Spin 01 - Spin State (37 page)

“Haas told me. I still remember how he looked when he did it. Like he was proud of it. Like he was daring me to say something. The next day he moved my things here, and it’s been … what you see now, ever since.”

Bella had given up even pretending to eat. Li watched her twist her napkin between white-knuckled fingers and thought about Haas, and about the blank impersonalness of Sharifi’s quarters and the single unexplained initial Sharifi had written in her datebook the week she died.

Maybe it was time to risk a shot in the dark.

“Did you tell Sharifi this story when she came to dinner?” she asked. “What?”

“When she had dinner with you. The night before she died. Was Haas here? Or was he conveniently offstation that night too?”

Bella stared, her mouth open, her face white. “Don’t,” she whispered. “Please don’t.” “You were lovers, weren’t you?”

“I never said—”

“You never had to. It’s all over your face every time you talk about her.”

Bella scrubbed at her mouth with her napkin. The skin of her face looked as pale as the bleached linen. “You can’t tell anyone,” she said. “Haas would … I don’t know what he’d do.” Her hand twitched toward the faint remnant of the bruise on her cheek, but she forced it down into her lap again.

“Doesn’t he know already? Isn’t that what you’re trying to tell me?”

“No.” Bella stood up so quickly she jostled the table and set the glassware ringing. “No. Not possible.” She moved to the side window and leaned her face against the viewport. Li followed.

It was second night, and the Companion cast its faint light into the room, etching the angles of Bella’s face in a red so dark it was almost black. “What can I do?” she whispered.

“Can’t you just go home, tell them you can’t finish it out?” She shook her head violently.

“Well, then—”

“Forget it. You can’t help. No one can help.”

Bella turned. She was so close now, the light behind her, the beautiful face lost in shadow. Li touched her cheek, and the feverish heat of the pale skin shocked her.

Bella leaned into her, sighing, and Li shuddered at the soft flutter of breath against her skin. Bella’s lips played along her neck, around the angle of her jaw, over her earlobe, and Li turned her head for the kiss she wanted so badly.

But in the last breath before their lips touched, she looked into Bella’s wide-open eyes—and saw something that stopped her cold. Not fear. Not reluctance. But … something. Something as deliberate and calculated as the blue-on-black MotaiSyndicate logo set into the outer perimeter of the violet irises.

Li stepped back, hands dropping to her sides. The hot desire that had taken hold of her a moment ago was gone, replaced by a clammy, after-fever chill. “Who killed Sharifi, Bella?”

Bella turned back toward the window, and it seemed to Li that the hand she put on the sill was trembling. “I don’t know,” she said finally. “I told you, I don’t remember.”

“You remember something,” Li said. “Or you suspect. Why else would you have told me about Cory? Why else tell me the bodies were in the glory hole when they weren’t? Because they weren’t, were they? And you must have known they weren’t. You’re laying a trail for me. The only thing I can’t figure out is if you’re leading me to Haas or away from him.”

“I’m not leading you anywhere! I don’t know. I told you that!”

“And I don’t believe it. Lovers talk. Sharifi must have told you things. That she found something. Some new piece of technology. Some new information.” Li paused, then went on. “Something Korchow wanted you to get from her.”

“It wasn’t like that,” Bella said stubbornly.

“Then how was it?”

Bella moved impatiently. “Is that all you came for? To ask questions?” “What did you expect?” Li asked.

She waited, but Bella didn’t turn around, and only the slight tremor in her shoulders told Li she was crying again.

“Hannah didn’t go to Korchow about the crystals,” Bella said finally. “And there was nothing illegal about it. She was going to buy my contract, with her own money.”

Li stood speechless for a moment, unable to muster a response. “She couldn’t have bought your contract, Bella. She couldn’t have afforded it.”

“She was rich,” Bella insisted, with the blind certainty of someone who didn’t understand what the word meant, what money meant.

“Not that rich.”

“You’re wrong. She was going to. She promised.”

“So what went wrong, Bella? What happened to the happy ending?”

“She changed,” Bella said after a long silence. “She found something that made her happier than I could.”

* * *

Halfway back to her quarters Li realized she wasn’t even close to sleep and turned aside to catch the next surface-bound shuttle.

The pithead guards knew her by now; they searched her perfunctorily, almost apologetically. Twenty minutes later, just as the graveyard shift was turning, she climbed down the ladder into the glory hole.

The crystals were in full voice, overloading her internals, wreaking havoc on her scan systems. By the time she set her foot on the bottom rung of the ladder her infrared and quantum scans had cut out completely. She could have lit her lantern, but she didn’t want to. There was something terrible about the smallness of a light in this ancient airless darkness. She sat in the dark with her back against the ladder and retraced the twisting course of the investigation.

She saw no straight sight lines, no clear cause and effect, nothing but blind corners and dead drops. Had she accomplished anything at all here? Or was she just stuck in rewind, projecting her own ghosts onto Sharifi, dredging the sterile runoff of a dead girl’s pathetic memories?

Ask yourself who the players are
, Cohen had said,
and what they want.
Well, what
did
they want?

Daahl and Ramirez wanted what the union always wanted. To wrest control of the mines away from the UN defense contractors, to build their workers’ paradise—a paradise that Li didn’t want any part of but that would probably be no worse than anyone else’s misguided little piece of heaven on earth.

Cartwright’s goals were tangential to the union’s, as Korchow would say. But he’d stand with the union —if only because the union was most likely to protect his precious crystals. If Daahl and Cartwright had to take Li down to get what they wanted, they would. Otherwise, they’d stay clear of her, if only because of their loyalty to the family she barely remembered.

Haas wanted to keep the mine running. And, when he thought he could get away with it, he’d wanted to keep Li out of the glory hole. Why? To avoid drawing the miners’ attention to it? No; they already knew, thanks to Cartwright and the wagging tongues of the miners Sharifi had paid union scale to dig it out for her. Was it simply the fierce multiplanetary’s drive to prevent a slowdown and protect profits? Or was it something more personal? Hiding his embezzling? Avenging himself for Bella’s betrayal?

Nguyen wanted Sharifi’s dataset. And she wanted to make sure no one else got it. That she knew things she wasn’t telling Li was a given, part of the price of working for her, of trusting her. But what were those things? Did she know what Sharifi had found in the mine? Who she had talked to about it? Did she know about Korchow? Was it just paranoia for Li to think she was following a track Nguyen had foreseen, even laid down for her?

And what about Korchow? He wanted the same information Nguyen wanted. He wanted it desperately enough to take the chance of approaching Li, of risking the sting he must know was a real possibility. And he had suggested—more than suggested—that Sharifi had already betrayed some of her secrets to him.

Bella was the wild card, of course. Did she know about Korchow? Was she working for him? What was there really between her and Haas? What had Voyt done to make her hate him so much? And what was the cold calculation Li had seen in her eyes? Grief over Sharifi, or something deeper, older, darker?

Something moved in the darkness. Li’s eyes snapped open. Nothing.

Then she heard the faint but unmistakable sound of someone breathing. She slid a hand into her coverall and eased the Beretta out of its holster. She flicked the safety off, inching the lever back with agonizing slowness in order to muffle the dry little click of the catch snapping open.

“You’re not going to shoot me, Katie,” said a familiar voice.

A match flared. Li smelled sulfur, saw a monstrous shadow loom across the vault high above her. The shadow bent, shifted. A rusty pin squeaked, and a Davy lamp flared into life. “Hello,” Cartwright said from where he sat cross-legged on the gleaming floor. “So you heard them too, did you?”

“Heard who?” Li asked breathlessly.

“The saints, Katie. Her children.” He smiled. “Rejoice, for we know the hour and the day of Her Coming. It’s beginning.”

“Save the sermons for your sheep, Cartwright. It has nothing to do with me.”

Something drew her eyes into the inky shadows behind the priest. Some movement, so faint that she felt rather than saw it. But when the voice spoke out of the darkness she felt so little surprise that she realized she’d known Daahl would be here.

“If it has nothing to do with you,” he asked, “then why are you down here?” “Just doing my job, that’s all.”

“There are a lot of people who are wondering just what that job is. A lot of people who’d like to know which side you’re on.”

She didn’t answer.

Cartwright began scratching at a patch of dry skin on his wrist, and something about the movement—the sound of fingernails on flesh, the dead skin flaking off and glittering in the lamplight—made her feel ill.
He’s crazy
, she thought.
He always was crazy
.

“Well, Katie,” Daahl asked, “don’t you have any answer at all for me?” Li rubbed a clammy hand across her face.

“I’m going to show you something,” Daahl said. “I may regret showing it to you. A lot of people have told me I will, in fact. But I think you have a right to see it. I think you have a right to know what’s on the table here.”

Li saw the UNSC seal on the letter before he’d finished handing it to her. “This is a classified internal memo,” she said. “Where the hell are you getting this stuff?”

“Just read it.”

It took several reads for the sense of the thing to come through to her—and even then she wasn’t sure what the cautious, bureaucratically vague words really meant. Someone else had been sure though. Some other reader had been there before her, had scored through the critical lines with a strong confident hand:

In conclusion, the presence of live Bose-Einstein strata on Compson’s World is both an internal and external security threat. It is vital, both in relation to Syndicate industrial espionage activities and for reasons of political stability (vis-à-vis the IWW and other outside agitators) to transfer the production of transport and communications-grade condensate off the planet and into a controlled laboratory setting. This goal presents a compelling reason, in and of itself, for supporting Dr. Sharifi’s research.

“You understand what that means, don’t you?” Daahl asked. “They’re saying that the very presence of live crystal on-planet is a security risk. That as soon as they can manufacture it off-planet they’ll destroy the deposits that are left in the ground here.”

“This memo doesn’t say anything like that, Daahl.”

“Doesn’t it? Then what does that mean, ‘the presence of live strata is a security risk’?”

“It means nothing. Some paper pusher producing overblown verbiage for a departmental meeting. And anyway, you have no guarantee this thing is genuine.”

“My source was too good for it to be anything else.”

“If you want me to take that claim seriously, you’d better tell me who this ‘source’ was and let me make up my own mind.”

“You know, Katie. Think about it.”

Li stared at the sooty fiche, her mind spinning through the possibilities. Station security. Mine personnel. TechComm itself. But almost by definition no one cleared to see this kind of document could have come from a place like Compson’s World, let alone cared enough about it to risk their job and freedom for it.

“Who?” she asked, looking up to see Cartwright and Daahl both watching her. “Who was it?”

Daahl smiled. He took the memo back, pulling it from her fingers so gently that she hardly realized she’d let go of it, and folded it carefully away into his shirt pocket.

“Hannah,” he said. “Hannah Sharifi.”

Li woke to the sound of people
running down the corridor outside, banging on its alloy walls hard enough to set them echoing: the universal spacer’s manual alarm system.

She rolled out of bed just as the station lit up her livewall and started talking to her. Her first thought was that there’d been a blowout, but as the calm automated voice droned on she realized it was calling all rescue and medical personnel to the shuttle bays. Whoever was in trouble, they were on the planet below.

She reached over to her cabin’s one chair and started pulling on the uniform she’d flung over it a few short hours ago. She was just lacing her boots up when the station put up a planet-side call for her.

Sharpe.

“You have medical training, don’t you?” he asked abruptly.

He was in his office at the hospital, and he looked as if he’d been hauled out of bed by the same crisis that had the stationers running for the shuttle bays. A mournful keening rose and fell on his end of the line like the Doppler-distorted navigational beacon of a drive ship pushing lightspeed.

“Just the usual,” she said. “CPR. Trauma response. My oracle has a combat med praxis it can load. What’s happened?”

“The Anaconda blew again.”

Suddenly Li recognized the wail coming over the line behind Sharpe’s voice for what it was: the pit whistle.

“How bad?” she asked.

“Pit 3’s gone. And 4’s burning. The above-ground foreman told me he’s got four hundred and twenty miners on the logs, all but seventy still underground. The closest doctor besides me is in Helena, three hours from here. More, if the weather doesn’t clear. If you can open a burn wrap and find a vein, I need you.”