CHAPTER 18

A bad chloride twinge kicked him awake, bone-deep aching along his left forearm and sudden sweat from the intensity of the pain. He’d curled up around it instinctively in his sleep, and there was a faint whimper trapped in his throat as he woke. Aunt Chitra’s pain-management training, the silent imperative. Take the pain, breathe, breathe it under control, and don’t make a fucking sound. He swallowed and rolled over, protecting the aching limb with his other arm.

Remembered he was in Sevgi Ertekin’s home, and relaxed. The whimper got free as a low groan.

The room was full of barely filtered light—there were varipolara drapes at the windows, and someone had forgotten to opaque them the all the way down the night before. His watch said it was a little after nine. He grunted and flexed the fingers of his left hand, chased the pain to fading. The mesh, for reasons the Marstech biolabs apparently still didn’t understand, “remembered” injury trauma and tended to overload the system in those parts of the body that had suffered it in the past. Fine so long as you fueled the system right; the worst you got was a faint warmth and itching at the site of previous wounds. But with the shit he’d been buying from Louie over the last few months, the neuromuscular interfacing would be ragged and inflamed. And Carl had once stopped a Saudi opsdog with that forearm. Some monstrous engineered hybrid, ghost-pale and snarling as it materialized out of the desert night and leapt at his throat. The impact put him on his back, the jaws sank into the bone, and even after he killed the fucking thing, it took them nearly five minutes to break the bite lock and get it off him.

He listened for sound through the apartment, heard nothing. Evidently Ertekin was still out cold. No chance of going back to sleep now, and the door was still locked. He thought about it for a moment then got up, pulled on his pants, and padded through to the kitchen. A brief search of the cupboards produced coffee for the espresso machine in the corner. OLYMPUS MONS ROBUSTA BLEND—FROM ACTUAL MARSTECH GENE LABS! Yeah, right. He allowed himself a sour grin and set up the machine to make two long cups, then went to the fridge for milk.

There were a couple of LongLife cartons open, one weighing in at about half full, the other a lot less. On impulse he sniffed at the torn cardboard openings on both. Pulled a face and upended each carton carefully one after the other over the sink. With the least full of the two, the contents came out slow and semi-solid, splattered across the metal in slimy white clots. He shook his head and rinsed the mess away.

“You and Zooly’d get on like a fucking house on fire,” he muttered and went back to the cupboards to find more milk.

“Who you talking to?”

He turned with the fresh carton in his hand. The kitchen had filled with the smell of coffee, and either that or the noise he was making rummaging in the cupboards had woken Ertekin. She stood in the kitchen doorway, eyes heavy-lidded, hair stuck up in clumps, wearing a faded NYPD T-shirt several sizes too big for her and, as far as he could tell, nothing much else. The look on her face wasn’t friendly.

“Singing,” he said. “To myself. I made coffee.”

“Yeah, so I fucking see.”

He raised an eyebrow. “You’re welcome.”

She looked back at him for a moment, impassively, then turned away. He caught the lines of her hips under the T-shirt, the length of her thighs as the about-turn brought her legs together.

“What time is it?”

“’Bout half past nine.”

“Fuck, Marsalis.” Her voice trailed away, back toward the bedroom. “What you got, insomnia or something?”

Sounds of water splashing, a door closing it off. A sudden, unlooked-for image opened in his head. Sevgi Ertekin strips off her T-shirt and steps into the shower, hands gathered under her chin beneath the stream of warm water, arms pressing breasts flat and—

He grinned wryly and derailed the internal experia script before it reached his groin. Finished making the coffee anyway. It came out rich and creamed with bubbles, steaming an aroma that kicked him straight back to the dusty bubblefabs of Huari camp. The ominous itch on his skin of sunlight through an atmosphere only recently made thick enough to breathe, the uneasy pull of Mars gravity, the loose grip of a planet that didn’t recognize him as its own and didn’t really see why it should hold on to him. Coffee in aluminium canisters, dust crunching underfoot, and Sutherland at his shoulder, rumbling speech like the reassuring turnover of heavy plant machinery. Nothing human-scale around here, soak. Just shade your eyes and take a look. And the staggering, neck-tilting view up Massif Verne, to drive the other man’s point home.

He poured the coffee into two mugs, took one for himself and left hers to get cold on the kitchen counter. Serve her fucking right. He sipped from his mug, pulled a surprised face. from actual marstech gene labs was right. He hated it when reality bore out the clanging boasts of the hype. He went back to the living room and peered out at the market below. He didn’t know the city well, and this part less than most, but Ertekin’s building was a pretty standard nanotech walk-up and he guessed the open plaza below had been a part of the same redevelopment. It had the faintly organic lines of all early nanobuild. He knew parts of southeast London that looked much the same. Buildings in a bucket—just pour it out and watch them grow.

He heard her come out of the bedroom, heard her in the kitchen. Then he could feel her in the room with him, at his back, watching. She cleared her throat. He turned and saw her on the other side of the room, dressed and somewhat groomed, coffee mug held in both hands. She gestured with the drink.

“Thanks.” She looked away, then back. “I uh. I’m not great first thing in the morning.”

“Don’t worry about it.” Randomly, for something to fill the quiet between them: “Possible sign of greatness. Nor was Felipe Souza, by all accounts.”

Flicker of a smile. “No?”

“No. Did all his molecular dynamics work at night. I read this biography of him, once I got back to Earth. Seemed appropriate, you know. Anyway, book says, when they took him on at UNAM, he refused to lecture before midday. Great guy to have as a tutor, right?”

“Not for you.”

“Well, my head starts to spin once you get past basic buckyball structure, so—”

“No, I meant the morning thing.” She gestured with the cup again, one-handed this time, a little more open. “You wouldn’t be—”

“Oh, that.” He shrugged. “It’s the training. Never really goes away.”

Quiet opened up again in the wake of his words. The conversation, caught and scraping in the shallow waters of her continued embarrassment. He reached for something to pole them clear again. Something that had flared dimly in his mind the previous night as he finally arced downward toward sleep.

“Listen, I’ve been thinking. You guys debriefed the onboard djinn for Horkan’s Pride, right? Back in June, when this all started.”

“Yeah.” Her voice stretched a little on the word, quizzical. He liked the sound it made. He fumbled after follow-up.

“Yeah, so who’d you have do it? In-house team?”

She shook her head. “I doubt it. We got transcripts handed down, probably some geek hired out of MIT’s machine interface squad. They handle most of our n-djinn work. Why, you think there’s something they missed?”

“It’s always a possibility.”

A skeptical look. “Something you’d pick up?”

“Okay, maybe not something they missed, as such.” He sipped his coffee. Gestured. “Just something they weren’t looking for, because I wasn’t on the scene. A close link between Merrin and me. Something that’ll put me next to him.”

“A link? You said you didn’t know him.”

“I don’t, directly. Come on, Ertekin, you were a cop. You must know something about complexity theory. Social webbing.”

She shrugged. “Sure. We got the basics in our demodynamics classes. Yaroshanko intuition, Chen and Douglas, Rabbani. All the way back to Watts and Strogatz, all that small-world networks shit. So what? You know, once you get out on the streets for real, most of that demodynamics stuff’s about as useful as poetry in a whorehouse.”

He held back a grin. “Maybe so. But small-world networks work. And the variant thirteen club on Mars is a very small world. As is Mars itself. I may not know Merrin, but I’m willing to bet you can link me to him in a couple of degrees of separation or less. And if those links are there, then nothing’s going to spot them out better than an n-djinn.”

“Yeah. Any n-djinn. Why’s it got to be Horkan’s Pride?”

“Because Horkan’s Pride was the last djinn to see Merrin alive. It stands to reason that—”

Soft chime from the door.

Ertekin glanced at her watch, reflexively. Confusion creased in the corners of her eyes.

“Guess Tom just doesn’t trust the two of us together,” Carl said, deadpan.

The confusion faded out, traded for a disdain he made as manufactured. She crossed to the door and picked up the privacy receiver.

“Yes?”

He saw her eyes widen slightly. She nodded, said yes a couple more times, then hung up. When she looked at him again, there was a fully fledged frown on her face. He couldn’t decide if she was worried or annoyed, or both.

“It’s Ortiz,” she said. “He drove here.”

He covered his own surprise. “What an honor. Does he collect all his new hires by limousine?”

“Not since I’ve been working there.”

“So it must be me.”

He’d intended it to come out light and supple with irony. But somewhere, sometime in the last four months, he’d lost the knack. He heard the weight in his own words, and so did she.

“Yeah.” She looked at him over her coffee mug. “It must be you.”

         

He’d met Ortiz a couple of times before, but doubted the man would remember him. Both meetings were years in the past, both had been swathed in the glassy-smile insincerity of diplomatic visits, and Carl had been only one of several variant thirteen trackers in a queue of agency staff lined up to press the visiting flesh on arrival. Munich II was in process, there was talk of COLIN coming back to the table to approve the Accords, fully this time, and everyone was walking on eggs. Back then—Carl recalled vaguely, he hadn’t been that interested—Ortiz was a newly recruited policy adviser, fresh from a political career in the Rim States and not yet a major figure in the COLIN hierarchy. Detail had faded, but Carl remembered grizzled hair and a tan, a slim-hipped dancer’s frame that belied the other man’s fifty-something years. A slight lift to the serious brown eyes that might have been Filipino ancestry or just biosculp to suggest the same to voters. A good smile.

For his own part, Carl had been busy enjoying the comforts of his newly reacquired anonymity at the time. The media focus attendant on his rescue and return from Mars and the Felipe Souza had died down, to his relief, the previous year; the celebrity machine, in the absence of any attempt on his part to restoke the fires of its interest, had grown bored with him and moved on. Sure, he’d made it back alive and sane from a nightmarish systems breakdown in deep space, but what else had he done recently? UNGLA was sealed up tight, bureaucratically impassive, not the kind of brightly confected media play the networks liked at all. The high-profile cases were still to come. Meanwhile, some adolescent son of African royalty was up and about on the Euro scene, deploying his Xtrasome capacity at a Cambridge college and his polished-jet good looks in the dj-votional clubs of west London. The Bannister family were settling, amid some local acrimony, into their Union citizenship. A Thai experia star was getting married. And so on. The unblinking media eye rolled away, and Carl felt its absence like the sudden cool of shade from the Martian sun.

They went down to the street. Cold struck through the thin fabric of the S(t)igma jacket he’d blagged in Florida.

Ortiz was waiting for them on the other side of the thoroughfare, leaning against the flank of the COLIN limo in a plain black topcoat and sipping coffee from a stall up the street. Carl could see the yellow-and-black logo repeat, weak holoplay in the bright winter air of the market and again in stenciled micro on the Styrofoam in Ortiz’s hand. Steam coiled up out of the cup and met the frost of the man’s breath as he raised the coffee to his lips. An unobtrusive security exec stood nearby, hands lightly clasped, scanning the façade from behind lens-sheathed eyes.

Ortiz spotted them and stacked his coffee casually on the roof of the limo at his side. As Carl approached, he stepped forward to meet him and stuck out his hand. No wince, no sign of the internal steeling Carl was used to when he made the clasp with someone who knew what he was. Instead, there was a loose grin on Ortiz’s lean bronzed face that shaved years off his otherwise sober demeanor.

“Mr. Marsalis. Good to see you again. It’s been awhile, I don’t know if you’ll remember me from Brussels.”

“Spring ’03.” Carl masked his surprise. “Yeah, I remember.”

Ortiz made a wry face. “What a complete mess that was, eh? Two agendas, worlds apart and steaming steadily in opposite directions. Hard to believe we even bothered talking.”

Carl shrugged. “Talking’s always the easy part. Looks good, doesn’t cost anything.”

“Yes, very true.” Ortiz shifted focus with the polished smoothness of the career politician. “Ms. Ertekin. I hope you’ll forgive the intrusion. Tom Norton told me you’d be coming in, but I felt in view of the. Unpleasantness, it might be as well to provide an escort. And since I was on my way across town anyway…”

You thought you’d swing the opportunity to curry some potential UN favor. Right. Or maybe just gawk at the thirteen.

But underneath the sneer, Carl found himself unable to summon much dislike for Ortiz. Maybe it was the relaxed handshake and the grin, maybe just the contrast with the past four months down in the Republic. He turned to catch Ertekin’s response, see what he could read in her face. The tiger eyes and—

—something invisible splits the air between them.

Carl was moving before he had time to consciously understand why.

—flicker of black motion in the corner of his eye—

He hit Ertekin with crossed arms, bore her to the pavement and crushed her there. One hand groping for a weapon he didn’t have. Over his head, the air in the street erupted in spit-hiss fury.

Magfire.

He heard the coachwork on the limo go first, riddled from end to end—it sounded like a spate of sudden, heavy rain. Someone yelled, grunted as they were hit. Bodies tumbled behind him, dimly sensed. Screams. He was smearing himself on top of Ertekin, casting about for the—

There.

Out of the market, the pitch and panic of the surrounding multitude, three crouched, black-clad forms, and the sashaying gait of skaters. They hugged the stubby electromag spray guns to their bellies, cradled low in both hands as they surfed the crowd. Shoulder work opened their path—Carl saw bystanders shunted aside and sprawling. The mesh made it seem like slow motion. Chloride clarity gave him the lead skater, stance shifting as he lifted the muzzle of the spray gun, eyes wide in the pale skin gap of the black ski mask. Half a dozen meters at most, he was going to make sure of his shot this time.

Carl locked gazes and came up off the floor snarling.

Later, he’d never know if it was the matched stare, the noise he made, or just the mesh-assisted speed that saved his life. Maybe there was the edge of a flinch in the man’s face as he hurtled forward; the ski mask made it hard to tell. By then Carl was already up and on him. Three—count them, one! two! three!—sprinted steps and a whirl of tanindo technique. The blade of his left hand slammed in under the lead skater’s chin; his right just added lift and vectored spin. The two of them went over together in a tangle of limbs. The spray gun dropped and skittered. Carl got on top of the skater and started hitting him in the face and throat.

The other two were sharp. The right wing leapt cleanly over the tumbled bodies in his path, came down tight with a solid plastic smack, and kept going. Carl got a confused glimpse of the landing, too busy killing the lead skater to pay real attention. But he felt the other wingman fuck up the same maneuver and catch one skate on Carl’s raised shoulder as he jumped. The black-clad form went headlong, almost graceful, hit and rolled on the pavement. Controlled impact, he’d be back up any second. The mesh strung moments apart like loops of cabling. Carl hacked down savagely with an elbow one more time and beneath him the lead skater went abruptly limp. As the tumbled wingman got almost back upright, Carl lunged, grabbed up the leader’s electromag, clumsily, left-handed, squirmed sideways, getting line of fire, and emptied the gun.

The magload sounded like seething water as it left the gun. No recoil—thank Christ—and pretty much point-blank. Carl lay, awkwardly braced, and watched the slugs rip into their target. The wing skater seemed to trip forward again, but jerkily this time, no grace in it. He collapsed facedown, twisted once, and didn’t move again.

The electromag’s feed mechanism coughed empty and stopped.

Sound filtered through: voices raised and hysterical weeping. Still frosted into the mesh, Carl heard it as if through a long pipe. He picked himself up warily, still not convinced at a cellular level that the third skater wasn’t coming back. He dropped the empty weapon, walked to the dead wingman. Crouched beside the body and tugged the man’s spray gun free. He checked the load, almost absently, on autopilot now, and surveyed the damage around him.

The limo was a write-off, coachwork pockmarked gray on black with the raking impact of the magfire. The windows were punched through in a couple of dozen places, powdered to white opaque in spiderweb lines around each hole. Incredibly, Ortiz’s coffee stood where he’d parked it, intact and steaming quietly on the roof of the limo. But Ortiz and his security were both down, tangled in each other’s arms and motionless—it looked as if the bodyguard had tried to get his boss to the ground and cover him there. Blood pooling on the molded pavement where they lay suggested he’d failed. Other bodies lay at a distance, shoppers and stall traders caught in the magfire. Ertekin was up on her knees, staring dazedly around at the mess. Her olive skin was smeared sallow with shock.

“Got two of them,” said Carl thickly as he helped her to her feet. “Third one was too fast leaving. Sorry.”

She just stared at him.

“Ertekin.” He flickered fingers in front of her face. “Are you injured? Are you hurt? Talk to me, Ertekin.”

She shook herself. Pushed his hand away.

“Fine.” It was a bare croak. She cleared her throat. “I’m fine. We’d better get. An ambulance. Get these people…”

She shook herself again.

“Who? Did you see…?”

“No.” Carl stared away in the direction the last skater had disappeared. He could feel a decision stealing over him like ice. “No, I didn’t. But right after the meat van gets here, I think you’d better take me in to COLIN so we can start work and find out.”