“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 o
f 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
I t was like a landscape out of Dalí.
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 a
pparently 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.
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