Spin State

by Chris Moriarty

  She could see the door into the back room, and she could guess what would be going on in there on a busy Saturday night. Cartwright had been a backroom regular, she remembered. So had her five-years-older-than-her third cousin. The one who taught her to shoot. The one with whom she had stolen her first, groping, furtive kisses up on the hill behind the atmospheric processors. What had happened to him? Killed, she thought. But she couldn’t remember if it was in the mine or back on Earth. How could she have forgotten his name? Well, all the backroom regulars would be at the big table tonight. Living in the past. Planning the next futile gesture. Hanging on every word of some hard-eyed young Republican just back from Belfast or Londonderry. She’d never known whether they were for real or not, those boys. She still didn’t know.

  A movement caught her eye. She glanced sideways and locked eyes with a broad-shouldered redhead leaning against the back wall watching her. He pushed off the wall and shouldered through the crowd toward her.

  “Sláinte,”he said when he reached her. Li noticed that another man had come up behind him. Neither of them were smiling.

  “Sláinte yourself,” she said.

  “Need some help, sweetheart?”

  “Not unless you can help me drink alone.”

  His eyes narrowed. “I suppose you just got lost and wandered in here by accident?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Like to make a donation then?” His tone suggested that refusal was not an option.

  “What for?”

  “Irish orphan relief.”

  “Oh.” So that was all it was. Li almost laughed. “How many new guns do the orphans need this winter?” she asked, pulling out her billfold.

  “Very funny. And we don’t take cash.”

  He pulled a portable scanner from his pocket and held it toward her. His companion slipped around behind her stool, cutting off any possibility of retreat.

  Li stared over the smaller man’s shoulder for a moment, straight into a bleak holo of jumpship-sized icebergs calving off the Armagh glacier. Then she shrugged and ran her palm across the scanner.

  The redhead looked at the readout, blinked, and looked back up at her. “What do you want here?”

  “I’m looking for Mirce Perkins. Someone said she’d be here.”

  “She’s here, all right.” He hailed the bartender, who arrived so fast he had to have been watching. “She’s looking for Mirce. A cop.”

  A slow tidal effect swept through the bar as he said the word. People shifted subtly in their seats, or even took new seats farther away from Li. A few customers slunk toward the exits. Li watched with amusement, but it still worried her; there were a lot of dark alleys between here and the safe house, and she’d been a fool to let herself be tagged as Corps personnel in a place where her internals were worth more money than the rest of the patrons would ever legally earn in their lives. Then Mirce Perkins stepped out of the back room, and Li forgot about the walk back to the flop and the precautions she should have taken and everything else except the woman walking toward her.

  She knew that face. And not just from distant childhood memories. It was the woman she had seen with Daahl. The woman who’d made him jump when she walked up to them at the pithead. The woman who, in fact, he’d never actually introduced to Li.

  Li searched the strong-boned face, the wire-muscled miner’s body for some point of commonality. Some sign that they had shared a home and a life with each other. Some hint that this was the woman who had masterminded the swindle that sprang Li, against all odds, from the trap of Compson’s World. She saw none of those things. Just a hard-eyed stranger.

  “Mrs. Perkins?”

  She lit a cigarette, cupping her hand over the flame so that Li could see the missing joint on the first finger—and the new ring on the third finger. “It’s not Perkins,” she said. “I remarried.”

  Li’s heart skipped treacherously as if it had slipped on a patch of black ice and almost gone down hard. She’d never thought about her mother’s remarrying. Certainly never imagined her having other children. Somehow, in some part of Li’s mind, it all stopped when she left. Her present went on, but her past stayed put, sealed in amber, always there for her if she really needed it. She should have known better.

  “Aren’t you going to introduce yourself?” Mirce asked coolly.

  “Major Catherine Li, UNSC.”

  “Can I see some ID then?”

  Li fished in her pocket and handed over her fiche. Mirce took it in both hands and stared intently at it, glancing back and forth between Li’s face and the ID holo several times. Li swallowed. “Can we go somewhere and—”

  Mirce shook her head, a barely visible gesture, so brief that Li could have imagined it. Her pale eyes slid toward the barkeep wiping down glasses a few feet away.

  Li hesitated, trying to read the undercurrents of this not-quite-conversation. Remarried, she had said. That meant a new husband. Were there new children too? Was that girl she’d seen in the door one of them? Did they even know about Li? Was that what Mirce was trying to tell her? That she had been doing her own share of burying and forgetting over the last fifteen years? Li swallowed. “I… uh. I came because I had a message for you.”

  “From?”

  “A friend.” She gathered steam, knowing what she wanted to say. “Caitlyn.”

  “Oh.” The corners of Mirce’s mouth twitched upwards ever so slightly. “I see.”

  “Um… she can’t make it back on this trip, maybe not for a while, but she wanted you to know that she’s fine. There was more, but I… forgot. You forget a lot with the jumps. Not just small things.”

  Mirce slid her eyes toward the barkeep again, but he’d been called away by a customer. “That’s what the doctors said would happen.”

  “It happened.”

  Mirce gave a little what are you going to do about it shrug. It was the gesture of a hardheaded woman who hadn’t learned anything the easy way, and suddenly Li knew—absolutely knew—that she remembered her.

  “I’m sorry,” Li said.

  “Sorry?” The word sounded stilted and unnatural on Mirce’s tongue, and her eyes glittered with some hotly felt emotion Li couldn’t put a name to. “Sorry for what? It’s what we wanted, what we worked for. Just go home, or wherever it is you’re spending the night. And watch your back. Your kind isn’t safe here.”

  After Mirce walked away, Li just sat there, clinging to her barstool with numb fingers, waiting for warmth and feeling to come back into her body, for the white noise around her to start making sense again. She went back over their conversation, word for word, looking for clues, grasping at brittle unreliable straws of memory. She thought about the look that had crossed Mirce’s face just at the end. Hot, fierce, almost angry. She knew that look. It was triumph.

  It was raining hard by the time she left. Night rain, laced with sulfur from the tailings piles and the red dog slides. She scanned the shadows on either side of the street, thinking about getting rolled for her internals, about the late-night barracks tales of soldiers who left some colonial port bar with a pretty girl and woke up the next morning in a backstreet clinic’s defleshing tanks. But the shadows looked empty, for the moment. She turned up her collar and started toward the safe house.

  She looked into the bright front window of the Molly as she passed by, but there was no sign Mirce had ever been there.

  * * *

  Korchow was livid. “What exactly did you think you were doing out there?” he asked in a voice that would have chilled any sensible person to the bone.

  “None of your business,” Li said, and pushed past him.

  “I think it is.” He followed her into the back corridor. “It’s my business when you endanger this mission. It’s my business when you disappear to do who knows what, and even Cohen can’t find you. And it’s most certainly my business when you go to a political bar and meet with a known IRA operative and miner’s union rep.”

  Li turned on him. “You had me tagged
?”

  “Naturally. And now that that’s clear, why don’t you tell me exactly what you told Perkins. What? Not feeling talkative? You found plenty to talk to her about back in the bar.”

  “Fuck off, Korchow.”

  “I’ll find out whether you tell me or not,” he said, and she saw his eyes flick toward her blinking status light.

  “I don’t think so,” she said, and shouldered past him.

  He grabbed her arm. Li whirled around, locked her left hand on to his throat, slammed him into the wall hard enough to rattle the panel bolts, and held him there while he gasped for breath.

  “I’ll do your job for you,” she said to his white, drawn face. “But you don’t own me. Don’t even start to think that.”

  She let him drop and turned down the hall toward the open doorway of her room. “We’re moving up the start date,” Korchow called after her. “We’re going tomorrow.”

  But Li was no longer listening. She was staring into her room with a sinking sense of déjà vu—at Bella sitting on the bed waiting for her.

  “I need to talk to you,” Bella said, holding out a cube Li recognized as a UNSC air-traffic recorder. “I need to read this.”

  “Where did you get it?”

  “From Ramirez.”

  “What, he just gave it to you out of the goodness of his heart?”

  Bella looked away.

  “Oh, Christ,” Li said. “Him too?”

  “What do you care?”

  Li frowned, but she took the datacube from Bella and slotted it into her portable.

  It took her a moment to understand what she was looking at. Then she saw it. Automated flight logs for the station-to-surface shuttles. The same ones she and McCuen had both looked at fifty times over. But when she compared them to the duplicates in her hard memory, she saw that the digital signature of this file was different. Someone had altered the station logs. They’d done a good job of it, but they hadn’t bothered to change the off-grid planetary-transport control recorders. They’d probably figured no one would care enough to check them.

  But Bella had cared enough. Bella had cared more than anyone else on the planet, Li included.

  Li found the key entry in the early predawn hours of the twenty-third. A single shuttle trip. A shuttle that came back up empty in time to carry down a twenty-four-man crew at the normal start of first shift. A shuttle that left Hannah Sharifi on the surface during the heart of the graveyard shift when the landing platforms and headframe offices would have been at their emptiest. Li accessed the passenger information, and there they were, Sharifi’s companions on her last trip into the mine. Jan Voyt and Bella. And no one else.

  Voyt, Bella, and Sharifi had gone down together. And only Bella had come back.

  “The file must have been tampered with,” Bella said when Li showed it to her.

  “I don’t think so. Look at the Fuhrman count.”

  “It’s altered. Any computer can be outsmarted.”

  “Look at the file yourself, if you want. I think it’s clean.”

  Bella opened her mouth as if to say something, then sat down heavily on the bed. Li closed the datacube and carefully erased the tracks she had laid while she opened and read it. No reason for Korchow to know about it. Or anyone else for that matter.

  “Are you all right?” she asked when she was finished, but Bella gave no sign of hearing. When Li touched her shoulder, she flinched as if she’d been burned. “Would knowing who did it really change anything?” Li asked.

  The brilliant eyes stared up at her, and there was that black, bottomless emptiness that Li had seen in them from the beginning. She had a sudden vision of Bella lying across Haas’s desk, of the blank, cold, catatonic stare of her eyes under the loop shunt.

  “Knowing who did it would change everything,” Bella said finally. She stood up and smoothed her dress over her hips. Something glittered at her neck with the movement. A pendant. A pendant made of a single sliver of Bose-Einstein condensate.

  Li stared, everything else forgotten. “Where did you get that?” she asked.

  Bella moved her hand to cover the pendant in the same half-embarrassed, half-protective gesture Li had seen the cleaning girl in the Helena airport use. Then she said what Li had known beyond a doubt she would say: “Hannah gave it to me.”

  “When?” Li said. “When did Hannah give it to you?”

  “The night before she died,” Bella answered, her voice no more than a whisper.

  “Before or after she sent the message from Haas’s quarters?”

  “She didn’t send—” Bella stopped, looked at Li for a long moment, then sighed. “After she sent it.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me before, Bella?”

  “Because she asked me not to. Because it was a secret. Hannah’s secret.”

  “That secret may have killed her.”

  Bella jerked her head back as if Li had slapped her. “No,” she said. “No.”

  “Who was the message to, Bella? Who did she talk to in Freetown? What did she tell them?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t even listen. I didn’t want to know.”

  “Because if you’d known, Haas would have found out?”

  “Haas, Korchow. What does it matter who? I couldn’t risk knowing.”

  Li laughed softly and rubbed at her sore shoulder.

  “You don’t understand,” Bella said, her voice harsh, urgent. “The contract, all that… it was secondary. She asked me to help her. She came to me. She said she needed me, that I was the only one she could trust. That it was the most important thing she would ever do, the most important thing either of us would ever do, but that it had to be our secret. I did it for her.”

  A gust of wind buffeted the flophouse, and the big sheet of viruflex that sealed the window snapped and billowed like a ship’s sail. Bella jumped, trembling. “Why don’t you believe me?” she whispered.

  “I do believe you,” Li said. “I do. I just… I don’t know what it means.”

  Li had put a hand on Bella’s shoulder while they talked, and now Bella turned into her arms and buried her head in the hollow of her neck. Li started to pull away, then realized the other woman was crying. She put her arms around her, reluctantly, and found herself patting Bella’s fine-boned shoulder.

  “I’m sorry,” Bella said, “it’s just…”

  “No, I’m sorry,” Li said. “It’s none of my business what you do. You didn’t promise me anything.”

  “I would, though.” Bella looked up at her. The violet eyes had cleared, though there were still tears hanging on her eyelashes. Bella reached a pale finger up and touched Li’s mouth, just where Cohen had touched her. “What I said about… you and Hannah. I was just angry.”

  Oh, Christ, Li thought. It’s time to leave. Now. So why did she feel like her feet were bolted to the floor?

  Someone coughed. Li jumped away from Bella like a dog caught with its nose in the trash can. “Arkady,” she said.

  “No,” Cohen said from the doorway. “It’s me.”

  “I—”

  “I have to go,” Bella said. “Korchow will want me.”

  Cohen turned and watched Bella down the hall until they both heard the slap of the blanket against the airlock and the shuffle of her soft-soled shoes moving away across the dome.

  Li started to speak, but he put a hand up. “You don’t have to explain yourself to me.” He lounged against the doorframe in a casual posture that Li suspected was a put-on, and when he spoke, it was in that neutral, inflectionless voice that she’d long ago learned meant storms ahead. “Watch out, Catherine.”

  “Watch out for what?” Li asked. But the answer was obvious; Bella’s perfume still hung in the air between them.

  “She’s out for revenge. And revenge is a tricky kind of idea. It makes people shortchange the future. It makes them take the kind of risks that can drag everyone down.”

  “Now you’re the expert in human motivation?”

  Cohen shru
gged. “Fine,” he said, as coolly as if they were discussing the weather. “Do what you want. But I think you know she’s using you.”

  “Then she has plenty of company, doesn’t she?”

  Cohen just sighed and inspected Arkady’s fingernails. When had he learned to make her feel so damn guilty by standing there doing nothing?

  “I figured out what Sharifi was up to,” Li said. “Now that it’s too late to do anything about it. She was the one who sent the message from Haas’s quarters. Bella gave her his password. Nguyen’s ‘corrupted’ file was actually encrypted—encrypted so that only Gould could decode it. They used a set of those stupid charm necklaces as their entanglement source. Of all goddamn things. A piece of costume jewelry!”

  She felt a curious tickling sensation that she realized was Cohen accessing her files, seeing Gould’s cheap necklace, the cleaning girl in the airport bathroom, Bella’s “gift” from Sharifi.

  “All right,” he said, visibly thinking about it. “So she found a ready-made source of entanglement. Maybe she and Gould even set the necklace thing up as a joke, long before she knew she’d actually need it. They used the necklaces as a one-time pad. Unbreakable encryption that Sharifi didn’t have to go through TechComm or any of her corporate backers to get. Now no one can read Sharifi’s transmission unless they have Gould’s pendant, which is conveniently stuck in slow time with her until—”

  “Until tomorrow,” Li interrupted.

  They stared at each other.

  “It’s like Hannah,” Cohen said finally. “A joke, practically, hiding what she knew we’d all be looking for in a cheap trinket. But where does it leave us?”

  “That message was Sharifi’s insurance policy, for one thing. Along with whatever she put in that storage compartment on the Medusa.”

  “Well, her policy didn’t work, did it?” Cohen said, and then flinched at the harshness of his words. “Poor Hannah. What a damn mess.”

  “I don’t get it,” he continued after a moment. “Sharifi gets her results. Then she encrypts them and sends unreadable versions to Nguyen, Korchow, Freetown. Then she erases every trace of her work off the AMC system. Then she—at least we have to assume it was her—tells Gould to go to Freetown. And gives Bella her used-up crystal after making her promise not to tell anyone about the encrypted message. Why? Why go to such absurd lengths to protect information and then send it to so many people? And if she wanted to spread the dataset over all of UN and Syndicate space, then why use the crystals? Why encrypt it so that only Gould’s crystal could make the dataset readable?”