CHAPTER 14

The sounds of shouting dragged her awake.

For a confused moment, she thought it was a theft or some excessive haggling down in the market. Then the rhythmic element in the voices made it through the wrap of sleep and she remembered where she was. She sat up sharply in the narrow barrack room bed. The inside of her head felt grimy with the lack of syn. On the other side of the room, dawn was seeping through at the edges of the moth-eaten varipolara curtain; pearl-gray light lay across the ceiling and down the far wall in blurred stripes. She looked at her watch and groaned. The chanting outside was too muffled to make sense of, but she didn’t need to hear the words.

On the table beside the bed, her phone rang.

“Yeah?”

Norton’s voice filtered into her ear. “Hear the fans?”

“I’m awake, aren’t I?”

“Good call, Sev. If we’d stayed in town, we’d be fucked. That nasty cop mind of yours saves the day again.”

“So.” She flapped back the sheet, swung her legs out of bed to the floor. The skin on her thighs goosefleshed in the cool air. “Parris has friends in Tallahassee after all.”

“Better than that.” There was a sour grin in Norton’s voice. “He went to the media feeds. We’re all over Good Morning South.”

“Ah, fuck.” Groping around on the floor with her free hand for clothes. “You think we can still get out of here okay?”

“Well, not by suborb, that’s for sure. Whatever was keeping the lid on Marsalis’s genetic secrets at South Florida State is long gone now. He’s blown. Either Parris talked, or somebody leaked higher up.”

“Got to be Parris.”

“Yeah, well, in any case, now you got Jesuslanders fifty-deep outside both gates and backing up down the access road for a couple of klicks at least. Real Diefor-the-Lord types by the look of it. I just got off the phone to our press liaison in Miami and she tells me there are bible thumpers lining up for airtime from here to Alaska.” She could hear him grinning again. “We’re not just trying to evade Republican justice anymore, Sev. We’re harboring an abomination before the Lord.”

“Great. So what do we do?” Sevgi stuck an arm into a shirtsleeve. “Fly home the old-fashioned way? COLIN’s got to have a couple of flatline Lears down here, right? For short-hop VIPs.”

“I would think so, yes.”

“And they’re not going to shoot us out of the sky when we hit Republic airspace, are they?”

Norton said nothing. Sevgi remembered her profiler cups halfway through seaming her shirt shut. She split the seam back open, peered around on the floor.

“Come on, Tom. You can’t seriously think—”

“Okay, no, they probably won’t shoot us down. But they might force the pilot back to a landing at Miami International and take us off the plane there. We’re not popular in these parts, Sev.”

“Not fucking popular anywhere,” she muttered. She caught the translucent gleam of a p-cup at the foot of the bed. She fished it up between two fingers and pressed it up under the weight of her right breast. “All right, Tom. What do you want to do?”

“Let me talk to Nicholson.” He rode out her snort. “Sev, he may be an asshole, but he’s still responsible for operations. It doesn’t look any better for him than for us if we end up slammed in some Miami jail.”

Sevgi prowled the darkened room looking for the other p-cup. “Nicholson won’t get in a fight at state legislature level, Tom, and you know it. He’s too much of a political animal to upset people with that much clout. If Tallahassee gets in line behind this thing, we’re going to be left twisting in the wind down here.”

Another hesitation. Outside, the sounds of the crowd surged like distant surf. Sevgi found the cup under the bed, dug it out, and fitted it awkwardly, left-handed, under her left breast. She sat on the edge of the bed and started seaming her shirt shut again.

“Tell me I’m wrong, Tom.”

“I think you are wrong, Sev. Nicholson is going to see this as interference with his COLIN Security authority, and at a minimum it’s going to make him look bad. Even if he doesn’t take on Tallahassee directly himself, he’ll kick it upstairs with an urgent-action label attached.”

“And meanwhile, what? We sit tight here?”

“There are more unpleasant places to be stranded, Sev.” He sighed. “Look. Worst-case scenario, you get to spend the day on the beach with your new pal.”

“My new…” Sevgi took the phone away from her ear and stared at it. The little screen was an innocent matte gray. Norton hadn’t enabled the v-feed. “Fuck you, Tom.”

“It was a joke, Sev.”

“Yeah? Well, next time you’re down on Fifth Avenue, get yourself a new fucking sense of humor.”

She killed the call.

         

From the landward observation tower, it didn’t look like much. Several hundred variously dressed men and women milling about in front of the facility gate while off to the left a suited, white-haired figure declaimed from behind a portable plastic ampbox podium. A couple of amateurish, hastily scrawled holo-placards tilted about in the air above the crowd. Teardrops and a few old-style IC vehicles were parked back along the access road, and people leaned against their flanks in ones and twos. Early-morning sunlight winked and glinted off glass and alloy surfaces. A couple of helicopters danced in the sky overhead, media platforms by the look of their livery.

It didn’t look like much, but they were a good two hundred meters back from the gate here; the noise was faint, and detail hard to see. Sevgi had worked crowd control a few time as a patrol officer, and she’d learned not to make snap judgments about situations involving massed humanity. She knew how quickly it could turn.

“…may have the form of a man, but do not be deceived by his form.” The words rinsed up from the podium sound system, still relatively unhysterical. Whoever the preacher was, he was building up slowly. “Man is made in the image and love of God. This. Creature. Was made by arrogant sinners, by shattering the seed God gave us in His wisdom. The Bible tells us…”

She tuned it out. Squinted up at one of the helicopters as it banked.

“No sign of the state police?” she asked the tower guard.

He shook his head. “They’ll show up if those clowns start charging the gate, not before. And only then because they know we’re authorized to use lethal force if there’s a line breach.”

His face was impassive, but the sour edge in his voice was unmistakable. The name on his chest tag read kim, but Sevgi guessed Korean American was close enough to Chinese for a common bitterness to find roots. Back before Secession, the Zhang fever mobs hadn’t been all that selective in their lynchings.

“I doubt it’ll come to that.” She faked a breezy confidence. “We’ll be out of your hair before lunchtime. They’ll all go home after that.”

“Good to know.”

She left him staring out across the COLIN defenses at the crowd and made her way back down the caged staircase to the ground. There was an ominous quiet around the facility, in contrast with the noise outside. They’d suspended nanorack operations while the crisis lasted, and the storage hangars were all closed up. Tracked freight loaders ten meters broad squatted immobile on the evercrete aprons and access paths, like massive, scalped tanks, abandoned at the end of some colossal urban conflict. Their mortarboard lifting platforms were all empty.

At the other end of the complex, the ’rack thrust up into the cloud cover like a god-size fire escape. It made everything on the ground feel like toys. They’d built Perez early on, back when Mars was still a barely scratched desert and Bradbury a collection of pressurized ’fabs. Now it looked used and grim, all mottled grays and blacks and overstated support structure. Compared with the cheery, brightly colored minimalism at Sagan or Kaku, Perez was a relic. Even for Sevgi, who didn’t like the ’racks whatever fucking color they came in, it was a melancholy sight.

“Ever been up?”

She looked around and saw that Marsalis had gotten within two meters of her back without giving himself away. Now he stood watching her with a blank speculation that reminded her of Ethan so much, it sent shivers up from the base of her spine.

“Not this one, no.” She nodded vaguely northward. “They trained me in New York. Kaku ’rack, mostly. I’ve been up Sagan and Hawking as well, and what they’ve built of Levin.”

“You don’t sound overenthusiastic.”

“No.”

It made him smile. “But the money’s good. Right?”

“The money’s good,” she agreed.

He looked away, toward the gate. The smile faded out.

“Is all that noise out there for me?”

“Yes, it is.” She felt oddly embarrassed, as if the Republicans on the other side of the wire were acquaintances whose bad behavior she had to cover for. “Blame your old friend Parris. Apparently he took exception to your departure after all. He’s fed the whole thing to the local media.”

“Smart of you to bring us here last night, then.”

She shrugged. “I worked witness protection for a while. You learn never to take anything for granted.”

“I see.” He seemed to consider for a moment. “Are you people going to give me a gun?”

“That’s not part of the deal. Didn’t you read the fine print?”

“No.”

It brought her up short. “You didn’t?”

“Ever spent time in a Jesusland justice facility?” He put on a gentle smile, but his eyes were hard with memory. “It’s not the sort of place you quibble over detail if they come to let you out.”

“Right.” She cleared her throat. “Well, the fine print says that you’re retained by COLIN in an advisory capacity, not for actual enforcement. So, ah, you don’t need a gun.”

“I will if our Jesusland friends decide to storm the fences.”

“That’s not going to happen here.”

“Your confidence is inspiring. Can we fly out of here?”

“It doesn’t look like it. Tom’s working the diplomatic angle, but it’ll be awhile before we know if we can take the risk. In this part of the world, the Air Nationals tend to shoot first and sift wreckage afterward.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard that.” He turned away from the powered fences and the gate, looking out across the shimmering surface of the Atlantic. “Speaking of which, any idea why the skycops in the Rim didn’t shove a heatseeker up Horkan’s arse when it crossed the line? I hear those boys are pretty jumpy, too, and it must have profiled pretty much like a threat.”

“Local COLIN liaison talked them out of it, apparently.”

“Yeah?” Marsalis raised an eyebrow.

“Yes. Relations with the Rim are pretty good these days. It’s not like down here. We negotiated a direct AI interface last year, high-level trust protocols, minimal buffering. The Sagan n-djinn mapped the trajectory and shunted it straight to the Rim Air Authority. No blocks, no datachecks above basic. It cleared the buffers in a couple of nanoseconds.” Sevgi spread her hands. “Everyone’s happy.”

“Especially Merrin.”

She said nothing. The sporadic chanting at the gate reached them between gusts of wind coming off the ocean. After a couple of seconds, Marsalis started away from her in the direction of the water. He didn’t speak or look back. It took her his first three steps to understand he’d been waiting for her to continue the conversation, and now that she hadn’t he was leaving.

“Where are you going?” It came out a lot less casually than she would have liked.

He stopped and turned back to her. “Why?” he asked gravely. “Am I in some kind of protective custody?”

Fuck it. “No, it’s just.” She gestured awkwardly. “In case I need to find you later, in a hurry.”

He weighed it, the way he had the comment about her work for WP.

“I’m going for another walk on the beach,” he said. “Want to come?”

“Ah…no.” She hesitated. He was waiting. “I need to go over the Montes crime scene while we’ve got the time. See if there’s anything that jumps out.”

“Is that likely?”

“No, but you never know. I’ve been looking at Merrin’s handiwork for the last four months, Angeline PD haven’t. There might be something.”

“No direct data interface there, then?”

“No. Technically, they’re not part of RimSec. It’s the Freeport legislation, Angeline PD have autonomy, they work pretty much like any city police department over in the Republic.”

“And you’re not sharing what you’ve got on this with any of those guys?”

“No. I told you, we don’t want a panic on our hands.” She threw out a weary signpost arm toward the chanting. “Listen to that. How do you think people like that are going to react to the news that there’s a cannibal thirteen loose in North America, murdering selected citizens at his leisure. Remember Sundersen?”

“Eric Sundersen?” A shrug. “Sure. I spent a couple of months looking for him last year, just like everybody else.”

“Then you’ll remember what it was like. Seven weeks, and we nearly had martial law declared in five states of the Republic. Media screaming off the screen about clone monsters. Armed mobs trying to break into the tract at Cimarron and slaughter everyone there. Emergency measures all along the Rim frontier. If Sundersen hadn’t broken cover when he did, it would have been Zhang fever all over again. And all he did was escape. He hadn’t killed anybody. With this one, the mobs would go fucking crazy.”

“Yeah, mobs. You humans have that trick down, don’t you.”

Sevgi ignored the jibe.

“We just don’t want another bloodbath,” she said doggedly. “We make local police aware that we have an interest, and we give them what help we can. But we can’t afford anyone to know the whole picture.”

He nodded. His walk on the beach seemed forgotten. “So what picture are they getting?”

“The cover story in the Republic is Marstech. A heist gang and a distribution network, squabbling over product.” The words tasted stale on her tongue, as concocted and unconvincing as some corporate mission statement. She forced down a grimace and pressed on. “With scumbags like Eddie Tanaka that’s been easy to sell. Elsewhere, when the victim’s respectable, we’re playing the collateral damage angle. Innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire, or cases of mistaken identity.”

“Sounds a little creaky. What are you doing about the genetic trace?”

“Taking it off their hands. The COLIN n-djinns have access to police datastacks right across North America; they fish out anything that fits the profile. That’s usually long before Forensics get around to running a gene scan on the crime scene traces, so in most cases we get there before anybody knows there’s been a thirteen at the scene.”

“Most cases?”

“Yeah, been a couple of medical examiners we’ve had to lean on, get them to shut up.” She looked away. “It isn’t hard to do that with COLIN authority.”

“No, I don’t imagine it is.”

She could feel herself flush a little. “Look, I have to get over to the upload building. You want to hit the beach, that’s fine.”

“No, it’s okay. I’ll walk with you.”

She gave him a sharp look. He looked innocently back.

“May as well look at this Montes myself,” he said. “Start earning my keep.”

So they crossed the apron from the observation tower together, heading for the main complex. There was some heat in the day now, and Sevgi’s own slightly stale scent pricked in her nostrils. She began to wish she’d had a shower before she tumbled out of the hospitality suite and into action.

“So, you were saying,” Marsalis prompted. “The Republic don’t know this is linked to Horkan’s Pride.”

“No. The media coverage said there were no survivors. We let them have the cannibalism angle, and told them anybody still alive would have been killed on impact. We let them have pictures.”

“Ah.”

“Yeah.” Sevgi curled her lip. “Cannibal Ghost Ship Horror—click for further images. Worked like a dream, they ran with it, splashed it across every site on the net. They completely forgot to do any investigative journalism.”

“Handy.”

She shrugged. “Standard. American media’s been taking sensation over fact for better than a hundred years now, and Secession just loaded the trend. Anyway, it is a miracle Merrin survived the crash. I mean, he had to find some way to trick the systems into accepting him back into his cryocap, which is glitched to fuck so the cryogen protocol doesn’t work anymore. So he’s got to beat that, he’s got to persuade the cryocap to fill with gel anyway, to drown a live, unsedated body—”

“Not like he didn’t have the spare time to work it all out.”

“I know. But that’s just the start. He’s then got to lie there and let the system drown him, unsedated. He’s got to breathe the gel, unsedated, awake, without his lungs revolting, for a good twenty minutes while Horkan’s Pride programs its final approach, hits reentry, course-corrects, and comes down in the ocean.”

A freight loader bulked dinosaur-like on their right, blocking out the angle of the early-morning sun. Sevgi shivered a little as they stepped into the long shadow it cast. She looked across at Marsalis, almost accusingly.

“You want to think what that must have been like—locked in an upright coffin with that shit filling your nose and your mouth and your throat, pouring in and filling up your lungs, pressing in on your eyeballs, and all around you the whole ship feels like it’s shaking itself apart, maybe is shaking itself apart for all you know. Can you imagine what that would have felt like?”

“I’m trying not to,” he said mildly. “Do we know how he got ashore?”

She nodded. “First victim in the Bay Area, Ulysses Ward. You saw him on the map last night. Tailored microfauna magnate, he had culture farms all over the Marin County shoreline and a bunch of those tethered plankton trays about a hundred klicks off the coast. We don’t have the satellite footage to be sure, but it looks like he was out there doing maintenance when Horkan’s Pride came down. Got curious, got too close, got himself killed.”

“Or he went out there specifically to pick Merrin up.”

“Yeah, we thought of that, too. RimSec did an n-djinn search, couldn’t find any links between Ward and Merrin. We went back forty years. Unless they knew each other in a previous life, this is exactly what it looks like—a bad-luck coincidence.”

“How’d he kill him?”

“Cressi sharkpunch. You ever see anyone killed with one of those things?” Sevgi gestured graphically. “Designed to stop a great white shark through ten meters of water, it’s practically a handheld disintegrator. Blew Ward’s belly out all over the surrounding furniture. Him plus another employee name of Emil Nocera, all in the same shot.”

“Thanks for the ride.”

“Right. CSI say there were another couple of employees around at the time, but they ran.”

“Hard to blame them.”

“Yeah, plus they were illegals. Apparently a lot of the casual labor up that way is. They see something, they’re not going to hang around and make witness statements. RimSec are looking, but they don’t hold out much hope.”

“Do they know what this is about?”

“RimSec do, but that’s as far as it’s gone. There’s no public knowledge, we can’t afford it, and neither can they. Things are bad enough between Jesusland and the Rim without word getting out that this guy’s treating their precious border security like a knee-high picket fence.”

“But the Rim cops know he’s killing in the Republic as well?”

“They’ve been apprised, yes.”

“Nice of them to keep quiet about it for you.”

“Well, like I said, there’s no love lost across the fencelines. And it looks bad if the high-powered high-tech Rim States couldn’t stop some psychotic killer crossing over and going on the rampage in the Republic. You can see how that’d play diplomatically.”

“What price technology without God on your side?”

“Right. Plus, if word got out that said psychotic killer is a, uh…”

“A genetic monster?” he asked gently. “A twist?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“No. I guess you didn’t.”

“The Republic are already handing their people a line of shit about how the Rim is just a craven appeasement system for the Chinese. And with the stories coming out of China, the black lab escapees—” She shrugged again. “Well, you can see how that one’d play as well, right?”

“Pretty much. Nothing like a good monster scare.”

They cleared the shadow of the freight loader. Sevgi turned her head to beat the sudden glare of the sun and thought she caught a smile slipping across the black man’s lips. His gaze had rolled out to somewhere well beyond the gathering of buildings around the nanorack.

“Something funny?”

His attention reeled back in, but he didn’t look at her. “Not really.”

She stopped.

After a couple of paces, so did he, and turned to face her. “Something the matter?”

“If you’ve got something to contribute,” she said evenly, “then I would like to hear it. This isn’t going to work unless you talk to me.”

He looked at her for a long couple of moments. “It’s really not very important,” he said easily. “I guess you’d call it a resonance.”

She stood where she was. “Resonance with what.”

He sighed. “A resonance with monsters. Do you know what a pistaco is?”

She dredged memory, pulled up something from a long-ago briefing on altiplano training camp crimes. “Yeah, it’s some sort of demon, right? Something the Indians believe in. Some sort of vampire?”

“Close. Pistaco’s a white man with a long knife who comes at night and chops up Indians to get at their body fat. Most likely, it’s a cultural memory from the conquistadores and the Inquisition, because they certainly weren’t averse to a bit of dismemberment in the name of Gold and Jesus Christ. But these days, up on the altiplano they’ve got a new angle on the story.”

“Which is what?”

Marsalis grinned. She was appalled at how much it reminded her of Ethan, at how it reached inside and touched her in the place he used to.

“These days,” he said, “the Andeans don’t believe the pistaco is the white man as such anymore. That’s gone. Still the same monster, still looks the same, but now the story they tell is, the pistaco’s something evil that the white man’s brought back.”

He nodded toward the dark towering webbed architecture of the nanorack.

“Brought back from Mars.”