Richard Morgan - Black Man / Thirteen

Norton was dealing with something else, staring at Ortiz. “You’re pulling favors with UNGLA already? You’ve got your hooks in that far?”

“Tom, I have a secure nomination for secretary general. There will be no dispute, it’s decided at all the levels that matter. I will hold the post by this time next year, if you let me live.” The pressed palms raised, almost like prayer. “Don’t you understand, either of you, that this is what I have been trying to safeguard? You think this was about me personally? It was not, please believe me. I have spent the last six years of my life trying to bend the Colony Initiative closer to a rapprochement with the UN. To reach agreements on Martian law and cooperative governance. To leash corporate greed and harness it to a European social model. To break down the barriers between us and the Chinese instead of building walls and fences. I’ve done all of that in the hope that we don’t have to take our insular nation-state insanities to the first new world we’ve reached and build the same stupid hate-filled structure from the ground up all over again.”

Ortiz’s face was flushed and animated, passion briefly imitating health while it filled him. Carl watched the COLIN director as if he were something behind glass in an insect vivarium. See the humans. Watch the patriarchal male justify his acts to his fellows and to himself.

“One more year,” said Ortiz urgently. “That’s all I need, and I can continue that work from the other side of the fence. I can restructure the idiot posturing in the General Assembly, force reforms, make promises, all built on the work I’ve already done here with COLIN. That’s what was under threat from this stupid petty blackmail out of the past—not some quick cash that I could have filtered through a COLIN account for less than the cost of a single nanorack elevator. That’s not why I did this. I did it for the future, a hope for the future. Isn’t that worth the sacrifice? It was a handful of used-up, counterfeit lives, tired, superannuated men and women of violence hiding from their own pasts, set in the balance against the hope of a better future for all of us.”

Carl thought briefly of Toni Montes, imagined her fighting Onbekend with the decayed vestiges of her combat skill, then letting go and dying to keep the thirteen away from her husband and children. He wondered if she’d thought of smoking ruins in Wyoming as she stood there waiting for the bullet, or only the children she would never see walk through the door again.

He wondered what he’d have to picture when the time came for him.

Elena Aguirre, whispering behind him.

The quiet, filling him up…

“You’re full of shit, Ortiz.” The rasp of Norton’s voice pulled him out of it. “You didn’t have a problem with using these men and women of violence when you were running Scorpion Response.”

“No, that’s true, Tom. But it was a different time.” Ortiz, pitching his tone raised but reasonable. Arguing his point in good faith. “You have to remember that. And back then, those men and women themselves would gladly have given their lives in the causes I’m talking about, because they also believed in a better future.”

Norton jolted forward, face tight with rage. He gripped the arms of Ortiz’s wheelchair, pushed it back half a meter before the autobrake cut in. Carl saw tiny specks of spittle hit Ortiz in the face as the COLIN exec yelled at his boss.

“A better fucking future? And what exactly was your bright new future going to be, you motherfucker? Covert ops in other people’s countries? Corrupt corporate practice? A genetic concentration camp in Wyoming?”

Carl pulled him back. “Get a grip, Tom. This isn’t what we’re here for.”

But the force had already gone out of Ortiz’s face, like a candle flame blown out by Norton’s rage. Suddenly the wheelchair held only an ill old man, shaking his head in weary admission.

“I…was…young. Foolish. I have no defense. But I believed what we were doing was right, at the time. You have to understand what it was like. In the West we were losing the edge, terrified of the gene research that needed to be done, held back by moral panic and ignorance. China was doing work that our universities and technology institutes should have been pursuing. They still are.” Ortiz shifted his gaze to Carl, grew animated once more. “There is a future on Mars, Mr. Marsalis, but it’s not a human future the way Jacobsen and UNGLA understood it. You’ve been there, you know what it’s like. We will need the variants, we will have to become a variant of some sort if we plan to stay. The Chinese understand this, that’s why they haven’t stopped their programs. I only sought to equalize the pressure, so when the explosion, the realization finally came, it would not rupture our society apart from the differential.”

Carl nodded. “Yeah. Let’s get back to Onbekend.”

“You don’t believe me?”

“What does it matter what I believe? It won’t change what you’ve done. How did Onbekend find out he was Manco Bambarén’s half brother?”

Ortiz sighed. “I really don’t remember details of that sort. It was a long time ago. Yes, possibly, he used Scorpion Response time and resources to track down his sourcemat mother, discovered who she was, and saw the angle. The work we were doing in Wyoming may have sparked his interest. It is through Scorpion channels that he discovered he had a twin, that I do know, so quite possibly he found Isabela Gayoso the same way. And I know that when he wasn’t seconded to us, Project Lawman deployed him in a covert capacity in Bolivia on at least one occasion, so he would perhaps have had opportunity then as well. All I can tell you is that when the time came to dissolve the Scorpion operation, he already had his place in the sun prepared. He knew that his twin had accepted Mars resettlement, and that Scorpion Response would be wiped from the flow by n-djinn. And Bambarén had made a place for him in his organization. It was a perfect disappearing act.”

Yeah, until Stefan Nevant shows up trying to sell Bambarén a pistaco threat he already has blood-related access to and drawing down attention they could really all do without. Poor old Stefan, right on target. Better intuition than you ever knew. No wonder Bambarén turned you over so fucking fast. All you were going to do was lead an UNGLA squad right to his half brother’s door.

And no wonder Bambarén freaked when we showed up, set it all in motion all over again. I thought I’d offended him when I talked about exemplary executions in some village square somewhere. Must have nailed something Onbekend did for him, too close to the truth for comfort.

He thought I was playing with him. Thought I’d come for his brother.

He thought of Sevgi Ertekin, propped against the side of the COLIN jeep, hands in pockets, jacket hooked back. The casual reveal of the shoulder-holstered Marstech gun, the telegraphed warning to Bambarén not to fuck up.

Sevgi, you should have been here to hear all of this. We were so fucking close after all.

But you would have told me not to gloat, it’s not attractive.

He focused hard on the man in the wheelchair. “Is Isabela Gayoso still alive?”

“No, she died some years ago. Onbekend mentioned it to me in passing when we met in New York. She grew up in crushing poverty, it seems, and of course these things tend to take their toll later in life. From what I hear, Bambarén himself was lucky to survive his childhood. Neither of his siblings did.”

“Does Bambarén know he has a second half brother?”

“No. We did not involve him. Onbekend has enough familia presence these days to make the contacts we needed at Bradbury and Wells, and to be convincing when he did. It took some time, but he convinced the Martian chapters that there is a wedge opening between the Lima clans and the altiplano.” Ortiz’s shrunken shoulders lifted under the gray silk of the pajamas. “From what I understand, it’s not far from the truth.”