COLIN is a fact of life," he said somberly. We all reach an accommodation of one sort or another with the realities, sooner or later."

" Yeah, very fucking poetic."

Sevgi drove back down the twisting road into Cuzco, taking the curves with a deliberate lack of care.

Marsalis held on to the rough-ride strap above his door.

Well, he has a point."

I didn' t say he didn' t. I' d just like to know what you got out of him- apart from cheap poetics- that was worth coming al this way for."

Marsalis said nothing. She shot him a sideways glance. The jeep drifted a little with her inattention, back toward the center of the corkscrew curve on the road, and they met an autohauler rig head-on. Sick, sudden jump of adrenaline and sweat through her pores. But slow- she was still a little soggy from the near showdown with Bambaren' s men. She dragged the wheel back, they swerved out of the rig' s path, bumped a curb. The autohauler' s collision alert blasted at them as it crawled past, machine-irate. People on the pavements stood and looked. The man sitting next to her said nothing still.

Well?"

Well, I think you should keep your eyes on the road."

She slammed the heel of her palm into the autocruise button. Let go of the wheel. The jeep' s navigational system lit blue across the dashboard and chimed.

Please state your destination." Fucking Asia Badawi' s perfect dulcet tones again.

City center," she snapped. They' d come direct from the airport, had no hotel as yet. She evened her voice, turned across the space between the seats to face him. Marsalis, in case you hadn' t noticed, we came close to a firefight up there. I got your back."

I know that."

Right. Now I don' t mind taking risks, but I want to know why I' m doing it. So you start fucking telling me what' s in your mind before it explodes all over us."

He nodded, mostly, she thought, to himself.

Bambaren' s clean." He said it reluctantly. I reckon."

But that' s not al ?"

He sighed. I don' t know. Look, I sprang the Martian angle on him, he didn' t blink. Or rather, he looked like I was talking in tongues. The war' s stil on, and I' d bet everything I made last year that no one up here has seen or heard anything to change that. I don' t think he knows anything about our pal Merrin' s trip home."

She heard the raised tone at the end. But?"

But he' s jumpy. Like you said, we nearly got into it up there. Last time I had to deal with Manco Bambaren, I' d just blown up a truckful of his product and killed one of his thugs, and I was promising to do it again if I didn' t get what I wanted. He was about as emotional about it as that wal of stone up there.

This time around, all I want to do is ask him some questions and he nearly gets us all kil ed for it. It doesn'

t make any fucking sense."

She grunted. She knew what it felt like, the nagging, loose-thread itch of something not right. The sort of thing that kept you awake and thinking last thing at night, stole your mind from elsewhere in your caseload during the day, and had you staring a hole in the detail while your coffee went cold. You just wanted to pull on that thread until it unraveled or snapped.

So what do you want to do about it?" she asked.

He stared out of the side window. I think we' d better talk to Greta Jurgens. She' s getting near the sleepy end of the season, and hibernoids generally aren' t at their best when that happens. She might let something slip."

That' s Arequipa, right?"

Yeah. We could drive it overnight, be there in the morning."

And be approximately as fried as Jurgens when we talk to her. No thanks. I' m sleeping in a bed tonight."

Marsalis shrugged. Suit yourself. Just, it takes us off the scope if we go by road. Chances are Manco' s going to have someone at the airport checking when we leave, checking where we leave to. And if he sees it' s Arequipa, well, it doesn' t take a genius to work out what we want there."

You think he' d try to stop us seeing Jurgens by force? You think he' d risk that with accredited COLIN reps?"

I don' t know. A couple of hours ago, I' d have said no. But you were there when the mirror-shade twins got twitchy. What did you think was going to happen?"

Long pause. Sevgi recalled the way it had gone, like her reaction to the near collision a couple of minutes ago, the sudden, pore-pricking sweat as the familia bodyguards moved, the surge of adrenal overdrive in her guts and up the insides of her arms. It had taken conscious will to keep her hand away from the butt of her gun, and she' d been afraid, rusty with too long away from the brink and not trusting her judgment, not knowing if she' d be fast enough or just call it wrong.

She sighed.

Yeah, okay." She sank back into her seat, thudded an irritable elbow into the padding a couple of times.

Insha' Al ah, we can get a halfway decent recline out of these things."

Then she pitched her voice louder, for the jeep.

Course-correct. Long haul, Arequipa."

Scribbles awoke on the displays.

This journey will take until the early hours of tomorrow morning," Asia Badawi told her cool y.

Yeah, fucking tell me about it."

CHAPTER 30.

T he center of Cuzco was solid with traffic, most of it driven by humans. No cooperation, no overview- the late-afternoon air rang with irate hornblasts and the queues backed up across intersections. Drivers went to the brink in duels to change lanes or inject themselves from filter systems into already established traffic flow. Windows were down to facilitate yelled abuse, but most people just sat rigidly behind the wheel and stared ahead as if they could generate forward motion through sheer willpower. That, and continual, frustrated blasts on the horn. Traffic cops stood amid it all with arms raised as if stuck in a swamp, gesturing like manic orchestra conductors and blowing whistles incessantly, to no appreciable effect. Perhaps, Sevgi thought sourly, they just didn' t want to be left out of the noisemaking process.

The jeep was a carpool standard. Its automated systems, safety-indexed down to a patient deference, could not cope. After they' d sat at a particularly fiercely contested intersection for twelve minutes by the dashboard clock, Marsalis shifted in his seat.

You want to drive?"

Sevgi looked out gloomily at the unbroken chain of nose-to-tail metal they were trying to break into.

Not real y."

You mind if I do?"

The lights changed, and the truck blocking the intersection crept out of the way. The jeep jerked forward half a meter, then jerked to a halt again as the vehicle behind the truck surged to take up the slack. The opening vanished.

Behind them, someone leaned on the horn.

Right."

It was the matter-of-fact tone that slowed her down. Before she realized what was going on, he' d cracked the passenger door and swung down onto the street. The sound of the horn redoubled. He looked back, toward the car behind them.

Marsalis, don' t- "

But he was already gone, striding back toward the car behind them. She twisted in her seat and saw him reach the vehicle, take two steps up and over the hood- she heard the clunk as his foot came down each time- and then jump lightly down again beside the driver' s-side window. The hornblast stopped abruptly. He leaned at the window a moment, she thought he reached in as wel , but couldn' t be sure.

Ah, shit."

Checked her gun in its holster, was turning to open her door when he appeared there beside the window.

She scrabbled it open.

What the fuck are you- "

Scoot over."

What did you just do?"

Nothing. Scoot over, I' m going to take it on manual."

She threw another look back at the vehicle behind them, couldn' t see anything through the darkened glass windshield. For a moment, she opened her mouth to argue. Saw the lights change back to their favor again and shook her head in weary resignation.

Whatever."

He took down the automation, engaged the drive, and rolled the jeep out hard, angling for a narrow gap in the opposing flow. He got the corner of the jeep in, waved casual thanks to the vehicle he' d cut off, and then levered them into the gap as it opened. They settled into the flow, crept forward a couple of meters and away from the intersection. She looked at his face and saw he was smiling gently.

Did you enjoy that?"

He shrugged. Had a certain operational satisfaction."

I thought the point of going by road was to keep a low profile. How' s that going to work with you starting fights all the way across town?"

Ertekin, there was no fight." He looked across and met her eye. Seriously. I just told the guy to please shut up, we were doing our best."

And if he hadn' t backed down?"

Well." He thought about it for a moment. You people usually do."

It took the best part of another hour to get through to the southern outskirts and pick up the main highway for Arequipa. By then the day was thickening toward dark and lights were coming on in the buildings on either side of the road, offering little yellowish snapshots into the lives of the people within. Sevgi saw a girl no older than nine or ten leaned intently on the edge of an opened truck engine in a workshop, peering down while an old man with a white walrus mustache worked on the innards. A mother seated on a front step, smoking and watching the traffic go by, three tiny children clinging about her. A young man in a suit leaning into a shop doorway and flirting with the girl behind the counter. Each scene slipped by and left her with the frustrated sense of life escaping through her fingers like sand.

On the periphery, they pulled into a Buenos Aires Beef Co. and ordered pampaburgers to go. The franchise stood out in the soft darkness like a grounded UFO, all brightly colored lights and smoothly plastic modular construction. Sets of car lights docked and pulled away in succession. Sevgi stopped for a moment on her way back to the jeep, bagged food hot through the wrappings against her chest, Cuzco'

s carpet of lights spread out across the valley. Sense of departure colliding with something else, something that hurt like all those passing yellow-lit moments of life she' d seen. She thought of Murat, of Ethan, of her mother somewhere back in Turkey, who knew the fuck where. Couldn' t make sense of any of it- just the general ache.

Supposed to get better at this with age, Sev.

Right.

Marsalis came up behind her, clapped her on the shoulder. You okay?"

Fine," she lied.

At the jeep, he got into the driver' s seat then powered up the autopilot. Sevgi blinked. Ethan would have kept the wheel until his eyelids were sagging.

You don' t want to drive anymore?"

No point. Going to be dark out there, and I don' t speak the same language as most of the long-haul traffic."

He was right. As they pulled away from Cuzco, the autohaulers began to materialize out of the gloom, routed straight out from corporation depots and warehouses on the city periphery. They seemed to come out of nowhere, like breaching whales beside a rowboat, no warning, no white wash of headlights from behind, surging up alongside with a sudden dark rush of air, hanging there for moments with high steel sides vibrating and swaying in the faint gleam from their running lights, then pulling ahead and away into the night. The jeep' s systems chirruped softly in the dashboard-lit cabin space, talking to each rig, interrogating, adjusting. Maybe bidding farewell.

You get used to that on Mars?" she asked him. The machine thing?"

He frowned. Got used to it from birth, just like everybody else. Machine age, you know?"

I thought on Mars- "

Yeah, everybody does. It' s the reflex image. Machines keeping everyone alive, right? I guess it' s got to be a hangover from the early years, before they got the environmental stuff really rolling. I mean, from what I read about it, back in the day even the scientists thought the terra-forming would take centuries.

Guess they just never saw what the nanotech was going to do to our time scales. Technology curve accelerates, we all spend our lives playing catch-up." He gestured. So now we' re stil stuck with the red-rocks-and-air-locks thing, all those images from back before the air was breathable. Takes a long time for stereotypes like that to change. People form a picture of something, they don' t like to let it go."

Ain' t that the fucking truth."

He paused, looked at her. Cracked a smile. Yeah, it is. Plus of course Mars is a long way off. Little too far to go and see for yourself, dispel the il usion. It' s a lot of empty black to cross just for that."

The smile faded out on the last of his words. She saw the way his gaze slipped out of focus as he spoke, heard the distance he was talking about in the shift of his voice, and suddenly a door seemed to have blown open somewhere, letting in the chill of the space between worlds.

It was bad, huh?" she said quietly. Out there?"

He shot her a glance. Bad enough."

Quiet settled into the cabin, the blue display-lit space, rocking gently with the motion of the jeep through the darkness.

There was this woman," he said at last. In one of the cryocaps. Elena Aguirre, I think she was from Argentina. Soil technician, coming home off tour. She looked sort of like... someone I used to know. So anyway, I used to talk to her. Started out as a joke, you know, you say a lot of stuff out loud just to stay sane. Asking her how her day' d been, like that. Any interesting soil samples recently? Trouble with the nanobes? And I' d tell her what I' d been doing, make stupid shit up about meetings with Earth Control and the rescue ship crew."

He cleared his throat.

See, after a while, when you' re on your own out there, you start to make patterns that aren' t there. The fact that you' re fucked starts to seem like more than an accident. You' re asking yourself, Why me? Why this fucking statistical impossibility of a malfunction on my watch? You start to think there' s some kind of malignant force out there, someone controlling all this shit." He grimaced. That' s religion, right?"

No, that' s not religion." Sudden asperity in her voice.

It' s not?" He shrugged. Well, it' s the closest I ever came. Got to the point, like I said, I was starting to believe there was something out there trying to take me down, and then it seemed like maybe if that were true, there' d be something else as wel , a kind of opposed force, something in there with me, something maybe looking out for me. So I started looking for it, started looking for signs. Patterns, like I said. And it didn' t take me long to make one- see, every time I stopped by Elena Aguirre' s cryocap, every time I looked in at that face and talked to her, I felt better. Pretty soon feeling better came to seem like feeling protected, and pretty soon after that I decided Elena Aguirre was put on the Felipe Souza to watch over me."