Spin State - Chris Moriarty [14]
She swung her legs over the rim of the coffin and felt the cold grid of deckplating under her feet. Bottom rack at least. Thank God for small mercies. She looked around at the cryobay. Racks of coffins rose above her in a brightly lit honeycomb of feedlines and biomonitors. Most of the other passengers were still on ice; cool green vital lines blipped steadily on their status screens. The virusteel deckplating hummed with the distant throb of idling Bussard drives. Somewhere out of sight a skeleton crew would be running postjump checks, evolving systems shut down for replication, signaling to the sublight tugs that would ferry the jumpship beyond the immense starfish arms of the field array.
Li’s uniform—or rather a quantum-faithful replica of it—lay in the kit drawer beneath her coffin, neatly folded and stowed by a Major Catherine Li, UNSC, who no longer existed. In the right-hand pants pocket she found a wad of tissue just where she always stashed it. In the left-hand shirt pocket she found her cigarettes, already unwrapped by that other Li who knew just how weak her fingers were after jumps these days.
She leaned against the coffin, uniform piled next to her, and blew her nose.
Pain rifled through her right shoulder as she raised her hands to her face. She touched the heart of the pain: eight centimeters of knotted scar tissue slicing up her triceps and across the point of her shoulder. It felt nervy to the touch, and when she twisted her head to look at it the scar stood out white against her brown skin.
Metz’s parting gift. She’d never seen the gunman, but the single shot shredded muscle, tendon, and ligament, and severed the ceramsteel filaments that threaded through her arm from shoulder to fingertip. Her oracle told her it had taken five weeks in the tanks to patch it up, but all she remembered of those weeks was painful awakenings, doctors’ questions, sharp flashes of underwater blue brilliance.
She got her uniform on without too much fumbling, but when she tried to pull on her boots her fingers wouldn’t grip properly. She tucked the boots under her good arm and staggered down the aisle, weaving like a worn-out drunk. Green arrows led to the exit. Somewhere down the corridor they’d lead her to a cup of coffee and a soft chair where she could smoke her first ritual postjump cigarette.
She stumbled into the passenger lounge just as the transport linked up with its tug and started the slow subluminal drift toward the field array’s perimeter.
Li had jumped often enough to know the protocol. They would clear the glittering crystal arms of the field array, then kick on the Bussard drives and jump to near lightspeed for the last leg of the journey. Once that happened they’d be in slow time, the communications limbo of a ship traveling at speeds that made relativity a practical rather than theoretical problem. They’d be outstream, cut off from streamspace and the rest of humanity until they dropped back into normal time.
She slumped into an empty chair, lit her cigarette, and looked around at her fellow passengers. Two Peacekeepers huddled in one corner playing a silent card game. The rest of the passengers were techs, company men, midlevel professionals. People whose expertise made it worth the multiplanetaries’ while to pay quantum-transport prices but who didn’t have enough corporate clout to get Ring-side assignments.
There were no constructs, of course. Partial constructs could theoretically bypass the off-planet travel restrictions and get clearance to hold company or even civil service posts. But geneset assays weren’t cheap, and it didn’t happen often.
The only obviously posthuman civilian in the lounge sat directly across from Li: a tall dark-skinned woman with a white scar on her forehead. West African, Li thought. Something in her bones, in the long line of her back, suggested the radiation-induced mutations of the old generation ships—ships that had dropped out of slow