Black Man / Thirteen

Voices came through the finger-thin wall, bassy with resonance but otherwise clear. Soundproofing on ’fab shells was pretty good these days, but if you wanted the same for interior partitioning, it cost. Not the sort of thing GH were going to provide at base; you’d have to buy the upgrade, and whoever lived here, Gaby or Gray, obviously hadn’t. Carl heard the woman’s accented English again, and then another voice he knew from filed audio playback.

“You stupid fucking bitch, why’d you come here?”

“I, you,” Her voice stumbled with hurt. “To warn you.”

“Yeah, and he’ll be right fucking behind you!”

A flat crack, open hand across her face. Carl caught the sudden jump of her breath through the wall, nothing more. She was tough, or used to this, or both. He eased down the door handle, cracked the door, and peered through. A big form jerked across his sliver of vision. An upthrown arm, gesturing, there and gone too fast to see if there was a weapon in the hand or not. Carl reached under his jacket for the Haag pistol. Something weighty went over with a thump in the next room.

“He’s probably tracking you right now, probably let you go so he could do it. You empty-headed cunt, you’ve—”

Now.

Carl threw the door open and found himself facing the two of them across a tiny living room laid with brightly colored rugs. Gray was half turned away, looming over a flinching Gaby, who had backed up and knocked over a tall potted plant by the front door. The reddened handprint was still visible on her face where he’d slapped her. More plants around the room, cheap painted ceramics and Pachamama icons on shelves, a small statue of some saint or other on a shelf, and a Spanish prayer in a frame on one wall. They were in Gaby’s house.

He pitched his voice hard and calm.

“That’s it, Frank. Game over.”

Gray turned slowly, deliberately and, fuck, yes, he had a weapon, a big black ca

It didn’t help when Gray smiled at him.

“Hello there, UN man.”

Carl nodded. “Put the gun down, Frank. It’s over.”

Gray frowned as if seriously considering it. “Who sent you? Jesusland?”

“Brussels. Put the gun down, Frank.”

But the other man didn’t move at all. He could have been a holoshot on pause. Even the frown stayed on his face. Maybe deepened a little, as if Gray was trying to work out how the hell it had all come to this. “I know you, don’t I,” he said suddenly. “Marceau, right? The lottery guy?”

Keep him talking.

“Close. It’s Marsalis. I like the new face.”

“Do you?” The Smith still hung loose in his grip, arm at his side. Carl wondered if Gray was meshed yet. It’d make a difference to his speed if he was, but that wasn’t the real problem. The real problem was the difference it’d make to Gray’s attitude. “Try to fit in, you know. Deru kui wa utareru.”

“I don’t think so.”

“No?” And the slow, alarming smile Carl had hoped he wouldn’t see.

“You were never going to get hammered down, Frank. None of us does, that’s our problem. And that’s an appalling Japanese accent. Want my advice, you’d be better off delivering your folk wisdom in English.”

“I don’t.” The smile became a grin. He was going, sliding into the crack. “Want your advice, that is.”

“Why don’t you put the gun down, Frank?”

“You want a fucking list?”

“Frank.” Carl stayed absolutely still. “Look at my hand. That’s a Haag pistol. Even if you get me, I don’t have to do more than scratch you on the way down. It is over. Why don’t you try to salvage something?”

“Like you have, you mean?” Gray shook his head. “I’m nobody’s puppy, UN man.”

“Oh grow up, Frank.” The sudden snap of the anger in his own voice was a surprise. “We’re all somebody’s puppy. You want to get dead, go right fucking ahead and make me do it. They pay me just the same.”

Gray tautened visibly. “Yeah, I’ll bet they fucking do.”

Carl got a grip on his own feelings. He made a slow, damping motion with his free hand. “Look—”

“Look, nothing.” A mirthless grin. “I know my score. Three Euro-cops, couple of Jesusland state troopers. You think I don’t know what that means?”

“It’s Brussels, man. They got jurisdiction. You don’t have to die. They’ll put you away, but—”

“Yeah, they’ll put me away. You ever spend time in the tract?”

“No. But it can’t be a lot worse than Mars, and you were going there anyway.”

Gray shook his head. “Wrong. On Mars, I’ll be free.”

“That’s not what it’s like, Frank.”

Gaby ran at him, screaming.

There wasn’t a lot of space to cross, and she’d come more than halfway, hands up, fingers splayed like talons, when he shot her. The Haag gun made a deep cough, and the slug caught her somewhere high in the right shoulder. It spun her completely around and knocked her into Gray, who was already raising the Smith. He got off a single shot, a sprung-sounding boom in the tiny room, and the wall blew apart at Carl’s left ear. Deafened, stung in the face and side of the head with impact fragments, Carl threw himself clumsily sideways and put four slugs into the other man. Gray staggered backward like a boxer taking heavy blows, hit the far wall, and thumped down into a sitting position on the floor. The Smith was still in his hand. He stared up at Carl for a moment, and Carl, moving cautiously closer, shot him twice again in the chest. Then he watched carefully, gun still leveled, until the life dimmed out of Gray’s eyes.

Biotech account—closed.

On the floor, Gaby tried to prop herself up and slipped on some of her own blood. The wound in her shoulder was leaking copiously down her arm and onto the gaily colored rug under her. Haag shells were designed to stay in the body—the wall behind Gray was pristine—but they made a lot of mess going in. She looked up at him, making a tiny panicked grunting in the back of her throat over and over.

He shook his head.

“I’ll go and get some help,” he said, in Quechua.

He stepped past her to the front door and opened it.

Then, in the flood of light from outside, he swiveled quietly and shot her once more, through the back of the head.

CHAPTER 2

They arrested him, of course.

Drawn by the gunfire, a squad of body-armored camp security came scuttling up the street, clinging to the cover of building edges and stopped vehicles like so many man-size beetles. Sunlight gleamed on their dull blue chest carapaces and the tops of their helmets, glinted off the barrels of the short, blunt assault rifles they carried. They were as silent as beetles, too—in all probability, their gh-stamped riot gear and weaponry came with an induction mike and coms link package. He imagined it from their point of view. Hushed, shocked voices on the wire. Goggle-eyed vision.

They found Carl seated cross-legged on the steps up to the prefab’s front door, hands offered outward, palms up. It was a tanindo meditation stance, one he’d learned from Sutherland, but he was anything but meditative. The effects of the mesh were ebbing now, and the pain from his injured side was begi