Spin State - Chris Moriarty [152]
“And you’d throw away your life for that?”
Li saw the ghost of a tremor around his mouth as he spoke, a suspicious shimmer in the hazel eyes. No, she told herself, squashing her reflexive response. Chiara’s mouth. Chiara’s eyes. Whatever she thought she saw in those eyes was mere physiological sleight of hand. A parlor trick generated by a code-driven superstructure and shot through a state-of-the-art biointerface. It didn’t mean anything. You might as well ask what rain meant.
She stepped back into the bright lamplight and began pulling her coat on. “What you’re offering . . . I appreciate it. But I don’t want it. Just let me know if you’ll do the job, okay?”
She had her hand on the door before he answered.
“You know I will.” He stood in the garden where she had left him, and all she could see when she looked back was the slow curve of a girl’s hip in refracted moonlight. “You knew I’d do it before you even asked.”
Li wavered, caught on the threshold. You could walk back into that room, she thought, and her heart flew up in her chest like a bird breaking cover in front of the gunsights. One word, one touch. You could change everything.
And then what?
Before she could decide whether to go or stay, Cohen spoke again. The voice from the shadows was quiet, measured, impersonal: a silicon voice for a circuitry lover.
“Just close the door on your way out,” he said.
She started to speak, but a cold, hard knot rose up her throat and choked the words off. She backed into the hall and pulled the door shut behind her.
Anaconda–Helena Shuttle: 26.10.48.
Li made the shuttle gate an hour early, but ten minutes before the flight was supposed to leave she was still waiting for Station Security to search the throng of passengers in front of her.
The chaos at the gate echoed the chaos on the planet’s surface. The union had wildcatted, locked down the mine even before all the rescuers were out. Within a day the strikers had set up an armed perimeter and the first militia units had arrived to reinforce AMC’s cadre of Pinkertons. Now, on the satellite images that dominated the local spins, the whole tailings-littered plain of the AMC coalfields had become a militarized no-man’s-land between two dug-in armies.
On-station, AMC security was taking no chances. All flights to Shantytown and the coalfield were canceled. And until AMC loosened its de facto embargo, the only way in or out of Shantytown was the grueling dangerous jeep road over the mountains from Helena—a road that would become completely impassable as soon as winter’s dust storms set in.
Legally AMC couldn’t keep anyone on-station against their will: planetary access was a holdover civil right from the Migration-era days of indentured labor on corporate orbital stations. Still, rights or no rights, AMC controlled the streets, the air, the station-to-surface shuttles. And Li had seen the guards turn back eight Helena-bound passengers in the space of fifteen minutes.
She doubted anyone would be complaining to her office. And she was dead certain she couldn’t get her superiors to do anything about it if someone did complain. Daahl had been right. It was war, a war in which the UN would side with whichever combatant could get the Bose-Einstein production lines moving soonest. And unless the union pulled a trump card out of its sleeve, AMC looked like the likeliest candidate.
When Li finally stepped onto the shuttle twenty minutes after its scheduled departure time, she realized she’d never been in danger of missing it. A river of passengers filled the aisles and overwhelmed the crew, bickering over duplicate seating assignments and cramming luggage into every inch of open space. She checked her seat number, uttered a fervent prayer of thanks when she finally reached her row and found it empty, and settled down to wait.
“Hey, boss,” a familiar voice said just as she was finally drifting into an uneasy doze. She looked up to find McCuen grinning down at her.
“What are