Spin State - Chris Moriarty [135]
That brought her up short. She looked at the unnamed woman and saw ice-blue eyes staring back at her. She looked back at Daahl and saw the same pale eyes, the same cold mistrustful look. He despises you, she thought. The words floated to the surface of her mind before she could suppress them. He despises you, and he’s right to. When did you become such a hypocrite?
She shoved the thought down savagely. “You make it sound like war,” she said.
“It is war. And you chose your side fifteen years ago.”
She looked out the window toward the helipad and saw a group of guards clotted around the perimeter.
No. Not a group. A line. Behind the line stood the white-and-orange coveralls of company techs, the blue of pit management. This side of the line there was only a roiling tide of miners and Shantytowners.
They stood, heads down, shoulders hunched, not quite facing the company men. A low buzz rose from their mouths, a sound as subtle and menacing as a wasp’s nest waking to a careless footfall.
Li knew that sound. It was the sound of a mob getting ready to hurt someone. The strike had begun.
“Go!” Daahl said.
As she walked away, she felt the two pairs of pale eyes boring into her back, as if they could see right through skin and ceramsteel to the coward she had somehow become.
She must have slept on the shuttle; she had no memory of the journey back to the station.
When they finally docked, she stumbled to her quarters, ignoring the littered corridors, the open doors, the rescue personnel flooding in from every other mining station in-system. She could barely see straight, and her eyes and throat felt like they’d been peeled.
She pressed her palm to her door seal and swayed unsteadily in the corridor while it read her implant. She had stepped inside before she felt the faint twinge of alarm that told her something was out of place.
Before she could react—before she could even think about what had triggered the feeling—a hard hand closed over her mouth.
“Leave the witch alone,” a man’s voice whispered in her ear, “and don’t ask questions you don’t want the answers to.”
She scanned to see if her attacker had a weapon and found none. That was the good news. The bad news was that he had the kind of probe shielding that could only go with a wire job.
He spun her around and slammed her head into the wall hard enough to make her eyes water.
“Accidents can happen on-station too,” he whispered, “not just underground.”
Then he was gone—just in time for Li to realize that the stink filling her nose was Kintz’s cheap aftershave.
AMC Station: 25.10.48.
The knock came at her door well after two in the morning station time.
“Who is it?” Li asked hazily, trying to remember if she’d put on enough clothes when she went to bed to be decent now. The whispered reply was enough to jolt her wide-awake and halfway to the door.
Bella all but fell into Li’s arms as the door hissed open. Li supported her to the bed. Bella clung to her as if she were drowning while Li brushed her hair back from her face to reveal a new bruise blossoming over the old ivory stain of the last one.
Her first thought was that Haas had done it. Then she caught herself. Had Bella ever come out and accused him? Had she ever done more than deal in hints and innuendo? Haas had been off-station for days, first in Helena, then dealing with rescue operations on the surface. Did this mean he was back? Or had someone else done it? And what, in the end, did she really know about Bella?
“Haas doesn’t know I’m here,” Bella said, shuddering. “He . . . fell asleep.”
“Let’s go down to Security, Bella. You can file a report.”
“No,” Bella whispered. “You’ll leave, sooner or later. Then there’ll be no one to protect me.”
Li stared at her, knowing what she said was true, hating it, hating herself