Spin State - Chris Moriarty [50]
“Fine,” Li said. “Cover your ass. But I have a job to do. If you won’t help, get off the tracks and let me by.”
Sharpe reached past her and turned the water back on. His hand was trembling, but one look at his face told her it was anger, not fear. “Just leave,” he said. “I’m up to my neck in patients you idiots put here. Haas knows I don’t have time to sneak around behind his back doing unauthorized autopsies. And I don’t need another of his petty little loyalty tests. God knows Voyt put me through that hoop enough times.”
And then, suddenly, it all made sense. Sharpe’s assumption that she would come down to talk to him after the mine fire. His confusion, his suspicion, the smoldering anger that he camouflaged with jokes and polite chitchat.
“Listen,” Li said. “I don’t know how things were under Voyt, and I don’t know what little arrangement he had with Haas. But I’m not part of it. I came down here myself, not on Haas’s orders. I’m not here to tell you what official line to toe. I want the truth from you. Or at least as much of it as you know. That’s all.”
“Truth is a complicated concept,” Sharpe said, and she could still hear the suspicion in his voice. “What exactly did you have in mind?”
“I want to see Sharifi’s body.”
“On whose authority?”
“Mine.”
She toggled her comm system, wrote and time-stamped an order, sent it to Sharpe’s streamspace coordinates and watched his eyes unfocus momentarily as he read it. He blinked down at her, astonished.
“Didn’t think I was going to put it in writing, did you?” she said. She leaned back against the sink, arms crossed on her chest, and looked up at him. “You’ve got me filed in the wrong box, Sharpe.”
“Indeed,” he said. He laughed and rubbed a still-damp hand through his hair. “I apologize for . . . well, there’s a certain paranoia that goes with being a mine doctor.”
“I can imagine.”
He led her back through a warren of hospital wards and corridors toward the rear modules of the hospital building. As they came closer to the morgue, Li started to see evidence of the recent fire.
They threaded between hospital beds and stacks of boxed medical supplies. Space was always tight in underfunded colonial hospitals, but this one looked like it was about to burst at the seams. Evac and rescue gear was crammed into every corner. Mountains of complicated diagnostic equipment and medical supplies lined the walls, as if someone had cleared out the storage rooms and dumped their contents in any empty space available. As they worked their way down the hallways, Li had to dodge nurses carrying bedpans and burn dressings.
Finally Sharpe opened one side of a broad double door marked with an orange biohazard decal and led Li through a frigid curtain of irradiated air into a long room stacked with virusteel drawers that looked unnervingly like cryocoffins.
“All full, unfortunately,” Sharpe said. “Running a brisk trade in dead miners these days.”
“And of course they all have to be autopsied,” Li said. “Otherwise, how could you prove it was their own damn fault they died down there?”
Sharpe looked sideways at her and his thin mouth kinked in a sardonic smile. “I can’t imagine what you’re talking about, Major.”
“Here we are,” he said, stopping at a drawer that looked to Li just like all the others. He opened the drawer with a smooth sweep of his lanky arm, and Li found herself face-to-face with Hannah Sharifi.
“Jesus,” she muttered. “What happened to her?”
She looked like she’d been hit with a sledgehammer. The right side of her head folded in on itself from jawbone to hairline like a crushed eggshell. And her right hand was a mess. Nails torn off, bloodstains spidering through the lined skin of palm and finger, black burns on her fingertips.
“That’s how the rescue team found her,” Sharpe said. “The cause of death appears to have been suffocation—not all that surprising in a mine fire.” He lifted the still-intact left hand to show Li the