Free Black Man by Richard K. Morgan Page A

her system. And the thought of starting an investigation in this state—with her abused brain and belly bleating protest at the zero g and the Earth rolling past somewhere sickeningly far below—already had her palms lightly greased with sweat.
    “Right. So you want to tell me where we are going?”
    “Sure. JFK suborb terminal. Got the eleven o’clock shuttle to SFO.”
    Sevgi sat up. “What happened, Horkan’s Pride overshoot the docking slot?”
    “You could say that.” Norton’s tone was dry. “Overshot Kaku, overshot Sagan, splashed down about a hundred klicks off the California coast.”
    “ Splashed down? They’re not supposed to land those things.”
    “Tell me about it. From what I hear, only the main crew section made it down in one piece. The rest is wreckage along a line from somewhere in Utah to the coast or burned up on reentry. The Rim authorities are having what’s left towed back to the Bay Area, where you and I will crack it open and dazzle them all with our lucid analysis of just what the fuck went wrong . Those are Nicholson’s words, by the way, not mine.”
    “Yeah, I guessed.” Norton spoke four-letter words the way a miser spends wafers—when he was utterly inescapably driven to it or when they belonged to someone else. It seemed to be a linguistic rather than a moral quirk, though, because he evinced no apparent embarrassment or distaste when he quoted other people like this, or when Sevgi swore, which was a lot of the time these days.
    “So how come you didn’t phone me earlier with this shit?”
    “Believe me, I tried. You weren’t answering.”
    “Oh.”
    “Yeah, so I covered for you with Nicholson, if that’s what you were wondering. Said you were somewhere downtown chasing leads from the Spring Street bust, you were going to meet me at the terminal.”
    Sevgi nodded to herself. “Thanks, Tom. I owe you one.”
    She owed him more than one, quite a lot more over the last two years, but neither of them would ever acknowledge it. The debt lay unspoken between them, like complicity, like family. And Nicholson, anyway, they both agreed was an asshole.
    “You think any of them are still alive?” Norton wondered.
    Sevgi stared out of the window at the traffic, marshaling facts from the file. “ Horkan’s Pride is a five series. They built them to survive crash-landing at the Mars end, and there aren’t any oceans there to do it in.”
    “Yeah, but that’s a lot less gravity to worry about on the way down.”
    An NYPD teardrop cruised up alongside them, panels at opaque except for the driver’s window, which was cranked back. A young cop up front had the system at manual and was steering idly with one tanned arm leaning on the sill. She was talking to someone, but Sevgi couldn’t make out if it was another occupant of the car or an audio hookup. Under the peak of her summer-weight weblar cap, she looked casually competent and engaged. Memory twinged, and Sevgi found herself wondering about Hulya. She really ought to get back in touch sometime, see what Hulya was doing these days, see if she took the sergeant’s exam again, if she was still hauling her tight, man-magnet ass out to Bosphorus Bridge every Saturday night. Sit down somewhere for a good do-you-remember-when session, maybe crack a case of Efes.
    At the thought of beer and the smell it had left in her kitchen, Sevgi’s stomach turned abruptly over. She shunted the nostalgia hastily aside. The NYPD car switched lanes and faded in the traffic. Sevgi took an experimental stab at some engaged competence of her own.
    “Cryocap fluid should absorb a lot of the impact shock,” she said slowly. “And the fact it came down in one piece at all means it was some kind of controlled reentry, right?”
    “Some kind of.”
    “Did we get any more out of the datahead before this happened?”
    Norton shook his head. “Same request for standby at Kaku, same interval broadcast. Nothing new.”
    “Great. Fucking ghost ship