Ward lay on his back beyond.
More blood again, the big man thrashing and slithering in it, clutching, Scott saw with numb horror, at a raw red hole where his belly had been. Shredded tissue hung in ropes out of him, was clotted on the floor and smeared on his fingers like some red-stained cake mix he’d stuck his hands into. Ward’s mouth was a gaping pink tunnel—you could see right down to the molars and a trembling whitish yellow tongue—and the screams came up out of it in sickening waves. His eyes clawed onto Scott as he stood in the doorway, nailed him there. Wide and pleading, crazy with pain, Scott couldn’t know whether his boss knew him or not. He made to throw himself forward into the fray, threw up instead, with punishing, gut-wrenching force. Vomit splattered in Nocera’s pooling blood.
Carmen yelled, desperate.
Cough of the sharkpunch.
Another impact, this time in his neck below the ear. He grabbed for something, anything. The floor came up. Blood and vomit, warm and wet in his face as he hit. He tried to get his mouth closed or twisted clear, failed in the attempt. The hot acid stink and taste—his stomach flipped again, weakly. His legs flexed like a crippled insect’s. Vision dimming out on a pool of red and flecks of yellow-white. He groped after a prayer, fumbled it, couldn’t get his mouth to work, made a handful of scrabbling words in his head—
Our Father…deliver me not…
And black.
CHAPTER 7
By evening, the news was all bad.
Genetic trace turned up a human occupant aboard Horkan’s Pride unaccounted for by any of the scattered corpses. It wasn’t hard to separate out the trace: it came with the full suite of modifications grouped loosely under the popular umbrella term variant thirteen. Or as Coyle had put it, a fucking twist.
They had a manhunt on their hands.
Recovered audiovid remained stubbornly the least filled section of the investigation model. There were scant fragments of satellite footage, from platforms busy about other business and nowhere near overhead. A weather monitor geo-synched to Hawaii had taken some angled peripheral interest when Horkan’s Pride dumped itself into the Pacific, and the Rim’s military systems had registered the incursion while the ship was still in the upper atmosphere, but abandoned close interest as the COLIN dataheads passed on what they knew. Horkan’s Pride had jettisoned its reactor as part of the emergency reentry protocols, carried no weapons, and was plotted to land harmlessly in the ocean. One of the milsats watched the ship complete the promised trajectory and then promptly went back to watching troop movements in Nevada.
None of the recovered footage showed any sign of an attempted pickup prior to the arrival of the coastal crews. Nor were there any helpful images of a lonely figure casting itself into the ocean. None of it was conclusive, even enhanced as far as state-of-the-art optics allowed, but neither did any of it provide anything approaching a useful lead.
They had a manhunt on their hands, and nowhere to start.
In the hotel, Sevgi sat and ate with Norton, food she didn’t want and conversation she wasn’t up to. The restaurant’s romantic low-lighting scheme felt like darkness crowding her eyes at the edges. The syn had crashed, definitively.
“How do you feel about this?” Norton asked her as she picked disinterestedly at an octopus salad.
“How do you think?”
It was deflection, something—yeah, the only fucking thing—she’d learned from the department-paid counseling sessions after Ethan and the rest of the shit came down. The specialist had sat across the room from her, smiling gently and pushing back every question she’d asked him with the same infuriating elicitation techniques. After a while, she started to do the same thing to him. Not helpful, she supposed, but it had brought the sessions to a rapid close, which was what she wanted. I can’t help you if you won’t help me, he’d said at the end, an edge of anger finally awake in his soporific, patient voice. He was missing the point. She didn’t want to be helped. She wanted to do damage, gashed red, bleeding, and screaming damage to all and any of the bland facets of social restraint that meshed her about like spiderweb.
“Nicholson’s probably going to kick,” Norton said quietly. “He’ll say you’re conflicted.”
“Yeah.”
“Not enjoying your octopus, then?”
“I’m not hungry.”
Norton sighed. “You know we can let this one go if you want, Sev. Tsai’s guys don’t want us here anyway, and RimSec would just love the chance to flex its secessional muscle. If this guy didn’t drown in the Pacific, he’s on their land now. Added to which, the fact he’s a thirteen pretty much makes it an UNGLA matter. Why don’t we just step back and let the UN and the Rim fight it out for jurisdiction.”
“No fucking way.” Sevgi tossed her chopsticks onto the plate. She sat back. “I didn’t join COLIN for an easy ride, Tom. I needed the money is all. And this is as good a way to earn it as busting black-market Marstech or chasing cultists away from the racks. Did you fucking see what he did to those bodies? Helena Larsen had a fucking life waiting for her when she got home. This is the first worthwhile thing I’ve done in over two years. This is ours.”
Norton looked at her in silence for a moment. Nodded. “All right. I’ll have Tsai upload the CSI files to COLIN New York. That should take the ambiguity out of the situation. What do you want to do about Coyle and Rovayo?”
“Retain them. Joint task force, indispensable local law enforcement support.” She found energy for a grin. “Should play well with the Rim media. COLIN fucks up and spills one of their transports into the Pacific, West Coast cops ride to the rescue. It’ll open some doors for us.”
“And save us some legwork.”
“Well, there’s that. You know the Bay Area pretty well, right? Got a sister here?”
Norton sipped at his wine. “Sister-in-law. Brother moved over here about fifteen years ago, he’s a special asylums coordinator with the Human Cost Foundation. You know, screening, social integration program. But it’s probably her you heard me talking about. Megan. We, uh, we get on pretty well.”
“You going to see them while we’re here?”
“Maybe.” Norton frowned into his drink. “How much of this are we going to let the media have?”
Sevgi yawned. “Don’t know. See how it goes. If you’re talking about the variant thirteen thing, I vote we keep a lid on it.”
“If I’m talking about the variant thirteen thing? Gee, I don’t know, do you think I could be? This is me, Sev. Do you think you could drop the say-what casual act for a while?”
She stared off into the gloom of the restaurant. Her eye caught on an underlit motion ad from the fifties—some nanotech dream of change, a ripple of green and blue marches across Martian red to the horizon, a bright new sun rises in synchrony.
“It’ll be enough to make him out a stowaway and a criminal,” she said carefully. “Say that he murdered members of the crew, keep the details back to screen out all the crank calls we’re going to pull down. Bad enough that he’s back from Mars. Telling them he’s a thirteen as well is just asking for trouble. You saw the way Coyle reacted. Remember Sundersen last year? We don’t need another Abomination Among Us panic on our hands.”
“You think they’d go that way again? After the spanking they all got from the Press Ethics Commission?”
Sevgi shrugged. “The media likes panic. It boosts viewing.”
“Are we going to give race type?”
“If and when Organic Trace get it for us. Why?”
“I’m wondering,” Norton said softly, “if he’s Chinese.”
Sevgi thought about it for a moment. “Yeah. There’s that. Don’t want a replay of Zhang fever. That shit was fucking awful. Least with Sundersen, no one died.”
“Apart from Sundersen.”
“You know what I mean. You ever see that lynching footage? They made us watch it in school.” Sevgi brushed fingertips to her temples. “I can still see it in here like it was fucking yesterday.”
“Bad times.”
“Yeah.” She pushed her plate away and bridged her arms in the space it left. “Listen, Tom, maybe we should run silent on this whole thing. For the time being, anyway. Just tell the media everybody died in the crash, including this guy. It’s not like there’s a plausibility problem with that, after all. Shit, we still haven’t worked out how he survived.”
“On the other hand, if we get a photo ID off the trace—”
“Big if.”
“—then broadcasting it’d be our best chance of nailing this guy.”
“He can change his face, Tom. Any backstreet salon in the Bay Area’ll do it for a couple of hundred bucks. By the time we get a face out to the media, he’ll have peeled it and gone underground. Gene trace is the only thing that’s going to work here.”
“If the gene code is Chinese, and that gets out, then you’re up against the same problem.”
“But it’ll be a specific code we’re looking for.”
“It was a specific face they were looking for with Zhang. I don’t recall it making much difference. Hell, Sevgi,” Out of nowhere, Norton burlesqued Nicholson for her. “You know those damn people all look alike anyway.”
Sevgi smeared a smile. “I don’t think it’s like that out here. This isn’t Jesusland.”
“You got idiocy everywhere, Sev. The Republic isn’t running the only franchise. Look at Nicholson—New York born and bred. Where does he get it from?”
“I don’t know. Faith Satellite Channel?”
“Hall-e-lu-jah! Praise the Lord, Jesus gonna come and cut my taxes.”
They both smirked a little more, but the laughter wouldn’t come. The bodies from the virtual still hung around them in the gloom. Presently, a busboy came and asked if they were done. Sevgi nodded; Norton asked to see the desserts. The busboy gathered the plates and headed off. It dawned slowly on Sevgi that he was peculiarly gaunt for his age, and that his speech had been oddly patterned, as if it hurt him to talk. His features looked northern Chinese, but his skin was very dark. The realization hit her liquidly in the stomach. She stared after the retreating figure.
“Think that’s one of your brother’s success stories then?” she asked.
“Hmm.” Norton followed her gaze. “Oh. Doubt it. Statistically, I mean. Jeff told me they get a couple of thousand new black lab escapees a year, minimum. And he’s mostly in management anyway, trying to keep the whole thing together. They got nearly a hundred counselors working, on and off, and they’re still swamped.”
“Human Cost’s a charity, right?”
“Yeah. The Rim gives them a budget, but it’s not what you’d call generous.” A sudden animation flooded her partner’s voice. “And then, you know, it’s tough work. Kind of thing that wears you down. Some of the stories he’s told me about what comes out of those black labs, I don’t think I could do it. I don’t really understand how Jeff can. It’s weird. When we were younger, it always looked like I was going to be the one with the justice vocation. He was the power-and-influence man, not me. And then”—Norton gestured with his wineglass—“somehow he’s out here doing charity work and I end up with the big job at COLIN.”
“People change.”
“Yeah.”
“Maybe it’s Megan.”
He looked up sharply. “What is?”
“Maybe that was what changed him. When he met Megan.”
Norton grunted. A waiter came by with the dessert cart, but nothing appealed. They settled for gene-enhanced coffees, for which the place was apparently famous, and the bill. Sevgi found herself staring at the antique Mars motion ad again.
“You know,” she said slowly, because they’d both been skating around it all evening, “the real issue isn’t who this guy is. The real issue is who helped him get home.”
“Ah. That.”
“Trick out the fucking ship’s djinn? If he was capped and the capsule thawed him, that should have triggered some kind of alarm all by itself. Before he even woke up, let alone had time to start hacking the systems. And if he wasn’t capped, if he did stow away, then the n-djinn wouldn’t have allowed the launch in the first place.”
“You think Coyle and Rovayo spotted that? I tried to steer past it.”
“Yeah. That’s happened before on the Mars run, we just don’t like to publicize the fact. Sometimes they just die. Nice shot.”
Norton grinned. “True as far as it goes, Sev.”
“Yeah. Maybe a dozen times in sixty-odd years of traffic. And for my money, you’re talking hardware-based failures every time.”
“You don’t think they’ll bite?”
“What, the secret flaws of the n-djinn AI?” Sevgi pulled a face. “I don’t know, it’s got appeal. Machine no match for a human and all that shit. And everyone likes to be let in on a secret. Sell people a conspiracy, their whole fucking brain will freeze up if you’re lucky. Baby-eating secret sects, a centuries-old plot to enslave mankind. Black helicopters, flying eggs. Shit like that plays to packed houses. Critical faculties out the lock.”
“And meantime—”
“Meantime”—Sevgi leaned across the table, all humor erased from her face—“we both know that someone else on Mars with some serious machine intrusion skills had a hand in this. Our mystery cannibal was capped along with the others, which means heavy-duty identity fraud, and then he was wired to wake up early, which—”
Norton shook his head. “Thing I don’t get. Why wake him up so early he’s got to eat everybody else to survive? Why not just trigger the cap a couple of weeks out from Earth.”
Sevgi rolled another shrug. “My guess? It was a glitch. Whoever took down the n-djinn wasn’t so hot with cryocap specifics. Guy wakes up two weeks out from the wrong planet, journey’s start, not journey’s end. Maybe that shorts out the cryocap so he can’t get back in and refreeze, maybe it doesn’t but he stays out anyway because he can’t afford to arrive still capped and go through quarantine. But however you look at it, glitch or no glitch, he had some heavy-duty help. We’re not talking about a jailbreak here, Tom. This guy was sent. And that means whoever sent him had a specific purpose in mind.”
Norton grimaced. “Well, there’s a limited number of reasons you’d hire a variant thirteen.”
“Yeah.”
They were both quiet for a while. Finally, Sevgi looked up at her partner and offered a thin smile.
“We’d better find this guy fast, Tom.”
CHAPTER 8
He caught the last ferry across the bay to Tiburon, hooked an autocab at the other end, and rode out to Mill Valley with the windows cranked down. Warm, green-scented air poured in, brought him a sharp memory of walking under redwood canopies with Megan in Muir Woods. He put it away again with great care, handling the image at the edges like an antique photo he might smudge or a fragment of broken mirror. He watched the soft glow from passing street lamps and the lights in wood-frame homes built back from the roads, shrouded in foliage. It was as distant from Horkan’s Pride and her cargo of carnage as he was currently from home. You looked at the well-kept, scenic-sculpted roadways, all that quiet and residential greenery, and you didn’t want to believe that the man who’d crashed into the ocean that morning with only the corpses he’d mutilated for company could be out there under the same night sky.
Sevgi Ertekin’s words drifted back through his mind. The wan intensity on her face as she spoke.
We’d better find this guy fast, Tom.
The cab found the address and coasted gently to a halt under the nearest street lamp. Idling there, it made scarcely more noise than the breeze through the trees, but still he saw downstairs lights spring up in the house, and the front door opened. Jeff stood there framed by the light, waved hesitantly. Must have been waiting at the window. No sign of Megan at his side.
Norton walked up the steep curve of the driveway, suddenly feeling the hours and the distance from New York. Cicadas whirred in the bushes and trees planted on either side, water splashe
d in the stone bowl fountain at the top. The house stood across the slope in rambling, porch-fronted spaciousness. His brother came down the steps to greet him, clapped him awkwardly on the shoulder.
“You remembered where to find us okay?”
“Took a taxi.”
“Uh, yeah. Right.”
They went in together.
“Megan not about?” he asked casually.
“No, she’s over at Hilary’s with the kids.”
“Hilary?”
“Oh, right. Haven’t seen you since, uh. Hilary, she’s our new legal adviser at the foundation. Got twins the same age as Jack. They’re having a sleepover.” Jeff Norton gestured toward the living room. “Come and sit down. Get you a drink?”
The room was much the same as Norton remembered it—battered cloth-covered armchairs facing a fire-effect screen set in a raw brick facing, Northwest Native art and family photos crowding the walls. Polished wood floors and Middle Eastern rugs. Jeff served them vintage Indonesian arrack from a bar cabinet made of reclaimed driftwood. Low-level glow from the screen flames and the Japanese-style wall sconces lit his profile as he worked. Norton watched him.
“So I guess you saw we made the feeds?”
Jeff nodded, pouring. “Yeah, just been looking at it. COLIN death ship in mystery plunge. That’s why you’re out this way?”
“Got it in one. It’s a genuine class-one nightmare.”
“Well, I guess you had to start earning that big salary you pull down sooner or later.” A brief, sidelong grin to show it wasn’t meant. Yeah, but somehow, Jeff, it always is, isn’t it. “How are things over at Jefferson Park these days? They treating you well?”
Norton shrugged. “Same as it ever was. Can’t complain. Got a new partner, hired out of NYPD Homicide. She’s a couple of years younger than me, keeps me on my toes.”
“Attractive?”
“Not that it makes any difference, but yeah, she is.”
Jeff came across with the two glasses, handed him one. He grinned. “Always makes a difference, little brother. Think you’ll nail her?”
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