Black Man / Thirteen

“Local COLIN liaison talked them out of it, apparently.”

“Yeah?” Marsalis raised an eyebrow.

“Yes. Relations with the Rim are pretty good these days. It’s not like down here. We negotiated a direct AI interface last year, high-level trust protocols, minimal buffering. The Sagan n-dji

“Especially Merrin.”

She said nothing. The sporadic chanting at the gate reached them between gusts of wind coming off the ocean. After a couple of seconds, Marsalis started away from her in the direction of the water. He didn’t speak or look back. It took her his first three steps to understand he’d been waiting for her to continue the conversation, and now that she hadn’t he was leaving.

“Where are you going?” It came out a lot less casually than she would have liked.

He stopped and turned back to her. “Why?” he asked gravely. “Am I in some kind of protective custody?”

Fuck it. “No, it’s just.” She gestured awkwardly. “In case I need to find you later, in a hurry.”

He weighed it, the way he had the comment about her work for WP.

“I’m going for another walk on the beach,” he said. “Want to come?”

“Ah…no.” She hesitated. He was waiting. “I need to go over the Montes crime scene while we’ve got the time. See if there’s anything that jumps out.”

“Is that likely?”

“No, but you never know. I’ve been looking at Merrin’s handiwork for the last four months, Angeline PD haven’t. There might be something.”

“No direct data interface there, then?”

“No. Technically, they’re not part of RimSec. It’s the Freeport legislation, Angeline PD have autonomy, they work pretty much like any city police department over in the Republic.”

“And you’re not sharing what you’ve got on this with any of those guys?”

“No. I told you, we don’t want a panic on our hands.” She threw out a weary signpost arm toward the chanting. “Listen to that. How do you think people like that are going to react to the news that there’s a ca

“Eric Sundersen?” A shrug. “Sure. I spent a couple of months looking for him last year, just like everybody else.”

“Then you’ll remember what it was like. Seven weeks, and we nearly had martial law declared in five states of the Republic. Media screaming off the screen about clone monsters. Armed mobs trying to break into the tract at Cimarron and slaughter everyone there. Emergency measures all along the Rim frontier. If Sundersen hadn’t broken cover when he did, it would have been Zhang fever all over again. And all he did was escape. He hadn’t killed anybody. With this one, the mobs would go fucking crazy.”

“Yeah, mobs. You humans have that trick down, don’t you.”

Sevgi ignored the jibe.

“We just don’t want another bloodbath,” she said doggedly. “We make local police aware that we have an interest, and we give them what help we can. But we can’t afford anyone to know the whole picture.”

He nodded. His walk on the beach seemed forgotten. “So what picture are they getting?”

“The cover story in the Republic is Marstech. A heist gang and a distribution network, squabbling over product.” The words tasted stale on her tongue, as concocted and unconvincing as some corporate mission statement. She forced down a grimace and pressed on. “With scumbags like Eddie Tanaka that’s been easy to sell. Elsewhere, when the victim’s respectable, we’re playing the collateral damage angle. I

“Sounds a little creaky. What are you doing about the genetic trace?”

“Taking it off their hands. The COLIN n-dji

“Most cases?”

“Yeah, been a couple of medical examiners we’ve had to lean on, get them to shut up.” She looked away. “It isn’t hard to do that with COLIN authority.”

“No, I don’t imagine it is.”

She could feel herself flush a little. “Look, I have to get over to the upload building. You want to hit the beach, that’s fine.”

“No, it’s okay. I’ll walk with you.”

She gave him a sharp look. He looked i

“May as well look at this Montes myself,” he said. “Start earning my keep.”

So they crossed the apron from the observation tower together, heading for the main complex. There was some heat in the day now, and Sevgi’s own slightly stale scent pricked in her nostrils. She began to wish she’d had a shower before she tumbled out of the hospitality suite and into action.

“So, you were saying,” Marsalis prompted. “The Republic don’t know this is linked to Horkan’s Pride.”

“No. The media coverage said there were no survivors. We let them have the ca

“Ah.”

“Yeah.” Sevgi curled her lip. “Ca

“Handy.”

She shrugged. “Standard. American media’s been taking sensation over fact for better than a hundred years now, and Secession just loaded the trend. Anyway, it is a miracle Merrin survived the crash. I mean, he had to find some way to trick the systems into accepting him back into his cryocap, which is glitched to fuck so the cryogen protocol doesn’t work anymore. So he’s got to beat that, he’s got to persuade the cryocap to fill with gel anyway, to drown a live, unsedated body—”

“Not like he didn’t have the spare time to work it all out.”

“I know. But that’s just the start. He’s then got to lie there and let the system drown him, unsedated. He’s got to breathe the gel, unsedated, awake, without his lungs revolting, for a good twenty minutes while Horkan’s Pride programs its final approach, hits reentry, course-corrects, and comes down in the ocean.”

A freight loader bulked dinosaur-like on their right, blocking out the angle of the early-morning sun. Sevgi shivered a little as they stepped into the long shadow it cast. She looked across at Marsalis, almost accusingly.

“You want to think what that must have been like—locked in an upright coffin with that shit filling your nose and your mouth and your throat, pouring in and filling up your lungs, pressing in on your eyeballs, and all around you the whole ship feels like it’s shaking itself apart, maybe is shaking itself apart for all you know. Can you imagine what that would have felt like?”

“I’m trying not to,” he said mildly. “Do we know how he got ashore?”

She nodded. “First victim in the Bay Area, Ulysses Ward. You saw him on the map last night. Tailored microfauna magnate, he had culture farms all over the Marin County shoreline and a bunch of those tethered plankton trays about a hundred klicks off the coast. We don’t have the satellite footage to be sure, but it looks like he was out there doing maintenance when Horkan’s Pride came down. Got curious, got too close, got himself killed.”

“Or he went out there specifically to pick Merrin up.”

“Yeah, we thought of that, too. RimSec did an n-dji