Spin State - Chris Moriarty [18]
“You’ve got that look on your face,” Nguyen said.
“What look?”
“The look you get when you’re thinking that if you were human, you’d be sitting behind my desk instead of doing my scut work.”
“General—”
“I wonder, Li, would you really be happy playing backroom politics and sitting through budget presentations?”
“I didn’t realize being happy was the point of the exercise.”
“Ah. Still out to change the world, are we? I thought we’d grown out of that.”
Li shrugged.
“You’ll put a dent in things, Li. Don’t worry. But not yet. For now what you’re doing out there matters more. The war’s not over. You know that. It didn’t end when we signed the Gilead Accords or the Trade Compact. And the front line of the new war is technology: hardware, wetware, psychware, and, above all, Bose-Einstein tech.”
Nguyen picked up her glass, looked into it like a fortune-teller peering at tea leaves, set it down again without drinking.
“Sharifi was working on a joint project with the Anaconda Mining Corp. She claimed she was close to developing a method for culturing transport-grade Bose-Einstein condensates.”
“I thought that was impossible.”
“We all thought it was impossible. But Sharifi . . . well, who knows what Sharifi thought. She told us she could do it, and that was enough. She was Sharifi, after all. She’s done the impossible before. So we put together the partnership with AMC. They provided the mine and the condensates. We provided the funding. And . . . other things. Sharifi sent us a preliminary report ten days ago.”
“And what was in this preliminary report?”
“We don’t know.” Nguyen laughed softly, sounding not at all amused. “We can’t read it.”
Li blinked.
“Sharifi transmitted an encrypted file through Compson’s Bose-Einstein relay. But when we decrypted it, we got . . . noise . . . garbage . . . just a bunch of random spins. We’ve put it through every decryption program we have. Nothing. It’s either irretrievably corrupted or it’s entangled with some other datastream that Sharifi failed to transmit to us.”
“So . . .”
“So I need the original dataset.”
“Why not ask AMC for it if they were cosponsors?”
Nguyen raised an eyebrow.
“Ah,” Li said. “We didn’t share it with them.”
“We didn’t share it period. And we don’t plan to.”
“All right,” Li said. “So I get the file and keep anyone else from getting it. That’s simple enough. But why me? What makes it worth the shipping bill?”
Nguyen paused, glancing over Li’s shoulder. She was looking out the window, Li realized; the distant, spectrum-enhanced reflection of Barnard’s Star glimmered in her pupils. “There’s more at issue than the missing spinstream,” she said. “In fact, we don’t have any of Sharifi’s results. She seems to have . . . cleaned things up before she died. It’s as if she wiped every trace of her work off the system. As if she planned to hide it from us.” A chilly smile played across Nguyen’s lips. “So. No Sharifi. No experiment. No dataset. And as if that weren’t bad enough, the station security chief died in the fire with Sharifi. Someone needs to get out there and pick up the pieces, Li. Someone I can trust. Someone who can face down press accusations of a cover-up, if things turn ugly. Who better than the hero of Gilead?”
Li shifted uncomfortably in her chair.
“Don’t look like that,” Nguyen said. “Gilead was the turning point. The press is right about that, no matter how badly they bungled everything else about the war. Gilead brought the Syndicates to the peace table. It kept them away from Compson’s World and everything else we’ve spent the last thirty years protecting. You had the courage to step into the breach when things fell apart and do what had to be done. And you didn’t do anything a real soldier needs to be ashamed of. I saw the realtime feed. I know it, even if you don’t.”
Li had no answer to that. All she remembered—all she was supposed to remember—was the official spinstream. Her realtime feed was classified, deadcached