Chris Moriarty: Spin State

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 double-hulled 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.