Black Man / Thirteen

It’s really better if you wait and see for yourself.

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 i

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.