Spin State - Chris Moriarty [54]
“In practice, AMC usually has me autopsy everyone who dies in the mine. But not this time. This time I got a bundle of automatic authorizations, all signed by Haas. Except for two: Voyt and Sharifi. On those I got completed death certificates, signed them, and sent them back upstairs.”
“And now you want to do the autopsies.”
“Wouldn’t you?”
“Why?”
“If you don’t want to tread on Haas’s toes . . .”
“It’s not Haas’s toes I’m worried about,” Li said.
A voice somewhere near the pit of her stomach whispered something eminently sensible about looking before she leapt. She squashed it.
“Fine,” she said. “Do your autopsies. But no one else sees the results until I sign off on them. Just so I know how low I have to duck if I want to keep my head attached.”
Sharpe looked at her soberly. “I appreciate this.”
“Don’t mention it,” Li said—and her next words were only half-joking. “I’m just giving you enough rope to hang me with.”
Shantytown: 14.10.48.
She should have gone straight back to the heliport when she left the hospital and caught the next shuttle station-side. But she didn’t. Without letting herself think about where she was going she turned left instead of right at the end of Hospital Street and started working her way along the winding, badly paved streets toward the old section of Shantytown.
Most of Shantytown had been thrown up in the first frenzy of the Bose-Einstein Rush. There’d been little money, less time, no planning, and from most angles the town looked like a sprawling collection of modular hab units that someone had dropped by accident and forgotten to come back for. It was only when you got deep into the old town that you began to see the bones of the place, the sealed biopods of the original colony. Few of the pods could still maintain an atmosphere, but the modern town had grown around their radiating spokes like skin grafts encrusting surgical mesh. The result was a warren of narrow alleys and windowless courtyards through which a native could travel for miles without ever seeing sky or showing up on the orbital surveillance grid.
The Riots had broken out here a few months after Li was born, and the UN’s collective memory had never recovered. Shantytown was still a code word for violence, treason, terrorism. And it still had the highest percentage of constructs of any city in UN space. Walking its streets again, Li had a sudden memory of her OCS course eight years ago. Of her tangled feelings of shame and disgust when she recognized the urban warfare lab as an exact streamspace replica of old Shantytown’s interlocking tunnels and courtyards. When she recognized the targets’ faces as her own face.
She found the chapel without ever having quite admitted to herself that she was looking for it. She stood before the gate, set her hand on it, pushed it open. As she stepped into the little churchyard she crossed herself.
Our Lady of the Deep stood just where she remembered it: dug into the steep bluff where the prehistoric lake bed Shantytown was built on met the hills that led up to the birthlabs and bootleg mines. The door was open. Li glanced in as she passed, saw the dim cavern of the nave and, like daylight at the end of a mine tunnel, the muted milk white gleam of the Mary Stone.
There was a tawdriness about the churchyard that didn’t show up in her childhood memories. The rectory’s peeling whitewash, the cheap insulation foam packed around badly fitted windows, the too-bright colors of artificial flowers, the mottled laminate of headstones peeling under a chemical rain they had never been designed to stand up to. It was almost enough to distract her from the really startling thing about the churchyard: how young everyone in it was.
She walked along the rows looking at birth and death dates. Thirty-five. Thirty-four. Twenty-four. Eighteen. And that wasn’t even counting the babies’ graves, half grown over by green-gray clumps of oxygen-producing algae.
She stumbled