Black Man (7 page)

And now, at a guess, they were all dead.

The autocopter settled with machine precision onto a raised platform at one end of the dock complex.

The motors wound down, and the hatch cracked open. Coyle did the honors again, levering the hatch back and jumping down first. Sevgi went next.

Badawi’s honeyed tones followed her out into the wind. “Watch your step. Please close the hatch behind you.”

Coyle led the way down the steps off the platform. There was a reception committee waiting at the bottom. Three RimSec uniforms backing a plainclothes ranking officer whose face Sevgi recognized from a couple of virtual briefings she’d attended last year on geneprint forgery. Smooth Asian features that made him seem younger than she supposed he was, thick gray hair and a rumpled way with clothes that belied the level scrutiny in the eyes. From that gaze and other general aspects of demeanor, she’d suspected he was probably enhanced—Rim officials of any rank usually were these days—but she never had more evidence than the hunch. In the social sessions after, he’d talked with quiet reservation, mainly about his family, and his eyes had barely flickered to Sevgi’s chest at all, for which she’d been quietly grateful. Now she scrabbled after a name, and the syn handed it to her.

“Lieutenant Tsai. How are you?”

“Captain,” he said drily. “Promoted back in January. And I’m as well as can be expected, thank you, given the circumstances. I presume you’d like to view your vessel immediately. What’s left of it.”

Sevgi nodded glumly. “That’d be helpful.”

“I’m told—” Tsai made gestures at his uniforms, and they sloped off across the dock. “—that we’ll have a working virtual by about seven. Crews are finishing up with the hull now, but Rovayo probably told you about the hatches.”

“That they were blown from the inside, yeah.”

“Captain,” Norton weighed in. “We’re concerned to know what state the crew of
Horkan’s Pride
are in.

Specifically, whether the cryosystems were breached or not.”

Tsai stopped in the act of turning to follow the uniforms, and his gaze seemed suddenly to lengthen, dialing up, out across the dock and then the bay, replaying something from memory that he’d maybe prefer not to. In Sevgi, the realization hit home that behind the turf-proud cool of Coyle and Rovayo there was the same base edginess, and that driving it all was not the jurisdiction envy she’d assumed.

They’re scared,
she suddenly knew.
And we’re their only solution
.

It was an epiphany Sevgi had had once before, back when she was still a rookie with the NYPD and dealing with a drugs-and-domestic-abuse case. Talking to the bruised and still-swelling face of the perpetrator’s mother, it hit her with the same sickening abruptness that this woman was looking at her as some kind of solution to her problem; that she expected Patrolwoman Ertekin, age twenty-three, to
do
something about the shitstorm state of her family and her life.

So nice to be needed.

“Breached,” Tsai said slowly. “Yes, I think you could say that.”

The outer hatches themselves were gone, blown clear by the emergency bolts—by now they’d be somewhere at the bottom of the Pacific. The blackened stub of
Horkan’s Pride
had been propped in the dry dock, as close to a usefully even keel as her design would allow. Still, they had to clamber down into Access Four as if it were a well cut into the top of the crew section’s hull. A zero-g assist ladder took them to the bottom of the air lock chamber within, and from there they dropped heavily through the inner lock and onto the canted surface of the main dorsal corridor. Maintenance lighting glowed in soft blue LCLS panels along the sides of the passageway, but Tsai’s uniforms had set up high-intensity incident lamps by the air lock and farther down. White glare bounced back off the grubby cream-colored walls, and teeth.

Sevgi’s gaze caught it as she came down off the last rung of the ladder, and she skidded to a halt at the sight. The ripped-to-the-gums grin of a mutilated human head where it lay only loosely attached to the limbless torso sprawled on the floor.

“You see what I mean?” Tsai climbed down beside her.

Sevgi stood, managing her stomach. Leaving aside the hangover, it had still been awhile. Even her last year with the NYPD had been mercifully short on gore; transferring from Homicide to COLIN liaison hadn’t made her any friends on the force, but it had certainly put a brake on the amount of mangled human remains she had to look at. Now she was vaguely aware that without the syn, she would have vomited up what little her stomach contained, all over Tsai’s crime scene.

Your
crime scene, you mean
.

This is yours, Sev.

She bent forward a little, peered at the dead man. Took possession.

“Alberto Toledo,” said Tsai quietly. “Engineer at the Stanley bubble, atmospheric nanotech. Fifty-six years old. Rotated home.”

“Yes, I know.” Biog detail bubbled up from the ruined, sneering face, whispering like ghosts. Job specs, résumé, family background. This one had a daughter somewhere. The flesh of both cheeks had been sheared off up to the cheekbone, where stringy fragments of tissue still clung. The jaw was stripped. The eyes—She swallowed. Still a little queasy. Norton joined her, put a hand on her shoulder.

“You okay, Sev?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.” She locked onto facts.
Horkan’s Pride
hadn’t talked to them for almost the whole seven and a half months of its long fall back to Earth. “Captain, this… looks recent.”

Tsai shrugged. “Antibacterials in the shipboard atmospheric system, they tell me. But yeah, we’re guessing Alberto here was probably one of the last.”

“The
last
?”

Sevgi glanced at Norton as he said it, and was pleased to notice that he looked as shaky as she felt.

Distantly, she picked out the acidic tang of someone else’s vomit in the air of the closed space around her. It was oddly comforting, the knowledge that others before her had seen and reacted in the same way she wanted to. It made it easier to hold on.

“What happened to the limbs?” she managed, almost casually.

“Surgically removed.” Tsai gestured up the corridor. “They’re still downloading the autosurgeon’s log, so we can’t be sure that’s how it was done, but it’s the obvious explanation.”

“So how did he end up here?”

The captain nodded. “Yeah, that’s a little harder. Could be the impact threw the bodies about some. We found most of the cryocaps hinged open, nutrients all over the floor and walls. Looks like whoever did this wasn’t all that tidy, at least toward the end.”

“The corridor locks should have engaged when she came down,” Norton said shortly. “These ships compartmentalize under emergency conditions. There’s no way something could get flung from one end of this hulk to the other like that. No way.”

“Well, it’s only a theory.” Tsai gestured up and down the unobstructed corridor again. “But as you’ll see.

Not a lot of compartmentalization going on here. You want to look at the cryocap section?”

Sevgi peered along the passageway to where more incident lamps lit the environs of the sleeper racks.

She could see figures moving about down there, heard a couple of voices. The brief rattle of a laugh. The sound carried her back, with a force that was almost physical, to her crime scene days with Homicide.

Black humor and hardened camaraderie, the quiet thrum of an intensity denied to anyone who didn’t work this beat, and the layering on of a detachment that came with custom.
So weird, the shit you can get nostalgic for, girl
. It alarmed her a little, realizing the extent to which, despite her quailing stomach, she did suddenly want to plunge back into that world and its dark procedural workings.

“The other bodies,” she said as the syn lit up her head. “They’re all mutilated like this one, right?”

Tsai’s face was a mask. “Or worse.”

“Have you found the limbs?”

“Not as such.”

Sevgi nodded. “Just bones, right?”

Oh, Ethan, you should have been around to see this. It really has happened this time, just the way you always used to bullshit me it would.

“That’s right.” Tsai was looking at her like a teacher with a smart kid.

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding,” said Norton, very quietly.

Sevgi turned to look at him fully. It was reflex denial, shock, not objection. “That’s right.”

“Someone chopped these people up with the autosurgeon—”

She nodded, still not sure in the bright spin of the syn and the shock of the understanding, how she felt, how she
should
feel.

“Yes. And ate them.”

It was like a landscape out of Dalí.

The CSI virtual was a forensics standard Sevgi remembered from her time with the NYPD—pristine Arizona desert as far as the eye could see, blue sky featureless but for a ghost moon that carried the designers’ logo like a watermark. Each section of the investigation presented as a separate three-story adobe structure, distributed across the landscape in a preternaturally neat semi-circular arc. The sectional homes were open on the facing side like cutaways in an architectural model, furnished with steps so you could walk up to each level. Labels floated in the air beside each structure, neatly lettered fonts announcing data anomaly; path labs; recovered surveillance; prior record. Much of the display space was still empty, data still to come, but shelved on the exposed floors of the path lab home, the mutilated corpses from
Horkan’s Pride
stood on their stumps like vandalized statues in a museum. Even here, not all the organic data was in yet, but the
corpses had been scanned into the system early on. Now they posed in catwalk perfection, colored and intimate enough to make your own flesh quail as you stared at theirs. Sevgi had already seen them close up, had focused with irresistible fascination on neatly sectioned bone in the densely packed meat of an arm taken off centimeters from the shoulder, and then wished she hadn’t. The syn was wearing off, leaving queasy traces of hangover beneath.

The path lab n-djinn interface, a perfectly beautiful Eurasian female in tailored blue scrubs, narrated the nightmare with machine calm.

“The perpetrator chose limbs because they represented the simplest transfer of the automated medical system’s functions from surgery to butchery.” An elegant gesture. “Amputation is an established procedure within the autosurgeon’s protocols, and it is not life threatening. After each surgical procedure, it was a simple matter to return the subject, still living, to the cryogen units, thus assuring a ready and continuing supply of fresh meat.”

“And the automed just let it all fucking
happen
?” Coyle was staring angrily about him, male outrage deprived of targets. “What the fuck is that?”

“That,” said Sevgi wearily, “is selective systems intrusion. Someone got into the general protocol level and closed down the ship’s djinn. For a good datahawk, it wouldn’t be difficult. All these ships have a human override option anyway, and there’s a fail-safe suicide protocol wired into the n-djinn. You just have to trick it into believing it’s been corrupted, and it shuts itself down. There are a whole series of secondary blocks to prevent that damage from seeping down into the discrete systems, but like we’re hearing, he didn’t need to worry about that. He wasn’t telling the medical systems to do anything they weren’t already programmed for.”

“He?” Rovayo. Sevgi’d already pegged her as a staunch man’s woman, and this looked like confirmation—umbrage taken at potential feminazi chauvinism. “Why’s it got to be a
he
?”

Sevgi shrugged.
Because, statistically, that’s the way it fucking is,
she didn’t say. “Sorry. Figure of speech.”

“Yeah, till we get the swab breakdowns back and find out it
was
a man,” drawled Norton. He stepped past Rovayo’s mutinous look, closer to the white-walled, opened architecture of the path home and its exhibits. The lab ’face gave ground and stood in deferential silence, waiting to be directly questioned. Its higher interactional functions had apparently not been enabled. Norton nodded up at the exposed grin of a female corpse, and it leapt out at them. Visual distance was elusive in the construct: it bowed and swelled like a lens according to user focus. “Thing I don’t get is the mess. I can see killing them all—you don’t want witnesses left around, with or without arms and legs. But why the blood on the walls? Why mutilate the faces like that?”

“Because he was fucking cracked,” Coyle growled. “He probably ate that stuff as well, right?”

“Difficult to say.” The lab ’face kicked in again, pointing and pulling in a bubble of data display from one of the other file houses. “Evidence gathered from the kitchen unit suggests meat scraped from the skulls
may
have been cooked and ingested. This does not seem to have been the case with the eyes, which were gouged out and then discarded.”

Sevgi barely glanced at the yanked-in focus. It was in any case a little too abstract for easy human digest—sketched molecular traces and a scrawled sidebar summary about microwave effect. Later she’d tramp over to the file house and review it at her own pace. Right now she was still staring up at the ruined face of Helena Larsen. Demodynamics specialist, psychiatric assessor. Divorced, signed up for Mars not long after. COLIN got a lot like this. You split from all you’ve known, why not. Your life’s columnar supports are crumbling all around you, you probably need the cash. Three years, the minimum qualified professional tour of duty, seems suddenly reasonable. On Mars you earn big, and for the short-timers at least there’s fuck-all to spend it on. You’ll come home wealthy, Helena Larsen. You’ll come home with tales of an alien skyline to tell the children you’ll someday have. You’ll have the cachet of the trip to trade off and the résumé potential it represents. You’ll have
moved on. Got to be better than sitting in the ruins of your old life, right? Better than clinging to whatever fragments you—

“Investigator Ertekin?”

She blinked. She’d missed what Coyle was saying to her.

“Sorry, just thinking,” she said truthfully. “What, uh—?”

“I asked,” said the cop, with the heavy emphasis of repetition, “whether you think it’s likely that whoever did this could still be alive?”

The air in the virtuality, already a breezeless sterile cool at odds with the desert landscape, seemed to slip a couple of degrees lower. Norton looked at Sevgi, and she felt the tiny, almost imperceptible nod come up from the roots of intuition.

“Someone blew the hatches,” Rovayo pointed out.

“That could have been the automated systems.” Coyle cast a hopeful glance at the two COLIN reps.

“Right?”

“It’s a possibility,” Sevgi said. “Until we see the damage to the automated systems and the n-djinn, it’s hard to know how the ship would behave on its own.”

But there was a steady thrum building in the back of her head now, like engines under decking, like the rumble of Ethan’s voice, reading to her the time she came down bad with the flu, passages out of Pynchon that came and went blurrily as she faded in and out of focus with the fever. She snapped the memory shut. Leaned into the cold sparkle of the syn, like wetting her face in a fountain. “Look, we’ll know if anyone got out alive when—”

“—the swabs come in,” Rovayo finished for her. “Right. But in the meantime, what do
you
think? Give us the benefit of your COLIN specialist insight.
Could
someone have made it down in one piece?”

“Outside of the cryocaps, it’s not likely,” Norton told her. Habitual public statement caution, the COLIN

watchword. “And even if they did, that still puts them a hundred kilometers off the coast. That’s a long swim.”

“Maybe someone came to get them.” Rovayo gestured at the empty levels of the recovered surveillance adobe. “We got no satellite stream data yet, no overhead incidentals. No way to know what went on before the recovery team got there.”

Coyle shook his head. “Doesn’t make sense, Alicia. Recovery scrambled as soon as they had the coordinates.”

“Who’d they use?” Sevgi asked, trying to sound neutral. NYPD had a longstanding superiority complex when it came to the Rim’s subcontract policy on emergency services, an attitude born of, and largely borne out by, New York’s disastrous flirtation with similar schemes in the past.

Rovayo glanced at Coyle.

“Filigree Steel, right? Or, wait.” She snapped her fingers. “Did they just lose the bid to ExOp?”

“Nah, that was up in Seattle. Down here, it’s still the Filstee crew.” Coyle looked around at Sevgi and Norton. “They’re pretty good, Filigree. Did the job well over spec. Aerial cover inside twenty minutes, drop teams deployed. No way there was time for anyone to get in first. Either this guy’s dead inside with the rest of them, or he took the plunge when the hatches came off and just swam off into the sunset.”

“Wrong direction then,” said Norton drily.

Coyle peeled him a glance. “I was using a metaphor there.”

“He does that sometimes,” Rovayo said, deadpan.

“I don’t think he went into the water,” said Sevgi. “You’d have to be suicidal or clinically insane to make that mistake.”

Coyle stared at her. “Were you there earlier today, Ms. Ertekin? Did you see the in-flight cuisine? You’re trying to tell me this motherfucker might
not
be insane?”

Sevgi grimaced. “This
motherfucker,
as you put it, had spent the last several months completely alone in deep space. Alone, that is, apart from the sporadic company of fellow crewmembers revived long enough to carve edible meat from. At a minimum, he is mentally unbalanced, yes, but—”

Rovayo snorted. “No shit, he’s unbalanced. You’d have to be fucking un
hinged
to—”

“No.” The force in the single syllable closed the other woman down. Words marched out of Sevgi’s mouth, words she remembered Ethan saying, almost verbatim. A cold conviction was growing in her.

“You wouldn’t have to be insane to do these things. You’d just have to have a goal and be determined to attain it. Let’s get this straight, early on. What we’ve seen aboard
Horkan’s Pride
are not the symptoms of insanity; they are only evidence of great force of will. Evidence of planning and execution shorn of any socially imposed limitation. Any mental problems this person was suffering by journey’s end are going to be a
result
of that execution, not a cause.”

“Speaking of planning,” said Coyle. “You going to tell me you guys don’t pack these Colony transports with emergency supplies? You know, like
food
? In case someone wakes up unscheduled?”

“Nobody wakes up unscheduled,” said Norton.

“Well, excuse the fuck out of me.” The big cop looked around elaborately. “I’d say on this trip someone did exactly that. Woke up unscheduled and very fucking hungry.”

“Or they stowed away,” Rovayo suggested. “Would that work?”

“That’d be next to impossible,” said Sevgi. “There’s a lot of security written into the launch protocols.

You’d have to hack it all in the time between the ship’s systems being enabled and the decouple.”

Rovayo nodded. “And how long is that?”

“About forty-five minutes. It takes these older ships longer to boot up.”

“Look, about this food.” Coyle wasn’t letting go. “We all know the Colony Initiative don’t like to spend any of the cash they tax out of the rest of us on anything resembling people, but are you guys really so fucking tight you won’t spring for a box of survival rations? What happens if something goes wrong midflight?”

Norton sighed. “Yeah. Okay. All COLIN vessels have onboard contingency rations. But that’s missing the point. On each run, you’ll have two qualified spaceflight officers, cryocapped separately from the hu—the passengers.”

“The hu what?” Rovayo asked curiously.

Human freight
. Sevgi finished Norton’s slip of the tongue silently for him.
Yeah, we have some lovely terminology over at COLIN. Contractual Constraint. Soft Losses. Quiet Facts. Profit Drag
.

Public Perception Management
.

She weighed in. NYPD commandments.
Fuck finer feelings and circumstance, you back your partner up
. Brusquely: “What we’re telling you is that there are two systems. The passenger cryocaps are wired to default into frozen. There’s no point them being awake in an emergency. They’re civilians.

What are they going to do, run around screaming
Oh no, we’re all going to die
? Onboard air’s too expensive for that shit. They’ve got nothing to contribute in a situation like that. So anything goes wrong, the whole system locks. You can’t get it open until the ship docks.”

Coyle shook his head. “Yeah, and what if the thing that goes wrong is that it thaws out?”

“How?” Sevgi gave him one of her best
only-an-idiot
looks. “You’re talking about deep space. You know how fucking cold it is out there? There isn’t enough ambient heat anywhere in the vessel to bring that system up a single degree from emergency frost. The only thing that might is the reactor, and that’s programmed to jettison if it fails.”

“Yeah, okay,” Rovayo doing a little partner support of her own. Sevgi caught herself in sudden sympathy.

It was like passing an unexpected mirror. “So what about this other system? The spaceflight guys.

They’re wired to wake up, right?”

“They
can
wake up.” Norton picked up again. “Under certain circumstances. If there’s a navigational emergency. The trajectory fails or you get unscheduled activity from the drive datahead maybe. Then the ship brings those two capsules up. Your spaceflight guys fix the problem, or call in the recovery if they can’t.”

That’s spaceflight
guy,
singular, people
. The sour voice in her head would not shut up.
Because—you taxpayers don’t need to know this, of course—for about a decade now we’ve been cutting back on emergency personnel by 50 percent. It’s just so fucking expensive, you see, wasting a perfectly good cryocap berth like that, after all this stuff almost never happens, right, and even if it does who needs two pilots to fix it when one can manage. That’s just overmanning, right?

“Right,” said Coyle. “And these guys got to eat and drink, right?”

“Yes, of course.” Norton gestured. Sevgi let him get on with it. Maybe from the long stay in virtual, her head was starting to hurt. “There’s tanked water anyway, for fusion mass, for radiation shielding, for the coolant systems. Even in the backup tanks, there’s more than two guys could drink even if they stayed out there for a couple of years. And obviously there’s food. But the supplies are calculated on the assumption that these two guys aren’t going to be up and about for very long. If it’s a simple problem, they fix it and then go back to sleep. If it’s not, they’ll send an SOS and then go back to sleep until the rescue ship gets there.”