Black Man / Thirteen

An NYPD teardrop cruised up alongside them, panels at opaque except for the driver’s window, which was cranked back. A young cop up front had the system at manual and was steering idly with one ta

At the thought of beer and the smell it had left in her kitchen, Sevgi’s stomach turned abruptly over. She shunted the nostalgia hastily aside. The NYPD car switched lanes and faded in the traffic. Sevgi took an experimental stab at some engaged competence of her own.

“Cryocap fluid should absorb a lot of the impact shock,” she said slowly. “And the fact it came down in one piece at all means it was some kind of controlled reentry, right?”

“Some kind of.”

“Did we get any more out of the datahead before this happened?”

Norton shook his head. “Same request for standby at Kaku, same interval broadcast. Nothing new.”

“Great. Fucking ghost ship to the last.”

Norton lifted hands with fingers draped wide and low, made phantasmal noises to match. Sevgi curled a grin under control.

“It’s not fucking fu

“Maybe they were concerned about loss of life,” said Norton, with a straight face.

“Yeah.”

“Now, I hope you’re not pla

She shrugged. “They pay COLIN taxes just like the rest of us. It’s their tin can, too.”

“Yeah, but we’re the ones supposed to make sure this kind of thing doesn’t happen. That’s why they pay their taxes.”

“Have you talked to anyone at their end yet?”

Norton shook his head. “No one human. I tried to hook whoever caught the case just before I left. Got the machine. Standard phone interface. It said we’ll be collected at the airport by RimSec. Two of their plainclothes guys, Rovayo and Coyle.”

“You get ID?”

Norton tapped the breast of his jacket. “Hardcopy download. Want to see it?”

“Might as well.”

The Rim cops were a balanced sex and eth couple. Under the label det. a. rovayo, a dark young Afro-Hispanic woman stared out of her photo with jaw set and mouth thi

Sevgi shrugged.

“We’ll see,” she said.

They saw.

Coyle and Rovayo met them off the suborb at SFO with perfunctory greetings and an iris scan. Standard procedure, they were told. Norton shot a warning glance at Sevgi, who was visibly fuming. This wasn’t how visiting cops would have been treated on arrival in New York. Here, it was hard to tell if they were being snubbed or not; Coyle, every bit as big and laconic as his holoshot had suggested, showed them brief ID and did the introductory honors. Rovayo took it from there. She leaned in and spread their eyelids with warm, slightly callused fingers, applied the sca

“This way,” he said economically. “We got the smart chopper.”

They rode up in silence, hooked a walkway across the glass-bubbled, white-girder-braced upper levels of the building, then another elevator that spilled them out onto a concrete apron where a sleek red-and-white autocopter sat twitching its rotors. Eastward, the bay glimmered silvery gray in the late-afternoon sun. A ruffling wind took the heat out of the day.

“So you guys are on the case?” Norton tried as they clambered aboard.

Coyle offered him an impassive glance. “Whole fucking force is on this case,” he grunted and tugged the hatch closed. “Badge coding 2347. Flight as filed. Let’s go.”

“Thank you. Please take your seats.”

The autocopter had Asia Badawi’s voice, low and honey-coated, unmistakable even from the half a dozen syllables uttered. Sevgi vaguely remembered reading, in some mindless magazine-space moment while she waited to see the lawyers, an article about the software contract Badawi had signed with Lockheed. Big PR smiles and clasps all around, outraged fans protest. Yawn, flick. Would you like to come through now, Ms. Ertekin? The rotors cranked in earnest, engine murmur rose to a dim, soundproofed crescendo on the other side of the window, and they unstuck from the pad. They settled into seats. The autocopter lifted, tilted, and whirled them out over the bay.

Sevgi made an effort. “You get anything from the skin yet?”

“Sca

“That’s fast work,” said Norton, though it wasn’t really.

Rovayo looked at him. “They’ve been busy inside, that kind of took priority.”

An eyeblink silence.

Sevgi exchanged a glance with Norton.

“Inside?” she asked, dangerously polite. “You’ve already cracked the hatches?”

A knowing grin went back and forth between the two Rim cops. Sevgi, fed up with being the least informed person in the room all day, felt her temper start to fray.

“Horkan’s Pride is COLIN’s property,” she said thinly. “If you’ve tampered with—”

“Put your cuffs away, Agent Ertekin,” said Coyle. “Time the coastals got out to your property, someone aboard had already blown the hatches out. From the inside. Quarantine seal’s long gone.”

That’s not possible. Narrowly, she managed to stop herself from saying it. Instead she asked: “Are the cryocaps breached?”

Coyle eyed her speculatively. “It’s really better if you wait and see for yourself.”

The autocopter banked about, and Sevgi leaned forward to peer out the window. Below them in the bay, Rim Security’s Alcatraz station rose off its island base in pale gray platforms and piers. On the southern shoreline, a floating dry-dock complex was laid out like a schematic, clean lines and spaces, people reduced to dots and vehicles to toys. The bulk of the Horkan’s Pride crew section showed up clearly in the center dock. Even with the external structures ripped away, even scorched and scarred by the reentry, it leapt out at her like a familiar face in a group photo. She’d seen sister ships in the orbital yards above the Kaku nanorack from time to time, and she’d had archive footage of Horkan’s Pride itself filed on her laptop ever since the ship stopped talking to COLIN Control. In the frequent chunks of waiting room time at the lawyers’ offices, in the sleepless still of the nights she didn’t drink, she’d stared at the detail until her eyes ached. A good detective eats, sleeps, and breathes the details, Larry Kasabian had once told her. That’s how you catch the bad guys. The habit stuck. She knew the internal architecture of the vessel so well, she could have walked it from end to end blindfolded. She had the hardware and software specs by heart. The names of the cryocapped crew were as familiar as product brands she habitually shopped for, and biographical detail from each popped into her head unbidden whenever she visualized one of their faces.