Black Man (8 page)

“What if the system won’t let them refreeze?” Coyle wasn’t going to be shaken loose of what was apparently an endemic lack of faith in technology. Maybe, Sevgi thought sourly, he’d grown up in Jesusland and immigrated to the Rim.

Norton hesitated. “Statistically, that’s so close to impossible that—”

“Not impossible,” said Rovayo lazily. “Because, my memory serves me right, that happened to some poor motherfucker about seven, eight years back. Exactly that. Woke up and couldn’t get refrozen, had to sit out the whole voyage.”

“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, running
temporarily neck and neck, so to speak—could vary by a million or more klicks. COLIN transit launches took some account of these variations, but since the cycle worked itself out over several years, you couldn’t just wait around and send all your traffic at the short end. That semi-famous unscheduled wake-up guy eight or so years back had gotten lucky, hit somewhere near an opposition with the trajectory down well under the hundred million klicks.

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-djinn is down. But there’s got to be provision for a manual backup, right?”

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 cannibalism, isolation, probable insanity. Risking a splashdown at the end of it all. Plus hotwiring the crycocap, that’s got to carry some attendant risk, right? I mean, come on. How badly could you want to get
home free
?”

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?”

Norton nodded. “Works like this. If you launch a COLIN transport from Mars to Earth and something goes wrong, something that requires a rescue, then it’s only worth the Mars people coming out up to a certain point. After that point, the transport is so far along the trajectory it would make more sense to send help from the Earth end. Anyone wanting to get home would have to wait at least until the tipover point, otherwise it’s all for nothing. Mars rescue brings you back and you’re still stuck there, with whatever penalties COLIN chooses to enforce on top. You need the rescue to come from Earth, because that way, whatever else happens to you, you’ve at least made it home. They’re not going to waste the pay-load cost on sending you back again, just out of spite.”

“Just out of curiosity,” said Coyle. “What are those penalties you’re talking about? What do COLIN do to you if you step out of line on Mars?”

Norton shuttled another glance at Sevgi. She shrugged.

“It works the same as anywhere else,” Norton said with trained care. They’d all been drilled in acceptable presentation on this one, too. “There’s a suite of sanctions called Contractual Constraint, but it’s what you’d expect, the usual stuff. Financial penalties set against your contract, incarceration in some serious cases. If you’re a short-timer, your jail time gets added onto the contract length without compensation.

So if you’re homesick, it doesn’t pay to act up.”

“Yeah.” Rovayo cranked an eyebrow. “And if you do make it back to Earth? Unauthorized, I mean.”

Norton hesitated.

Sevgi said it for him. “That’s never been done before.”

And she wondered vaguely why she was smiling as she spoke. Cold, hard little smile. Ethan stood there in her memory and grinned back at her.

“Oho,” said Coyle.

“What,
never
?” Rovayo again. “In thirty years, this has never happened before?”

“Thirty-two years,” said Norton. “Over twice that if you count the original bubble crews back before the nanoforming really kicked in. Like Sevgi says, it’s a closed system. Very hard to beat.”

Coyle shook his head. “I still don’t get it. He could have called in a rescue from the Earth end. Okay, he’d maybe do some time, but Jesus fuck, he did the time anyway, out
there
. How much worse could white-collar jail time
be
than that?”

“But he wasn’t looking at just a white-collar sentence,” said Sevgi softly.

“Look.” Coyle wasn’t listening to her. He was still looking for somewhere to dump his anger. “What I still don’t get is this: why didn’t you people send out the rescue ship on spec as soon as the n-djinn went down?”

“Too fucking cheap is why,” muttered Rovayo.

“Because there wasn’t any point.” Sevgi said evenly. “
Horkan’s Pride
was coming home anyway. As far as we knew, the crew were unharmed.”

“Un-fucking-
harmed
?” Coyle again, disbelieving.

Norton stepped into the breach. “Yeah, I know how that sounds. But you’ve got to understand how this works. It was only the n-djinn that stopped talking to us. That’s happened before on the Mars run, we just don’t like to publicize the fact. We’ve had cases where the djinn goes offline temporarily, then blips back on a few days later. Sometimes they just die. We don’t really know why.”

He spanned an invisible cube with both hands, chopped downward. Sevgi looked elsewhere, face kept carefully immobile.

“The point is, it doesn’t matter that much. The ship will run fine on automated modular systems. Think of the n-djinn as the captain of a ship. If the captain on one of those Pacific factory rafts dies, you don’t have to send out a salvage vessel to bring the raft into port, do you?” A self-deprecatory smile at the rhetorical question. “Same thing with
Horkan’s Pride
. Losing the n-djinn didn’t affect the ship’s fail-safe protocols. Mars and Earth traffic control were both still getting the standard green lights from
Horkan’s Pride
. Shipboard atmosphere and rotational gravity constant, no hull breaches, cryocap systems all online, trajectory uncompromised, pilot systems active. The baseline machines were all still working, it’s just the ship itself that wouldn’t talk to us.”

Rovayo shook her head. “And the fact that this
hijo de puta
was taking people out of the cryocaps and cutting them up, that didn’t register anywhere?”

“No,” admitted Norton tiredly. “No, it didn’t.”

“Without the djinn, there was no way to know what was going on.” Sevgi droned on, partly bored, partly trying to bury her own grim conviction that Rovayo had guessed right about COLIN’s real motives.

Midtrajectory retrieval was still a mind-numbingly expensive call for any flight project manager to make.

“The baseline system is exactly what it sounds like. It tells us if something malfunctions. There was no visible malfunction, and since the whole crew was supposed to be in cryocap, that meant—logically—there was no way for them to be harmed. We had no way of knowing any different. And the ship was on course. In a situation like that, you wait. That’s how spaceflight works.”

Rovayo took the tutorial edge on the last comment without blinking.

“Yeah? Well, if the ship wasn’t talking to you, how was it going to dock at the nanorack?”

Norton spread his hands. “Same answer. Autonomic engagement. The docking facility takes over from the pilot systems on approach. We had no reason to think that wouldn’t happen.”

“Seems to me,” said Coyle, “whoever did this knew your systems inside out.”

“Yes, they did.”
And our miserable cost-cutting souls, too
. Sevgi shook off the thought. Time to get back on track. “They knew our systems, because they’d studied them and they were highly skilled at planning an intrusion into those systems, which means a high degree of raw intelligence and insurgency training. And they were utterly committed to their own survival above and beyond any other concern, which takes an extreme degree of strength and mental discipline. And yet this same person was so terrified of being registered on arrival that they did
this
to avoid it.”