The path lab n-djinn interface, a perfectly beautiful Eurasian female in tailored blue scrubs, narrated the nightmare with machine calm.
‘The perpetrator chose limbs because they represented the simplest transfer of the automated medical system’s functions from surgery to butchery.’ An elegant gesture. ‘Amputation is an established procedure within the autosurgeon’s protocols, and it is not life threatening. After each surgical procedure, it was a simple matter to return the subject, still living, to the cryogen units, thus assuring a ready and continuing supply of fresh meat.’
‘And the automed just let it all fucking happen?’ Coyle was staring angrily about him, male outrage deprived of targets. ‘What the fuck is that?’
‘That,’ said Sevgi wearily, ‘is selective systems intrusion. Someone got into the general protocol level and closed down the ship’s djinn. For a good datahawk, it wouldn’t be difficult. All these ships have a human override option anyway, and there’s a failsafe suicide protocol wired into the n-djinn. You just have to trick it into believing it’s been corrupted, and it shuts itself down. There are a whole series of secondary blocks to prevent that damage seeping down into the discrete systems, but like we’re hearing, he didn’t need to worry about that. He wasn’t telling the medical systems to do anything they weren’t already programmed for.’
‘He?’ Rovayo. Sevgi’d already pegged her as a staunch man’s woman and this looked like confirmation – umbrage taken at potential feminazi chauvinism. ‘Why’s it got to be a he?’
Sevgi shrugged. Because, statistically, that’s the way it fucking is, she didn’t say.
‘Sorry. Figure of speech.’
‘Yeah, ’til we get the swab breakdowns back, and find out it was a man,’ drawled Norton. He stepped past Rovayo’s mutinous look, closer to the white-walled, opened architecture of the path home and its exhibits. The lab ’face gave ground and stood in deferential silence, waiting to be directly questioned. Its higher interactional functions had apparently not been enabled. Norton nodded up at the exposed grin of a female corpse, and it leapt out at them. Visual distance was elusive in the construct, it bowed and swelled like a lens according to user focus. ‘Thing I don’t get is the mess. I can see killing them all, you don’t want witnesses left around, with or without arms and legs. But why the blood on the walls? Why mutilate the faces like that?’
‘Because he was fucking cracked,’ Coyle growled. ‘He probably ate that stuff as well, right?’
‘Difficult to say.’ The lab ’face kicked in again, pointing and pulling in a bubble of data display from one of the other file houses. ‘Evidence gathered from the kitchen unit suggests meat scraped from the skulls may have been cooked and ingested. This does not seem to have been the case with the eyes, which were gouged out and then discarded.’
Sevgi barely glanced at the yanked-in focus. It was in any case a little too abstract for easy human digest – sketched molecular traces and a scrawled sidebar summary about microwave effect. Later she’d tramp over to the file house and review it at her own pace. Right now she was still staring up at the ruined face of Helena Larsen. Demodynamic specialist, psychiatric assessor. Divorced, signed up for Mars not long after. COLIN got a lot like this. You split from all you’ve known, why not. Your life’s columnar supports are crumbling all around you, you probably need the cash. Three years, the minimum qualified professional tour of duty, seems suddenly reasonable. On Mars you earn big, and, for the short-timers at least, there’s fuck all to spend it on. You’ll come home wealthy, Helena Larsen. You’ll come home with tales of an alien skyline to tell the children you’ll someday have. You’ll have the cachet of the trip to trade off and the résumé potential it represents. You’ll have moved on. Got to be better than sitting in the ruins of your old life, right? Better than clinging to whatever fragments you–
‘Investigator Ertekin?’
She blinked. She’d missed what Coyle was saying to her.
‘Sorry, just thinking,’ she said truthfully. ‘What, uh-?’
‘I asked,’ said the cop, with the heavy emphasis of repetition, ‘whether you think it’s likely that whoever did this could still be alive?’
The air in the virtuality, already a breezeless sterile cool at odds with the desert landscape, seemed to slip a couple of degrees lower. Norton looked at Sevgi, and she felt the tiny, almost imperceptible nod come up from the roots of intuition.
‘Someone blew the hatches,’ Rovayo pointed out.
‘That could have been the automated systems.’ Coyle cast a hopeful glance at the two COLIN reps. ‘Right?’
‘It’s a possibility,’ Sevgi said. ‘Until we see the damage to the automated systems and the n-djinn, it’s hard to know how the ship would behave on its own.’
But there was a steady thrum building in the back of her head now, like engines under decking, like the rumble of Ethan’s voice, reading to her the time she came down bad with the flu, passages out of Pynchon that came and went blurrily as she faded in and out of focus with the fever. She snapped the memory shut. Leaned into the cold sparkle of the syn, like wetting her face in a fountain. ‘Look, we’ll know if anyone got out alive when—’
‘The swabs come in,’ Rovayo finished for her. ‘Right. But in the meantime, what do you think? Give us the benefit of your COLIN specialist insight. Could someone have made it down in one piece?’
‘Outside of the cryocaps, it’s not likely,’ Norton told her. Habitual public statement caution, the COLIN watchword. ‘And even if they did, that still puts them a hundred kilometres off the coast. That’s a long swim.’
‘Maybe someone came to get them.’ Rovayo gestured at the empty levels of the recovered surveillance adobe. ‘We got no satellite stream data yet, no overhead incidentals. No way to know what went on before the recovery team got there.’
Coyle shook his head. ‘Doesn’t make sense, Alicia. Recovery scrambled as soon as they had the co-ordinates.’
‘Who’d they use?’ Sevgi asked, trying to sound neutral. NYPD had a long standing superiority complex when it came to the Rim’s contract-out policy on emergency services, an attitude born of, and largely borne out by, New York’s disastrous flirtation with similar schemes in the past.
Rovayo glanced at Coyle.