No one paid any attention to the black man as he came up the hall. Dudeck was too deep in the game, and with full audiovid monitoring systems webbed up in the nanocarb vault of the hall, the others were loose and unvigilant. Carl got to within ten paces of the gathering before anybody turned round. Then one of the wannabes must have caught black in motion out of the corner of an eye. He pivoted about. Stepped forward, secure in the knowledge of how the monitoring system worked, puffed up with association and proximity to Dudeck.
‘Fuck you want, nigger?’
Carl stepped in and hit him, full force with one trailing arm and the back of his hand. The impact smashed the boy’s mouth and knocked him to the floor. He stayed there, bleeding and staring up at Carl in disbelief.
Carl was still moving.
He closed with the tat-marked spectator, broke down a fumbled defence and tipped the man into Dudeck, who was still trying to get up from the console. The two men tangled and went down, sprawled. The second sycophant hovered, gaped. He wasn’t going to do anything. The older guy was already backing off, hands spread low in front of him to denote his detachment.
Dudeck rolled to his feet with practised speed. A siren cut loose somewhere.
‘Got some unfinished business,’ Carl told him.
‘You’re fucking cracked, nigger. That’s monitored, unprovoked aggre—’
He let the mesh drive him. Dudeck saw him coming, threw together a Thai boxing guard and kicked out. Carl stamped the kick away, feinted the guard, rode the jab punch response and then broke Dudeck’s nose with a close-in palm heel. The Aryan went over again, explosively, backwards. The second serious AC member was staggering upright. Carl punched him in the throat to keep him out of the fight. He went down, choking. Dudeck had bounced up, hadn’t even wiped the blood from his nose. Old hand. His eyes were blank with fury. He came in like a truck, a flurry of blows, all simple linear shit. Carl beat most of it, winced on a stray punch that scraped his cheekbone, then snagged the other man’s right arm at the wrist. He locked up the arm, twisted it and slammed down with his own forearm. Dudeck’s elbow broke with a crunch, audible even over the sirens. The Aryan shrieked and went down for the last time. Carl kicked him as hard as he could in the ribs. He felt something give. He kicked again, twice, into the stomach. Dudeck threw up on the second impact, softly, like something rupturing. Carl stepped over the Aryan’s twitching body to avoid the pool of vomit, stamped in the man’s already bloodied face and then bent over him. He grabbed Dudeck’s head by one ear.
‘New rules, birdshit,’ he hissed. ‘I’m working for the man now. I can do what the fuck I want with you. I could kill you, and it wouldn’t make any fucking difference now.’
Dudeck foamed blood and spit. Fragments of a tooth on his smashed lower lip. He was making a low grinding noise somewhere deep in his throat.
Carl let go and stood up. For a moment, he thought he’d stamp on the crumpled form at his feet again, hard into the base of the spine to do some damage the infirmary wouldn’t easily put right, into the face again to destroy it utterly. Maybe go back for the ribs until they snapped inwards and punctured something. At least, he thought, he might spit on the Aryan. But the rage had drained abruptly away. He couldn’t be bothered. The Guatemalan had what he’d asked for. Dudeck was out, infirmary bound. Let the remainder of the Aryan’s shitty Jesusland life take him the rest of the way down. Marsalis didn’t need to see or inflict any more damage. He already knew, within parameters, how it would play out. They stacked men like Dudeck in cheap coffins five deep outside the poor fund crematoria across the Republic every Sunday. Most of them never made it out of their twenties.
At the far end of F wing, the gate clanged back and the intervention squad piled through. Body armour, stunwrap carbines and yells. Carl sighed, raised his hands to his head and walked down the siren-screaming nanocarb hall to meet them.
‘Cordwood Systems.’
‘Marsalis. Print me.’
‘Voiceprint confirmed. You are speaking to the duty controller. Please state your preferences.’
‘Jade, lattice, mangosteen, oak.’
‘Opening. What are your requirements?’
‘I’ve just been hired out of custody by the Western Nations Colony Initiative. They want me to run a variant thirteen retrieval outwith UNGLA jurisdiction.’
‘That is contrary to—’
‘I know. I’ll be in New York in a couple of days. Tell the perimeter crews to expect me. I’ll be dumping my newfound friends as soon as practically possible.’
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
‘Did you have to fucking hospitalise him?’ He shrugged. He’d dumped his prison jacket earlier, stripped off shoes and socks too, and the beach sand under his feet was cool and firm. The night air brushed his neck and his bared arms like loose-drape silk.
‘Couldn’t see a good reason not to.’
‘No?’ Ertekin had not taken off her shoes. ‘Well, it would have meant we got home tonight, instead of staying in this dump. Ever think of that?’
Her gesture took in the floodlit clutch of low rise behind them, the comms tower and behind it like some Godzilla parent the endless upward loom of the Perez nanorack. The rack’s structure stood mostly in darkness, but red navigation lights blinked in dizzying stacked synchrony, dragging vision upward until the lights disappeared into the cloud cover.
‘It’s your dump,’ he said.
‘It’s leased.’
‘That must be heartbreaking for you. COLIN dependent on local state power. I’m surprised you don’t just topple the government. You know, like you did in Bolivia back in the nineties.’
She shot him a look he was beginning to recognise. Halfway to anger, locked down by something else. In another thirteen, he’d have read it as social aptitude training. Here, he wasn’t sure what it might mean. Only one thing was clear. Something was scratching at the edges of Sevgi Ertekin, and had been since he met her.
‘Marsalis, it’s late,’ she told him. ‘I’m not going to get in a fight with you about something COLIN may or may not have done ten years before I joined them. The reason we’re in this dump is because you let your much-vaunted thirteen tendencies get out of hand, and it cost us another six fucking hours of phone calls and negotiation. So don’t push your luck. I’m close enough to sending you back as it is.’
He grinned. ‘Now you’re lying.’
‘Think so? The warden wanted to refer it all the way back up to Tallahassee and a convened Violent Crimes Committee assessment. He’d just love to have you locked down while that grinds through the legislature.’
‘I’d have thought he’d be glad to see the back of me.’
‘Well, you’d be wrong. Warden Parris is an ex-marine.’ Sevgi shot him another glance. ‘Just like Willbrink.’
‘Will who?’
‘Yeah, right. Forget it.’
He didn’t know how much truth she was telling. Certainly, things had been fraught once they saw what he’d done to Dudeck. The intervention squad didn’t quite stunwrap him on the spot, but it was a close thing. He spent three hours in the faintly ammoniac-perfumed gloom of the riot holding cells, was hauled out, marched summarily across to admin and then marched just as rapidly back as, he supposed, competing authorisations whiplashed back and forth. It took another two hours to get him out of the hole permanently, by which time it was dark and the admin block was down to a skeleton crew of care-takers and security.