Black Man / Thirteen

“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.”

CHAPTER 5

It was like a landscape out of Dali.

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 a

The path lab n-dji

“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 dji

“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-dji

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?”