Spin State - Chris Moriarty [134]
“Let’s just call it into pit bottom and let a closer team handle it,” Ramirez said.
And that was when she figured it out.
It wasn’t that Ramirez didn’t believe her. He believed Cartwright was down there, all right; he wasn’t even surprised to hear it. He just didn’t want her to know about it.
“You crazy bastards,” she said. “What the hell have you done?”
“Come on. We need to go up.”
“How does it feel to kill a few hundred people, Leo?”
“It’s AMC that’s killing them, not Cartwright.”
Li turned and started walking toward the slant down to the Trinidad.
“Where are you going?” Ramirez asked.
“To find that son of a bitch and beat the truth out of him.”
“No, wait.” Ramirez was chasing after her, stumbling in his haste to catch up to her. “It’s not what you think. I’ll talk to you. I’ll tell you everything you want. But please, please let Daahl handle this. It’s for him to handle. And if you tell anyone, it’ll only get more people killed. It’ll only mean they all died for nothing, for AMC’s damned bottom line!”
Later, she wished she had insisted. Wished she had gone straight down to the glory hole, no matter what Ramirez had said or how reasonable it had sounded. But later was too late, because when they went up to find Daahl they got more than they bargained for.
“That doesn’t look good,” Ramirez said as they stepped out of the pithead office.
Li followed his glance to the triage area where Sharpe and the other medics had been. It was deserted. The wounded had been evacuated while she was underground, and the medics with them. All they had left behind was a fluttering trash field of steriwipes and used IVs and torn burn wrappings.
She looked toward the helipads and saw a group of company employees clustered nervously around the single station shuttle still on the helipad. Everything else was a sea of coveralled miners and ragged Shantytowners.
Daahl greeted Ramirez’s news without even pretending to be surprised by it. He sent Ramirez off to gather a group of rescuers—though it looked to Li like Daahl didn’t much think Cartwright needed rescuing.
“Get on the shuttle,” he told Li when that was done. “You can’t do anything else here, and this doesn’t concern you.”
Li stood her ground. “What the hell’s going on here?”
“Like I said, nothing that concerns you.”
“Bullshit! Cartwright’s messing with live crystals, and you’re standing around chatting on top of a mine that’s already blown once!”
“Cartwright knows what he’s doing, Katie. He doesn’t need your help.”
“Help wasn’t what I had in mind, Daahl. I don’t know what little game you two are playing but—”
Daahl met someone’s eyes over Li’s shoulder, froze for a split second, then relaxed again as if he’d made a conscious effort to look natural. Li turned to see who he was looking at and found herself staring into a pair of ceramsteel-cold blue eyes set in the face of a tough-looking woman in EMT gear.
The woman nodded to Daahl, gave Li a measuring look, then just stood, hands thrust into her overall pockets, sharp eyes flicking back and forth between the two of them.
Li looked at Daahl, then glanced at the woman, hesitating. Should she know her? She shook her head and turned back to Daahl.
“Go ahead,” he said, without introducing the woman. “No secrets here.”
“No secrets?” Li snorted. “You must be joking. I can’t walk a step without tripping over one.”
“Just because something’s none of your business doesn’t mean it’s a secret.”
“None of my business? People are dying down there.”
“People have been dying down there every day since you left here,” Daahl said, his voice as hard as Shantytown’s gypsum flats in August. “I haven’t noticed that you cared until now.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You can’t fight in two armies, Katie.”
“I—”
“I’m not laying