Spin State - Chris Moriarty [187]
She could see the door into the back room, and she could guess what would be going on in there on a busy Saturday night. Cartwright had been a backroom regular, she remembered. So had her five-years-older-than-her third cousin. The one who taught her to shoot. The one with whom she had stolen her first, groping, furtive kisses up on the hill behind the atmospheric processors. What had happened to him? Killed, she thought. But she couldn’t remember if it was in the mine or back on Earth. How could she have forgotten his name? Well, all the backroom regulars would be at the big table tonight. Living in the past. Planning the next futile gesture. Hanging on every word of some hard-eyed young Republican just back from Belfast or Londonderry. She’d never known whether they were for real or not, those boys. She still didn’t know.
A movement caught her eye. She glanced sideways and locked eyes with a broad-shouldered redhead leaning against the back wall watching her. He pushed off the wall and shouldered through the crowd toward her.
“Sláinte,” he said when he reached her. Li noticed that another man had come up behind him. Neither of them were smiling.
“Sláinte yourself,” she said.
“Need some help, sweetheart?”
“Not unless you can help me drink alone.”
His eyes narrowed. “I suppose you just got lost and wandered in here by accident?”
“I suppose.”
“Like to make a donation then?” His tone suggested that refusal was not an option.
“What for?”
“Irish orphan relief.”
“Oh.” So that was all it was. Li almost laughed. “How many new guns do the orphans need this winter?” she asked, pulling out her billfold.
“Very funny. And we don’t take cash.”
He pulled a portable scanner from his pocket and held it toward her. His companion slipped around behind her stool, cutting off any possibility of retreat.
Li stared over the smaller man’s shoulder for a moment, straight into a bleak holo of jumpship-sized icebergs calving off the Armagh glacier. Then she shrugged and ran her palm across the scanner.
The redhead looked at the readout, blinked, and looked back up at her. “What do you want here?”
“I’m looking for Mirce Perkins. Someone said she’d be here.”
“She’s here, all right.” He hailed the bartender, who arrived so fast he had to have been watching. “She’s looking for Mirce. A cop.”
A slow tidal effect swept through the bar as he said the word. People shifted subtly in their seats, or even took new seats farther away from Li. A few customers slunk toward the exits. Li watched with amusement, but it still worried her; there were a lot of dark alleys between here and the safe house, and she’d been a fool to let herself be tagged as Corps personnel in a place where her internals were worth more money than the rest of the patrons would ever legally earn in their lives. Then Mirce Perkins stepped out of the back room, and Li forgot about the walk back to the flop and the precautions she should have taken and everything else except the woman walking toward her.
She knew that face. And not just from distant childhood memories. It was the woman she had seen with Daahl. The woman who’d made him jump when she walked up to them at the pithead. The woman who, in fact, he’d never actually introduced to Li.
Li searched the strong-boned face, the wire-muscled miner’s body for some point of commonality. Some sign that they had shared a home and a life with each other. Some hint that this was the woman who had masterminded the swindle that sprang Li, against all odds, from the trap of Compson’s World. She saw none of those things.