‘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 grey and shaved almost militarily short. The image was head and shoulders only, but he 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 honours. Rovayo took it from there. She leaned in and spread their eyelids with warm, slightly calloused fingers, applied the scanner and then stepped back. It was all done with a detached competence and amongst the streams of arriving passengers, it had the intimate flavour 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 towards 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 lift that spilled them out onto a concrete apron where a sleek red and white autocopter sat twitching its rotors. Eastward, the bay glimmered silvery grey 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 off the half-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 round, 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.’
An eyeblink silence.
Sevgi exchanged a glance with Norton.
‘Inside?’ she asked, dangerously polite. ‘You’ve already cracked the hatches?’
A knowing grin went back and forth between the two Rim cops. Sevgi, fed up with being the least informed person in the room all day, felt her temper start to fray.
‘Horkan’s Pride is COLIN’s property,’ she said thinly. ‘If you’ve tampered with—’
‘Put your cuffs away, agent Ertekin,’ said Coyle. ‘Time the coastals got out to your property, someone aboard had already blown the hatches out. From the inside. Quarantine seal’s long gone.’
That’s not possible. Narrowly, she managed to stop herself saying it. Instead, she asked: ‘Are the cryocaps breached?’
Coyle eyed her speculatively.
‘It’s really better if you wait and see for yourself,’ he said.
The autocopter banked about and Sevgi leaned forward to peer out of the window. Below them in the bay, Rim Security’s Alcatraz station rose off its island base in pale grey platforms and piers. On the southern shoreline, a floating dry dock complex was laid out like a schematic, clean lines and spaces, people reduced to dots and vehicles to toys. The bulk of the Horkan’s Pride crew section showed up clearly in the centre dock. Even with the external structures ripped away, even scorched and scarred by the re-entry, it leapt out at her like a familiar face in a group photo. She’d seen sister ships in the orbital yards above the Kaku nanorack from time to time, and she’d had archive footage of Horkan’s Pride itself filed on her laptop ever since the ship stopped talking to COLIN control. In the frequent chunks of waiting-room time at the lawyers’ offices, in the sleepless still of the nights she didn’t drink, she’d stared at the detail until her eyes ached. A good detective eats, sleeps and breathes the details, Larry Kasabian had once told her. That’s how you catch the bad guys. The habit stuck. She knew the internal architecture of the vessel so well she could have walked it from end to end blindfolded. She had the hardware and software specs by heart. The names of the cryocapped crew were as familiar as product brands she habitually shopped for, and biographical detail from each popped into her head unbidden whenever she visualised one of their faces.
It’s really better if you wait and see for yourself.
And now, at a guess, they were all dead.
The autocopter settled with machine precision onto a raised platform at one end of the dock complex. The motors wound down and the hatch cracked open. Coyle did the honours again, levered the hatch back and jumped down first. Sevgi went next. Badawi’s honeyed tones followed her out into the wind.
‘Mind your step. Please close the hatch behind you.’
Coyle led the way down the steps off the platform. There was a reception committee waiting at the bottom. Three RimSec uniforms backing a plainclothes ranking officer whose face Sevgi recognised from a couple of virtual briefings she’d attended last year on geneprint forgery. Smooth Asian features that made him seem younger than she supposed he was, thick grey hair and a rumpled way with clothes that belied the level scrutiny in the eyes. From that gaze and other general aspects of demeanour, she’d suspected he was probably enhanced – Rim officials of any rank usually were these days – but she had never had more evidence than the hunch. In the social sessions after, he’d talked with quiet reservation, mainly about his family, and his eyes had barely flickered to Sevgi’s chest at all, for which she’d been quietly grateful. Now she scrabbled after a name and the syn handed it to her.
‘Lieutenant Tsai. How are you?’
‘Captain,’ he said dryly. ‘Promoted back in January. And I’m as well as can be expected, thank you, given the circumstances. I presume you’d like to view your vessel immediately. What’s left of it.’