Black Man (11 page)

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.”

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 splashed 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?”

“Jeff, for Christ’s sake.” No real anger; he was too travel-worn and weary for it. “Do you really have to act like such a throwback all the time?”

“What? Girl’s attractive, you don’t do the math, add up your chances?” Still standing, his brother knocked back a chunk of the arrack, grinned down at him. “Come on, I can see it in your eyes. This one, you want.”

Norton pressed thumb and forefinger to his eyelids. “You know what, Jeff, maybe I do, and maybe I don’t. But it isn’t my primary concern right now. You think we could talk about something that matters for a change?”

He didn’t see the way the expression on his brother’s face shifted, the way the grin faded out, gave way to a watchful tension. Jeff backed up and dropped into the opposing armchair, thrust his legs out in front of him. When Norton looked at him, he met his gaze and gestured. “Okay, Tom, you got it. Whatever I can do. But it’s a long time since I had much pull in New York. I mean, I can maybe make some calls if they’re on your back, but—”

“No, it’s nothing like that.”

“It’s not?”

“No, we’ve pretty much got free rein on this one. Word down from on high, do what you want but clean up the mess.”

“And what mess would that be, exactly? Feeds say everyone aboard is dead.”

“Yeah. Since when did you trust what you see on the feeds? Truth is, we’ve got a live one, and he made it off the ship. This is confidential information I’m giving you, Jeff. Can’t go any farther than this room, this conversation. Not even Megan.”

Jeff spread his hands. Slow smile. “Hey, since when did I ever tell Megan everything? You know me, Tom.”

“Yeah, well.” He held down the anger, old and accustomed like the kick he got out of the Cadillac when he downshifted without the brake.

“So come on. What’s the big secret?”

“Big secret is that this guy is a variant thirteen.”

There was a small satisfaction in watching the way Jeff reacted. Eyes widened, mouth dropping to frame a response he didn’t have. Norton thought it came off a little phony, but he’d grown used to that aspect of Jeff over the years, the actorly, slightly-larger-than-life way he deployed himself for whatever audience there was. He’d always tried to see it, charitably, as the price of admission into the charmed power circle his brother had inhabited with such aplomb when they were both younger men—but now, now that his brother had apparently become charitable himself without losing any of that mannered polish, Norton was forced to consider that maybe Jeff had always been that way, always playing himself for the cheap seats.

“You deal with this kind of thing on a daily basis, Jeff,” he said simply. “I need some advice here.”

“Did you call UNGLA?”

“Not yet. Way things are, it’s not likely we will.”

“You want my advice? Call ’em.”

“Come on, Jeff. COLIN wouldn’t even sign up to the Accords at Munich. You think they’re going to want the UN walking all over their stuff with big international treaty boots?”

Jeff Norton set his drink aside on a tall driftwood table, distant cousin to the cabinet. He rubbed hands over his face. “How much do you know about variant thirteen, Tom?”

Norton shrugged. “What everyone knows.”

“What everyone knows is bullshit hype and moral panic for the feeds. What do you
actually
know?”

“Uh, they’re sociopaths. Some kind of throwback to when we were all still hunter-gatherers, right?”

“Some kind of, yeah. Truth is, Tom, it’s like the bonobos and the hibernoids and every other misbegotten premature poke at reengineering that last century’s idiot optimist pioneers saddled us with. Guesswork and bad intentions. Nobody ever built a human variant because they thought they were giving it a better shot at life, liberty, and the pursuit of fucking happiness. They were products, all of them, agenda-targeted. Spaceflight programs wanted the hibernoids, the bonobos were patriarchal authority’s wet dream of womanhood—”

“Yours, too, huh?”

Jeff gave him a crooked grin. “Are you ever going to let that go?”

“Would Megan?”

“Megan doesn’t know. It’s my problem, not hers.”

“That’s big of you.”

“No, it’s weak and masculine of me. I know that. Guess I’ll just never have your moral fucking rectitude, little brother. But telling Megan isn’t going to achieve anything except hurt her and the kids. And I won’t do that.”

He picked up his glass again and lifted it in Norton’s direction.

“So here’s to living with your mistakes, little brother. Either that, or fuck you very much.”

Norton shrugged and raised his own glass. “Living with your mistakes.”

And Megan flitted through his mind, sun-splashed hair and laughter amid the redwood trunks, and later, naked body sun-dappled and straining upward to press against him on the sweat-damp sheets of the motel bed.

“So,” he said, to drive out the vision, “if the bonobos were patriarchal authority’s wet dream, what does that make variant thirteen?”

“Variant thirteen?” Jeff gave him the crooked grin again. “Variant thirteen gave us back our manhood.”

“Oh come on.”

“Hey, you weren’t there, little brother.”

“You’re six years older than me, Jeff. You weren’t there, either.”

“So go read the history books, you don’t want to trust what your big brother tells you. I’m talking pre-Secession. Pre-atmosphere on Mars. You got a first world where manhood’s going out of style.

Advancing wave of the feminized society, the alpha males culling themselves with suicide and supervirility drugs their hearts can’t stand, which in the end
is
suicide, just slower and a bit more fucking fun.”

“I thought they criminalized that stuff.”

Jeff gave him a crooked grin. “Oh yeah, and
that
worked. I mean,
no one
takes drugs once they’re illegal, right? Especially not drugs that give you a hard-on like a riot baton and all-night-long instant replay.”

“I still don’t believe that stuff tipped any kind of balance. That’s talk-show genetics, Jeff.”

“Suit yourself. The academic jury’s still out on the virilicide, you’re right about that much. But I don’t know a single social biologist who doesn’t count alpha-male self-destruct as one of the major influences on the last century’s political landscape. Shrinking manhood”—the grin again—“so to speak. And right along with that, you’ve got a shrinking interest in military prowess as a function of life. Suddenly, no one but dirt-poor idiots from Kansas wants to be a soldier, because hell, that shit can get you killed and there have
got
to be better, and better-paid, ways to live your life. So you got these few dirt-poor idiots fighting tooth and nail for causes”—Jeff’s voice morphed momentarily into a gruff Jesusland parody—“
they don’t understand real good,
but generally speaking the rest are screaming human rights abuse and let me out of here, where’s my ticket through college. And we are losing, little brother, all the way
down.

Because we’re up against enemies who eat, sleep, and breathe hatred for everything we represent, who don’t care if they die screaming so long as they take a few of us with them. See, a feminized, open-access society can do a lot of things, Tom, but what it can’t do worth a damn is fight wars in other people’s countries.”

“I didn’t ask for a class on the Secession, Jeff. I asked you about variant thirteen.”

“Yeah, getting there.” Jeff took another chunk off his arrack. “See, once upon a time we all thought we’d send robots to fight those wars. But robots are expensive to build, and down where it counts no one really trusts them. They break down when it gets too hot, or too cold, or too sandy. They fuck up in urban environments, kill the wrong people in large numbers, bring down infrastructure we’d really rather keep intact. They can be subverted, hacked, and shut down with a halfway decent black-market battlefield deck run by some techsmart datahawk we probably trained ourselves on a bighearted arms-around-the-fucking-world scholarship program at MIT. Robots can be stolen, rewired, sent back against us without us knowing it. You remember that memorial stone Dad showed us that time we drove down to New Mexico? That big fucking rock in the middle of Oklahoma?”

“Vaguely.” He had a flash on a big, pale granite boulder, sheared on one side and polished on that single surface to a high gray gloss that clashed with the rough matte finish of the rest of the stone. Letters in black he was too young to read. Arid, failing farmland, a couple of stores on a sun-blasted highway straight as a polished steel rail. An old woman behind the counter where they bought candy, hair as gray as the stone outside. Sad, he remembered, she looked sad as they chose and paid. “I was what, five or six?”

“If that. I guess it would have gone right over your head, but I had nightmares for a couple of weeks after that. This Trupex AS-81 straight out of an old toy set I had, but full-size, smashing into the house, flattening Mom and Dad, standing over my bed, pulling me out and ripping my arms and legs out of their sockets. You know those fucking machines sat in that storage depot for
nine weeks
before the
Allahu Akbar
virus kicked in.”

“Yeah, I read about it in school. Like I said, Jeff, I’m not here for a history lesson.”

“They massacred the whole fucking town, Tom. They tore it apart. There’s nothing left there anymore except that fucking rock.”

“I know.”

“Hardesty, Fort Stewart, Bloomsdale. The marine base at San Diego. All in less than three years. Are you surprised the military went looking for a better option?”

“Variant thirteen.”

“Yeah, variant thirteen. Precivilized humans. Everything we used to be, everything we’ve been walking away from since we planted our first crops and made our first laws and built our first cities. I’m telling you, Tom, if I were you I’d just call in UNGLA and stand well back. You do not want to fuck about with thirteens.”

“Now
you
sound like the feeds.”

Jeff leaned forward, face earnest. “Tom, thirteen is the only genetic variant Jacobsen thought dangerous enough to abrogate basic human rights on. There’s a reason those guys are locked up or exiled to Mars.

There’s a reason they’re not allowed to breed. You’re talking about a type of human this planet hasn’t seen in better than twenty thousand years. They’re paranoid psychotic at base, glued together with from-childhood military conditioning and not much else. Very smart, very tough, and not much interested in anything other than taking what they want regardless of damage or cost.”