Black Man (10 page)

Ward BioSupply had begun life as one of several marine biotech startups working off the Kwok commercial wharf complex, but over time it had absorbed a lot of the neighboring competition and now sprawled across the north end of the complex in a patchwork collection of office prefabs, scaffolded sub docks, and newly built warehousing. To find anything that didn’t belong to Ulysses Ward, you had to walk one of the narrow linking gantries over to the south side, where a run of eateries with sea views catered to the wharf’s workers.

They ducked into a place called Chung’s, which was widely reckoned to be the best of the caffeine joints and had a set of displays running club footage from the Singapore bloodbeat scene.

“This is good,” Ren said, gesturing at the screens with her coffee mug. “Beats that saccharine shit they pipe in on site.”

“Yeah.” Gruffly—he was still smarting a little from her calling him dumb. Besides which, he quite liked the on-site music. And he didn’t really approve of the massed writhing bodies rubbing up against one another’s all-but-nakedness.

She drank, nodded appreciatively at the taste. “Yeah. Be good to be caffeinated, too, come to that. If Ward’s going to shout at us, I want to be awake when he does it. I’ve been up since four this morning.”

“Doing what?”

She shrugged. “Ah, you know how it is.”

By which he knew she meant she had another job. And was therefore illegal like him, because out here if you were legitimate, you’d get by pretty easily on a single wage. It was the standout difference between the Rim and the Republic.

The hint of solidarity softened his sulk.

“Things’ll smooth out when you’ve been here awhile,” he offered in return. “I was working every open-eye hour, three different places, till I hooked this gig. Ward likes to run his mouth when things go wrong, but he’s a pretty good boss under that.”

She nodded. “I guess things must have been pretty grim where you’re from, right?” she said shrewdly.

“Where is that? I’m guessing Nebraska? The Dakotas, maybe?”

“Montana.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Water war country. Man, that must have been tough growing up.”

“They got it worse in other places,” he said defensively, though he couldn’t have named any offhand.

“Just, well, you know. Hard to get paying work, you don’t know the right people.”

She nodded. “
Plus ça change
.”

“Excuse me?”

“Doesn’t matter.” She watched the screens. “Ward say anything to you about when he’d be back?”

“Not really. Said it might be most of the day. I figure he’s got to be aiming on some serious overhaul work. Usually, trip like that, trellis check, he’d be out and back in not much more than a couple of hours.”

He hesitated. “Carmen, you mind if I ask you a question?”

“Sure.” It was said absently; she wasn’t really paying attention.

“Where are
you
from?”

Sudden sidelong glance.
Now
he had her attention.

“That’s a long story, Scott.” She sipped her coffee. “You sure you want to be that bored?”

“I won’t be. I like hearing about places I haven’t been.”

“Makes you think I’m from someplace else?”

But she grinned as she said it, in a way that said he was supposed to join in. He grinned back, flushing only a little.

“Come on, Carmen. You wouldn’t be working for Ward if you were Rim born and bred. None of us would.” He nodded around at the clientele, dropped his voice a prudent couple of notches. “Everyone in this place is from someplace else. I don’t figure you for any different.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Detective, huh?”

“I just pay attention,” he said.

“Yeah, I guess you do.”

“So come on—tell me. Where’d you swing in from?”

There was a long pause. Scott waited. He’d had these moments before with fellow illegals, the weightless gap before trust engaged, before each one shed the load of suspicion and talked together like two free Americans once would have done, back before the internationalist scum and the Chinese—
political
Chinese, he reminded himself,
you’re not a racist, Scott
—broke apart the greatest nation on the face of the Earth and cast down the fractured remnants like Moses breaking the tablets.

“Taiwan,” she said, and his heart welled up with the knowledge that yes, she
did
trust him. “You heard of Taiwan?”

“Right. I mean, sure.” Falling over himself in eagerness. “That’s in China, right? It’s, like, a Chinese province.”

Ren snorted. “They fucking wish. It’s an island, and it’s off the coast of China, you got that right. But we’re an independent state. Written that way into every Pacific Rim trade agreement and nonproliferation pact in the last hundred years. What you call a hothouse economy, same status as the Angeline Freeport, same hyperpowered output and no one wants to fuck with it in case they break it and the whole Rim feels the backwash. That’s where I grew up.”

“So why’d you leave?”

She gave him a sharp look, for all it had been an innocent question. Scott couldn’t see leaving a place that was doing that well for any reason on Earth, not if it was your home, not if you grew up there.

“I mean,” he stumbled. “I guess you weren’t happy there, right? But, you know, it sounds like the kind of place a person would be happy.”

She smiled a little. “Well, it has its upsides. But even in hothouse economies, you got losers as well as winners. I mean, not everyone in the Freeport’s a movie star or a nanotech licensee, right?”

“Got that right.” He’d worked in the Freeport on and off, would never go back if he didn’t have to.

“Okay, so like I said, winners and losers, if you’re the loser then—”

“You don’t want to talk like that, Carmen.” Scott leaned across the table, earnest. “You’re not a loser just on account of you gotta go somewhere else to make a better life for yourself. None of us is a loser here, we’re just looking for that opportunity to get back on the horse.”

For a moment, it got him a blank look. Then the confusion cleared from her porcelain face. “Ah, right.

Culture gap. No, I’m not talking about losers the way you people do. I mean losers in the trade-off.

Some win, some lose, the wheel goes ’round. That kind of thing.”

“You people?” He tried to hide the hurt. “What do you mean,
you people
?”

“You know, guys like you.” She gestured impatiently. “Old Americans, heart-landers. From the Republic.”

“Oh, okay. But look, Carmen.” He allowed himself a superior smile. “We’re not the
old
Americans, that’s the Union, that sell-out eastern scum, all their UN-loving pals. The Confederated Republic is the
New
America. We’re the Phoenix rising, Carm.”

“Right.”

“I mean, uhm,” he stumbled again, looking for language that wouldn’t offend. “Look, I know probably you didn’t go to a church the same way I always did, guess for you it was some kind of temple or something, but in the end it’s the same thing, right?” Pleased with himself for the way he’d eased out from under Pastor William’s unremitting hellfire and One True Christ ranting, seen a better light in the succession of more moderate churches he’d had to make do with over the last couple of years. “I mean whatever you call God, if you accept that God as your guiding principle the way the Republic does, then any nation that does that has to succeed, right? Has to rise up in the end, no matter what Satan does to lay snares in our path.”

Ren looked at him thoughtfully. “Are you really a, uh, a Christian?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“So you belie—”

Her phone blipped at them. She fished it out and put it to her ear.

“Yeah?” Features tautening, the way he’d seen it that morning when the news about the humidity loop came through. “Got it. Be right there.”

She snapped the phone off again.

“Ward,” she said. “He’s back, and he’s pretty fucking pissed off.”

Pretty pissed off
was about right. Scott could hear Ward’s bellowing through the metal walls of the con room while they were still at the far end of the corridor. He followed Ren along the narrow space, hurrying to keep up with her curiously long, rapid strides. He would have tried to get ahead of her, to go first in case Nocera was still behaving like an asshole, but there was no room to pass, and anyway…

The door sliced back to admit them. Ward’s rage boiled out, suddenly on full audio. Scott was used to the sound, but this time he thought there was an edge on the voice he hadn’t heard before, something that went well beyond anger.

“…the
fucking point
of all this
planning
if we’re—”

He shut up as he saw them. Ulysses Ward was a big, bearish man, muscular from the constant sub-aqua and surface swimming time the business demanded, balding in a way you didn’t see so much of on this side of the fenceline. He flushed when he got angry, as he was now, and he punctuated his speech with aggressive motion of limbs and head. Scott had never seen him actually hit anyone, but he often gave the impression that it wasn’t entirely out of the question. Nocera, perhaps wisely, had given him center stage in the con room, and he stood there now, fists clenched.

“We’re back,” said Ren superfluously.

“So I fucking see.” Ward seemed to notice Scott for the first time. “You, get down to the sub dock and take a look at the air scrubbers on
Lastman
. Felt like I was breathing farts and fumes the last hour back, I nearly fucking had to surface it got so bad.”

For about half a second, before he spotted the idiocy of it, Scott thought about refusing to leave Ren until Ward had calmed down. He swallowed instead, said: “Might be a compatibility problem, all that software we took out of, uh,
Fell 8
was—”

Ward pinned him with a glare. “And can you fix that for me if it is?”

“Well, no, but—”

“No, that’s right. Because I didn’t fucking hire you as a software specialist. So why don’t you get the fuck down there like I asked you to and take a fucking look at what you can fucking fix for me. All right?

Simple enough for you?”

Scott looked at him, knowing he was flushing. Breathed in hard, nodded on clenched teeth and lips pulled tight.

“Good, then why are you still standing here?”

Scott wheeled about and plunged back into the corridor, fury rising through him like heat.
One more month,
he promised himself silently.
One more
fucking
month, and out
. Before today, he’d thought Ward was okay, he’d thought the man was an
American
. Guy lost his temper now and then, but what real man didn’t. Point was, he knew where the lines were. But now, talking that way, treating Scott like he was some just-over-the-fence liability who’d fucked up when all the time it was Scott had been warning Ward that if you were going to cannibalize plug-ins from one sub to another, you couldn’t just
expect
that the systems would fall in love with each other without you ran a whole slew of up-to-date compatibility patches.

He was on the stairs down to the dock when he became aware that something had changed fractionally in the light in the corridor behind him.

He stopped on the first step, looked back.

Saw a tall figure advancing down the passageway from the other end, darkening the view along the narrow perspectives as it passed under each overhead bulb and got between Scott and the light source.

This guy really was tall, and big with it, and advancing with inexorable calm. Someone not used to being stopped, someone who must not have liked the signs all over the topside offices that asked you to buzz and take a seat while you waited, one of our staff will be with you shortly, must instead have decided to just come down anyway and find whatever he was looking for.

Scott lifted an arm and waved.

“Uh, hey,” he called.

The figure gave no indication that it had seen or heard him. It moved steadily along the corridor toward the con room door, seemed to be wearing a long coat and had one hand held stiffly down inside the folds of the garment—And suddenly, out of nowhere, a lever tipped over in Scott’s guts. Something was wrong. This was trouble.

He hopped off the step and jogged back up the corridor, toward the newcomer. He didn’t call out again; there was no point. He knew from experience how voices boomed and echoed in the metal confines of the corridor—this guy had heard him well enough. And yes, there was definitely something in that coat-shrouded hand, he saw the way the material wrapped stiffly around it. He dropped the jog, kicked into a sprint.

They met at the door. Scott’s sprint died, puddled right out of him. What he had to say dried up in his mouth. He gaped.

It was the face. His mind seemed to gibber it. It was the face,
the
face.

Right out of the End Times comics they gave out every fourth Sunday in church, the ones the little kids got nightmares over and the older kids had to earn with red ticks in Pastor William’s Book of Deeds. It was the same hollow-cheeked privation and clamped mouth, the long, untidy hair hanging past the hard-angled bones of cheeks and jaw, the same burning eyes—The Gaze of Judgment. Right out of Volume II Issue 63.

His knees trembled. His mouth worked. He couldn’t—

The door hummed—he’d never noticed the noise before now—and slid back. Voices within, still angry.

The coat swirled, the stranger’s right arm came free, came up swinging. Something hit Scott in the side of the head and he stumbled, went down in an awkward, twisted-limb sprawl. Lightning switched through his head, left sparks and a wow-and-flutter effect in his ears. The Gaze lit on him briefly, then swung away again, left and into the opened con room. The stranger stepped through.

Yells erupted. Nocera and Ward, almost in unison. “This is private fucking property, asshole, what do you—”

A sudden silence that sang above the numbness in his head where he’d been hit. Then Ward again, raw disbelief.

“
You?
What the
fuck
are you doing in here? What—”

Deep, soft cough—a sound he knew from somewhere.

And the screaming started.

Scott felt the sound wring sweat from his pores, turn his skin shivery-ticklish with horror. Like the time Aaron got his arm trapped in the teeth of Dougie Straker’s rock breaker, exactly the same feeling—the sound of agony, of damage so massive it ripped register and recognition out of the voice that made it, left only a flayed shriek of denial that could have belonged to anyone and almost anything.

Carmen!

Scott flailed about. Panic for her got him to his knees, got him to his feet. He felt blood trickling in his hair. He stumbled and almost fell, braced himself on the edge of the door just as it started to slide closed again. The mechanism trembled against his grip a moment, then gave and sank back to full open. Scott shoved himself upright and staggered through.

He had time for one flash-burned glimpse.

Blood, everywhere, the siren color of it shocked onto the consoles and wall, what looked like a couple of fistfuls of offal from the discount end of a butcher’s counter drip-sliding down the screens. Nocera was down, face turned awkwardly sideways, eyes open, cheek pressed hard to the ill-swept, dusty floor as if he were listening for rats in the understructure. More blood, a broad, wine-dark puddle of it leaking out around his midriff, tongues of the stuff twisting out through the scattered dust. Over his body, Ren and the stranger wrestled for a squat-barreled weapon—Scott made the match with the soft impact he’d heard, one of the Cressi sharkpunch guns from the cabinet upstairs. Supposed to be locked, he was
always
telling Ward that, but—

Ward lay on his back beyond.

More blood again, the big man thrashing and slithering in it, clutching, Scott saw with numb horror, at a raw red hole where his belly had been. Shredded tissue hung in ropes out of him, was clotted on the floor and smeared on his fingers like some red-stained cake mix he’d stuck his hands into. Ward’s mouth was a gaping pink tunnel—you could see right down to the molars and a trembling whitish yellow tongue—and the screams came up out of it in sickening waves. His eyes clawed onto Scott as he stood in the doorway, nailed him there. Wide and pleading, crazy with pain, Scott couldn’t know whether his boss knew him or not. He made to throw himself forward into the fray, threw up instead, with punishing, gut-wrenching force. Vomit splattered in Nocera’s pooling blood.

Carmen yelled, desperate.

Cough of the sharkpunch.

Another impact, this time in his neck below the ear. He grabbed for something, anything. The floor came up. Blood and vomit, warm and wet in his face as he hit. He tried to get his mouth closed or twisted clear, failed in the attempt. The hot acid stink and taste—his stomach flipped again, weakly. His legs flexed like a crippled insect’s. Vision dimming out on a pool of red and flecks of yellow-white. He groped after a prayer, fumbled it, couldn’t get his mouth to work, made a handful of scrabbling words in his head—Our Father… deliver me not…

And black.