Black Man / Thirteen

He was on the stairs down to the dock when he became aware that something had changed fractionally in the light in the corridor behind him.

He stopped on the first step, looked back.

Saw a tall figure advancing down the passageway from the other end, darkening the view along the narrow perspectives as it passed under each overhead bulb and got between Scott and the light source. This guy really was tall, and big with it, and advancing with inexorable calm. Someone not used to being stopped, someone who must not have liked the signs all over the topside offices that asked you to buzz and take a seat while you waited, one of our staff will be with you shortly, must instead have decided to just come down anyway and find whatever he was looking for.

Scott lifted an arm and waved.

“Uh, hey,” he called.

The figure gave no indication that it had seen or heard him. It moved steadily along the corridor toward the con room door, seemed to be wearing a long coat and had one hand held stiffly down inside the folds of the garment—

And suddenly, out of nowhere, a lever tipped over in Scott’s guts. Something was wrong. This was trouble.

He hopped off the step and jogged back up the corridor, toward the newcomer. He didn’t call out again; there was no point. He knew from experience how voices boomed and echoed in the metal confines of the corridor—this guy had heard him well enough. And yes, there was definitely something in that coat-shrouded hand, he saw the way the material wrapped stiffly around it. He dropped the jog, kicked into a sprint.

They met at the door. Scott’s sprint died, puddled right out of him. What he had to say dried up in his mouth. He gaped.

It was the face. His mind seemed to gibber it. It was the face, the face.

Right out of the End Times comics they gave out every fourth Sunday in church, the ones the little kids got nightmares over and the older kids had to earn with red ticks in Pastor William’s Book of Deeds. It was the same hollow-cheeked privation and clamped mouth, the long, untidy hair hanging past the hard-angled bones of cheeks and jaw, the same burning eyes—

The Gaze of Judgment. Right out of Volume II Issue 63.

His knees trembled. His mouth worked. He couldn’t—

The door hummed—he’d never noticed the noise before now—and slid back. Voices within, still angry.

The coat swirled, the stranger’s right arm came free, came up swinging. Something hit Scott in the side of the head and he stumbled, went down in an awkward, twisted-limb sprawl. Lightning switched through his head, left sparks and a wow-and-flutter effect in his ears. The Gaze lit on him briefly, then swung away again, left and into the opened con room. The stranger stepped through.

Yells erupted. Nocera and Ward, almost in unison. “This is private fucking property, asshole, what do you—”

A sudden silence that sang above the numbness in his head where he’d been hit. Then Ward again, raw disbelief.

“You? What the fuck are you doing in here? What—”

Deep, soft cough—a sound he knew from somewhere.

And the screaming started.

Scott felt the sound wring sweat from his pores, turn his skin shivery-ticklish with horror. Like the time Aaron got his arm trapped in the teeth of Dougie Straker’s rock breaker, exactly the same feeling—the sound of agony, of damage so massive it ripped register and recognition out of the voice that made it, left only a flayed shriek of denial that could have belonged to anyone and almost anything.

Carmen!

Scott flailed about. Panic for her got him to his knees, got him to his feet. He felt blood trickling in his hair. He stumbled and almost fell, braced himself on the edge of the door just as it started to slide closed again. The mechanism trembled against his grip a moment, then gave and sank back to full open. Scott shoved himself upright and staggered through.

He had time for one flash-burned glimpse.

Blood, everywhere, the siren color of it shocked onto the consoles and wall, what looked like a couple of fistfuls of offal from the discount end of a butcher’s counter drip-sliding down the screens. Nocera was down, face turned awkwardly sideways, eyes open, cheek pressed hard to the ill-swept, dusty floor as if he were listening for rats in the understructure. More blood, a broad, wine-dark puddle of it leaking out around his midriff, tongues of the stuff twisting out through the scattered dust. Over his body, Ren and the stranger wrestled for a squat-barreled weapon—Scott made the match with the soft impact he’d heard, one of the Cressi sharkpunch guns from the cabinet upstairs. Supposed to be locked, he was always telling Ward that, but—

Ward lay on his back beyond.

More blood again, the big man thrashing and slithering in it, clutching, Scott saw with numb horror, at a raw red hole where his belly had been. Shredded tissue hung in ropes out of him, was clotted on the floor and smeared on his fingers like some red-stained cake mix he’d stuck his hands into. Ward’s mouth was a gaping pink tu

Carmen yelled, desperate.

Cough of the sharkpunch.

Another impact, this time in his neck below the ear. He grabbed for something, anything. The floor came up. Blood and vomit, warm and wet in his face as he hit. He tried to get his mouth closed or twisted clear, failed in the attempt. The hot acid stink and taste—his stomach flipped again, weakly. His legs flexed like a crippled insect’s. Vision dimming out on a pool of red and flecks of yellow-white. He groped after a prayer, fumbled it, couldn’t get his mouth to work, made a handful of scrabbling words in his head—

Our Father…deliver me not…

And black.

CHAPTER 7

By evening, the news was all bad.

Genetic trace turned up a human occupant aboard Horkan’s Pride unaccounted for by any of the scattered corpses. It wasn’t hard to separate out the trace: it came with the full suite of modifications grouped loosely under the popular umbrella term variant thirteen. Or as Coyle had put it, a fucking twist.

They had a manhunt on their hands.

Recovered audiovid remained stubbornly the least filled section of the investigation model. There were scant fragments of satellite footage, from platforms busy about other business and nowhere near overhead. A weather monitor geo-synched to Hawaii had taken some angled peripheral interest when Horkan’s Pride dumped itself into the Pacific, and the Rim’s military systems had registered the incursion while the ship was still in the upper atmosphere, but abandoned close interest as the COLIN dataheads passed on what they knew. Horkan’s Pride had jettisoned its reactor as part of the emergency reentry protocols, carried no weapons, and was plotted to land harmlessly in the ocean. One of the milsats watched the ship complete the promised trajectory and then promptly went back to watching troop movements in Nevada.

None of the recovered footage showed any sign of an attempted pickup prior to the arrival of the coastal crews. Nor were there any helpful images of a lonely figure casting itself into the ocean. None of it was conclusive, even enhanced as far as state-of-the-art optics allowed, but neither did any of it provide anything approaching a useful lead.

They had a manhunt on their hands, and nowhere to start.