Spin State - Chris Moriarty [27]
“I tried.” Haas made an impatient gesture, and the upper facet of his desk threw back a distorted reflection of the movement as if there were a subtle tidal effect in the condensate’s interior. Which there might be, for all Li knew. Sharifi would have known, of course. But Sharifi had gone underground and gotten herself killed. And as far as Li could tell, she hadn’t left anything behind her but unanswered questions.
“I talked to her, all right,” Haas went on. “And you know what? The bitch laughed at me. She was crazy. I don’t care how famous she was. Oh, she talked a good line. Empirical runs this, statistical data that. But the gist of it was she thought the Beckies were talking to her. And just like everyone else I’ve known who thought that, she ended up room temperature. I just wish the stupid digger bitch hadn’t brought half my mine down on top of her.”
Li stiffened. Digger was about as nasty a word as there was in the pidgin English that passed for a common language on Compson’s World—and Li had been called it herself back when she still looked like the full-blooded construct she was.
Haas saw her reaction; he shifted in his chair and twisted his face into an expression that might have looked apologetic on another man. “Not talking about you, of course.”
“Of course.”
“Look.” He leaned forward, hunching his massive shoulders for emphasis. “I don’t give a shit what Sharifi was. Or you. Or anyone else, for that matter. What I do give a shit about is that some Ring-side bureaucrat made me lend her my best witch and shut down half the mine so she could play her little games. And now that the wheels have come off, all they can tell me to do is wait.”
“Well, I’m not telling you to wait,” Li said. “And the sooner I get down there, the sooner we can get to the bottom of this and get your men back to work.”
Haas leaned back in his chair and let out a short high bark of laughter. The reaction seemed so practiced that Li wondered if it was something he’d copied out of a spinfeed interactive. “We’re not running a tourist operation,” he said. “Sharifi was working less than a hundred meters from an active cutting face. You’re not getting anywhere near there.”
“Sharifi did.”
“Sharifi was famous. You’re just a hick with a lucky trigger finger.”
Li grinned. “Nice line, Haas. But I am going down. Why make me go over your head?”
“Fuck, go to whoever you want. You ever been in a Bose-Einstein mine? You can get killed fifty different ways without blinking. I don’t need any more bodies on my hands this week, and I’m not letting you down there.”
Li stood up, walked around Haas’s desk, and picked up the headset of his VR rig. “Would you like to speak to Corps HQ or should I?”
He turned in his chair and watched her, looking for the bluff.
“Fine,” he said after a long pause. “I’m going down with a survey crew in about two hours. If you’re up to it.”
“I’m up to it,” Li said, pushing down the thought of her exhaustion, the hope of a hot shower and a merciful stretch of sleep without jump-dreams.
“Don’t expect me to baby-sit you. You fuck up your rebreather or fall down a shaft, it’s your neck.”
“I can take care of myself.”
Haas laughed. “That’s what Voyt said.”
Li looked down at the stars wheeling between her feet and decided it was time to change the subject before she had second thoughts about going into the mine again. “Has TechComm said when they’ll get your field array up?”
“Take a fucking guess. They’re working on it. Which is TechComm speak for ‘we don’t give a shit, it’s not coming out of our pocket.’ ”
Haas had that about right, Li thought. The UN had seen the shape of things to come long before most, had recognized from the dawn of the Bose-Einstein era where the live wire of power lay. It bet everything on the new technology. Subsidized it, patented it, entered into carefully structured partnerships with the half dozen multiplanetaries capable of exploiting it.
That had been back in the darkest years of the Migration, when they were still trying