Was a time...

Sure. And there was another fucking time the summers never seemed to end and you' d never paid for it in your life. Remember that? Time passes, Max- get over it. Skip the fucking nostalgia, let' s get where we' re at.

And here he was. Snot and no blow job, out in the night.

He wiped a hand down his jacket, not bothering to look. The synadrive hooked in visual memory and sparked a link to neuromotor precision, put the gesture right on target, and his fingers came away gummy with the snot. He rubbed them back and forth, grimacing. He didn' t need this shit right now, not the way things were. Not like he didn' t have enough stress. He told her, he fucking told her he had other stuff cooking, stuff that needed managing, not like this pimping shit was his main gig- Yeah, right, the syn told him crisply. How many years we been saying that, exactly? Smart guy?

Different this time. This pays off like it has been, this time next year we' re out. Out for good.

And if it doesn' t?

If it doesn' t, we' re already set up to cover. Quit worrying.

Set up to cover, yeah. And go on being a pimp for life. What you going to do about Chrissie then?

What he was going to do then, he reflected somberly, was going to have to do about Chrissie then, was probably something violent. Should have seen that one all along- fucking bitch always had been high maintenance, even back in Houston when she was still working street corners. Cotton-candy mane of blond and that manicured fucking Texan drawl, and now the subcute tit work he' d gotten for her, he should have fucking known she' d start with the airs and graces as soon as she settled in at Tabitha' s.

Acting just like she actual y was the bonobo purebred they' d packaged her as. Cal ing him at all hours, or pushing Tabitha' s management so they called instead, bitching about how she wouldn' t work on account of some headache or stomach cramp or just plain didn' t like some fat fuck who' d paid good money to get between her legs, sitting there on the fucking bed bright-eyed and whining Eddie this, Eddie that, Eddie the fucking other, forcing him to wheel out the whole nine yards of bully-threaten-cajole like it was some favorite comic routine she liked to see him do.

So why the fuck didn' t you just take Serena or Maggie for that subcute work instead. Either one' d be half the fucking trouble.

In the hyperlucid blast of the syn, he knew why. But he turned on his heel and put the knowledge at his back along with the blink-blink carnal come-on of Tabitha' s skyline billboard. The relative gloom of the softly lit parking lot darkened his vision. He blinked hard to adjust.

Hello, Max."

The voice jolted him as he blinked, kicked him back to the Scorpion memories, to times and places so vivid he opened his eyes and almost expected to find himself back there, back before Wyoming in that other, cleaner time.

But he wasn' t.

He was still here, in the deserted parking lot of a second-rate Texas bordel o, with a sassy whore' s snot drying on his fingers and too much syn for his own good sparking through his brain.

The figure detached itself from the shadows around his car, stood to face him. Soft violet light from the lot'

s marker lamps threw the form into silhouette, killed facial recognition. But something about the stance chased up the memories the voice had stirred. The syn gave him a name, features to put on the darkened form. He stared, trying to make sense of it.

You?"

The figure shifted, made a low gesture with one hand.

But... " He shook his head. You... You' re on fucking Mars, man."

The figure said nothing, waited. Eddie moved closer, arms raised toward a tentative hugging embrace.

When' d you get back? I mean, man, what are you doing back here?"

Don' t you know?"

He made a baffled smile, genuine in its origins. No, man, I' ve got no fucking- "

- and the smile collapsed, bleached out with sudden understanding.

For just an instant, the desert quiet and the rushing away of an autohauler on the highway.

He clawed across his belly, under his jacket. Had fingers hooked around the butt of the compact Colt Citizen he kept cling-padded at his belt- He' d moved too close.

The knowledge dripped through him, and it was a Scorpion knowing from that other time, somehow sad and slow despite the speed at which he could see it all coming apart. The figure snapped forward, bruising grip on his wrist, and pinned his gun arm where it was. He flung up a warding left arm, chopped at the other man' s throat, or face, or, too close, too fucking close in, and here came the block, he had nothing, could do nothing. A low kick took out his legs from under him, a full-body shove, and he went down. He rolled, desperately, don' t let the fucker get on you with his boots, land on your back maybe, the gun, the fucking gun- The cling-clip held. He got a grip of the Colt' s butt again, dragged it loose and sprawled backward with a snarl of relief, raising the pistol, the Citizen had no safety, just squeeze hard and- The figure stood over him, black against the sky. Arm down, pointing- And something flattened him to the ground again, something with god-like force.

Muffled crack. His ears took it in, but it took him a couple of moments to assign it any importance. The stars were right overhead. He watched them, abruptly fascinated. They seemed a lot closer than you' d expect, hanging low, like they' d taken a sudden interest.

He wheezed, felt something leaking rapidly, like cold water in his chest. He knew what it was. The syn forced a merciless clarity.

He lifted his head and it was the hardest work he' d ever done, as if his skull were made of solid stone.

He made out the figure of the other man, arm still pointing down at him like some kind of judgment.

I figured you' d fight," said the voice. But it' s been a long time for you, hasn' t it. Too long. Maybe that'

s why."

Why what? he wondered muzzily. He coughed, tasted blood in his throat. Wondered also what Chrissie was going to do now, stupid little bitch.

I think you' re done," said the voice.

He tried to nod, but his head just fell back on the gritty surface of the lot, and this time it stayed there. The stars, he noticed, seemed to be dimming, and the sky looked colder than it had before, less velvet-soft and more like the open void it really was.

Dead in a brothel parking lot, for fuck' s sake.

He heard the blastpast of another autohauler out on the highway, saw in his mind' s eye the cozy red glow of its taillights accelerating away into the darkness.

He ran to catch up.

CHAPTER 11.

I n the end, it went down in the chapel, pretty much as he' d expected it would. Prisons like this didn' t offer many places free of surveillance, but Florida' s faith-based approach to rehabilitation meant that a man had a Charter-enshrined right to privacy in prayer at any hour outside of the night lockdown. No securi-cams, no invasive scrutiny. The theory was, presumably, that in the House of the Lord the corrections officers didn' t need to be watching you, because God already was. No one seemed to have noticed that the Lord was falling down on the job. In the three months since Carl transferred in from Miami, there' d been at least half a dozen bloody showdowns in the low-light arena of the chapel. Two ended in fatal injury.

Carl wasn' t sure if at some level, prison staff were giving sanction to the fights, or if quiet and massive pressure from above kept the matter clean of investigation or review. In the end, it came to the same thing. No one wanted to buck the system, no one wanted to hear about it. Sigma Corporation, by invoking religious status for its operation, effectively sidestepped the bulk of what weak administrative oversight the Confederated Republic was prepared to endorse, and glowing testimonials at the congressional level pissed all over the rest. The bodies were taken away, shrink-wrapped in black.

See, niggah, you gotta put your trust in the Lord, grinned the Guatemalan when he sold him the shank.

He nodded at the little oil lamp altar he had on a corner shelf, though it was the black-skinnned Virgen de Guadalupe behind the flickering flame. Like the governor always sayin' at the assemblies, the Lord got your back. But it don' never hurt to equalize, right.

The shank itself was a splinter of homegrown practicality that echoed the pragmatism in the Guatemalan'

s words. Someone had taken the monofil blade off a workshop fretsaw and piece-melted an array of colored plastic beads around the lower half to form a garish, pebbly-surfaced grip. The whole thing was less than twenty centimeters long, and the beads had been carefully selected for a surface that resisted fingerprinting. That left genetic trace, of course, but the Guatemalan was thorough and he' d carefully anointed his customer' s hands from a tiny bottle he kept on the same shelf as the Virgen. Brief high-tech reek of engineered molecules cutting through the fart-and-patchouli warmth in the cell as Carl rubbed the fluid in; then the volatile bulk evaporated and left a fading chill on his palms. For a good three or four hours now, any skin cells he shed from either hand would be useless to a gene sniffer. The high-and low-tech mix sent a faint shudder of recollection through him. Going equipped among the nighttime shanties of Caracas. The city center spread out below him like a bowl of stars, the close warmth of barely lit streets up where he prowled. The confidence of well-chosen weaponry and what it would do.

Eventually, of course, the monofil would cut into the plastic enough to loosen the mounting, and with time the blade would drop out. But by then the whole weapon would have been dropped through the grate on some basement ventilation duct. Like a lot of what went on inside the South Florida State Partnership (Sigma Holdings) Correctional Facility, it was strictly a short-term option.

It was also expensive.

Seventeen, the Guatemalan wanted. He liked Carl enough to add explanations. My boy Danny gotta run big risks down in the shop, puttin' something like this together. Then I gotta hold it for you. Do your hands for you. Find the downtime for handover. Full service like that don' t come cheap. Carl looked back into the man' s polished coal features, shrugged, nodded. There was a degree of race solidarity operating in South Florida State, but it didn' t do to push it too far. And he had the seventeen. Had, in fact, nearly two dozen of the twenty-mil endorphin capsules that served the prison as a high-denomination contraband currency. Never mind that he' d need them in a couple of weeks to trade against whatever debased form of griego Louie the Chem could swing for him this time around. Never mind that he might need endorphins for his own wounds a few hours hence. Short-term focus. Now he needed the shank. Worry about the rest later, if and when he had the leisure.

Short-term focus.

It was a profoundly depressing feature of life in the prison that increasingly he caught himself thinking like his fellow inmates. Adaptive behavior, Sutherland would have tagged it. Like finding himself masturbating to cheap porn, something he' d also done his share of since Florida' s penal system had swept him up into its clammy embrace. Best, he' d found, to simply not think about it at al .

So he stepped out of the Guatemalan' s cel and went casual y back down the B wing thoroughfare, right arm held slightly bent. Under his sleeve, the chill of the monofil strip warmed slowly against his skin. Gray nanocarb scaffolding rose on either side of him, holding up three levels of galleries and the tracks for the big surveillance cams. The wing was roofed in arched transparency, and late-afternoon light sifted down into the quiet of the hall. Most of general population were out on Partnership work projects, paying their debt to society into Sigma' s corporate coffers. The few who remained in B wing leaned off the galleries in ones or twos, or stood in small knots across the hall floor. Conversation evaporated as he passed, eyes swiveling to watch him. On the lower right-hand gallery, a grizzled longtimer called Andrews stared down at him and nodded in fractional acknowledgment. Suddenly, despite the sunlight, Carl felt cold.

It wasn' t the coming fight. Equipped as he now was, Carl was reasonably sure he could take Dudeck without too much trouble. The Aryans either weren' t hooked up outside the prison or just hadn' t done their research; all they knew about Carl Marsalis was that he talked funny for a nigger, was up from Miami on some foreign-national retention loophole, and, at forty-one, was old. Possibly they thought he was some kind of terrorist, therefore foreign and a coward who had everything coming to him. Certainly they believed that lean-muscled tat-covered twenty-something Jack Dudeck was going to rip his shit apart, whoever he fucking was. That nigger had to learn some respect.

It wasn' t the fight. It was the creeping sense of the trap that came with it.

Three months in this corporate newbuilt shithole, before that five weeks in the Miami High Risk unit. No trial, no bail. Release assessment dates set back time and again, access to lawyers refused. Appeals and diplomatic pressure from UNGLA summarily thrown out, no end in sight. He could feel the time getting away from him like blood loss. There was an ongoing investigation that no one was prepared to talk about but Carl knew it had to do with Caracas and the death of Richard Willbrink. It had to be. Relations between the UN and the Republic had never been great, but there was no way the Florida state legislature would have held out against major diplomacy for the sake of a single low-grade vice bust that already screamed entrapment. No, somewhere in the processing when the fetal murder team took him downtown, his documentation had tripped a high-level wire. Connections had been made, whether in Langley or Washington or some covert operations base farther south, and the national security beast was awake. Ghost agencies were looking for payback, cold covert vengeance for one of their own; they were going to make an example of Carl Marsalis, and while they tried to assemble the necessary legal toys to do it, he was going to stay safely locked down in a Republic prison. And if he shanked Jack Dudeck today as he fully intended to, they might not be able to pin it on him, but it was still going to put him back into Close Management and provide the perfect pretext for another lengthy extension of holding time, maybe even a subsidiary sentence. More than a few times in the last month he' d awoken with a panicky shortness of breath and a dream-like certainty that he would never get out of this place. It was starting to look like premonition.

He locked down the fear, siphoned it carefully into anger and stoked it up. He stopped at the B wing gate and raised his face for the laser. The blue light licked over his features, the machine consulted its real-time records, and the gate cracked open. He paced through. The chapel was left and halfway down a fifty-meter corridor that led to kitchen storage. Surveillance would have him for twenty-five meters along the passage, would see him turn in through the impressively sculpted genoteak double doors, and that was all they would know. Carl felt the mesh shudder online, jerky and grating with Louie' s substandard griego chlorides.

All right, Jacky boy. Let' s fucking do this.

The chapel doors gave smoothly as he pushed them, oozed backward on hydraulic hinges and showed him twin rows of pews, also in genoteak. The furniture sat like islands on the shine of the fused-glass floor. The interior architecture soared modestly in echo of a modern church. Angled spots made the altar rail and lectern gleam. In the space between the rail and the first row of pews, Jack Dudeck stood with another, bulkier Aryan at his side. Both wore their corporate prison blue coveralls peeled neatly to the waist and tied off. Sleeveless generic gray T-shirts showed beneath. A third shaven-headed weight-bench type, similarly dressed, hauled himself up from his slumped position between two pews halfway down on the right. He was chewing gum.

Hello nigger," said Dudeck loudly.

Marsalis nodded. Needed help, did you?"

Don' t need me no fucking help to carve a slice off your ass, boy. Marty and Roy here just wanted to make sure we ain' t disturbed."

That' s right, nigger." The gum chewer squeezed out between the pew ends, eyes screwed up in a grin, voice leaning hard on the insult. Carl tamped down a flaring rage and thought about hooking out those eyes with his thumbnails.

Lock it down, soak.

It was depressing- the same timeslip sense of loss at his reactions. Over the last four months, he could track his own change in attitude toward the antique racial epithets still in wide use across the Republic.

Nigger. The first couple of times, it was disconcerting and almost quaint, like having your face slapped with a dueling glove. With time, it came to feel more and more like the verbal spittle it was intended to be.

That his fellow blacks in general population used it of themselves did nothing to stem the slowly awakening anger. It was a locally evolved defense, and he was not from there. Fuck these Republicans and their chimpanzee-level society.

Lock it down.

The gum chewer came ponderously up the aisle toward him. Carl moved to the right-hand bank of pews and waited, nailed the approaching Aryan' s gaze as he came level, watched the man' s eyes for the move if it was coming. He figured boot to shin and elbow uppercut to chin if he had to, left-side strikes. He didn' t want to show Dudeck the shank ahead of time.

But the other man was as good as Dudeck' s word. He brushed past with a snort of contempt and stationed himself at the door. Carl moved down the aisle, feeling the mesh now like arousal, like the juddering of bad brakes. It wasn' t ideal, but the tidal power of it would do. He stepped out from between the two last pews and faced Dudeck across five meters of fused glass. He lifted his left hand in a casual gesture designed to lead the Aryan' s attention away from his right, rejoiced silently as Dudeck' s eyes flickered to follow the move.

So, birdshit. You want to run me your rap now?" Carl burlesqued a Jesusland comedy drawl. The South will rise again."

South already risen, nigger," blurted the big Aryan next to Dudeck. Confederated Republic is the white man' s America."

Carl let his gaze shift briefly to the speaker. Yeah, that seems to have worked out well for you."

The big Aryan bristled, surged forward. Dudeck lifted a hand and pressed him back without looking away from Carl.

No call to get all riled up, Lee," he said softly. This here- "

Jack!" It was a hissed prison whisper from the door. The lookout, gesturing furiously. Jack! COs coming."

The change was unreal, almost comical. In seconds flat, the two Aryans in front of Carl hit the front pew side by side, shaven heads bent in an attitude of prayer. Back by the door, the lookout moved two rows down and did the same. Carl stifled a snort and found a front seat of his own on the far side of the aisle from Dudeck and Roy. The mesh surged and pounded for release. He kept peripheral awareness of the two men and waited, head down, controlling his breathing. If the correctional officers passed by without stopping, the fight was going to kick off again right where it got paused, only by then Roy would have calmed down and the chances of goading him back up to interference levels would be lost. Carl had planned to fuck with the big Aryan' s head just enough to get him in Dudeck' s way, and then use the confusion to shank them both. Now- Footfalls at the back of the chapel.

Marsalis."

Fuck.

He looked around. Three COs, two from the B wing day crew, Foltz and Garcia, both hefting stunwrap carbines and scanning the pews with seasoned calm. The other guy was a stranger, unarmed, and the phone clip he wore at ear and jaw looked shiny new with lack of use. White male, forties or older. Carl made him for admin-side, and probably senior. There was gray in his hair and the face was lined with middle-aged working weariness, but his eyes lacked the laconic watchfulness of the men who walked the galleries. The fact that Carl didn' t know him wasn' t in itself of note- South Florida State was a big prison- but the appeal-and-counter game had taken him across to admin close to a dozen times now and he was good with faces. Wherever this guy worked, wasn' t somewhere Carl had been or seen.

Chew doin' here, Marsalis?" Foltz' s jaws worked a steady, tight-jaw rhythm on the gum in his mouth.

You ain' t no believer."

It didn' t require an answer. Garcia and Foltz were old hands; they knew what went down in the chapel.

Foltz' s eyes tracked across to Dudeck and Lee. He nodded to himself.

Findin' racial harmony in the Lord, are we, boys?"

Neither of the front-pew Aryans said anything. And back at the door, the third supremacist had the butt of Garcia' s carbine almost at his ear.

That' s enough," snapped the new face. Marsalis, you' re required in admin."

A tiny surge of hope. Meetings with Andritzky, the UNGLA rep, were alternate Tuesdays, late morning.

For someone to turn up this late in the week unannounced, it had to be progress. Had to be. Someone somewhere had found the key log in the Republican logjam of xenophobia and moral illusion. Pressure applied, it would break up the jam and set the whole legal and diplomatic process flowing downstream once more. The trigger line of code that would crack Carl Marsalis out of this fucking prison glitch and send him home.

Yeah, you' d better hope, soak. He let the shank slide out of his sleeve and land gently on the pew beside him. He tucked it back against the upright with his fingers and got up, leaving it there, invisible to anyone, including the Aryans, who didn' t have a clear angle of vision on where he' d been sitting. Seventeen, he remembered, and felt a faint chil at the thought. He didn' t have the finances or the juice to buy again if this didn' t work out and they sent him back to B wing to face Dudeck and the supremacist grudge. And mesh or no mesh, without an edged weapon he was probably going to get hurt.

Suddenly the hope in his belly collapsed into sick despair and a pointless, billowing anger.

Reggie Barnes, I hope you fucking die on that respirator.

He walked up the aisle toward the COs. Dudeck turned to watch him go. Carl caught it in peripheral vision, swung his head to meet the Aryan' s gaze. He saw the hunger there, the deferred bloodlust, and summoned a stone-faced detachment to meet it. But beneath the mask, he found he was suddenly falling-down weary of the youth and fury in the other man. Of the hatred that seemed to seep not just out of Dudeck and his kind, but right out of the prison walls around him, as if institutions like South Florida State were just glands in the Republican body politic, oozing the hate like some kind of natural secretion, stockpiling it and then pumping it back out into the circulatory system of the nation, corrosive and ripe for any focus it could find.

Eyes front, Dudeck." Foltz had spotted the sparks. His voice came out rich with irony. That ain' t how you pray, son."

Carl didn' t look back to watch Dudeck comply. He didn' t need to. Whichever way Dudeck was now looking, it didn' t matter. Carl could feel the Aryan' s hatred at his back, pushing outward behind him like a vast, soft balloon swelling to fill the space in the house of worship. Faith-based prison charter. Each man to his own personal god, and Dudeck' s was white as polypuff packing chips.