“You see any evidence? When you were there, I mean?”
Carl shook his head. “You don’t see much of the Chinese at all on Mars. They’re mostly based down in Hellas or around the Utopia spread. Long way from Bradbury or Wells, unless you’ve got some specific reason to go there.”
They both watched the silvered chop of the water for a while.
“I did think about going,” Rovayo said finally. “I was younger when Enrique came back with all his stories, still in my teens. I was going to get some studies, sign up for a three stint.”
“So what happened?”
She laughed. “Life happened, man. Just one of those dreams the logistics stacked up against, you know.”
“You probably didn’t miss much.”
“Hey, you went.”
“Yeah. I went because the alternative was internment.” A brief memory of Nevant’s jeering slipped across his mind. “And I came back as soon as I got the chance. You don’t want to believe all your cousin’s war stories. That stuff always looks better in the rearview mirror. A lot of the time, Mars is just this cold, hardscrabble place you won’t ever belong to no matter how hard you scrabble at trying.”
Rovayo shrugged.
“Yeah, well.” A hard little smile came and went across her mouth, but her voice was quiet and cop-wisdom calm. “You think it’s any different here on Earth, Marsalis? You think down here they’re ever going to let you belong?”
And for that, he had no answer. He just stood and watched the disappearing bridge until Rovayo propped herself upright off the rail and touched his arm.
“C’mon,” she said companionably. “Let’s get back to work.”
They were working the Horkan’s Pride case out of a closed suite in the lower levels of the Alcatraz station. Shielding in the superstructure above them ensured a leak-tight data environment, the transmission systems in and out ran Marstech-standard encryption, and all the equipment in the suite was jacked together with python-thick coils of black actual cable. It gave the offices a period feel that sat well with the raw, sandblasted stone walls and the subterranean cool that soaked off them. Sevgi sat in a commandeered desk chair and stared at a rough-hewn corner, keeping her eyes off Marsalis and furious with herself for the feeling that had snaked across her belly when Rovayo came back with the black man in tow.
“Coyle and Norton went to talk to Tsai,” she told them. “Going to book some n-djinn time, run a fresh linkage model on Ward and the victims, soon as we can get on the machine.”
Rovayo nodded and went to her desk, where she stood prodding through a pile of hardcopy with limited enthusiasm. Sevgi turned to Marsalis.
“There’s a Mars datafile you might want to take a look at here. Seems Norton got on to Colony while we were in Istanbul, had them pull Gutierrez in. You want to screen it?”
She thought she saw a subtle tightening go through him. But he only shrugged. “Think it’s worth looking at?”
“I don’t know,” she said acidly. “I haven’t seen it yet.”
“The chances Colony got anything useful out of an old familia hand like Gutierrez are pretty thin.”
“Not really the main point,” said Rovayo absently from across the room without looking up from her paperwork. “Cop’ll tell you it’s what the guy doesn’t say as often as not gives you the angle.”
“Uh, exactly,” said Sevgi, startled.
Marsalis shuttled a sour look between the two women.
“All right,” he said ungraciously. “So let’s all watch the fucking thing, shall we.”
But in the screening chamber, she saw how the quick-flaring irritation damped down to an intent stare that might have passed for boredom if she hadn’t seen him looking the same way after the third skater in New York, the man he’d failed to kill. She had no way of knowing where exactly Marsalis’s attention fell—the file was a standard split-screen interrogation tape, six or seven facets slotted together on the LCLS display, frontal on Gutierrez, face and body from the tabletop up, vital signs in longitudinal display below, minimized footage of the whole interview room from two or three different angles, voice profiles in dropdown to the left. Cop custom had her skimming detail from the whole thing in random snatches. But if she’d had to guess, she’d say the thirteen at her side was riveted on the slightly gaunt, sun-blasted features of the familia datahawk as he sat unimpressed and smoking his way through the interrogation.
“They let him take fucking cigarettes in there?” asked Rovayo, outraged.
“It’s not a cigarette as such,” Sevgi told her patiently. She’d been a little shocked the first time she saw it, too. “That’s a gill. You know, like in the settler flicks. Chemical ember, gives off oxygen instead of burning it. Like a lung supercharger.”
Rovayo snapped her fingers. “O-kay. Like, Kwame Oviedo’s always got one stuck in the corner of his mouth, practically every scene in that Upland Heroes trilogy.”
Sevgi nodded. “Yeah, same with Marisa Mansour. Even in Marineris Queen, which when you think about it, is pretty—”
“Weren’t we supposed to be watching this,” said Marsalis loudly.
Sevgi cocked an expressive eyebrow at the Rim cop, and they turned back toward the screen. Gutierrez was settling comfortably into his role of career criminal cool. Upland-dialect Quechua drawled out of him—the language monitor tagged it in the lower right-hand corner of the screen, provided a machine-speed simultaneous subtitle in Amanglic, but for the original interrogators it would have been hard work. They’d have some street Quechua, Sevgi supposed, you’d have to have, be a decent cop out there, but you could see they were uncomfortable with it. Instead, they fell back repeatedly on Amanglic or Spanish—both of which the file said Gutierrez spoke well—and listened constantly to their sleek black earplug whisperers. The datahawk smirked through it.
“Look, let’s cut the bouncing about, Nicki,” he said, apparently. “There is no motherfucking way you have anything on me. You’ll have to give me my phone call sooner or later. So why not save us all a lot of fucking around and do it now?”
The ranking officer on the other side of the table sat back in her chair and fixed the ex-datahawk with a somber stare.
“I think you’ve forgotten which planet you’re on, Franklin. You’ll get to make a phone call when I say you can.”
Her companion got up out of his chair and began to pace a slow circle around the table. Gutierrez tipped his head back a little to watch the move, drew on his gill and puffed a long feather of fumes up into the air, then went back to looking at the woman. He shook his head.
“They’ll come and dig me out of here before breakfast, Nicki. You know that.”
The other cop hit him, dropped body weight into the swing, one cupped striking hand to the datahawk’s ear and side of the head. The gill went flying. In the slack grip of Mars gravity, so did Gutierrez and the chair. Clatter of plastic on evercrete, soft human yelp. Rovayo flinched—Sevgi caught it peripherally from two seats over. On screen, Gutierrez rolled to a halt and the cop was on him. The datahawk was shaking his head muzzily, trying to pick himself up—his assailant locked a thick muscled arm around his throat, hauled him upright by it. The ranking officer watched impassively.
“Wrong guess, fuckwit,” hissed the strong-arm cop into the ear he hadn’t deafened. “See, we got a lot of leeway on this one. You really fucked up with Horkan’s Pride, and I mean big-time. There’s a lot more juice coming down from COLIN right now than your buddies over in Wells know how to soak up. I’d say we’ve got you down here for a fortnight at least.”
The datahawk choked out a reply. “Reyes,” said the subtitles. “You’re confusing your wet dreams with reality again.”
The cop bared his teeth in a grin. He reached down and grabbed Gutierrez by the crotch. Twisted. A suffocated screech made it up the datahawk’s throat.