Black Man (6 page)

Total-body awareness, right, Sarge.

He summoned a grin. Didn’t think he’d broken anything. Looking up, he figured it for not much more than a three-meter drop.

He blew a hard, chuckled breath of relief into the mask filter. Completed his expletive quietly.

“Fuck.”

Point?
Command came through, yeah,
finally
fucking concerned now.
Report your status. Are you injured?

“I’m fine.” He propped himself up on one arm, squinted around in the gloom and snapped on the helmet light. “Just took a digger. Nothing to—”

The edge of the beam clipped something that didn’t make any sense. His head jerked around, the beam hit full on what he’d seen—

“Ah,
fuck
man, you gotta be—”

And suddenly, with the flood of disbelieving comprehension, he gagged, vomit flooding up and into the mask, burning his nose and throat, as he saw for the first time exactly what the soft thing was that had broken his fall.

Sevgi Ertekin awoke to the curious conviction that it was raining in dirty gray sheets all over the city.

In June?

She blinked. Somewhere outside the open window of the apartment, she heard a siren calling her.

Intimate and nostalgic as the sound of the
ezan
she still missed from the old neighborhood, but freighted with an adrenaline significance the prayer call would never match. Rusted professional reflex surfaced in her, then rolled over and sank as memory came aboard. Not her call anymore. In any case, the melancholy caught-breath cry of the cop car, wherever it was, was distant. Noises of commerce from the street market six floors below almost drowned it out. There was shouting, mostly good-humored, and music from stall-mounted sound systems, frenetic neo-arabesque that she was in no mood for currently.

The day had started without her.

Against her own better judgment, she turned over to face the window. Glare from the sun hit her in the face and drove her to squinting. The varipolara drapes billowed in the breeze from outside, incandescent with morning light. It appeared she’d forgotten to remote them down to opaque again. An empty bottle of Jameson’s was partly hidden where the curtain hem brushed the floor, someone—
someone, yeah, right, Sev, who would that be?
—had rolled it away across the polished wooden boards of the living room when it had nothing left to offer. The same living room where she’d apparently slept fully clothed on the couch. A moment’s groggy reflection brought in corroborative memory. She’d sat there after the party broke up, and she’d killed the rest of the bottle. Vague recollection of talking quietly to herself, the smoky warmth of the whiskey as it went down. She’d been thinking all the time, she’d just have one more, she’d just have one more, then she’d get
up and—She hadn’t gotten up. She’d passed out.

This is new, Sev. Usually, you make it to a bed.

She made a convulsive effort and heaved herself fully into a sitting position, then wished she hadn’t moved quite so rapidly. The contents of her head seemed to shift on some kind of internal stalk. A long wave of nausea rolled through her, and her clothing felt suddenly like restraints. She’d lost her boots at some point—they were keeled over on opposite sides of the room, about as far apart as the dimensions allowed—but shirt and pants remained. She had a vague memory of rolling hilariously about on her back after everyone was gone, trying to tug off the boots and then the socks. In this at least, it seemed she’d succeeded, but obviously the rest had defeated her.

And now the shirt was rucked up and bunched under her arms, and her profiler cups had peeled and worked loose from her breasts as she tossed and turned. One seemed to have ended up in her armpit; the other was gone altogether. Some way below her waist, her pants had somehow twisted about until they were no longer loose; her guts were similarly tight. Her bladder was uncomfortably full, and her head was settling to a steady throb.

And it’s raining.

She looked up, and a sudden, raw anger took hold as she traced the low hissing to its real source. In one corner of the room, the ancient JVC entertainment deck was still on. Whatever chip was in had played to its conclusion, and the temperamental default system had failed to return to bluescreen. The monitor showed a snowdance of static instead and the gentle hiss of it filled up the base of hearing, below the sounds of the city outside. Filled up everything like—Her mouth tightened. She knew what chip she’d been watching. She couldn’t remember, but she knew.

It’s not
fucking
raining, all right
.

She lurched to her feet and stabbed the deck to silence. For a moment then she stood in her apartment as if it weren’t her own, as if she’d broken in to steal something. She felt the steady flog of her pulse in her throat and she knew she was going to cry.

She shook her head instead, violently, trading the tears for an intense, sonar-pulsing pain. Stumbled through the bedroom to the en suite, fingers pressing to the ache. There was a plastic bottle of generic headache pills on the shelf there, and beside it a foil of syn. Or more precisely, k37 synadrive—military-issue superfunction capsules, her share of a black-market trickle into NYPD way back when and several times the strength of anything the street liked to call syn. She’d used the caps a handful of times before and found them scarily effective—they stimulated synaptic response and physical coordination, sidelined pretty much everything else, and they did it fast. Sevgi wavered for a moment, realized she had things to do today, even if she couldn’t remember right now exactly what they were.

Whole fucking city self-medicates these days anyway, Sev. Get over it.

She pressed a couple of the milissue capsules out of the foil and was about to dry-swallow them when a fragment of peripheral vision caught up with her.

She strode back into the bedroom.

“Hey.”

The girl in the bed couldn’t have been much more than eighteen or nineteen. Blinking awake, she seemed even younger, but the body beneath the single sheet was too full for the waif-like look. She sat up, and the sheet slipped off improbably thrusting breasts. From the way they moved, it was a subcute muscle web, not implants, that was pulling the trick. Pricey work for someone that young. Sevgi made her for someone’s trophy date, the whole fake-bonobo thing, but was too hungover to rack her head for faces from the party. Maybe whoever brought her had gotten too wasted to remember all his accessories when he went home.

“Who told you you could sleep in here?”

The girl blinked again. “You did.”

“Oh.” Sevgi’s anger crumpled. She rode out another wave of nausea and swallowed. “Well, get your stuff together and go home. Party’s over.”

She headed back to the bathroom, closed the door carefully, and then, as if to emphasize her own last words, hooked over and vomited into the toilet.

When she was sure she could hold them down, she took the k37 slugs with a glass of water and then propped herself under the warm drizzle of the shower while she waited for the effects to kick in. It didn’t take long. The tweaked chemistry in the drug made for rapid uptake as well as retained clarity, and the lack of anything else in her stomach sped the process even more. The throbbing in her head began to subside. She got off the tiled wall and groped for the gel, started gingerly on her scalp with it. The soaked and matted mass of her hair collapsed into silky submission, and the foam from the gel ran down her body in clumped suds. It was like shedding five-day-old clothes. She felt new strength and focus stealing through her like a fresh skeleton. When she stepped dripping out of the shower ten minutes later, the pain was wrapped away in chemical gauze and a spiky, clear-sighted brilliance had taken its place.

Which was a mixed blessing. Drying herself in the mirror, she saw the weight that was gathering on her haunches and grimaced. She hadn’t been inside a gym in months, and her home-based Cassie Rogers AstroTone—
as used by real MarsTrip personnel!!
—program was settling into oblivion like a deflating circus tent. The incriminating evidence of the neglect was right there. And you couldn’t take milissue slugs to make it go away like you could with pain. The ludicrously perfect flanks of the girl in her bed flitted through her mind. The jutting designer chest. She looked at the swell of her own breasts, gathered low on her ribs and tilting away to the sides.

Ah fuck it, you’re in your thirties now, Sevgi. Not trying to impress the boys at
Bosphorus Bridge
anymore, are we. Give it a rest. Anyway, you’re due, that always makes it worse
.

Her hair was already settling back into its habitually untidy black bell as it dried out. She took a couple of swipes at it with a brush, then gave up in exasperation. In the mirror, her largely Arab ancestry glowered back at her: cheekbones high and wide, face hawk-nosed and full-lipped, set with heavy-lidded amber flake eyes. Ethan had once said there was something tigerish in her face, but Sevgi, sharp from the syn and not yet made up, suspected that today she looked more like a disgruntled crow. The idea dragged a grin to the surface and she made cawing noises at herself in the mirror. Dumped the towel and went to get dressed. Discovered a desire for coffee.

The kitchen, predictably, looked like a war zone. Every available counter was piled with used dishes.

Sevgi tracked the party dishes through the debris—dark green remnants like tiny rags where the plates had held stuffed vine leaves, brittle fragments of
sigara börek
pastry, eggplant and tomato in oil gone cold, half a
lahmacun
left upside down so that it looked like a stiffly dried-out washcloth. In the sink, a small turret of stacked pans reared drunkenly out at her like some robot jack-in-the-box. Efes Export bottles were gathered in squat, orderly rows along one wall on the floor. Their slightly sour breath rose up to fill the kitchen space.

Good party.

A few of her departing guests had burbled it at her as she let them out. An abrupt avalanche of memory confirmed it, a tangle of friends throughout the apartment, sprawled on sofas and beanbags, food and drink and gesturing with mouths full, comfortable hilarity. It
had
been a good party.

Yeah—pity you had to murder that bottle of Irish afterward.

Why was that, Sev?

She felt how her face twitched and knew her eyes had gone flat and hard with the feeling as it rolled across her.

You know why.

The syn came on behind the thought, spiky and bright. She had a sudden insight into how easy it would be to kill someone in this state of mind.

The phone spoke, soft and reasonable, like biting into cotton wool.

“I have registered contact Tom Norton on the line. Will you accept the call?”

Recollection of what she had to do that day fell on her like a brick.

She groaned and went to fetch the rest of the painkillers.

The first wrong thing was the car.

Norton usually ran a ludicrous half acre of antique Cadillac soft-top with a front grille like a sneer and a hood you could have sunbathed on. He was grin—proud of the fucking thing, too, which was odd given its history. Built in some Alabama sweatshop before Norton was born, it was a vehicle he’d have been summarily arrested for driving in New York if he hadn’t paid almost double the auction price to have the original IC engine ripped out and replaced with the magdrive from a discontinued line of Japanese powerboats. He’d blown yet another month’s wages on having it polymered from snout to tail, immortalizing the catalog of scrapes and dents it had collected during its previous life out in Jesusland.

Sevgi couldn’t get him to see that it was practically a metaphor for the idiocies of the past it came from.

Today, in an abrupt spike of syn insight, she realized it was the kind of car Ethan would have loved to own, and that was why this aberration in Norton’s otherwise flawless Manhattan male urbanity drove her time and again to a silent, waspish anger.

Today he wasn’t driving it.

Instead, as she let herself out onto the street—still settling a grabbed-at-random tailored summer jacket onto her shoulders—he unfolded from the backseat of a dark blue autodrive teardrop that was recognizably from the COLIN pool. He stood there looking as smooth and self-contained as the vehicle he’d stepped out of, a poem in groomed competence. The filaments of gray in his close-cropped hair glinted in the sun; the tanned future-presidential-candidate Caucasian features that he swore were his own crinkled around pale blue eyes.

He gave her a trademark slanted grin.

“Morning, Sev. Rise and shine.”

“Yeah, right.”

“What time’d you wind it up in the end?” He’d gone home well before midnight, chemically unimpaired as far as Sevgi could remember.

“Don’t recall. Late.”

She pushed past him and dumped herself in the car, slid over to let him in beside her. The door hinged down and the teardrop pulled smoothly away, cornered into West 118th, and kept going. Traffic surged around them. They’d cruised four blocks before Sevgi woke up to the direction and the second jarring nail in the day’s expected course. She glanced across at Norton.

“What’s the matter, you leave something at the office?”

“Not going to the office, Sev.”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought we agreed to yesterday. So why are we headed east?”

Norton grinned again. “Not going out to Kaku, either. Change of plans. No freefall for you today.”

The relief that rolled through her at the news felt like sun on her skin, suddenly warming and way ahead of any accompanying curiosity. She really hadn’t been looking forward to the gut-swooping elevator ride up the Kaku nanorack or the creeping around weightless when they got to the top. They had drugs to take the sting out of both experiences at the ’rack facility, but she wasn’t at all sure they’d mix well with the syn already coursing through her system. And the thought of starting an investigation in this state—with her abused brain and belly bleating protest at the zero g and the Earth rolling past somewhere sickeningly far below—already had her palms lightly greased with sweat.

“Right. So you want to tell me where we
are
going?”

“Sure. JFK suborb terminal. Got the eleven o’clock shuttle to SFO.”

Sevgi sat up. “What happened,
Horkan’s Pride
overshoot the docking slot?”

“You could say that.” Norton’s tone was dry. “Overshot Kaku, overshot Sagan, splashed down about a hundred klicks off the California coast.”

“
Splashed down?
They’re not supposed to land those things.”

“Tell me about it. From what I hear, only the main crew section made it down in one piece. The rest is wreckage along a line from somewhere in Utah to the coast or burned up on reentry. The Rim authorities are having what’s left towed back to the Bay Area, where you and I will crack it open and dazzle them all with our lucid analysis of
just what the fuck went wrong
. Those are Nicholson’s words, by the way, not mine.”

“Yeah, I guessed.” Norton spoke four-letter words the way a miser spends wafers—when he was utterly inescapably driven to it or when they belonged to someone else. It seemed to be a linguistic rather than a moral quirk, though, because he evinced no apparent embarrassment or distaste when he quoted other people like this, or when Sevgi swore, which was a lot of the time these days.

“So how come you didn’t phone me earlier with this shit?”

“Believe me, I tried. You weren’t answering.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, so I covered for you with Nicholson, if that’s what you were wondering. Said you were somewhere downtown chasing leads from the Spring Street bust, you were going to meet me at the terminal.”

Sevgi nodded to herself. “Thanks, Tom. I owe you one.”

She owed him more than one, quite a lot more over the last two years, but neither of them would ever acknowledge it. The debt lay unspoken between them, like complicity, like family. And Nicholson, anyway, they both agreed was an asshole.

“You think any of them are still alive?” Norton wondered.

Sevgi stared out of the window at the traffic, marshaling facts from the file. “
Horkan’s Pride
is a five series. They built them to survive crash-landing at the Mars end, and there aren’t any oceans there to do it in.”

“Yeah, but that’s a lot less gravity to worry about on the way down.”

An NYPD teardrop cruised up alongside them, panels at opaque except for the driver’s window, which was cranked back. A young cop up front had the system at manual and was steering idly with one tanned arm leaning on the sill. She was talking to someone, but Sevgi couldn’t make out if it was another occupant of the car or an audio hookup. Under the peak of her summer-weight weblar cap, she looked casually competent and engaged. Memory twinged, and Sevgi found herself wondering about Hulya. She really ought to get back in touch sometime, see what Hulya was doing these days, see if she took the sergeant’s exam again, if she was still hauling her tight, man-magnet ass out to Bosphorus Bridge every Saturday night. Sit down somewhere for a good
do-you-remember-when
session, maybe crack a case of Efes.

At the thought of beer and the smell it had left in her kitchen, Sevgi’s stomach turned abruptly over. She shunted the nostalgia hastily aside. The NYPD car switched lanes and faded in the traffic. Sevgi took an experimental stab at some engaged competence of her own.

“Cryocap fluid should absorb a lot of the impact shock,” she said slowly. “And the fact it came down in one piece at all means it was some kind of controlled reentry, right?”

“Some kind of.”

“Did we get any more out of the datahead before this happened?”

Norton shook his head. “Same request for standby at Kaku, same interval broadcast. Nothing new.”

“Great. Fucking ghost ship to the last.”

Norton lifted hands with fingers draped wide and low, made phantasmal noises to match. Sevgi curled a grin under control.

“It’s not fucking funny, Tom. Beats me why the Rim skycops didn’t just vaporize it soon as it crossed the divide. It wouldn’t be the first time those day-rate morons turned glitched air traffic into confetti when it didn’t answer nicely.”

“Maybe they were concerned about loss of life,” said Norton, with a straight face.

“Yeah.”

“Now, I hope you’re not planning to bring that attitude with you, young lady. The locals probably won’t be overfriendly as it is. This is our tin can that fell out of the sky on them.”

She shrugged. “They pay COLIN taxes just like the rest of us. It’s their tin can, too.”

“Yeah, but we’re the ones supposed to make sure this kind of thing doesn’t happen. That’s
why
they pay their taxes.”

“Have you talked to anyone at their end yet?”

Norton shook his head. “No one human. I tried to hook whoever caught the case just before I left. Got the machine. Standard phone interface. It said we’ll be collected at the airport by RimSec. Two of their plainclothes guys, Rovayo and Coyle.”

“You get ID?”

Norton tapped the breast of his jacket. “Hardcopy download. Want to see it?”

“Might as well.”

The Rim cops were a balanced sex and eth couple. Under the label det. a. rovayo, a dark young Afro-Hispanic woman stared out of her photo with jaw set and mouth thinned, trying rather obviously and without much success to beat a full-lipped, hazel-eyed beauty. Belying the severity of her expression, her hair coiled thick and longer than NYPD would have let her get away with. Below her on the same printout, DET. r. coyle glowered up, blunt-featured, middle-aged, Caucasian. His hair was shot with gray and shaved almost militarily short. The image was head and shoulders only, but it gave the impression of size and impatient force.

Sevgi shrugged.

“We’ll see,” she said.

They saw.

Coyle and Rovayo met them off the suborb at SFO with perfunctory greetings and an iris scan. Standard procedure, they were told. Norton shot a warning glance at Sevgi, who was visibly fuming. This wasn’t how visiting cops would have been treated on arrival in New York. Here, it was hard to tell if they were being snubbed or not; Coyle, every bit as big and laconic as his holoshot had suggested, showed them brief ID and did the introductory honors. Rovayo took it from there. She leaned in and spread their eyelids with warm, slightly callused fingers, applied the scanner, and then stepped back. It was all done with a detached competence, and among the streams of arriving passengers it had the intimate flavor of a European kiss on the cheek. Norton seemed to enjoy it, anyway. Rovayo ignored his smile, glanced at the green light the machine had given them, and put the scanner away in the shoulder bag she carried.

Coyle nodded toward a bank of elevators at the end of the arrivals hall.

“This way,” he said economically. “We got the smart chopper.”

They rode up in silence, hooked a walkway across the glass-bubbled, white-girder-braced upper levels of the building, then another elevator that spilled them out onto a concrete apron where a sleek red-and-white autocopter sat twitching its rotors. Eastward, the bay glimmered silvery gray in the late-afternoon sun. A ruffling wind took the heat out of the day.

“So you guys are on the case?” Norton tried as they clambered aboard.

Coyle offered him an impassive glance. “Whole fucking force is on this case,” he grunted and tugged the hatch closed. “Badge coding 2347. Flight as filed. Let’s go.”

“Thank you. Please take your seats.”

The autocopter had Asia Badawi’s voice, low and honey-coated, unmistakable even from the half a dozen syllables uttered. Sevgi vaguely remembered reading, in some mindless magazine-space moment while she waited to see the lawyers, an article about the software contract Badawi had signed with Lockheed. Big PR smiles and clasps all around, outraged fans protest. Yawn,
flick. Would you like to
come through now, Ms. Ertekin?
The rotors cranked in earnest, engine murmur rose to a dim, soundproofed crescendo on the other side of the window, and they unstuck from the pad. They settled into seats. The autocopter lifted, tilted, and whirled them out over the bay.

Sevgi made an effort. “You get anything from the skin yet?”

“Scanning crew are going over the hull now.” The cabin had facing seats and Coyle was opposite her, but he was staring out of the window as he spoke. “We’ll have a full virtual up and running by this evening.”

“That’s fast work,” said Norton, though it wasn’t really.

Rovayo looked at him. “They’ve been busy inside, that kind of took priority.”

An eyeblink silence.

Sevgi exchanged a glance with Norton.

“Inside?” she asked, dangerously polite. “You’ve already cracked the hatches?”

A knowing grin went back and forth between the two Rim cops. Sevgi, fed up with being the least informed person in the room all day, felt her temper start to fray.

“
Horkan’s Pride
is COLIN’s property,” she said thinly. “If you’ve tampered with—”

“Put your cuffs away, Agent Ertekin,” said Coyle. “Time the coastals got out to your
property,
someone aboard had already blown the hatches out. From the inside. Quarantine seal’s long gone.”

That’s not possible
. Narrowly, she managed to stop herself from saying it. Instead she asked: “Are the cryocaps breached?”

Coyle eyed her speculatively. “It’s really better if you wait and see for yourself.”

The autocopter banked about, and Sevgi leaned forward to peer out the window. Below them in the bay, Rim Security’s Alcatraz station rose off its island base in pale gray platforms and piers. On the southern shoreline, a floating dry-dock complex was laid out like a schematic, clean lines and spaces, people reduced to dots and vehicles to toys. The bulk of the
Horkan’s Pride
crew section showed up clearly in the center dock. Even with the external structures ripped away, even scorched and scarred by the reentry, it leapt out at her like a familiar face in a group photo. She’d seen sister ships in the orbital yards above the Kaku nanorack from time to time, and she’d had archive footage of
Horkan’s Pride
itself filed on her laptop ever since the ship stopped talking to COLIN Control. In the frequent chunks of waiting room time at the lawyers’ offices, in the sleepless still of the nights she didn’t drink, she’d stared at
the detail until her eyes ached.
A good detective eats, sleeps, and breathes the details,
Larry Kasabian had once told her.
That’s how you catch the bad guys
. The habit stuck. She knew the internal architecture of the vessel so well, she could have walked it from end to end blindfolded. She had the hardware and software specs by heart. The names of the cryocapped crew were as familiar as product brands she habitually shopped for, and biographical detail from each popped into her head unbidden whenever she visualized one of their faces.

It’s really better if you wait and see for yourself.