Spin State - Chris Moriarty [17]
“Not yet. I—”
“They kicked it upstairs.”
“Upstairs where?”
“Do I have to spell it out for you, Major? Loss of personnel in circumstances suggesting misconduct by the commanding officer. Use of lethal force on a civilian. Use of an unauthorized weapon. Where the hell did you think you were, pulling that thing out? Gilead?”
“They recommended a court-martial?” Li said, trying to get her brain around the idea.
“Not exactly.”
Not exactly. Not exactly meant that covert ops wanted the Metz raid kept quiet, that they planned to comb through every fact and opinion and scrap of testimony before they released it. And if that left Li without a defense, no one would lose much sleep over it.
“When do I testify?” she asked.
“You already have. We downloaded the Metz data and opened your backup files to the Defender’s Office. You can amend your extrapolated testimony if you like, but I doubt you’ll want to. Your attorney did a good job.”
“Right,” Li said. It made her queasy to think of her files being used that way. A backup was exactly that. It sat in an oracle-compatible datacache in Corps archives, received updates and edits and waited to be retrieved if the medtechs needed it. It sure as hell didn’t walk into court-martial proceedings and proffer testimony that could end your career.
“The board hasn’t rendered its decision,” Nguyen said. “It seemed prudent to let things cool down a little. And when the . . . situation on Compson’s World came up, the board thought you were the right person.”
“You mean you convinced them I was the right person.”
Nguyen smiled at that, but the smile never made it up to her eyes. “Have you had time to catch any spinfeed since you came off ice?”
Li shook her head.
“Ten days ago one of the mines in the Anaconda strike caught fire. The mine director—I forget his name, you’ll have to talk to him when you get there—got the fire under control, but we lost our on-station security chief in the initial explosion, and we need someone there fast to oversee the investigation and help the AMC personnel restart production.”
Nguyen paused, and Li forced herself to sit through the pause without asking the questions they both knew she wanted answered: what any of this had to do with her, and why Nguyen had shipped her halfway to Syndicate territory to pursue a mining accident that should have been handled by the UN’s Mine Safety Commission.
“Everything I’ve told you so far is public record,” Nguyen continued. “What’s not yet public is that Hannah Sharifi died in the fire.”
Li suppressed the flare of guilt and fear that shot through her at the sound of that name. Nguyen didn’t know—couldn’t know—what Sharifi meant to her. That was a secret she’d mortgaged half her life to protect. And she had protected it. She was sure she had.
Almost sure.
Hannah Sharifi was—had been—the most prominent theoretical physicist in UN-controlled space. Her equations had made Bose-Einstein transport possible, had woven themselves into the fabric of UN society until there was hardly a technology that hadn’t been touched by Coherence Theory. But Sharifi’s legend went well beyond her work. She was also a genetic construct—the most famous construct in UN space. News of her death would flood streamspace the moment it went public. And the faintest tinge of scandal would spark off a new round of debates on genetics in the military, genetic mandatory registration, genetic everything.
Li took another sip of water, mainly in order to have something to do with her hands. The water was still cold, and it still went down all wrong. “How long do we have before word of her death gets out?” she asked.
“Another week at most. It’s been all we could do to keep the lid on it this long, frankly. And that’s why I’m sending you there. I want you to pick up the reins for the last station security chief and investigate Sharifi’s death, and I need someone there now, while the trail’s still hot.”
Li frowned. She’d spent the eight years since peace broke out chasing