Spin State - Chris Moriarty [193]
“When will they move in?” she asked Daahl as Ramirez and Mirce Perkins walked in.
Daahl turned to them. “Any word?”
“Nothing new,” Ramirez said. Mirce didn’t answer at all, except for a curt shake of her head.
“We think we’ve got another day or two,” Daahl said.
“What happens if they move in while we’re underground?”
Mirce shrugged. “If they come, they come. And our biggest problems underground are going to be air and time, not ground troops.”
She rolled out a map and traced their path on it. Daahl’s guide would get them into the Trinidad, then split off into the back tunnels toward a vertical borehole that didn’t show up on the AMC maps. With a little scaling, the hole should be clean enough for someone at the top to lower fresh oxy canisters as long as there was a man at the bottom with a guide rope. When the live field run was complete, Li and Bella would make their way back to the oxygen dump, and Daahl’s men would haul them to the surface.
Li listened to Mirce with half her mind and traced the route on the maps with the other. It was doable. Eminently doable. She’d taken dicier gambles more than once. The only question this time was whether the mine was going to let them get away with it.
“You just get yourselves back to the drop,” Mirce concluded. “Once we rendezvous there we’ll evaluate the situation, and I’ll either get you out through the main gangway or up into the hills through the bootlegger tunnels.”
“You?” Li stared at her. “You’re not going. You can’t go.”
“Of course I am,” Mirce said. “I’m the best.”
Li looked toward Daahl, but before she could speak she heard a sound that raised her hackles and sent Daahl and Mirce diving toward the window. Rifle shots. And the shots came from this side of the line.
Li stepped up behind Daahl and Mirce and tried to see out the window herself. Hopeless. All she could see was movement, out across the flat plain in the twisting fire-shot shadows. Then the movement turned into a shape, the shape into a man. A man walking, holding a white flag.
“Tell them not to shoot!” Daahl snapped, and Ramirez took off out the door, running.
“Christ,” Li muttered. “That guy’s taking his life in his hands.”
“More than just his life,” Daahl said.
They waited. Ramirez reappeared in the doorway.
“We know who it is,” he said. “A militia officer seconded to Station Security. Shantytown kid too, I guess. Brian McCuen.”
Li caught her breath.
“Now why the hell would they send Brian?” Daahl asked slowly, quietly.
“Because,” Mirce said, her eyes as cold as the night side of a dead space station, “they think we won’t kill him.”
The miners outside, and maybe a few of the ones inside, got to McCuen before Li could. By the time she finally saw him, one eye was threatening to puff shut and he looked more than a little tattered around the edges.
“Are you crazy?” she said.
He just gave her a lost-puppy-dog look. “I need to talk to you alone.”
Li glanced at Daahl standing just behind her, at Mirce slouching in the open door.
“We’ll give you ten minutes,” Daahl said.
Mirce said nothing, just detached herself from the doorframe as Daahl went by and pulled the door shut behind her. Li sure as hell hoped she’d never stared at any Syndicate prisoners the way Mirce stared at McCuen.
“I haven’t told them anything,” McCuen said when they were alone, “except that I had to talk to you.”
“Well, you’re talking to me. What have you got to say for yourself?”
He just kept staring at her, trust, fear, suspicion chasing across his boyish face.
“Who sent you, Brian?”
His eyes evaded hers for a moment. “Don’t you know?”
“Haas?”
He glanced around the room hesitantly, searching the ramshackle walls for surveillance