Black Man / Thirteen

by Richard K. Morgan

  “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 sociopath 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?”

  And for that, he had no answer. He just stood and watched the disappearing bridge until Rovayo propped herself upright off the rail and touched his arm.

  “C’mon,” she said companionably. “Let’s get back to work.”

  They were working the Horkan’s Pride case out of a closed suite in the lower levels of the Alcatraz station. Shielding in the superstructure above them ensured a leak-tight data environment, the transmission systems in and out ran Marstech-standard encryption, and all the equipment in the suite was jacked together with python-thick coils of black actual cable. It gave the offices a period feel that sat well with the raw, sandblasted stone walls and the subterranean cool that soaked off them. Sevgi sat in a commandeered desk chair and stared at a rough-hewn corner, keeping her eyes off Marsalis and furious with herself for the feeling that had snaked across her belly when Rovayo came back with the black man in tow.

  “Coyle and Norton went to talk to Tsai,” she told them. “Going to book some n-djinn time, run a fresh linkage model on Ward and the victims, soon as we can get on the machine.”

  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 on to 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 without 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, minimized footage of the whole interview room from two or three different angles, voice profiles in dropdown 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, sun-blasted 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 toward 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 have, 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 around 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 somber 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 pl
astic 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 strong-arm 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 tabletop 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 favor, 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 around 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 patted his pockets for the pack of gills, found them, and fit a new one into his mouth. He twisted the end till 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?”

  “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. “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 sympathize. 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 spiraling downward all the way. Gutierrez drew gill fumes and strength in the soft spells, weathered Reyes’s brutality when it came around. He didn’t give a millimeter. 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 get 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 hookups 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 on 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 fr
om two hundred fifty million kilometers 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 toward 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 toward 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.”