Norton nodded. “Works like this. If you launch a COLIN transport from Mars to Earth and something goes wrong, something that requires a rescue, then it’s only worth the Mars people coming out up to a certain point. After that point, the transport is so far along the trajectory it would make more sense to send help from the Earth end. Anyone wanting to get home would have to wait at least until the tipover point, otherwise it’s all for nothing. Mars rescue brings you back and you’re still stuck there, with whatever penalties COLIN chooses to enforce on top. You need the rescue to come from Earth, because that way, whatever else happens to you, you’ve at least made it home. They’re not going to waste the pay-load cost on sending you back again, just out of spite.”

“Just out of curiosity,” said Coyle. “What are those penalties you’re talking about? What do COLIN do to you if you step out of line on Mars?”

Norton shuttled another glance at Sevgi. She shrugged.

“It works the same as anywhere else,” Norton said with trained care. They’d all been drilled in acceptable presentation on this one, too. “There’s a suite of sanctions called Contractual Constraint, but it’s what you’d expect, the usual stuff. Financial penalties set against your contract, incarceration in some serious cases. If you’re a short-timer, your jail time gets added onto the contract length without compensation. So if you’re homesick, it doesn’t pay to act up.”

“Yeah.” Rovayo cranked an eyebrow. “And if you do make it back to Earth? Unauthorized, I mean.”

Norton hesitated.

Sevgi said it for him. “That’s never been done before.”

And she wondered vaguely why she was smiling as she spoke. Cold, hard little smile. Ethan stood there in her memory and grinned back at her.

“Oho,” said Coyle.

“What, never?” Rovayo again. “In thirty years, this has never happened before?”

“Thirty-two years,” said Norton. “Over twice that if you count the original bubble crews back before the nanoforming really kicked in. Like Sevgi says, it’s a closed system. Very hard to beat.”

Coyle shook his head. “I still don’t get it. He could have called in a rescue from the Earth end. Okay, he’d maybe do some time, but Jesus fuck, he did the time anyway, out there. How much worse could white-collar jail time be than that?”

“But he wasn’t looking at just a white-collar sentence,” said Sevgi softly.

“Look.” Coyle wasn’t listening to her. He was still looking for somewhere to dump his anger. “What I still don’t get is this: why didn’t you people send out the rescue ship on spec as soon as the n-djinn went down?”

“Too fucking cheap is why,” muttered Rovayo.

“Because there wasn’t any point.” Sevgi said evenly. “Horkan’s Pride was coming home anyway. As far as we knew, the crew were unharmed.”

“Un-fucking-harmed?” Coyle again, disbelieving.

Norton stepped into the breach. “Yeah, I know how that sounds. But you’ve got to understand how this works. It was only the n-djinn that stopped talking to us. That’s happened before on the Mars run, we just don’t like to publicize the fact. We’ve had cases where the djinn goes offline temporarily, then blips back on a few days later. Sometimes they just die. We don’t really know why.”

He spanned an invisible cube with both hands, chopped downward. Sevgi looked elsewhere, face kept carefully immobile.

“The point is, it doesn’t matter that much. The ship will run fine on automated modular systems. Think of the n-djinn as the captain of a ship. If the captain on one of those Pacific factory rafts dies, you don’t have to send out a salvage vessel to bring the raft into port, do you?” A self-deprecatory smile at the rhetorical question. “Same thing with Horkan’s Pride. Losing the n-djinn didn’t affect the ship’s fail-safe protocols. Mars and Earth traffic control were both still getting the standard green lights from Horkan’s Pride. Shipboard atmosphere and rotational gravity constant, no hull breaches, cryocap systems all online, trajectory uncompromised, pilot systems active. The baseline machines were all still working, it’s just the ship itself that wouldn’t talk to us.”

Rovayo shook her head. “And the fact that this hijo de puta was taking people out of the cryocaps and cutting them up, that didn’t register anywhere?”

“No,” admitted Norton tiredly. “No, it didn’t.”

“Without the djinn, there was no way to know what was going on.” Sevgi droned on, partly bored, partly trying to bury her own grim conviction that Rovayo had guessed right about COLIN’s real motives. Midtrajectory retrieval was still a mind-numbingly expensive call for any flight project manager to make. “The baseline system is exactly what it sounds like. It tells us if something malfunctions. There was no visible malfunction, and since the whole crew was supposed to be in cryocap, that meant—logically—there was no way for them to be harmed. We had no way of knowing any different. And the ship was on course. In a situation like that, you wait. That’s how spaceflight works.”

Rovayo took the tutorial edge on the last comment without blinking.

“Yeah? Well, if the ship wasn’t talking to you, how was it going to dock at the nanorack?”

Norton spread his hands. “Same answer. Autonomic engagement. The docking facility takes over from the pilot systems on approach. We had no reason to think that wouldn’t happen.”

“Seems to me,” said Coyle, “whoever did this knew your systems inside out.”

“Yes, they did.” And our miserable cost-cutting souls, too. Sevgi shook off the thought. Time to get back on track. “They knew our systems, because they’d studied them and they were highly skilled at planning an intrusion into those systems, which means a high degree of raw intelligence and insurgency training. And they were utterly committed to their own survival above and beyond any other concern, which takes an extreme degree of strength and mental discipline. And yet this same person was so terrified of being registered on arrival that they did this to avoid it.”

Sevgi gestured around the virtuality. Aspects of the crime leapt out at them as the systems read Focus in the wake of her sweeping arm. Outraged data, cut-and-splice code wounding marked in siren colors, frozen footage snaps of cryocap fluids spilled across pristine floors, blood spotted on walls, and stripped-skull grins.

She drew a deep breath.

“Now does anyone want to tell me what those pixels paint?”

She wasn’t that far ahead of them. Coyle’s eyes changed with the understanding, anger finally doused, damped down to something else. Rovayo went very still. Norton—Sevgi twisted to meet his eyes—just looked thoughtful. But no one said anything. Oddly, it was the path ’face that took up the challenge. It thought it had been asked a question.

“The salients you describe,” the confected woman said precisely, “are consistent with the perpetrator being a variant thirteen reengineered male.”

Sevgi nodded her thanks at the ’face.

“Yes. Aren’t they just.”

They all stood there while it sank in.

“Great,” said Coyle finally. “Just what we need, a fucking twist for a perp.”