‘So I’m the black man.’
She pulled a face. ‘Yeah, you just showed up and fit the role a little too well.’
‘Tell me about it.’ Carl stirred through his recollections again, the fight in the night-time mall. ‘You didn’t send him after me then?’
‘No, that was all his idea.’ Ren’s tone was sour. ‘Thought it up all on his own, and I wasn’t there to stop him. Wasn’t for that, we might all have got off the Cat quietly, while RimSec were still clumping about up on deck trying to lock us down.’
‘You have any idea why you were supposed to bodyguard Merrin?’
‘None. I’m strictly for hire. Got the word he’d be coming in, emergency splashdown and Ward goes out to collect. My end was just keep him safe for a few months, they were going to need him later. We were going to do that at Ward’s place, but it seems Merrin had a few trust issues after what he went through aboard Horkan’s Pride.’
‘Yeah. Understandable. So how’d you talk him down?’
‘Initially?’ Ren grinned. ‘With ninjutsu.’
‘And after that?’
The grin stayed. ‘How do you think?’
‘Really? Osborne and Merrin? How’d you make that work?’
Another elegant shift of the grey fleeced shoulders. ‘Playing handmaiden to Christ, I get to do what I like in Scotty’s eyes. Or at least, he sells it to himself that way as long as he can, because he doesn’t want the rest of it to go away. Maybe that’s what really went wrong when you showed up. Who can tell?’
‘And Merrin?’
‘Well, I’d say Merrin never quite came back from that ride he took home on Horkan’s Pride. I’d been bracing myself for all the usual arrogant thirteen bullshit when he arrived.’ She shook her head. ‘Not much sign of it. I wouldn’t say he was broken, but I’m not sure he ever straightened out what was really going on. I rammed it home that if he made waves, he was just going to blow cover, and I guess he was smart enough to take that much in. He had covert training, right?’
‘Yeah. Field experience too.’
‘So. Something to hang onto, I guess.’
Carl felt the sequence of the fight rise up in his mind again. Slurred tanindo, the slack, not-quite-committed feel to the moves, the lack of force. Almost as if Merrin was still halfback on Mars and living a lesser gravitational pull. As if he’d never really made it home after all.
‘So, you had any field experience?’ he asked Ren.
‘Not as such.’
‘Not as such, huh?’ Carl glanced out across the bay to Marin. The light was almost gone now. ‘Who the fuck are you, Ren?’
‘That’s not what matters here.’
‘I think it is.’
She stared at him for a couple of seconds in the gloom. Put together a throwaway gesture.
‘I’m just some guy they hired.’
‘Just some guy. Right. With ninjutsu technique good enough to beat an ex-Lawman. Try again. Who are you?’
‘Look, it’s simple. Forget whatever skills I picked up on my way round the Pacific Rim. I got hired here, in California, to do a handling job, because that’s what I do. I did my job, I handled the mess when Merrin boiled over, and I kept him covered. Then, when the heat got turned up high again, my scumbag client cut me loose. And now I’m looking for payback.’
‘I thought you were here to help.’
‘I am. My payback is handing you the people who cut me loose.’
‘Not good enough.’
‘I’m sorry, it’ll have to do.’
‘Then go peddle your grudge to someone else.’
He turned his back and leaned on the seaward wall. Stared at the lights out across the water, tried hard not to think of Istanbul, and failed. Under certain superficial differences, the two cities shared an essence you couldn’t evade. Both freighted with the same distilled dream of shoreline, hills and suspension spans, the same hazy sunlit air and rumble by day, the same glimmer on water at evening as ferries criss-crossed the gloom, and traffic flowed in skeins of red and pale gold light, across the bridges and through the street-lamp studded veins of the city. What was in the air there, was here as well, and he felt it catching in his throat.
He heard her boots move behind him. Footfalls on evercrete, closing the gap. He looked out at the glimmer of lights.
‘Kind of careless tonight, aren’t you?’ She draped her arms on the wall, mimicked his posture about a metre off to his left.
He shrugged, didn’t look at her. ‘I figure if you want to feed me some information, it doesn’t pay you to take me out. You were going to do that, you would have done it a while ago.’
‘Fair analysis. Still a risk, though.’
‘I’m not feeling very risk-averse right now.’
‘Yeah, but you’re being fucking choosy about who you take your leads from. Mind telling me why?’
He tipped a glance at her.
‘How about because I don’t trust you any further than I would a Jesusland preacher with a choirboy? You’re handing me what looks like half of a solution, Ren. And it doesn’t match up with what I already know. To me, that stinks of deflection. You want me to believe you’re really ready to sell out your boss? Tell me who you are.’
Quiet. The city breathed. Reflected light trembled across the water.
‘I’m like you,’ she said.
‘You’re a variant?’
She squinted at the blade of her outstretched hand. ‘That’s right. Harbin black-lab product. Nothing but the best.’
‘You some kind of bonobo then?’
‘No, I am not some kind of fucking bonobo.’ There were a couple of grammes of genuine anger in the way her voice lifted. ‘I had sex with Merrin and Scotty for my operational benefit, not because I couldn’t keep my hands off them.’
‘Well, you know what?’ He kept his voice at a drawl, not really sure why he was pushing, just some vague intuitive impulse to feed the anger and keep Ren off balance. ‘The real bonobo females, the pygmy chimps in Africa? That’s what they do a lot of the time too. Fuck to calm the males down, keep them in line. I guess you could call that operational benefit, from a social point of view.’
She got off the wall and faced him.
‘I’m a fucking thirteen, Marsalis. A thirteen, just like you. Got that?’
‘Bullshit. They never built a female thirteen.’
‘Right. Tell yourself that, if it makes you feel better.’
She stood a metre off, and he saw her force the anger back down, iron it out of her stance and put it away. Shiver of unlooked-for fellow feeling as he watched it happen. She leaned on the wall again, and her voice came out cool and conversational.
‘Has it ever occurred to you, Marsalis, to wonder why Project Lawman failed so spectacularly? Has it occurred to you that just maybe cramming gene-enhanced male violent tendency into a gene-enhanced male chassis is overloading the donkey a little?’
Carl shook his head. ‘No, that hasn’t occurred to me. I was there when Lawman blew apart. What went wrong was that thirteens don’t like to do what they’re told, and as soon as the normal constraints come off, they stop doing it. You can’t make good soldiers out of thirteens. It’s that simple.’
‘Yeah, like I said. Overloading the donkey.’