Black Man / Thirteen

“Yes, I remember that, too.” Norton nodded. “The cryocap spat him out and wouldn’t reset, some kind of systems glitch. Guy had to sit out the trajectory until the recovery crew got to him. See, if the transport is close enough to point of origin, emergency systems turn it around and send it back to meet the rescue ship, which cuts the retrieval time right down. If they’re closer to the end of the journey, they burn emergency fuel to speed up. However you cut it, you don’t need that much food to keep someone alive until they’re recovered.”

Well, Sevgi parenthesized to herself, not if you luck out and get a friendly orbital configuration anyway. But we don’t like to talk about that, guys. That’s what we in the trade like to call a Quiet Fact. Sort of thing even accredited COLIN staff won’t necessarily have pointed out to them. Sort of thing you might have to dig a little for.

But as Horkan’s Pride fell silently, implacably homeward, Sevgi had done that digging. Detective Ertekin has a sound analytical approach to casework, her first-year homicide report had come back one time, and shows energy and enthusiasm in absorbing fresh background detail. She has a talent for adjusting rapidly to new circumstances. She did her homework, they were trying to say, and here, nearly a decade later in the heart of COLIN, she did it again. Did her homework and found that the distance between Earth and Mars could vary by up to a factor of six. Mars, it seemed, orbited elliptically, and that plus the different orbital velocities of the two planets meant that they could be anything between about sixty and about four hundred million kilometers apart, depending on when you chose to span the gap. Even oppositions—Mars and Earth catching up to each other, ru

This time around, their homecoming guy hadn’t been so lucky. Horkan’s Pride ate the thick end of the cycle, was coming home across more than three hundred million kilometers of cold, empty space.

And no lunch stops.

“Okay,” said Rovayo. “So there’s no SOS because the n-dji

Norton nodded. “Yes. It isn’t difficult to do. There are step-by-step instructions nailed up in the coms nest.”

“And our guy chose to ignore them.”

“So it appears, yes. He ran silent all the way home, and presumably from somewhere close to the Mars end. There’s not enough food on board to do that, not even for one person. You want to sit in silence and wait out the whole trajectory, you’ve got to find something else to eat.”

“So the guy is fucking cracked.” The tinge of told-you-so in Rovayo’s voice. Bending back to her original assumptions. Okay, so she’d let this be a man, but she wasn’t going to believe he could be sane. “Got to be. He didn’t need—”

“Yeah, he did,” Sevgi said it to the air, detachedly. Time to run this for everybody’s benefit. “He did need to run silent. He couldn’t call in the rescue ship, and he couldn’t get back in the cryocap, assuming that it would have let him, because both those options would have defeated his whole purpose.”

A flicker of quiet. She saw Rovayo shoot an exasperated glance at Coyle. The big cop spread his hands.

“The purpose being?”

“To get home free.”

“Seems a little extreme,” said Rovayo sardonically. “Wouldn’t you say?”

“No, it’s not extreme.” Sevgi could hear herself talking, but the words seemed suddenly heavy, hard to get out. The syn was deserting her, retreating from her speech centers, leaving her with the fading light of the inspiration but no clear way to get it across. She fumbled for clarity. “Look, spaceflight’s a closed system. You dock in orbit, that’s quarantine control, post-cryocap medical checks, ID download. A week, usually, before they let you down the nanorack elevator and out. Whoever this guy was, he didn’t want to go through all that. He couldn’t afford to arrive cryocapped with the others, and he certainly couldn’t afford to be rescued. Both those options end at the nanorack. He needed to walk away unseen, unregistered. And this was the only way he could do it.”

“Yeah, but why?” Coyle wanted to know. “Six or seven months of ca

A wry grin from Norton, but he said nothing. Not for public consumption. Sevgi waved the diplomacy away.

“That’s missing the point. It’s no secret that there are people on Mars who wish they’d never signed up, who’d like to come home. But they’re the grunts, the cheap labor end of the Colony effort. This man was not a grunt. We’re talking about someone who’s at ease manipulating cryogen and medical datasystems, who’s able to operate the onboard emergency landing protocols—”

“Yeah, that’s something else I don’t get,” Rovayo said, frowning. “The whole trip, this guy’s taking the passengers in and out of the cryocaps to feed off. Why not just kill one of them and stick himself in the empty freezer in their place.”

“Kind of hard to explain when they take you out at the other end,” said Coyle drily.

His partner shrugged. “Okay, so you set the cryocap to wake you up a week out from home. Then—”

Norton shook his head. “Can’t be done. The cryocaps are individually coded at nanolevel for each passenger, and they’ve got very rigid program parameters. They’d reject a different body out of hand. You’d need to be a cryogen biotech specialist to get around that, and even then you probably couldn’t do it mid-transit. That kind of coding gets done while the ship’s in dock. They take the whole system down to do it. And you wouldn’t be able to recode an early wake-up, either, for much the same reason. The whole point of what happened here is that it was all within the existing parameters of the automated systems. There’s programmed provision for bringing a passenger temporarily out of cryogen for medical procedures. There is no provision for swapping passengers around, or letting them wake up early.”

“And he was smart enough, or skilled enough to know that,” said Sevgi. “Think about that. He knew exactly which systems he could safely subvert, and he did it without tripping a single alarm in the process.”

“Yeah, yeah, and he’s a mean hand at alternative cuisine,” growled Coyle. “Your point is?”

“My point is, anyone with the skills and strengths this man has shown would have gone out on a qualpro tour, which means a three-to five-year gig, no requirement to renew. He could have waited, come home cryocapped and comfortably wealthy.” Sevgi looked around at them. “Why didn’t he?”

Rovayo shrugged. “Maybe he couldn’t do the time. Three years is a long stretch when you’re looking at it from the starting line. Ask the new fish up at Folsom or Quentin Two, and that’s just jail time here on Earth. Maybe this guy gets off the shuttle at Bradbury, takes one look at all those red rocks, and realizes he made a big mistake, he just can’t go through with it.”

“That doesn’t fit with the force of will he’d need to do this,” said Norton soberly.

“No, it doesn’t,” Sevgi agreed. “And anyway, he could have called in the rescue ships as soon as he was outside the Mars support envelope. He didn’t—”

“Support envelope?” Rovayo frowned inquiry at Norton. “What’s that?”