Chris Moriarty - Spin State

Her feet knew the way to the Molly almost as well as they knew the way to her house. Five minutes later she was stepping into the front room of the rusty Quonset hut and shouldering her way past the laughing, jostling crowd that always seemed to mill around the Molly’s threshold.

Every table she could see was taken. Even at the bar there were only a few empty stools left. She found one and settled onto it.

“Triple,” she said to the barkeep. He started slightly, but only at the unfamiliar face; half the Molly’s regulars were at least part construct, and even the most Irish of the Irish bore the marks of Migration-era genesplicing. The triple stout was good when it came, thick and peaty and so rich you could drink it instead of a meal in a pinch. Whatever else might go on at the Molly, or in the dark alleys behind it, the beer was on the up and up.

She drank thirstily and looked around the long, narrow space under the curving roof. Nothing had changed here except her. There were the same hard-muscled, hard-faced miners that still stalked her dreams. There were the pictures of famous local sons and the cups and ribbons of twenty years’ soccer championships gathering dust above the bar. There were the same cheap wall holos, opening onto the stone walls and heartbreakingly green fields of Ireland.

Li let the talk flow around her, listening to the hard-edged flat-voweled voices, relishing the same Saturday night arguments that had always bored her to tears. Wives trying to get their husbands to dance. Husbands trying to keep arguing about soccer and politics. The inevitable table of Gaelic speakers, talking a little too loud and sounding a little too much like they’d learned it out of books. The loners at the bar solving life’s injustices with drunken earnestness. But there weren’t many loners at the Molly, of course. Everyone was someone’s cousin, someone’s brother. Even the shabbiest drunk had two or three or five friends ready to stand by him in a fight or just carry him home if he needed it.

She could see the door into the back room, and she could guess what would be going on in there on a busy Saturday night. Cartwright had been a backroom regular, she remembered. So had her five-years-older-than-her third cousin. The one who taught her to shoot. The one with whom she had stolen her first, groping, furtive kisses up on the hill behind the atmospheric processors. What had happened to him? Killed, she thought. But she couldn’t remember if it was in the mine or back on Earth. How could she have forgotten his name? Well, all the backroom regulars would be at the big table tonight. Living in the past. Planning the next futile gesture. Hanging on every word of some hard-eyed young Republican just back from Belfast or Londonderry. She’d never known whether they were for real or not, those boys. She still didn’t know.

A movement caught her eye. She glanced sideways and locked eyes with a broad-shouldered redhead leaning against the back wall watching her. He pushed off the wall and shouldered through the crowd toward her.

“Sláinte,” he said when he reached her. Li noticed that another man had come up behind him. Neither of them were smiling.

“Sláinte yourself,” she said.

“Need some help, sweetheart?”

“Not unless you can help me drink alone.”

His eyes narrowed. “I suppose you just got lost and wandered in here by accident?”

“I suppose.”

“Like to make a donation then?” His tone suggested that refusal was not an option.

“What for?”

“Irish orphan relief.”

“Oh.” So that was all it was. Li almost laughed. “How many new guns do the orphans need this winter?” she asked, pulling out her billfold.

“Very funny. And we don’t take cash.”

He pulled a portable scanner from his pocket and held it toward her. His companion slipped around behind her stool, cutting off any possibility of retreat.

Li stared over the smaller man’s shoulder for a moment, straight into a bleak holo of jumpship-sized icebergs calving off the Armagh glacier. Then she shrugged and ran her palm across the scanner.

The redhead looked at the readout, blinked, and looked back up at her. “What do you want here?”

“I’m looking for Mirce Perkins. Someone said she’d be here.”

“She’s here, all right.” He hailed the bartender, who arrived so fast he had to have been watching. “She’s looking for Mirce. A cop.”

A slow tidal effect swept through the bar as he said the word. People shifted subtly in their seats, or even took new seats farther away from Li. A few customers slunk toward the exits. Li watched with amusement, but it still worried her; there were a lot of dark alleys between here and the safe house, and she’d been a fool to let herself be tagged as Corps personnel in a place where her internals were worth more money than the rest of the patrons would ever legally earn in their lives. Then Mirce Perkins stepped out of the back room, and Li forgot about the walk back to the flop and the precautions she should have taken and everything else except the woman walking toward her.

She knew that face. And not just from distant childhood memories. It was the woman she had seen with Daahl. The woman who’d made him jump when she walked up to them at the pithead. The woman who, in fact, he’d never actually introduced to Li.

Li searched the strong-boned face, the wire-muscled miner’s body for some point of commonality. Some sign that they had shared a home and a life with each other. Some hint that this was the woman who had masterminded the swindle that sprang Li, against all odds, from the trap of Compson’s World. She saw none of those things. Just a hard-eyed stranger.

“Mrs. Perkins?”

She lit a cigarette, cupping her hand over the flame so that Li could see the missing joint on the first finger—and the new ring on the third finger. “It’s not Perkins,” she said. “I remarried.”

Li’s heart skipped treacherously as if it had slipped on a patch of black ice and almost gone down hard. She’d never thought about her mother’s remarrying. Certainly never imagined her having other children. Somehow, in some part of Li’s mind, it all stopped when she left. Her present went on, but her past stayed put, sealed in amber, always there for her if she really needed it. She should have known better.

“Aren’t you going to introduce yourself?” Mirce asked coolly.

“Major Catherine Li, UNSC.”

“Can I see some ID then?”

Li fished in her pocket and handed over her fiche. Mirce took it in both hands and stared intently at it, glancing back and forth between Li’s face and the ID holo several times. Li swallowed. “Can we go somewhere and—”

Mirce shook her head, a barely visible gesture, so brief that Li could have imagined it. Her pale eyes slid toward the barkeep wiping down glasses a few feet away.

Li hesitated, trying to read the undercurrents of this not-quite-conversation. Remarried, she had said. That meant a new husband. Were there new children too? Was that girl she’d seen in the door one of them? Did they even know about Li? Was that what Mirce was trying to tell her? That she had been doing her own share of burying and forgetting over the last fifteen years? Li swallowed. “I… uh. I came because I had a message for you.”

“From?”

“A friend.” She gathered steam, knowing what she wanted to say. “Caitlyn.”

“Oh.” The corners of Mirce’s mouth twitched upwards ever so slightly. “I see.”

“Um… she can’t make it back on this trip, maybe not for a while, but she wanted you to know that she’s fine. There was more, but I… forgot. You forget a lot with the jumps. Not just small things.”

Mirce slid her eyes toward the barkeep again, but he’d been called away by a customer. “That’s what the doctors said would happen.”