Spin 01 - Spin State (32 page)

They grappled, each of them trying for a grip, for purchase. He had caught her in an awkward position, and she felt him improving his hold, getting a wrestler’s lock on her. She planted a leg, grunting with the effort, leaned into him with her good shoulder, and threw him.

The flash of anger in his eyes was unmistakable, but he recovered his balance and his attitude quickly. “Nice trick,” he said. “Guess you didn’t just sleep your way to the top.”

“Wouldn’t you like to know,” Li answered, resisting the urge to stamp on his fingers.

McCuen and the others had drifted over, drawn by the thud of Kintz’s body hitting the mat. “If you think this is worth watching, you’ve got a lot to learn,” Li told them, and they drifted away again, looking embarrassed.

Kintz was pushing her now. He’d been doing his own weighing and balancing during the meet-and-greet sparring; now he was going after her bad arm with the fierce instincts of a street fighter. He was getting winded, though. She heard the faint whistle of constricting air passages every time he sucked breath. That was something, she thought, and ducked in under his guard, chancing a risky move.

Five years ago it would have worked. But she wasn’t as fast as she’d been five years ago. He caught her hip with a blow that sent her staggering, and in that fraction of a second’s hesitation, he had her. He went after her bad arm, and she struggled to keep him from getting a grip on it. When things sorted out, he had her in a neck lock.

When he spoke, his voice was so twisted by the effort of holding the lock on her that she didn’t at first register the sounds as words. Then she understood them and felt a cold rush of adrenaline course through her.

“I could snap your neck right now,” he said. “Who’d ever think it was anything but an accident? I could tell them you wanted to fight with safeties off, and you just shit ran out of luck.”

She tried to slip her hands under his arm and get the pressure off her neck, but he jerked at her hard enough to put the thought out of her mind.

“You think you’re special, don’t you?” he whispered. “Think you can just walk in and start poking sticks at people? Think we’ll all just jump to it? Right, Major? Whatever you say, Major?”

Li bent her knees, felt out Kintz’s balance, took a chance, and managed to throw him again. “Piss off, Kintz. You and Haas. You are his errand boy, aren’t you?”

Kintz wiped his mouth, and his hand came away red. “You don’t have a fucking clue, do you?” he said. Then he was on his feet, and they were back at it.

She never figured out how he got by her the next time, but suddenly he had her. His right arm snaked out and caught her under the jaw. His left twisted her bad arm behind her back so tightly she felt ceramsteel grate and creak against cartilage. He lifted her onto her toes, using his height to deny her leverage. She felt his ribs pressing into her back, smelled sweat and cheap aftershave. She gathered herself, braced her feet, textbook fashion, and tried to throw him.

Kintz laughed. “That the best you can do, Major?” He was as solid as rock behind her. Or, more accurately, as solid as ceramsteel.

Adrenaline had kicked her internals on a few times already during the fight, and she had shut them off just as quickly. Now she turned them on and left them on. She twisted and strained, pushing protesting tendons and ligaments within a millimeter of breaking. Nothing budged. He had a solid grip on her, and even with her internals pushed as far as she could risk pushing them, he was just plain stronger than she was.

“The Corps isn’t juicing you guys like it used to,” Kintz said. “Or maybe you’re just behind the curve.” He twisted her arm until her knees buckled and her vision shut down to a red-hazed tunnel.

“I know what you are,” he whispered, his breath hot in her ear. “I can buy half-bred cunts like you in every whorehouse in Helena. This isn’t Gilead. You don’t have an army to back you up here. And I’ll show you what that means if you don’t mind your nasty little digger business.”

Her first urge was to fight, driven by the massive dose of adrenaline her internals were shooting through her system. Then she thought it through and almost laughed at the ridiculous childishness of the situation. What the hell did she care? What point was there in damaging herself in order to not have Kintz be able to say he’d beaten her on the practice mat? She forced herself to go limp in his arms, waiting.

It worked, after a fashion.

“Stupid slut,” Kintz muttered under his breath. He let go of her arm, but as he did he slipped his foot in front of hers, almost sending her sprawling. Her internals kept her on her feet, but by the time she turned to face him he’d already crossed his arms and pasted his usual grin back onto his face.

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 transportgrade 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 she 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.

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?”