Sevgi nodded glumly. ‘That’d be helpful.’
‘I’m told,’ Tsai made gestures at his uniforms and they sloped off across the dock, ‘that we’ll have a working virtual by about seven. Crews are finishing up with the hull now, but Rovayo probably told you about the hatches.’
‘That they were blown from the inside, yeah.’
‘Captain,’ Norton weighed in. ‘We’re concerned to know what state the crew of Horkan’s Pride are in. Specifically, whether the cryosystems were breached or not.’
Tsai stopped in the act of turning to follow the uniforms, and his gaze seemed suddenly to lengthen, dialling up, out across the dock and then the bay replaying something from memory that he’d maybe prefer not to. In Sevgi, the realisation hit home that behind the turf-proud cool of Coyle and Rovayo there was the same base edginess, and that driving it all was not the jurisdiction envy she’d assumed.
They’re scared, she suddenly knew. And we’re their only solution.
It was an epiphany Sevgi had had once before, back when she was still a rookie with the NYPD and dealing with a drugs-and-domestic abuse case. Talking to the bruised and still swelling face of the perpetrator’s mother, it hit her with the same sickening abruptness that this woman was looking at her as some kind of solution to her problem, that she expected patrolwoman Ertekin, age twenty-three, to do something about the shitstorm state of her family and her life.
So nice to be needed.
‘Breached,’ Tsai said slowly. ‘Yes, I think you could say that.’
The outer hatches themselves were gone, blown clear by the emergency bolts – by now they’d be somewhere at the bottom of the Pacific. The blackened stub of Horkan’s Pride had been propped in the dry dock, as close to a usefully even keel as her design would allow. Still, they had to clamber down into Access Four as if it were a well cut into the top of the crew section’s hull. A zero-G assist ladder took them to the bottom of the airlock chamber within, and from there they dropped heavily through the inner lock and onto the canted surface of the main dorsal corridor. Maintenance lighting glowed in soft blue LCLS panels along the sides of the passageway, but Tsai’s uniforms had set up high-intensity incident lamps by the airlock and further down. White glare bounced back off the grubby cream-coloured walls, and teeth.
Sevgi’s gaze caught it as she came down off the last rung of the ladder, skidded to a halt on the sight. The ripped-to-the-gums grin of a mutilated human head where it lay only loosely attached to the limbless torso sprawled on the floor.
‘You see what I mean?’ Tsai climbed down beside her.
Sevgi stood, managing her stomach. Leaving aside the hangover, it had still been a while. Even her last year with the NYPD had been mercifully short on gore; transferring from homicide to COLIN liaison hadn’t made her any friends on the force, but it had certainly put a brake on the amount of mangled human remains she had to look at. Now, she was vaguely aware that without the syn, she would have vomited up what little her stomach contained, all over Tsai’s crime scene.
Your crime scene, you mean.
This is yours, Sev.
She bent forward a little, peered at the dead man. Took possession.
‘Alberto Toledo,’ said Tsai quietly. ‘Engineer at the Stanley bubble, atmospheric nanotech. Fifty-six years old. Rotated home.’
‘Yes, I know.’ Biog detail bubbled up from ruined, sneering face, whispering like ghosts. Job specs, résumé, family background. This one had a daughter somewhere. The flesh of both cheeks had been sheared off up to the cheekbone, where stringy fragments of tissue still clung. The jaw was stripped. The eyes–
She swallowed. Still a little queasy. Norton joined her, put a hand on her shoulder.
‘You okay, Sev?’
‘Yeah, I’m fine.’ She locked onto facts. Horkan’s Pride hadn’t talked to them for almost the whole seven and a half months of its long fall back to Earth. ‘Captain, this… looks recent.’
Tsai shrugged. ‘Antibacterials in the shipboard atmospheric system, they tell me. But yeah, we’re guessing Alberto here was probably one of the last.’
‘The last?’
Sevgi glanced at Norton as he said it, and was pleased to notice that he looked as shaky as she felt. Distantly, she picked out the acidic tang of someone else’s vomit in the air of the closed space around her. It was oddly comforting, the knowledge that others before her had seen and reacted in same way she wanted to. It made it easier to hold on.
‘What happened to the limbs?’ she managed, almost casually.
‘Surgically removed.’ Tsai gestured up the corridor. ‘They’re still downloading the autosurgeon’s log, so we can’t be sure that’s how it was done, but it’s the obvious explanation.’
‘So how did he end up here?’
The captain nodded. ‘Yeah, that’s a little harder. Could be the impact threw the bodies about some. We found most of the cryocaps hinged open, nutrients all over the floor and walls. Looks like whoever did this wasn’t all that tidy, at least towards the end.’
‘The corridor locks should have engaged when she came down,’ Norton said shortly. ‘These ships compartmentalise under emergency conditions. There’s no way something could get flung from one end of this hulk to the other like that. No way.’
‘Well, it’s only a theory.’ Tsai gestured up and down the unobstructed corridor again. ‘But as you’ll see. Not a lot of compartmentalisation going on here. You want to look at the cryocap section?’
Sevgi peered along the passageway to where more incident lamps lit the environs of the sleeper racks. She could see figures moving about down there, heard a couple of voices. The brief rattle of a laugh. The sound carried her back, with a force that was almost physical, to her crime scene days with homicide. Black humour and hardened cameraderie, the quiet thrum of an intensity denied to anyone who didn’t work this beat and the layering on of a detachment that came with custom. So weird, the shit you can get nostalgic for, girl. It alarmed her a little, realising the extent to which, despite her quailing stomach, she did suddenly want to plunge back into that world and its dark procedural workings.
‘The other bodies,’ she said, as the syn lit up her head. ‘They’re all mutilated like this one, right?’
Tsai’s face was a mask. ‘Or worse.’
‘Have you found the limbs?’
‘Not as such.’
Sevgi nodded. ‘Just bones, right?’
Oh, Ethan, you should have been around to see this. It really has happened this time, just the way you always used to bullshit me it would.
‘That’s right.’ Tsai was looking at her like a teacher with a smart kid.
‘You’ve got to be fucking kidding,’ said Norton, very quietly.
Sevgi turned to look at him fully. It was reflex denial, shock, not objection.
‘That’s right.’
‘Someone chopped these people up with the autosurgeon—’
She nodded, still not sure in the bright spin of the syn and the shock of the understanding, how she felt, how she should feel.
‘Yes. And ate them.’
CHAPTER FIVE
It was like a landscape out of Dali.
The CSI virtual was a forensics standard Sevgi remembered from her time with the NYPD – pristine Arizona desert as far as the eye could see, blue sky featureless but for a ghost moon that carried the designers’ logo like a watermark. Each section of the investigation presented as a separate three-storey adobe structure, distributed across the landscape in a preternaturally neat semi-circular arc. The sectional homes were open on the facing side like cutaways in an architectural model, furnished with steps so you could walk up to each level. Labels floated in the air beside each structure, neatly lettered fonts announcing data anomaly; path labs; recovered surveillance; prior record. Much of the display space was still empty, data still to come, but shelved on the exposed floors of the path lab home, the mutilated corpses from Horkan’s Pride stood on their stumps like vandalised statues in a museum. Even here, not all the organic data was in yet, but the corpses had been scanned into the system early on. Now they posed in catwalk perfection, coloured and intimate enough to make your own flesh quail as you stared at theirs. Sevgi had already seen close up, had focused with irresistible fascination on neatly sectioned bone in the densely packed meat of an arm taken off centimetres from the shoulder, and then wished she hadn’t. The syn was wearing off, leaving queasy traces of hangover beneath.