“I’m trying to catch the person who killed her, Bella. I need your help. I need any help I can get.”
Bella looked at Li for a moment without speaking, then came across the room, knelt in front of her chair between her feet, and laid her pale smooth hands on Li’s thighs. “I want to help,” she whispered. “You have to believe me. I’d do anything to help you.”
Bella’s hands were hot, even through the thick fabric of Li’s uniform. She knew she should put some distance between them, but leaning back into the deep chair seemed too much like an invitation.
And Bella wasn’t looking for that. She was looking for help. For someone to stand up for her, to be the friend Sharifi seemed to have been. She wasn’t looking for Li to get in line behind Haas and who knew how many others to take advantage of her. And the mere fact that she seemed to think she had to offer it made Li sick.
She took Bella’s hands in hers. She put them away from her. She extricated herself from the chair and stepped around the kneeling woman. Bella made no move to stop her.
“Have you ever met Andrej Korchow?” Li asked when she’d gotten far enough away to think straight.
Something snapped closed behind Bella’s eyes. “Who?”
“Korchow.”
“No. Why?”
“I think he was paying Sharifi for information about her project.”
“No!” Bella stood up abruptly. “That’s not the way Hannah was. She didn’t care about money.”
“For someone who didn’t care about money, she spent a lot of time fund-raising.”
“She had to do that. Putting fiche in the printers and cubes in the computers. That’s what she called it. But she didn’t care about it.”
“Then what did she care about? What was it all for?”
Bella stood up and smoothed her dress over her waist in the habitual gesture of someone raised in the low rotational gravity of the Syndicate’s orbital stations. “It was about the crystals. She talked about them all the time. What people were doing to them. She wanted to protect them.”
“From what?”
Bella shrugged. “From… this.” She made a gesture that encompassed Haas’s streamspace terminal, the planet below them, the whole of UN space.
“The miners think the condensates are dying, Bella. Are they?”
She laughed harshly. “We have twenty years of digging left, thirty maybe. The geologists can never agree on the exact number, but what does it matter? The reports never get past management.” She smiled. “It’s AMC’s dirty little secret.”
“Did Sharifi discover that secret?”
“It’s why she came here.”
“Is that what happened in the glory hole, Bella? Did Sharifi try to stop Haas from digging? Did they fight over it?”
“I told you,” Bella said, her voice cracking with frustration, “I don’t know. I can’t remember. But that’s where you have to look. To the mine. To the crystals.”
AMC Station: 22.10.48.
Li had seen her own specs once, at a technical briefing on a troopship off the occulted side of Palestra’s fifth moon, the night before her first combat drop.
It had been excruciating, even in a room of people who had no reason to know that she wasn’t the legally enlisted one-quarter construct she appeared to be. And it changed her life.
She sat in the briefing room, watching the codes scroll up the screen before her, listening to the techs discuss tensile-strength equations and bone-core profiles, self-evolving immune systems, designer intestinal and respiratory flora. And she understood for the first time in her life what she was, what all constructs were. They were beasts of burden. The culmination of ten thousand years of human intervention in Earth’s genetic pool. The universal working animal of the interstellar age.
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 sweat-soaked 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 on-planet. 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 Ring-side 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 squared 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 go
t 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.
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