Spin State - Chris Moriarty [20]
“The real question,” Nguyen continued, “is why an unknown person or persons decided to intercept that particular message.”
“Obviously someone told them it was coming.”
“Obviously. But who was it? That’s what I’m sending you to find out.” Nguyen straightened the file in front of her and set it aside. Case closed, the gesture said. End of discussion. “Officially, you’ve simply been diverted to Compson’s to replace the prior station security chief. The rest is . . . only to be spoken of to me personally.”
“Anything else?”
“Just be your usual discreet and thorough self.” Nguyen’s eyes were as black and unreadable as stones. “And be careful. We’ve already lost one officer down there.”
“Yeah,” Li said. “I meant to ask. Who was it?”
“Jan Voyt. I don’t think you knew him.”
“Voyt,” Li repeated, but the name didn’t jog any soft memory loose and all her oracle produced for her were public-access files. “No,” she said, “I don’t think I did know him.”
After Nguyen signed off, Li moved to a window seat and watched her home star fill up the scratched viewport.
She couldn’t see Compson’s World itself at first; it was second night and the planet was engulfed in the vast gloomy shadow of the companion planet that orbited between it and 51 Pegasi. Then the Companion cleared the trailing edge of the star, and she got her first clear view of AMC station just as its 2 million square meters of photovoltaic panels rotated to the rising sun.
She was still too far away to see the dents of meteor impacts, the frozen streaks of fuel and sewage leaks on the station’s outer skin. From here it looked like a piece of jeweled clockwork. The glittering double-hulled life-support ring spun at an oblique angle to the planet surface, well out of the trajectory of the mass drivers. Nested within the main ring lay the complex interlocking gears of precession ring, spin stablizers, and Stirling engines—a cosmic windmill veiled in the curving black-and-silver dragonfly wings of the solar panels. And below, shrouded in Compson’s murky, processor-generated atmosphere, lay the Anaconda.
No roads tied the mine to Compson’s major cities. The only surface road was a rutted red track that cut across sage and chaparral, passed under the shadow of the antiquated atmospheric processors, and petered out among the gin joints and miner’s flats of Shantytown.
Shantytown wasn’t its map name, of course. But it was what the people who lived there called it.
What Li herself had called it.
She’d been sixteen, four years underground already, when she walked into a cash-only chop shop, clutching a pitifully thin wad of UN currency, and paid a gray-market geneticist to give her a dead girl’s face and chromosomes. That money had been the first real cash she’d ever held: her father’s life insurance payout. She didn’t remember much of that day, but she did recall thinking how funny it was that a man got paid cash money to die and only miner’s scrip for doing the job that killed him.
The genetic work itself had been painless, just a series of injections and blood tests. The scars on her face took longer to heal, but the stakes made it worth waiting for. She’d stepped into the chop shop as a trademarked genetic construct with a red slash across the cover of her passport. When she left, her mitochondria still carried the damning corporate serial number, but the rest of her DNA said she had three natural-born grandparents—enough to make her a citizen. Two days later, she walked into the Peacekeepers’ recruiting post, lied about her age as well as everything else, and started passing.
The recruiting board hadn’t asked too many questions. They’d been desperate for strong young bodies to throw at the Syndicates back then, and the same proprietary geneset that barred her from military