Spin State - Chris Moriarty [68]
McCuen just shook his head and made a spitting sound in his throat. “You thought about Gould any more?” he asked.
Li shrugged.
“Why go slow time?” McCuen asked. “That’s what I keep wondering.”
They were traveling down the main gangway now. It was still wide enough to walk two abreast, but the ceiling was already lowering overhead, forcing McCuen to duck his head and stoop, miner fashion.
“You sound like you have a theory,” Li hazarded.
“Well, not really . . . but . . .”
“But what?”
“It just occurred to me that maybe the point isn’t just to get . . . whatever it is . . . Gould herself, I’d guess . . . to Freetown, but to keep anyone else from getting hold of her until she gets there.”
Li stopped, struck by the idea. “You’re saying she’s using the flight as a kind of dead drop.”
“Well, I hadn’t quite thought of it that way, but . . . yeah. I mean, once that ship dropped into slow time, it was gone. No radio contact. No way to stop it or board it or even find it. It doesn’t even exist as far as we’re concerned.”
“Not until it gets to Freetown.”
“Right.”
“You’re assuming that it doesn’t matter to her if we find out what it is before she gets there.”
“Right.”
“Because . . . ?”
“Because once she gets there it’ll already be too late for us to stop her?”
Li stood staring at the ground, at the coal dust already caking her boots, her mind racing.
“It was just a thought,” McCuen said. “I guess it doesn’t really make sense when you look at it that way.”
“No,” Li said slowly. “It makes sense. It makes all kinds of sense.”
He looked over at her, his face a pool of lamplit white in the darkness. “What do we do now?” he asked.
“Follow up on our other leads and hope to hell that sometime in the next three weeks we crack this thing.”
McCuen grinned. “Other leads meaning Louie?”
“Other leads meaning Louie.”
Six linear kilometers from the shaft by Li’s measurement, they turned a sharp kink in the gangway and dropped into the long, high-roofed chamber that was the temporary home of cutting face South 8. The survey crews must have come through and ruled out the presence of any worthwhile crystal deposits; the miners had already blasted a large section of coal and were taking it down with a track-mounted rotary cutter. The big machine threw up a spume of stove-grease black diesel smoke and made enough noise to start a roof fall all by itself. There was no point in talking to anyone while they were cutting, so Li and McCuen took refuge in the most sheltered corner they could find and watched.
Someone must have seen them; when the crew stopped to break down the cutter and move the tracks up, the foreman pushed his cutting goggles up onto his forehead and walked over to them.
“Louie,” McCuen said, grinning.
Louie was easily Haas’s size, but he wasn’t carrying any creeping desk-job fat on his big frame. He was all wiry knotted miner’s muscle—a man who looked built to take down mountains. He pulled a grimy rag out of his coveralls and wiped his hands with it. It looked to Li like he was just moving the accumulated coal dust and diesel grease from one big-knuckled finger to another.
When he’d finished redistributing the dirt, he pulled a tobacco tin out of a hidden pocket and offered it around. Li and McCuen both refused. Louie pulled a swag out and planted it in one cheek.
“So,” he said, looking McCuen up and down. “Massa treatin’ you all right in the big house?”
“Very funny,” McCuen said. He turned to Li. “Louie and I went to school together.”
Louie laughed. “Grade school, anyway. That’s all the school one of us had.”
“Major Li would like to ask you a few questions.”
“Ask and you shall receive!” Louie said, throwing out his strong, coal-slicked arms expansively. “Answers, that is. I ain’t giving away World Series tickets.”
One of the cutters on break walked over, eyeing them curiously. Louie glanced at him, then looked back at Li and McCuen. “So,” he asked, “you think the Mets are gonna sweep?”
Li snorted.
“She’s just bitter,” McCuen said.
The cutter passed by and turned down a side tunnel.
“Right,” Louie