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.
“Hey,” the woman said. “You don’t want ’em, get something else. But get something; I got a line behind you.”
“Eggs, then,” Li said, and they shook left-handed to make the credit transfer.
“Sprang for the eggs,” the line cook said when she slid down the counter toward him.
“Haven’t had real ones in years,” Li said.
“My brother’s got chickens. Sends the eggs up from Shantytown on the mine shuttle. Shipped us a whole chicken last year. Not that we sold it.” He grinned, and Li saw the long indigo blue line of a coal scar slicing across the point of his chin. “Ate the sucker in one sitting.”
They were running spinfeed on the shop’s livewall. NowNet. Politics. As Li turned to look, Cohen’s face flashed across the screen, big and pretty as life. He stood on the marble steps of the General Assembly Building, formal in a dark suit and striped tie. A gaggle of reporters were hurling questions at him about the latest AI suffrage resolution.
“It’s not about special rights for Emergents,” he was saying in answer to a question Li hadn’t heard. “It’s simply a question of the basic respect owed to all persons, whether they’re running on code or genesets. The limited-suffrage faction would like to have things both ways. All pigs are equal, according to our opponents—but some pigs are more equal than others. That’s a step away from equality, not toward it.”
He was shunting through Roland, a golden-haired, golden-eyed boy who could have passed for a girl except for the coppery shadow above his upper lip. Li had met the kid once when he came by Cohen’s place on his day off. They’d had a surreal tea during which he’d explained earnestly to her over buttered scones and Devonshire cream that he was putting himself through medical school on what Cohen paid him.
The woman hanging on Cohen’s, or rather Roland’s, arm would have been taller than him even without the three-inch heels. Li recognized her face from the fashion spins, but she couldn’t tell if the carefully painted features were natural or synthetic.
“So what you’re after is one-for-one universal suffrage?” a reporter asked, seizing on Cohen’s last words. “That sounds like a nod toward repealing the genetics laws.”
Cohen laughed and put up a hand, fending off the question. “That’s someone else’s cause,” he said. “I wouldn’t dream of trying to break up a squabble between primates.”
“And what would you say to those who claim that your own connections with the Consortium have had a negative impact on the AI suffrage movement?” asked another reporter.
Cohen turned toward the reporter slowly, as if he couldn’t quite believe what Roland’s ears were hearing. Li wondered if the reporter noticed the slight pause before his smile, if he understood the fury that lurked behind that serene, inhuman stillness.
“There is no connection with the Consortium,” Cohen said coolly, “and our opponents’ attempts to portray a legal association like ALEF as the political arm of the Consortium or any of its component AIs are, quite simply, slanderous.”
“Still,” the reporter pursued. “You can’t deny that your… lifestyle has clouded the issue in these hearings.”
“My lifestyle?” Cohen unleashed his most dazzling smile on the camera. “I’m as boring as a binary boy can be. Just ask my ex-wives and -husbands.”
Li rolled her eyes, hacked into the livewall’s controls, and flipped to the sports feed.
“Whoever did that, beer on me!” called a drunken voice from one of the back tables. Li ignored it; she was busy watching the Yankees’ new phenom deliver a filthy curveball.
“There you go,” the cook said, handing her noodles over the scratched countertop. Li turned her hand palm up as she took the plate from him, baring the silver matte lines of her wire job where the ceramsteel ran just under the skin of the inner wrist.
“So you’re our sports fan,” he said. “How d’you like the Yanks for the Series?”
“I like ’em fine.” Li grinned. “They’re gonna lose, of course. But I still like them.”
The cook laughed, the coal scar standing out neon-bright along his jawline. “Come back for game one, and I’ll give you a free meal. I need one goddamn person in here who’s not a Mets fan.”
Li left the noodle shop and walked on, eating as she went. The streets and arcades were filling up. The graveyard shift had come up from the mine, and second-shift workers were making their way to the planet-bound shuttles. The bars were all open. Most of them were running spinfeed, but a few had live music even at this time of the morning.
The crackling moan of a badly amplified fiddle stopped Li in her tracks outside one bar. A girl’s voice rose above the fiddle, and suddenly Li was smelling disinfectant, bleached sheets, the mold-heavy air of Shantytown. A pale old-young man lay in a hospital bed, his skin several sizes too large for him. Across the room, a doctor held up a badly out-of-focus X ray.
A stranger brushed by Li, knocking her sideways, and she realized she was blinking back tears.
“You gonna eat that?” someone asked.
She looked up to find a skinny old drunk staring at her noodles with rheumy eyes.
“Shit, take it,” she said, and walked on.
* * *
She’d expected Security to be quiet this time of night. She should have known better. AMC Orbital was a mining town; even at 4A.M.—especially at 4A.M.—the drunk tank was up and running.
Dingy government office yellow light seeped through double-hinged viruflex doors into the side street. Large block letters on the doors read, “AMC SECURITY, A DIVISION OF ANACONDA MINING COMPANY, S.A.” And below, in much smaller letters, “Organización de Naciónes Unidas 51PegB18.”
The station’s front room did double duty as main office and holding facility. A chest-height counter stretched across its midsection, corralling the public out or Security in, depending which side of the counter you were stuck on. Someone had slapped a careless coat of paint onto the walls, in a nursery-school pink that was no doubt supposed to make arrestees less likely to start fights. It worked, Li thought; she’d have made friends with her worst enemy to get away from the color.
One wall supported a Corps surplus bulletin board festooned with several years’ accumulation of station directives, workplace safety warnings, and wanted posters. The bench below it groaned under the night’s catch of scatter junkies and unlicensed prostitutes. The whole place had a resigned, halfhearted air. Even the criminals on the wanted posters looked too pinched and petty to have stolen anything valuable or killed anyone important.
When Li arrived the duty sergeant had one eye on the customers and the other on his desktop spinfeed, where some washed-up ballplayer was pointing to a map of pre-Embargo New York and explaining what a subway series was.
“Sergeant,” Li said as she bellied up to the counter.
He looked up reluctantly, then snapped to his feet when he saw the chrome on her shoulder tabs. “Jesus, Bernadette!” he said, looking past her. “How many times do I have to tell you?”
Li blinked and turned to look over her shoulder. One of the whores on the bench—the one sitting immediately below the no-smoking sign—had a lit cigarette in her hand. Her skinny body was covered with skintight latex, except for the upper slope of her breasts, which sported a writhing smart tattoo. She was pregnant, and L
i struggled not to stare at her bizarrely swollen belly.
“Put it out, Bernadette!” the duty sergeant snapped.
The woman crushed the cigarette out on the sole of one boot and sketched a rude gesture with its mangled corpse. Her tattoo crawled up onto her forehead and did something nasty.
“Sorry, ma’am,” the sergeant said, speaking to Li again. “Can I help you?”
“Looking for my office, actually.”
He read her name tag, started nervously, then glanced over his shoulder toward an unmarked door behind the counter. “Uh… they weren’t expecting your flight in for another few hours. Let me call back and tell—”
“Don’t bother,” Li said, already crossing through the security field and skirting around the fake wood-finish desks toward the back office.
She stepped into a narrow hallway floored and ceilinged in battleship gray gridplate. The security chief’s office was second on the right; Li could still see the torn-up paint where someone had removed Voyt’s name. The adhesive hadn’t wanted to come unstuck; the V and pieces of the Y and T were still visible.
“The king is dead,” she muttered to herself. “Long live the king.”
The office door was open. She stepped through it—and saw two men bent over her desk, rummaging through the desk drawers. Her kit lay on the floor in front of the desk, forwarded from the transport ship. She couldn’t be sure, but she thought it looked like they’d searched that too.
“Gentlemen,” she said quietly.
They both snapped to attention. Li’s oracle pulled up their dossiers as she read their name tags. Lieutenant Brian Patrick McCuen and Captain Karl Kintz. Both men were technically under her command, but they were commissioned in Compson’s planetary militia, not the Peacekeepers. In Li’s experience that meant they could be anything from perfectly decent local cops to street thugs in uniform. It also meant that no matter how much she threw her weight around, she was never going to command their undivided loyalty; in the back of their minds they’d always know that she’d leave sooner or later, and they’d still have to answer to the company.
They were big men, both of them. Li found herself measuring them instinctively, adding up reach, weight, muscle tone, wondering if they were wired. Hell of a way to think about your own junior officers, she told herself.
“Ma’am,” said McCuen. He was blond and lanky, a freckle-faced kid whose uniform looked freshly pressed even at this impossible hour of the morning. “We were cleaning out Voyt’s, um, your desk. We didn’t expect you so soon.”
“Obviously,” Li said.
McCuen fidgeted with the stack of fiche in his hands; he looked embarrassed about the situation and too young to hide his embarrassment.
Kintz, on the other hand, just stood there smirking at her like he didn’t give a shit what she thought. “Someone better tell Haas she’s here,” he said, and brushed past Li into the hall without even excusing himself.
Li let him go; no percentage in starting a fight until she was sure she could win it.
“I’m really, really sorry about this,” McCuen said. “We should have gotten the office cleaned up, met you at Customs. We’ve been running around like maniacs since the fire, is the problem. Rescue, body ID, cleanup. We’re really shorthanded.”
She looked at the boy’s face, saw the telltale puffiness around his eyes that said he’d been through not one but several sleepless nights in the last few station cycles. “Well,” she said mildly, “at least you had time to make sure my bags got here.”
He coughed at that, and Li watched a red flush spread over his fair skin. “That was on Haas’s orders,” he said after glancing up and down through the gridplating to make sure no one was in the adjoining rooms. “I didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“Haas. He’s the station exec?”
McCuen nodded.
“That how the militia works here, Brian? You pulling down a corporate paycheck on the side?”
“No! Look at my file. I just want out of here and into the War College.”
So. McCuen wanted a ticket into the freshman class at Alba. That made all kinds of sense on a periphery planet like Compson’s. Bose-Einstein transport fueled an interstellar economy in which data, commercial goods, and a few properly wired humans could cross interstellar distances almost instantaneously. But uplinks, VR rigs, and spinstream access time still cost so much that most colonials spent their entire lives planetbound, stuck in the ebbs and deadwaters of the interstellar economy. The military was the best way out for ambitious colonials—sometimes the only way out. It was certainly the way she had taken.
Li sent her oracle on a fishing trip through McCuen’s files, and it came back with a stream of data, from his primary-school grades to records from a government school in Helena to a string of applications to Alba, all denied.
“You must want it bad,” she said. “You applied three times.”
McCuen started. “That doesn’t show up in my file. How—?”
“Voyt wouldn’t recommend you,” she said, twisting the knife a little. “Why not?”
His flush deepened. Li looked into his face and saw distress, embarrassment, earnest hopefulness.
“Never mind. You do a good honest job while I’m here and you’ll get to Alba.”
McCuen shook his head angrily. “You don’t need to cut deals with me to get me to do my job.”
“I’m not cutting deals,” Li said. “It’s your choice. Do a bad job, I’ll show you the door. Do a good job, I’ll make sure the right people know it. Got a problem with that?”
“Of course not.” He started to say something else, but before Li could hear it, quick steps rattled on the hall gridplate.
The footsteps stopped and Kintz stuck his head through the doorway. “Haas wants to see her. Now.”
* * *
Haas’s desk floated on stars.
It was live-cut from a single two-meter-long Bose-Einstein condensate. Sub-communications grade, more of a curiosity than anything else, but still it must be priceless. Its polished face revealed the schistlike structure of the bed that had calved it. Its diamond facets mirrored the stars beyond the transparent ceramic compound floor panel so that the desk seemed to hang above empty space in a pool of reflected starlight.
Haas was a big man, bullish around the neck and shoulders, with an aura of resolutely clamped-down violence. He looked like a man who enjoyed losing his temper, but had learned to ration out that particular pleasure with iron self-discipline. And he looked nothing like the kind of man Li would have expected to find running AMC’s crown jewel mine.
He had the accessories down pat. His suit hung well on his big frame even in station gravity. The strong-jawed, aggressively norm-conforming face must have cost a bundle in gene therapy and cosmetic surgery. But his body showed signs of hard living, and his handshake, when he rose behind his desk to greet Li, was the crushing, callused grip of a man who had done rough labor in heavy gravity.
Li glanced at his hand as she shook it and saw a functional-looking watch strapped around his powerful wrist. Was he completely unwired? Allergic to ceramsteel? Religious objections? Either way, it took steel-plated ambition and an unbreakable work ethic to make it into corporate management without being wired for direct streamspace access.
Haas gestured to an angular, expensive-looking chair. Li sat, the ripstop of her uniform pants squeaking against cowhide. She tried to tell herself it was just tank leather, as artificial as everything else in the room, Haas included. Still, even the idea of making a chair out of a mammal was intimidatingly decadent.
“I’m in a hurry,” Haas said as soon as she was seated. “Let’s get this out of the way fast.”
“Fine,” Li answered. “Like to clear something up first, though. Want to tell me why you had my bags searched?”
He shrugged, completely unembarrassed. “Standard procedure. You’re a quarter genetic. Your transfer papers say so. Nothing personal, Major. It’s the rules.”
“UN rules or company rules?”
“My rules.”
“You made an exception for Sharifi, I assume?”
“No. And when she complained about it, I told her the same fucking thing I’m telling you.”
Li couldn’t help smiling at that. “Any other rules I should bear in mind?” she asked. “Or do you make them up as you go along?”
“Too bad about Voyt,” Haas said, shifting gears abruptly enough to leave Li feeling vaguely disoriented. “He was a good security officer. He understood that some things are UN business and some things are company business. And that we’re all here for one reason: to keep the crystal flowing.” He rocked back in his chair and its springs creaked under his weight. “Some of the security officers I’ve worked with haven’t understood that. Things haven’t turned out well for them.”
“Things didn’t turn out so well for Voyt either,” Li observed.
“What do you want?” Haas said, putting his feet up on the gleaming desk. “Promises?”
Haas’s account of the fire was brief and to the point. The trouble had started while Sharifi was underground running one of her closely guarded live field experiments. The station monitors had logged a power surge in the field AI that controlled AMC’s orbital Bose-Einstein array, and the power surge had been followed almost immediately by a flash fire in the Anaconda’s newly opened Trinidad seam. Haas dispatched a rescue team to douse the pit fire, pulled everyone out of the Trinidad, and shut down the bottom four levels of the mine pending a safety inspection. The field AI seemed to right itself after the brief power surge; no one had given it another thought.
Haas and Voyt went underground with the safety inspector to visit the ignition point. They weren’t able to pinpoint the fire’s cause, but they recommended suspension of Sharifi’s experiment pending further investigation. A recommendation that the Controlled Technology Committee rejected. They reopened the seam as soon as they could get the pumps and the ventilators back on-line, and the miners—and Sharifi’s research team—went back to work.
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