Spin State - Chris Moriarty [16]
She toggled the icon, and a high-ceilinged twenty-second-century baroque revival room sprang into three dimensions around her. A tiger maple desk floated on gracefully bowed legs above a pine floor buffed to a smooth gloss by generations of officers’ boots. Each floorboard was as wide as both Li’s hands put side to side, and they were laid down in the unmistakable herringbone pattern of the Security Council Administration Building on Alba. Behind the desk, hands resting on the carved leaves and volutes of her chair’s arms, sat the general.
General Nguyen was a spare, elegant woman, far into a well-preserved middle age. It was hard not to stare at her, even across a spinstream interface. The slightly crooked nose, the asymmetrical cheekbones, the quirked line of the left eyebrow were like the irregularities in a bolt of raw silk; they enhanced rather than detracted from a fragile, unmistakably human beauty.
Nguyen looked directly at Li as she came on-line, meeting her eyes in streamspace. It was a politician’s trick, but knowing the trick didn’t make you immune to it. And when Nguyen did it, you felt like she was inches away from you, not light-years.
“Major,” Nguyen said in a voice that knew how to make itself heard quietly. “It’s good to see you.”
“General,” Li said.
Someone spoke to Nguyen from outside the streamspace projection field. “Fine,” she told her unseen assistant. “Tell Delegate Orozco I’ll be there in five minutes.”
She turned back to Li. “Sorry, Major. I’m pressed for time, as usual. The Assembly’s voting on a military appropriations bill that still needs some baby-sitting.” She smiled. “You’ve probably guessed I have a little job for you.”
Li coaxed her still-numb face into what she hoped was a politely expectant expression. She’d done more than one little job for Nguyen. The general’s jobs were risky; she demanded a level of personal loyalty that could mean bending, if not breaking, the rules. But her rewards were generous. And she remembered favors as tenaciously as she held grudges.
The general’s next words were as unexpected as they were unwelcome. “You’re from Compson’s World, Major?”
“Yes.” Li shifted uncomfortably. Mother of God. Not Compson’s. Anywhere but Compson’s World.
“You’ve never gone home since enlisting?”
Li didn’t answer. It wasn’t really a question; Nguyen had clearance to view her psych files, and in five minutes she could know as much about her personal life as Li herself knew. More, if the barracks scuttlebutt about memory spinning was true.
“Why not?” Nguyen asked.
Li started to speak, then bit the words back. “It’s not the kind of place you go home to,” she said finally.
“Not the kind of place you go home to.” The words sounded like a riddle in Nguyen’s mouth. “Now tell me what you were about to say before you thought the better of it.”
Li hesitated. Her lips were dry; the urge to lick them was like an itch she knew she was going to have to scratch sooner or later. “I was about to say that when I left I swore I’d die before I went back.”
“I hope you don’t still feel that way. You’ll be docking at AMC’s orbital station on Compson’s World in a little over four hours.”
Nguyen reached across her desk to a silver tray that held a carafe of ice water and two cut-crystal glasses. She poured a glass and handed it to Li, who raised it to her lips, hearing the chime of ice against crystal.
The water was good, but the line to Alba was so laced with security protocols that it could only process high-load sensory data in intermittent bursts. She sipped, felt nothing, then got a disorienting headache-cold burst of taste half a second after she’d swallowed. She shook her head and put the glass down.
“Not where you expected to wake up?” Nguyen asked.
“I expected to wake up at Alba. I need to be at Alba. I’m running on a field-hospital patch job—”
“Alba would be a bad place for you just now,” Nguyen interrupted smoothly.
She caught Li’s look of confusion and raised