Spin State - Chris Moriarty [19]
“People believe in you,” Nguyen insisted. “They trust you. And look in the mirror, for Heaven’s sake. You’re, what, one grandparent away from mandatory registration? And out of the same lab that tanked Sharifi. Have you ever seen holos of her? You could be her sister.” One immaculately groomed eyebrow arched upward. “Isn’t that what you are, technically?”
“More like her granddaughter,” Li said reluctantly. Better for her if people didn’t think of her name in the same breath with the word construct.
“Well, there you are. What reporter in his right mind is going to accuse you of bigotry against your own grandmother?”
Li stared at the floor between her feet. Some long-ago bootheel or chair leg had gouged a swerving path across several of the floorboards, and she marveled at the vividness of it, as real and touchable—while she was caught in this illusion—as the flight deck that her feet really rested on.
There must be a way out, she told herself. She couldn’t go back to Compson’s World. It was insane to think that no one would recognize her. Insane to imagine that someone somewhere wouldn’t make the fatal connection.
“I’m not sure you appreciate what I’m doing for you,” Nguyen said. “You made a real mess of things on Metz—”
“Only by trusting Cohen.”
“Don’t be naive. Cohen’s untouchable. Tel Aviv proved that. You, however, are eminently touchable.” Nguyen put her elbows on her desk, clasped her hands, looked at Li over the steeple of her fingers. “Did you know that you’re the highest-ranking partial genetic in the Corps?”
What the hell do you think? Li thought. But she kept her mouth shut. Biting her tongue was one skill she’d gotten down cold in the last fifteen years.
“It came up. During your court-martial proceedings. You stand for something, Li. Not everyone likes it. Half the Committee would like nothing better than to chapter you out and forget about you. The other half—me included—would rather not lose you. Things are changing, and you’re part of the change. Don’t throw that away.”
“All right,” Li said. “All right.”
“Good,” Nguyen said. But she was still watching Li carefully, measuringly. “And there’s another problem. Or perhaps I should say another potential problem. We have reason to believe someone intercepted Sharifi’s message.”
Li understood then—and caught her breath as she realized what the stakes were.
The UN had defeated the Syndicates, had held the line through a decade of cold war for one reason: Bose-Einstein transport. The UN had commercial-scale, reliable FTL. The Syndicates didn’t. The UN could put troops into any system with a Bose-Einstein relay on a moment’s notice. The Syndicates couldn’t. The UN had spent the last half century building up a vast interstellar network of banked entanglement that enabled them to safely broadcast quantum data through the transient wormholes of the spinfoam. The Syndicates, in contrast, limped along with haphazard supplies of entanglement pirated from UN ships or bought off bootleg miners through the Freetown black market.
It all came down to Compson’s World and its unique, nonrenewable deposits of Bose-Einstein condensates. But the moment someone discovered how to culture transport-grade condensates, then it would be the new technology of condensate culture that determined control of space. And if the Syndicates got hold of that technology, then the balance of interstellar power, the Trade Compacts—the fragile peace itself—would crumble.
That was why she was on her way to Compson’s World, Li realized. Not just to prevent a leak, but to fix one that Nguyen feared had already happened.
“Who do you think intercepted the message?” she asked, swallowing. “The Syndicates?”
“We don’t know. We hope not, obviously. We just know there was an eavesdropper.”
Li nodded. The Security