Spin State - Chris Moriarty [59]
Why bother, Li wondered. It wasn’t their planet. These children had been born in space, like their parents and their parents’ parents. They hadn’t killed Earth, or seeded the glaciers, or negotiated the Evacuation and Embargo Treaties. Earth was just another moon to them: a pretty light in the night sky, an exotic travel destination. But when she looked around she saw them watching, rapt, as the glittering ice swirled across the equator. Except for a few boys in the back, of course, who were imitating the bow hunters in the aboriginal lifestyles hologram, aiming imaginary arrows at the scurrying pigeons, gleefully pondering mayhem. Li, who had been a back-of-the-class kind of kid herself, couldn’t help grinning at them.
When the docent started in on the standard-issue spiel about the brave new era of peace and international cooperation, she walked. She could look down even from this height and pick out all the still-bubbling hot spots on the dead planet. Ireland. Israel. The icebound fortress of the Northern Rockies. The ice might have swallowed their borders, but the old wars were still on, though the UN had spent fortunes trying to squash them. And the old combatants were still keeping the home fires burning so they could start right up where they’d left off whenever the UN finally managed to make the planet habitable again. Li herself had watched a generation of angry young men and women disappear from Shantytown’s Irish quarter and come back a few years later—if they came back at all—with stories of the street fighting in Dublin and Ulster, deals cut between the UN and the English, the Embargo Enforcement Division’s smart neuroweapons. Thank God Li hadn’t been assigned to the EED when the war ended; there were some things even she couldn’t swallow.
She threaded her way through the children and dodged the midafternoon traffic to reach one of the Zócalo’s many outdoor cafés. She took a table in the back. A good table, by her standards: one with a solid wall behind it and a clear view of the approaches.
Three chicas buenas turned away from their foamed matés de coca to look at her. Their long hair was gold-leafed and twisted into elaborate fronded topknots in the style of the season. With their black Mayan eyes and brightly painted faces they looked like chimeras from a cyberartist’s menagerie. Li considered them briefly and decided the tall-hair thing was even sillier than most fashions. The chicas buenas gave Li’s buzz cut and UN-issue ripstop a cool once-over, frowned at her construct’s features, and turned back to their conversation. This was the Zone. Not even a construct in a Peacekeeper’s uniform could surprise people here.
Li drank her coffee in the refracted sunlight, looked up at Earth’s blue-and-white belly, and thought about what the hell she was going to say to Cohen.
Metz stank, no matter how you looked at it. And instead of pride at having pulled it up short of total disaster, Li felt only cold fury at Soza, at the Security Council brass, and most of all at Cohen. Four Peacekeepers had been shot. Li had had to kill a civilian, something that still gave her cold sweats after all these years, no matter that the civilian in question had been armed and aiming at her. And it had all happened because she trusted Cohen—and he failed her.
The trouble with friends was that you couldn’t get rid of them. There was no way to take back a friendship in the wake of betrayal or disappointment. The friendship, and everything that went with it, stayed.