Spin 01 - Spin State

by Chris Moriarty

  That knowledge stuck with her through all the jumps and all the new planets that came after that briefing. It lurked at the back of her mind whenever she hefted a heavy load, put in a long day’s work, slipped into streamspace, took a lover in her arms.

  She thought it again now as she crouched on the practice mat and watched McCuen strip off his sweatsoaked T-shirt, baring a freckled torso that spoke of a good exercise regimen and an only mildly tweaked geneset. A little tougher, stronger, stockier than human norm, but still the product of two parents and the random collision of forty-six chromosomes. Still street legal and well beyond the long arm of TechComm.

  “Hot as hell in here,” McCuen said, and threw his shirt to the edge of the mat. “And that’s leaving aside the fact that you’re driving me into massive oxygen debt. You sure you’re not cheating?”

  “Swear to God,” Li said. “Got my whole system powered down.” She stood, pulled off her own shirt, and wiped her dripping face with it. “See that?” She pointed to the ridged muscle on her stomach. “Worked my ass off for that. Something you might bear in mind next time you decide to sleep late instead of dragging your sorry tail to the gym.”

  There was a mirror on the far wall, and as she turned, she caught a glimpse of herself. She saw what she always saw: stocky, hard-muscled body; genetically preset 6 percent body fat; chest flat enough to make feminine modesty as theoretical as athletic support.

  It took a hell of a lot of work to maintain a military-grade wire job. Hours of gym time just to keep up the muscle strength and bone density that protected you from stress fractures. And though Li’s construct genes gave her the luxury of skimping on that work, she didn’t. It was her one vanity.

  She glanced in the mirror again. Cohen was right, she thought critically; she looked thin. Too many jumps, too little gym time. She ought to get Sharpe to send up a case of hormone shots before she overdid it and pulled something.

  “You don’t go in for the smart tattoos, huh?” McCuen said, pointing to the baby blue UNSC on her left shoulder.

  She’d gotten the tattoo along with her whole platoon sometime during the wild week of drinking that had followed her first live-fire action. The names of her fellow initiates had slipped out of soft memory, but she still felt the cold sharp sting of the needle, could still see the intent face of the dockside tattoo artist bent over his work.

  “Good thing it’s not on the other arm,” McCuen said. “Scar would have gone straight through it.”

  Li twisted to get a glimpse of the blue letters, the first time she could remember looking at them in years. She grinned, acutely aware of the clichéd ridiculousness of the tattoo. “Perish the thought!”

  She’d set up the Security-personnel physical-training program for fun more than anything else, and any benefit to on-station morale was a side perk. The main point of the sessions was that they created an at least arguably official excuse to round up the half dozen Security personnel on-station and tussle. She wasn’t going to give them some line of crap about how practicing carefully choreographed moves with a line soldier whose internals were powered down was going to open up glorious new career opportunities. She just set a time, showed up, and left it at that. If they wanted to come, they could. If they didn’t, they didn’t.

  And McCuen had wanted it. Wanted it enough to show up, morning after morning, and take the punishment she doled out. He was on fire, a single track of idealistic ambition. When she worked with him Li could feel the old heat coming on, the sharp edge of a happiness she hadn’t felt since long before Metz. If she could get him a ticket off Compson’s, she caught herself thinking, maybe her time here wouldn’t be a dead loss after all.

  “You’ve really never been back here since you enlisted?” he asked, as they worked on the footing for a particularly complicated throw Li was trying to teach him. “Why not? Bad memories?”

  Li loafed over to the side of the mat, took a drink of water, wiped her face and hands. “Not really. Just never had a reason to.”

  “No family?”

  She hesitated. “Not that I know of.”

  They worked through the move a few more times in silence, McCuen picking it up quickly and grinning with delight when Li finally let him throw her at something like full speed—an indulgence she knew was a mistake the moment her sore shoulder hit the mats.

  “No family makes it easier, I guess,” he said, picking up where they’d left off. “My parents aren’t so hot on the Corps. They’ve been reading about wetware side effects, jump amnesia.” He smiled and shrugged, trying to pass off the concern as his parents’, something only old people would worry about. Li answered the implied question anyway.

  “If you cooperate with the psychtechs and back everything up carefully, you shouldn’t forget much. Otherwise … sure, you can lose a lot. But even if something goes wrong, it’s not the way it was ten years ago. They’ve been minimizing jumps, moving personnel around much less. Even enlisted troops. Hell, you could pull a permanent assignment on one planet, never jump more than a half dozen times in your whole career. If the peace holds.”

  “If the peace holds. That’s the kicker, isn’t it?”

  “What do you want?” Li asked, amused to hear herself echoing Haas’s words of a few weeks ago. “Promises?”

  A flush bloomed behind McCuen’s freckles. “That’s not what I meant. It’s just … the war gave a lot of colonials a chance to prove themselves. People like you. People who would never have gotten a shot at command in peacetime. Now that’s gone. And back home it’s even worse. We’ve got the multiplanetaries doing business with the Syndicates, trading away what few jobs there were on Compson’s for locals. There are mines on the southern hemisphere that already have D Series constructs working underground. Replacing miners. My dad keeps telling me to stay home and run the store, but where’s the future in it? Once the multiplanetaries figure out they can use Syndicate labor, that’s the end of the independents and the bootleggers. And no more bootleggers means no more UN currency onplanet. And no more UN dollars means company scrip only, which means the company stores are going to finally squeeze out the rest of us. Things keep going the way they’re going, and there’ll be the Ringside multis and the Syndicates, and that’s it. Nothing left for the little guy except a government post. If you can get one.”

  “They really have D Series working Bose-Einstein deposits?” Li asked. She’d never heard that, couldn’t imagine how TechComm had allowed it.

  “Working everywhere,” McCuen said. “You name it. Why hire a born worker when you can sign a thirty-year contract and get someone who’s programmed to do the job for free and can be replaced with another clone if they get sick or start causing trouble?”

  Why indeed?Li thought.

  “Hey,” McCuen said. “Sorry to rant. You want to grab dinner tonight with some of the other day-shift guys? Catch a game or something?”

  “Can’t.” Li grinned. “Hot date.”

  McCuen looked at her and bit his lip. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Just … it’s not with Bella, is it?” “Excuse me?”

  “Small station, that’s all. Rumors travel.”

  “Well, in this case, they’re unfounded. Whatever they are.”

  “Good,” McCuen said. He seemed about to add something else, then stopped. “I just wouldn’t like to see you get hurt,” he said finally.

  Li was about to ask who he thought was going to hurt her when Kintz walked into the gym with his usual gang of sidekicks.

  “Morning,” he said to Brian. “Getting a little private tutoring?”

  McCuen flushed, just as Kintz had intended him to, and Li groaned internally; McCuen would never command a grade-school class, let alone combat troops, if he couldn’t learn to brush off that kind of nonsense.

  “Feeling neglected?” she shot at Kintz. “I can fix that.” And within a minute the others had taken her unsubtle hints about applying themselves to the weight machines, and she and Kintz had squ
ared off against each other on the last practice mat away from the door.

  Kintz was fast and accurate, and even with his internals powered down for safety purposes he moved with the surefooted speed of a professional. Normally it would have been an unadulterated pleasure to be faced with such an able opponent. But there was something about Kintz that made Li not want to get into the clinches with him. Not want to touch him, even.

  She settled into her rhythm, feeling out her opponent, looking for whatever she could use against him. Kintz was good. Far better than anyone else on-station. But he wasn’t as good as he thought he was, and that faint tinge of complacency gave Li a hole big enough to drive a tank through.

  She moved him around the mat, still assessing his footwork, letting him feel like he was getting a few hits in. It was a necessary sacrifice given his longer reach, but every time he landed a blow she regretted the pounds she’d dropped since Metz—pounds that would have spared her ribs and given her something to push back with when he closed on her.

  She was starting to see something she could work with, though. Kintz preferred to hit right-handed and his footwork was particularly clumsy when she pushed him back and to the left. The trick of course was to play off that weakness without alerting him to it. And to do that she had to stay outside, mix it up, keep him moving. And of course let him get in those sucker hits.

  She drew him into the middle of the mat, dancing around him. He caught her on a lucky kick, missing her knee but momentarily catching her instep. It threw her off-balance just long enough for him to catch up with her.

  They grappled, each of them trying for a grip, for purchase. He had caught her in an awkward position, and she felt him improving his hold, getting a wrestler’s lock on her. She planted a leg, grunting with the effort, leaned into him with her good shoulder, and threw him.

  The flash of anger in his eyes was unmistakable, but he recovered his balance and his attitude quickly. “Nice trick,” he said. “Guess you didn’t just sleep your way to the top.”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know,” Li answered, resisting the urge to stamp on his fingers.

  McCuen and the others had drifted over, drawn by the thud of Kintz’s body hitting the mat. “If you think this is worth watching, you’ve got a lot to learn,” Li told them, and they drifted away again, looking embarrassed.

  Kintz was pushing her now. He’d been doing his own weighing and balancing during the meet-and-greet sparring; now he was going after her bad arm with the fierce instincts of a street fighter. He was getting winded, though. She heard the faint whistle of constricting air passages every time he sucked breath. That was something, she thought, and ducked in under his guard, chancing a risky move.

  Five years ago it would have worked. But she wasn’t as fast as she’d been five years ago. He caught her hip with a blow that sent her staggering, and in that fraction of a second’s hesitation, he had her. He went after her bad arm, and she struggled to keep him from getting a grip on it. When things sorted out, he had her in a neck lock.

  When he spoke, his voice was so twisted by the effort of holding the lock on her that she didn’t at first register the sounds as words. Then she understood them and felt a cold rush of adrenaline course through her.

  “I could snap your neck right now,” he said. “Who’d ever think it was anything but an accident? I could tell them you wanted to fight with safeties off, and you just shit ran out of luck.”

  She tried to slip her hands under his arm and get the pressure off her neck, but he jerked at her hard enough to put the thought out of her mind.

  “You think you’re special, don’t you?” he whispered. “Think you can just walk in and start poking sticks at people? Think we’ll all just jump to it? Right, Major? Whatever you say, Major?”

  Li bent her knees, felt out Kintz’s balance, took a chance, and managed to throw him again. “Piss off, Kintz. You and Haas. You are his errand boy, aren’t you?”

  Kintz wiped his mouth, and his hand came away red. “You don’t have a fucking clue, do you?” he said. Then he was on his feet, and they were back at it.

  She never figured out how he got by her the next time, but suddenly he had her. His right arm snaked out and caught her under the jaw. His left twisted her bad arm behind her back so tightly she felt ceramsteel grate and creak against cartilage. He lifted her onto her toes, using his height to deny her leverage. She felt his ribs pressing into her back, smelled sweat and cheap aftershave. She gathered herself, braced her feet, textbook fashion, and tried to throw him.

  Kintz laughed. “That the best you can do, Major?” He was as solid as rock behind her. Or, more accurately, as solid as ceramsteel.

  Adrenaline had kicked her internals on a few times already during the fight, and she had shut them off just as quickly. Now she turned them on and left them on. She twisted and strained, pushing protesting tendons and ligaments within a millimeter of breaking. Nothing budged. He had a solid grip on her, and even with her internals pushed as far as she could risk pushing them, he was just plain stronger than she was.

  “The Corps isn’t juicing you guys like it used to,” Kintz said. “Or maybe you’re just behind the curve.” He twisted her arm until her knees buckled and her vision shut down to a red-hazed tunnel.

  “I know what you are,” he whispered, his breath hot in her ear. “I can buy half-bred cunts like you in every whorehouse in Helena. This isn’t Gilead. You don’t have an army to back you up here. And I’ll show you what that means if you don’t mind your nasty little digger business.”

  Her first urge was to fight, driven by the massive dose of adrenaline her internals were shooting through her system. Then she thought it through and almost laughed at the ridiculous childishness of the situation. What the hell did she care? What point was there in damaging herself in order to not have Kintz be able to say he’d beaten her on the practice mat? She forced herself to go limp in his arms, waiting.

  It worked, after a fashion.

  “Stupid slut,” Kintz muttered under his breath. He let go of her arm, but as he did he slipped his foot in front of hers, almost sending her sprawling. Her internals kept her on her feet, but by the time she turned to face him he’d already crossed his arms and pasted his usual grin back onto his face.

  She laughed, aware that her hands were shaking with rage. “That was fun. We’ll have to do it again sometime.”

  “Sure.” Still grinning. “See you around.”

  She stood in the middle of the mat, weight on her toes, and tracked him all the way to the door. She must have looked as shaken as she felt; before she could pull herself together, McCuen came and stood in front of her with a worried look on his face.

  “Okay, Major?” She heard his voice through a haze of adrenaline, as if he were speaking from somewhere far away.

  “I’m fine,” she said, running a dripping hand over her hair. “But that son of a bitch needs an attitude adjustment.”

  * * *

  The glory hole.

  Light and silence. A fullness of space like the rush inside a conch shell. Pillars that were ribs leaping up into the wild geometry of the fan vaults, raising the roof of a living cathedral.

  Li had last seen it in the dark and underwater. Now she was seeing it as the miners had seen it, as Sharifi had seen it. And Bella was right; it did sing. Li might not hear the music the witch heard, but her internals were going wild, overloaded by the quantum storm that raged in the glory hole’s gleaming belly.

  There had been problems draining it. It had taken the cleanup crew much longer than expected to shore up the surrounding passages and run the pumps in. And for several tense days they had struggled to find an underground river, broken out of its banks by the fire and subsequent flooding, that kept refilling the Trinidad’s lower levels as fast as they could drain them.

  The work went even slower because the miners, except for the pit Catholics, wouldn’t work the glory hole. It was a place surrounded by fearful superstition, as terribl
e to some people as it had been fascinating to Sharifi.

  Something cracked and skittered away from Li’s foot. She bent, her headlamp raking the rough floor with shadows, and saw two glittering red eyes flashing back at her. She touched the thing and heard a little clack like the sound of two marbles kissing. She picked it up.

  It was plastic. The kind of cheap, locally produced petroleum product that always cluttered up Compson’s markets. Two red marbles connected by a loop of black elastic. It was a Love-in-Tokyo, a cheap bauble to tie off a little girl’s ponytail. Li herself had worn one in some faded past in which she’d actually been a little girl with a ponytail. Reflexively, she pulled the elastic around her wrist and slipped the plastic marble through the loop. She heard the click as it fastened, felt the elastic bite into her wrist, the smooth pressure of plastic beads against her skin. A memory rose up out of the deep rift of her unconscious, fierce and precise, a child’s vision of night and fear.

  It had been some other glory hole she had visited, not this one. A hole long since dug out and sold off piece by piece by AMC or some other company. Her mother had carried her. Her father was there, nearby but not with them. It was in another deposit; she remembered long hours on the rough mountain roads, borrowed rebreathers passed from hand to hand in the shaking, grinding truck bed under the flapping canvas. It was dark when they left, darker when they got there, darkest in the hot muttering mine. She had been terrified by the noises the mine made, by all those tons of mountain shifting and grumbling above her. I am inside a beast, she remembered thinking, swallowed alive, like Jonah.

  The memory dropped away from her. She shook her head and looked around. What had they been doing in that other glory hole? Why had they gone there? She followed the vein of the memory, trying to pick it up further along, pry loose some concrete recollection. Nothing.

  “What’s that?” McCuen asked, pointing at the Love-in-Tokyo.

  Li jumped; she’d forgotten him. Then she held it out for him to see.

  He grinned. “Doesn’t look like Sharifi’s style exactly.”