CHAPTER 12
As soon as he walked through the door, Sevgi knew she was in trouble.
It was there in the looseness as he moved, in the balance of stance as he paused behind the chair, in the way he hooked it out and sat down. It smoked off the body beneath the shapeless blue prison coveralls like music cutting through radio interference. It looked back at her through his eyes as he settled into the chair, and it soaked out through the powerful quiet he’d carried into the room with him. It wasn’t Ethan—Marsalis had skin far darker than Ethan’s, and there was no real similarity in the features. Ethan had been stockier, too, heavier-muscled.
Ethan had died younger.
It didn’t matter. It was there just the same.
Thirteen.
“Mr. Marsalis?”
He nodded. Waited.
“I’m Sevgi Ertekin, COLIN Security. You’ve already met my partner, Tom Norton. There are a number of things we need to clarify before—”
“I’ll do it.” His voice was deep and modulated. The English accent tripped her.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Whatever it is you need me to do. I’ll do it. At cost. I already told your partner. I’ll take the job in return for unconditional immunity to all charges pending against me, immediate release from Republican custody, and any expenses I’m likely to incur while I’m doing your dirty work.”
Her eyes narrowed. “That’s quite an assumption you’re making there, Mr. Marsalis.”
“Is it?” He raised an eyebrow. “I’m not known for my flower arranging. But let’s see if I’m assuming wrong, shall we? At a guess you want someone tracked down. Someone like me. That’s fine, that’s what I do. The only part I’m unclear on is if you want me to bring him in alive or not.”
“We are not assassins, Mr. Marsalis.”
“Speak for yourself.”
She felt the old anger flare. “You’re proud of that, are you?”
“You’re upset by it?”
She looked down at the unfolded dataslate and the text printed there. “In Peru, you shot an unarmed and injured woman in the back of the head. You executed her. Are you proud of that, too?”
Long pause. She picked up his stare and held it. For a moment, she thought he would get up and walk out. Half of her, she realized, hoped he would.
Instead, he switched his gaze abruptly to one of the high-placed windows in the waiting room. A small smile touched his lips. Went away. He cleared his throat.
“Ms. Ertekin, do you know what a Haag gun is?”
“I’ve read about them.” In NYPD communiqués, urging City Hall to issue tighter gun control guidelines before the new threat hit the streets. Scary enough that the initiatives passed almost without dispute. “It’s a bioload weapon.”
“It’s a little more than that, actually.” He opened his right hand loosely, tipped his head to look at it as if he could see the gun weighed there in the cup of his palm. “It’s a delivery system for an engineered immune deficiency viral complex called Falwell Seven. There are other loads, but they don’t get a lot of use. Falwell is virulent, and very unpleasant. There is no cure. Have you ever watched someone die from a collapsed immune system, Ms. Ertekin?”
In fact, she had. Nalan, a cousin from Hakkari, a onetime party girl in the frontier bases where Turkey did its proud European duty and buffered the mess farther east. Something she caught from a UN soldier. Nalan’s family, who prided themselves on their righteousness, threw her out. Sevgi’s father spat and found a way to bring her to New York, where he had clout in one of the new Midtown research clinics. Relations with family in Turkey, already strained, snapped for good. He never spoke to his brother again. Sevgi, only fourteen at the time, went with him to meet a sallow, big-eyed girl at the airport, older than her by what seemed like a gulf of years but reassuringly unversed in urban teen sophistication. She still remembered the look on Nalan’s face when they all went into the Skill-man Avenue mosque through the same door.
Murat Ertekin did everything he could. He enrolled Nalan in experimental treatment lists at the hospital, fed her vitamin supplements and tracker anti-virals at home. He painted the spare room for her, sun-bright and green like the park. He prayed, five times a day for the first time in years. Finally, he wept.
Nalan died anyway.
Sevgi blinked away the memory; fever-stained sheets and pleading, hollow eyes.
“You’re saying you did this woman a favor?”
“I’m saying I got her quickly and painlessly where she was going anyway.”
“Don’t you think that should have been her choice?”
He shrugged. “She made her choice when she tried to jump me.”
If she’d doubted what he was at all, she no longer did. It was the same unshakable calm she’d seen in Ethan, and the same psychic bulk. He sat in the chair like something carved out of black stone, watching her. She felt something tiny shift in her chest.
She tapped a key on the dataslate. A new page slid up on the display.
“You were recently involved in prison violence. A fight in the F wing shower block. Four men hospitalized. Three of them by you.”
Pause. Silence.
“You want to tell me your side of that?”
He stirred. “I would think the details speak for themselves. Three white men, one black man. It was an Aryan Command punishment beating.”
“Which prison staff did nothing to prevent?”
“Surveillance in the showers can be compromised by steamy conditions. Quote unquote.” His lip curled fractionally. “Or soap jammed over lenses. Response time can be delayed. By extraneous factors, quote unquote.”
“So you felt moved to intervene.” She groped around for motivations that would have fit Ethan. “This Reginald Barnes, he was a friend of yours?”
“No. He was a piece-of-shit wirehead snitch. He had it coming. But I didn’t know that at the time.”
“Was he genetically modified?”
Marsalis smirked. “Not unless there’s some project somewhere I haven’t heard of for turning out brainless addictive-personality fuckups.”
“You felt solidarity because of his color, then?”
The smirk wiped away, became a frown. “I felt I didn’t want to see him arse-fucked with a power drill. I think that’s probably a color-neutral preference, don’t you?”
Sevgi held on to her temper. This wasn’t going well. She was gritty with the syn comedown—no synaptic modifiers permitted in Jesusland, they’d taken them off her at the airport—and still fuming from the argument she’d lost with Norton in New York.
I’m serious, Sev. The policy board’s all over this thing now. We’ve got Ortiz and Roth coming down to section two, three times a week—
In the flesh? What an honor.
They’re looking for progress reports, Sev. Which means reports of progress, and right now we don’t have any. If we don’t do something that looks like fresh action, Nicholson is going to land on us with both feet. Now, I’ll survive that. Will you?
She knew she wouldn’t.
October. Back in New York, the trees in Central Park were starting to rust and stain yellow. Under her window as she got ready for work each day, the market traders went wrapped against the early-morning chill. The summer had turned, tilted about like a jetliner in the clear blue sky above the city, sunlight sliding cold and glinting off its wings. The warmth wasn’t gone yet, but it was fading fast. South Florida felt like clinging.
“How much has Norton told you?”
“Not much. That you have a problem UNGLA won’t help you with. He didn’t say why, but I’m guessing it’s Munich-related.” A sudden, unexpected grin that dropped about a decade off his seamed features. “You guys really should have signed up to the Accords like everybody else.”
“COLIN approved the draft in principle,” said Sevgi, feeling unreasonably defensive.
“Yeah. All about that principle, wasn’t it. Principally: you don’t tell us what to do, you globalist bureaucrat scum.”
Since he wasn’t far wrong, she didn’t argue the point. “Is that going to be a problem?”
“No. I’m freelance. My loyalties are strictly for sale. Like I already said, just tell me what you want me to do.”
She hesitated a moment. The dataslate had an integral resonance scrambler built to COLIN specs, which made it tighter than anything any lawyer had ever carried into an interview room at South Florida State. And Marsalis was pretty clearly desperate for an out. Still, the habit of the past four months was ingrained.
“We have,” she said finally, “a renegade thirteen on our hands. He’s been loose since June. Killing.”
He grunted. No visible surprise. “Where’d he get out of? Cimarron? Tanana?”
“No. He got out of Mars.”
This time she had him. He sat up.
“This is a completely confidential matter, Mr. Marsalis. You need to understand that before we start. The murders are widely distributed, and varied in technique. No official connection has been made among them, and we want it to stay that way.”
“Yeah, I bet you do. How’d he get past the nanorack security?”
“He didn’t. He shorted out the docking run and crashed the vessel into the Pacific. By the time we got there, he was gone.”
Marsalis pursed his lips in a soundless whistle. “Now, there’s an idea.”
She let the rest out. Anything to take the smug, competent control off his face. “Before that, he had systematically mutilated the other eleven cryocapped crewmembers in order to feed himself. He amputated their limbs and kept them alive in suspension, then, finally, began to kill them and strip the rest of their bodies for meat.”
A nod. “How long was transit?”
“Thirty-three weeks. You don’t seem surprised by any of this.”
“That’s because I’m not. You’re stuck out there, you’ve got to eat something.”
“Did you ever think that?”
Something like a shadow passed across his eyes. His voice came out just short of even. “Is that how you found me? Cross-reference?”
“Something like that.” She chose not to mention Norton’s sudden enthusiasm for the new tactic. “Our profiling n-djinn cited you as the only other thirteen known to have experienced similar circumstances.”
Marsalis offered her a thin smile. “I never ate anybody.”
“No. But did you think about it?”
He was silent for a while. She was on the point of asking her question again when he got up from the seat and went to stand by the high window. He stared out at the sky.
“It crossed my mind a few times,” he said quietly. “I knew the recovery ship was coming, but I had the best part of two months to worry about it. You can’t help running the scenarios in your mind. What if they don’t make it, what if something crazy happens? What if—”
He stopped. His gaze unhooked from the cloud cover and came back to the room, back to her face.
“Was he out there the whole thirty-three weeks?”
“Most of it. From what we can tell, his cryocap spat him out about two weeks into the trajectory.”
“And Mars Control didn’t fetch him back?”
“Mars Control didn’t know about it.” Sevgi gestured. “The n-djinn went down, looks like it was tricked out. The ship fell back on automated systems. Silent running. He woke up right after.”
“That’s a nice little cluster of coincidence.”
“Isn’t it.”
“But not very convenient from a culinary point of view.”
“No. We’re assuming the cryocap timing was an error. Whoever spiked the n-djinn probably planned to have the system bring him up a couple of weeks out from Earth. Something in the intrusion program flipped when it should have flopped, and you wake up two weeks out from Mars instead. Our friend arrives starved and pissed off and probably not very sane.”
“Do you know who he is?”
Sevgi nodded. She hit the keypad again and pushed the dataslate around so they could both see the screen and the face it held. Marsalis left the window and propped himself in casual angles on the edge of the table. Light gleamed off the side of his skull.
“Allen Merrin. We recovered trace genetic material from Horkan’s Pride, the vessel he crashed, and ran it through COLIN’s thirteen database. This is what they came up with.”
It was almost imperceptible, the way he grew focused, the way the casual poise tautened into something else. She watched his eyes sweep the text alongside the pale head-and-shoulders photo. She could have recited it to him from memory.
Merrin, Allen (sin 48523dx3814)
Delivered (c/s) April 26, 2064, Taos, New Mexico (Project Lawman). Uteral host, Bilikisu Sankare, source genetic material, Isaac Hubscher, Isabela Gayoso (sins appended). All genetic code variants property of Elleniss Hall, Inc., patents asserted (Elleniss Hall & US Army Partnership 2029).
Initial conditioning & training Taos, New Mexico, specialist skills development Fort Benning, Georgia (covert ops, counterinsurgency). Deployed: Indonesia 2083, Arabian peninsula 2084–5, Tajikistan 2085–7 & 2089, Argentina, Bolivia 2088, Rim Authority (urban pacification program) 2090–1.
Retired 2092 (under 2nd UNGLA Convention Accords, Jacobsen Protocol). Accepted Mars resettlement 2094 (COLIN citizenship record appended).
“Very Christ-like.”
She blinked. “I’m sorry?”
“The face.” He tapped the screen with a fingernail. The LCLS glow rippled around the touch. Merrin stared up under the tiny distortions. “Very Faith Satellite Channel. Looks like that Man Taking Names anime they did for the Cash memorial.”
The smile slipped out before she could stop it. His mouth quirked response. He moved the chair a little, sat down again.
“Saw that, did you? We get the reruns in here all the time. Faith-based rehab, you know.”
Quit grinning at him like a fucking news ’face, Sev. Get a grip.
“You don’t recognize him, then?”
A curious, tilted look. “Why would I?”
“You were in Iran.”
“Wasn’t everybody.” When she just waited, he sighed. “Yeah, we heard about the Lawmen. Saw them at a distance a few times in Iran, down around Ahvaz. But from what you’ve got there, it doesn’t look like this Merrin ever got up that far north.”
“He could have.” Sevgi nodded toward the screen. “I’ll be honest with you, this is a pretty loose summary. Once you get into the mission records, it’s a whole lot less defined. Covert deployments, so-called lost documentation, rumor and hearsay, subject is understood to have, that sort of shit. Executive denial and cover-ups around practically every corner. Plus, you’ve got a whole fucking hero mythology going on around this guy. I’ve seen data that puts Merrin in combat zones hundreds of kilometers apart on the same day, eyewitness accounts that say he took wounds we can’t find any medical records to confirm, some of them wounds he couldn’t possibly have survived if the stories are true. Even that South American deployment has too much overlap to be wholly accurate. He was in Tajikistan, no he wasn’t, he was still in Bolivia; he was solo-deployed, no, he was leading a Lawman platoon in Kuwait City.” Her disgust bubbled over. “I’m telling you, the guy’s a fucking ghost.”
He smiled, a little sadly she thought.
“We all were, back then,” he said. “Ghosts, I mean. We had our own British version of Project Lawman, minus the delusional name, of course. We called it Osprey. The French preferred Department Eight. But none of us ever officially existed. What you’ve got to remember, Ms. Ertekin, is that back in the eighties the whole thirteen thing was fresh out of the can. Everyone knew the technology was out there, and everybody was busy denying they’d ever have anything to do with it. UNGLA didn’t even exist back then, not as an agency in its own right. It was still part of the Human Rights Commission. And no one was very keen on letting anybody else get a close look at their new genetic warriors. The whole Middle East was a testing ground for all sorts of cutting-edge nastiness, and all of it was operating on full deniability. You know how that shit works, right?”
She blinked. “What shit?”
“Deniability. You work for COLIN, right?”
“I’ve been with COLIN two and a half years,” she said stiffly. “Before that I was a New York police detective.”
He grinned again, a little more genuine humor in it this time. “Getting the hang of it, though, aren’t you. This is a completely confidential matter, we want it to stay that way. That’s very COLIN.”
“It’s not a question of that.” She tried without much success to get the stiffness out of her voice. “We don’t want a panic on our hands.”
“How many has he killed so far? Here on the ground, I mean.”
“We think it’s in the region of twenty. Some of those are unconfirmed, but the circumstantial evidence points to a connection. In seventeen cases, we’ve recovered genetic trace material that clinches it.”
Marsalis grimaced. “Busy little fucker. Is this all in the Rim States?”
“No. The initial deaths were in the San Francisco Bay Area, but later they spread over the whole of continental North America.”
“So he’s mobile.”
“Yes. Mobile and apparently a very competent systems intrusion specialist. He murdered two men at the same location in the Bay Area on the night of June 13th and a man in southeastern Texas less than a week later. There’s no trace anywhere in the flight records for that period, and nothing from Rim Border Control, either. We had an n-djinn run face recognition checks on every cross-border flight and surface exit into the Republic for that week and got nothing.”
“He could have had his face changed.”
“In less than a week? With matching documentation? Rim States fenceline is the toughest frontier anywhere in the world. Anyway the same n-djinn we used for the face recog had instructions to flag anyone with bandaging or other traces of recent surgical procedure to the face. All we got was a bunch of rich brats coming home from West Coast cosmetic therapy, and a couple of over-the-hill erotica stars.”
She saw him hold back all but the corner of a grin. It was irritatingly infectious. She concentrated on the dataslate.
“The only options we are seriously entertaining are that either he was able to contact professional frontier busters within days of coming ashore, or he left the Rim for some other, intermediate destination before flying back into the Republic. It would be a tight time frame that way, but still doable. Of course once it goes global like that, there’s no way to run a comprehensive face recog. Too many places that refuse to let the n-djinns into their datasystems.”
“I take it these are both confirmed kills, Bay Area and then Texas?”
“Yes. Genetic trace material recovered at both locations.”
His gaze went back to the dataslate display. “What do Fort Benning have to say about it?”
“That Merrin was never provided with substantial datasystems training. He could run a battlefield deck—anybody in covert ops could. But that’s it. We’re assuming he upskilled on Mars.”
“Yeah. Or someone’s doing it for him.”
“There is that.”
He looked at her. “If he had systems help getting aboard Horkan’s Pride, and he’s still getting it now, then this is bigger than just some thirteen bailing out of Mars because he doesn’t like all the red rocks.”
“Yes.”
“And you’re out of leads.”
It wasn’t a question.
She sat back and spread her hands. “Without access to the UNGLA databases, we’re in a hole. We’ve done everything we know how to do, and it isn’t enough. The deaths keep coming, they’re steady but unpredictable. There’s no crescendo effect—”
“No, there wouldn’t be.”
“—but he’s not stopping. He’s not making any mistakes big enough to nail him or give us a working angle. Our inquiries on Mars have hit a wall—he obviously covered his tracks there, or, as you say, someone did it for him.”
“And down here?”
She nodded. “Down here, as you’ve also so eloquently pointed out, we are not on hugely cooperative terms with UNGLA, or the UN in general.”
“Well, I guess you can hardly blame them for that.” He widened his eyes at her, grinned. It’s not like you’ve been overly cooperative yourselves for the last decade.”
“Look, Munich was not—”
The grin faded to a grimace. “I wasn’t really talking about the Accords. I was thinking more of the reception we get in the prep camps every time we have to operate in them. You know we’re about as welcome down there as evolutionary science in Texas.”
She felt herself flush a little. “Individual corporate partners in the Colony effort do not necessarily—”
“Yeah, skip it.” A frown. “Still, UNGLA have a mandate requirement in circumstances like this. You report a loose thirteen, they pretty much have to show up.”
“We don’t really want them to show up, Mr. Marsalis.”
“Ah.”
“We need access to their datastacks, or failing that someone like you to talk to our profiling n-djinns. But that’s all. In the end, this is a COLIN matter, and we’ll clean our own house.”
Listen to you, Sevgi. Cop to corporate mouthpiece in one easy, well-paid move.
Marsalis watched her for a couple of moments. He shifted slightly in the chair, seemed to be considering something.
“Are you running this gig out of New York?”
“Yes. We’ve got borrowed space at RimSec’s Alcatraz complex, liaison with their detectives. But since this thing went continental, we’re back in the New York offices. Why?”
A shrug. “No reason. When I get on the suborb, I like to know where I’m going to be when I get off again.”
“Right.” She glanced at her watch. “Well, if we’re going to make that suborb, we should probably get moving. I imagine my colleague will have finished with the warden by now. There’ll be some paperwork.”
“Yes.” He hesitated a moment. “Listen. There are a couple of people in here I’d like to say good-bye to before we go. People I owe. Can we do that?”
“Sure.” Sevgi shrugged carelessly. She was already folding up the dataslate. “No problem. It’s a COLIN perk. We can do pretty much anything we want.”
The Guatemalan was still in his cell, flat on his back in his bunk and blissed out by the look of him on some of his newly acquired endorphin. A half-smoked New Cuban smoldered between the knuckles of his left hand, and his eyes were lidded almost shut. He looked up, dreamily surprised, when Carl strummed the bars of the half-open door.
“Hey, Eurotrash. Chew doin’ here?”
“Leaving,” said Carl crisply. “But I need a favor.”
The Guatemalan struggled upright on the bunk. He glanced up to the cell’s monitor lens, and the cheap interference slinger taped on the wall next to it. No attempt had been made to hide the scrambler, and it had hung there every time Carl had been inside the cell. He didn’t like to think what it cost the Guatemalan to have it overlooked on a permanent basis.
“Leavin’?” A stoned smirk. “Don’ see no fuckin trowel in your hand.”
Carl moved an African-carved wooden stool over to the bunk and seated himself. “Not like that. This is official. Out the front gate. Listen, I need to make a phone call.”
“Phone call?” Even through the endorphins, the Guatemalan was blearily shocked. “You know what tha’s gonna cost you?”
“I can guess. And I don’t have it. Look, there are seven more twenty-mil caps taped in plastic up in the U-bend of my cell’s shitter. All yours. Think of—”
“That ain’t gonna cut it, niggah.”
“I know. Think of it as a down payment.”
“Yeah?” The stoned look was sliding away from the other man. He put the New Cuban in the corner of his mouth and grinned around it. “How’s that shit work? You walkin’ outta here, how you gonna settle your account? Down payment on what? Come to that”—brow creasing—“you walkin’ outta here, why you need my little phone service?”
Carl gestured impatiently. “Because I don’t trust the people who are walking me out. Listen, once I’m outside, I’m going to have juice—”
“Yeah, sounds like it. Juice with folks that you don’t trust.”
“I can help you on the outside.” Carl leaned in. “This is COLIN business. That mean anything to you?”
The Guatemalan regarded him owlishly for a moment. Then he shook his head and got off the bunk. Carl shifted aside to let him past.
“Sound to me, niggah, like you ridin’. You sure those seven caps still in that shitter bend, not inside you? COLIN getting you out? What the fuck for?”
“They want me to kill someone for them,” Carl said evenly.
A snort from behind him. Liquid coursing as the Guatemalan poured himself a glass of juice from the chiller flask he kept on a shelf. “Sure. In the whole Confederated Republic, they can’t find one black man do their killin’ for them, they got to come flush some high-tone Eurotrash outta South Florida State. You ridin’, niggah.”
“Will you stop fucking calling me that.”
“Oh yeah.” The Guatemalan drank deep. He put the glass down and made a gusty, satisfied sound. “I’s forgettin’. You the only black man in here don’ seem to noticed what color skin he got.”
Carl stared straight ahead at the cell wall. “You know, where I come from, there are a lot of different ways of being black.”
“Well, then you one lucky fucking black man.” The Guatemalan moved around to face him. His face was almost kindly, softened with the endorphins and maybe something else. “But see, blood, ’bout now, where you come from ain’t where you at. ’Bout now, you in South Florida State. You in the Confederated Republic, niggah. Roun’ here, they only got the one way of being black, and sooner or later that’s the black you gonna be. Ain’t no diversity of product in the Republic, they just got this one box for us, and sooner or later they gonna squeeze you in that box right along with the rest of us.”
Carl looked at the wall some more. He took the decision.
“Now, see, that’s where you’re wrong.”
“I’m wrong?” The other man chuckled. “Look around you, blood. How the fuck am I wrong?”
“You’re wrong,” Carl told him, “because they already got me in a whole other box. It’s a box you won’t ever see the inside of, and that’s why I’m getting out, that’s why they need me. They can’t get anyone else like me.”
The Guatemalan propped himself against the cell wall and gave Carl a quizzical look.
“Yeah? You got moves, trash, I give you that. And what I hear from Louie, you got some fucked-up wirin’ inside you. But that don’ make you no stone killer. Two hours ago you walk out of here with my boy’s best shiv-work up your sleeve, but what I hear is Dudeck still walking around.”
“We were interrupted.”
“Yeah. By the nice people from COLIN.” But there wasn’t much mockery in the other man’s voice now. He sucked thoughtfully on the cigar. “Shame about Dudeck, that birdshit coulda used some time in the infirmary. You want to tell me what that means, they can’t get anyone else like me?”
Carl met his eyes. “I’m a thirteen.”
It was like peeling a scab. For the last four months, he’d kept it hedged behind his teeth, the secret that would kill him. Now he watched the Guatemalan’s face and saw the final confirmation for his paranoia, saw the flicker of fear, faint but there, covered for quickly with a nod.
“O-kay.”
“Yeah.” He felt an obscure disappointment; somehow he’d hoped this man might be proof against the standard prejudice. Something about the Guatemalan’s patient con math realism. But now abruptly he could feel himself through the other man’s gaze, sliding into caricature. Could even feel himself go with it, let go, take on the old skin of impassive power and threat. “So. About this phone call. What’s it going to take?”
He found Dudeck in the F wing rec hall, playing speed chess against the machine. Three or four others inmates were gathered around: one tat-stamped and certified AC brother, a couple of late-teen wannabe sycophants, and an older white guy who seemed to be there just for the chess. No one from the chapel confrontation—Dudeck would have shrugged loose of them in the wake of the failed gig. Too many undischarged fight chemicals sloshing around, too much blustering talk while they leached back out of the system. Not what you needed at all after a walk-away.
No one paid any attention to the black man as he came up the hall. Dudeck was too deep in the game, and with full audiovid monitoring systems webbed up in the nanocarb vault of the hall, the others were loose and unvigilant. Carl got to within ten paces of the gathering before anybody turned around. Then one of the wannabes must have caught black in motion out of the corner of an eye. He pivoted about. Stepped forward, secure in the knowledge of how the monitoring system worked, puffed up with association and proximity to Dudeck.
“Fuck you want, nigger?”
Carl stepped in and hit him, full force, with one trailing arm and the back of his hand. The impact smashed the boy’s mouth and knocked him to the floor. He stayed there, bleeding and staring up at Carl in disbelief.
Carl was still moving.
He closed with the tat-marked spectator, broke down a fumbled defense, and tipped the man into Dudeck, who was still trying to get up from the console. The two men tangled and went down sprawling. The second sycophant hovered, gaped. He wasn’t going to do anything. The older guy was already backing off, hands spread low in front of him to denote his detachment.
Dudeck rolled to his feet with practiced speed. A siren cut loose somewhere.
“Got some unfinished business,” Carl told him.
“You’re fucking cracked, nigger. That’s monitored, unprovoked aggre—”
He let the mesh drive him. Dudeck saw him coming, threw together a Thai boxing guard, and kicked out. Carl stamped the kick away, feinted the guard, rode the jab punch response, and then broke Dudeck’s nose with a close-in palm heel. The Aryan went over again, explosively, backward. The second serious AC member was staggering upright. Carl punched him in the throat to keep him out of the fight. He went down, choking. Dudeck had bounced up, hadn’t even wiped the blood from his nose. Old hand. His eyes were blank with fury. He came in like a truck, a flurry of blows, all simple linear shit. Carl beat most of it, winced on a stray punch that scraped his cheekbone, then snagged the other man’s right arm at the wrist. He locked up the arm, twisted it, and slammed down with his own forearm. Dudeck’s elbow broke with a crunch, audible even over the sirens. The Aryan shrieked and went down for the last time. Carl kicked him as hard as he could in the ribs. He felt something give. He kicked again, twice, into the stomach. Dudeck threw up on the second impact, softly, like something rupturing. Carl stepped over the Aryan’s twitching body to avoid the pool of vomit, stamped in the man’s already bloodied face, and then bent over him. He grabbed Dudeck’s head up by one ear.
“New rules, birdshit,” he hissed. “I’m working for the man now. I can do what the fuck I want with you. I could kill you, and it wouldn’t make any fucking difference now.”
Dudeck foamed blood and spit. Fragments of a tooth on his smashed lower lip. He was making a low grinding noise somewhere deep in his throat.
Carl let go and stood up. For a moment, he thought he’d stamp on the crumpled form at his feet again, hard into the base of the spine to do some damage the infirmary wouldn’t easily put right, into the face again to destroy it utterly. Maybe go back for the ribs until they snapped inward and punctured something. At least, he thought, he might spit on the Aryan. But the rage had drained abruptly away. He couldn’t be bothered. The Guatemalan had what he’d asked for. Dudeck was out, infirmary-bound. Let the remainder of the Aryan’s shitty Jesusland life take him the rest of the way down. Marsalis didn’t need to see or inflict any more damage. He already knew, within parameters, how it would play out. They stacked men like Dudeck in cheap coffins five-deep outside the poor fund crematoria across the Republic every Sunday. Most of them never made it out of their twenties.
At the far end of F wing, the gate clanged back and the intervention squad piled through. Body armor, stunwrap carbines, and yells. Carl sighed, raised his hands to his head, and walked down the siren-screaming nanocarb hall to meet them.
“Cordwood Systems.”
“Marsalis. Print me.”
“Voiceprint confirmed. You are speaking to the duty controller. Please state your preferences.”
“Jade, lattice, mangosteen, oak.”
“Opening. What are your requirements?”
“I’ve just been hired out of custody by the Western Nations Colony Initiative. They want me to run a variant thirteen retrieval outside UNGLA jurisdiction.”
“That is contrary to—”
“I know. I’ll be in New York in a couple of days. Tell the perimeter crews to expect me. I’ll be dumping my newfound friends as soon as practically possible.”