The Complete SF Collection

by Morgan, Richard

  A list of books that proved inspirational during the writing of Market Forces is appended at the end of the novel, should the reader be interested. They are too many to list or talk about here, but they are too important not to mention at all. On a lighter note, Market Forces also owes a rather obvious debt of inspiration to the ground-breaking movies Mad Max and Rollerball, both of which made a massive impact on me at an age when legally I shouldn’t have been watching either.

  BOOKS CONSULTED

  Note: the views expressed in Market Forces are in no way intended to represent the views of any of the authors listed above.

  Black Man

  RICHARD MORGAN

  Orion

  www.orionbooks.co.uk

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  PART I - Down in Flames

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  PART II - OFF THE HOOK

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  PART III - AWAY FROM IT ALL

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  PART IV - OUT TO SEA

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  PART V - HOME TO ROOST

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  CODA PISTACO

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  Acknowledgements

  This book is dedicated to the memory of my mother

  MARGARET ANN MORGAN

  Who taught me to hate bigotry, cruelty and injustice

  with an unrelenting rage, and to despise the hypocrisy

  that looks away or makes comfortable excuses when those

  same vices crop up closer to home than we’d like.

  I miss you

  ‘It seems feasible that over the coming century human nature will be scientifically remodelled. If so, it will be done haphazardly, as an upshot of struggles in the murky realm where big business, organised crime and the hidden parts of government vie for control.’

  John Gray Straw Dogs

  ‘Human, to the discontinuous mind, is an absolutist concept. There can be no half measures. And from this flows much evil.’

  Richard Dawkins A Devil’s Chaplain

  PROLOGUE: HOMEWARD BOUND

  Gleaming steel, gleaming steel . . .

  Larsen blinks and shifts slightly on the retrieval cot as it tracks under a linear succession of lighting panels and lateral roof struts. Recognition smears in with vision, blurry and slow; she’s in the dorsal corridor. Overhead, light angles off each metal beam, sliding from glint to full blown burst and back as she passes below. She supposes it’s the repeated glare that’s woken her. That, or her knee, which is aching ferociously, even through the accustomed groggy swim of the decanting drugs. One hand rests on her chest, pressing into the thin fabric of the cryocap leotard. Cool air on her skin tells her she’s otherwise naked. An eerie sense of déjà vu steals over her with the knowledge. She coughs a little, tiny remnants of tank gel in the bottom of her pumped-out lungs. She shifts again, mumbles something to herself.

  ... not again . . . ?

  ‘Again, yes. The cormorant’s legacy, yes, again.’

  That’s odd. She’s not expecting another voice, least of all one talking in riddles. Decanting’s usually a wholly mechanised process, the datahead’s programmed to wake them before arrival, and unless something’s gone wrong . . .

  So you’re the big expert on cryocapping now, are you?

  She isn’t - her entire previous experience comes down to three test decantings and the one real deal at journey’s end on the voyage out, whence, she supposes, the déjà vu. But still . . .

  ... more than three ...

  ... it is not more, it is not . . .

  The vehemence in the retort has a ragged edge on it that she doesn’t like. If she’d heard it in another person’s voice, a test subject’s voice, say, she’d be thinking sedatives, maybe even a call to security. In her own thoughts, it’s suddenly, intimately chilling, like the realisation that there’s someone in the house with you, someone that you didn’t invite in. Like the thought out of nowhere that you might not be wholly sane.

  This is the drugs, Ellie. Let go, ride it out.

  Gleaming stee-

  The retrieval cot bumps slightly as it takes a right turn. For some reason, it sets off a violent jolt in her pulse, a reaction that, drugged, she labels almost idly as panic. A tremor of impending doom trickles through her like cold water. They’re going to crash, they’re going to hit something, or something’s going to hit them, something massive and ancient beyond human comprehension tumbling endlessly end over end through the empty night outside the ship. Space travel isn’t safe, she was insane to ever think it was, to sign up for the contract and think she could get away with it, there and home again in one piece as if it were no more than a suborbital across the Pacific, you just couldn’t-

  Let go, Ellie. It’s the drugs.

  Then she realises where she is. The autosurgeon’s folded arachnoid arms wheel past in one quadrant of her vision as the cot slots into position on the examination rack. A qualified relief seeps into her. Something’s wrong, but she’s in the right place. Horkan’s Pride is equipped with the finest automated medical systems COLIN knows how to build, she’s read it in a Colony News digest, the whole shipboard AI suite was overhauled a couple of weeks before she left. And, look, there’s a limit to what can go wrong with a cryocapped body, right, Ellie? Organic functions slow to a chilled crawl and so does anything hostile that you might be carrying.

  But the panic, the sense of inescapable nemesis, won’t let her go. She feels it dull and insistent, like a dog worrying at an anaesthetised limb.

  She rolls her head sideways on the cot, and sees him.

  More familiarity, sharper now, jolting through her like current.

  Once, on a trip to Europe, she went to the Museo della Sindone in Turin and saw the tortured image printed on cloth that they keep there. She stood in dimness on the other side of the bullet-proof glass, surrounded by the reverent murmurs of the faithful. Never a believer of any sort herself, Larsen was still oddly moved by the harsh and hollow lines of the face staring back at her out of the sealed vacuum chamber. It seemed a testament to human suffering that completely short-circuited its divine pretensions, that rendered the devotions paid it beside the point. You looked at that face and you were struck by the sheer stubborn survivability of organic life, the heritage of built-in, bitten-down defiance that the long march of evolution had gift
ed you with.

  It could be the same man. Here, now.

  He’s propped against a tall corner cabinet, staring at her, ropesinewed arms folded across a cage-gaunt chest whose ribs she can see even through the T-shirt he wears, long straight hair hanging either side of narrow features drawn even thinner with pain and want. His mouth is a clamped line, etched in between the sharp chin and blade-boned nose. Hollows cling under the bones in his cheeks.

  Her heart surges sluggishly in her chest as she meets his eyes.

  ‘Is it-’ And, with the words, an awful understanding is welling up inside her now, a monstrous recognition that her conscious mind is still sprinting hard ahead to evade. ‘Is it my knee? My leg?’

  Out of somewhere, abruptly, she finds strength, she props herself up on her elbows, she forces herself to look.

  Sight collides with recollection.

  The scream shrills up out of her, rips momentarily through the cobwebby drapery of the drugs in her system. She can’t know how weak it sounds in the cold dimensions of the surgery; inside her it seems to splinter in her ears, and the knowledge that comes with it is a blackening of vision that threatens to suck her away. She is not, she knows, screaming at what she can see.

  Not at the neatly bandaged stump where her right thigh ends, twenty centimetres below her hip; not that.

  Not at the stabbed home comprehension that the ache in her knee is a phantom pain in a limb she no longer owns; not that.

  She’s screaming at memory.

  The memory of the cot ride along the quiet corridor, the soft bump and turn into the surgery, and then, veiled in the drug haze, the rising whine of the saw blade, the grating slip in tone as it bites, and the small, suckling sizzle of the cauterising laser that comes after. The memory of the last time, and the sickening, down-plunging understanding that it’s all about to happen again.

  ‘No,’ she husks. ‘Please.’

  A long-fingered hand presses warmly down on her forehead. The Turin shroud countenance looms above her.

  ‘Shshshsh ... the cormorant knows why . . .’

  Past the face she sees movement. Knows it from memory for what it is. The stealthy, unflexing spider-leg motions of the autosurgeon as it awakes.

  Gleaming steel . . .

  PART I

  Down in Flames

  ‘Above all, the hard lessons of this century have taught us that there must be consistent oversight and effective constraint, and that the policing systems thus required must operate with unimpeachable levels of integrity and support.’

  Jacobsen Report August 2091

  CHAPTER ONE

  He finally found Gray in a MarsPrep camp just over the Bolivian border and into Peru, hiding behind some cheap facial surgery and the name Rodriguez. It wasn’t a bad cover in itself, and it probably would have stood standard scrutiny. Security checks in the prep camps were notoriously lax; the truth was that they didn’t much care who you’d been before you signed up. But there were still a few obvious signs you could look for if you knew how, and Carl, with a methodical intensity that was starting to resemble desperation, had been looking for weeks. He knew that Gray was up on the altiplano somewhere, because the trail led there from Bogota, and because where else, ultimately, was a variant thirteen going to run. He knew this, and he knew it was just a matter of time before the traces showed up and someone called it in. But he also knew, with induction programmes everywhere skimping and speeding up to meet increasing demand, that time was on the other man’s side. Something had to give, and soon, or Gray was going to be gone and Carl wasn’t going to get his bounty.

  So when the break came, the tiny morsel of data finally fed back from the web of contacts he’d been plying all those weeks, it was hard not to jump. Hard not to dump his painstakingly constructed cover, fire up his Agency credit and badge and hire the fastest set of all-terrain wheels available in Copacabana. Hard not to tear across the border at Agency speed, raising road dust and rumours all the way to the camp, where Gray, of course, if he had any kind of local support, would be long gone.

  Carl didn’t jump.

  Instead, he called in a couple of local favours and managed to blag a ride across the border with a military liaison unit - some superannuated patrol carrier with a colony corporation’s logo sun-bleached to fading on the armoured sides. The troops were Peruvian regulars, drafted in from dirt-poor families in the coastal provinces and then seconded to corporate security duties. They’d be pulling down little more than standard conscript pay for that, but the interior of the carrier was relatively plush by military standards and it seemed to have air-con. And anyway, they were tough and young, a sort of young you didn’t see so much in the western world any more, innocently pleased with their hard-drilled physical competence and cheap khaki prestige. They all had wide grins for him, and bad teeth, and none was older than twenty. Carl figured the good cheer for ignorance. It was a safe bet these kids didn’t know the charge-out rate their high command was extracting from its corporate clients for their services.

  Sealed inside the jolting, sweat-smelling belly of the vehicle, brooding on his chances against Gray, Carl would really have preferred to stay silent altogether. He didn’t like to talk, never had. Felt in fact that it was a much overrated pastime. But there was a limit to how taciturn you could be when you were getting a free ride. So he mustered some lightweight chat about next week’s Argentina-Brazil play-off and threw as little of it into the conversational mix as he thought he could get away with. Some comments about Patricia Mocatta, and the advisability of female captains for teams that were still predominantly male. Player name checks. Tactical comparisons. It all seemed to go down fine.

  ‘Eres Marciano?’ one of them asked him, finally, inevitably.

  He shook his head. In fact, he had been a Martian once, but it was a long, complicated story he didn’t feel like telling.

  ‘Soy contable,’ he told them, because that was sometimes what he felt like. ‘Contable de biotecnologia.’

  They all grinned. He wasn’t sure if it was because they didn’t think he looked like a biotech accountant, or because they just didn’t believe him. Either way they didn’t push the point. They were used to men with stories that didn’t match their faces.

  ‘Habla bien el espanol,’ someone complimented him.

  His Spanish was good, though for the last two weeks it was Quechua he’d been speaking mostly, Mars-accented but still tight up against the Peruvian original that had spawned it. It was what the bulk of the altiplano dwellers used, and they in turn made up most of the grunt labour force in the prep camps, just as they still did on Mars. Notwithstanding which fact, the language of enforcement up here was still Spanish. Aside from a smattering of web-gleaned Amanglic, these guys from the coast spoke nothing else. Not an ideal state of affairs from the corporate point of view, but the Lima government had been adamant when the COLIN contracts were signed. Handing over control to the gringo corporations was one thing, had oligarchy-endorsed historical precedent on its side in fact. But allowing the altiplano dwellers to shake themselves culturally loose from the grip of coastal rule, well, that would be simply unacceptable. There was just too much bad history in the balance. The original Incas six hundred years ago and their stubborn thirty-year refusal to behave as a conquered people should, the bloody reprise by Tupac Amaru in 1780, the sendero luminoso Maoists a bare century back, and more recently still the upheavals of the familias andinas. The lessons had been learnt, the word went out. Never again. Spanish-speaking uniforms and bureaucrats drove home the point.

  The patrol carrier pulled up with a jerk and the rear door hinged weightily outward. Harsh, high-altitude sunlight spilled in, and with it came the sound and smell of the camp. Now he heard Quechua, the familiar unSpanish cadences of it, shouted back and forth above the noise of machinery in motion. An imported robot voice trampled it down, blared vehicle reversing, vehicle reversing in Amanglic. There was music from somewhere, huayno vocals remixed to a bloodbeat dance rh
ythm. Pervasive under the scent of engine oil and plastics, the dark meat odour of someone grilling antecuchos over a charcoal fire. Carl thought he could make out the sound of rotors lifting somewhere in the distance.

  The soldiers boiled out, dragging packs and weapons after. Carl let them go, stepped down last and looked around, using their boisterous crowding as cover. The carrier had stopped on an evercrete apron opposite a couple of dusty, parked coaches with destination boards for Cuzco and Arequipa. There was a girdered shell of a terminal building, and behind it Garrod Horkan 9 camp stretched away up the hill, all single storey prefab shacks and sterile rectilinear street plan. Corporate flags fluttered whitely on poles every few blocks, an entwined G and H ringed by stars. Through the unglassed windows of the terminal, Carl spotted figures wearing coveralls with the same logo emblazoned front and back.

  Fucking company towns.

  He dumped his pack in a locker block inside the terminal, asked directions of a coveralled cleaner, and stepped back out into the sun on the upward sloping street. Down the hill, Lake Titicaca glimmered painfully bright and blue. He slipped on the Cebe smart lenses, settled his battered leather Peruvian Stetson on his head and started up the slope, tracking the music. The masking was more local cover than necessity - his skin was dark and leathered enough not to worry about the sun, but the lenses and hat would also partially obscure his features. Black faces weren’t that common in the altiplano camps, and unlikely though it was, Gray might have someone watching the terminal. The less Carl stood out, the better.