Thirteen

  “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 cannibal thirteen loose in North America, murdering selected citizens at his leisure. Remember Sundersen?”

  “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. Innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire, or cases of mistaken identity.”

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

  “Taking it off their hands. The COLIN n-djinns have access to police datastacks right across North America; they fish out anything that fits the profile. That’s usually long before Forensics get around to running a gene scan on the crime scene traces, so in most cases we get there before anybody knows there’s been a thirteen at the scene.”

  “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 innocently back.

  “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 cannibalism angle, and told them anybody still alive would have been killed on impact. We let them have pictures.”

  “Ah.”

  “Yeah.” Sevgi curled her lip. “Cannibal Ghost Ship Horror—click for further images. Worked like a dream, they ran with it, splashed it across every site on the net. They completely forgot to do any investigative journalism.”

  “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-djinn search, couldn’t find any links between Ward and Merrin. We went back forty years. Unless they knew each other in a previous life, this is exactly what it looks like—a bad-luck coincidence.”

  “How’d he kill him?”

  “Cressi sharkpunch. You ever see anyone killed with one of those things?” Sevgi gestured graphically. “Designed to stop a great white shark through ten meters of water, it’s practically a handheld disintegrator. Blew Ward’s belly out all over the surrounding furniture. Him plus another employee name of Emil Nocera, all in the same shot.”

  “Thanks for the ride.”

  “Right. CSI say there were another couple of employees around at the time, but they ran.”

  “Hard to blame them.”

  “Yeah, plus they were illegals. Apparently a lot of the casual labor up that way is. They see something, they’re not going to hang around and make witness statements. RimSec are looking, but they don’t hold out much hope.”

  “Do they know what this is about?”

  “RimSec do, but that’s as far as it’s gone. There’s no public knowledge, we can’t afford it, and neither can they. Things are bad enough between Jesusland and the Rim without word getting out that this guy’s treating their precious border security like a knee-high picket fence.”

  “But the Rim cops know he’s killing in the Republic as well?”

  “They’ve been apprised, yes.”

  “Nice of them to keep quiet about it for you.”

  “Well, like I said, there’s no love lost across the fencelines. And it looks bad if the high-powered high-tech Rim States couldn’t stop some psychotic killer crossing over and going on the rampage in the Republic. You can see how that’d play diplomatically.”

  “What price technology without God on your side?”

  “Right. Plus, if word got out that said psychotic killer is a, uh…”

  “A genetic monster?” he asked gently. “A twist?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “No. I guess you didn’t.”

  “The Republic are already handing their people a line of shit about how the Rim is just a craven appeasement system for the Chinese. And with the stories coming out of Ch
ina, the black lab escapees—” She shrugged again. “Well, you can see how that one’d play as well, right?”

  “Pretty much. Nothing like a good monster scare.”

  They cleared the shadow of the freight loader. Sevgi turned her head to beat the sudden glare of the sun and thought she caught a smile slipping across the black man’s lips. His gaze had rolled out to somewhere well beyond the gathering of buildings around the nanorack.

  “Something funny?”

  His attention reeled back in, but he didn’t look at her. “Not really.”

  She stopped.

  After a couple of paces, so did he, and turned to face her. “Something the matter?”

  “If you’ve got something to contribute,” she said evenly, “then I would like to hear it. This isn’t going to work unless you talk to me.”

  He looked at her for a long couple of moments. “It’s really not very important,” he said easily. “I guess you’d call it a resonance.”

  She stood where she was. “Resonance with what.”

  He sighed. “A resonance with monsters. Do you know what a pistaco is?”

  She dredged memory, pulled up something from a long-ago briefing on altiplano training camp crimes. “Yeah, it’s some sort of demon, right? Something the Indians believe in. Some sort of vampire?”

  “Close. Pistaco’s a white man with a long knife who comes at night and chops up Indians to get at their body fat. Most likely, it’s a cultural memory from the conquistadores and the Inquisition, because they certainly weren’t averse to a bit of dismemberment in the name of Gold and Jesus Christ. But these days, up on the altiplano they’ve got a new angle on the story.”

  “Which is what?”

  Marsalis grinned. She was appalled at how much it reminded her of Ethan, at how it reached inside and touched her in the place he used to.

  “These days,” he said, “the Andeans don’t believe the pistaco is the white man as such anymore. That’s gone. Still the same monster, still looks the same, but now the story they tell is, the pistaco’s something evil that the white man’s brought back.”

  He nodded toward the dark towering webbed architecture of the nanorack.

  “Brought back from Mars.”

  CHAPTER 15

  T he sweep and swoop of the codes took hold.

  Sevgi felt herself dislodged from current reality, turned away from it like a small child guided away from a TV screen by warm parental hands. The couches at COLIN Florida were clunky, thirty-year-old military surplus stock, fully enclosed and soundproofed, and now, in the deadened stillness they created, there was a low chiming that seemed to resonate deep in her guts. From long habit, she let herself home in on it. Gentle steerage to the new focus. Look at this, look at this. The colors above her seemed to mesh into significance just out of reach. The chiming was the beat of her heart, the shiver of blood along veins and arteries, a cellular awareness. The swirling ebbed and inked back, glaring out like antique celluloid film melting through. The standard desert format inked in.

  She looked around. Marsalis was not with her.

  “Good afternoon, ma’am.”

  The Freeport PD ’face was a handsome black patrolman in his early twenties, insignia winking in the jarringly heatless Arizona sun. The fabric of his short-sleeved uniform had a perfect, factory-fresh texture to it, and so did his flawless, airbrushed skin. Muscle roped his forearms and bulked out his shoulders. He might have stepped, Sevgi thought sourly, out of the early stages of a porn experia, the storyline section before the clothes came off. She guessed the intention was to inspire confidence and respect for the symbols of Angeline law enforcement, but all it did was put her on the edge of a giggle and make her slightly warm.

  Oh well, at least it isn’t another fucking body-perfect überbitch.

  More than slightly warm, in fact.

  “Uh, I’m waiting—”

  “For a colleague.” The ’face nodded. “He’s incoming, but it’s taking some time. May I see your authorization?”

  Sevgi lifted an open palm and watched as the skeins of bluish machine code fell out of it. They splashed on the ground with a faint crackling and disappeared into the dirt as if soaked up. Despite the color, it felt uncomfortably like watching herself bleed through a slashed wrist. At least, what she’d imagined it would when—

  Stop that.

  “Thank you, ma’am. You are cleared to proceed.” Ahead of her, the familiar adobe datahomes swam rapidly into existence. The ’face stepped aside to indicate Sevgi’s new status. “Your colleague also.”

  She hadn’t noticed. Beside her, Marsalis was shading in. Looking at him as he solidified, she suddenly lost all interest in the patrolman. The attraction was in the flaws, the lines in the face, the faint and flattened scar across his left hand that looked like a burn, the barely perceptible tangles of gray in the hair. The way his mouth crimped slightly to the right when he looked at the patrolman. The way he took up space as if blocking a doorway to somewhere. The way—

  She still wasn’t sure why he’d suddenly opted to join her in the virtuality.

  “You took your time,” she said, a little more harshly than she’d intended.

  He shrugged. “Blame the genes. Thirteens run high resistance to hypnotic technique. I knew some guys back in Osprey who had to be sedated before they could use a v-format at all. Shall we go have a look at Toni?”

  The ’face led them across the sand to the closest of the datahomes. primary crime scene hung in the air beside it in holographic blue. Unusually, the adobe structure had a door. The patrolman worked the black iron latch and pushed the raw wood surface inward. It opened incongruously onto a prissily decorated suburban front hall.

  “My name is Cranston,” said the ’face as it stood back to let them pass. “If you need departmental assistance, please call me. The victim is in the dining room. Second door on the left. Feel free to touch or move anything, but if you wish the changes to be saved, you’ll need to advise me.”

  They found Toni Montes sprawled on the dining room floor not far from the section of wall where her blood and brains were splashed. She’d rolled when she fell and landed on her side, head turned, displaying the soggy mess of the exit wound. Her limbs were a seemingly boneless tangle, her feet bare. The faintly shimmering white corpse outline seemed to isolate her from the surroundings of her home, as if preparatory to snipping her out of the picture. As they approached, supplementary data scrolled up over the body in neat holographic boxes. Tissue trauma, time of death. Probable causes of secondary injuries. Age, sex, race. Genetic salients.

  “I hate that shit,” said Sevgi, for something to say. “Fucking convenience culture, it just gets in the way of what you’re trying to see.”

  “You can probably disable it.”

  “Yeah.” She made no move to summon Cranston. “Back when I started on the force, NYPD ran trials on this option where you could get the corpse to talk to you.”

  “Jesus, whose fucked-up idea was that?” But it was said absently. Marsalis knelt by the body, brow creased.

  “I don’t know. Some datageek with too much time on his hands, looking for a creative edge. Rationale was, it was to prevent desensitizing. Supposed to bring back to you the fact that this was once a living, breathing human being.”

  “Right.” He took one of the dead woman’s hands, which had fallen cupped loosely upward, and lifted it gently. He seemed to be stroking her fingers.

  Sevgi crouched beside him. “Well, they already had the models where you could get the victim to reverse from moment of death, back up, and then walk through the probable sequence of events. Guess it wasn’t that much of a stretch.”

  He turned to look at her, face suddenly close. “Can we do that here?”

  “You want to?”

  Another shrug. “We’ve got time to kill, haven’t we?”

  “All right. Cranston?”

  The ’face shaded undramatically into being across the room from them, like a pre-mill
ennial photo Sevgi had once seen developed chemically at a seminar.

  “What can I do for you?”

  Sevgi got up and gestured. “Can you run the crime event model for us? Last few minutes only.”

  “No problem. You’ll need to come through to the front room; that’s where it seems to have started. I’ll engage the system now. Do you want sound?”

  Sevgi, who’d watched a lot of this sort of thing, shook her head.

  “No, just the motions.”

  “Then if you’ll follow me.”

  Unnervingly, the patrolman stepped directly through the wall. They left the body and took the more conventional route through the connecting door to the front room, where Cranston was waiting. As they came in, the sky outside the room’s window darkened abruptly to night and the drapes drew themselves partway closed like some cheap horror-flick effect. An unharmed edition of Toni Montes stood in for the ghost—she shaded back to life in the center of the room, feet still shod in mint-and-cream espadrilles that picked up the colors in her skirt and blouse. Her makeup was intact, and she looked impossibly composed.

  A pace away from her, the system penciled in the perpetrator.

  It was a black outline of a man, a figure with the smooth, characterless features and standardized body mass of an anatomical sketch, all done in shiny jet. But it breathed, and it swayed slightly, and it sprang at Toni Montes and hit her with a savage, looping backfist. The image of the woman flew silently backward, tripped, and fell on the couch. One espadrille came off, flipped ludicrously high, and landed on the other side of the room. The black figure went after Montes, seized her by the throat, and punched her in the face. She flopped and slumped. The other espadrille came off. She pushed herself away along the couch, stumbled toward upright while the black figure stood and watched with robot calm. When Montes got to her feet, it stepped in again and punched her high in the chest. She flew back into the drapes, rolled, staggered upright. She flailed with nails, got a backhand for her trouble that knocked her fully across the room. The edge of the opened door to the hall caught her in the back. This time she went down and stayed down.