Black Man / Thirteen

“Yeah, well, like I said they’re kind of busy right now. And I’ll be going in under a fresh identity. No COLIN badge, no UNGLA accreditation, no weapons, nothing to ring any bells.”

Norton paused, chin hovering over the cue. “No weapons?”

“Not as such, no. I aim to look like a tourist.”

“And this fresh identity.” The COLIN exec rammed his shot home. “I assume you’re looking to me for that.”

“No, I’ve got a friend back in London can handle that for me, have the stuff couriered across inside a day. What I need from you is the cash. Free wafers, untraceable back to COLIN. My credit still good for that?”

“You know it is.”

“Good. And can you persuade RimSec to keep Ferrer locked up somewhere until end of next week? Make sure he doesn’t have a change of heart and go squawking down the wires to Bambarén?”

“I suppose so.” Norton looked vainly for position, tried a double, took it too fast and missed. “But look. You don’t know this Jurgens will be there. What if she’s not sleeping yet?”

“It’s November, Norton.” Carl chalked his cue. “Jurgens was almost flaking out when I talked to her three weeks ago. She’s got to be under by now.”

“I thought they had drugs that’ll unlock the hibernation.”

“Yeah.” Carl lined up his shot, eased back with due regard for the scarred yellow wall behind him. Sharp snap and the target ball disappeared into a corner pocket as if sucked there by vacuum. The cue ball stood solid in its place. “I knew this hibernoid back on Mars, we used to go the same tanindo classes. He was a private detective, occasional enforcer, too. Very tough guy, always getting into scrapes. I don’t think I ever knew him when he wasn’t carrying some kind of injury. And he told me that no beating he ever took hurt as much as the time he dosed himself with that wake-up shit.”

“Yeah, but if they’re worried about—”

“Norton, they don’t know any reason why I’d be coming after them like this. They don’t know Ertekin was anything to me. And if there’s going to be any COLIN fallout in the air, the very best thing Onbekend can do with his girlfriend right now is put her away somewhere safe and cozy for the next several months. Believe me, she’s there. Just a question of getting to her, digging in, and waiting for Onbekend to come ru

He slammed the next shot, rattled it in the jaws. It didn’t go down.

He peeled off his coat, unslung the sharkpunch, and dumped it on the kitchenette bar. He checked himself for damage. The Marstech impact jacket, disguised through airport security as part of his scuba gear, had soaked up the slugs he’d collected and left him with no worse than bruising, maybe a couple of cracked ribs. He pressed on the tender areas, grimaced, shrugged. He’d gotten off lightly.

So far.

He stripped the dead men of their weapons, piling them up on the shot-splintered breakfast bar. He dragged the worst of the wreckage from the man he’d killed in the kitchenette out the door and left him with his companions. He’d get the rest with a mop and bucket if there was time.

In the upstairs gallery of the lodge, he found a room that extended back into the cliff the house was built against. There was a heavy-duty lock on the door but he shot it out with one of his several newly acquired handguns. The door swung weightily inward on a curved womb-like space lit by subdued orange LCLS paneling at knee height along the walls. He found a panel of switches next to the door and flipped them until a harsher white light sprang up. Assumption confirmed—he’d found Greta Jurgens.

She lay like some dead Viking noblewoman on a broad, carved wood platform with lines that vaguely suggested a boat. Thick tangles of gray-green insulene foam netting supported her and wrapped her over. Carl could smell the stuff as he stepped toward her, the signature nanotech reek of tightly engineered carbon plastics. He’d used the netting on Mars a lot, camping out on expeditions in the Wells uplands.

—Flash recall of sitting out in the warm glow of a heating element while the Martian night came on in all its thin-air glory, thick shingles of stars everywhere and the tiny, on-and-off tracery of burn-up from the leftover seed particles as they kept coming down, decades overdue for their date with atmospheric modification. Sutherland, staring up there at it all, pleased smile on the scarred ebony features, as if all of it, the sky and everything in it, had been put there just for him. Musing, nodding along with whatever it was the young Carl Marsalis had been bitching about. Soaking it up, then turning it around so Carl’d have to look at it from an angle that hadn’t occurred to him before. You ever wondered, soak, if that doesn’t just mean…

Jurgens stirred just barely as the lights came up, but the down end of her cycle had her buried too deep for any substantial reaction. She was naked in the foam, skin taut and shiny with the adipose buildup, lidded eyes bruised and gummed shut with the secretions of the hibernoid sleep. Carl stood looking down at her for a long while, handgun at the end of his arm like a hammer. Images of the last month flickered behind his eyes like flames, like something burning down.

South Florida State. The Perez nanorack. Sevgi Ertekin beside him on the beach. New York, and the futon she made up for him. Gunfire in the street outside, the first warm crushing pressure as he flattened her under him.

Istanbul, the walk to Moda. The gleaming, glittering grins-in-darkness escaping feel to everything they did.

His mouth twitched upward in echo.

The wind across the stones at Sacsayhuamán. Sevgi leaned against the jeep at his back, the tight feeling of cover, of safety.

The road to Arequipa, her face in the soft dashboard glow.

San Francisco and Bulgakov’s Cat, the predawn view out of starboard loading. Don’t gloat, Marsalis. It’s not attractive.

Sevgi dead.

The smile fell off his face. He stared down at the sleeping woman.

Greta Jurgens is Onbekend’s?

So it would appear. A curious match, is it not? But then they do at least have in common that they are both objects for the hormonal hatred the rest of humanity seems constantly to need a target for.

The mesh surged a little in the pit of his stomach, maybe aftermath of the firefight, maybe something else. He thought of Sevgi’s eyes closing in the hospital. He stared at Jurgens like she was a problem he had to solve.

Only live with what you’ve done, and try in the future to do only what you’re happy to live with. That’s the whole game, soak, that’s all there is.

He reached out left-handed. Spread the foam netting a little thicker over the hibernoid’s body, pulled it up where one pale shoulder was exposed.

Then he went rapidly back to the door and killed the bright white LCLS, because something was happening to his vision that felt like blindness. He stood a moment in the warm orange gloom, looked twitchily around as if someone were there next to him, then slipped quietly out and closed the door behind him.

He moved along the gallery, checked doors until he found a darkened, windowless chamber with the fragrant hygiene reek of a woman’s bathroom. He stepped inside, touched the switch panel; more bright white light exploded across the pastel-tiled space. His own face mugged him from a big circular mirror in one wall—sweat-streaked whitener melting and smudging, the black coming up underneath, eyes ringed with the stuff like dark water at the bottom of a pair of pale psychedelic wells. Fuck, no wonder the guys at the bridge freaked. He supposed he owed Carmen Ren for the inspiration.

Wherever she was right now.

He wondered briefly if Ren would make it, if she’d stay ahead of the cudlips and the Agency the way she had before. He wondered if the child growing inside her would make it out into the world safely, and what would happen then. What Ren would have to do to protect it after that.