Today, in an abrupt spike of syn insight, she realised it was the kind of car Ethan would have loved to own, and that was why this aberration in Norton’s otherwise flawless Manhattan male urbanity drove her time and again to a silent, waspish anger.
Today, he wasn’t driving it.
Instead, as she let herself out onto the street – still settling a grabbed-at-random tailored summer jacket onto her shoulders – he unfolded from the back seat of a dark blue autodrive teardrop that was recognisably from the COLIN pool. He stood there looking as smooth and self-contained as the vehicle he’d stepped out of, a poem in groomed competence. The filaments of grey in his close-cropped hair glinted in the sun, the tanned future-presidential-candidate Caucasian features that he swore were his own crinkled around pale blue eyes.
He gave her a trademark slanted grin.
‘Morning, Sev. Rise and shine.’
‘Yeah, right.’
‘What time’d you wind it up in the end?’ He’d gone home well before midnight, chemically unimpaired as far as Sevgi could remember.
‘Don’t recall. Late.’
She pushed past him and dumped herself in the car, slid over to let him in beside her. The door hinged down and the teardrop pulled smoothly away, cornered into West 118th and kept going. Traffic surged around them. They’d cruised four blocks before Sevgi woke up to the direction and the second jarring nail in the day’s expected course. She glanced across at Norton.
‘What’s the matter, you leave something at the office?’
‘Not going to the office, Sev.’
‘Yeah, that’s what I thought we agreed yesterday. So why are we headed east?’
Norton grinned again. ‘Not going out to Kaku either. Change of plans. No freefall for you today.’
The relief that rolled through her at the news felt like sun on her skin, suddenly warming and way ahead of any accompanying curiosity. She’d really not been looking forward to the gutswooping elevator ride up the Kaku nanorack or the creeping around weightless when they got to the top. They had drugs to take the sting out of both experiences at the ’rack facility, but she wasn’t at all sure they’d mix well with the syn already coursing through her system. And the thought of starting an investigation in this state – with her abused brain and belly bleating protest at the zero G and the Earth rolling past somewhere sickeningly far below – already had her palms lightly greased with sweat.
‘Right. So you want to tell me where we are going?’
‘Sure. JFK suborb terminal. Got the 11 o’clock shuttle to SFO.’
Sevgi sat up. ‘What happened? Horkan’s Pride overshoot the docking slot?’
‘You could say that.’ Norton’s tone was dry. ‘Overshot Kaku, overshot Sagan, splashed down about a hundred klicks off the California coast.’
‘Splashed down? They’re not supposed to land those things.’
‘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 burnt up on re-entry. 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 embarrasment 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, marshalling 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 window, which was cranked back. There was a young cop up front. She had the system at manual and was steering idly with one tanned arm leant 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 hook-up. 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 re-entry, 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 vaporise 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 over-friendly 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.’