Come on, that was a one-off.
A twice-off. So far.
Zooly’s a friend.
Yeah, a friend who likes to fuck unlucks on an occasional basis.
Maybe it’s me Zooly likes to fuck on an occasional basis. Ever think of that? Maybe my genetic status has fuck-all to do with it.
Right. And maybe this Ertekin woman just liked to fuck her unluck boyfriend for who he was, too.
Ah, go to sleep.
He couldn’t. The mesh sent rusty twinges through him, out of time with his pulse.
Better deal with that tomorrow. Nearly four months of substandard chloride, you’ll be lucky if it doesn’t seize up on you soon.
Seemed to work on Dudeck and his pals.
Yeah, this isn’t some bunch of neo-Nazi fuckwits you’re dealing with now, this is another thirteen. An adapted thirteen, by the sound of it. You’ll need to be wired all the way right if you’re going to—
Hoy. Going to what? Couple of days and a dropped guard, we’re out of here, remember.
He went back to staring at the ceiling.
CHAPTER 18
A bad chloride twinge kicked him awake, bone-deep aching along his left forearm and sudden sweat from the intensity of the pain. He’d curled up around it instinctively in his sleep, and there was a faint whimper trapped in his throat as he woke. Aunt Chitra’s pain-management training, the silent imperative. Take the pain, breathe, breathe it under control, and don’t make a fucking sound. He swallowed and rolled over, protecting the aching limb with his other arm.
Remembered he was in Sevgi Ertekin’s home, and relaxed. The whimper got free as a low groan.
The room was full of barely filtered light—there were varipolara drapes at the windows, and someone had forgotten to opaque them the all the way down the night before. His watch said it was a little after nine. He grunted and flexed the fingers of his left hand, chased the pain to fading. The mesh, for reasons the Marstech biolabs apparently still didn’t understand, “remembered” injury trauma and tended to overload the system in those parts of the body that had suffered it in the past. Fine so long as you fueled the system right; the worst you got was a faint warmth and itching at the site of previous wounds. But with the shit he’d been buying from Louie over the last few months, the neuromuscular interfacing would be ragged and inflamed. And Carl had once stopped a Saudi opsdog with that forearm. Some monstrous engineered hybrid, ghost-pale and snarling as it materialized out of the desert night and leapt at his throat. The impact put him on his back, the jaws sank into the bone, and even after he killed the fucking thing, it took them nearly five minutes to break the bite lock and get it off him.
He listened for sound through the apartment, heard nothing. Evidently Ertekin was still out cold. No chance of going back to sleep now, and the door was still locked. He thought about it for a moment then got up, pulled on his pants, and padded through to the kitchen. A brief search of the cupboards produced coffee for the espresso machine in the corner. OLYMPUS MONS ROBUSTA BLEND—FROM ACTUAL MARSTECH GENE LABS! Yeah, right. He allowed himself a sour grin and set up the machine to make two long cups, then went to the fridge for milk.
There were a couple of LongLife cartons open, one weighing in at about half full, the other a lot less. On impulse he sniffed at the torn cardboard openings on both. Pulled a face and upended each carton carefully one after the other over the sink. With the least full of the two, the contents came out slow and semi-solid, splattered across the metal in slimy white clots. He shook his head and rinsed the mess away.
“You and Zooly’d get on like a fucking house on fire,” he muttered and went back to the cupboards to find more milk.
“Who you talking to?”
He turned with the fresh carton in his hand. The kitchen had filled with the smell of coffee, and either that or the noise he was making rummaging in the cupboards had woken Ertekin. She stood in the kitchen doorway, eyes heavy-lidded, hair stuck up in clumps, wearing a faded NYPD T-shirt several sizes too big for her and, as far as he could tell, nothing much else. The look on her face wasn’t friendly.
“Singing,” he said. “To myself. I made coffee.”
“Yeah, so I fucking see.”
He raised an eyebrow. “You’re welcome.”
She looked back at him for a moment, impassively, then turned away. He caught the lines of her hips under the T-shirt, the length of her thighs as the about-turn brought her legs together.
“What time is it?”
“’Bout half past nine.”
“Fuck, Marsalis.” Her voice trailed away, back toward the bedroom. “What you got, insomnia or something?”
Sounds of water splashing, a door closing it off. A sudden, unlooked-for image opened in his head. Sevgi Ertekin strips off her T-shirt and steps into the shower, hands gathered under her chin beneath the stream of warm water, arms pressing breasts flat and—
He grinned wryly and derailed the internal experia script before it reached his groin. Finished making the coffee anyway. It came out rich and creamed with bubbles, steaming an aroma that kicked him straight back to the dusty bubblefabs of Huari camp. The ominous itch on his skin of sunlight through an atmosphere only recently made thick enough to breathe, the uneasy pull of Mars gravity, the loose grip of a planet that didn’t recognize him as its own and didn’t really see why it should hold on to him. Coffee in aluminium canisters, dust crunching underfoot, and Sutherland at his shoulder, rumbling speech like the reassuring turnover of heavy plant machinery. Nothing human-scale around here, soak. Just shade your eyes and take a look. And the staggering, neck-tilting view up Massif Verne, to drive the other man’s point home.
He poured the coffee into two mugs, took one for himself and left hers to get cold on the kitchen counter. Serve her fucking right. He sipped from his mug, pulled a surprised face. From actual Marstech gene labs was right. He hated it when reality bore out the clanging boasts of the hype. He went back to the living room and peered out at the market below. He didn’t know the city well, and this part less than most, but Ertekin’s building was a pretty standard nanotech walk-up and he guessed the open plaza below had been a part of the same redevelopment. It had the faintly organic lines of all early nanobuild. He knew parts of southeast London that looked much the same. Buildings in a bucket—just pour it out and watch them grow.
He heard her come out of the bedroom, heard her in the kitchen. Then he could feel her in the room with him, at his back, watching. She cleared her throat. He turned and saw her on the other side of the room, dressed and somewhat groomed, coffee mug held in both hands. She gestured with the drink.
“Thanks.” She looked away, then back. “I uh. I’m not great first thing in the morning.”
“Don’t worry about it.” Randomly, for something to fill the quiet between them: “Possible sign of greatness. Nor was Felipe Souza, by all accounts.”
Flicker of a smile. “No?”
“No. Did all his molecular dynamics work at night. I read this biography of him, once I got back to Earth. Seemed appropriate, you know. Anyway, book says, when they took him on at UNAM, he refused to lecture before midday. Great guy to have as a tutor, right?”
“Not for you.”
“Well, my head starts to spin once you get past basic buckyball structure, so—”
“No, I meant the morning thing.” She gestured with the cup again, one-handed this time, a little more open. “You wouldn’t be—”
“Oh, that.” He shrugged. “It’s the training. Never really goes away.”
Quiet opened up again in the wake of his words. The conversation, caught and scraping in the shallow waters of her continued embarrassment. He reached for something to pole them clear again. Something that had flared dimly in his mind the previous night as he finally arced downward toward sleep.