She let the rest out. Anything to take the smug, competent control off his face. “Before that, he had systematically mutilated the other eleven cryocapped crewmembers in order to feed himself. He amputated their limbs and kept them alive in suspension, then, finally, began to kill them and strip the rest of their bodies for meat.”
A nod. “How long was transit?”
“Thirty-three weeks. You don’t seem surprised by any of this.”
“That’s because I’m not. You’re stuck out there, you’ve got to eat something.”
“Did you ever think that?”
Something like a shadow passed across his eyes. His voice came out just short of even. “Is that how you found me? Cross-reference?”
“Something like that.” She chose not to mention Norton’s sudden enthusiasm for the new tactic. “Our profiling n-djinn cited you as the only other thirteen known to have experienced similar circumstances.”
Marsalis offered her a thin smile. “I never ate anybody.”
“No. But did you think about it?”
He was silent for a while. She was on the point of asking her question again when he got up from the seat and went to stand by the high window. He stared out at the sky.
“It crossed my mind a few times,” he said quietly. “I knew the recovery ship was coming, but I had the best part of two months to worry about it. You can’t help running the scenarios in your mind. What if they don’t make it, what if something crazy happens? What if—”
He stopped. His gaze unhooked from the cloud cover and came back to the room, back to her face.
“Was he out there the whole thirty-three weeks?”
“Most of it. From what we can tell, his cryocap spat him out about two weeks into the trajectory.”
“And Mars Control didn’t fetch him back?”
“Mars Control didn’t know about it.” Sevgi gestured. “The n-djinn went down, looks like it was tricked out. The ship fell back on automated systems. Silent running. He woke up right after.”
“That’s a nice little cluster of coincidence.”
“Isn’t it.”
“But not very convenient from a culinary point of view.”
“No. We’re assuming the cryocap timing was an error. Whoever spiked the n-djinn probably planned to have the system bring him up a couple of weeks out from Earth. Something in the intrusion program flipped when it should have flopped, and you wake up two weeks out from Mars instead. Our friend arrives starved and pissed off and probably not very sane.”
“Do you know who he is?”
Sevgi nodded. She hit the keypad again and pushed the dataslate around so they could both see the screen and the face it held. Marsalis left the window and propped himself in casual angles on the edge of the table. Light gleamed off the side of his skull.
“Allen Merrin. We recovered trace genetic material from Horkan’s Pride, the vessel he crashed, and ran it through COLIN’s thirteen database. This is what they came up with.”
It was almost imperceptible, the way he grew focused, the way the casual poise tautened into something else. She watched his eyes sweep the text alongside the pale head-and-shoulders photo. She could have recited it to him from memory.
Merrin, Allen (sin 48523dx3814)
Delivered (c/s) April 26, 2064, Taos, New Mexico (Project Lawman). Uteral host, Bilikisu Sankare, source genetic material, Isaac Hubscher, Isabela Gayoso (sins appended). All genetic code variants property of Elleniss Hall, Inc., patents asserted (Elleniss Hall & US Army Partnership 2029).
Initial conditioning & training Taos, New Mexico, specialist skills development Fort Benning, Georgia (covert ops, counterinsurgency). Deployed: Indonesia 2083, Arabian peninsula 2084—5, Tajikistan 2085—7 & 2089, Argentina, Bolivia 2088, Rim Authority (urban pacification program) 2090—1.
Retired 2092 (under 2nd UNGLA Convention Accords, Jacobsen Protocol). Accepted Mars resettlement 2094 (COLIN citizenship record appended).
“Very Christ-like.”
She blinked. “I’m sorry?”
“The face.” He tapped the screen with a fingernail. The LCLS glow rippled around the touch. Merrin stared up under the tiny distortions. “Very Faith Satellite Channel. Looks like that Man Taking Names anime they did for the Cash memorial.”
The smile slipped out before she could stop it. His mouth quirked response. He moved the chair a little, sat down again.
“Saw that, did you? We get the reruns in here all the time. Faith-based rehab, you know.”
Quit grinning at him like a fucking news ’face, Sev. Get a grip.
“You don’t recognize him, then?”
A curious, tilted look. “Why would I?”
“You were in Iran.”
“Wasn’t everybody.” When she just waited, he sighed. “Yeah, we heard about the Lawmen. Saw them at a distance a few times in Iran, down around Ahvaz. But from what you’ve got there, it doesn’t look like this Merrin ever got up that far north.”
“He could have.” Sevgi nodded toward the screen. “I’ll be honest with you, this is a pretty loose summary. Once you get into the mission records, it’s a whole lot less defined. Covert deployments, so-called lost documentation, rumor and hearsay, subject is understood to have, that sort of shit. Executive denial and cover-ups around practically every corner. Plus, you’ve got a whole fucking hero mythology going on around this guy. I’ve seen data that puts Merrin in combat zones hundreds of kilometers apart on the same day, eyewitness accounts that say he took wounds we can’t find any medical records to confirm, some of them wounds he couldn’t possibly have survived if the stories are true. Even that South American deployment has too much overlap to be wholly accurate. He was in Tajikistan, no he wasn’t, he was still in Bolivia; he was solo-deployed, no, he was leading a Lawman platoon in Kuwait City.” Her disgust bubbled over. “I’m telling you, the guy’s a fucking ghost.”
He smiled, a little sadly she thought.
“We all were, back then,” he said. “Ghosts, I mean. We had our own British version of Project Lawman, minus the delusional name, of course. We called it Osprey. The French preferred Department Eight. But none of us ever officially existed. What you’ve got to remember, Ms. Ertekin, is that back in the eighties the whole thirteen thing was fresh out of the can. Everyone knew the technology was out there, and everybody was busy denying they’d ever have anything to do with it. UNGLA didn’t even exist back then, not as an agency in its own right. It was still part of the Human Rights Commission. And no one was very keen on letting anybody else get a close look at their new genetic warriors. The whole Middle East was a testing ground for all sorts of cutting-edge nastiness, and all of it was operating on full deniability. You know how that shit works, right?”
She blinked. “What shit?”
“Deniability. You work for COLIN, right?”
“I’ve been with COLIN two and a half years,” she said stiffly. “Before that I was a New York police detective.”
He grinned again, a little more genuine humor in it this time. “Getting the hang of it, though, aren’t you. This is a completely confidential matter, we want it to stay that way. That’s very COLIN.”
“It’s not a question of that.” She tried without much success to get the stiffness out of her voice. “We don’t want a panic on our hands.”
“How many has he killed so far? Here on the ground, I mean.”
“We think it’s in the region of twenty. Some of those are unconfirmed, but the circumstantial evidence points to a connection. In seventeen cases, we’ve recovered genetic trace material that clinches it.”
Marsalis grimaced. “Busy little fucker. Is this all in the Rim States?”
“No. The initial deaths were in the San Francisco Bay Area, but later they spread over the whole of continental North America.”
“So he’s mobile.”
“Yes. Mobile and apparently a very competent systems intrusion specialist. He murdered two men at the same location in the Bay Area on the night of June 13th and a man in southeastern Texas less than a week later. There’s no trace anywhere in the flight records for that period, and nothing from Rim Border Control, either. We had an n-djinn run face recognition checks on every cross-border flight and surface exit into the Republic for that week and got nothing.”