Ричард Морган - The SF Collection

‘Over there?’ Carl asked from the depths of an immense, rushing calm. ‘You’re talking about the Chinese mainland?’

‘Yeah.’ Jeff kept the tissues loosely pressed to his nose, worked the cork on the bottle one-handed, poured himself another tumblerful. ‘Scorpion Response had been running covert operations into South East Asia and China since the middle of last century. It was their playground, they got in and out of there like a greased dick. The new brief just meant going in and getting what looked like promising material. Pre-Jacobsen, variant science still looked like the way to go. The Chinese were still doing it full on, no human rights protest to get in the way, they were getting ahead of the game. We aimed to even up the race.’

Carl saw the way Tom Norton was looking around the office, dazed, stark disbelief smashed through with understanding.

‘Human Cost. Promising material. You’re talking about people? Jesus Christ, Jeff, you’re talking about fucking people ?’

His brother shrugged and drank. ‘Sure. People, live tissue culture, cryocapped embryos, lab notes, you name it. Small scale, but we were into everything. We were a big unit, Tom. Lot of backing, lot of resources.’

‘This is not possible.’ Norton made a two-handed gesture as if pushing something away. ‘You’re telling us Human Cost was… you ran Human Cost as a, as some kind of pirate genetic testing programme?’

‘Not exactly, no. Human Cost was the back-end shell charity to cover the operation here in the Rim. It was a lot smaller then, back before we had official state funding, before I came out here to run it officially. Back then it was a guerrilla outfit. Couple of transit houses here and there, some waterfront industrial units down in San Diego. Scorpion Response were the sharp end, gathering the intelligence, going in and getting the goods.’ Jeff stared through his brother at something else. ‘Setting up the actual labs and the camps.’

‘Camps,’ Norton repeated sickly. ‘Black labs, here in the Rim? I don’t believe you. Where?’

‘Where do you think, little brother? Where do the Rim stick anything they don’t like the smell of?’

‘Jesusland.’ Carl nodded to himself. ‘Sure, why not? Just pre-empting Cimarron and Tanana, after all. Where’d you set up shop? Nevada? That’s nice and close to the fenceline. Utah, maybe?’

Jeff shook his head. ‘Wyoming. Big place, barely any population. No one to see what’s going on, no one to care, and state legislature in that part of the world will take your hand right off at the wrist if you offer good money for use of the land. We just told them it was another gene-modified crop project.’ Still, the glassy, through-everything stare. ‘I guess that’s even the truth when you get right down to it, right? So. We took a couple of hundred square kilometres, power-fenced it in. Minefields and scanners, big corporate keep-out notices.’ His voice dropped to a whisper. ‘I saw it once. I saw it working, all working perfectly and no one out there knew or cared.’

‘What happened to it all when you folded?’ Carl asked quietly.

‘Can’t you guess?’

The black man kicked out, smashed into Jeff Norton’s shin just below the knee. The Human Cost director yelped and hunched over. Carl grabbed his head by the hair and smashed his face down on the coffee table. Pulled back, smashed again–

Then Tom Norton was in his way. Restraining hands on him, pushing him back.

‘That’s enough,’ the COLIN exec said.

Carl nailed him with a look. ‘Get your hands off me.’

‘I said that’s enough. We need him conscious.’

At their feet, Jeff huddled away from the blows, curled up foetally on the floor space between coffee table and sofa. Carl stared at Norton a moment longer, then jerked a nod. He dragged the Human Cost director back to the sofa and dumped him there. Bent so he was eye to eye with him.

‘I told you not to make me guess again,’ he said evenly. ‘Now what happened to the Wyoming camp when Scorpion folded?’

‘All right.’ The words burst out of Jeff Norton like a dam breaking. His nose had started bleeding again, was leaking into his cupped hands. ‘We torched it, we fucking torched it, all right? Scorpion went in, they killed everyone, the subjects and the hired staff. Then they mined it, blew it up and burned everything to the ground. Left nothing but the ashes.’

In his mind, Carl saw how it would be, the sporadic clatter of small arms, the wailing panic and truncated shrieks, dying away to quiet and the crackle of flames. The ripcord string of crunch-thump explosions through the camp as the placed charges went up. And later, walking away, the fire on the darkened skyline in the distance when you turned to look back. Like Ahvaz, like Tashkent, like the hotels in Dubai. The age-old signal. The beast is out.

‘And no one said anything?’ Norton asked, disbelieving.

‘Oh, Jesus Tom, have you been listening to any fucking thing I’ve said?’ Jeff sobbed out a snot-thickened laugh. ‘This is the Republic you’re talking about. You know, Guantanamo syndrome? Do it far enough away, and no one gives a shit.’

Carl moved back to the desk and leaned against its edge. It wasn’t interrogation procedure, he should keep proximity, keep up the pressure. But he didn’t trust himself within arm’s reach of Jeff Norton.

‘Okay,’ he said grimly. ‘Scorpion Response ties all these people together, gives them a dirty little secret to keep, and Scorpion Response buries their details so there are no links left on the flow. None of that explains killing them all now, fourteen, fifteen years later. Someone’s cleaning house again. So why now?’

The Human Cost director lifted his bloodied face and bared his teeth in a stained grin. He seemed to be shaking, coming apart with something that was almost laughter.

‘Career fucking progression,’ he said bitterly. ‘Ortiz.’

They caught a crack-of-dawn Cathay Pacific bounce to New York the following morning. Carl would have preferred not to wait, but he needed time to make a couple of calls and plan. Also, he wanted Tom Norton to sleep on his choices – if he could sleep at all – and face the whole thing in the cold light of a new day. All things considered, he was playing with better cards than he’d expected, but Norton was still an unknown quantity, all the more so for the way things had finally boiled down at the Human Cost Foundation.

At the airport, Norton’s COLIN credentials got them fast-tracked through security and aboard before anyone else. Carl sat in a preferential window seat, waiting for the shuttle to fill, and stared out at an evercrete parking apron whipped by skirling curtains of wind-driven rain. Past the outlines of the terminal buildings, a pale, morose light was leaking across the sky between thick gunmetal cloud. The bad weather had blown in overnight, and looked set to stick around.

Forecasts for New York said cold, dry and clear. The thoughts in his head were a match.

The suborb shuttle shifted a little on its landing gear, then started to back out. Carl flexed his right hand, then held it cupped. Remembered the smooth glass weight of the ornament from the Human Cost director’s desk. He glanced across at Tom Norton in the seat next to him. The COLIN exec caught his eye – face haggard with the demons that had kept him from sleep.

‘What?’

Carl shook his head. ‘Nothing. Just glad you’re along.’

‘Leave me the fuck alone, Marsalis. I made a promise. I’ll keep it. I don’t need your combat-bonding rituals.’

‘Not about bonding,’ Carl looked back at the window. ‘I’m glad you’re here because this would have been about a hundred times harder to do.’