. All right? Simple enough for you?”

Scott looked at him, knowing he was flushing. Breathed in hard, nodded on clenched teeth and lips pulled tight.

“Good, then why are you still standing here?”

Scott wheeled about and plunged back into the corridor, fury rising through him like heat. One more month, he promised himself silently. One more fucking month, and out. Before today, he’d thought Ward was okay, he’d thought the man was an American. Guy lost his temper now and then, but what real man didn’t. Point was, he knew where the lines were. But now, talking that way, treating Scott like he was some just-over-the-fence liability who’d fucked up when all the time it was Scott had been warning Ward that if you were going to cannibalize plug-ins from one sub to another, you couldn’t just expect that the systems would fall in love with each other without you ran a whole slew of up-to-date compatibility patches.

He was on the stairs down to the dock when he became aware that something had changed fractionally in the light in the corridor behind him.

He stopped on the first step, looked back.

Saw a tall figure advancing down the passageway from the other end, darkening the view along the narrow perspectives as it passed under each overhead bulb and got between Scott and the light source. This guy really was tall, and big with it, and advancing with inexorable calm. Someone not used to being stopped, someone who must not have liked the signs all over the topside offices that asked you to buzz and take a seat while you waited, one of our staff will be with you shortly, must instead have decided to just come down anyway and find whatever he was looking for.

Scott lifted an arm and waved.

“Uh, hey,” he called.

The figure gave no indication that it had seen or heard him. It moved steadily along the corridor toward the con room door, seemed to be wearing a long coat and had one hand held stiffly down inside the folds of the garment—

And suddenly, out of nowhere, a lever tipped over in Scott’s guts. Something was wrong. This was trouble.

He hopped off the step and jogged back up the corridor, toward the newcomer. He didn’t call out again; there was no point. He knew from experience how voices boomed and echoed in the metal confines of the corridor—this guy had heard him well enough. And yes, there was definitely something in that coat-shrouded hand, he saw the way the material wrapped stiffly around it. He dropped the jog, kicked into a sprint.

They met at the door. Scott’s sprint died, puddled right out of him. What he had to say dried up in his mouth. He gaped.

It was the face. His mind seemed to gibber it. It was the face, the face.

Right out of the End Times comics they gave out every fourth Sunday in church, the ones the little kids got nightmares over and the older kids had to earn with red ticks in Pastor William’s Book of Deeds. It was the same hollow-cheeked privation and clamped mouth, the long, untidy hair hanging past the hard-angled bones of cheeks and jaw, the same burning eyes—

The Gaze of Judgment. Right out of Volume II Issue 63.

His knees trembled. His mouth worked. He couldn’t—

The door hummed—he’d never noticed the noise before now—and slid back. Voices within, still angry.

The coat swirled, the stranger’s right arm came free, came up swinging. Something hit Scott in the side of the head and he stumbled, went down in an awkward, twisted-limb sprawl. Lightning switched through his head, left sparks and a wow-and-flutter effect in his ears. The Gaze lit on him briefly, then swung away again, left and into the opened con room. The stranger stepped through.

Yells erupted. Nocera and Ward, almost in unison. “This is private fucking property, asshole, what do you—”

A sudden silence that sang above the numbness in his head where he’d been hit. Then Ward again, raw disbelief.

“You? What the fuck are you doing in here? What—”

Deep, soft cough—a sound he knew from somewhere.

And the screaming started.

Scott felt the sound wring sweat from his pores, turn his skin shivery-ticklish with horror. Like the time Aaron got his arm trapped in the teeth of Dougie Straker’s rock breaker, exactly the same feeling—the sound of agony, of damage so massive it ripped register and recognition out of the voice that made it, left only a flayed shriek of denial that could have belonged to anyone and almost anything.

Carmen!

Scott flailed about. Panic for her got him to his knees, got him to his feet. He felt blood trickling in his hair. He stumbled and almost fell, braced himself on the edge of the door just as it started to slide closed again. The mechanism trembled against his grip a moment, then gave and sank back to full open. Scott shoved himself upright and staggered through.

He had time for one flash-burned glimpse.

Blood, everywhere, the siren color of it shocked onto the consoles and wall, what looked like a couple of fistfuls of offal from the discount end of a butcher’s counter drip-sliding down the screens. Nocera was down, face turned awkwardly sideways, eyes open, cheek pressed hard to the ill-swept, dusty floor as if he were listening for rats in the understructure. More blood, a broad, wine-dark puddle of it leaking out around his midriff, tongues of the stuff twisting out through the scattered dust. Over his body, Ren and the stranger wrestled for a squat-barreled weapon—Scott made the match with the soft impact he’d heard, one of the Cressi sharkpunch guns from the cabinet upstairs. Supposed to be locked, he was always telling Ward that, but—

Ward lay on his back beyond.

More blood again, the big man thrashing and slithering in it, clutching, Scott saw with numb horror, at a raw red hole where his belly had been. Shredded tissue hung in ropes out of him, was clotted on the floor and smeared on his fingers like some red-stained cake mix he’d stuck his hands into. Ward’s mouth was a gaping pink tunnel—you could see right down to the molars and a trembling whitish yellow tongue—and the screams came up out of it in sickening waves. His eyes clawed onto Scott as he stood in the doorway, nailed him there. Wide and pleading, crazy with pain, Scott couldn’t know whether his boss knew him or not. He made to throw himself forward into the fray, threw up instead, with punishing, gut-wrenching force. Vomit splattered in Nocera’s pooling blood.

Carmen yelled, desperate.

Cough of the sharkpunch.

Another impact, this time in his neck below the ear. He grabbed for something, anything. The floor came up. Blood and vomit, warm and wet in his face as he hit. He tried to get his mouth closed or twisted clear, failed in the attempt. The hot acid stink and taste—his stomach flipped again, weakly. His legs flexed like a crippled insect’s. Vision dimming out on a pool of red and flecks of yellow-white. He groped after a prayer, fumbled it, couldn’t get his mouth to work, made a handful of scrabbling words in his head—

Our Father…deliver me not…

And black.

CHAPTER 7

By evening, the news was all bad.

Genetic trace turned up a human occupant aboard Horkan’s Pride unaccounted for by any of the scattered corpses. It wasn’t hard to separate out the trace: it came with the full suite of modifications grouped loosely under the popular umbrella term variant thirteen. Or as Coyle had put it, a fucking twist.

They had a manhunt on their hands.

Recovered audiovid remained stubbornly the least filled section of the investigation model. There were scant fragments of satellite footage, from platforms busy about other business and nowhere near overhead. A weather monitor geo-synched to Hawaii had taken some angled peripheral interest when Horkan’s Pride dumped itself into the Pacific, and the Rim’s military systems had registered the incursion while the ship was still in the upper atmosphere, but abandoned close interest as the COLIN dataheads passed on what they knew. Horkan’s Pride had jettisoned its reactor as part of the emergency reentry protocols, carried no weapons, and was plotted to land harmlessly in the ocean. One of the milsats watched the ship complete the promised trajectory and then promptly went back to watching troop movements in Nevada.

None of the recovered footage showed any sign of an attempted pickup prior to the arrival of the coastal crews. Nor were there any helpful images of a lonely figure casting itself into the ocean. None of it was conclusive, even enhanced as far as state-of-the-art optics allowed, but neither did any of it provide anything approaching a useful lead.

They had a manhunt on their hands, and nowhere to start.

In the hotel, Sevgi sat and ate with Norton, food she didn’t want and conversation she wasn’t up to. The restaurant’s romantic low-lighting scheme felt like darkness crowding her eyes at the edges. The syn had crashed, definitively.

“How do you feel about this?” Norton asked her as she picked disinterestedly at an octopus salad.

“How do you think?”

It was deflection, something—yeah, the only fucking thing—she’d learned from the department-paid counseling sessions after Ethan and the rest of the shit came down. The specialist had sat across the room from her, smiling gently and pushing back every question she’d asked him with the same infuriating elicitation techniques. After a while, she started to do the same thing to him. Not helpful, she supposed, but it had brought the sessions to a rapid close, which was what she wanted. I can’t help you if you won’t help me, he’d said at the end, an edge of anger finally awake in his soporific, patient voice. He was missing the point. She didn’t want to be helped. She wanted to do damage, gashed red, bleeding, and screaming damage to all and any of the bland facets of social restraint that meshed her about like spiderweb.

“Nicholson’s probably going to kick,” Norton said quietly. “He’ll say you’re conflicted.”

“Yeah.”

“Not enjoying your octopus, then?”

“I’m not hungry.”

Norton sighed. “You know we can let this one go if you want, Sev. Tsai’s guys don’t want us here anyway, and RimSec would just love the chance to flex its secessional muscle. If this guy didn’t drown in the Pacific, he’s on their land now. Added to which, the fact he’s a thirteen pretty much makes it an UNGLA matter. Why don’t we just step back and let the UN and the Rim fight it out for jurisdiction.”

“No fucking way.” Sevgi tossed her chopsticks onto the plate. She sat back. “I didn’t join COLIN for an easy ride, Tom. I needed the money is all. And this is as good a way to earn it as busting black-market Marstech or chasing cultists away from the racks. Did you fucking see what he did to those bodies? Helena Larsen had a fucking life waiting for her when she got home. This is the first worthwhile thing I’ve done in over two years. This is ours.”

Norton looked at her in silence for a moment. Nodded. “All right. I’ll have Tsai upload the CSI files to COLIN New York. That should take the ambiguity out of the situation. What do you want to do about Coyle and Rovayo?”

“Retain them. Joint task force, indispensable local law enforcement support.” She found energy for a grin. “Should play well with the Rim media. COLIN fucks up and spills one of their transports into the Pacific, West Coast cops ride to the rescue. It’ll open some doors for us.”

“And save us some legwork.”

“Well, there’s that. You know the Bay Area pretty well, right? Got a sister here?”

Norton sipped at his wine. “Sister-in-law. Brother moved over here about fifteen years ago, he’s a special asylums coordinator with the Human Cost Foundation. You know, screening, social integration program. But it’s probably her you heard me talking about. Megan. We, uh, we get on pretty well.”

“You going to see them while we’re here?”

“Maybe.” Norton frowned into his drink. “How much of this are we going to let the media have?”

Sevgi yawned. “Don’t know. See how it goes. If you’re talking about the variant thirteen thing, I vote we keep a lid on it.”

“If I’m talking about the variant thirteen thing? Gee, I don’t know, do you think I could be? This is me, Sev. Do you think you could drop the say-what casual act for a while?”

She stared off into the gloom of the restaurant. Her eye caught on an underlit motion ad from the fifties—some nanotech dream of change, a ripple of green and blue marches across Martian red to the horizon, a bright new sun rises in synchrony.

“It’ll be enough to make him out a stowaway and a criminal,” she said carefully. “Say that he murdered members of the crew, keep the details back to screen out all the crank calls we’re going to pull down. Bad enough that he’s back from Mars. Telling them he’s a thirteen as well is just asking for trouble. You saw the way Coyle reacted. Remember Sundersen last year? We don’t need another Abomination Among Us panic on our hands.”

“You think they’d go that way again? After the spanking they all got from the Press Ethics Commission?”

Sevgi shrugged. “The media likes panic. It boosts viewing.”

“Are we going to give race type?”

“If and when Organic Trace get it for us. Why?”

“I’m wondering,” Norton said softly, “if he’s Chinese.”

Sevgi thought about it for a moment. “Yeah. There’s that. Don’t want a replay of Zhang fever. That shit was fucking awful. Least with Sundersen, no one died.”

“Apart from Sundersen.”

“You know what I mean. You ever see that lynching footage? They made us watch it in school.” Sevgi brushed fingertips to her temples. “I can still see it in here like it was fucking yesterday.”

“Bad times.”

“Yeah.” She pushed her plate away and bridged her arms in the space it left. “Listen, Tom, maybe we should run silent on this whole thing. For the time being, anyway. Just tell the media everybody died in the crash, including this guy. It’s not like there’s a plausibility problem with that, after all. Shit, we still haven’t worked out how he survived.”

“On the other hand, if we get a photo ID off the trace—”

“Big if.”

“—then broadcasting it’d be our best chance of nailing this guy.”

“He can change his face, Tom. Any backstreet salon in the Bay Area’ll do it for a couple of hundred bucks. By the time we get a face out to the media, he’ll have peeled it and gone underground. Gene trace is the only thing that’s going to work here.”

“If the gene code is Chinese, and that gets out, then you’re up against the same problem.”

“But it’ll be a specific code we’re looking for.”

“It was a specific face they were looking for with Zhang. I don’t recall it making much difference. Hell, Sevgi,” Out of nowhere, Norton burlesqued Nicholson for her. “You know those damn people all look alike anyway.”

Sevgi smeared a smile. “I don’t think it’s like that out here. This isn’t Jesusland.”

“You got idiocy everywhere, Sev. The Republic isn’t running the only franchise. Look at Nicholson—New York born and bred. Where does he get it from?”

“I don’t know. Faith Satellite Channel?”

“Hall-e-lu-jah! Praise the Lord, Jesus gonna come and cut my taxes.”

They both smirked a little more, but the laughter wouldn’t come. The bodies from the virtual still hung around them in the gloom. Presently, a busboy came and asked if they were done. Sevgi nodded; Norton asked to see the desserts. The busboy gathered the plates and headed off. It dawned slowly on Sevgi that he was peculiarly gaunt for his age, and that his speech had been oddly patterned, as if it hurt him to talk. His features looked northern Chinese, but his skin was very dark. The realization hit her liquidly in the stomach. She stared after the retreating figure.

“Think that’s one of your brother’s success stories then?” she asked.

“Hmm.” Norton followed her gaze. “Oh. Doubt it. Statistically, I mean. Jeff told me they get a couple of thousand new black lab escapees a year, minimum. And he’s mostly in management anyway, trying to keep the whole thing together. They got nearly a hundred counselors working, on and off, and they’re still swamped.”

“Human Cost’s a charity, right?”

“Yeah. The Rim gives them a budget, but it’s not what you’d call generous.” A sudden animation flooded her partner’s voice. “And then, you know, it’s tough work. Kind of thing that wears you down. Some of the stories he’s told me about what comes out of those black labs, I don’t think I could do it. I don’t really understand how Jeff can. It’s weird. When we were younger, it always looked like I was going to be the one with the justice vocation. He was the power-and-influence man, not me. And then”—Norton gestured with his wineglass—“somehow he’s out here doing charity work and I end up with the big job at COLIN.”

“People change.”

“Yeah.”

“Maybe it’s Megan.”

He looked up sharply. “What is?”

“Maybe that was what changed him. When he met Megan.”

Norton grunted. A waiter came by with the dessert cart, but nothing appealed. They settled for gene-enhanced coffees, for which the place was apparently famous, and the bill. Sevgi found herself staring at the antique Mars motion ad again.

“You know,” she said slowly, because they’d both been skating around it all evening, “the real issue isn’t who this guy is. The real issue is who helped him get home.”

“Ah. That.”

“Trick out the fucking ship’s djinn? If he was capped and the capsule thawed him, that should have triggered some kind of alarm all by itself. Before he even woke up, let alone had time to start hacking the systems. And if he wasn’t capped, if he did stow away, then the n-djinn wouldn’t have allowed the launch in the first place.”

“You think Coyle and Rovayo spotted that? I tried to steer past it.”

“Yeah. That’s happened before on the Mars run, we just don’t like to publicize the fact. Sometimes they just die. Nice shot.”

Norton grinned. “True as far as it goes, Sev.”

“Yeah. Maybe a dozen times in sixty-odd years of traffic. And for my money, you’re talking hardware-based failures every time.”

“You don’t think they’ll bite?”

“What, the secret flaws of the n-djinn AI?” Sevgi pulled a face. “I don’t know, it’s got appeal. Machine no match for a human and all that shit. And everyone likes to be let in on a secret. Sell people a conspiracy, their whole fucking brain will freeze up if you’re lucky. Baby-eating secret sects, a centuries-old plot to enslave mankind. Black helicopters, flying eggs. Shit like that plays to packed houses. Critical faculties out the lock.”

“And meantime—”

“Meantime”—Sevgi leaned across the table, all humor erased from her face—“we both know that someone else on Mars with some serious machine intrusion skills had a hand in this. Our mystery cannibal was capped along with the others, which means heavy-duty identity fraud, and then he was wired to wake up early, which—”

Norton shook his head. “Thing I don’t get. Why wake him up so early he’s got to eat everybody else to survive? Why not just trigger the cap a couple of weeks out from Earth.”

Sevgi rolled another shrug. “My guess? It was a glitch. Whoever took down the n-djinn wasn’t so hot with cryocap specifics. Guy wakes up two weeks out from the wrong planet, journey’s start, not journey’s end. Maybe that shorts out the cryocap so he can’t get back in and refreeze, maybe it doesn’t but he stays out anyway because he can’t afford to arrive still capped and go through quarantine. But however you look at it, glitch or no glitch, he had some heavy-duty help. We’re not talking about a jailbreak here, Tom. This guy was sent. And that means whoever sent him had a specific purpose in mind.”

Norton grimaced. “Well, there’s a limited number of reasons you’d hire a variant thirteen.”

“Yeah.”

They were both quiet for a while. Finally, Sevgi looked up at her partner and offered a thin smile.

“We’d better find this guy fast, Tom.”

CHAPTER 8

He caught the last ferry across the bay to Tiburon, hooked an autocab at the other end, and rode out to Mill Valley with the windows cranked down. Warm, green-scented air poured in, brought him a sharp memory of walking under redwood canopies with Megan in Muir Woods. He put it away again with great care, handling the image at the edges like an antique photo he might smudge or a fragment of broken mirror. He watched the soft glow from passing street lamps and the lights in wood-frame homes built back from the roads, shrouded in foliage. It was as distant from Horkan’s Pride and her cargo of carnage as he was currently from home. You looked at the well-kept, scenic-sculpted roadways, all that quiet and residential greenery, and you didn’t want to believe that the man who’d crashed into the ocean that morning with only the corpses he’d mutilated for company could be out there under the same night sky.

Sevgi Ertekin’s words drifted back through his mind. The wan intensity on her face as she spoke.

We’d better find this guy fast, Tom.

The cab found the address and coasted gently to a halt under the nearest street lamp. Idling there, it made scarcely more noise than the breeze through the trees, but still he saw downstairs lights spring up in the house, and the front door opened. Jeff stood there framed by the light, waved hesitantly. Must have been waiting at the window. No sign of Megan at his side.

Norton walked up the steep curve of the driveway, suddenly feeling the hours and the distance from New York. Cicadas whirred in the bushes and trees planted on either side, water splashed in the stone bowl fountain at the top. The house stood across the slope in rambling, porch-fronted spaciousness. His brother came down the steps to greet him, clapped him awkwardly on the shoulder.

“You remembered where to find us okay?”

“Took a taxi.”

“Uh, yeah. Right.”

They went in together.

“Megan not about?” he asked casually.

“No, she’s over at Hilary’s with the kids.”

“Hilary?”

“Oh, right. Haven’t seen you since, uh. Hilary, she’s our new legal adviser at the foundation. Got twins the same age as Jack. They’re having a sleepover.” Jeff Norton gestured toward the living room. “Come and sit down. Get you a drink?”

The room was much the same as Norton remembered it—battered cloth-covered armchairs facing a fire-effect screen set in a raw brick facing, Northwest Native art and family photos crowding the walls. Polished wood floors and Middle Eastern rugs. Jeff served them vintage Indonesian arrack from a bar cabinet made of reclaimed driftwood. Low-level glow from the screen flames and the Japanese-style wall sconces lit his profile as he worked. Norton watched him.

“So I guess you saw we made the feeds?”

Jeff nodded, pouring. “Yeah, just been looking at it. COLIN death ship in mystery plunge. That’s why you’re out this way?”

“Got it in one. It’s a genuine class-one nightmare.”

“Well, I guess you had to start earning that big salary you pull down sooner or later.” A brief, sidelong grin to show it wasn’t meant. Yeah, but somehow, Jeff, it always is, isn’t it. “How are things over at Jefferson Park these days? They treating you well?”

Norton shrugged. “Same as it ever was. Can’t complain. Got a new partner, hired out of NYPD Homicide. She’s a couple of years younger than me, keeps me on my toes.”

“Attractive?”

“Not that it makes any difference, but yeah, she is.”

Jeff came across with the two glasses, handed him one. He grinned. “Always makes a difference, little brother. Think you’ll nail her?”

“Jeff, for Christ’s sake.” No real anger; he was too travel-worn and weary for it. “Do you really have to act like such a throwback all the time?”

“What? Girl’s attractive, you don’t do the math, add up your chances?” Still standing, his brother knocked back a chunk of the arrack, grinned down at him. “Come on, I can see it in your eyes. This one, you want.”

Norton pressed thumb and forefinger to his eyelids. “You know what, Jeff, maybe I do, and maybe I don’t. But it isn’t my primary concern right now. You think we could talk about something that matters for a change?”

He didn’t see the way the expression on his brother’s face shifted, the way the grin faded out, gave way to a watchful tension. Jeff backed up and dropped into the opposing armchair, thrust his legs out in front of him. When Norton looked at him, he met his gaze and gestured. “Okay, Tom, you got it. Whatever I can do. But it’s a long time since I had much pull in New York. I mean, I can maybe make some calls if they’re on your back, but—”

“No, it’s nothing like that.”

“It’s not?”

“No, we’ve pretty much got free rein on this one. Word down from on high, do what you want but clean up the mess.”

“And what mess would that be, exactly? Feeds say everyone aboard is dead.”

“Yeah. Since when did you trust what you see on the feeds? Truth is, we’ve got a live one, and he made it off the ship. This is confidential information I’m giving you, Jeff. Can’t go any farther than this room, this conversation. Not even Megan.”

Jeff spread his hands. Slow smile. “Hey, since when did I ever tell Megan everything? You know me, Tom.”

“Yeah, well.” He held down the anger, old and accustomed like the kick he got out of the Cadillac when he downshifted without the brake.

“So come on. What’s the big secret?”

“Big secret is that this guy is a variant thirteen.”

There was a small satisfaction in watching the way Jeff reacted. Eyes widened, mouth dropping to frame a response he didn’t have. Norton thought it came off a little phony, but he’d grown used to that aspect of Jeff over the years, the actorly, slightly-larger-than-life way he deployed himself for whatever audience there was. He’d always tried to see it, charitably, as the price of admission into the charmed power circle his brother had inhabited with such aplomb when they were both younger men—but now, now that his brother had apparently become charitable himself without losing any of that mannered polish, Norton was forced to consider that maybe Jeff had always been that way, always playing himself for the cheap seats.

“You deal with this kind of thing on a daily basis, Jeff,” he said simply. “I need some advice here.”

“Did you call UNGLA?”

“Not yet. Way things are, it’s not likely we will.”

“You want my advice? Call ’em.”

“Come on, Jeff. COLIN wouldn’t even sign up to the Accords at Munich. You think they’re going to want the UN walking all over their stuff with big international treaty boots?”

Jeff Norton set his drink aside on a tall driftwood table, distant cousin to the cabinet. He rubbed hands over his face. “How much do you know about variant thirteen, Tom?”

Norton shrugged. “What everyone knows.”

“What everyone knows is bullshit hype and moral panic for the feeds. What do you actually know?”

“Uh, they’re sociopaths. Some kind of throwback to when we were all still hunter-gatherers, right?”

“Some kind of, yeah. Truth is, Tom, it’s like the bonobos and the hibernoids and every other misbegotten premature poke at reengineering that last century’s idiot optimist pioneers saddled us with. Guesswork and bad intentions. Nobody ever built a human variant because they thought they were giving it a better shot at life, liberty, and the pursuit of fucking happiness. They were products, all of them, agenda-targeted. Spaceflight programs wanted the hibernoids, the bonobos were patriarchal authority’s wet dream of womanhood—”

“Yours, too, huh?”

Jeff gave him a crooked grin. “Are you ever going to let that go?”

“Would Megan?”

“Megan doesn’t know. It’s my problem, not hers.”

“That’s big of you.”

“No, it’s weak and masculine of me. I know that. Guess I’ll just never have your moral fucking rectitude, little brother. But telling Megan isn’t going to achieve anything except hurt her and the kids. And I won’t do that.”

He picked up his glass again and lifted it in Norton’s direction.

“So here’s to living with your mistakes, little brother. Either that, or fuck you very much.”

Norton shrugged and raised his own glass. “Living with your mistakes.”

And Megan flitted through his mind, sun-splashed hair and laughter amid the redwood trunks, and later, naked body sun-dappled and straining upward to press against him on the sweat-damp sheets of the motel bed.

“So,” he said, to drive out the vision, “if the bonobos were patriarchal authority’s wet dream, what does that make variant thirteen?”

“Variant thirteen?” Jeff gave him the crooked grin again. “Variant thirteen gave us back our manhood.”

“Oh come on.”

“Hey, you weren’t there, little brother.”

“You’re six years older than me, Jeff. You weren’t there, either.”

“So go read the history books, you don’t want to trust what your big brother tells you. I’m talking pre-Secession. Pre-atmosphere on Mars. You got a first world where manhood’s going out of style. Advancing wave of the feminized society, the alpha males culling themselves with suicide and supervirility drugs their hearts can’t stand, which in the end is suicide, just slower and a bit more fucking fun.”

“I thought they criminalized that stuff.”

Jeff gave him a crooked grin. “Oh yeah, and that worked. I mean, no one takes drugs once they’re illegal, right? Especially not drugs that give you a hard-on like a riot baton and all-night-long instant replay.”

“I still don’t believe that stuff tipped any kind of balance. That’s talk-show genetics, Jeff.”

“Suit yourself. The academic jury’s still out on the virilicide, you’re right about that much. But I don’t know a single social biologist who doesn’t count alpha-male self-destruct as one of the major influences on the last century’s political landscape. Shrinking manhood”—the grin again—“so to speak. And right along with that, you’ve got a shrinking interest in military prowess as a function of life. Suddenly, no one but dirt-poor idiots from Kansas wants to be a soldier, because hell, that shit can get you killed and there have got to be better, and better-paid, ways to live your life. So you got these few dirt-poor idiots fighting tooth and nail for causes”—Jeff’s voice morphed momentarily into a gruff Jesusland parody—“they don’t understand real good, but generally speaking the rest are screaming human rights abuse and let me out of here, where’s my ticket through college. And we are losing, little brother, all the way down. Because we’re up against enemies who eat, sleep, and breathe hatred for everything we represent, who don’t care if they die screaming so long as they take a few of us with them. See, a feminized, open-access society can do a lot of things, Tom, but what it can’t do worth a damn is fight wars in other people’s countries.”

“I didn’t ask for a class on the Secession, Jeff. I asked you about variant thirteen.”

“Yeah, getting there.” Jeff took another chunk off his arrack. “See, once upon a time we all thought we’d send robots to fight those wars. But robots are expensive to build, and down where it counts no one really trusts them. They break down when it gets too hot, or too cold, or too sandy. They fuck up in urban environments, kill the wrong people in large numbers, bring down infrastructure we’d really rather keep intact. They can be subverted, hacked, and shut down with a halfway decent black-market battlefield deck run by some techsmart datahawk we probably trained ourselves on a bighearted arms-around-the-fucking-world scholarship program at MIT. Robots can be stolen, rewired, sent back against us without us knowing it. You remember that memorial stone Dad showed us that time we drove down to New Mexico? That big fucking rock in the middle of Oklahoma?”

“Vaguely.” He had a flash on a big, pale granite boulder, sheared on one side and polished on that single surface to a high gray gloss that clashed with the rough matte finish of the rest of the stone. Letters in black he was too young to read. Arid, failing farmland, a couple of stores on a sun-blasted highway straight as a polished steel rail. An old woman behind the counter where they bought candy, hair as gray as the stone outside. Sad, he remembered, she looked sad as they chose and paid. “I was what, five or six?”

“If that. I guess it would have gone right over your head, but I had nightmares for a couple of weeks after that. This Trupex AS-81 straight out of an old toy set I had, but full-size, smashing into the house, flattening Mom and Dad, standing over my bed, pulling me out and ripping my arms and legs out of their sockets. You know those fucking machines sat in that storage depot for nine weeks before the Allahu Akbar virus kicked in.”

“Yeah, I read about it in school. Like I said, Jeff, I’m not here for a history lesson.”

“They massacred the whole fucking town, Tom. They tore it apart. There’s nothing left there anymore except that fucking rock.”

“I know.”

“Hardesty, Fort Stewart, Bloomsdale. The marine base at San Diego. All in less than three years. Are you surprised the military went looking for a better option?”

“Variant thirteen.”

“Yeah, variant thirteen. Precivilized humans. Everything we used to be, everything we’ve been walking away from since we planted our first crops and made our first laws and built our first cities. I’m telling you, Tom, if I were you I’d just call in UNGLA and stand well back. You do not want to fuck about with thirteens.”

“Now you sound like the feeds.”

Jeff leaned forward, face earnest. “Tom, thirteen is the only genetic variant Jacobsen thought dangerous enough to abrogate basic human rights on. There’s a reason those guys are locked up or exiled to Mars. There’s a reason they’re not allowed to breed. You’re talking about a type of human this planet hasn’t seen in better than twenty thousand years. They’re paranoid psychotic at base, glued together with from-childhood military conditioning and not much else. Very smart, very tough, and not much interested in anything other than taking what they want regardless of damage or cost.”

“I fail to see,” said Norton acidly, “how that gives us back our manhood.”

“That’s because you live in New York.”

Norton snorted and drained his arrack.

His brother watched with a thin smile until he was done. “I’m serious, Tom. You think Secession was about Pacific Rim interests and the green agenda? Or maybe a few lynched Asians and a couple of failed adventures in the Middle East?”

“Among other things, yeah, it was.”

Jeff shook his head. “That wasn’t it, Tom. None of it was. America split up over a vision of what strength is. Male power versus female negotiation. Force versus knowledge, dominance versus tolerance, simple versus complex. Faith and Flag and patriotic Song stacked up against the New Math, which, let’s face it, no one outside quantum specialists really understands, Cooperation Theory and the New International Order. And until Project Lawman came along, every factor on the table was pointing toward a future so feminized, it’s just downright un-American.”

Norton laughed despite himself. “You should be writing speeches, Jeff.”

“You forget,” his brother said unsmilingly, “I used to. Now, think about the situation the way it was back then, the sinking ship of heartland masculinity, bogged down abroad in complexities it can’t understand, failed by its military technology and its own young men. And then you put these new, big, kick-ass motherfuckers into American uniforms, you call them the Lawmen, and suddenly they’re winning. No one knows exactly where they’ve come from all of a sudden, there’s a lot of deniability going around, but who ever gave a shit about that? What counts is that these guys are American soldiers, they’re fighting for us, and for once they’re carrying the battle. You just sit there for a moment, Tom, and you think what effect that had, in all those little towns you just flew over to get here.”

Jeff lowered the stabbing finger he had leveled on his brother, looked into his glass, and raised his eyebrows, maybe at his own sudden gust of passion.

“That’s the way I read it, anyway.”

The room seemed to huddle in a little. They sat in the quiet. After a while, Jeff got up and headed for the bar again. “Get you another?”

Norton shook his head. “Got to get back, get up early.”

“You’re not going to stay the night?”

“Well…”

“Jesus, Tom. Do we get along that badly?” Jeff turned from the drink he was pouring, and nailed him with a look. “Come on, there’s no fucking way you’ll get a ferry back across at this time of night. Are you really going to ride a taxi all the way around the bay just so you don’t have to sleep under my roof?”

“Jeff, it’s not—”

“Tom, I know I can be an asshole sometimes, I know that. I know there are things about me you don’t approve of, things you think Mom and Dad wouldn’t approve of, but Christ, you think the old man’s been a saint his whole fucking life?”

“I don’t know,” Norton said quietly. “But if he wasn’t, none of us ever caught him.”

“You didn’t catch me. I fucking told you about it.”

“Yeah, thanks for that.”

“Tom, I’m your brother for Christ’s sake. Who got you that fucking job at COLIN in the first place?”

Norton shot to his feet. “I won’t believe that. Tell Megan and the kids I said hi. Sorry I didn’t have time to get them a gift.”

“Tom, wait. Wait.” Hands out, placating, drink forgotten. “I’m sorry, that was a bitchy crack. All right, look, I didn’t get you your job, you were well up the list for it anyway. But I spoke well of you in a lot of ears that summer. And I’d do it again. You’re my brother, don’t you think that means something to me?”

“Megan’s your wife. Doesn’t that mean something to you?”

“Christ, it’s not the same. She’s a woman, not, not—” He stopped, gestured helplessly. “It’s married life, Tom. That’s how it works. You get kids, you get tired, the gloss comes off. You go looking for, for. Something. I don’t know, something fresh, something to remind you that you’re not dead yet. That you’re not turning into two harmless little old people in a Costa Rican retirement complex.”

“That’s how you see Mom and Dad?”

“That’s how they are, Tom. You should get down there more often, you’d see that. Maybe then you’d start to understand.”

“Yeah, right. You fucked one of your bonobo refugee clients because Mom and Dad are old. Makes a lot of sense.”

“Tom, you got no fucking idea what you’re talking about. You’re thirty-seven years old, you’ve never been married, you don’t have a family. I mean—” Jeff seemed to be straining to reach something inside himself. “Look, do you really think Megan would care that much if she knew? I mean, sure, she’d go through the motions, the emotions, she’d make me move out for a while, there’d be a lot of crying. But in the end, Tom, she’d do what’s best for the kids. They’re her world now, not me. I couldn’t break her heart anymore, even if I wanted to, even if I tried. It’s genetics, Tom, fucking genetics. I’m secondary to the kids for Megan because that’s just the way she’s wired.”

“And you fucked Nuying because that’s just the way you’re wired, right?”

Jeff puffed out a breath, looked down, spread his hands up from his sides. “Pretty much, yeah. My wiring and hers, Nu I’m talking about. I’m the big alpha male around the foundation, the patriarch and the most expensive suit in sight. For a bonobo, that’s a bull’s-eye bigger than Larry Lastman’s dick.”

“So you just obligingly stepped into range, right? Just couldn’t bear to disappoint the girl.”

Another sigh. This time, Norton heard in it how the fight had gone out of his brother. Jeff dropped back into his seat. Looked up.

“Okay, Tom,” he said quietly “Have it your own way. I guess you’ve probably never fucked a bonobo in your life, either, so you don’t know how that feels, all that submission, all that broken-flower femininity in your hands like…”

He shook his head.

“Forget it. I’ll call you a cab.”

“No.” Norton felt an odd, sliding sensation in his chest. “I’ll stay, Jeff. I’m sorry, I’m just…it’s been a long day.”

“You sure?”

“Sure, I’m sure. Look, I don’t want to judge you, Jeff. You’re right, none of us is a saint. We’ve all done things”—Megan, astride him in the motel, feeds him her breasts with eyes focused somewhere else, as if he’s some accustomed household task. Toward the end, she closes her eyes altogether, thrusts herself up and down on his erection and into her climax, grunting you motherfucker, oh you fucking motherfucker through gritted teeth. It will make him rock-hard just thinking about it for weeks afterward, though he’s close to certain it isn’t him she’s talking to and when, in the aftermath, he asks her, she claims not to remember saying anything at all—“things we regret, things we’d take back if we could. You think I’m any different?”

Jeff gave him a searching look.

“You’re missing a pretty major point here, Tom.” He raised his hands, palms open. There was something almost pleading in his face. “I don’t regret Nuying. Or the others, because God knows Nu hasn’t been the only one. I just never told you about the others after the way you reacted. Yeah, each time it’s emotional complication, Tom, stress I could do without. But I can’t make myself feel bad about it, and I can’t make myself wish it hadn’t happened. Can you understand that? Can you stand knowing that about your brother?”

I can’t make myself wish it hadn’t happened.

Norton put himself carefully back in the other armchair, gingerly, on the edge of the seat. Jeff’s words were like staples taken out of his heart, a sudden easing of a pain he hadn’t fully known he was carrying. The bright truth about his feelings for Megan welled up in the new spaces. He sat there trying to balance it all out for a moment, then nodded.

“Sure,” he said. “I guess I can stand it. I guess I’ve got to.” He shrugged, smiled faintly. “Brothers, right?”

Jeff matched the nod, vigorously. “Right.”

“So pour me another drink, big brother. Make up the spare room. What time’s Megan getting back?”

CHAPTER 9

They slept in well-worn nanoweave survival bags—as used by real Mars settlers!, the fraying label on Scott’s insisted—but always inside. Too many eyes up there, Ren said somberly as they stood at the hangar door on the evening of the second day and watched the stars begin to glimmer through in the east. It’s better if we don’t give them anything unusual to notice. The abandoned airfield buildings offered shelter from both satellite scan and desert sun; the heat built up inside during the day but long-ago-shattered windows and doorways mostly without doors ensured a cooling through-flow of air. The walls in the rooms they used were peeled of all but fragmentary patches of paint, stripped back to a pale beige plaster beneath, and none of the lights worked. The toilet facilities and showers, oddly enough, did seem to work, though again without the privacy of doors and only cold water. There was no power for the elevator up to the control tower, but the stairs seemed safe enough, and once up there you had long views over the surrounding tangle of ancient concrete runways and the flat open spaces beyond.

Ren spent a lot of her time up there in the tower, watching, he supposed, for signs of unwelcome visitors, and talking in low tones with the stranger, with Him. And that last part worried Scott, for reasons he could not entirely pin down.

He supposed, finally, it was lack of faith. Pastor William had always said it attacked the so-called freethinkers first and worst, and God knew Scott had been away long enough to get contaminated, rubbing up against all the smut and doubt of West Coast life. He felt a vague, uncontrolled spurt of anger at the thought of it, the bright LCLS nights, the nonstop corrosive stimulus-ridden whirl of so-called modern living and no escape anywhere, not even in church, because God knew he’d gone there and tried. All that lukewarm, anything-cuddly-goes sermonizing, all the meetinghouse handholding circles and the flaky moist-eyed psychobabble that never went anywhere except to justify whatever weakling failures of moral vision the speakers had allowed themselves to fall into, three fucking years and more of it, clogging the certainty of his own vision, confusing the simple algebra of good and evil he damn fucking well knew was right, because that was the way it damn fucking well felt.

His head ached.

Had been aching, on and off, since he’d woken in the back of the swaying truck and touched the field dressing wrapped just above his eyes. The doctor Ren took him to that night outside Fresno told him it was a normal symptom for the head injuries he’d sustained; with luck it should fade in a few days.

Head injuries the stranger had given Scott. And how could that be right? At first, he couldn’t make sense of it.

He will return—Pastor William’s soft tones rolling out over the pulpit like thunder a long way off, thunder you knew was riding in on the wings of a storm coming right your way. They said he’d trained at one of the South Carolina megachurches before he got his ministry, and in the teeth of the gale he blew you could well believe it. He will return, and how’s that going be, you ask yourselves. Well, I’ll tell you, friends, I’ll tell you, building now to a roar, it ain’t going be no cluster-hugging happy clapping day like them niggers always singing on about. No, sir, the day of His return ain’t gonna be no party, ain’t gonna be no picnic and skipping road right up to paradise for you all. When Jesus comes again, He will come in judgment, and that judgment going to be hard, hard on man and woman and child, hard on us all, because we are all sinners and that sin, that dreadful black sin gotta be paid out once and for all. Look in your hearts, my friends, look in your hearts and find that black sin there and pray you can cut it out of you before judgment because if you don’t then the Lord will, and the Lord don’t use no anesthetic when He operates on your soul.

There was a story Scott remembered from the End Times comics, Volume III Issue 137, The Triumph in Babylon. Coat wrapped, the Savior stalks the mirror-glass canyons of New York with a long navy Colt on one hip and a billy club in his hand fashioned from the sweat and bloodstained wood of the cross he died on. He kicks in the frosted-glass door of a coffee franchise off Wall Street and beats seven shades of damnation out of the money changers gathered there. Painted, black-stockinged lady brokers twisting prostrate at his feet, red licked lips parted in horror and abandonment, thighs exposed under short, whorish skirts. Fat, big-nosed men in suits braying and panicking, trying to get away from the scything club. Blood and waxed coffee cups flying, screams. The capitalized crunch of broken bones.

Judgment!

Scott touched the bandage around his head again, figured maybe he’d gotten off lightly after all.

In the truck, staring at the gaunt, sleeping face, he’d leaned across and whispered to Ren, “Is it really Him?”

She’d given him a strange look. “Who’d you think it is?”

“Him, Jesus. The Lord, come again.” He swallowed, wet his lips. “Is this, are we living in the, you know, the End Times?”

No response. She’d just looked at him curiously and told him to rest, he was going to need his strength. Thinking back, he guessed he must probably have sounded delirious with the concussion.

And then the doctor, and other helpers along the way. People Ren seemed to know well. A change of trucks, a house and a soft bed on the outskirts of a town whose name he never saw. Another long, bone-jarring night in an all-terrain vehicle and tipping out at dawn on the airfield’s deserted expanse.

And then the waiting.

He tried to make himself useful. He tidied up after Ren and the stranger, put their bags and bedrolls straight every morning—and, oddly, glimpsed in among Ren’s gear a Bible and a sheaf of curling hardcopy from Republican ministry download sites, some of which he knew well himself; he closed the bag gently and didn’t look again, he wasn’t nosy by nature, but it made him frown all the same. He put it out of his mind as much as he could. Instead he put together a table and three dining places out of pieces of junk he found lying around in the control tower block and the hangars. He discovered a wrecked and wingless Cessna in one hangar corner, halfheartedly draped in thick plastic sheeting that he cut up and made into hanging curtains for a couple of the toilet cubicles and the showers. He took care of the food. The supplies the all-terrain driver had left them were mostly pull-tab autoheating, but he did his best to make meals out of what there was, carried them up to the other two in the tower when they showed no sign of coming down to eat. Tried not to stare at the stranger. He took the painkillers the doctor had given him sparingly and he prayed, diligently, every time he ate or slept. In an odd way, he felt better about life than he had in months.

“Won’t be much longer now.”

He started. When night fell, the quiet in the derelict building seemed to deepen somehow, and Ren’s voice jumped him like a gunshot. He looked up and saw her standing in the doorway that led through to the tower stairs. Light from the last red-gold leavings of the sunset outside meshed with the bluish glow of the camping lamps he’d lit, picked up a gleam in her eyes and along the teeth of the zip fastener on the ancient leather jacket she wore.

“What you doing?”

“Praying.” Half defiant, because he certainly hadn’t noticed her doing it in the last few days.

She nodded. Moved into the room and folded herself down onto her sleeping bag with unconscious grace.

“We need to talk,” she said, and he thought she sounded weary. “Why don’t you come over here.”

He nearly jumped again. “What for?”

“I won’t bite you, Scott.”

“I, uh, I know that. I can hear you from here, though.”

“Maybe you can. But I’d rather we didn’t have to shout. Now, come over here.”

Tight-lipped, he got up from his own bedroll and walked over to hers. She nodded to her left and he squatted awkwardly beside her, not quite sitting down. Her scent washed over him, faintly unclean with desert sweat—he thought she hadn’t showered since early the day before. She looked into his face, and he felt the same old flip in his chest. She nodded upward, toward the ceiling and the tower above.

“You know who that is up there,” she murmured. “Don’t you.”

Exhilaration sloshed in his guts, chased up and met the feeling she’d made under his ribs. He managed a jerky nod of his own. “It is, isn’t it.”

“Yeah, it is.” She sighed. “This is difficult for me, Scott. I grew up in a big family that had some Christians in it, but I wasn’t one of them. My religious experience is…very different from yours. Where I’m from, we accepted that other beliefs were possible, but we always thought they were just other ways of looking at the same truths we believed in. Less accurate, less enlightened paths. I never thought that maybe our truth would be the less enlightened one, that the Christians would be the ones who got it right. That—” She shook her head. “I never considered that.”

He felt a warm, protective affection for her surge up inside, like flames. He reached out and took her hand where it lay in her lap, squeezed gently.

“It’s okay,” he said. “You were true in your beliefs. That’s what counts.”

“I mean, you have to believe what you see with your own eyes, Scott. Right?” Her eyes held his. “You have to believe what you’re told when nothing else makes any sense, right?”

He drew a deep breath. “This makes perfect sense to me, Carmen.”

“Yeah, well here’s the thing, and I don’t know if there’s anything in your Bible that covers this, because it certainly isn’t what I was taught about the final cycle. He says”—another upward tilt of her eyes—“that he’s come early, that it’s not time yet and he has to gather his strength. He has work to do here, but his enemies are out there and they’re still strong. And that means we have to protect him until it is time. He’s chosen us, Scott. Sorted us from the, uh, the—”

“The chaff?”

“Yeah, the chaff. You saw what he did with Nocera and Ward? They were servants of the darkness, Scott. I see that now. I mean, I never liked Nocera, and Ward, well, I thought he was okay but—”

“Satan has a thousand snares,” Scott told her. “A thousand masks to wear.”

“Right.”

He hesitated, looking at her. “Are you His—” He tasted the word, awkward on his tongue. “His handmaiden?”

“Yes. That’s what he’s told me. Until one of the, uh, the angels can come to take on the task. Until then, he says he’ll speak through me.”

He was still holding her hand. He let go, pulled his own hands back as if she were hot to the touch. He tried not to stare at how beautiful she was.

“You are. So worthy of it,” he said hoarsely. “You’ll be filled with light.”

Then her hand was on him, on the buckle of his belt, pulling him to her. She leaned in and brushed her parted lips across his mouth. Pulled back again.

He gaped. Blood hammered in his head. Below the belt buckle, he felt suddenly trapped and swollen.

“What are you doing?” he hissed.

She gestured at the ceiling. “He’s up there, Scott. Staying up there, keeping watch for us. It’s all right.”

“No, it’s—” Shaking his head numbly. Trying to explain. “—it’s a, a sin, Carmen.”

He wanted to move away from her, but in moving he only tipped back over in his awkward crouch and wound up sitting slumped against the wall behind him, still on the bedroll. He hadn’t succeeded in opening the distance between them at all. Or maybe—he’d wonder about it afterward—maybe he just hadn’t wanted to move away from her after all.

“Carmen,” he pleaded. “We can’t be sinners. Not now. Not here. It’s wrong.”

But Carmen Ren only hooked a thumb inside the neckline of her shirt, looked down at her own hand, and tugged. The static seam split with a tiny crackle and she ran her thumb downward, opening the shirt on the molded lift of her breasts in their profiler cups. He could see through the clear plastic sheen to where her nipples were pressed flat against the inner surface of each cup. She looked up again and smiled at him.

“How can it be?” she asked simply. “Scott, don’t you see? Don’t you feel it? This is meant to be. This is a sacrament, a purification for both of us. A gift of his love. Reach inside yourself. Don’t you feel it?”

And he did.

It had been a very long time.

He was not a virgin, not since the eleventh grade and Janey Wilkins, and Janey hadn’t exactly been the only one before he left for the Rim, either, though he tried not to take pride in that because he knew pride in it was wrong. But the girls had always come to him, no way to deny it. Scott took after his mother, was tall and long-legged, and he’d hardened his upper body in his early teens, putting in all the part-time hours he could get stringing fences and doing river security for the big Bitterroot land parcels so later he’d be able to pay his own way through tenth to twelfth grade and not be a burden or have to sign up for a youth stint with the marines if he wanted to finish out his education. And then, for all his muscle and length of limb, he was still soft-spoken and kind, and it seemed from what Janey told him that that didn’t hurt too much, either, when a girl was looking.

But in the Rim, something happened to him.

Maybe it was the fact that sex was suddenly everywhere—perfectly toned and tampered-with bodies, impossible to know if they were real flesh or generated v-format interfaces, but there they were, twining around each other on the big LCLS billboards, on storefront display screens, on those high-end pixelated shopping bags the women carried in fistfuls like a harvest of some big, brightly colored oblong fruit held up by the stalks and vines. There was flesh and liquid moaning on every nonfaith channel he had viewing access to, in every ad-tagged piece of mail he opened, on the trash cans, for God’s sake, and even, once, when he was down in the Freeport, sketched holographically across the sky and booming out of massive speakers along Venice Beach. Maybe it was that, the unending barrage, the overload of it all, or maybe it was just that he was heartsick for what he’d left behind. Whatever it was, by the end of the first year, the gentle confidence he’d enjoyed back home had gone wisping off him like steam off a morning coffee left out on the porch. Had left him lonely and cold.

Carmen Ren burned through his loneliness like a falling star. Months of half-denied fantasy boiled up inside him. Her flesh where he touched it, where she guided his hands, was warm and smooth, and her tongue in his mouth tasted of some dark, unfamiliar spice. She peeled one of the profiler cups for him, dropped the jellied weight of the breast beneath into his hand. It seemed to fit there as if made for him to hold, as if intended that way. Her hands went back to his belt, loosened it and slipped inside. He went rigid as she slid fingers around the shaft of his erection, squeezed hard at her breast in reflex. She moaned into his mouth.

They worked each other out of the clothes piecemeal, stopping to kiss and touch until finally she lay back on the bedroll naked, brushed her own hands down her flanks, and opened her thighs for him. He shifted on elbows and hands, a little awkward with lack of custom, and then gasped as he slipped into her. The evening air was cool and breezy against his skin, and Carmen Ren was heated and wet inside. She smiled, shifted sideways lazily, did something with her muscles. He felt himself gripped along the length of his cock, a slippery, tugging intimacy, and then she pulled him down on top of her, lifted her thighs, and clamped them to his sides—they burned like branding in the cool—and he came, sudden and rushing unstoppable, jolting like there was current through him off some badly insulated cable.

He hung his head, stayed propped on his elbows.

“I’m sorry.”

She smiled up at him again, wiggled a little and tensed her muscles around his fading hardness. “Don’t be. You know how it makes me feel, seeing you lose control like that?”

“It’s just.” He could feel himself flushing. “Been a long time, you know.”

“Yeah, I guessed that. It doesn’t matter, Scott. We’ve got time. I like you inside me. We’ll go again when you’re ready.” Another twitch of that coiled muscle, and a sudden widening of her eyes. “Oh. In fact.”

He didn’t know if it was the way she talked, casual as she lay there under him, as if they were sitting in a breakfast diner together, or maybe just the fact that he had her here, the culmination of so many damp, hopeless daydreams when he went home from Ward BioSupply alone. Or maybe it was that word, handmaiden, drumming around in his head, still on his lips like the dark spice taste of her. He didn’t know, truth be told didn’t much care. He knew, because Janey had once told him, that he was uncommonly fast back in the saddle, but even for him this was something else. He felt himself hardening right there inside her, swelling against that thing she did with those muscles, and he knew this time it was going to be all right, was going to be a long, sweet ride.

Afterward, they lay in a tangle of limbs on the bedroll, backs to the peeling wall, partially draped with the sleeping bag and Ren’s jacket, gazing at the slice of evening sky just visible through the empty doorway that led outside. Scott thought the stars had never looked so bright and kind as they did tonight, not even back home. They seemed like sentinels, vibrating gently in the soft blue-black, wishing well. He told her that, and she chuckled deep in her chest.

“Postcoital astronomy,” she said.

“No,” he said, letting her have her joke, but firm despite it. “This is special, Carmen. We’re blessed tonight.”

She made a small, noncommittal noise and stretched a little.

“You know,” she told him, a little later. “It could be for a long time, this hiding. It’s going to be tough.”

“I don’t mind.”

“Yeah.” She rubbed a hand on the stubble of his cheek, mock roughly. “I imagine you’re used to tough, aren’t you.”

“Will RimSec come after us?”

“I don’t know.” Her tone was thoughtful. “There are people I’ve called to tidy up back at the dock. They’ll cover our traces, that’ll be a start. We have friends, Scott. More friends than you’d imagine.”

“And enemies,” he said.

“Yeah. Enemies, too.”

He twisted his head to look into her face.

“Tell me the truth, Carmen. Is this the End Times? When the world goes down in flames, and the beast rises from the ocean with the names of blasphemy written upon him? Is that who we’re up against? The beast?”

She hesitated. “I don’t think so. He hasn’t talked about that. But I do know this much: somewhere out there, there’s a dark man looking for him, and for us. This man is a servant of the darkness, and that’s who we have to guard against, Scott. Both of us, whatever happens, we’re servants of the light and we have to keep watch. The black man is coming. And when he comes, we have to be ready to fight, if necessary to the death. Are you ready for that?”

“Of course I am. I’ll do anything. But…”

She shifted, pushing herself up against the wall so she could look him in the eye. “But what?”

Scott looked up at the ceiling. “Can’t He do anything about this black man?”

“Not yet,” she said gently. “At least, that’s what he tells me. It isn’t time. He has other concerns, Scott, other work to do. It’s complicated, I know, I don’t pretend to understand it all myself, but I know what’s been revealed to me, and all I can do is tell you the same. We have to have faith, Scott, that’s what he told me. That’s a Christian strength, isn’t it? Having faith, not questioning what’s revealed?”

“Uh, yeah…”

“And, yes, maybe this doesn’t make a lot of sense right now, but if we have faith, I think it will. We have a part to play in this, Scott. You have a part. There’s a reckoning in the wind, and, uh, a harrowing to come. Those who stand in its way will fall, those who follow in faith will be raised up.”

“Then, that means…” He squeezed her hand tightly. Blood thudded in him; he felt his groin stir faintly. “He has come in judgment. It is the time.”

And then, abruptly, he remembered the gaunt, hollow-eyed stare of the stranger, remembered how it felt to be fixed by those eyes at close range, and looking up at the ceiling again he no longer felt the warm pulse of longed-for vindication, the affirmation of all he’d struggled to believe and hold true. Instead, out of nowhere, he remembered those eyes, that stripped-to-the-bone face, and all he felt was cold, and afraid.

A reckoning in the wind.

CHAPTER 10

Fifty kilometers outside Van Horn, Interstate Highway 10 laid down a luminescent pale strip of gray in the desert night, stretching away toward low, horizon-hugging mountain ranges whose names the man calling himself Eddie Tanaka had never bothered to learn. Stars punctured the velvet blue-black above like knife points, sharp white contrast to the dull red glowing orbs of the autohaul rigs below as they hammered along through the darkness in both directions, following the highway with insectile machine focus. Rising drone, blastpast rush of dark noise and wind, drone collapsing back into the distance. Passing the garish LCLS lights of Tabitha’s with a detachment no human driver could have mustered.

Well, maybe a gleech, he allowed sourly. They don’t got much use for this kind of merchandise.

He glanced up at the brothel’s skyline billboard—the name in vampiric spidery red lettering the original Tabitha would never have agreed to if she hadn’t sold up and moved to the Rim as soon as she had the capital. Behind the spiky-thin lettering, as if caged in by it, female figures switched back and forth in full flesh-toned color, pixeled almost—but, legal requirements and all, not quite—up to human footage perfect.

Gleech wouldn’t be out here on the highway anyway. They don’t drive.

That you know of.

That Kenan knew of, and he fucking was one, smart guy.

Smart guy? Yeah, you’re some fucking smart guy, Max, out in the parking lot of Tabitha’s with whore’s snot on your jacket and not even a blow job to show for it. All your plans and schemes, your carve-out-a-new-life bullshit, look where you’re standing still. Snot on your clothes and no blow job. That’s how fucking smart you are, smart guy.

“Smart guy…”

He heard his own mutter, final echo off the abrupt, tinny dispute he’d just mounted in his head, knew he was subvocalizing again, knew why. Knew, too, why he hadn’t bothered, couldn’t be bothered to push Chrissie into blowing him.

Never can fucking leave it at just one shot, can you.

He’d dumped the synadrive into his eyes a couple of hours earlier, and the thing was, this was quality product, right out of his own stash, not the stepped-on shit he shifted to the kids in Van Horn and Kent on a Saturday night. So he fucking well knew he’d only need that single squirt—and initially that was what he settled for, just the one dropperload dribbled down onto the quivering surface of his left eye, what the kids called pirate dosage. But pirate shots always, fucking always, left him feeling weirdly unbalanced, and that was on a good night—which tonight wasn’t—and so as the synadrive came on, that feeling of fucked-up symmetry built and fucking built until it seemed like the whole right side of his body was just too slow and sleepy to bear, and so he gave in and tipped his head back one more time before he hit the road, and the fluid rolled down his right eyeball like tears.

Was a time, he recalled, you had the disicipline. Discipline or self-respect, either way something that wouldn’t let you do this to yourself.

He was remembering that time a lot these days, staring into mirrors at rooms he abruptly couldn’t believe he belonged in, wondering how he’d wound up here and where it had all leaked away to. That time when syn was a tool like any other, useful and used with a wired confidence that would have been arrogance if it hadn’t all felt so fucking clean and right. Back before it all turned to shit and a black pall of smoke across a Wyoming sundown sky.

Was a time…

Sure. And there was another fucking time the summers never seemed to end and you’d never paid for it in your life. Remember that? Time passes, Max—get over it. Skip the fucking nostalgia, let’s get where we’re at.

And here he was. Snot and no blow job, out in the night.

He wiped a hand down his jacket, not bothering to look. The synadrive hooked in visual memory and sparked a link to neuromotor precision, put the gesture right on target, and his fingers came away gummy with the snot. He rubbed them back and forth, grimacing. He didn’t need this shit right now, not the way things were. Not like he didn’t have enough stress. He told her, he fucking told her he had other stuff cooking, stuff that needed managing, not like this pimping shit was his main gig—

Yeah, right, the syn told him crisply. How many years we been saying that, exactly? Smart guy?

Different this time. This pays off like it has been, this time next year we’re out. Out for good.

And if it doesn’t?

If it doesn’t, we’re already set up to cover. Quit worrying.

Set up to cover, yeah. And go on being a pimp for life. What you going to do about Chrissie then?

What he was going to do then, he reflected somberly, was going to have to do about Chrissie then, was probably something violent. Should have seen that one all along—fucking bitch always had been high maintenance, even back in Houston when she was still working street corners. Cotton-candy mane of blond and that manicured fucking Texan drawl, and now the subcute tit work he’d gotten for her, he should have fucking known she’d start with the airs and graces as soon as she settled in at Tabitha’s. Acting just like she actually was the bonobo purebred they’d packaged her as. Calling him at all hours, or pushing Tabitha’s management so they called instead, bitching about how she wouldn’t work on account of some headache or stomach cramp or just plain didn’t like some fat fuck who’d paid good money to get between her legs, sitting there on the fucking bed bright-eyed and whining Eddie this, Eddie that, Eddie the fucking other, forcing him to wheel out the whole nine yards of bully-threaten-cajole like it was some favorite comic routine she liked to see him do.

So why the fuck didn’t you just take Serena or Maggie for that subcute work instead. Either one’d be half the fucking trouble.

In the hyperlucid blast of the syn, he knew why. But he turned on his heel and put the knowledge at his back along with the blink-blink carnal come-on of Tabitha’s skyline billboard. The relative gloom of the softly lit parking lot darkened his vision. He blinked hard to adjust.

“Hello, Max.”

The voice jolted him as he blinked, kicked him back to the Scorpion memories, to times and places so vivid he opened his eyes and almost expected to find himself back there, back before Wyoming in that other, cleaner time.

But he wasn’t.

He was still here, in the deserted parking lot of a second-rate Texas bordello, with a sassy whore’s snot drying on his fingers and too much syn for his own good sparking through his brain.

The figure detached itself from the shadows around his car, stood to face him. Soft violet light from the lot’s marker lamps threw the form into silhouette, killed facial recognition. But something about the stance chased up the memories the voice had stirred. The syn gave him a name, features to put on the darkened form. He stared, trying to make sense of it.

“You?”

The figure shifted, made a low gesture with one hand.

“But…” He shook his head. “You…You’re on fucking Mars, man.”

The figure said nothing, waited. Eddie moved closer, arms raised toward a tentative hugging embrace.

“When’d you get back? I mean, man, what are you doing back here?”

“Don’t you know?”

He made a baffled smile, genuine in its origins. “No, man, I’ve got no fucking—”

—and the smile collapsed, bleached out with sudden understanding.

For just an instant, the desert quiet and the rushing away of an autohauler on the highway.

He clawed across his belly, under his jacket. Had fingers hooked around the butt of the compact Colt Citizen he kept cling-padded at his belt—

He’d moved too close.

The knowledge dripped through him, and it was a Scorpion knowing from that other time, somehow sad and slow despite the speed at which he could see it all coming apart. The figure snapped forward, bruising grip on his wrist, and pinned his gun arm where it was. He flung up a warding left arm, chopped at the other man’s throat, or face, or, too close, too fucking close in, and here came the block, he had nothing, could do nothing. A low kick took out his legs from under him, a full-body shove, and he went down. He rolled, desperately, don’t let the fucker get on you with his boots, land on your back maybe, the gun, the fucking gun—

The cling-clip held. He got a grip of the Colt’s butt again, dragged it loose and sprawled backward with a snarl of relief, raising the pistol, the Citizen had no safety, just squeeze hard and—

The figure stood over him, black against the sky. Arm down, pointing—

And something flattened him to the ground again, something with god-like force.

Muffled crack. His ears took it in, but it took him a couple of moments to assign it any importance. The stars were right overhead. He watched them, abruptly fascinated. They seemed a lot closer than you’d expect, hanging low, like they’d taken a sudden interest.

He wheezed, felt something leaking rapidly, like cold water in his chest. He knew what it was. The syn forced a merciless clarity.

He lifted his head and it was the hardest work he’d ever done, as if his skull were made of solid stone. He made out the figure of the other man, arm still pointing down at him like some kind of judgment.

“I figured you’d fight,” said the voice. “But it’s been a long time for you, hasn’t it. Too long. Maybe that’s why.”

Why what? he wondered muzzily. He coughed, tasted blood in his throat. Wondered also what Chrissie was going to do now, stupid little bitch.

“I think you’re done,” said the voice.

He tried to nod, but his head just fell back on the gritty surface of the lot, and this time it stayed there. The stars, he noticed, seemed to be dimming, and the sky looked colder than it had before, less velvet-soft and more like the open void it really was.

Dead in a brothel parking lot, for fuck’s sake.

He heard the blastpast of another autohauler out on the highway, saw in his mind’s eye the cozy red glow of its taillights accelerating away into the darkness.

He ran to catch up.