Thirteen

by Richard K. Morgan

  “Sure,” said Coyle. “Your kind, you’d just let that be. Let the people who abandoned you out there in space get away with it.”

  “Who said anything about getting away with it?” Marsalis grinned unpleasantly. “My kind know how to wait, cudlip. My kind would let the people who did this live with the knowledge that we’re coming, let them wake up every day knowing—”

  “What did you call me?” It had taken Coyle a moment or two to grasp the unfamiliar insult he’d just been handed.

  “You heard me.”

  “Will you two knock it off,” snapped Sevgi. “Marsalis, you’re saying this isn’t revenge. Then what is it?”

  “I don’t know what it is,” the black man said irritably. “I’m not Merrin, and contrary to what our friend here thinks, not everyone with a variant thirteen geneprint thinks exactly alike.”

  Norton stepped into the breach. “No, but you were trained similarly, and that must count for something. You say his training wouldn’t allow an impulse of revenge. What would it dictate in this situation?”

  “Maybe he just needed to shut Ward up,” Rovayo said. “Cover his retreat. If Ward talked—”

  Sevgi shook her head. “Doesn’t fit. Ward isn’t far enough up the chain of command. Self-made biosupply magnates don’t swing the weight to get things done on Mars, even in California. If Ward was a part of this, he was a small cog. They hired him to fish Merrin out of the Pacific and hand him on. End of function. He didn’t know anything that he hadn’t already been told.”

  “Right,” said Coyle slowly. “But he must have known his chain of command, or at least his nearest contact. We’re looking at this the wrong way around. Merrin didn’t go to Ward to shut him up, he went to make him talk. To get the names of the people who were giving the orders.”

  Norton looked suddenly hopeful. “You think Merrin got his hit list out of Ward?”

  “Unlikely.” Marsalis prowled the virtual apartment like someone looking for a hidden exit somewhere high up. “The way Merrin’s been hopping the border back and forth, he’s working off either partial or sequential knowledge. Whatever he got out of Ward, it wasn’t his hit list.”

  “Or maybe just not the whole list,” said Norton hopefully. “Maybe Ward had the first couple of names.”

  “There are no links from Ward to Whitlock,” Rovayo pointed out.

  “Or Montes,” said Coyle.

  Norton sighed. “Right. Or any of the Jesusland kills, as far as we can tell. Shame, it would have been nice to find ourselves getting somewhere for a change.”

  “Yeah, well, for that you’ve got to be looking in the right place.” Marsalis gestured around the apartment. “And like I said before, we’re wasting our time here.”

  Coyle’s lip curled. “Then perhaps you’d care to tell us how we could more profitably employ that time.”

  “Outside of going back to the altiplano and coming down hard on Manco Bambarén?” A shrug. Marsalis caught Sevgi’s eye, clashed gazes like swords. “Well, you could start by asking yourselves why this corpse shows up now, all of a sudden, just as we’re cracking the ice off the familias. You could wonder why it’s taken nearly six months for someone to go sniffing around the aquaculture environs of the crash site—”

  “Who the fuck is Bambarén?” Rovayo wanted to know. She shuttled a glance between Norton and Sevgi. Sevgi shook her head wearily. Don’t ask.

  Meanwhile, Coyle’s sneer had made it to a full-blown grin. “The reason it’s taken four months to find this corpse—fucked-up, gene-enhanced paranoia aside—is that the outfit that run routine maintenance on Ward BioSupply’s deep-water platforms are mobile contractors with a biannual contract. Daskeen Azul. They’re based out of a co-op factory raft called Bulgakov’s Cat, and they come by here just about every six months to do the work. They just got here.”

  “You think I’m paranoid?” asked Marsalis, with the same gentle smile he’d used on Coyle earlier.

  The big Rim cop snorted. “Are you shitting me? You people were fucking designed paranoid, Marsalis.”

  Norton cleared his throat. “I think—”

  “Nah, let’s just lay this out where we can all see it.” Coyle jabbed a finger at the thirteen. “In case you missed it, Marsalis, I don’t like your kind. I don’t like what you are, and I don’t think you should be walking around in public without a wolf-trap cuff on. But that’s not my call.”

  “No, it’s not,” said Norton. “So why don’t we—”

  “I’m not done yet.”

  Marsalis watched the Rim cop quietly. Measuring, Sevgi realized. He was measuring the other man.

  “This is a Rim States police investigation,” Coyle said. “Not some black ops slaughter ground out in the Middle East. We’re in the business of catching criminals, not murdering them—”

  “Yes. You don’t seem to have caught Merrin yet, though, do you?”

  Coyle bared his teeth. “Cute. No, we haven’t caught this one yet. But we will. And when we do—”

  “Roy.” It was the first time Sevgi could remember hearing Rovayo use her partner’s first name. “Crank it down, huh?”

  “No, Al, I’m sick of the assumptions here. This has got to be said.” Coyle looked pointedly at Sevgi and Norton on his way back to staring down the thirteen. “If your COLIN masters here decide they want Merrin summarily executed when we’ve done our job and brought him in, well then I guess we’ll come to you for your professional expertise. Meantime, why don’t you just curb your fucking twi…gene-enhanced tendencies and let us work?”

  Wall of silence. The last of the words seemed to hit it like pebbles off evercrete. It was a space, Sevgi realized with syn-sharpened surety, that outside virtual would have filled with violence the way blood rises to fill a wound. Marsalis and the Rim cop were wired eye-to-eye, like nothing else existed around them. She caught something in Rovayo’s face she couldn’t define. The other woman seemed locked up, an impossible step away from doing something. Norton wavered, helpless exasperation in the way he twitched. And she, Sevgi, watching the situation decay like—

  “Okay,” said Marsalis, very softly.

  Sevgi thought he’d finished. She opened her mouth, but the black man went on speaking.

  “A couple of things.” Still soft, like the touch of cotton-wool wadding on fingertips. “First, if you think you’ll bring Allen Merrin down in any condition other than dead, then you’re not living in the real world. None of you are. And second, Roy, if you ever speak to me like that again, in the real world, I’ll put you in intensive care.”

  The Rim cop flared up. “Hey, you want to fucking step outside with me?”

  “Very much, yes.” But Sevgi had the curious sensation that Marsalis was imperceptibly shaking his head as he said it. “But it isn’t going to happen. I want you to remember a name, Roy. Sutherland. Isaac Sutherland. He saved your life today.”

  Then he was gone.

  Scribbled out in a flicker of virtual light as he left them to the empty virtual apartment, Merrin’s viewpatch freeze-frame portrait walking away, and the hundred red glow traces of his forensic passing.

  CHAPTER 34

  O ddly enough, it was Rovayo who came looking for him. By the time she tracked him down, he’d stopped prowling angrily about the Alcatraz station and drifted instead to an irritable halt on an outside gallery at the western end of the complex. She found him leaning on the rail, staring across the silver-glinting chop of the sea toward the mouth of the bay and the rust-colored suspension span that bridged it. There was a towering bank of fog rolling in against the blue of the sky, like a pale cotton-candy wave about to break.

  “Enough water for you?” she asked.

  Carl shot her a curious glance. “I’ve been back a long time.”

  “Yeah, I know.” Rovayo joined him at the rail. “I got this cousin down in the Freeport, he did six years on Mars when he was younger. Soil engineer. Two three-year qualpro stints back-to-back. He told me you never get used to the si
ze of the water again, doesn’t matter how long ago you went.”

  “Well, that’s him. Everyone handles it differently.”

  “You ever miss it?”

  He looked at her again. “What do you want, Rovayo?”

  “Says he misses the sky,” she went on neutrally, as if Carl hadn’t spoken. “Sky at night, you know. All that landscape on that tiny horizon, says it looks like furniture crammed into a storeroom that’s too small for everything to fit. And all the stars. He says it was like you were all camping out together, like you were all part of the same army or something. You and every other human being you knew was on the planet with you, all with the same reason for being there, like you were all doing something that mattered.”

  Carl grunted.

  “You ever feel like that?” she asked.

  “No.”

  It came out more abrupt than he’d meant. He sighed and opened his hands where they rested on the rail. “I’m a thirteen, remember. We don’t suffer from this need to feel useful that you people have. We’re not wired for group harmony.”

  “Yeah, but you don’t always let your wiring tell you what to do, right?”

  “Maybe not, but I’d say it pays to listen to it from time to time. If you plan on ever being happy, that is.”

  Rovayo rolled over on the railing, put her arched spine to it, and hooked her elbows back for support. “I seem to remember reading somewhere we’re none of us wired for that one. Being happy. Just a chemical by-product of function, a trick to get you where your genes want you to go.”

  His gaze slipped sideways, drawn by the lithe twist she’d used to reverse her position on the rail. He caught her profile, lean high-breasted body and long thighs, the dark flaring facets of her face. The wind off the bay fingered through the curls in her hair, flattened it forward around her head.

  “You don’t want to worry too much about Coyle,” she said, not looking at him.

  “I’m not.”

  She smiled. “Okay. It’s just. See, we don’t get a whole lot of thirteens out here on the Rim. They crop up occasionally, we just bust ’em and ship ’em out. Dump them in Cimarron or Tanana. Jesusland’s always a good place to export the stuff you don’t want in your own backyard. Nuclear nondegradables, nanotech test runs, cutting-edge crop research. The Republic takes it all at a fraction what it’d cost us to do the processing ourselves.”

  “I know.”

  “Yeah, you worked a couple of Cimarron breaks, right?”

  “Six.” He considered. “Seven if you count Eric Sundersen last year. He escaped en route, never actually got to Cimarron itself.”

  “Oh yeah, I remember that one. The guy who shorted out the autocopter, right?”

  “Right.”

  “You the one who brought him in?”

  “No,” he said shortly. Eric Sundersen had died in a hail of assault rifle fire on the streets of Minneapolis. Standard police ordnance and tactics; apparently he’d been mistaken for a local drug dealer. Carl was chasing false leads down in Juarez at the time. He went home with day-rate expenses and minor lacerations from a razor fight triggered by one too many questions in the wrong bar. “I missed out on that one.”

  “Yeah?” Rovayo hitched herself up on the rail. “Well, anyway, like I said. Having guys like you around isn’t something any of us are used to. Coyle’s got a pretty standard Rim mentality about what a good thing that is. And with the mess Merrin made on that ship…well, Coyle’s a cop, he just doesn’t want to see any more blood in the streets.”

  “You trying to apologize for him? That what this is about?”

  She grimaced. “I’m just trying to make sure you two don’t kill each other before we get the job done.”

  He cocked an eyebrow at her. “I can guarantee you Coyle won’t kill me.”

  “Yeah.” She nodded and her mouth tightened. “Well, just so you know, he’s my partner. It’s not a fight I’ll stay out of if it cuts loose.”

  He let it sit for a while, waiting to see if she was finished, if she’d leave him alone with the threat. When she didn’t, he sighed again.

  “Okay, Rovayo, you win. Go back and tell your good, honest, compassionate cop partner that if he can keep the word twist hedged a little tighter behind his teeth next time, I’ll cut him some slack.”

  “I know. I’m sorry about that.”

  “Don’t be. You’re not the one who said it.”

  She hesitated. “I don’t like that word any more than you do. It’s just, like I said, we don’t get—”

  “Yeah, I know. You don’t get many like me in the Rim, so Coyle gets to throw the words around without repercussions. Don’t worry, it’s not much different anywhere else I’ve been.”

  “Apart from Mars?”

  He hunched around to look at her properly.

  “Mars, huh? This cousin of yours really planted some seeds, didn’t he? What’s the deal, you thinking about going yourself?”

  She didn’t meet his gaze. “Nothing like that. Just Enrique, my cousin, he talked a lot about how no one had a problem with the thirteens there. Like they had this kind of minor celebrity status.”

  Carls snorted. “Pretty fucking minor, I’d say. Sounds to me like your cousin Enrique’s having a bad attack of qualpro nostalgia. That’s pretty common once you get safely back, but you notice most of these guys don’t sign up for another tour. I mean, he didn’t, right?”

  She shook her head. “I think part of him wanted to, part of him would have stayed out there longer, maybe not come back at all. But he got scared. He didn’t exactly tell me that, but you could pick it up from what he said, you know.”

  “Well, it’s an easy place to get scared,” Carl admitted grudgingly.

  “Even for a thirteen?”

  He shrugged. “We’re not that good at fear, it’s true. But this is something deeper, it’s not an actual fear of anything. It’s something that comes up from inside. No warning, no trigger you can work out. Just a feeling.”

  “Feeling of what?”

  Carl grimaced, remembering. “A feeling that you don’t belong. That you shouldn’t be there. Like being in someone else’s home without them knowing, and you know they might be coming home any minute.”

  “Big bad Martian monsters, huh?”

  “I didn’t say it made any sense.” He stared out at the bridge. The southern tower was almost lost in the encroaching fog bank now, wrapped and shrouded to the top. Tendrils crept through under the main span. “They say it’s the gravity and the perceived horizon that does it. Triggers a survival anxiety. Maybe they’re right.”

  “You think you handled it better?” She made an embarrassed gesture. “Because. You know, because of what you are?”

  He frowned. “What do you want to hear from me, Rovayo? What’s this really about?”

  “Hey, just making conversation. You want to be alone, say the word. I can take a hint if you hit me upside the head with it.”

  Carl felt a faint smile touch the corners of his mouth.

  “You work at it, you can reach a balance,” he said. “The fear tips over into exhilaration. The weakness turns into strength, fuels you up to face whatever it is your survival anxiety thinks it’s warning you about. Starts to feel good instead of bad.” He looked down at the backs of his hands where they rested on the rail. “Kind of addictive after a while.”

  “You think that’s why they’re happy to have you on Mars?”

  “Rovayo, they’re happy to have anyone on Mars. The qualpro guys mostly go home as soon as their stint’s up—to be fair to your cousin, he’s a tough motherfucker if he stayed even for a second tour—and you’ve got a high rate of mental health problems in the permanent settlers, that’s the grunts and the ex-grunts who’ve upskilled, doesn’t seem to make much difference either way. End result—there’s never enough labor to go around, never enough skilled personnel or reliable raw human material to learn the skills. So yeah, they can put up with the fact you’re a born-and-bred twist soc
iopath if they think you’ll be able to punch above your weight.” A thin smile. “Which we mostly can.”

  The Rim cop nodded, as if convincing herself of something.

  “They say the Chinese are breeding a new variant for Mars. Against the Charter. You believe that?”

  “I’d believe pretty much anything of those shitheads in Beijing. You don’t keep a grip on the world’s largest economy the way they have without stamping on a few human rights.”

  “You see any evidence? When you were there, I mean?”

  Carl shook his head. “You don’t see much of the Chinese at all on Mars. They’re mostly based down in Hellas or around the Utopia spread. Long way from Bradbury or Wells, unless you’ve got some specific reason to go there.”

  They both watched the silvered chop of the water for a while.

  “I did think about going,” Rovayo said finally. “I was younger when Enrique came back with all his stories, still in my teens. I was going to get some studies, sign up for a three stint.”

  “So what happened?”

  She laughed. “Life happened, man. Just one of those dreams the logistics stacked up against, you know.”

  “You probably didn’t miss much.”

  “Hey, you went.”

  “Yeah. I went because the alternative was internment.” A brief memory of Nevant’s jeering slipped across his mind. “And I came back as soon as I got the chance. You don’t want to believe all your cousin’s war stories. That stuff always looks better in the rearview mirror. A lot of the time, Mars is just this cold, hardscrabble place you won’t ever belong to no matter how hard you scrabble at trying.”

  Rovayo shrugged.

  “Yeah, well.” A hard little smile came and went across her mouth, but her voice was quiet and cop-wisdom calm. “You think it’s any different here on Earth, Marsalis? You think down here they’re ever going to let you belong?”