Ричард Морган - The SF Collection

Brief quiet. In the window, the terminal building slid out of view as the shuttle turned to taxi. He could feel Norton hesitate.

‘That wouldn’t have stopped you, though,’ he said finally. ‘Would it.’

Carl rolled his head to face front, pressed back into the seat’s cushioning. He hadn’t had a lot of sleep either. Elena Aguirre had sat in the darkened corners of his hotel room on and off all night, pretending to be Sevgi Ertekin, and not quite pulling it off.

‘Not in the end, no.’

‘Is that how you do it?’ Norton asked him.

‘Do what?’

‘Become a thirteen. Is that what it’s about, just not letting yourself be stopped?’

Carl shot him a surprised look. ‘No. It’s about genetic wiring. Why, you feeling left out?’

‘No.’ Norton sank back in his seat as well. ‘Just trying to understand. ’

The shuttle trundled steadily out towards the runway. Rain swept the window pane, smeared diagonal with the wind. Soft chime – the fasten-webbing sign lit on the LCLS panel above their heads, complete with animated instructions. They busied themselves with the thick, padded tongues of fabric. Like the siren song lull of v-format prep, Carl usually had a hard time with how it felt once the webbing had him in its grip – it triggered tiny escape impulses across his body that he had to consciously hold down with Osprey-trained calm. But this time he finished smoothing the cross-folds over each other, drew a deep breath and found, with a shock like trying to walk up a step that wasn’t there, that he felt nothing at all. Only the sense of anchored purpose, soaking coldly through him like the woken mesh.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said to the man at his side. ‘About your brother, I’m sorry it had to work out this way.’

Norton said nothing.

Across the aisle and back, a soft but urgent chiming signalled that some idiot had failed to web up correctly. An attendant appeared and hurried down past them to help out. The shuttle’s motors picked up their idling whine, began to build force. On the LCLS panel, soft purple lettering in Chinese, then English, then Spanish, then Arabic, swelling forward, fading out. On station.

Carl glanced at the silent COLIN exec. ‘That’s part of the reason you’re here, right?’

‘Sevgi’s the reason I’m here.’ Norton’s voice came out tight.

The engines outside reached shrieking pitch, the shuttle unstuck and hurled itself down the runway. Carl felt himself pressed back into the cushioning once more, this time with outside force beyond his own strength.

He closed his eyes and gave himself up to it.

They hit the sky on screaming turbines, the suborbital fuel lit and kicked them up around the curve of the world. The webbing hugged them tight and close.

‘Fucking Ortiz,’ said Norton loudly, beside him.

In the judder and thrum of the trajectory, it wasn’t clear if he was talking to the man or just about him. And this time his tone was loose and hard to define, but somewhere at the bottom of it Carl thought he could hear something like despair.

Norton wasn’t really surprised when Jeff spat the name out, but not because it wasn’t a shock. Simply, surprise wasn’t an option any more, the glandular wiring that would have supplied it was running surge-overloaded, had been since the previous evening when Marsalis played him Jeff’s phone conversation and told him about Ren. And it certainly shouldn’t have mattered to him more than his own brother’s betrayal.

Somehow it did.

He still remembered the change when Ortiz came fully aboard at Jefferson Park, when the slim, dynamic Rim politician’s post morphed from consultative policy adviser to actual Americas policy director. He remembered the sudden sense of stripping down as layers of bureaucracy were lashed into efficiency or simply fired down to skeleton staffing levels. He remembered the way the little-fiefdom people like Nicholson and Zikomo ran for cover. The new hires and promotions, Andrea Roth, Lena Oyeyemi, Samson Chang. Himself. The tide of change and the clean air it seemed to bring in with it, as if someone had suddenly opened all the windows facing the East River.

On another day, some other time, he would have called the bringer of this news a liar to his face, would have refused to believe.

But there was too much else now. The old landscape had burned down around him, Sevgi, Jeff, the aftermath of the Merrin case – it was all on fire, too hot to touch anywhere without getting hurt.

‘It was Tanaka’s fucking idea from the start.’ Jeff, laying it out. Bloodied nose staunched once more, this time with torn twists of tissue pushed up each nostril, a freshened tumbler of cognac and, now, slightly slurring tones. ‘He comes to me two, two and a half years ago with this stupid fucking scheme. We can take Ortiz for some serious extra cash, if we just threaten to go public on Scorpion Response.’

‘Why you?’ Marsalis asked.

Jeff shrugged. ‘I was all he had. When we scattered back in ’94, there were no links, no looking back. I was the only one apart from Ortiz who kept my identity, the only one with any public profile. Tanaka – he was called Asano back then, Max Asano – sees me on the feeds, this conference in Bangkok on the Pacific Rim refugee problem. So he sneaks across the fenceline, tracks me to the house over in Marin and he lays it out for me. He’s got it all set up, the discreet clearing accounts in Hawaii, the back-sealed financial disconnect, the whole method. It’s all there for the taking.’

‘Ortiz?’ Norton still could not make it fit. ‘Joaquin Ortiz ran Scorpion Response? Why the hell would he get involved in something like that?’

Jeff shot him a weary look. ‘Oh, grow up, Tom. Because he’s a fucking politician, a power-broker with an eye to the main chance. He always has been. Back then, just after secession kicked in, he was a junior Rim staffer looking for an edge. He got Scorpion Response handed to him and he worked it as far as it would carry him, which was pretty much up to policy level. When Jacobsen came in and the oversight protocols looked too stiff to risk any more, he folded Scorpion up ahead of time and moved on to getting elected to the assembly instead. That’s how you do it, Tom. Stay ahead of the game, know when to get out and keep your eyes open for the next opportunity.’

‘The next opportunity being COLIN.’

‘Yeah, that’s right, little brother.’ Jeff’s expression turned hooded and resentful. ‘Fucking Ortiz does seven years of elected office in the Rim, which he then bargains into a consultancy with the Colony Initiative. Another six years there, climbs to the top of that tree as well, and now they’re talking about the UN.’

‘Ripe for the plucking,’ said Marsalis.

‘Yeah, well, that’s what Tanaka thought.’ Jeff swallowed brandy, shivered. ‘See, he figures there are twenty or thirty ex-Scorpion personnel scattered about North America with their new identities, so Ortiz can’t know who the blackmail’s coming from, and he can’t very well set out to find and kill them all. Plus he’s got access to COLIN-level funds these days, he can skim a few million off here and there, make the payments easily. It’s the line of least resistance.’

‘But that’s not Ortiz,’ said Norton automatically, startled.

‘No. That’s what Tanaka missed.’

‘And so did you,’ Marsalis pointed out. ‘Why did Tanaka need you in the first place? Why not take his demands straight to Ortiz?’

Another shrug. ‘He said he wanted a buffer. I don’t know, maybe he just wanted a friend, someone to work with. It’s got to be tough, right? Living a cover identity for the rest of your life. Covering for a past you can’t ever tell anyone about.’