“Look, let’s cut the bouncing about, Nicki,” he said, apparently. “There is no motherfucking way you have anything on me. You’ll have to give me my phone call sooner or later. So why not save us all a lot of fucking around and do it now?”

The ranking officer on the other side of the table sat back in her chair and fixed the ex-datahawk with a somber stare.

“I think you’ve forgotten which planet you’re on, Franklin. You’ll get to make a phone call when I say you can.”

Her companion got up out of his chair and began to pace a slow circle around the table. Gutierrez tipped his head back a little to watch the move, drew on his gill and puffed a long feather of fumes up into the air, then went back to looking at the woman. He shook his head.

“They’ll come and dig me out of here before breakfast, Nicki. You know that.”

The other cop hit him, dropped body weight into the swing, one cupped striking hand to the datahawk’s ear and side of the head. The gill went flying. In the slack grip of Mars gravity, so did Gutierrez and the chair. Clatter of plastic on evercrete, soft human yelp. Rovayo flinched—Sevgi caught it peripherally from two seats over. On screen, Gutierrez rolled to a halt and the cop was on him. The datahawk was shaking his head muzzily, trying to pick himself up—his assailant locked a thick muscled arm around his throat, hauled him upright by it. The ranking officer watched impassively.

“Wrong guess, fuckwit,” hissed the strong-arm cop into the ear he hadn’t deafened. “See, we got a lot of leeway on this one. You really fucked up with Horkan’s Pride, and I mean big-time. There’s a lot more juice coming down from COLIN right now than your buddies over in Wells know how to soak up. I’d say we’ve got you down here for a fortnight at least.”

The datahawk choked out a reply. “Reyes,” said the subtitles. “You’re confusing your wet dreams with reality again.”

The cop bared his teeth in a grin. He reached down and grabbed Gutierrez by the crotch. Twisted. A suffocated screech made it up the datahawk’s throat.

“Can he—” Rovayo began numbly.

Marsalis rolled his head slightly in her direction. Met her eye. “Colony police. Oh yeah. He can.”

The ranking officer made a tiny motion with her head. Her companion let go of Gutierrez’s testicles and dumped the datahawk forward onto the tabletop like a load of laundry. He lay there, face to one side, breath whistling hoarsely in and out of his teeth. The cop called Reyes pressed a flat palm down hard against their suspect’s cheek, leaned on it, and then closer, over him.

“You’d better fucking learn to behave, Franklin,” he said conversationally. “What they tell me, we can blow this whole year’s compensation budget on you if we have to.” He looked at the woman. “What’s the rate for testicular damage these days, Nick?”

The ranking officer shrugged. “Thirty-seven grand.”

Reyes grinned again. “Right. Now, that’s for each one, right?”

“No, that’s for both.” The woman leaned forward a little. “I hear the restorative surgery’s a bitch, Franklin. Not something you’d want to go through at all.”

“Yeah, so how about you speak English to us for a change.” Reyes marked the emphasis, skidding his palm hard off the datahawk’s face, as if wiping it clean. His face wrinkled up with disgust. “Because we all know you can, sort of. Just wrap the fucking Upland chatter for a while. Do us that small favor, huh? Maybe then I leave your cojones intact.”

He stepped back. A thin sound trickled out of Gutierrez. Sevgi, disbelieving, made it as laughter. The datahawk was chuckling.

Reyes hooked back around to stare. “Something amusing you, pendejo?”

Gutierrez got up off the table. He straightened his clothes. Nodded, as if he’d just had something entirely reasonable explained to him. His ear, Sevgi knew, must still have been singing like a fire alarm.

“Only the dialogue.” His English was lightly accented, otherwise flawless. “You say you got me down here indef. Okay, I’ll bite. Nicki, you want to put a leash on your dog?”

Reyes tensed, but the woman made another barely perceptible motion with her head, and he slackened off again. Gutierrez lowered himself gingerly back into his chair, wincing. He patted his pockets for the pack of gills, found them, and fit a new one into his mouth. He twisted the end till it tore open, puffed it to life. Breathed the fumes out of his mouth and up his nose. Sevgi made it for buying time. The datahawk shrugged.

“So what do you want to know?”

“Horkan’s Pride,” said Reyes evenly.

“Yeah, you mentioned it. Big spaceship, went home last year. Crashed into the sea, they say.” He plumed pale smoke “So what?”

“So why’d you do it?”

“Why’d I do what?”

The two Colony cops swapped a glance of theatrical exasperation. Reyes took a couple of steps forward, hands lifting.

“Hold it,” said the woman. It rang staged, patently false after the imperceptible signals the two cops had exchanged before.

“Yeah, hold it,” agreed Gutierrez. “You’re going to tie me to some systems crash on another fucking planet? I mean, back in the day I was good. But not that good.”

“That’s not what we hear,” growled Reyes.

“So what do you hear, exactly?”

“Why don’t you tell us, pendejo?”

Gutierrez cocked his head. “Why don’t I tell you what you’ve just heard? What am I, telepathic now?”

“Listen, fuckwit…”

Marsalis groaned, a little theatrical exasperation of his own. It was hard for Sevgi not to sympathize. Colony were fucking it up beyond belief.

They sat it out, nonetheless. The interrogation cycled a couple more times, reasonable to third degree and back again, but spiraling downward all the way. Gutierrez drew gill fumes and strength in the soft spells, weathered Reyes’s brutality when it came around. He didn’t give a millimeter. They took him out limping, broken-mouthed, and bruised around one eye, nursing a sprained wrist. He gave one of the cameras a bloodied smile as he was led away. The vital signs monitors collapsed as he left the room; the ranking officer signed off formally. Fade to black.

Marsalis sighed. “Happy now?”

“I will be when you tell me what you think.”

“What do I think? I think short of professional torture with electrodes and psychotropics, Gutierrez isn’t going to tell Colony anything worth knowing. How long ago did this happen?”

“Couple of days. Norton put in the arrest order the night we flew out to Istanbul.”

“They worked on him since?”

“I don’t think so. This is all we have. I don’t think they’ll go to the next level with him until they get something solid from us.”

“Yeah, and they’ll probably still be wasting their time. Earth or Mars, the familias have too much invested in guys like this. They get in early on with the good ones, give them the same synaptic conditioning you see in covert ops biotech. Stuff where the brain’ll turn to warm porridge sooner than give up proscribed information.”

“You think he’d really be wearing something like that?” Rovayo asked, slightly wide-eyed.

“If I were running him, I’d have had it built in years ago.” Marsalis yawned and stretched in his seat. “Plus, you want to remember Gutierrez is a datahawk. Those guys live for the virtual, they spend their whole lives switching off exactly the kind of physical realities torture involves. If they’re good at one thing, it’s distancing themselves from their own bodies. Back in the early days, back when the technology was fresh and the hookups were a lot more jack-and-pray than they are now, lot of ’hawks died from stupid shit like dehydration or burning to death because they missed a fire alarm. I remember Gutierrez telling me once, Hey, pain, that’s just your body letting you know what the thing you’re doing is going to cost—just got to get in there and pay the bill, soak. At that level, he’s as tough a motherfucker as you’ll ever see walk into an interrogation chamber. And with the familias behind him, he’s not much scared of physical damage, either, because he knows it can be repaired.”