The Complete SF Collection

by Morgan, Richard

  Rovayo nodded and went to her desk, where she stood, prodding through a pile of hardcopy with limited enthusiasm. Sevgi turned to Marsalis.

  ‘There’s a Mars datafile you might want to take a look at here. Seems Norton got onto Colony while we were in Istanbul, had them pull Gutierrez in. You want to screen it?’

  She thought she saw a subtle tightening go through him. But he only shrugged. ‘Think it’s worth looking at?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said acidly. ‘I haven’t seen it yet.’

  ‘The chances Colony got anything useful out of an old familia hand like Gutierrez are pretty thin.’

  ‘Not really the main point,’ said Rovayo absently from across the room, not looking up from her paperwork. ‘Cop’ll tell you it’s what the guy doesn’t say as often as not gives you the angle.’

  ‘Uh, exactly,’ said Sevgi, startled.

  Marsalis shuttled a sour look between the two women.

  ‘All right,’ he said ungraciously. ‘So let’s all watch the fucking thing, shall we?’

  But in the screening chamber, she saw how the quick-flaring irritation damped down to an intent stare that might have passed for boredom if she hadn’t seen him looking the same way after the third skater in New York, the man he’d failed to kill. She had no way of knowing where exactly Marsalis’s attention fell - the file was a standard split-screen interrogation tape, six or seven facets slotted together on the LCLS display, frontal on Gutierrez, face and body from the tabletop up, vital signs in longitudinal display below, minimised footage of the whole interview room from two or three different angles, voice profiles in drop down to the left, cop custom had her skimming detail from the whole thing in random snatches. But if she’d had to guess, she’d say the thirteen at her side was riveted on the slightly gaunt, sunblasted features of the familia datahawk as he sat unimpressed and smoking his way through the interrogation.

  ‘They let him take fucking cigarettes in there?’ asked Rovayo, outraged.

  ‘It’s not a cigarette as such,’ Sevgi told her patiently. She’d been a little shocked the first time she saw it too. ‘That’s a gill. You know, like in the settler flicks. Chemical ember, gives off oxygen instead of burning it. Like a lung supercharger.’

  Rovayo snapped her fingers. ‘O-kay. Like, Kwame Oviedo’s always got one stuck in the corner of his mouth, practically every scene in that Upland Heroes trilogy.’

  Sevgi nodded. ‘Yeah, same with Marisa Mansour. Even in Marineris Queen, which when you think about it, is pretty-’

  ‘Weren’t we supposed to be watching this?’ said Marsalis loudly.

  Sevgi cocked an expressive eyebrow at the Rim cop and they turned back towards the screen. Gutierrez was settling comfortably into his role of career criminal cool. Upland dialect Quechua drawled out of him - the language monitor tagged it in the lower right-hand corner of the screen, provided a machine-speed simultaneous subtitle in Amanglic, but for the original interrogators it would have been hard work. They’d have some street Quechua, Sevgi supposed - you’d have to, to be a decent cop out there - but you could see they were uncomfortable with it. Instead, they fell back repeatedly on Amanglic or Spanish - both of which the file said Gutierrez spoke well - and listened constantly to their sleek black earplug whisperers. The datahawk smirked through it.

  ‘Look, let’s cut the bouncing about, Nicki,’ he said, apparently. ‘There is no motherfucking way you have anything on me. You’ll have to give me my phone call sooner or later. So why not save us all a lot of fucking about and do it now?’

  The ranking officer on the other side of the table sat back in her chair and fixed the ex-datahawk with a sombre stare.

  ‘I think you’ve forgotten which planet you’re on, Franklin. You’ll get to make a phone call when I say you can.’

  Her companion got up out of his chair and began to pace a slow circle around the table. Gutierrez tipped his head back a little to watch the move, drew on his gill and puffed a long feather of fumes up into the air, then went back to looking at the woman. He shook his head.

  ‘They’ll come and dig me out of here before breakfast, Nicki. You know that.’

  The other cop hit him, dropped body weight into the swing, one cupped striking hand to the datahawk’s ear and side of the head. The gill went flying. In the slack grip of Mars gravity, so did Gutierrez and the chair. Clatter of plastic on evercrete, soft human yelp. Rovayo flinched - Sevgi caught it peripherally from two seats over. On screen, Gutierrez rolled to a halt and the cop was on him. The datahawk was shaking his head muzzily, trying to pick himself up - his assailant locked a thick-muscled arm around his throat, hauled him upright by it. The ranking officer watched impassively.

  ‘Wrong guess, fuckwit,’ hissed the strongarm cop, into the ear he hadn’t deafened. ‘See, we got a lot of leeway on this one. You really fucked up with Horkan’s Pride, and I mean big time. There’s a lot more juice coming down from COLIN right now than your buddies over in Wells know how to soak up. I’d say we’ve got you down here for a fortnight at least.’

  The datahawk choked out a reply. ‘Reyes,’ said the subtitles. ‘You’re confusing your wet dreams with reality again.’

  The cop bared his teeth in a grin. He reached down and grabbed Gutierrez by the crotch. Twisted. A suffocated screech made it up the datahawk’s throat.

  ‘Can he-’ Rovayo began numbly.

  Marsalis rolled his head slightly in her direction. Met her eye. ‘Colony police. Oh, yeah. He can.’

  The ranking officer made a tiny motion with her head. Her companion let go of Gutierrez’s testicles and dumped the datahawk forward onto the table top like a load of laundry. He lay there, face to one side, breath whistling hoarsely in and out of his teeth. The cop called Reyes pressed a flat palm down hard against their suspect’s cheek, leaned on it, and then closer, over him.

  ‘You’d better fucking learn to behave, Franklin,’ he said conversationally. ‘What they tell me, we can blow this whole year’s compensation budget on you if we have to.’ He looked at the woman. ‘What’s the rate for testicular damage these days, Nick?’

  The ranking officer shrugged. ‘Thirty-seven grand.’

  Reyes grinned again. ‘Right. Now that’s for each one, right?’

  ‘No, that’s for both.’ The woman leaned forward a little. ‘I hear the restorative surgery’s a bitch, Franklin. Not something you’d want to go through at all.’

  ‘Yeah, so how about you speak English to us for a change.’ Reyes marked the emphasis, skidding his palm hard off the datahawk’s face, as if wiping it clean. His face wrinkled up with disgust. ‘Because we all know you can, sort of. Just wrap the fucking upland chatter for a while. Do us that small favour, huh? Maybe then I leave your cojones intact.’

  He stepped back. A thin sound trickled out of Gutierrez. Sevgi, disbelieving, made it as laughter. The datahawk was chuckling.

  Reyes hooked back round to stare. ‘Something amusing you, pendejo?’

  Gutierrez got up off the table. He straightened his clothes. Nodded, as if he’d just had something entirely reasonable explained to him. His ear, Sevgi knew, must still have been singing like a fire alarm.

  ‘Only the dialogue.’ His English was lightly accented, otherwise flawless. ‘You say you got me down here indef. Okay, I’ll bite. Nicki, you want to put a leash on your dog?’

  Reyes tensed, but the woman made another barely perceptible motion with her head, and he slackened off again. Gutierrez lowered himself gingerly back into his chair, wincing. He padded his pockets for the pack of gills, found them and fitted a new one into his mouth. He twisted the end ’til it tore open, puffed it to life. Breathed the fumes out of his mouth and up his nose. Sevgi made it for buying time. The datahawk shrugged.

  ‘So what do you want to know?’

  ‘Horkan’s Pride,’ said Reyes evenly.

  ‘Yeah, you mentioned it. Big spaceship, went home last year. Crashed into the sea, they say.’ He plumed pale smoke ‘So what?’<
br />
  ‘So why’d you do it?’

  ‘Why’d I do what?’

  The two Colony cops swapped a glance of theatrical exasperation. Reyes took a couple of steps forward, hands lifting.

  ‘Hold it,’ said the woman. It rang staged, patently false after the imperceptible signals the two cops had exchanged before.

  ‘Yeah, hold it,’ agreed Gutierrez. ‘You’re going to tie me to some systems crash on another fucking planet ? I mean, back in the day I was good. But not that good.’

  ‘That’s not what we hear,’ growled Reyes.

  ‘So what do you hear, exactly?’

  ‘Why don’t you tell us, pendejo?’

  Gutierrez cocked his head on one side. ‘Why don’t I tell you what you’ve just heard? What am I, telepathic now?’

  ‘Listen, fuckwit . . .’

  Marsalis groaned, a little theatrical exasperation of his own. It was hard for Sevgi not to sympathise. Colony were fucking it up beyond belief.

  They sat it out, nonetheless. The interrogation cycled a couple more times, reasonable to third degree and back again, but spiralling downward all the way. Gutierrez drew gill fumes and strength in the soft spells, weathered Reyes’ brutality when it came round. He didn’t give a millimetre. They took him out limping, broken-mouthed and bruised around one eye, nursing a sprained wrist. He gave one of the cameras a bloodied smile as he was led away. The vital signs monitors collapsed as he left the room, the ranking officer signed off formally. Fade to black.

  Marsalis sighed. ‘Happy now?’

  ‘I will be when you tell me what you think.’

  ‘What do I think? I think short of professional torture with electrodes and psychotropics, Gutierrez isn’t going to tell Colony anything worth knowing. How long ago did this happen?’

  ‘Couple of days. Norton put in the arrest order the night we flew out to Istanbul.’

  ‘They worked on him since?’

  ‘I don’t think so. This is all we have. I don’t think they’ll go to the next level with him until they’ve got something solid from us.’

  ‘Yeah, and they’ll probably still be wasting their time. Earth or Mars, the familias have too much invested in guys like this. They get in early on with the good ones, give them the same synaptic conditioning you see in covert ops biotech. Stuff where the brain’ll turn to warm porridge sooner than give up proscribed information.’

  ‘You think he’d really be wearing something like that?’ Rovayo asked, slightly wide-eyed.

  ‘If I were running him, I’d have had it built in years ago.’ Marsalis yawned and stretched in his seat. ‘Plus, you want to remember Gutierrez is a datahawk. Those guys live for the virtual, they spend their whole lives switching off exactly the kind of physical realities torture involves. If they’re good at one thing, it’s distancing themselves from their own bodies. Back in the early days, back when the technology was fresh and the hook-ups were a lot more jack-and-pray than they are now, lot of ’hawks died from stupid shit like dehydration or burning to death because they missed a fire alarm. I remember Gutierrez telling me once hey, pain, that’s just your body letting you know what the thing you’re doing is going to cost - just got to get in there and pay the bill, soak. At that level, he’s as tough a motherfucker as you’ll ever see walk into an interrogation chamber. And with the familias behind him, he’s not much scared of physical damage either, because he knows it can be repaired.’

  ‘Scared of dying though, I guess,’ Sevgi said snappishly.

  ‘Yeah, and that’s part of your problem. See, Colony are a real bunch of thugs, but they can’t actually kill you, except maybe by accident. But the people Gutierrez works for, the familias - now that’s a whole other skyline. If they think he’s talked, or even that he might talk, then they got no problem putting him away. None at all, and he knows that. So yeah, Gutierrez is scared of dying, just like anybody else. But you’ve got to be able to deliver the threat.’

  They sat for a couple of moments, facing the dead LCLS screen. Sevgi looked across at Rovayo.

  ‘You mind giving us a couple of minutes?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ he said, as soon as they were alone.

  ‘I’m not saying-’

  ‘I know exactly what you’re saying, and you can just fucking forget it. They’re on Mars, Ertekin. You saw the footage. You think I can scare Gutierrez any worse than that from two hundred and fifty million kilometres out?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said steadily. ‘I think you can.’

  He shook his head. Voice creased with irritation. ‘Oh, based on what?’

  ‘Based on the fact you and Gutierrez have history. I’m a cop, Marsalis. Eleven years in, so give me some fucking credit, why don’t you. I saw the way you were when his name popped out of the n-djinn scan. I saw the way you watched him up on that screen just now.’ She drew a deep breath, let it go. ‘Gutierrez wired you to wake up midway home on Felipe Souza, didn’t he?’

  ‘Did he?’ Now there was nothing in his voice at all.

  ‘Yeah, he did.’ Gathering certainty, the way he sat like stone. ‘It’s too much of a coincidence, you and Merrin. The way I figure it, you did some kind of deal with Gutierrez for the lottery win, but Gutierrez didn’t like his end when it paid off. He sent you home with a little farewell kick. Fuck with your head, wake you up out there and hope you maybe go insane before recovery can get to you. That how it was?’

  He rolled his head towards her on the back of the seat, looked at her and suddenly, for the first time in days, she was afraid of him again.

  ‘Well you’re the cop,’ he said tonelessly. ‘You got it all worked out, what do you need me for?’

  She threw herself to her feet, paced towards the screen and turned to look back at him. Told herself it was not a retreat.

  ‘What I need you for is to look at Gutierrez like you just looked at me. Look him in the eye and tell him you’ll kill him if he doesn’t tell us what we need to know.’

  ‘That standard operating procedure for the NYPD these days, is it?’

  She was back in the field, upstate New York at dawn and the gagging stench of disinterred flesh. The speculative stare of the IA detectives.

  ‘Fuck you.’

  ‘See. I can’t even scare you. And you’re right here in the room with me. How am I going to scare Gutierrez on Mars?’

  ‘You know what I’m talking about.’

  He sighed. ‘Yeah, I know what you’re talking about. Talking about the mythos, right? You think that because Gutierrez was a thirteen aficionado he bought into this whole implacable gene-warrior bullshit that goes with it. But it’s Mars, Sevgi. It’s hundreds of millions of kilometres of empty fucking space and no way to cross it without a licence. Don’t you understand what that does to all those fucking human imperatives Jacobsen goes on about? What it does to love and loyalty, and trust, and revenge? Mars isn’t just another world, it’s another fucking life. What happens there, stays there. You come back, you leave it behind. It’s like a dream you wake up from. Gutierrez helped send me home. He isn’t going to believe in a million years that I’d go back there just to kill him for what he did, let alone just to shake him down for you people.’

  ‘He might believe you’d order it done. Pay for someone else to do it at the other end.’

  ‘Someone who isn’t scared of the familias?’

  She hesitated a beat. ‘There are options that-’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, I know. I don’t doubt COLIN could rustle up a hit squad for me if your pal Norton makes the right calls. But I do my own killing, and Gutierrez knows that. I can’t fake him out on that one. And Sevgi, you know what? Even if I thought I could do it, I won’t.’

  The last word grated in his mouth, like braking on gravel. Sevgi felt her expression congeal. ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because this is bullshit. We are being led around by the dick here, and it’s got nothing to do with what may or may not have happened back on Mars. We are looking in the wrong places.’

&n
bsp; ‘I am not going back to Arequipa.’

  ‘Well then, let’s start closer to home. Like maybe looking a little harder at your pal Norton.’

  Quiet dripped into the room. Sevgi folded her arms and leaned against the back of a chair.

  ‘And what the fuck is that supposed to mean?’

  He shrugged. ‘Work it out for yourself. Who else knew where I was sleeping in New York the morning the skaters jumped us? Who called you the same time we were getting hijacked on the way to Arequipa? Who dragged us all the way back here to look at a fucking four-month-drowned lead when we were just about to start getting somewhere?’

  ‘Oh.’ She gestured helplessly. ‘Fuck off Marsalis. Coyle was right, this is pure thirteen paranoia.’

  ‘Is it?’ Marsalis came to his feet with a jolt. He stalked towards her. ‘Think about it, Ertekin. Your n-djinn searches have failed. They didn’t find the link between Ward and Merrin, they didn’t find Gutierrez. Everything we’ve found since I started shaking the tree points to a cover-up, and Norton is ideally placed to pull it off. He’s fucking perfect for it.’

  ‘You shut the fuck up, Marsalis.’ Sudden rage. ‘You know nothing about Tom Norton. Nothing!’

  ‘I know men like him.’ He was in her face, body so close she seemed to feel the warmth coming off it. ‘They were all over the Osprey project from as young as I can remember. They dress well and they talk soft and they smile like they’re doing it for the society pages. And when the time comes, they’ll order the torture and slaughter of women and children without blinking because at core they do not give a shit about anything but their own agenda. And you, you people hand control over to them every fucking time, because in the end you’re just a bunch of fucking sheep looking for an owner.’

  ‘Yeah, well.’ The anger shifted, sluggish in her guts. Intuitive reflex, maybe the years with Ethan, told her how to use it, kept her voice nailed-down, detached. ‘If they ran Osprey, then I’d say you people handed over control to them pretty smartly too.’

  It was like pulling a plug.

  You can feel a good shot, an NYPD firearms instructor told her once, early on in training. Like you and the target and the gun and the slug are all part of this one mechanism. Shoot like that, you’ll know you’ve hit the guy before you even see him go down.