Spin State - Chris Moriarty [30]
It took her a moment to put her finger on what was wrong with the view. There was a thick haze hanging around the mountains’ shoulders, up around the four-thousand-meter level. And farther down, a wash of bright oxygenated green swept the feet of the cliffs. When Li had last seen those cliffs they were above the atmosphere line, bathed in the dull orange of native lichens. This wasn’t the planet she’d left behind, and the sheer breadth of the human encroachment in that fifteen years was chilling.
Compson’s World was the great joke of the interstellar era: all the anticipation, all the apprehension, all the first-contact planning, and on thirty-eight planets in twenty-seven star systems, Compson’s coal and condensates were the only sign of complex life humans had ever found in the universe. And by the time humans reached Compson’s, there was no life left on the planet but the high, windswept algae tundra.
Li looked down at the spreading human footprint on the planet and thought of the thronging life that had laid down its bones to make the coal seam. The first humans to set pickax and shovel to the planet had been paleontologists, not miners. There was a whole exploration literature from that time—books Li had read eagerly lying in her cramped bedroom in Shantytown.
The scientists had fought terraforming, of course. But the first Bose-Einstein strike killed any chance they had. The mines had come, and the genetics labs, and from the day the first atmospheric processor went up, Compson’s World was a walking ghost. Now Li thought back on the dozens of terraformed, self-consciously balanced and controlled planets she’d seen in her tours of duty, and wondered if she might be one of the last people in the universe to know an untamed world.
Haas was talking to her, she realized. She snapped back into the present, wondering what she’d missed.
“Your average Shantytown witch is a pure fraud,” he was saying. “I’ve known three witches, tops, who could actually strike live crystal. And two of the bastards never turned a strike over to AMC until they’d given every Pat and Micky they ever got drunk with a crack at it. Fucking bootleggers.” He jerked his safety harness tight in preparation for landing. “Underground democracy, my ass. It’s theft!”
Li grunted noncommittally.
“Hey,” Haas called to the pilot. “Can we get some livefeed back here?”
The pilot scanned the channels and accessed what looked like local spin from the planetary capital in Helena. A suited commentator was interviewing a young man in miner’s gear.
“So,” the interviewer asked, “what is your reply to AMC’s claims that the union’s safety-related demands are merely a pretext for a pay raise?”
The camera panned back to the interviewee, and Li realized she’d misread him. He wasn’t a miner, despite the worn coveralls and well-used kit. His haircut was too expensive, his teeth and skin too healthy for a Shantytowner. And that was a Ring-sider’s face. A human face. He looked like he should be lounging in a café on Calle Mexico drinking maté de coca, not trashing his unadapted lungs in the Trusteeships.
“I’d say two things,” the young man answered in an accent that sounded like the product of generations of fancy private schooling. “First, that anyone who doubts the reality of the safety issues in this case needs to look at the statistics; the death rate among miners in AMC’s Trinidad vein over the past six months is higher than the death rate in most front-line military units during the Syndicate Wars. Second, I’d remind viewers that, though Compson’s company towns may have opted out of the Human Rights Charter, the multiplanetaries themselves—and the planetary legislators—remain subject to the court of public opinion. Every consumer has a responsibility to vote with his credit chip when he sees a corporation that blatantly disregards basic humanitarian—”
“Turn that shit off!” Haas shouted.
The feed shut off with a hollow click, and the passengers fell into an uncomfortable