Spin State - Chris Moriarty [28]
But the price of that protection was the UN’s stranglehold on interstellar transport. And anyone who ran afoul of TechComm had better settle in for a long, cold, lonely wait.
Haas jabbed a thick finger toward the planet surface. “We can’t store more than a month’s worth of production up here, and TechComm closed the main relay to private traffic as soon as the field AI flatlined. I pink-slipped two thousand miners last week. Another month of this and there’ll be kids starving in Shantytown.”
They were probably starving already, Li thought. The line between living and dying was desperately thin in a mining town. Sometimes it took no more than a missed paycheck to push a family across it.
“I swear I’d rather do business with the Syndicates,” Haas went on. “At least when their tech breaks down, they fix it. Or shoot it. It’s enough to make you support bilateralism.”
Then he met Li’s eyes and paled as he remembered who he was talking to.
She just watched him. So Haas was for secession—or at least willing to consider the idea. Li doubted that secessionist talk would still get a man thrown into provisional detention on Compson’s World these days, but it would certainly get Haas into hot water with his corporate superiors. Fine, she thought. Let the son of a bitch squirm.
But in the end she couldn’t follow through.
It wasn’t that she didn’t like to watch the Haases of the world squirm. But not over politics. And not at her hands.
“Forget it,” she said. “I’ve been to the dance enough times to know saying something isn’t doing it. And I’m here to investigate Sharifi’s death, not your politics.”
But she still rubbed her hand along her chair arm as she stood up, coating the brush-finished steel with a fine layer of dead skin cells. Reprogramming skinbugs for surveillance wasn’t legal, exactly. But she’d never seen anyone actually get in trouble over it. And if she turned up any really good dirt, she’d be able to wring some mileage out of it, warrant or no warrant.
As she turned to leave, she thought she heard a rustle from the shadows behind the big desk. She stopped, listened, and could have sworn she smelled perfume. She looked toward Haas, but he’d gone back to his paperwork and didn’t seem to notice.
Was someone watching? Had there been a silent audience to their meeting?
No, she decided. No women in the walls here. Just the little noises any station made. Just heat turning on and off, air sighing through ventilators.
Just nothing.
AMC Station: 13.10.48.
Haas and his crew were waiting in the shuttle’s cramped passenger compartment by the time Li boarded. She stripped and donned her borrowed miner’s kit in the aisle. Most of the other passengers looked away. Haas didn’t.
The kit included a microfilament climbing harness, a rebreather and oxygen canister, a first-aid kit with endorphin-boosters, syntheskin patches, and an old-fashioned viral tourniquet. Li hoisted the harness and pulled it on, wincing as the familiar motion strained her damaged arm. The full kit weighed less than the infantryman’s gear Li had carried back in the Syndicate Wars, but just the feel of webbing on her shoulders reminded her of all the things that could go fatally wrong in the deep shafts of a Bose-Einstein mine.
Haas loomed over her, looking even bigger now that he wasn’t quarantined behind his vast desk. His bad mood seemed to have vanished; he sounded almost pleasant as he introduced Li to the various geologists and engineers on the survey team. The one person he didn