Spin State - Chris Moriarty [105]
“For someone who didn’t care about money, she spent a lot of time fund-raising.”
“She had to do that. Putting fiche in the printers and cubes in the computers. That’s what she called it. But she didn’t care about it.”
“Then what did she care about? What was it all for?”
Bella stood up and smoothed her dress over her waist in the habitual gesture of someone raised in the low rotational gravity of the Syndicate’s orbital stations. “It was about the crystals. She talked about them all the time. What people were doing to them. She wanted to protect them.”
“From what?”
Bella shrugged. “From . . . this.” She made a gesture that encompassed Haas’s streamspace terminal, the planet below them, the whole of UN space.
“The miners think the condensates are dying, Bella. Are they?”
She laughed harshly. “We have twenty years of digging left, thirty maybe. The geologists can never agree on the exact number, but what does it matter? The reports never get past management.” She smiled. “It’s AMC’s dirty little secret.”
“Did Sharifi discover that secret?”
“It’s why she came here.”
“Is that what happened in the glory hole, Bella? Did Sharifi try to stop Haas from digging? Did they fight over it?”
“I told you,” Bella said, her voice cracking with frustration, “I don’t know. I can’t remember. But that’s where you have to look. To the mine. To the crystals.”
AMC Station: 22.10.48.
Li had seen her own specs once, at a technical briefing on a troopship off the occulted side of Palestra’s fifth moon, the night before her first combat drop.
It had been excruciating, even in a room of people who had no reason to know that she wasn’t the legally enlisted one-quarter construct she appeared to be. And it changed her life.
She sat in the briefing room, watching the codes scroll up the screen before her, listening to the techs discuss tensile-strength equations and bone-core profiles, self-evolving immune systems, designer intestinal and respiratory flora. And she understood for the first time in her life what she was, what all constructs were. They were beasts of burden. The culmination of ten thousand years of human intervention in Earth’s genetic pool. The universal working animal of the interstellar age.
That knowledge stuck with her through all the jumps and all the new planets that came after that briefing. It lurked at the back of her mind whenever she hefted a heavy load, put in a long day’s work, slipped into streamspace, took a lover in her arms.
She thought it again now as she crouched on the practice mat and watched McCuen strip off his sweat-soaked T-shirt, baring a freckled torso that spoke of a good exercise regimen and an only mildly tweaked geneset. A little tougher, stronger, stockier than human norm, but still the product of two parents and the random collision of forty-six chromosomes. Still street legal and well beyond the long arm of TechComm.
“Hot as hell in here,” McCuen said, and threw his shirt to the edge of the mat. “And that’s leaving aside the fact that you’re driving me into massive oxygen debt. You sure you’re not cheating?”
“Swear to God,” Li said. “Got my whole system powered down.” She stood, pulled off her own shirt, and wiped her dripping face with it. “See that?” She pointed to the ridged muscle on her stomach. “Worked my ass off for that. Something you might bear in mind next time you decide to sleep late instead of dragging your sorry tail to the gym.”
There was a mirror on the far wall, and as she turned, she caught a glimpse of herself. She saw what she always saw: stocky, hard-muscled body; genetically preset 6 percent body fat; chest flat enough to make feminine modesty as theoretical as athletic support.
It took a hell of a lot of work to maintain a military-grade wire job. Hours of gym time just to keep up the muscle strength and bone density that protected you from stress fractures. And though Li’s construct genes gave her the luxury of skimping on that work, she didn’t. It was her one vanity.
She glanced