Black Man (42 page)

Seen from the descending autocopter,
Bulgakov’s Cat
had the blunt, blocky look of a nighttime skyscraper chopped off across its base and floated lengthwise on the ocean. Lights festooned every segment of the factory raft’s structure, studded its aerials and dishes, marked out landing pads and open-air sports arenas along the upper levels. Carl picked out a baseball diamond, a soccer pitch, a scattering of basketball courts and softly underlit swimming pools, some half of which appeared to be in use. Like most of its floating sisters, the raft sold itself on being a twenty-four-hour city, a pulsing engine of production, employment, and leisure whose reactor-powered heart never missed a beat. The publicity specs said she was home to thirty thousand people, not including the tourists. Just looking down at her made Carl feel itchy and sociopathic.

In the next seat, Alicia Rovayo yawned cavernously and shot him a sour look over her turned-up jacket collar. “I can’t fucking believe I let you talk me into this.”

“You asked what I wanted to do.”

“Yeah.” She leaned across his lap to peer out of the cabin port. “Not quite what I had in mind at the time.”

The autocopter swung closer, made a courtesy circuit before touchdown so its decals could be read by sight and not just by machines. Carl picked out individual figures on a basketball court, shadowed forms plowing laps up and down in the tranquil, rippling lights of the pools.

“Think of it as an intuitive leap,” he said absently.

“I’m thinking of it as a paranoid fantasy outing. Which is exactly the way it’s going to look when I have to write up the chopper time. I told you, Donaldson and Kodo came down here yesterday and talked to these people. Got the interviews and the report on file. We’re wasting our time. Long flight for nothing.”

“Yeah, that’s something else you might want to think about.
Cat
there is still a couple of hundred klicks off optimum range for maintenance on Ward’s spread. How come they rushed up here to do it now instead of waiting until next week?”

“How the fuck would I know?” she grumbled. “Maybe if you’d accessed the file instead of insisting on coming down here personally, you’d already have an answer.”

“Yeah, I’d have an answer. I’d have whatever lie Daskeen Azul have decided to tell you to cover themselves. That’s not what I want.”

Rovayo rolled her eyes. “Like I said. Fucking paranoid.”

The autocopter found its designated landing pad, exchanged brief electronic chatter with the traffic-management systems, and floated down to land with characteristic, inhuman perfection. The cabin hatch hinged open, and Carl jumped down. Rovayo followed him, still mutinous.

“Just don’t break anything,” she said.

Daskeen Azul had an unremarkable mall frontage somewhere amidships for direct client contact and a couple of elevator-served workshops down in the hull where they kept the submarine hardware. They subcontracted landing pad time and aircraft support through a secondary provider, but had their own surface and sub vessels moored in dry dock, aft and starboard. This much Rovayo could tell him off the top of her head, detail skimmed from what she remembered of Donaldson and Kodo’s briefing. There was more in the file, and in theory they could have requested it via the autocopter’s datahead, but the Rim cop seemed disinclined to use the machine systems more than they already were—was already, it seemed, regretting the way they’d requisitioned the transport with her Special Cases badge—and Carl didn’t much care one way or the other. He had more than enough to work with.

So they flagged their business aboard
Bulgakov’s Cat
as simple follow-up investigation, which the autocopter told the factory raft’s datahead, and the Rim Security protocols did the rest. Technically, vessels like the
Cat
were autonomous nation-states, but any nation-state that lived so solidly from niche entry into the hyperdynamic Rim States economy had to live with the political realities the relationship entailed.
Bulgakov’s Cat
cruised freely in and out of the Rim’s coastal jurisdiction, its citizens had right of access to Rim States soil, its contracts were legally enforceable in Rim courts—but it all came at a stiff colonial price. Rovayo led Carl along the promenades and corridors of the factory raft with a proprietorial lack of self-consciousness and an authorized, loaded gun beneath her jacket. They might have been taking a stroll inside Alcatraz station for all the tension she showed.
They’d spoken to no one when they came aboard, notified no one, taken no courtesy measures whatsoever at a human level.

Somewhere in the walls, the machines whispered to one another about them in incomprehensible electronic tones, but beyond that they came on Daskeen Azul unannounced.

“And at this time of night,” the Daskeen Azul front desk agent complained, with barely disguised irritation.

“I mean, our usual hours of business—”

“—are not my problem,” Rovayo told him crisply. “We’re here for follow-up on a RimSec murder investigation, and the last I heard
Bulgakov’s Cat
was a twenty-four-hour service community. You’ve seen my ID, so how about you roll out some of that twenty-four-hour service and answer my questions.”

The agent switched his eyes to Carl. “And he is?”

“Getting impatient,” Carl said impassively.

“I’ve seen no ID,” the agent insisted. Below the smooth upper shelf of the reception desk, his hands were busy pressing buttons. “I have to see ID for both of you.”

Rovayo leaned on the shelf.

“Did your mother get you this job?” she asked curiously.

The agent gaped at her, belated anger dropping his jaw for a retort he wasn’t fast enough to make.

“Because it appears to be a job you don’t feel any pressing need to do properly. This man is a private consultant for Rim Security and his liaison is with me, not you. I’ve shown you my fucking ID, sonny, and in about another ten seconds I’m going to be showing you the front end of a RimSec probable-cause shutdown order. Now either you’re going to answer my questions or you’re going to get someone better paid out of bed to do it for you. I don’t much care either way, so which is it going to be?”

The man behind the desk flinched as if slapped.

“I’ll just see,” he muttered, prodding more buttons on the screens beneath his hands. “Just, please, just, uhm, have a seat.”

“Thank you,” said Rovayo with heavy irony.

They folded themselves into the utilitarian bank of chairs opposite the desk. The reception agent fit a phone hook to his ear, muttered into it. Outside, on the broad sweep of the mall, a thin but unending nighttime herd of shoppers browsed past the open storefronts, clothing bright, gait unhurried and undirected, like sleepwalkers or the victims of some multiple hypnotic trick. Carl sat and tried, the way Sutherland had taught him, not to feel the usual seeping contempt. It wasn’t easy.

On Mars…

Yeah, like fuck.

On Mars, things are different because they have to be, soak
. Lopsided grin, like he was giving away some secret he shouldn’t.
But that’s strictly temporary. No more long-term truth in it than all that bullshit they sell in the qualpro ads. Day’s going to come, this place’ll be just like home only less gravity. It’s them, Carl. It’s the humans. Take ’em wherever and give ’em time, they’ll build you the same fairy fucking playground as ever was. And
that’s
the construct you got to live inside, soak, like it or like it not
.

A slim, elegantly dressed woman emerged from an inner door behind the front desk. Tailored jacket and slacks in olive green and black, just a chic hint of work coveralls about the ensemble. Striking looks, strong on Chinese genes but salted with something else. She leaned down beside the reception agent, spoke briefly in low tones, then looked up again. Carl met her eyes from across the room and saw a depth of calm there that told him they’d just gone up an entire level. He saw something that might have been an acknowledgment in the return gaze; then the woman straightened up and came around the side of the desk toward them. She walked like a dancer, like a combat pro.

Carl came to his feet, on automatic, the way he would have if someone in the room had pulled a gun.

The new arrival saw it and smiled a little. It hit him secondarily, riding in past the wave of caution, that she was very beautiful in that Rim-blended, Asia Pacific fashion you saw in Freeport movie stars and major female political figures up and down the West Coast. She put out her hand, offered to Carl first. The grip and the look that backed it up were both coolly evaluative. Shaking hands with Rovayo was strictly a side issue, a formality dealt with and then set aside.

“Good evening,” she said. “I’m Carmen Ren, assistant duty manager. I must apologize for the way you’ve been received. We’re all still a little shaken from our discovery up at Ward BioSupply. But of course, we want to cooperate fully with the investigation. Please come with me.”

She led them back through the door she’d used, through cramped storage space racked with shelves of underwater equipment and other less identifiable hardware. On the far side of one sparsely loaded freestanding unit, Carl glimpsed two commercial-size elevator hatches set into a sidewall. A faint sea-salt dampness hung about in the air. At the back, the storeroom had another door that opened into an office cubicle where Carmen Ren gestured them to the two visible chairs and pulled down a third, folding seat from the wall. They sat with knees almost touching. The Chinese woman looked back and forth between them.

“So then,” she said brightly. “I’d been given to understand that your colleagues had all the information they needed, but clearly that’s not the case. So what is it I can do for you?”

Rovayo looked over at Carl and nodded with ironic largesse. She was still visibly fuming from their reception at the front desk and the subtle relegation Ren had dealt her. Carl shrugged and stepped up.

“Ward BioSupply’s fields are a good two hundred kilometers northwest of here,” he said. “Nearer three hundred, when you went up there two days ago. You mind telling us why you didn’t hold off until the
Cat
got a little closer?”

“Well.” Carmen Ren gestured apologetically. “I wasn’t the duty manager for that shift, so it’s not a question I can answer fully. But we quite often do attend to a contract ahead of time that way. It depends more on staffing rotations, hardware overhaul, that kind of thing, than actual proximity. As you’ll probably know from our promotional literature, Daskeen Azul has an operational deployment radius of up to five hundred kilometers should the need arise.”

“And the need arose here.”

“So it appears, yes. Though, as I said—”

Rovayo joined the play. “Yeah, you weren’t on duty. We heard you. So who was?”

“I would really need to check the duty logs to be certain.” A hint of reproach tinged Ren’s voice. “But I’m reasonably sure that the officers who visited us yesterday will already have that information.”

Carl ignored the significant look he was getting from Rovayo.

“I’m not concerned with what you told Donaldson and Kodo,” he said bluntly. “I’m looking for Allen Merrin.”

Ren frowned, genuine puzzlement or immaculate control. “Alan…?”

“Merrin,” said Rovayo.

“Alan Merrin.” Ren nodded seriously, kept to the slightly vowel-heavy mispronunciation of the first name.

“I’m afraid we don’t have an employee of that name. Or a client, as far as I’m aware. I could—”

Carl smiled. “I’m not a policeman, Ren. Don’t make that mistake with me. I’m here for Merrin. If you don’t give him up, I’ll go through you to get him. Your choice but one way or another, it’s going to get done. He can skulk about America, hiding in the crowd like a cudlip if he wants, but it isn’t going to save him. This game is over. Next time you hear from him, you can tell him that from me.”

Ren let go a small, sliding breath, the sound of politeness embarrassed. “And you are, exactly?”

“Who I am isn’t very important. You can call me Marsalis, if it matters.
What
I am, well.” He watched her face closely. “I’m a variant thirteen, just like your pal Merrin. You can tell him that, too, if you like.”

A defensive smile hesitated at the corners of the woman’s mouth. Her eyes slipped sideways to Rovayo, as if in appeal.

“I’m afraid I really don’t know who you’re referring to with this Merrin. And, Detective Rovayo, I have to say that your colleague here is being considerably less well mannered than the two officers who preceded you.”

“He’s not my colleague,” said Rovayo indifferently. “And I don’t think he’s that bothered about manners, either. I’d start cooperating if I were you.”

“We are already cooperating fully with—”

“You put in to Lima on your way up here,” Carl asked her. “Right?”

This time, he thought the frown was genuine. “
Bulgakov’s Cat
very rarely
puts in,
as you express it, anywhere. We are dry-docked in the Angeline Freeport on average every five years, but otherwise—”

“I’m not talking about the
Cat
. I’m talking about Daskeen Azul. You got friends on the Peruvian coast, right?”

“I, personally, do not. No. But it may be that some of our employees do.
Bulgakov’s Cat
is, as I’m sure you’re aware, licensed for the whole of the Pacific Americas Rim. And Daskeen Azul certainly has contracts along the Peruvian segment. As do many of our fellow companies aboard. But this, all of this, is common knowledge—you could have ascertained it using any corporate commerce register for the region.”

“Seen Manco Bambarén recently? Or Greta Jurgens?”

Another elegant furrowing of the clean white brow. Lips pursed, regretful shaking of the head. Her long glossy hair shifted in sheaves. “I’m sorry, these names. None of them is familiar to me. And I’m still not clear exactly what—if anything—you are accusing us of.”

“What are they paying you, Ren?”

Pause. The brief smile again. “I really don’t think, Mr. Marsalis, that my salary is any of your—”

“No, really. Give it some thought. I think the people I represent would make it worth your while to turn.

And this is coming down around you anyway. We don’t have enough yet, but we will. And when Merrin breaks cover, I’ll be there. You don’t want to get caught in that particular crossfire, believe me.”

“Are you trying to scare me, Mr. Marsalis?”

“No, I’m appealing to your sense of reality. I don’t think you scare easily, Ren. But in the end, I think you’re smart enough to recognize when it’s time to cut cable and bounce.” He held her gaze. “That time is now.”

The polite, sliding-breath sound again. “I don’t really know how to respond to that. You’re attempting to… bribe me?” Another shuttled glance at Rovayo. “Into what, exactly? Is this standard RimSec procedure these days?”

“I already told you I’m not a cop, Ren. I’m just like you. For hire and—”

Ren shot to her feet, clean and rapid motion, no leverage with either arm on the furniture around her. In the confined office space, it was a remarkable piece of physical precision. She brought loosely cupped fists together at her chest, a formal stance that echoed dojo training.

“That’s it,” she flared. “This conversation is over. I have been as cooperative as possible, Detective Rovayo, and all I have received in return are innuendo and insult. I will not be compared to some…

variant
in this way. Take your offensive, genetically enhanced friend, and get out. If you wish to speak to me again, you will contact our legal representatives.”