“Thanks.”

“Question remains, though.” Her stance opened a little. She crossed one long ebony thigh over the other, bounced her foot up and down lightly at the end of the raised leg, and spread her arms cruciform along the back of the sofa. “What do you want to do now?”

He smiled.

“Got an idea,” he said.

Seen from the descending autocopter, Bulgakov’s Cat had the blunt, blocky look of a nighttime skyscraper chopped off across its base and floated lengthwise on the ocean. Lights festooned every segment of the factory raft’s structure, studded its aerials and dishes, marked out landing pads and open-air sports arenas along the upper levels. Carl picked out a baseball diamond, a soccer pitch, a scattering of basketball courts and softly underlit swimming pools, some half of which appeared to be in use. Like most of its floating sisters, the raft sold itself on being a twenty-four-hour city, a pulsing engine of production, employment, and leisure whose reactor-powered heart never missed a beat. The publicity specs said she was home to thirty thousand people, not including the tourists. Just looking down at her made Carl feel itchy and sociopathic.

In the next seat, Alicia Rovayo yawned cavernously and shot him a sour look over her turned-up jacket collar. “I can’t fucking believe I let you talk me into this.”

“You asked what I wanted to do.”

“Yeah.” She leaned across his lap to peer out of the cabin port. “Not quite what I had in mind at the time.”

The autocopter swung closer, made a courtesy circuit before touchdown so its decals could be read by sight and not just by machines. Carl picked out individual figures on a basketball court, shadowed forms plowing laps up and down in the tranquil, rippling lights of the pools.

“Think of it as an intuitive leap,” he said absently.

“I’m thinking of it as a paranoid fantasy outing. Which is exactly the way it’s going to look when I have to write up the chopper time. I told you, Donaldson and Kodo came down here yesterday and talked to these people. Got the interviews and the report on file. We’re wasting our time. Long flight for nothing.”

“Yeah, that’s something else you might want to think about. Cat there is still a couple of hundred klicks off optimum range for maintenance on Ward’s spread. How come they rushed up here to do it now instead of waiting until next week?”

“How the fuck would I know?” she grumbled. “Maybe if you’d accessed the file instead of insisting on coming down here personally, you’d already have an answer.”

“Yeah, I’d have an answer. I’d have whatever lie Daskeen Azul have decided to tell you to cover themselves. That’s not what I want.”

Rovayo rolled her eyes. “Like I said. Fucking paranoid.”

The autocopter found its designated landing pad, exchanged brief electronic chatter with the traffic-management systems, and floated down to land with characteristic, inhuman perfection. The cabin hatch hinged open, and Carl jumped down. Rovayo followed him, still mutinous.

“Just don’t break anything,” she said.

Daskeen Azul had an unremarkable mall frontage somewhere amidships for direct client contact and a couple of elevator-served workshops down in the hull where they kept the submarine hardware. They subcontracted landing pad time and aircraft support through a secondary provider, but had their own surface and sub vessels moored in dry dock, aft and starboard. This much Rovayo could tell him off the top of her head, detail skimmed from what she remembered of Donaldson and Kodo’s briefing. There was more in the file, and in theory they could have requested it via the autocopter’s datahead, but the Rim cop seemed disinclined to use the machine systems more than they already were—was already, it seemed, regretting the way they’d requisitioned the transport with her Special Cases badge—and Carl didn’t much care one way or the other. He had more than enough to work with.

So they flagged their business aboard Bulgakov’s Cat as simple follow-up investigation, which the autocopter told the factory raft’s datahead, and the Rim Security protocols did the rest. Technically, vessels like the Cat were autonomous nation-states, but any nation-state that lived so solidly from niche entry into the hyperdynamic Rim States economy had to live with the political realities the relationship entailed. Bulgakov’s Cat cruised freely in and out of the Rim’s coastal jurisdiction, its citizens had right of access to Rim States soil, its contracts were legally enforceable in Rim courts—but it all came at a stiff colonial price. Rovayo led Carl along the promenades and corridors of the factory raft with a proprietorial lack of self-consciousness and an authorized, loaded gun beneath her jacket. They might have been taking a stroll inside Alcatraz station for all the tension she showed. They’d spoken to no one when they came aboard, notified no one, taken no courtesy measures whatsoever at a human level. Somewhere in the walls, the machines whispered to one another about them in incomprehensible electronic tones, but beyond that they came on Daskeen Azul unannounced.

“And at this time of night,” the Daskeen Azul front desk agent complained, with barely disguised irritation. “I mean, our usual hours of business—”

“—are not my problem,” Rovayo told him crisply. “We’re here for follow-up on a RimSec murder investigation, and the last I heard Bulgakov’s Cat was a twenty-four-hour service community. You’ve seen my ID, so how about you roll out some of that twenty-four-hour service and answer my questions.”

The agent switched his eyes to Carl. “And he is?”

“Getting impatient,” Carl said impassively.

“I’ve seen no ID,” the agent insisted. Below the smooth upper shelf of the reception desk, his hands were busy pressing buttons. “I have to see ID for both of you.”

Rovayo leaned on the shelf.

“Did your mother get you this job?” she asked curiously.

The agent gaped at her, belated anger dropping his jaw for a retort he wasn’t fast enough to make.

“Because it appears to be a job you don’t feel any pressing need to do properly. This man is a private consultant for Rim Security and his liaison is with me, not you. I’ve shown you my fucking ID, sonny, and in about another ten seconds I’m going to be showing you the front end of a RimSec probable-cause shutdown order. Now either you’re going to answer my questions or you’re going to get someone better paid out of bed to do it for you. I don’t much care either way, so which is it going to be?”

The man behind the desk flinched as if slapped.

“I’ll just see,” he muttered, prodding more buttons on the screens beneath his hands. “Just, please, just, uhm, have a seat.”

“Thank you,” said Rovayo with heavy irony.

They folded themselves into the utilitarian bank of chairs opposite the desk. The reception agent fit a phone hook to his ear, muttered into it. Outside, on the broad sweep of the mall, a thin but unending nighttime herd of shoppers browsed past the open storefronts, clothing bright, gait unhurried and undirected, like sleepwalkers or the victims of some multiple hypnotic trick. Carl sat and tried, the way Sutherland had taught him, not to feel the usual seeping contempt. It wasn’t easy.

On Mars…

Yeah, like fuck.

On Mars, things are different because they have to be, soak. Lopsided grin, like he was giving away some secret he shouldn’t. But that’s strictly temporary. No more long-term truth in it than all that bullshit they sell in the qualpro ads. Day’s going to come, this place’ll be just like home only less gravity. It’s them, Carl. It’s the humans. Take ’em wherever and give ’em time, they’ll build you the same fairy fucking playground as ever was. And that’s the construct you got to live inside, soak, like it or like it not.