Spin State - Chris Moriarty [15]
Li shifted in her chair and wondered why the woman hadn’t paid to have that scar taken off. She was pretty enough to make it worthwhile. Beautiful, actually.
She caught Li staring at her and smiled, black eyes crinkling at the corners. Li looked away, but not soon enough to miss the sharpening of the woman’s gaze on her too-regular, too-symmetrical features. Not soon enough to miss the unspoken question that lingered behind every first meeting: Was she a construct or wasn’t she?
Li could have looked up again. Could have asked the woman where they were, what system they were about to dock in. But it would sound silly, a tired variation on a very old pickup line. And there was always the awful risk of rejection. The fear that—even to a posthuman whose genes were warped by centuries of radiation—she, Li, was a monster.
She lit another cigarette and checked her mail. When she’d weeded out the junk, she was left with three items. A memo from the Metz field hospital explaining what they’d been able to fix in her arm and what they hadn’t, telling her to go in for a checkup when she reached her next posting. A cryptically worded notice that the review board had postponed issuance of its final ruling on the Metz incident pending further fact-gathering. And three messages from Cohen.
She hadn’t talked to him since Kolodny died. They’d recovered her body, but Dalloway had been right; there was nothing they could do for her. The wet bug had eaten away so much of her brain that when the medtechs showed Li the scans, even she could see Kolodny was never coming back from it.
Kolodny had written Li’s name into the next-of-kin line on her emergency forms. Without telling her. The revelation shook Li, partly because it reminded her that the next-of-kin line on her own papers was still blank. But Kolodny hadn’t been one to leave things to chance; she’d left precise instructions about what to do if she flatlined.
Li had followed her instructions to the letter.
The techs were there when they pulled the plug; they were hacking the precious slivers of communications-grade condensate out of Kolodny’s skull before she was even cold. Li should have known better than to get angry. Christ, she’d done field recoveries herself on a few awful occasions. But it was still like watching vultures pick Kolodny apart. And when it was over, she and Cohen had the worst fight of their lives.
She’d been going into the tanks, groggy with shock and pain-suppression routines, and she’d wanted to put off talking to him. But he insisted. And then he had the gall to give her technical jargon instead of reasons, excuses instead of explanations.
“You dropped us,” she’d said at last, on the outer edge of control. “And Kolodny’s dead because of it.”
“She was my friend too, Catherine.”
“You don’t have friends,” she’d snapped, her stomach churning with the guilty suspicion that if she hadn’t let things get personal, Kolodny would still be alive. “You’re not wired for it.”
“Don’t throw my code in my face,” he’d said, though he ought to have known better. “It’s bigoted.”
“It’s the truth. It’s what you are. You’re wired to twist and manipulate and feed off people. And I’m through with it!”
That was the last time they’d spoken. One or both of them, she suspected, had gone too far to be forgiven. And she wasn’t sure she wanted to forgive, anyway. Or be forgiven.
She stared at Cohen’s messages, wavering. Then she deleted them, unopened and unanswered.
Her commsys icon started flashing as soon as they dropped out of slow time. The call came in with no user tag over a stand-alone scrambled Security Council