Chris Moriarty: Spin State

She looked at the boy’s face, saw the telltale puffiness around his eyes that said he’d been through not one but several sleepless nights in the last few station cycles. “Well,” she said mildly, “at least you had time to make sure my bags got here.”

He coughed at that, and Li watched a red flush spread over his fair skin. “That was on Haas’s orders,” he said after glancing up and down through the gridplating to make sure no one was in the adjoining rooms. “I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

“Haas. He’s the station exec?”

McCuen nodded.

“That how the militia works here, Brian? You pulling down a corporate paycheck on the side?”

“No! Look at my file. I just want out of here and into the War College.”

So. McCuen wanted a ticket into the freshman class at Alba. That made all kinds of sense on a periphery planet like Compson’s. Bose-Einstein transport fueled an interstellar economy in which data, commercial goods, and a few properly wired humans could cross interstellar distances almost instantaneously. But uplinks, VR rigs, and spinstream access time still cost so much that most colonials spent their entire lives planetbound, stuck in the ebbs and deadwaters of the interstellar economy. The military was the best way out for ambitious colonials—sometimes the only way out. It was certainly the way she had taken.

Li sent her oracle on a fishing trip through McCuen’s files, and it came back with a stream of data, from his primary-school grades to records from a government school in Helena to a string of applications to Alba, all denied.

“You must want it bad,” she said. “You applied three times.”

McCuen started. “That doesn’t show up in my file. How—?”

“Voyt wouldn’t recommend you,” she said, twisting the knife a little. “Why not?”

His flush deepened. Li looked into his face and saw distress, embarrassment, earnest hopefulness.

“Never mind. You do a good honest job while I’m here and you’ll get to Alba.”

McCuen shook his head angrily. “You don’t need to cut deals with me to get me to do my job.”

“I’m not cutting deals,” Li said. “It’s your choice. Do a bad job, I’ll show you the door. Do a good job, I’ll make sure the right people know it. Got a problem with that?”

“Of course not.” He started to say something else, but before Li could hear it, quick steps rattled on the hall gridplate.

The footsteps stopped and Kintz stuck his head through the doorway. “Haas wants to see her. Now.”

Haas’s desk floated on stars.

It was live-cut from a single two-meter-long Bose-Einstein condensate. Sub-communications grade, more of a curiosity than anything else, but still it must be priceless. Its polished face revealed the schistlike structure of the bed that had calved it. Its diamond facets mirrored the stars beyond the transparent ceramic compound floor panel so that the desk seemed to hang above empty space in a pool of reflected starlight.

Haas was a big man, bullish around the neck and shoulders, with an aura of resolutely clamped-down violence. He looked like a man who enjoyed losing his temper, but had learned to ration out that particular pleasure with iron self-discipline. And he looked nothing like the kind of man Li would have expected to find running AMC’s crown jewel mine.

He had the accessories down pat. His suit hung well on his big frame even in station gravity. The strong-jawed, aggressively norm-conforming face must have cost a bundle in gene therapy and cosmetic surgery. But his body showed signs of hard living, and his handshake, when he rose behind his desk to greet Li, was the crushing, callused grip of a man who had done rough labor in heavy gravity.

Li glanced at his hand as she shook it and saw a functional-looking watch strapped around his powerful wrist. Was he completely unwired? Allergic to ceramsteel? Religious objections? Either way, it took steel-plated ambition and an unbreakable work ethic to make it into corporate management without being wired for direct streamspace access.

Haas gestured to an angular, expensive-looking chair. Li sat, the ripstop of her uniform pants squeaking against cowhide. She tried to tell herself it was just tank leather, as artificial as everything else in the room, Haas included. Still, even the idea of making a chair out of a mammal was intimidatingly decadent.

“I’m in a hurry,” Haas said as soon as she was seated. “Let’s get this out of the way fast.”

“Fine,” Li answered. “Like to clear something up first, though. Want to tell me why you had my bags searched?”

He shrugged, completely unembarrassed. “Standard procedure. You’re a quarter genetic. Your transfer papers say so. Nothing personal, Major. It’s the rules.”

“UN rules or company rules?”

“My rules.”

“You made an exception for Sharifi, I assume?”

“No. And when she complained about it, I told her the same fucking thing I’m telling you.”

Li couldn’t help smiling at that. “Any other rules I should bear in mind?” she asked. “Or do you make them up as you go along?”

“Too bad about Voyt,” Haas said, shifting gears abruptly enough to leave Li feeling vaguely disoriented. “He was a good security officer. He understood that some things are UN business and some things are company business. And that we’re all here for one reason: to keep the crystal flowing.” He rocked back in his chair and its springs creaked under his weight. “Some of the security officers I’ve worked with haven’t understood that. Things haven’t turned out well for them.”

“Things didn’t turn out so well for Voyt either,” Li observed.

“What do you want?” Haas said, putting his feet up on the gleaming desk. “Promises?”

Haas’s account of the fire was brief and to the point. The trouble had started while Sharifi was underground running one of her closely guarded live field experiments. The station monitors had logged a power surge in the field AI that controlled AMC’s orbital Bose-Einstein array, and the power surge had been followed almost immediately by a flash fire in the Anaconda’s newly opened Trinidad seam. Haas dispatched a rescue team to douse the pit fire, pulled everyone out of the Trinidad, and shut down the bottom four levels of the mine pending a safety inspection. The field AI seemed to right itself after the brief power surge; no one had given it another thought.

Haas and Voyt went underground with the safety inspector to visit the ignition point. They weren’t able to pinpoint the fire’s cause, but they recommended suspension of Sharifi’s experiment pending further investigation. A recommendation that the Controlled Technology Committee rejected. They reopened the seam as soon as they could get the pumps and the ventilators back on-line, and the miners—and Sharifi’s research team—went back to work.

“It was nothing,” Haas told Li. “I’ve been underground since I was ten, and I’m telling you, I didn’t for one minute think there was a secondary explosion risk. I don’t give a shit what the local spins say, I wouldn’t send one miner into a pit I thought was ready to blow. That’s not the way I do things.”

But he had sent miners into the pit. And it had blown thirty hours later.

It blew hard enough to demolish the Pit 3 headframe and breakerhouse and light a fire that was still smoldering ten days later. The orbital field AI went down again, just as it had in the last explosion. Only this time it never came back on-line.

It took three days to put out the fires and evacuate the desperately small number of survivors. The damage, when they finally had time to assess it, was extensive: one mine fire, cause unknown; one Bose-Einstein relay failure, cause unknown; two hundred and seven dead adult geologists, mine techs, and miners; seventy-two dead children, working underground under an industrywide opt-out from the UN child-labor laws. And, of course, one famous dead physicist.