Spin State - Chris Moriarty [56]
“Maybe you should go onstream and see if you can find her?” McCuen said. “I—I’m so slow. Maybe you can turn something up. That’s why I came out to meet you.”
“Yes,” Li said. “But not here. In private.”
When they reached HQ the duty officer was waiting for her, wanting to tell her something. She swept past, ignoring him, and waved McCuen into her office.
“All right,” she told him, sitting down on the desk she still hoped she wouldn’t be here long enough to think of as anything but Voyt’s desk. “What kind of time frame are we looking at? When’s the last time someone actually saw her?”
“Last night, Ring-time. Twelve hours.”
“Jesus,” Li said, then saw the stricken look on McCuen’s face and bit the rest of her words back. It was an understandable mistake, even if it was potentially disastrous. They might as well skip the recriminations and just fix it. If they still could.
She closed her eyes briefly as she slipped on-line, then opened them to a disorienting double vision of streamspace superimposed on McCuen’s pale features. “You’ve checked credit access and so forth?” she asked.
“Yes. Nothing.”
She checked again, ticking over bank reports, food and water and air charges, spinstream access debits, looking for the tracks no person in the Ring could help laying down every minute of every day of their conscious lives. “It doesn’t make sense,” she said. “There can’t be nothing. Not unless she’s dead.”
“Dead or using cash.”
“You can’t use cash Ring-side, McCuen. No one takes it. Even the scatter dealers and chop artists want nice clean freshly laundered credit.”
“Maybe she’s not Ring-side,” McCuen said, looking as if he desperately wanted to be wrong.
“You can’t get off the Ring without credit,” Li snapped. Then she caught her breath as gut instinct made a connection that she knew at once had to be right, though she didn’t know how or why.
“Check the shipping records,” she told McCuen. “Get me the name of every ship that’s left on the Freetown run in the last twelve hours.”
Two hours later Li was bending over McCuen’s monitor watching wavering security-cam footage of passengers filing along the boarding gantry of a Freetown-bound cargo freighter.
“Are you sure?” McCuen said when she stopped the tape and pointed.
“I’m sure.”
The silk blouse and expensive handmade jewelry were gone. Gould wore cheap clothes, cheap shoes, carried what little baggage she had in a cheap viruhide shoulder bag. She had chopped off her fair hair or shoved it under a hat, Li couldn’t tell which. And she was keeping her head down, moving fast, not letting the cameras get a clear view of her. But there was the straight, thin line of her mouth, the arrogant curve of cheekbone and nostril, the air of unbending, unquestioned superiority that made Li perversely glad this woman was running from her.
She pushed that thought away, feeling petty, and told herself she just wasn’t cut out to be a policeman. “Check the relay schedules,” she told McCuen. “See if we can intercept the ship before they jump.”
As Gould hefted her bag up the boarding ramp, something at her neck glittered. Li smiled. Gould was wearing a charm necklace: a vacuum-mounted sliver of low-grade Bose-Einstein condensate suspended in a cheap heart-shaped locket of translucent plastex. Pure trash. The kind of trinket street vendors sold to tourists along with the fake Rolexes and the Zone baseball caps. The kind of thing Gould wouldn’t be caught dead wearing in normal life. The woman was nothing if not thorough.
“I can’t find them on the relay queue,” McCuen said, sounding overwhelmed.
Li checked the carrier’s schedule herself, then dove onto the public server to access the flight plan that every carrier had to file with the en route relay stations. But there was no flight plan. They hadn’t filed anything.
Then it dawned on her.
“We’re too late,” she said. “It’s not a jumpship. She’s going to Freetown sublight. And they’re already in slow time. We won’t be able to catch her