Spin State

by Chris Moriarty

  She stepped back into the bright lamplight and began pulling her coat on. “What you’re offering… I appreciate it. But I don’t want it. Just let me know if you’ll do the job, okay?”

  She had her hand on the door before he answered.

  “You know I will.” He stood in the garden where she had left him, and all she could see when she looked back was the slow curve of a girl’s hip in refracted moonlight. “You knew I’d do it before you even asked.”

  Li wavered, caught on the threshold. You could walk back into that room, she thought, and her heart flew up in her chest like a bird breaking cover in front of the gunsights. One word, one touch. You could change everything.

  And then what?

  Before she could decide whether to go or stay, Cohen spoke again. The voice from the shadows was quiet, measured, impersonal: a silicon voice for a circuitry lover.

  “Just close the door on your way out,” he said.

  She started to speak, but a cold, hard knot rose up her throat and choked the words off. She backed into the hall and pulled the door shut behind her.

  Anaconda-Helena Shuttle: 26.10.48.

  Li made the shuttle gate an hour early, but ten minutes before the flight was supposed to leave she was still waiting for Station Security to search the throng of passengers in front of her.

  The chaos at the gate echoed the chaos on the planet’s surface. The union had wildcatted, locked down the mine even before all the rescuers were out. Within a day the strikers had set up an armed perimeter and the first militia units had arrived to reinforce AMC’s cadre of Pinkertons. Now, on the satellite images that dominated the local spins, the whole tailings-littered plain of the AMC coalfields had become a militarized no-man’s-land between two dug-in armies.

  On-station, AMC security was taking no chances. All flights to Shantytown and the coalfield were canceled. And until AMC loosened its de facto embargo, the only way in or out of Shantytown was the grueling dangerous jeep road over the mountains from Helena—a road that would become completely impassable as soon as winter’s dust storms set in.

  Legally AMC couldn’t keep anyone on-station against their will: planetary access was a holdover civil right from the Migration-era days of indentured labor on corporate orbital stations. Still, rights or no rights, AMC controlled the streets, the air, the station-to-surface shuttles. And Li had seen the guards turn back eight Helena-bound passengers in the space of fifteen minutes.

  She doubted anyone would be complaining to her office. And she was dead certain she couldn’t get her superiors to do anything about it if someone did complain. Daahl had been right. It was war, a war in which the UN would side with whichever combatant could get the Bose-Einstein production lines moving soonest. And unless the union pulled a trump card out of its sleeve, AMC looked like the likeliest candidate.

  * * *

  When Li finally stepped onto the shuttle twenty minutes after its scheduled departure time, she realized she’d never been in danger of missing it. A river of passengers filled the aisles and overwhelmed the crew, bickering over duplicate seating assignments and cramming luggage into every inch of open space. She checked her seat number, uttered a fervent prayer of thanks when she finally reached her row and found it empty, and settled down to wait.

  “Hey, boss,” a familiar voice said just as she was finally drifting into an uneasy doze. She looked up to find McCuen grinning down at her.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  “Friends in Helena. It’s my day off, remember?”

  “Oh.” She did remember now. “Yeah.”

  “You?”

  “Just going down for the day.” She hoped.

  “Want to join us?” he asked, folding his long frame into the seat next to her. “We can show you around.”

  “I have an appointment,” she said evasively, hoping she could get rid of McCuen before Korchow’s man showed up. This was one wrinkle she didn’t need.

  “Oh, by the way,” McCuen said. “I figured out where that storage chit in Sharifi’s journal came from.”

  Sharifi and the investigation had been so far from Li’s mind for the last thirty-six hours that it took her a moment to remember what McCuen was talking about. “Oh?” she asked. “Where?”

  “Remember how all her researchers got so conveniently shipped out on that survey mission? Well, one of them didn’t. He shipped out the day after Sharifi died. On the Medusa, bound for Freetown. And it looks like he checked a package through for her.”

  “Let me guess when the Medusa makes Freetown.”

  McCuen nodded. “Thirteen days, sixteen hours, and fourteen minutes from now. Or, to answer your real question, about twenty minutes after Gould’s ship is supposed to drop into orbit.”

  Li frowned, thinking. “Remember what Sharifi wrote on that page, McCuen? Next to Gould’s address? Life insurance. I looked at it and thought it had to be some kind of protective measure, something to save her life. But what if it wasn’t like that at all? What if it was really like an actual life insurance policy, something that would go into effect only if she died?”

  “Well, that’s when it did go into effect, right? I mean the student shipped out the day after Sharifi died. And, whatever she may have suspected, Gould didn’t actually leave for Freetown until your call gave her solid confirmation that Sharifi was dead.”

  If McCuen was right, then Nguyen had thirteen days to go fishing for Korchow with Li as bait. And Li had thirteen days to get that chop-shop receipt back from Korchow—while he still needed her enough to keep his promise. Because once Gould and the mysterious package reached Freetown all bets were off.

  She looked up at McCuen and found him frowning at her.

  “What?” she said.

  “Call logs.” He looked worried, hesitant. “Remember you told me to check for calls to Freetown?”

  How the hell had she forgotten about that?

  “Well, someone called a Freetown-based Consortium front company the night before Sharifi died. From Haas’s private terminal. With Haas’s password.”

  A chill spread through the pit of Li’s stomach at the thought that Nguyen had been right all along, that ALEF and the Consortium lay at the bottom of Sharifi’s betrayal, and not the Syndicates.

  McCuen’s eyes flicked to the aisle. Li followed his gaze and saw Bella standing a few rows up, waiting for a seat. Bella glanced at her and immediately glanced away, her lips set in a pale furious line. She passed by without speaking and found a seat four or five rows back from them.

  “Oops,” McCuen said, and the look he shot at Li was full of questions she didn’t want to answer.

  She tapped into the in-flight computer and watched the inevitable safety disclaimers scroll up her seat-back screen. “If you feel unable to sit in an exit row,” she told McCuen brightly, “please ask the crew for a change of seating assignment.”

  * * *

  “I have to piss,” Li said, as they stepped out of the boarding gate. Weak, but the ladies’ room was the one place in the airport she could think of that McCuen couldn’t follow her.

  “Sure you don’t want to hit the town with us?” he asked, hovering.

  “No. I need to check up on a few things. Talk to that nun again, maybe. You go on.”

  They were cleaning the bathroom when she stepped in, two skinny, undergrown girls swabbing listlessly at the floor with mops so filthy that Li figured the net exchange of disinfectant and bacteria had reversed itself years ago. As she skirted the wet floor the flash of a gemstone at the older girl’s neck caught her eye.

  It was a necklace. A stupid, tacky little charm that you could buy anywhere. But that wasn’t synthetic diamond glittering at the end of the chain. It was condensate. And she’d seen something like it before. Somewhere or someplace that she ought to remember if her hacked and kinked and decohering memory wasn’t playing tricks on her.

  “Pretty,” she said, pointing. “Where’d you get it?”

  The girl gig
gled and put a protective, embarrassed hand to her throat. “My boyfriend?” she half-said half-asked, giggling again.

  “What’s it made of?”

  “Crystal? It’s entangled?” Another giggle. “With his?”

  “Oh. Right,” Li said. “It’s pretty,” she added, since some comment along those lines was obviously required at this point. After all, someone must think the gimmicky little things looked good; she’d been seeing them everywhere lately.

  Then her oracle shook loose the right file, and she remembered who she’d last seen one on.

  Gillian Gould.

  Li turned back to stare at the pendant. The girl flinched and stepped backward under the intensity of her gaze. “Are you all right?” she asked, looking frightened.

  “Yeah,” Li said. “Yeah, I’m fine. Sorry.”

  She stepped into a stall and squatted to relieve herself, trying not to touch anything she didn’t have to. When she opened the door and stepped out again she ran head-on into Bella.

  “Christ!” she gasped, heart pounding. “You scared me. Why the hell didn’t you say something?”

  Bella didn’t answer. The cleaning girls had vanished, though the smell of standing water lingered.

  “What are you doing here, Bella?”

  The construct turned without acknowledging the question and walked toward the door. “Follow me,” she said, the words barely a murmur. “Not close. They’ll be watching.”

  Li trailed her down the main axis of the spaceport, through the baggage claim, out past the taxi lines, into the yawning cement-smelling darkness of the underground parking. She must have let her guard down, because though she knew that she was gradually losing satellite access she didn’t see the trap until it had already closed on her.

  “How ya doing?” said a voice high overhead, just as she heard the soft click of a safety being eased back.

  She was crossing a ramp with no cover in sight—and even if there had been cover it was far, far too late to take advantage of it. She looked up and saw McCuen’s friend Louie sitting one level above her, legs swinging lazily, sighting down the snub-nosed barrel of a rebuilt Sten.

  “Too bad about those Yankees,” Louie said.

  “It’s not over yet. McCuen know what you’re up to down here?”

  Louie grinned. “Let’s just say Brian doesn’t know me as well as he thinks he does.”

  A flick of his eyes drew Li’s own gaze to the shadows below the ramp, and she found herself staring down the black barrel of a Colt Peacemaker, close enough to see just how long it had been since the gun had had a proper cleaning.

  “Take it easy,” Ramirez said from the driver’s end of the Colt. “Both of you.”

  Li glanced toward Bella and saw her standing halfway down the garage’s central aisle, looking poleaxed.

  “Let Bella go, Ramirez. She’s got nothing to do with this.”

  “Sorry,” he said. “Not an option.” He gestured to Bella. “Go on. Over by Li. Now!”

  Bella scurried to Li’s side and stood there shivering while Ramirez frisked both of them with depressing thoroughness.

  “I’d better get that back,” Li said when he took the Beretta, but it was pure bravado and they both knew it. She’d seen enough of Ramirez underground to know he wouldn’t hesitate or lose his nerve. And even if he did, Louie was up on the exit ramp training the Sten on them.

  “I hate to burst your bubble,” Li told Ramirez, “but jail time for kidnapping isn’t going to look good on your college transcripts.”

  “I got my master’s degree two years ago,” Ramirez said. “And they have to catch me before they can put me in jail, don’t they? Turn around and put your hands behind your back.”

  Li did it, knowing it was a bad idea but unable to think of an alternative. Ramirez pulled a pair of virusteel cuffs out of his pocket and snapped them around her wrists, locking her arms behind her. As the cuffs snapped shut Li felt a slight sting at the nape of her neck and realized Ramirez had slapped a derm on her.

  “Forgive me,” she heard him say through the rising haze of a sedative that must have been specially designed to outsmart her internals, “but better safe than sorry. You see that van over there? The white one? The back’s open. Get in and shut the door behind you.”

  Li walked toward the van as slowly as she could, trying to catch Bella’s eye. Who’s following us? she wanted to ask. Where are they? Is help coming if we can wait it out a little longer?

  But no one came. No one was intended to come. And as Li stepped into the van she glanced up toward the garage ceiling and saw why: the van had been parked a little crooked in its space, tail end facing out into the aisle, just where the garage’s security cameras could catch prime-time quality spinfeed of the kidnapping.

  “Smile for the cameras,” Louie said, and the last thing she remembered before she passed out was his wide-open Irish laugh.

  * * *

  The next few hours were a dope-smeared blur. Sprinting across a rain-swept landing pad, half-held half-dragged by Ramirez. A brief struggle with Louie during which she refused, childishly, to let him scan her palm implant and he pulled a knife and told her he’d damn well cut it off her if she didn’t cooperate. A thwonking, shuddering hopper flight.

  When she woke they were still in the air and someone had strapped an oxygen mask over her face. She opened her eyes to a bird’s-eye view of the granite teeth of the Johannesburg Massif, the vast rolling red ocean of the algae steppes. She started, feeling as if she were falling forward into the abyss, then blinked and twisted her head around and made sense of her surroundings.

  She was on the deck of an old cropduster-rigged Sikorsky, an Earth-built antique that must have been broken down to its gearboxes and shipped out in the airless cargo hold of some long-abandoned generation ship. Like most of Compson’s presettlement tech, the Sikorsky had been rerigged to run on fossil fuel—and Li guessed from the grumbling shudder beneath her that it had been flying seeder runs for the terraforming authority ever since then.

  Li had been tucked between the pilot’s and copilot’s seats and was now staring straight through the smooth Plexiglas bubble of the windshield. When she looked up she saw Louie at the pilot’s controls and Ramirez on her other side, staring at a handheld navcomp and frowning.

  “Where are we?” she rasped, and Ramirez looked down, frowning.

  “I thought that derm was supposed to last longer,” he said.

  Louie glanced over and shrugged. “Tough motherfucker, isn’t she?”

  “I don’t have another one, though. And she wasn’t supposed to wake up until we got there.”

  “So what? She’d know the place in her sleep anyway.” He laughed a laugh that didn’t sound quite as friendly to Li as it once had. “They all do.”

  Ramirez scowled over her head at Louie, and she found herself wondering just who was in charge of this kidnapping.

  They landed twenty minutes later, setting down on a dusty stretch of hardpan that seemed implausibly level until Li realized it was an old shuttle runway.

  “We’re there,” Ramirez said unnecessarily. “We’re going to get out and walk to the buildings, okay? Just cooperate and it’s all going to be fine.”

  She could walk under her own steam now, and as she stumbled along trying to clear her hazed vision she heard Bella’s thin-soled shoes whispering across the ground just beside her. She knew this place, though she couldn’t yet put a name to it. She’d been here, not once but many, many times. She knew that the rutted jeep track beyond the landing strip would take her through the foothills to Shantytown if she had the strength to walk for a few hours in the unprocessed air of the foothills. She knew that the box canyon hidden behind that ridge harbored a steep-walled wash that she and her father had once used for target practice.

  But she didn’t quite understand where they were until she squinted at the long-empty airplane hangar looming over the lab building and read the words that sent an atavistic fight-or-flight reaction
flooding through every cell of her body:

  XENOGEN MINING TECHNOLOGIES RESEARCH DIVISION

  XenoGen Research Division: 26.10.48.

  The sprawling lab complex had stood empty for decades, and the rats, roaches, and kudzu vine had had their way with it. As their captors steered them into the back corridors they stumbled over abandoned equipment and office supplies, ducked under torn-out wiring, waded through snowdrifts of shredded insulation tile.

  The air was musty with rat dung and mildew. But under those smells—the smells humans and their pests had brought—Li could still catch a sharp desert scent that tugged at her childhood memories. It was a smell you only caught high in the foothills, under the dark wall of the mountains. The planet’s own smell. Compson’s World was taking back the birthlabs. Just as it would take back the whole planet if the thread of the UN’s far-flung trade lines ever snapped and the atmospheric processors and seeding operations ever shut down.

  They turned a corner just like every other corner, and Ramirez stopped so abruptly that Li ran into him. “In there,” he said, and pushed her into a small windowless room.

  As the door clanged shut, Li realized he had locked her into one of the lab’s old holding cells. It was a box. A box with soundproofed walls, a metal-sheathed door, with no furniture or windows or running water. A box built for a person. She heard footsteps echo beyond the door and the clang of another door slamming shut. Then silence.

  A scrap of memory floated into her mind: a ghost story about a group of kids who had come up to the labs and locked one of their friends into a holding cell as a prank. They had been called back down to Shantytown in some childishly implausible plot twist. When they returned the next morning, they couldn’t find the cell their friend was in. They ran up and down the windowless corridors, trying every rusty lock, throwing open the food slots of a thousand dark bolt-holes. The boy was dead when they finally found him. Killed, according to the internal logic of the tale, by the ghost of some bloodily murdered construct.