Spin State - Chris Moriarty [38]
“Think the spins have picked that up yet?” someone said.
Haas was already jogging over to the guards. He leaned into the wind, cupping a hand around his mouth, and shouted something in the squad leader’s ear. He stepped back, and the line of guards advanced, firing their guns into the air.
A few of the strikers backed off. The rest didn’t.
The guards fired again, this time at the strikers’ feet. One woman cried out as if she’d been hit. Another shouted, “There are children here!”
“No one needs to get hurt!” one of the guards called, his voice shaking with adrenaline. “Don’t do anything stupid!”
And then, for no reason Li could put her finger on, the crisis passed.
The strikers lowered their signs. The guards uncocked their rifles. The crowd broke up and straggled back along the rutted track to Shantytown. Li felt a spasm of relief. No one was going to die. Not today, anyway.
AMC Station: 13.10.48.
Three hours later, the smell of the mine still on her hair and skin, Li stood in front of the security seal on the door of Sharifi’s quarters. The tape read her palm implant, dissolved, re-formed behind her as she stepped through.
Sharifi’s quarters were cramped, utilitarian, not much different from Li’s own room a few spokes away. The whole room was no wider than the corridor outside. Five steps took Li from the entrance to the door of the cramped bathroom. A shallow closet ran the length of the left wall. The right wall held a narrow bunk and a drop-down desk cluttered with datacubes and loose stacks of microfiche.
The closet held a few changes of practical-looking clothes, some of them still folded neatly in an Italian-made leather bag that must have cost more than Li made in a month. No family pictures. No personal items. No makeup. Except for the single dress suit hanging in the closet, it was hard to identify even the sex of the room’s last occupant. Whoever Sharifi had been, there was little trace of her here.
On an impulse, Li slipped the suit jacket on and looked curiously at herself in the mirror. It bound around the armpits; she carried a lot more muscle than Sharifi had. It was a little long. But then, Sharifi had been a good two centimeters taller than her—better nutrition and fewer cigarettes. Other than that, it fit. And the color looked good on her. No surprise there.
The smell was a surprise, though. Foreign. A touch of the other woman’s perfume, perhaps. And yet, beneath it, something unnervingly familiar. A memory surfaced, rolled over and sank again. A dog lunging and snarling at a passing miner. The warm glow of hate on its master’s face as he said, You can smell them, can’t you?
Next to the closet door were the light and livewall controls and the viewport dimmer. Li cleared the floorport, looked down at the planet between her toes, and thought about how the sweep of UN politics and her own life had intersected there. How could they all still be fighting the same battle that was hacked into the burnt-out shells of the birthlabs, the forty-year-old artillery scars fading on the hillsides above Shantytown?
For decades the now-crumbling industrial park had turned out a continuous stream of constructs. Industrial-grade genesets specifically engineered for hard-rock mining, steel smelting, terraforming—all the hard, dangerous jobs that humans couldn’t or wouldn’t do. Sharifi was tanked in those labs. Li herself had been tanked in one of the last production runs before the Riots. It was only the rawest, quirkiest chance that either of them got off-planet; Sharifi adopted by rich Ring-side abolitionists, Li farmed out to a childless miner’s family in one of the last abortive attempts to assimilate constructs into the general population.
The Riots hit eight months after Li was born—about the time Sharifi would have been in university. Shantytown became a battlefield, a maze of tunnels and barricaded cul-de-sacs in which a ragtag band of constructs held off the UN and the planetary militia . . . for a while, anyway.
A good number of