She laughed, aware that her hands were shaking with rage. “That was fun. We’ll have to do it again sometime.”
“Sure.” Still grinning. “See you around.”
She stood in the middle of the mat, weight on her toes, and tracked him all the way to the door. She must have looked as shaken as she felt; before she could pull herself together, McCuen came and stood in front of her with a worried look on his face.
“Okay, Major?” She heard his voice through a haze of adrenaline, as if he were speaking from somewhere far away.
“I’m fine,” she said, running a dripping hand over her hair. “But that son of a bitch needs an attitude adjustment.”
* * *
The glory hole.
Light and silence. A fullness of space like the rush inside a conch shell. Pillars that were ribs leaping up into the wild geometry of the fan vaults, raising the roof of a living cathedral.
Li had last seen it in the dark and underwater. Now she was seeing it as the miners had seen it, as Sharifi had seen it. And Bella was right; it did sing. Li might not hear the music the witch heard, but her internals were going wild, overloaded by the quantum storm that raged in the glory hole’s gleaming belly.
There had been problems draining it. It had taken the cleanup crew much longer than expected to shore up the surrounding passages and run the pumps in. And for several tense days they had struggled to find an underground river, broken out of its banks by the fire and subsequent flooding, that kept refilling the Trinidad’s lower levels as fast as they could drain them.
The work went even slower because the miners, except for the pit Catholics, wouldn’t work the glory hole. It was a place surrounded by fearful superstition, as terrible to some people as it had been fascinating to Sharifi.
Something cracked and skittered away from Li’s foot. She bent, her headlamp raking the rough floor with shadows, and saw two glittering red eyes flashing back at her. She touched the thing and heard a little clack like the sound of two marbles kissing. She picked it up.
It was plastic. The kind of cheap, locally produced petroleum product that always cluttered up Compson’s markets. Two red marbles connected by a loop of black elastic. It was a Love-in-Tokyo, a cheap bauble to tie off a little girl’s ponytail. Li herself had worn one in some faded past in which she’d actually been a little girl with a ponytail. Reflexively, she pulled the elastic around her wrist and slipped the plastic marble through the loop. She heard the click as it fastened, felt the elastic bite into her wrist, the smooth pressure of plastic beads against her skin. A memory rose up out of the deep rift of her unconscious, fierce and precise, a child’s vision of night and fear.
It had been some other glory hole she had visited, not this one. A hole long since dug out and sold off piece by piece by AMC or some other company. Her mother had carried her. Her father was there, nearby but not with them. It was in another deposit; she remembered long hours on the rough mountain roads, borrowed rebreathers passed from hand to hand in the shaking, grinding truck bed under the flapping canvas. It was dark when they left, darker when they got there, darkest in the hot muttering mine. She had been terrified by the noises the mine made, by all those tons of mountain shifting and grumbling above her. I am inside a beast, she remembered thinking, swallowed alive, like Jonah.
The memory dropped away from her. She shook her head and looked around. What had they been doing in that other glory hole? Why had they gone there? She followed the vein of the memory, trying to pick it up further along, pry loose some concrete recollection. Nothing.
“What’s that?” McCuen asked, pointing at the Love-in-Tokyo.
Li jumped; she’d forgotten him. Then she held it out for him to see.
He grinned. “Doesn’t look like Sharifi’s style exactly.”
“Is it possible Cartwright or someone else would have been bringing children down here?”
McCuen looked uncomfortable. “Well, AMC tries to stop them. But what are they going to do? They can’t block off every borehole and ventilation drift. And even if they tried, there are plenty they don’t know about.”
“What do you know about glory holes, McCuen?”
He looked at her as if he thought she was asking a trick question.
“Really. I’ve forgotten a lot of what I knew before… before I enlisted.”
McCuen took a breath and frowned. “They’re what the geologists call white bodies—nodes in the beds that cross multiple strata. The best crystal’s always in the white bodies. Some of them are transport-grade straight through from end to end. When a company hits one… well, it’s the big money. Boom time.”
“But it’s more than money, right? Why’s Cartwright so worked up about it?”
“I’m Pentecostal,” McCuen said, and there was a knife edge of disapproval in his voice so subtle Li would have missed it if she hadn’t somehow known it would be there.
“And this is about the pit priests,” she said slowly. “And the union.”
“Is there a difference?” McCuen asked.
“Come on, Brian. It’s important.”
“I… only know what you hear. I’m not sure most of the Catholics know much more than that. It’s not like Rome approves of it.”
“And?”
“And nothing. The priests—the ones that believe in it—look for white bodies. That’s what Cartwright’s doing down here. Not that AMC knows he’s a priest. They’d flay him alive.”
“And what do they do when they find a glory hole?”
“Go down and gawk at it, mostly. I mean what do people do when the Pope comes?”
“And?”
His face shut down. “And nothing.”
“That wasn’t nothing I just saw cross your face. Tell me what you just decided not to tell me.”
“I didn’t decide not to tell you. I just don’t believe in repeating rumors. I mean, I haven’t mentioned all the guys who are supposed to have fought for the Provisionals, have I? Because obviously they haven’t. It’s just tongue wagging.”
“Actually,” Li said, “a lot of them have.”
McCuen stared. “No shit,” he said, and she could see the wondering look on his face even in the lamplight. “Like who?”
“Chuck Kinney, for one.”
“He’s a construct!”
“So? And the barkeep at the Molly. Obviously. Oh, and those two brothers, the redheads, four or five years older than me.”
“Mutt and Jeff?”
“Christ, they still call them that?”
“Well, look at them.”
Li laughed. “So what’s the supposedly not true rumor about what they’re doing down here?” she asked, hoping McCuen’s gossipy mood would survive the change of subject.
“Oh, it’s a lot weirder than the IRA thing. More like the kind of story you tell kids to scare them into doing what you want them to.” He grinned. “I bet it was my aunt or someone who told me. And… you really don’t know any of this?”
“Sometimes I do. Sometimes I forget.” She grinned. “You’ll get to find out all about that soon enough.”
“Right. Well, the story about the glory holes is that the priests take people down there and… feed them to something.”
Li laughed. “What, like ritual cannibalism?”
“I told you it was ridiculous.”
It is ridiculous, Li started to say. But before she could open her mouth, the vaults spun around her ears and she was in the grip of another flashback.
Her father and mother were there. But they were smaller than in the last memory, strangely reduced. It took her a moment to puzzle that out. Then she realized it was she who had changed, not them. This was a more recent memory.
She tried to see their faces but couldn’t. She knew who they were in an abstract sense, but their actual features were invisible to her. As if each of them wore a blank white mask that said Mother or Father. As if they had no faces.
Two men stood beside her father, cloaked in shadow. One sh
e recognized by the set of his shoulders and the scar snaking down his throat: Cartwright. The other, thin, wiry, ducking his head into his collar, she couldn’t quite place. She looked at her mother and saw that she was crying silently, tears streaming down her cheeks. She looked back toward her father, and she almost fainted in terror.
His chest was gone. All she saw there was a dark hole that swallowed all the light of the crystals around them, that threatened to suck down into itself even the spanning ribs of the vaults overhead. He smiled at her—or perhaps he just smiled. Slowly, not taking his eyes from hers, he lifted a hand, plunged it into the black void within him, and pulled out a thick sheaf of paper.
Li saw the paper, the bony coal-scarred hand holding it, even the sooty rubber band tied off around the wad. She saw it all, registered it, digested it with the surreal accuracy of dream vision. What she did not see—not until it was too late, not until it was burning in her hand already—was what the paper was.
It was money. Money she’d spent fifteen years ago.
SecServ, UNSC Headquarters: 22.10.48.
Nguyen sat at her desk under the tall windows. Ruddy sunlight glinted off her uniform jacket, struck fire off her epaulettes, haloed her straight-backed figure in red and gold.
“So,” she said. “The station exec was skimming. You think. But you don’t have proof, as far as I can see, other than the fact that you think he’s mistreating his girlfriend. Everyone is always skimming in any Bose-Einstein operation, Li. The rewards are too rich to resist. If he really is guilty, AMC probably knows already, and they won’t welcome hearing about—what did you say his name was?”
“Haas.”
“—hearing about Haas from us.”
Li didn’t answer immediately. Nguyen continued. “What about Gould?”
“She’ll reach Freetown in twenty days.”
“Then you need to have this wrapped up by then.”
“We may not be able to wrap it up without her.”
“No. That’s not acceptable. We may lose her again. She may manage to get some message out—God knows what or to whom—before we can intercept the ship. Twenty days. That’s all you’ve got. And you’re wasting time on some two-bit embezzler and his Syndicate-bred girlfriend.”
“But Sharifi’s murder—”
“You’re missing the point, Li. Sharifi’s murder—if she really was murdered—is a side issue. The real target is what she was working on and who she was leaking information to.”
“Yes, but the two things are tangled up together. Haas was—”
“Are you trying to tell me that Hannah Sharifi was ignoring her research in order to chase after a second-rate petty thief?”
“No, but—”
“Then we’re in agreement. I want Sharifi’s datasets. I want to know who she showed them to. And most of all I want to know what kind of damage control we need to do in order to prevent them from getting into the wrong hands.”
“The wrong hands being… ?”
“Anyone’s but ours.” Nguyen took a breath and leaned forward. “I have good news. I saw an internal draft of the board’s decision on Metz. It’s not official yet, but I think they’ll clear you.”
“Great,” Li said, but the muscles of her thighs and shoulders ratcheted even tighter as she waited for the other shoe to drop.
“If that happens, I want to talk to you about a new assignment. To Alba.”
“Great.”
“Assuming the board falls your way, that is. There are still a few members on the fence, as I understand it.”
Including Nguyen herself, no doubt. “What would it take to get them off the fence?” Li asked, playing the game and hating herself for it.
“A clean, fast resolution of this investigation, for one thing.”
First the carrot, then the stick.
“Also”—Nguyen paused delicately—“stay away from Cohen for the next little while. You’re a fine officer. A good soldier. But you’re in over your head with him. Cohen, despite all his charming eccentricities, is no harmless crackpot. Talk to him, and you’re talking to the board of directors and sole stockholder of the largest multiplanetary in UN space. He controls shipping lanes and streamspace links to a good third of the Periphery. He has a corporate espionage department that is, without exaggeration, twice the size of our internal affairs division—”
Li laughed. “I think he’s offered me a job in it.”
“Probably. I’m sure you’d be very useful to him. Which is exactly my point. It’s never personal when you talk to him. Don’t let the organic interface lull you into thinking you’re dealing with someone who feels things as we do. You can’t trust him. Except to act in his own best interest. That’s what he’s built to do. Nothing else. There is nothing else for him.”
“Why are you telling me this?” Li asked. “Cohen’s the best freelancer we have. Now he’s suspect?”
“Just because we work with him doesn’t mean we trust him. Some people are too powerful to be challenged. Cohen’s on the Security Council’s watch list, for Heaven’s sake. Don’t forget that. We may not have had enough to take him to court on it, but he deliberately caused the planetary net crash on Kalispell last year. That’s manipulating a network with intent to harm humans. If we’d nailed him on it, he’d have been stripped down to his switches. And Tel Aviv—”
“Tel Aviv was an accident.”
“An accident like Metz?”
Li’s stomach turned over. “What do you mean, Metz?”
“Catherine,” Nguyen said patiently, and Li felt a weird sense of disjuncture at hearing the name that Cohen always called her. “Forget Metz. I’m just asking you to remember he isn’t human.”
“Neither am I,” Li pointed out.
Nguyen gestured impatiently. “That’s not the point. What you are or aren’t… that’s semantics. A few divergent chromosomes. A grandmother whose geneset was assembled by design instead of chance. But in every way that counts, you are human. Cohen is something else entirely. Don’t let personal feelings get in the way of remembering that.”
Nguyen sighed, picked up a fiche, scanned and signed it, and moved it to the other side of her desk.
“Well, that’s over with,” she said. “I hope it wasn’t more unpleasant than it had to be. I think you understand my reasons for raising the issue. Anything else?”
Li started to speak, then hesitated, weighing the risks of telling Nguyen about Korchow. “Yes,” she said. “I had a strange talk with someone the other day. I’m not sure how to proceed.”
Something sparked behind Nguyen’s dark eyes as Li told her about Korchow, and she had a sudden uncomfortable conviction that her meeting with Korchow was the real news Nguyen had been waiting to hear. Maybe even the real reason Nguyen had sent her to Compson’s in the first place. But that was crazy, of course. Even Nguyen didn’t control everything and everyone.
“What makes you think Korchow was in contact with Sharifi?” Nguyen asked.
Li downloaded an image of Korchow’s card and flashed it onto a shared substream. “I found this in her datebook.”
“Well,” Nguyen said, looking at it. “Maybe she was just buying antiques from him.”
“Sure she was.”
“How sure are you he’s Syndicate?”
“I’m not. But he had the look. And if he wasn’t Syndicate, he was doing everything he could to make me think he was.”
“So. Sharifi was talking to a Syndicate agent… about her work, we have to assume. And now the same agent wants to talk to you.”
“What do I do?” Li asked.
Nguyen’s lips thinned in a chilly smile. “You talk to him.”
Helena: 22:10:48.
Korchow’s address put him square in the center of Helena’s commercial district, a five-minute walk, air quality permitting, from the old colonial administration building. But Li had a first stop to make before she saw Korchow: St. Joseph’s Home for Girls. And unlike Korchow’s shop, St. Joe’s wasn’t
in the nicer part of town.
Compson’s capital city predated the Bose-Einstein Rush. The elegantly dilapidated domes of the capitol building and governor’s mansion recalled the old home-rule days before the Bose-Einstein boom. The commercial zone’s masonry colonnades and office blocks reminded visitors that Helena had once been more than just a company town, Compson’s World more than a Trusteeship. Still, there was nothing quaint or old-fashioned about the slums Li’s cab rolled through on the long drive in from the spaceport. They were brand-name UN-wide standard-issue: market democracy in action, legislated by the General Assembly, bankrolled by the Interplanetary Monetary Fund.
Everywhere she looked, she saw the mines. The Anaconda was half a continent away, the next closest Bose-Einstein mine in the remote northern hemisphere, but even at that distance they stamped their mark on the city. Acid rain painted long sulfur-yellow streaks on the composite board walls of the housing projects. A permanent smog of coal dust hung in the air, fed by pea-coal fires in every kitchen. Blue-faced ex-miners shuffled along the sidewalks in the final stages of black-lung, come to the capital to live off their comp checks.
On the outskirts of the industrial zone the cab passed a long weedy stretch of open space. Goalposts leaned crookedly at either end of the field. They’d been white once, but the paint was peeling and streaked with rust. Someone, probably some local welfare group, had taken care of the grass; otherwise, it would long ago have lost its battle against the burning rain.
Eight players were scattered across the field, a few in uniform, the rest dressed in street clothes. As the car passed, one player broke upfield, running with the long sure stride of a born striker. The sun passed out of the clouds just as he took his shot, and a ray of sunlight stabbed across the field, silvering the striker’s legs, the taut arc of the goalie’s body as he leapt to intercept the shot.
Li shuddered and looked away, back into the half dark of the cab.
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