Spin 01 - Spin State (8 page)

“Gentlemen,” she said quietly.

They both snapped to attention. Li’s oracle pulled up their dossiers as she read their name tags. Lieutenant Brian Patrick McCuen and Captain Karl Kintz. Both men were technically under her command, but they were commissioned in Compson’s planetary militia, not the Peacekeepers. In Li’s experience that meant they could be anything from perfectly decent local cops to street thugs in uniform. It also meant that no matter how much she threw her weight around, she was never going to command their undivided loyalty; in the back of their minds they’d always know that she’d leave sooner or later, and they’d still have to answer to the company.

They were big men, both of them. Li found herself measuring them instinctively, adding up reach, weight, muscle tone, wondering if they were wired.
Hell of a way to think about your own junior officers
, she told herself.

“Ma’am,” said McCuen. He was blond and lanky, a freckle-faced kid whose uniform looked freshly pressed even at this impossible hour of the morning. “We were cleaning out Voyt’s, um, your desk. We didn’t expect you so soon.”

“Obviously,” Li said.

McCuen fidgeted with the stack of fiche in his hands; he looked embarrassed about the situation and too young to hide his embarrassment.

Kintz, on the other hand, just stood there smirking at her like he didn’t give a shit what she thought. “Someone better tell Haas she’s here,” he said, and brushed past Li into the hall without even excusing himself.

Li let him go; no percentage in starting a fight until she was sure she could win it.

“I’m really, really sorry about this,” McCuen said. “We should have gotten the office cleaned up, met you at Customs. We’ve been running around like maniacs since the fire, is the problem. Rescue, body ID, cleanup. We’re really shorthanded.”

She looked at the boy’s face, saw the telltale puffiness around his eyes that said he’d been through not one but several sleepless nights in the last few station cycles. “Well,” she said mildly, “at least you had time to make sure my bags got here.”

He coughed at that, and Li watched a red flush spread over his fair skin. “That was on Haas’s orders,” he said after glancing up and down through the gridplating to make sure no one was in the adjoining rooms. “I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

“Haas. He’s the station exec?”

McCuen nodded.

“That how the militia works here, Brian? You pulling down a corporate paycheck on the side?” “No! Look at my file. I just want out of here and into the War College.”

So. McCuen wanted a ticket into the freshman class at Alba. That made all kinds of sense on a periphery planet like Compson’s. Bose-Einstein transport fueled an interstellar economy in which data, commercial goods, and a few properly wired humans could cross interstellar distances almost instantaneously. But uplinks, VR rigs, and spinstream access time still cost so much that most colonials spent their entire lives planetbound, stuck in the ebbs and deadwaters of the interstellar economy. The military was the best way out for ambitious colonials—sometimes the only way out. It was certainly the way she had taken.

Li sent her oracle on a fishing trip through McCuen’s files, and it came back with a stream of data, from his primary-school grades to records from a government school in Helena to a string of applications to Alba, all denied.

“You must want it bad,” she said. “You applied three times.” McCuen started. “That doesn’t show up in my file. How—?” “Voyt wouldn’t recommend you,” she said, twisting the knife a little. “Why not?”

His flush deepened. Li looked into his face and saw distress, embarrassment, earnest hopefulness. “Never mind. You do a good honest job while I’m here and you’ll get to Alba.”

McCuen shook his head angrily. “You don’t need to cut deals with me to get me to do my job.”

“I’m not cutting deals,” Li said. “It’s your choice. Do a bad job, I’ll show you the door. Do a good job, I’ll make sure the right people know it. Got a problem with that?”

“Of course not.” He started to say something else, but before Li could hear it, quick steps rattled on the hall gridplate.

The footsteps stopped and Kintz stuck his head through the doorway. “Haas wants to see her. Now.”

* * *

Haas’s desk floated on stars.

It was live-cut from a single two-meter-long Bose-Einstein condensate. Sub-–communications grade, more of a curiosity than anything else, but still it must be priceless. Its polished face revealed the schistlike structure of the bed that had calved it. Its diamond facets mirrored the stars beyond the transparent ceramic compound floor panel so that the desk seemed to hang above empty space in a pool of reflected starlight.

Haas was a big man, bullish around the neck and shoulders, with an aura of resolutely clamped-down violence. He looked like a man who enjoyed losing his temper, but had learned to ration out that particular pleasure with iron self-discipline. And he looked nothing like the kind of man Li would have expected to find running AMC’s crown jewel mine.

He had the accessories down pat. His suit hung well on his big frame even in station gravity. The strongjawed, aggressively norm-conforming face must have cost a bundle in gene therapy and cosmetic surgery. But his body showed signs of hard living, and his handshake, when he rose behind his desk to greet Li, was the crushing, callused grip of a man who had done rough labor in heavy gravity.

Li glanced at his hand as she shook it and saw a functional-looking watch strapped around his powerful wrist. Was he completely unwired? Allergic to ceramsteel? Religious objections? Either way, it took steel-plated ambition and an unbreakable work ethic to make it into corporate management without being wired for direct streamspace access.

Haas gestured to an angular, expensive-looking chair. Li sat, the ripstop of her uniform pants squeaking against cowhide. She tried to tell herself it was just tank leather, as artificial as everything else in the room, Haas included. Still, even the idea of making a chair out of a mammal was intimidatingly decadent.

“I’m in a hurry,” Haas said as soon as she was seated. “Let’s get this out of the way fast.”

“Fine,” Li answered. “Like to clear something up first, though. Want to tell me why you had my bags searched?”

He shrugged, completely unembarrassed. “Standard procedure. You’re a quarter genetic. Your transfer papers say so. Nothing personal, Major. It’s the rules.”

“UN rules or company rules?”

“My rules.”

“You made an exception for Sharifi, I assume?”

“No. And when she complained about it, I told her the same fucking thing I’m telling you.”

Li couldn’t help smiling at that. “Any other rules I should bear in mind?” she asked. “Or do you make them up as you go along?”

“Too bad about Voyt,” Haas said, shifting gears abruptly enough to leave Li feeling vaguely disoriented. “He was a good security officer. He understood that some things are UN business and some things are company business. And that we’re all here for one reason: to keep the crystal flowing.” He rocked back in his chair and its springs creaked under his weight. “Some of the security officers I’ve worked with haven’t understood that. Things haven’t turned out well for them.”

“Things didn’t turn out so well for Voyt either,” Li observed.

“What do you want?” Haas said, putting his feet up on the gleaming desk. “Promises?”

Haas’s account of the fire was brief and to the point. The trouble had started while Sharifi was underground running one of her closely guarded live field experiments. The station monitors had logged a power surge in the field AI that controlled AMC’s orbital Bose-Einstein array, and the power surge had been followed almost immediately by a flash fire in the Anaconda’s newly opened Trinidad seam. Haas dispatched a rescue team to douse the pit fire, pulled everyone out of the Trinidad, and shut down the bottom four levels of the mine pending a safety inspection. The field AI seemed to right itself after the brief power surge; no one had given it another thought.

Haas and Voyt went underground with the safety inspector to visit the ignition point. They weren’t able to pinpoint the fire’s cause, but they recommended suspension of Sharifi’s experiment pending further investigation. A recommendation that the Controlled Technology Committee rejected. They reopened the seam as soon as they could get the pumps and the ventilators back on-line, and the miners—and Sharifi’s research team—went back to work.

“It was nothing,” Haas told Li. “I’ve been underground since I was ten, and I’m telling you, I didn’t for one minute think there was a secondary explosion risk. I don’t give a shit what the local spins say, I wouldn’t send one miner into a pit I thought was ready to blow. That’s not the way I do things.”

But he had sent miners into the pit. And it had blown thirty hours later.

It blew hard enough to demolish the Pit 3 headframe and breakerhouse and light a fire that was still smoldering ten days later. The orbital field AI went down again, just as it had in the last explosion. Only this time it never came back on-line.

It took three days to put out the fires and evacuate the desperately small number of survivors. The damage, when they finally had time to assess it, was extensive: one mine fire, cause unknown; one Bose-Einstein relay failure, cause unknown; two hundred and seven dead adult geologists, mine techs, and miners; seventy-two dead children, working underground under an industrywide opt-out from the UN child-labor laws. And, of course, one famous dead physicist.

“There’s one thing I’m still not clear on,” Li said when he had finished. “What caused the original fire? The one in the—” She checked her files for the name. “—The one in the Trinidad?”

“Nothing.” Haas shrugged. “This is a Bose-Einstein mine. Flash fires are part of business. And most of the time you never find out where they started, let alone what caused them.”

Li looked at him doubtfully.

“Christ!” Haas muttered. “I thought you were from here. I thought you were supposed to know something.”

Li tapped her temple where the faint shadow of wires showed beneath the skin. “You want me to know, tell me.”

“Right. Bose-Einstein condensates don’t burn, Major. But coal does. And the crystals set the coal on fire sometimes. We don’t know why. It’s just one of the things you have to account for if you want to run a Bose-Einstein mine. It’s dangerous and it’s inconvenient. And sometimes—this time being one of them —it’s deadly.” He snorted. “But this time the crystals had some help. This time they had fucking Sharifi.”

“What do you mean, Sharifi? You think she caused the fire? What was she doing that’s any different from what AMC does every day?”

“She was cutting crystal for one thing.”

“So? AMC’s cutting every day. You don’t have flash fires every day.”

“Yeah, but
where
are we cutting, Major? That’s the question you have to ask. And where was
she
cutting?”

“I don’t know,” Li said. “Where was she cutting?”

“Look,” Haas said. “A Bose-Einstein bed is like a tree. You have to prune it, trim it, manage it. But if you cut too hard, or in the wrong place, you’ve got problems. And when you cut too hard in a Bose-Einstein mine you get fires.”

“Because … ?”

He shrugged. “TechComm has armies of researchers out here, year in year out, clogging up the gangways and wasting our time and slowing down production. But when it comes to actually giving us useful information they’re hopeless. Hell, they don’t know things any miner over twelve could tell you. Like that you don’t mess with live strata unless you have a death wish. The Beckies don’t like it. And when the Beckies don’t like a man, bad luck has a way of finding him.”

Li stared.
Becky
was Shantytown slang for Bose-Einstein condensates. It was a miner’s word, resonant with myths about singing stones, haunted drifts, glory holes. It certainly wasn’t the kind of word you heard in AMC’s orbital executive offices. Either corporate culture had taken a sharp left turn in the last decade, or this fire was even stranger than Haas was admitting.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Haas said. “Poor dumb miner, seeing singing Beckies and the Blessed Virgin down every mine shaft. But I grew out of church a long time ago. And I’m telling you, Sharifi was courting trouble down there.”

“Did you voice your concerns about the Beckies—uh, the condensates—to Sharifi?”

“I tried.” Haas made an impatient gesture, and the upper facet of his desk threw back a distorted reflection of the movement as if there were a subtle tidal effect in the condensate’s interior. Which there might be, for all Li knew. Sharifi would have known, of course. But Sharifi had gone underground and gotten herself killed. And as far as Li could tell, she hadn’t left anything behind her but unanswered questions.

“I talked to her, all right,” Haas went on. “And you know what? The bitch laughed at me. She was crazy. I don’t care how famous she was. Oh, she talked a good line. Empirical runs this, statistical data that. But the gist of it was she thought the Beckies were talking to her. And just like everyone else I’ve known who thought that, she ended up room temperature. I just wish the stupid digger bitch hadn’t brought half my mine down on top of her.”

Li stiffened.
Digger
was about as nasty a word as there was in the pidgin English that passed for a common language on Compson’s World—and Li had been called it herself back when she still looked like the full-blooded construct she was.

Haas saw her reaction; he shifted in his chair and twisted his face into an expression that might have looked apologetic on another man. “Not talking about you, of course.”

“Of course.”

“Look.” He leaned forward, hunching his massive shoulders for emphasis. “I don’t give a shit what Sharifi was. Or you. Or anyone else, for that matter. What I do give a shit about is that some Ring-side bureaucrat made me lend her my best witch and shut down half the mine so she could play her little games. And now that the wheels have come off, all they can tell me to do is wait.”

“Well, I’m not telling you to wait,” Li said. “And the sooner I get down there, the sooner we can get to the bottom of this and get your men back to work.”