Spin State - Chris Moriarty [80]
Someone had put a Viper—Voyt’s, probably—to Sharifi’s head and pulled the trigger at contact range. Li had seen people die that way. A point-blank shot to the head usually caused respiratory paralysis. Death by suffocation. A death that left scars only the most alert coroner would look closely enough to discover.
Sharifi had been murdered.
She linked through to the planet net and dialed the Shantytown hospital.
“How did you find out already?” Sharpe asked when she got through to him.
“What do you mean? I read the autopsies.”
He blinked, obviously confused. “You’re not calling about the wetware?”
“No. What about it?”
“Haas took it. Or rather, he sent his Syndicate-designed girl Friday down for it.”
“What? How did he even know about it?”
Sharpe rocked back in his chair and raised his eyebrows. “That, Major, is what I was hoping you’d tell me.”
AMC Station: 19.10.48.
Establishing the crime scene turned out to be as impossible as keeping roaches off a space station.
Anaconda’s pitheads formed the tip of a subterranean iceberg, a catacomb of constantly shifting drifts, adits, and ventilation shafts. AMC’s maps lagged far behind the digging no matter how fast the surveyors scrambled to update them. And they didn’t begin to account for the hundreds of kilometers of unreported bolt-holes, mountainside entrances, and bootleggers’ tunnels.
This sprawling, chaotic anthill was filled up, shift after shift, by five daily launches from the station, numerous unscheduled drops of specialized technicians and surveying crews, and a constant, completely unregulated stream of dilapidated ground vehicles shuttling back and forth from Shantytown. No one controlled access or knew, really, who was in the mine during any given shift. The pithead logs were convenient fictions, just like the pithead rules and the posted safety regulations and the rented Davy lamps and oxygen canisters. AMC’s control of the Anaconda was as illusory—even if the illusion had real financial and legal consequences—as a general’s control over a looting, raiding, pillaging army.
“If we can’t catch them going in,” Li finally decided, “we’ll tag them going out.”
The evacuation had taken five shifts, using every available shuttle on-station and every hopper that could be begged, borrowed, or commandeered from the four or five Compson’s World settlements within flight range of the Anaconda. Casualties had been high. The evac teams had begun triage within forty minutes of the first alarm, and they’d tagged and entered every evacuee on handheld monitors uplinked to the station net to create a running dead, wounded, and missing list.
When McCuen cross-referenced the triage lists with the station’s shuttle passenger manifests and the Shantytown hospital’s admission records, they got a solid freeze-frame of who had been where when the mine caught fire.
The list of people who had been underground but not down there on easily verifiable official business was surprisingly short. Jan Voyt, Hannah Sharifi, and Karl Kintz were on it. No surprises there.
But there was a fourth name Li didn’t recognize.
“Who’s Bella?” she asked. “And why don’t we have a full name for him?”
“Bella’s the witch. And that is her whole name, as far as anyone knows.” McCuen grinned lasciviously. “I can go talk to her for you. I’m just a slave to duty.”
“Very funny, Brian.”
“Just kidding,” he said, sobering suddenly. “Besides, anyone who wants to keep working and living on this station would have to be crazy to go fishing in that pond.”
Li started to ask McCuen what he meant, then decided she didn’t want to get sidetracked into a conversation about Haas’s sleeping habits. “What about Kintz?” she asked instead.
Kintz had been more or less invisible since her first morning on-station. What little she’d seen of him had led her to two conclusions.