“It was nothing,” Haas told Li. “I’ve been underground since I was ten, and I’m telling you, I didn’t for one minute think there was a secondary explosion risk. I don’t give a shit what the local spins say, I wouldn’t send one miner into a pit I thought was ready to blow. That’s not the way I do things.”
But he had sent miners into the pit. And it had blown thirty hours later.
It blew hard enough to demolish the Pit 3 headframe and breakerhouse and light a fire that was still smoldering ten days later. The orbital field AI went down again, just as it had in the last explosion. Only this time it never came back on-line.
It took three days to put out the fires and evacuate the desperately small number of survivors. The damage, when they finally had time to assess it, was extensive: one mine fire, cause unknown; one Bose-Einstein relay failure, cause unknown; two hundred and seven dead adult geologists, mine techs, and miners; seventy-two dead children, working underground under an industrywide opt-out from the UN child-labor laws. And, of course, one famous dead physicist.
“There’s one thing I’m still not clear on,” Li said when he had finished. “What caused the original fire? The one in the—” She checked her files for the name. “—The one in the Trinidad?”
“Nothing.” Haas shrugged. “This is a Bose-Einstein mine. Flash fires are part of business. And most of the time you never find out where they started, let alone what caused them.”
Li looked at him doubtfully.
“Christ!” Haas muttered. “I thought you were from here. I thought you were supposed to know something.”
Li tapped her temple where the faint shadow of wires showed beneath the skin. “You want me to know, tell me.”
“Right. Bose-Einstein condensates don’t burn, Major. But coal does. And the crystals set the coal on fire sometimes. We don’t know why. It’s just one of the things you have to account for if you want to run a Bose-Einstein mine. It’s dangerous and it’s inconvenient. And sometimes—this time being one of them —it’s deadly.” He snorted. “But this time the crystals had some help. This time they had fucking Sharifi.”
“What do you mean, Sharifi? You think she caused the fire? What was she doing that’s any different from what AMC does every day?”
“She was cutting crystal for one thing.”
“So? AMC’s cutting every day. You don’t have flash fires every day.”
“Yeah, but where are we cutting, Major? That’s the question you have to ask. And where was she cutting?”
“I don’t know,” Li said. “Where was she cutting?”
“Look,” Haas said. “A Bose-Einstein bed is like a tree. You have to prune it, trim it, manage it. But if you cut too hard, or in the wrong place, you’ve got problems. And when you cut too hard in a Bose-Einstein mine you get fires.”
“Because… ?”
He shrugged. “TechComm has armies of researchers out here, year in year out, clogging up the gangways and wasting our time and slowing down production. But when it comes to actually giving us useful information they’re hopeless. Hell, they don’t know things any miner over twelve could tell you. Like that you don’t mess with live strata unless you have a death wish. The Beckies don’t like it. And when the Beckies don’t like a man, bad luck has a way of finding him.”
Li stared. Becky was Shantytown slang for Bose-Einstein condensates. It was a miner’s word, resonant with myths about singing stones, haunted drifts, glory holes. It certainly wasn’t the kind of word you heard in AMC’s orbital executive offices. Either corporate culture had taken a sharp left turn in the last decade, or this fire was even stranger than Haas was admitting.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Haas said. “Poor dumb miner, seeing singing Beckies and the Blessed Virgin down every mine shaft. But I grew out of church a long time ago. And I’m telling you, Sharifi was courting trouble down there.”
“Did you voice your concerns about the Beckies—uh, the condensates—to Sharifi?”
“I tried.” Haas made an impatient gesture, and the upper facet of his desk threw back a distorted reflection of the movement as if there were a subtle tidal effect in the condensate’s interior. Which there might be, for all Li knew. Sharifi would have known, of course. But Sharifi had gone underground and gotten herself killed. And as far as Li could tell, she hadn’t left anything behind her but unanswered questions.
“I talked to her, all right,” Haas went on. “And you know what? The bitch laughed at me. She was crazy. I don’t care how famous she was. Oh, she talked a good line. Empirical runs this, statistical data that. But the gist of it was she thought the Beckies were talking to her. And just like everyone else I’ve known who thought that, she ended up room temperature. I just wish the stupid digger bitch hadn’t brought half my mine down on top of her.”
Li stiffened. Digger was about as nasty a word as there was in the pidgin English that passed for a common language on Compson’s World—and Li had been called it herself back when she still looked like the full-blooded construct she was.
Haas saw her reaction; he shifted in his chair and twisted his face into an expression that might have looked apologetic on another man. “Not talking about you, of course.”
“Of course.”
“Look.” He leaned forward, hunching his massive shoulders for emphasis. “I don’t give a shit what Sharifi was. Or you. Or anyone else, for that matter. What I do give a shit about is that some Ring-side bureaucrat made me lend her my best witch and shut down half the mine so she could play her little games. And now that the wheels have come off, all they can tell me to do is wait.”
“Well, I’m not telling you to wait,” Li said. “And the sooner I get down there, the sooner we can get to the bottom of this and get your men back to work.”
Haas leaned back in his chair and let out a short high bark of laughter. The reaction seemed so practiced that Li wondered if it was something he’d copied out of a spinfeed interactive. “We’re not running a tourist operation,” he said. “Sharifi was working less than a hundred meters from an active cutting face. You’re not getting anywhere near there.”
“Sharifi did.”
“Sharifi was famous. You’re just a hick with a lucky trigger finger.”
Li grinned. “Nice line, Haas. But I am going down. Why make me go over your head?”
“Fuck, go to whoever you want. You ever been in a Bose-Einstein mine? You can get killed fifty different ways without blinking. I don’t need any more bodies on my hands this week, and I’m not letting you down there.”
Li stood up, walked around Haas’s desk, and picked up the headset of his VR rig. “Would you like to speak to Corps HQ or should I?”
He turned in his chair and watched her, looking for the bluff.
“Fine,” he said after a long pause. “I’m going down with a survey crew in about two hours. If you’re up to it.”
“I’m up to it,” Li said, pushing down the thought of her exhaustion, the hope of a hot shower and a merciful stretch of sleep without jump-dreams.
“Don’t expect me to baby-sit you. You fuck up your rebreather or fall down a shaft, it’s your neck.”
“I can take care of myself.”
Haas laughed. “That’s what Voyt said.”
Li looked down at the stars wheeling between her feet and decided it was time to change the subject before she had second thoughts about going into the mine again. “Has TechComm said when they’ll get your field array up?”
“Take a fucking guess. They’re working on it. Which is TechComm speak for ‘we don’t give a shit, it’s not coming out of our pocket.’ ”
Haas had that about right, Li thought. The UN had seen the shape of things to come long before most, had recognized from the dawn of the Bose-Einstein era where the live wire of power lay. It bet everything on the new technology. Subsidized it, patented it, entered into carefully structured partnerships with the half dozen multiplanetaries capable of exploiting it.
T
hat had been back in the darkest years of the Migration, when they were still trying to make Earth work and the Ring was just a few thousand paltry kilometers of hastily assembled space platforms. Since then, the UN had used Bose-Einstein tech to leverage humanity’s first stable, effective interstellar government. When the genetic riots burned across the Periphery, only UN control of the orbital relay stations contained them. And when the Syndicate incursions began, UN troops used those same relays to meet every Syndicate offensive, to raid the outlying crèches and birthlabs, to quell the revolts that flared up wherever Syndicate troops landed.
But the price of that protection was the UN’s stranglehold on interstellar transport. And anyone who ran afoul of TechComm had better settle in for a long, cold, lonely wait.
Haas jabbed a thick finger toward the planet surface. “We can’t store more than a month’s worth of production up here, and TechComm closed the main relay to private traffic as soon as the field AI flatlined. I pink-slipped two thousand miners last week. Another month of this and there’ll be kids starving in Shantytown.”
They were probably starving already, Li thought. The line between living and dying was desperately thin in a mining town. Sometimes it took no more than a missed paycheck to push a family across it.
“I swear I’d rather do business with the Syndicates,” Haas went on. “At least when their tech breaks down, they fix it. Or shoot it. It’s enough to make you support bilateralism.”
Then he met Li’s eyes and paled as he remembered who he was talking to.
She just watched him. So Haas was for secession—or at least willing to consider the idea. Li doubted that secessionist talk would still get a man thrown into provisional detention on Compson’s World these days, but it would certainly get Haas into hot water with his corporate superiors. Fine, she thought. Let the son of a bitch squirm.
But in the end she couldn’t follow through.
It wasn’t that she didn’t like to watch the Haases of the world squirm. But not over politics. And not at her hands.
“Forget it,” she said. “I’ve been to the dance enough times to know saying something isn’t doing it. And I’m here to investigate Sharifi’s death, not your politics.”
But she still rubbed her hand along her chair arm as she stood up, coating the brush-finished steel with a fine layer of dead skin cells. Reprogramming skinbugs for surveillance wasn’t legal, exactly. But she’d never seen anyone actually get in trouble over it. And if she turned up any really good dirt, she’d be able to wring some mileage out of it, warrant or no warrant.
As she turned to leave, she thought she heard a rustle from the shadows behind the big desk. She stopped, listened, and could have sworn she smelled perfume. She looked toward Haas, but he’d gone back to his paperwork and didn’t seem to notice.
Was someone watching? Had there been a silent audience to their meeting?
No, she decided. No women in the walls here. Just the little noises any station made. Just heat turning on and off, air sighing through ventilators.
Just nothing.
AMC Station: 13.10.48.
Haas and his crew were waiting in the shuttle’s cramped passenger compartment by the time Li boarded. She stripped and donned her borrowed miner’s kit in the aisle. Most of the other passengers looked away. Haas didn’t.
The kit included a microfilament climbing harness, a rebreather and oxygen canister, a first-aid kit with endorphin-boosters, syntheskin patches, and an old-fashioned viral tourniquet. Li hoisted the harness and pulled it on, wincing as the familiar motion strained her damaged arm. The full kit weighed less than the infantryman’s gear Li had carried back in the Syndicate Wars, but just the feel of webbing on her shoulders reminded her of all the things that could go fatally wrong in the deep shafts of a Bose-Einstein mine.
Haas loomed over her, looking even bigger now that he wasn’t quarantined behind his vast desk. His bad mood seemed to have vanished; he sounded almost pleasant as he introduced Li to the various geologists and engineers on the survey team. The one person he didn’t introduce was the woman next to him, and Li knew why as soon as she looked at her.
It was there in the surreal color of her violet eyes, the inhuman, almost repellent perfection of her face. No human geneticist would have designed such a face. Nature had never meant humans to look like that. She could be only one thing: a postbreakaway A or B Series Syndicate-built genetic construct.
Haas intercepted Li’s glance at the woman and put a proprietary hand on her shoulder. “And here’s our witch, of course,” he said offhandedly.
The witch stood as still under Haas’s hand as a well-trained animal, but something in the set of her shoulders said his touch was less than welcome. Or did Syndicate constructs even think that way? Could like and dislike be programmed in the crèches? Could feelings be spliced out of the perfect, unvarying, simulation-tested genesets? Or were the wrong feelings just forbidden—along with every other unprogrammable thing that made up an individual?
Li said her name and held out her hand.
The witch hesitated, then reached out tentatively, like an explorer greeting possibly dangerous natives. Her hand felt restless as a bird in Li’s grasp, and she kept her head down so that Li saw just the pale curve of forehead, the dark hair falling away from a part as straight as a knife blade.
Li watched her surreptitiously as they took their seats and the pilots went into the final preflight checks. She’d spent half her adult life fighting the Syndicates, but she’d rarely been so close to a high-series construct. This one would have been tanked in the orbital birthlabs above the Syndicate home planets. She would have grown up in a crèche full of her twins, never seeing a face that wasn’t hers, never hearing a voice or feeling a touch that wasn’t hers. And if she’d lived long enough to end up here, then she’d survived the one-year cull, the eight-year cull, the constant barrage of norm-testing that routed out physical and psychological variations in order to achieve the disciplined, unquestioning, unvarying perfection that the Syndicate designers insisted on.
Li glanced around at the other passengers. Even the ones who weren’t looking at the witch were focused on her, aware of her, orbiting her like iron filings lining up under the influence of a magnet. They were seduced by the beautiful face, the graceful body, the woman she appeared to be. But Li saw battle lines forming along the Great Divide of Gilead’s southern continent. She saw a flesh-and-blood statement of Syndicate ideology, Syndicate superiority, Syndicate disdain for human values.
Maybe Nguyen was right, Li thought. Maybe she didn’t understand politics. Maybe she was just that stereotypical, vaguely pitiful figure: an old soldier who couldn’t look peace in the eye. But was she the only old soldier who thought the UN was selling off hard-earned victories to pad the multiplanetaries’ profit margins? Was she the only UN construct who thought the thirty-year contracts were still slavery—even if the new slave masters were constructs, not humans? Why was this woman here? What could she offer that was worth the risk of her presence?
“Best investment we ever made,” Haas said, as if in answer to Li’s unspoken questions. “First six months after we picked up her MotaiSyndicate contract, we tripled production and halved our payroll. Fantastic, huh?”
“Yeah,” Li said. “Fantastic. Bet the union loves it.”
“What?” Haas looked like he was giving serious thought to spitting. “Someone’s been selling you fairy tales, Major. There is no union.”
He shot an arm past Li’s face and lifted the window shade to check their progress toward the planet. They were well into the atmosphere, pinions of flame streaking the shuttle’s wings, the coalfield spread out like a map below them. Li scanned the broad floodplain, leveled by an ocean that had dried up three geologic ages before humans set foot on Compson’s World. Headframes and mine buildings curved along the valley’s edge, following the coal seam. Far above, their jagged spires already flashing red in the dawn, loomed the Black Mountains, ramping up in serr
ied cliffs and ridgelines toward the Continental Divide.
It took her a moment to put her finger on what was wrong with the view. There was a thick haze hanging around the mountains’ shoulders, up around the four-thousand-meter level. And farther down, a wash of bright oxygenated green swept the feet of the cliffs. When Li had last seen those cliffs they were above the atmosphere line, bathed in the dull orange of native lichens. This wasn’t the planet she’d left behind, and the sheer breadth of the human encroachment in that fifteen years was chilling.
Compson’s World was the great joke of the interstellar era: all the anticipation, all the apprehension, all the first-contact planning, and on thirty-eight planets in twenty-seven star systems, Compson’s coal and condensates were the only sign of complex life humans had ever found in the universe. And by the time humans reached Compson’s, there was no life left on the planet but the high, windswept algae tundra.
Li looked down at the spreading human footprint on the planet and thought of the thronging life that had laid down its bones to make the coal seam. The first humans to set pickax and shovel to the planet had been paleontologists, not miners. There was a whole exploration literature from that time—books Li had read eagerly lying in her cramped bedroom in Shantytown.
The scientists had fought terraforming, of course. But the first Bose-Einstein strike killed any chance they had. The mines had come, and the genetics labs, and from the day the first atmospheric processor went up, Compson’s World was a walking ghost. Now Li thought back on the dozens of terraformed, self-consciously balanced and controlled planets she’d seen in her tours of duty, and wondered if she might be one of the last people in the universe to know an untamed world.
Haas was talking to her, she realized. She snapped back into the present, wondering what she’d missed.
“Your average Shantytown witch is a pure fraud,” he was saying. “I’ve known three witches, tops, who could actually strike live crystal. And two of the bastards never turned a strike over to AMC until they’d given every Pat and Micky they ever got drunk with a crack at it. Fucking bootleggers.” He jerked his safety harness tight in preparation for landing. “Underground democracy, my ass. It’s theft!”
Spin State Page 7
