Chris Moriarty: Spin State

“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 Li 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.”