“Outside of the cryocaps, it’s not likely,” Norton told her. Habitual public statement caution, the COLIN watchword. “And even if they did, that still puts them a hundred kilometers off the coast. That’s a long swim.”

“Maybe someone came to get them.” Rovayo gestured at the empty levels of the recovered surveillance adobe. “We got no satellite stream data yet, no overhead incidentals. No way to know what went on before the recovery team got there.”

Coyle shook his head. “Doesn’t make sense, Alicia. Recovery scrambled as soon as they had the coordinates.”

“Who’d they use?” Sevgi asked, trying to sound neutral. NYPD had a longstanding superiority complex when it came to the Rim’s subcontract policy on emergency services, an attitude born of, and largely borne out by, New York’s disastrous flirtation with similar schemes in the past.

Rovayo glanced at Coyle.

“Filigree Steel, right? Or, wait.” She snapped her fingers. “Did they just lose the bid to ExOp?”

“Nah, that was up in Seattle. Down here, it’s still the Filstee crew.” Coyle looked around at Sevgi and Norton. “They’re pretty good, Filigree. Did the job well over spec. Aerial cover inside twenty minutes, drop teams deployed. No way there was time for anyone to get in first. Either this guy’s dead inside with the rest of them, or he took the plunge when the hatches came off and just swam off into the sunset.”

“Wrong direction then,” said Norton drily.

Coyle peeled him a glance. “I was using a metaphor there.”

“He does that sometimes,” Rovayo said, deadpan.

“I don’t think he went into the water,” said Sevgi. “You’d have to be suicidal or clinically insane to make that mistake.”

Coyle stared at her. “Were you there earlier today, Ms. Ertekin? Did you see the in-flight cuisine? You’re trying to tell me this motherfucker might not be insane?”

Sevgi grimaced. “This motherfucker, as you put it, had spent the last several months completely alone in deep space. Alone, that is, apart from the sporadic company of fellow crewmembers revived long enough to carve edible meat from. At a minimum, he is mentally unbalanced, yes, but—”

Rovayo snorted. “No shit, he’s unbalanced. You’d have to be fucking unhinged to—”

“No.” The force in the single syllable closed the other woman down. Words marched out of Sevgi’s mouth, words she remembered Ethan saying, almost verbatim. A cold conviction was growing in her. “You wouldn’t have to be insane to do these things. You’d just have to have a goal and be determined to attain it. Let’s get this straight, early on. What we’ve seen aboard Horkan’s Pride are not the symptoms of insanity; they are only evidence of great force of will. Evidence of planning and execution shorn of any socially imposed limitation. Any mental problems this person was suffering by journey’s end are going to be a result of that execution, not a cause.”

“Speaking of planning,” said Coyle. “You going to tell me you guys don’t pack these Colony transports with emergency supplies? You know, like food? In case someone wakes up unscheduled?”

“Nobody wakes up unscheduled,” said Norton.

“Well, excuse the fuck out of me.” The big cop looked around elaborately. “I’d say on this trip someone did exactly that. Woke up unscheduled and very fucking hungry.”

“Or they stowed away,” Rovayo suggested. “Would that work?”

“That’d be next to impossible,” said Sevgi. “There’s a lot of security written into the launch protocols. You’d have to hack it all in the time between the ship’s systems being enabled and the decouple.”

Rovayo nodded. “And how long is that?”

“About forty-five minutes. It takes these older ships longer to boot up.”

“Look, about this food.” Coyle wasn’t letting go. “We all know the Colony Initiative don’t like to spend any of the cash they tax out of the rest of us on anything resembling people, but are you guys really so fucking tight you won’t spring for a box of survival rations? What happens if something goes wrong midflight?”

Norton sighed. “Yeah. Okay. All COLIN vessels have onboard contingency rations. But that’s missing the point. On each run, you’ll have two qualified spaceflight officers, cryocapped separately from the hu—the passengers.”

“The hu what?” Rovayo asked curiously.

Human freight. Sevgi finished Norton’s slip of the tongue silently for him. Yeah, we have some lovely terminology over at COLIN. Contractual Constraint. Soft Losses. Quiet Facts. Profit Drag. Public Perception Management.

She weighed in. NYPD commandments. Fuck finer feelings and circumstance, you back your partner up. Brusquely: “What we’re telling you is that there are two systems. The passenger cryocaps are wired to default into frozen. There’s no point them being awake in an emergency. They’re civilians. What are they going to do, run around screaming Oh no, we’re all going to die? Onboard air’s too expensive for that shit. They’ve got nothing to contribute in a situation like that. So anything goes wrong, the whole system locks. You can’t get it open until the ship docks.”

Coyle shook his head. “Yeah, and what if the thing that goes wrong is that it thaws out?”

“How?” Sevgi gave him one of her best only-an-idiot looks. “You’re talking about deep space. You know how fucking cold it is out there? There isn’t enough ambient heat anywhere in the vessel to bring that system up a single degree from emergency frost. The only thing that might is the reactor, and that’s programmed to jettison if it fails.”

“Yeah, okay,” Rovayo doing a little partner support of her own. Sevgi caught herself in sudden sympathy. It was like passing an unexpected mirror. “So what about this other system? The spaceflight guys. They’re wired to wake up, right?”

“They can wake up.” Norton picked up again. “Under certain circumstances. If there’s a navigational emergency. The trajectory fails or you get unscheduled activity from the drive datahead maybe. Then the ship brings those two capsules up. Your spaceflight guys fix the problem, or call in the recovery if they can’t.”

That’s spaceflight guy, singular, people. The sour voice in her head would not shut up. Because—you taxpayers don’t need to know this, of course—for about a decade now we’ve been cutting back on emergency personnel by 50 percent. It’s just so fucking expensive, you see, wasting a perfectly good cryocap berth like that, after all this stuff almost never happens, right, and even if it does who needs two pilots to fix it when one can manage. That’s just overmanning, right?

“Right,” said Coyle. “And these guys got to eat and drink, right?”

“Yes, of course.” Norton gestured. Sevgi let him get on with it. Maybe from the long stay in virtual, her head was starting to hurt. “There’s tanked water anyway, for fusion mass, for radiation shielding, for the coolant systems. Even in the backup tanks, there’s more than two guys could drink even if they stayed out there for a couple of years. And obviously there’s food. But the supplies are calculated on the assumption that these two guys aren’t going to be up and about for very long. If it’s a simple problem, they fix it and then go back to sleep. If it’s not, they’ll send an SOS and then go back to sleep until the rescue ship gets there.”

“What if the system won’t let them refreeze?” Coyle wasn’t going to be shaken loose of what was apparently an endemic lack of faith in technology. Maybe, Sevgi thought sourly, he’d grown up in Jesusland and immigrated to the Rim.

Norton hesitated. “Statistically, that’s so close to impossible that—”

“Not impossible,” said Rovayo lazily. “Because, my memory serves me right, that happened to some poor motherfucker about seven, eight years back. Exactly that. Woke up and couldn’t get refrozen, had to sit out the whole voyage.”