Chris Moriarty: Spin State

“Voyt killed her,” she said.

“I don’t believe you.”

She looked Bella square in the face, unblinking. “It’s true.”

“I have a right to know. I need to know.”

Li sighed. “You know already, Bella. Think about it.”

Li saw the knowledge unfold in her, blossoming like a night flower. She put a hand over her mouth, turned on her heel, and walked across the holding pen into the bathroom. Li heard her retch again and again until there couldn’t have been anything left to bring up.

When she came back her face and arms were wet, and there was water on her clothes. But she looked clear-eyed, calm, reasonable. “Who was on-shunt?”

Li started to answer, but Bella spoke before she could. “It was Haas, wasn’t it? You don’t have to say it, just nod.”

Li nodded.

“What are you going to do about it?”

Li shifted in her chair. “What do you mean?”

“Are you going to arrest me?”

“You didn’t kill her, Bella. No one’s crazy enough to hold someone responsible for crimes committed when they’re under a shunt.”

“A crime was committed.” Bella still sounded rational, but Li was beginning to hear an ominous edge in her voice. “I thought that was what you were doing here. Finding her murderer. Punishing him. Do I have to show you the way to his office? Or was all that talk about right and wrong and punishment just something you made up to get me to believe in you?”

Li pushed her chair back and stood, swaying with exhaustion.

“Sit down, Bella.” She put a hand on Bella’s shoulder, steered her to a chair and pushed her into it. “Listen to yourself. You want me to march over and arrest Haas? On whose authority? He killed Sharifi on what amounts to Security Council orders. No one’s going to punish him. He won’t spend a day in jail, no matter what you or I do.”

“He killed her.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake! She was as good as selling information to the Syndicates.”

Neither of them breathed for a moment. Then Bella walked across the room, opened the door, stepped into the street. She turned and looked at Li, her eyes glistening. “So you won’t do it?”

“What’s the point?”

“What’s in it for you, you mean.”

Li grabbed the chair Bella had been sitting in and slammed it down hard enough to set the pens and coffee cups rattling on the nearby desks.

“Just leave, Bella. Leave and don’t come back and don’t ever talk to me again. Because if I have to look at your face for one more second, I swear I won’t be responsible for myself. I lost friends down there. And I killed four people to save your worthless carcass. What I do and why and what I get out of it is none of your fucking business!”

Bella stared for a moment, then turned on her heel and left.

Li stood gripping the chair, white-knuckled, while the big doors swung to and fro, regained their equilibrium, and came to a standstill. Then she borrowed someone’s forgotten uniform coat, curled up on the duty-room couch, and cried herself into a numb, dead, dreamless sleep.

She woke up falling.

She’d had enough stations shot out from under her in the war to know the feeling. AMC station had just lost rotational stability. And they were about to lose gravity.

Even as she sat up, the emergency systems kicked in and she felt the lurching, shuddering deceleration of four thousand permanent residents and all the clutter that went with them. Her arms and legs lightened, her stomach lurched as the grav lines wavered. The lights dimmed and the ventilation ducts overhead fell silent. The systems picked up again, but the rush of air was fainter now, the overhead panels dimmer. Someone had just shut down the massive Stirling cycle engines buried in the station’s core; they were running on emergency power.

There was still partial gravity, enough to make things easier than they would be in a very few minutes. She tapped in to the station net, trying to figure out what was going on; but the net was down, or she was locked out of it. She got carefully to her feet and began moving out into the main room of the HQ, where the duty officer hovered behind the counter looking bewildered by this sudden reversal of the laws of gravity as stationers knew them.

“What’s going on?” Li asked.

He started so violently at the sight of her that he bounced off the counter and had to scrabble for traction to keep from drifting sideways. Only then did she look down at herself and realize she hadn’t washed or changed since reaching the station.

“Christ. Sorry.” She rummaged through the lockers at the back of the room until she’d found something almost small enough. Meanwhile, others were starting to filter into HQ, all trying to figure out what had shut down the gravity and what they were supposed to do about it.

It wasn’t until the chief engineer called saying he couldn’t find Haas that she finally put the pieces together.

She burst into Haas’s office just as the precession ring ground to a stop and gravity gave out completely. It caught her off guard, and she careened across the room, her feet stranded in midair above the star-filled floorport.

She saw Haas out of the corner of her eye. He sat in the chair behind the big desk. His face looked peaceful, except for the mottled bruises spreading beneath his eyes.

Bella stood, or rather floated, above him.

She hung weightless over the tide-swept slab of the crystal desk. Her hair writhed like a vipers’ nest. Her eyes were closed, her face pale, her chest rising and falling in a sinister parody of a sleeper’s breathing. Her smile sent cold fingers brushing down Li’s spine.

Something—her own subconscious or one of Cohen’s remnant systems—nudged at her, prompting her to run a network scan.

Spitting, flaring lines of current shot out from Bella, splicing into each of the station’s embedded systems, running back and forth between station and planet, between surface and mine shaft. And all that immense power was being channeled into the single frail wire that connected Bella’s jack to the derms at Haas’s temples.

She was breaking him. Slowly, pitilessly, irresistibly. She had locked him into the loop shunt somehow and was running the whole vast power of the worldmind through him, killing him.

Li looked at Haas, slumped over the glowing desk. She looked at Bella’s peaceful face, at the hair circling her head like the flaming corona of an eclipsed star.

She is coming down from the mountains , she thought. Singing. With stones in her hands .

She called Security.

“I’m in Haas’s office,” she said. “Don’t send anyone. Everything’s fine here.”

She didn’t try to see Bella again until the night before she left—and by that time the guards wouldn’t let her in.

They were planetary militia, whatever that meant now, and they weren’t taking orders from anyone in UN uniform.

“You’re not authorized anymore,” said a sergeant Li belatedly recognized as one of Ramirez’s fellow kidnappers. He squared his shoulders as if expecting her to fight and squirmed his feet deeper into the zero-g loops.

Behind him she could see the corridor leading to Haas’s office. It was shut down, life support ticking over at the bare minimum required to keep the air breathable and the water running.

A group of miners shoved past Li, smelling like they’d just come up from the pit, and pulled along the guide ropes toward the office.