“I’m not going home until this is done.”
“Yes, Sevgi made that quite clear to me as well.” Norton tried to brush past him. Carl fought down a desire to snag his arm and snap him around. He backed up a couple of rapid paces instead and put his arm out across the corridor to the wall, so the COLIN exec had to stop. Norton’s teeth clenched, his fists balled at his sides.
“What, do you want, from me, Marsalis?”
“Two things. First, you need to get on to Ortiz and have him put a stopper on my release back to UNGLA jurisdiction. I had a call from the Brussels office last night and they’re very keen to have me back in the fold.”
“Ortiz is barely out of intensive care. He’s in no condition—”
“Then talk to whoever is. I don’t want to have fight UNGLA as well as whoever’s running Onbekend.”
Norton pulled in a compressed breath. “Very well. I’ll pass this on to Nicholson when I speak to him this afternoon. What else?”
“I want you to lean on Colony. I want to talk to Gutierrez.”
COLIN ran a small administrative unit out of two blocks in downtown Oakland, with facilities for a Mars coms link. Norton got a RimSec autocopter detailed to fly them back up and across the bay, and a COLIN limo to meet them at touchdown. He did it all with the remote command of a preoccupied man driving a familiar route home. In the limo, he called ahead to the coms link duty technician and set up the call.
Sevgi burned in his head like a brand, dry-eyed beside the small stream, all the things she didn’t say. All the things he didn’t, either.
The red tape from the Colony police administration at the Mars end was fierce and self-referential. Having Gutierrez arrested and interrogated had been easy by comparison—Colony knew, in their own cloddish way, how to do that. But authorized off-world communication, from custody, with non-COLIN personnel was apparently just too exotic to have precedent or established procedure. It took three levels of rank before he reached someone who’d do what he told them. And the distances didn’t help—Mars currently sat just less than 250 million kilometers away, and transmission time was around thirteen and a half minutes each way. Almost a full half hour between each act of communication. It seemed somehow emblematic.
Marsalis prowled outside the chamber, occasionally visible through the head-height windows on the door. There was a small, mean-spirited pleasure in excluding the thirteen from the early proceedings, an impulse that Norton knew only too drearily well was the human equivalent of a tomcat pissing to mark his territory.
He was too tired to combat the urge, too nonspecifically furious to feel embarrassed by his behavior. He battered down the red tape at Colony with a cold, controlled anger he hadn’t known he owned, appealed to reason where he could, bullied and threatened where he could not. He waited out the long delay silences that punctuated the whole process with the patience of an automaton. None of it seemed to matter, except as a way to stave off the knowledge that Sevgi would die, was dying right now by stages as her immune system staggered under the repeated blows from the Falwell viruses and their mutating swirl.
Finally, he let Marsalis in. Ceded the operational seat and folded himself into an off-scope chair at the side of the chamber. Stared emptily at the thirteen as he settled himself.
“You really think this is going to work?”
His voice was slack and careless in his own ears, run flat with emotional overload.
“That depends,” said Marsalis, studying the countdown clock above the lens-and-screen array in front of him.
“On what?”
“On whether Franklin Gutierrez wants to go on living or not.”
The last digits blinked through, the receiving announcer chimed, and the screen rezzed up to an image of a similar transmission chamber at the Mars end. Gutierrez sat there, cleaned up since Norton had last seen him dragged out of interrogation. There was a clean white plaster wrap on his damaged hand, and the bruising around his face and eye had been treated with inflammation suppressants. He frowned into the camera a little, glanced aside to someone off screen, then cleared his throat and leaned forward.
“Till I see who the fuck’s on the other end of this, I don’t say anything. Got that? You get these morons to pull their claws out of me, we can maybe do some kind of deal. But that’s when I see your face, not before.”
He sat back. The transmission-locked seal blipped across the screen in green machine code, and the image froze. The online light glowed orange. Marsalis sat looking at the screen, moved no more than a corpse.
“Hullo, Franklin,” he said flatly. “Remember me? I’m pretty sure you do. So now that you know who’s on the other end, listen carefully to me. You will give me everything you know about Allen Merrin and why you helped send him home. You get one chance to do this. Don’t disappoint me.”
He snapped the arm control and the transmission sealed, fired off. Above their heads, the counter started down again.
“You’ll forgive me if I’m not impressed yet,” Norton said.
Marsalis barely shifted in the seat, but his eyes tracked around and out of nowhere, through all the weariness and grief, Norton saw something there that sent a small chill chasing around the base of his skull like cold water rinsing around a basin.
They waited out the counter. It reached zero, started counting up again into time used before transmission at the other end.
“Hey, the lottery man!” Gutierrez came back sneering, but behind it Norton could see the chill, the same jolt he’d felt when Marsalis looked at him half an hour earlier. And the counter told its own tale in glowing frozen digits. They were up around two and a half minutes over base transmission-and-turnaround time—and unless the datahawk had made a speech to the camera, the time overspill was hesitation. Gutierrez had jammed up, had had to put a reply together on hold. The bravado rang false as a Tennessee Marstech label. “Yeah, how’s your luck holding back home, Marsalis? How you doing? Missing the girls from the Dozen Up club?”
After that, Gutierrez switched into Quechua. The screen fired up stilted subtitles to cover. You are three hundred million kilometers away from me. That is a long way off for making threats. What will you do, take the long sleep? Come all the way back here, just to kill me? You don’t scare me anymore, Marsalis. You make me laugh. It went on, derisory, building the bravado up. It boiled down to fuck off and die.
It still rang false.
Marsalis watched it all with a thin, cold smile.
When the transmission ended, he leaned forward and started speaking, also in Quechua. Norton had no knowledge of the altiplano tongue beyond counting one to twenty and a handful of food items, but even through the blanket incomprehension, he felt a dry-ice cold coming off the black man and what he was saying. The words husked out of him, rustling and intent, like something reptilian breaking out of an egg. In the fog of sleeplessness that was gradually shutting down his senses, Norton had one moment of clarity so supreme he knew it had to be a lie; but in that moment it was as if something else was speaking through Marsalis, something ancient and not really human using his mouth and face as a mask and a launch point to hurl itself across the gulf between worlds, to reach out and take Franklin Gutierrez by the throat and heart, as if he were sitting across a desk and not a quarter of a billion kilometers of empty space.
It took little more than a minute to say, whatever it was, but for Norton the whole thing seemed to happen outside real time. When Marsalis was finished speaking, the COLIN exec opened his mouth to say something—say anything, to break the creaking, something-has-left-the-building silence—and then stopped because he saw that Marsalis had not thumbed for transmission. The message was still open, still waiting to be sealed, and for what seemed like a very long time the black man just looked into the facing lens and said nothing at all, just looked.