Richard Morgan - Black Man / Thirteen

“Alberto Toledo,” said Tsai quietly. “Engineer at the Stanley bubble, atmospheric nanotech. Fifty-six years old. Rotated home.”

“Yes, I know.” Biog detail bubbled up from the ruined, sneering face, whispering like ghosts. Job specs, résumé, family background. This one had a daughter somewhere. The flesh of both cheeks had been sheared off up to the cheekbone, where stringy fragments of tissue still clung. The jaw was stripped. The eyes—

She swallowed. Still a little queasy. Norton joined her, put a hand on her shoulder.

“You okay, Sev?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.” She locked onto facts. Horkan’s Pride hadn’t talked to them for almost the whole seven and a half months of its long fall back to Earth. “Captain, this…looks recent.”

Tsai shrugged. “Antibacterials in the shipboard atmospheric system, they tell me. But yeah, we’re guessing Alberto here was probably one of the last.”

“The last ?”

Sevgi glanced at Norton as he said it, and was pleased to notice that he looked as shaky as she felt. Distantly, she picked out the acidic tang of someone else’s vomit in the air of the closed space around her. It was oddly comforting, the knowledge that others before her had seen and reacted in the same way she wanted to. It made it easier to hold on.

“What happened to the limbs?” she managed, almost casually.

“Surgically removed.” Tsai gestured up the corridor. “They’re still downloading the autosurgeon’s log, so we can’t be sure that’s how it was done, but it’s the obvious explanation.”

“So how did he end up here?”

The captain nodded. “Yeah, that’s a little harder. Could be the impact threw the bodies about some. We found most of the cryocaps hinged open, nutrients all over the floor and walls. Looks like whoever did this wasn’t all that tidy, at least toward the end.”

“The corridor locks should have engaged when she came down,” Norton said shortly. “These ships compartmentalize under emergency conditions. There’s no way something could get flung from one end of this hulk to the other like that. No way.”

“Well, it’s only a theory.” Tsai gestured up and down the unobstructed corridor again. “But as you’ll see. Not a lot of compartmentalization going on here. You want to look at the cryocap section?”

Sevgi peered along the passageway to where more incident lamps lit the environs of the sleeper racks. She could see figures moving about down there, heard a couple of voices. The brief rattle of a laugh. The sound carried her back, with a force that was almost physical, to her crime scene days with Homicide. Black humor and hardened camaraderie, the quiet thrum of an intensity denied to anyone who didn’t work this beat, and the layering on of a detachment that came with custom. So weird, the shit you can get nostalgic for, girl. It alarmed her a little, realizing the extent to which, despite her quailing stomach, she did suddenly want to plunge back into that world and its dark procedural workings.

“The other bodies,” she said as the syn lit up her head. “They’re all mutilated like this one, right?”

Tsai’s face was a mask. “Or worse.”

“Have you found the limbs?”

“Not as such.”

Sevgi nodded. “Just bones, right?”

Oh, Ethan, you should have been around to see this. It really has happened this time, just the way you always used to bullshit me it would.

“That’s right.” Tsai was looking at her like a teacher with a smart kid.

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding,” said Norton, very quietly.

Sevgi turned to look at him fully. It was reflex denial, shock, not objection. “That’s right.”

“Someone chopped these people up with the autosurgeon—”

She nodded, still not sure in the bright spin of the syn and the shock of the understanding, how she felt, how she should feel.

“Yes. And ate them.”

It was like a landscape out of Dali.

The CSI virtual was a forensics standard Sevgi remembered from her time with the NYPD—pristine Arizona desert as far as the eye could see, blue sky featureless but for a ghost moon that carried the designers’ logo like a watermark. Each section of the investigation presented as a separate three-story adobe structure, distributed across the landscape in a preternaturally neat semi-circular arc. The sectional homes were open on the facing side like cutaways in an architectural model, furnished with steps so you could walk up to each level. Labels floated in the air beside each structure, neatly lettered fonts announcing data anomaly; path labs; recovered surveillance; prior record. Much of the display space was still empty, data still to come, but shelved on the exposed floors of the path lab home, the mutilated corpses from Horkan’s Pride stood on their stumps like vandalized statues in a museum. Even here, not all the organic data was in yet, but the corpses had been scanned into the system early on. Now they posed in catwalk perfection, colored and intimate enough to make your own flesh quail as you stared at theirs. Sevgi had already seen them close up, had focused with irresistible fascination on neatly sectioned bone in the densely packed meat of an arm taken off centimeters from the shoulder, and then wished she hadn’t. The syn was wearing off, leaving queasy traces of hangover beneath.

The path lab n-djinn interface, a perfectly beautiful Eurasian female in tailored blue scrubs, narrated the nightmare with machine calm.

“The perpetrator chose limbs because they represented the simplest transfer of the automated medical system’s functions from surgery to butchery.” An elegant gesture. “Amputation is an established procedure within the autosurgeon’s protocols, and it is not life threatening. After each surgical procedure, it was a simple matter to return the subject, still living, to the cryogen units, thus assuring a ready and continuing supply of fresh meat.”

“And the automed just let it all fucking happen ?” Coyle was staring angrily about him, male outrage deprived of targets. “What the fuck is that?”

“That,” said Sevgi wearily, “is selective systems intrusion. Someone got into the general protocol level and closed down the ship’s djinn. For a good datahawk, it wouldn’t be difficult. All these ships have a human override option anyway, and there’s a fail-safe suicide protocol wired into the n-djinn. You just have to trick it into believing it’s been corrupted, and it shuts itself down. There are a whole series of secondary blocks to prevent that damage from seeping down into the discrete systems, but like we’re hearing, he didn’t need to worry about that. He wasn’t telling the medical systems to do anything they weren’t already programmed for.”

“He?” Rovayo. Sevgi’d already pegged her as a staunch man’s woman, and this looked like confirmation—umbrage taken at potential feminazi chauvinism. “Why’s it got to be a he ?”

Sevgi shrugged. Because, statistically, that’s the way it fucking is , she didn’t say. “Sorry. Figure of speech.”

“Yeah, till we get the swab breakdowns back and find out it was a man,” drawled Norton. He stepped past Rovayo’s mutinous look, closer to the white-walled, opened architecture of the path home and its exhibits. The lab ’face gave ground and stood in deferential silence, waiting to be directly questioned. Its higher interactional functions had apparently not been enabled. Norton nodded up at the exposed grin of a female corpse, and it leapt out at them. Visual distance was elusive in the construct: it bowed and swelled like a lens according to user focus. “Thing I don’t get is the mess. I can see killing them all—you don’t want witnesses left around, with or without arms and legs. But why the blood on the walls? Why mutilate the faces like that?”