“You mean you convinced them I was the right person.”
Nguyen smiled at that, but the smile never made it up to her eyes. “Have you had time to catch any spinfeed since you came off ice?”
Li shook her head.
“Ten days ago one of the mines in the Anaconda strike caught fire. The mine director—I forget his name, you’ll have to talk to him when you get there—got the fire under control, but we lost our onstation security chief in the initial explosion, and we need someone there fast to oversee the investigation and help the AMC personnel restart production.”
Nguyen paused, and Li forced herself to sit through the pause without asking the questions they both knew she wanted answered: what any of this had to do with her, and why Nguyen had shipped her halfway to Syndicate territory to pursue a mining accident that should have been handled by the UN’s Mine Safety Commission.
“Everything I’ve told you so far is public record,” Nguyen continued. “What’s not yet public is that Hannah Sharifi died in the fire.”
Li suppressed the flare of guilt and fear that shot through her at the sound of that name. Nguyen didn’t know—couldn’t know—what Sharifi meant to her. That was a secret she’d mortgaged half her life to protect. And she had protected it. She was sure she had.
Almost sure.
Hannah Sharifi was—had been—the most prominent theoretical physicist in UN-controlled space. Her equations had made Bose-Einstein transport possible, had woven themselves into the fabric of UN society until there was hardly a technology that hadn’t been touched by Coherence Theory. But Sharifi’s legend went well beyond her work. She was also a genetic construct—the most famous construct in UN space. News of her death would flood streamspace the moment it went public. And the faintest tinge of scandal would spark off a new round of debates on genetics in the military, genetic mandatory registration, genetic everything.
Li took another sip of water, mainly in order to have something to do with her hands. The water was still cold, and it still went down all wrong. “How long do we have before word of her death gets out?” she asked.
“Another week at most. It’s been all we could do to keep the lid on it this long, frankly. And that’s why I’m sending you there. I want you to pick up the reins for the last station security chief and investigate Sharifi’s death, and I need someone there now, while the trail’s still hot.”
Li frowned. She’d spent the eight years since peace broke out chasing black-market tech instead of being the soldier she’d been trained to be. And now Nguyen was asking her to play cops and robbers?
“You’ve got that look on your face,” Nguyen said. “What look?”
“The look you get when you’re thinking that if you were human, you’d be sitting behind my desk instead of doing my scut work.”
“General—”
“I wonder, Li, would you really be happy playing backroom politics and sitting through budget presentations?”
“I didn’t realize being happy was the point of the exercise.”
“Ah. Still out to change the world, are we? I thought we’d grown out of that.” Li shrugged.
“You’ll put a dent in things, Li. Don’t worry. But not yet. For now what you’re doing out there matters more. The war’s not over. You know that. It didn’t end when we signed the Gilead Accords or the Trade Compact. And the front line of the new war is technology: hardware, wetware, psychware, and, above all, Bose-Einstein tech.”
Nguyen picked up her glass, looked into it like a fortune-teller peering at tea leaves, set it down again without drinking.
“Sharifi was working on a joint project with the Anaconda Mining Corp. She claimed she was close to developing a method for culturing transport-grade Bose-Einstein condensates.”
“I thought that was impossible.”
“We all thought it was impossible. But Sharifi … well, who knows what Sharifi thought. She told us she could do it, and that was enough. She was Sharifi, after all. She’s done the impossible before. So we put together the partnership with AMC. They provided the mine and the condensates. We provided the funding. And … other things. Sharifi sent us a preliminary report ten days ago.”
“And what was in this preliminary report?”
“We don’t know.” Nguyen laughed softly, sounding not at all amused. “We can’t read it.” Li blinked.
“Sharifi transmitted an encrypted file through Compson’s Bose-Einstein relay. But when we decrypted it, we got … noise … garbage … just a bunch of random spins. We’ve put it through every decryption program we have. Nothing. It’s either irretrievably corrupted or it’s entangled with some other datastream that Sharifi failed to transmit to us.”
“So …”
“So I need the original dataset.”
“Why not ask AMC for it if they were cosponsors?” Nguyen raised an eyebrow.
“Ah,” Li said. “We didn’t share it with them.” “We didn’t share it period. And we don’t plan to.”
“All right,” Li said. “So I get the file and keep anyone else from getting it. That’s simple enough. But why me? What makes it worth the shipping bill?”
Nguyen paused, glancing over Li’s shoulder. She was looking out the window, Li realized; the distant, spectrum-enhanced reflection of Barnard’s Star glimmered in her pupils. “There’s more at issue than the missing spinstream,” she said. “In fact, we don’t have any of Sharifi’s results. She seems to have … cleaned things up before she died. It’s as if she wiped every trace of her work off the system. As if she planned to hide it from us.” A chilly smile played across Nguyen’s lips. “So. No Sharifi. No experiment. No dataset. And as if that weren’t bad enough, the station security chief died in the fire with Sharifi. Someone needs to get out there and pick up the pieces, Li. Someone I can trust. Someone who can face down press accusations of a cover-up, if things turn ugly. Who better than the hero of Gilead?”
Li shifted uncomfortably in her chair.
“Don’t look like that,” Nguyen said. “Gilead was the turning point. The press is right about that, no matter how badly they bungled everything else about the war. Gilead brought the Syndicates to the peace table. It kept them away from Compson’s World and everything else we’ve spent the last thirty years protecting. You had the courage to step into the breach when things fell apart and do what had to be done. And you didn’t do anything a real soldier needs to be ashamed of. I saw the realtime feed. I know it, even if you don’t.”
Li had no answer to that. All she remembered—all she was supposed to remember—was the official spinstream. Her realtime feed was classified, deadcached in the data catacombs under Corps HQ on Alba. Gilead wasn’t hers anymore—except in the jump-dreams that put the lie to her official memory and left her with the queasy certainty that all the kinks and evasions it had taken to get off Compson’s World were finally catching up with her.
“People believe in you,” Nguyen insisted. “They trust you. And look in the mirror, for Heaven’s sake. You’re, what, one grandparent away from mandatory registration? And out of the same lab that tanked Sharifi. Have you ever seen holos of her? You could be her sister.” One immaculately groomed eyebrow arched upward. “Isn’t that what you are, technically?”
“More like her granddaughter,” Li said reluctantly. Better for her if people didn’t think of her name in the same breath with the word construct.
“Well, there you are. What reporter in his right mind is going to accuse you of bigotry against your own grandmother?”
Li stared at the floor between her feet. Some long-ago bootheel or chair leg had gouged a swerving path across several of the floorboards, and she marveled at the vividness of it, as real and touchable—while she was caught in this illusion—as the flight deck that her feet really rested on.
There must be a way out, she told herself. She couldn’t go back to Compson’s World. It was insane to think that no one would recognize her. Insane to imagine that someone somewhere wouldn’
t make the fatal connection.
“I’m not sure you appreciate what I’m doing for you,” Nguyen said. “You made a real mess of things on Metz—”
“Only by trusting Cohen.”
“Don’t be naive. Cohen’s untouchable. Tel Aviv proved that. You, however, are eminently touchable.” Nguyen put her elbows on her desk, clasped her hands, looked at Li over the steeple of her fingers. “Did you know that you’re the highest-ranking partial genetic in the Corps?”
What the hell do you think? Li thought. But she kept her mouth shut. Biting her tongue was one skill she’d gotten down cold in the last fifteen years.
“It came up. During your court-martial proceedings. You stand for something, Li. Not everyone likes it. Half the Committee would like nothing better than to chapter you out and forget about you. The other half—me included—would rather not lose you. Things are changing, and you’re part of the change. Don’t throw that away.”
“All right,” Li said. “All right.”
“Good,” Nguyen said. But she was still watching Li carefully, measuringly. “And there’s another problem. Or perhaps I should say another potential problem. We have reason to believe someone intercepted Sharifi’s message.”
Li understood then—and caught her breath as she realized what the stakes were.
The UN had defeated the Syndicates, had held the line through a decade of cold war for one reason: Bose-Einstein transport. The UN had commercial-scale, reliable FTL. The Syndicates didn’t. The UN could put troops into any system with a Bose-Einstein relay on a moment’s notice. The Syndicates couldn’t. The UN had spent the last half century building up a vast interstellar network of banked entanglement that enabled them to safely broadcast quantum data through the transient wormholes of the spinfoam. The Syndicates, in contrast, limped along with haphazard supplies of entanglement pirated from UN ships or bought off bootleg miners through the Freetown black market.
It all came down to Compson’s World and its unique, nonrenewable deposits of Bose-Einstein condensates. But the moment someone discovered how to culture transport-grade condensates, then it would be the new technology of condensate culture that determined control of space. And if the Syndicates got hold of that technology, then the balance of interstellar power, the Trade Compacts—the fragile peace itself—would crumble.
That was why she was on her way to Compson’s World, Li realized. Not just to prevent a leak, but to fix one that Nguyen feared had already happened.
“Who do you think intercepted the message?” she asked, swallowing. “The Syndicates?”
“We don’t know. We hope not, obviously. We just know there was an eavesdropper.”
Li nodded. The Security Council’s standard instream quantum-encryption protocols couldn’t prevent a third party from intercepting any given transmission, but the very nature of quantum information meant that no eavesdropper could intercept a message without collapsing its fragile spin states and thus revealing himself.
“The real question,” Nguyen continued, “is why an unknown person or persons decided to intercept that particular message.”
“Obviously someone told them it was coming.”
“Obviously. But who was it? That’s what I’m sending you to find out.” Nguyen straightened the file in front of her and set it aside. Case closed, the gesture said. End of discussion. “Officially, you’ve simply been diverted to Compson’s to replace the prior station security chief. The rest is … only to be spoken of to me personally.”
“Anything else?”
“Just be your usual discreet and thorough self.” Nguyen’s eyes were as black and unreadable as stones. “And be careful. We’ve already lost one officer down there.”
“Yeah,” Li said. “I meant to ask. Who was it?” “Jan Voyt. I don’t think you knew him.”
“Voyt,” Li repeated, but the name didn’t jog any soft memory loose and all her oracle produced for her were public-access files. “No,” she said, “I don’t think I did know him.”
* * *
After Nguyen signed off, Li moved to a window seat and watched her home star fill up the scratched viewport.
She couldn’t see Compson’s World itself at first; it was second night and the planet was engulfed in the vast gloomy shadow of the companion planet that orbited between it and 51 Pegasi. Then the Companion cleared the trailing edge of the star, and she got her first clear view of AMC station just as its 2 million square meters of photovoltaic panels rotated to the rising sun.
She was still too far away to see the dents of meteor impacts, the frozen streaks of fuel and sewage leaks on the station’s outer skin. From here it looked like a piece of jeweled clockwork. The glittering doublehulled life-support ring spun at an oblique angle to the planet surface, well out of the trajectory of the mass drivers. Nested within the main ring lay the complex interlocking gears of precession ring, spin stablizers, and Stirling engines—a cosmic windmill veiled in the curving black-and-silver dragonfly wings of the solar panels. And below, shrouded in Compson’s murky, processor-generated atmosphere, lay the Anaconda.
No roads tied the mine to Compson’s major cities. The only surface road was a rutted red track that cut across sage and chaparral, passed under the shadow of the antiquated atmospheric processors, and petered out among the gin joints and miner’s flats of Shantytown.
Shantytown wasn’t its map name, of course. But it was what the people who lived there called it. What Li herself had called it.
* * *
She’d been sixteen, four years underground already, when she walked into a cash-only chop shop, clutching a pitifully thin wad of UN currency, and paid a gray-market geneticist to give her a dead girl’s face and chromosomes. That money had been the first real cash she’d ever held: her father’s life insurance payout. She didn’t remember much of that day, but she did recall thinking how funny it was that a man got paid cash money to die and only miner’s scrip for doing the job that killed him.
The genetic work itself had been painless, just a series of injections and blood tests. The scars on her face took longer to heal, but the stakes made it worth waiting for. She’d stepped into the chop shop as a trademarked genetic construct with a red slash across the cover of her passport. When she left, her mitochondria still carried the damning corporate serial number, but the rest of her DNA said she had three natural-born grandparents—enough to make her a citizen. Two days later, she walked into the Peacekeepers’ recruiting post, lied about her age as well as everything else, and started passing.
The recruiting board hadn’t asked too many questions. They’d been desperate for strong young bodies to throw at the Syndicates back then, and the same proprietary geneset that barred her from military service also made her tougher than kudzu vine. Besides, what questions needed asking? She was just another rim-colony miner’s kid looking down the long tunnel of forty years in the pit and deciding that a UN paycheck and a one-way ticket off-planet were worth fighting someone else’s war for.
Getting wired was the hardest part. The psych techs wanted to know everything. Childhood. Family. First time with a boy. First time with a girl. She’d told them whatever she could without letting the truth slip. The rest she’d just let slide. It hadn’t seemed like much of a loss at the time; there was little about growing up on Compson’s that she wanted to remember even if it were safe to have it kicking around in her hard files where the techs could get at it.
Now, fifteen years later, she remembered only the little things. Church bells and midnight mass. The high lonesome moan of the pit whistle. A pale-eyed woman. A thin, tired man, black-skinned on workdays, white as February when he washed the coal dust off his face on Sunday.
Their names were gone. They belonged not to Catherine Li, but to the woman Li had spent her entire adult life erasing—a woman who’d been slipping away, jump by jump, since the day she enlisted.
AMC Station: 13.10.48.
No one met Li at the boarding gate. She waited briefly, th
en went onstream and asked the station for directions to her office.
The UNSC field office was annexed to Station Security—not uncommon in poorly funded periphery jurisdictions—and Security was on the far end of the station, buried in the ramshackle maze of the public-sector arcades and gangways. Most of her fellow passengers peeled off into the corporate spokes, and soon she was walking alone. As she moved into the public arcs, magtubes gave way to slidewalks, slidewalks to solid decking, decking to virusteel gridplate.
She saw old people everywhere, people obviously out of work, though she didn’t see how anyone without at least a foreman’s salary could afford the air tax. As she moved into the poorer sections of the life-support ring, she understood: they were lung-shot miners, most of them, wearing nose tubes and towing wheeled oxygen tanks. AMC must have reached some kind of black-lung settlement since she’d left, given orbital residency to the worst cases.
She also saw women in chador. She tried to remember if there’d been any Interfaithers on Compson’s in her childhood. It was hard to imagine them converting the hard-luck, hard-drinking Catholics she’d grown up with. But then fanaticism of every stripe was a growth industry on the Periphery—and if you could see the Virgin Mary in a Bose-Einstein crystal, it probably wasn’t much of a stretch to see the Devil in an implanted interface.
She threaded her way through a maze of tired window displays, cheap VR signs, bars, fast-food joints. She ducked into a hole-in-the-wall called the All Nite Noodle; it didn’t look like much, but was crowded and it smelled better than the other places.
“What do you want?” asked the woman at the counter. “What do you have?”
“Real eggs. Cost a lot, but they’re worth it.”
Li scanned the overhead menu. Holos of noodles and vegeshrimp; holos of noodles and vegepork; holos of noodles and every conceivable shape and flavor of algae-based protein. Someone had pasted a handwritten fiche under the noodles and fried eggs holo upping the price to twelve dollars UN.
Spin 01 - Spin State Page 5