Spin State

by Chris Moriarty

  “Oh?”

  “Can’t you guess who the first person was?”

  “Who?” she asked.

  “Hannah Sharifi.”

  “Christ!” Li burst out. “I’m starting to wish I’d never heard of the woman! Gould’s going to hit Freetown in twenty-three days to do who knows what. I have to be there before her. I have to know what Sharifi did, what she found. What she was hiding from us.”

  And I have to know how far I can trust you, Cohen.

  But she couldn’t ask him that.

  She couldn’t ask because she knew, in some instinctive animal recess of her mind, that it was the one question he couldn’t answer.

  * * *

  Li’s quarters on-station looked even more bleak and squalid after her trip Ring-side.

  She slipped offstream, lit a cigarette—her last of the day she hoped—and watched the late-night spins with the sound all the way down, her mind teeming with vague unsettled half memories.

  Sharpe had forwarded Sharifi’s and Voyt’s draft autopsies to her, and she scanned them absentmindedly, thinking she’d give them a serious reading in the morning. He certified Sharifi’s cause of death as suffocation. The damage to Sharifi’s head and hand was premortem, as all the blood suggested. And she’d bitten through the tip of her tongue before she died as well.

  Li’s stomach clenched when she read that, but she told herself it could have happened when Sharifi fell. It wouldn’t be the first time someone trying to get out of a burning mine panicked and stumbled. And no matter how odd that and the injuries to her hand were, she’d clearly died from suffocation, not trauma.

  Voyt’s autopsy was more puzzling. The rescuers found his body near Sharifi’s, as if the two were trying to escape together, but Sharpe attributed his death to the same mysterious brain seizure that had afflicted so many other miners in the Trinidad.

  Li fell asleep puzzling over it, reminding herself to put her cigarette out before she dropped it.

  * * *

  It hit her at four in the morning, barreling through her sleep-dazed mind like a runaway coal cart.

  “Idiot!” she muttered. She sat up, turned on the lights, pulled up Sharifi’s autopsy again.

  How could she have missed it? Sharpe damn well hadn’t. He’d done everything short of write it on the wall for her. She accessed the rescue crew logs and cross-referenced them with the shift assignments for the day of the fire. Twelve people had been in the Trinidad. Most of them belonged to a work crew of engineers and electricians who were laying wire to a newly opened face deep in the south sections of the newly opened vein. The work crew was at the far end of the main south gangway—almost an eighth of a mile farther from the stairs than Sharifi had been.

  She tapped in to the Shantytown hospital database and saw that two of the electricians who had gotten out were half genetics. The rest weren’t. And they’d all made it to pit bottom under their own steam. The only people who’d died in the Trinidad were Voyt and Sharifi.

  Sharifi was a genetic. Voyt, whatever his genes might be, had been wired just like Li was. Both should have been able to resist gas and lack of oxygen long after the nongenetics.

  So why had they died when the others had lived?

  Li scanned Sharifi’s autopsy, cursing herself for missing what was right in front of her. Finally she found it, halfway through the report, buried in a wealth of camouflaging detail. Sharpe had put it where anyone who knew what they were looking for could see it.

  If they wanted to see it.

  On the side of Sharifi’s head, just below her temple, among all the other bruises and lacerations, Sharpe had noted two small oblong burn marks, spaced two centimeters apart.

  Li leaned across the narrow space between her bunk and the facing closet. She fished her Viper out of its Corps-issue holster and extruded the fanglike anodes: oblong, tapered, sharp enough to cut through skin. And exactly two centimeters apart.

  Someone had put a Viper—Voyt’s, probably—to Sharifi’s head and pulled the trigger at contact range. Li had seen people die that way. A point-blank shot to the head usually caused respiratory paralysis. Death by suffocation. A death that left scars only the most alert coroner would look closely enough to discover.

  Sharifi had been murdered.

  * * *

  She linked through to the planet net and dialed the Shantytown hospital.

  “How did you find out already?” Sharpe asked when she got through to him.

  “What do you mean? I read the autopsies.”

  He blinked, obviously confused. “You’re not calling about the wetware?”

  “No. What about it?”

  “Haas took it. Or rather, he sent his Syndicate-designed girl Friday down for it.”

  “What? How did he even know about it?”

  Sharpe rocked back in his chair and raised his eyebrows. “That, Major, is what I was hoping you’d tell me.”

  AMC Station: 19.10.48.

  Establishing the crime scene turned out to be as impossible as keeping roaches off a space station.

  Anaconda’s pitheads formed the tip of a subterranean iceberg, a catacomb of constantly shifting drifts, adits, and ventilation shafts. AMC’s maps lagged far behind the digging no matter how fast the surveyors scrambled to update them. And they didn’t begin to account for the hundreds of kilometers of unreported bolt-holes, mountainside entrances, and bootleggers’ tunnels.

  This sprawling, chaotic anthill was filled up, shift after shift, by five daily launches from the station, numerous unscheduled drops of specialized technicians and surveying crews, and a constant, completely unregulated stream of dilapidated ground vehicles shuttling back and forth from Shantytown. No one controlled access or knew, really, who was in the mine during any given shift. The pithead logs were convenient fictions, just like the pithead rules and the posted safety regulations and the rented Davy lamps and oxygen canisters. AMC’s control of the Anaconda was as illusory—even if the illusion had real financial and legal consequences—as a general’s control over a looting, raiding, pillaging army.

  “If we can’t catch them going in,” Li finally decided, “we’ll tag them going out.”

  The evacuation had taken five shifts, using every available shuttle on-station and every hopper that could be begged, borrowed, or commandeered from the four or five Compson’s World settlements within flight range of the Anaconda. Casualties had been high. The evac teams had begun triage within forty minutes of the first alarm, and they’d tagged and entered every evacuee on handheld monitors uplinked to the station net to create a running dead, wounded, and missing list.

  When McCuen cross-referenced the triage lists with the station’s shuttle passenger manifests and the Shantytown hospital’s admission records, they got a solid freeze-frame of who had been where when the mine caught fire.

  The list of people who had been underground but not down there on easily verifiable official business was surprisingly short. Jan Voyt, Hannah Sharifi, and Karl Kintz were on it. No surprises there.

  But there was a fourth name Li didn’t recognize.

  “Who’s Bella?” she asked. “And why don’t we have a full name for him?”

  “Bella’s the witch. And that is her whole name, as far as anyone knows.” McCuen grinned lasciviously. “I can go talk to her for you. I’m just a slave to duty.”

  “Very funny, Brian.”

  “Just kidding,” he said, sobering suddenly. “Besides, anyone who wants to keep working and living on this station would have to be crazy to go fishing in that pond.”

  Li started to ask McCuen what he meant, then decided she didn’t want to get sidetracked into a conversation about Haas’s sleeping habits. “What about Kintz?” she asked instead.

  Kintz had been more or less invisible since her first morning on-station. What little she’d seen of him had led her to two conclusions. One, he’d gotten special treatment from Voyt. Two, he expected to keep getting it.

  In the normal course of th
ings, she would have shaped Kintz up or shipped him out posthaste. But if things went well, she wouldn’t be on Compson’s long enough to make lowering the boom on Kintz worth her while.

  “So what was Kintz doing down there?” she asked. “And what was the deal between him and Voyt, anyway?”

  McCuen looked like he’d sat on a tack.

  “I’m not asking you to tell tales out of school, McCuen. I just need to know how to spin him.”

  “I know,” McCuen said reluctantly. “But it’s my job if I piss the wrong people off.”

  Li looked at him, eyes narrowed. “So it wasn’t just that Kintz was scamming Voyt. Kintz was Haas’s man in the office. Is that it? Or was Voyt in on it too?”

  One look at McCuen’s face told her she’d hit pay dirt.

  “So what were Voyt and Kintz doing for Haas besides passing along information?” she asked.

  Again the hesitation.

  Li kicked her chair back and lit a cigarette. “Christ, Brian. Tell me if you want. If not, don’t. We’re all big boys and girls here. I’m not going to waste my time dragging it out of you.”

  “I don’t know anything,” McCuen said. “Honest. I’m just repeating rumors. But… Voyt had an eye on the bottom line. You always hear rumors about mine security being on the take. God knows there’s plenty of chances. But Voyt… the rumors about him were pretty persistent. And somehow if you knew Voyt at all, they didn’t surprise you.”

  “And you think Kintz might have taken over Voyt’s sideline?”

  “I’m not saying that. But it’s possible.”

  Li put down the list of names and stood up. “Let’s go talk to him then. Before Haas’s little bird gets a chance to whistle in his ear.”

  * * *

  Kintz turned out to be a hard man to find. They finally caught up with him in one of the fifth-level strip joints. Li recognized his drinking buddies as company goons—one step above the bouncers who were standing around itching to kick them out before they broke something. None of them looked sober enough to operate heavy equipment.

  “Like to talk to you,” she told Kintz.

  He looked at her but kept his hand on his drink. “I go back on duty tomorrow at eight. That soon enough?”

  “Jesus, Kintz,” McCuen burst out. “We’ve been looking for you since three in the afternoon!”

  “And how the hell was I supposed to know that, Brian?” Kintz said McCuen’s name as if it were a dirty joke.

  “You could answer your damned comm for one thing.”

  Kintz kicked back in his chair, smiling. “Aren’t you the teacher’s pet,” he drawled. “Wag your tail a little harder and maybe she’ll let you sit in her lap.”

  “Right,” Li said. “If I wanted to referee playground fights, I could have taught kindergarten. Karl and I are stepping around the corner for a nice quiet cup of coffee.”

  Kintz didn’t protest much; Li was able to steer him out of the bar and down the street with no more than a firm hand on his elbow.

  “What do you want from me?” he asked when she’d gotten a table and two steaming cups of coffee between them. “I’m off duty in case you didn’t notice. And I don’t fucking appreciate being dragged around like a child either.”

  Li smiled and lit a cigarette. “I don’t recall asking whether or not you appreciated it,” she said pleasantly. “In fact I’m pretty sure I don’t give a shit. Personally, I’d have fired you the day I got here. Except I’m piss lazy, and if I shipped you out, I’d have to waste my time figuring out who Haas’s new rat in the office was.”

  “Whatever.”

  “What were you doing in the mine the day of the fire?”

  “Working.” He sounded nonchalant, but the sudden tension around his eyes told a different story.

  “Working on what?”

  “Working for that dumb bitch, Sharifi.”

  “You obviously got along. Must have been a real pleasure all around.”

  “You wouldn’t think it was so funny if it was you who had to deal with her fucking attitude. I knew her before she ever got here. Not that she remembered. She was my fucking college physics teacher.”

  Li blinked, uncertain whether she was more baffled by the idea of Kintz being a student anywhere Sharifi would teach or the idea of his being a student at all. “Was she a good teacher?” she settled on asking.

  “Fuck no! You know how she graded us? She gave an exam with one problem on it, one problem that takes like three hours to solve, and I get it back and there’s one fucking sentence written on it: ‘Oops, you lost the mass of the universe. C minus.’ Like my whole exam was some kind of fucking joke to her. You lost the mass of the universe ? I mean, what the fuck does that mean, anyway?”

  “I think it means she had a sense of humor and you don’t,” Li said. “So. What did your favorite physics professor have you doing in the mine?”

  Kintz shrugged sullenly. “Standing around mostly. Security, I guess. Fuck if I know.”

  Li drew on her cigarette and watched him in silence. “Did you know Sharifi was murdered?” she asked finally.

  “I might have heard something like that.”

  “And did you know that you’re the last person who saw her alive? Other than Voyt. Oh, but someone killed him too.”

  “So what?”

  “So if I were you, I’d be busy thinking about how many ways I could bend over for the investigating officer and keep myself out of trouble.”

  “Jeez, lighten up! I fucking work for you, in case you forgot. Why don’t you go round up the usual suspects?”

  “Unfortunately the usual suspects weren’t down in the mine. You were. And I want to know what Haas had you doing down there.”

  Kintz stared. Then he kicked his chair back on two legs and laughed a laugh that set Li’s teeth on edge.

  “You don’t know shit,” he said. “They hung you out to dry. You’re in fucking free fall, and you’re just too blind to see it.”

  Li flicked out her left arm as fast as her internals would go. It hurt like hell, but the special effects were worth it. To anyone watching it would have looked like Kintz’s coffee had simply fallen off the table and into his lap. Before Kintz realized what had happened, Li was on her feet and coming around the table right behind the coffee.

  “Gosh!” she said, patting at the front of his pants with a napkin. “You spilled on yourself. Hope it wasn’t too hot.”

  Kintz stood up and backed away from the table a step or two but let Li keep swatting at him with the napkin. He looked like he was still trying to catch up with his coffee. He was also now standing with his back against the wall and Li’s body between him and the rest of the tables. Li smiled, grabbed him where it counted, and lifted.

  “Have I mentioned that you’re really pissing me off?” she asked.

  Kintz’s face contorted, but his eyes didn’t drop away from hers. Worse, as pain drained the blood from his neck and face, Li saw the dense network of ceramsteel filament woven through flesh and muscle.

  She almost dropped him in surprise.

  Well, that explained where he’d taken Sharifi’s classes. The only thing that didn’t add up was why the Corps had put this waste of skin through Alba. Or how an ex-Peacekeeper had washed up as Haas’s errand boy. Either Kintz was working for internal affairs—impossible—or he’d screwed up so badly the Corps couldn’t risk the publicity of a dishonorable discharge.

  Yet another reason to keep a close eye on him. As if she needed one.

  “You’re no better than me,” Kintz said, pain and hatred battling in his voice. “I was on Gilead. I know just what kind of fucking hero you are. I know you.”

  Li let go and backed away as if he’d stung her.

  “Yeah,” Kintz said. “I was there. And when the memory wipe didn’t take they washed me out. For doing the same thing you did. For doing less than you did. What do you think of that, Major? Only you weren’t a major then, were you? That was your reward for doing their dirty work.” He l
aughed. “Or don’t you like to talk about it?”

  Li shrugged. It took every bit of willpower she had, but she did it.

  “Look,” she said. “I don’t give a shit what you think you remember or what lies you need to tell yourself to get by. We can either keep standing here insulting each other, or you can tell me something that’ll make me leave. Which is it gonna be, Kintz? And while we’re on the topic of Gilead, why don’t you think about what happened to the people who got in my way there before you decide to make an enemy.”

  Kintz stared at her. He was trembling with anger, and she could see the sweat standing out on his upper lip.

  “Talk to the witch,” he said finally. “She was the one Sharifi trusted. Hell, maybe she killed Sharifi herself.” He laughed, trying to regain his composure. “You always hurt the one you love, isn’t that how the song goes?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Li said. “I’ll be seeing you.”

  “You sure as fuck will be.”

  * * *

  Li found the witch in Haas’s office, working.

  Haas was slumped behind the big desk, staring into streamspace. He surfaced long enough to wave Li into a chair, then faded out again.

  Li sat and watched. She noted the wire’s route from the derms at Haas’s temples, through the deceptively simple dryware casing of the transducer, to the witch’s cranial socket. The witch was his interface, Li realized, the ungainly external wires the only way he could access the spinstream. The transducer intercepted the construct’s output, keyed it to his neural patterns, packeted and transferred it. Li thought of the loop shunt and shuddered.

  “All right,” Haas said to the empty air in front of him.

  The witch stood up, teased the jack out from behind her ear, then pulled her hair over the socket, hiding it.

  “Can I offer you something?” Haas asked Li. “Coffee?” He looked at his watch. “Beer?”