“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.”