Chris Moriarty - Spin State

“There’s one thing I’m still not clear on,” Li said when he had finished. “What caused the original fire? The one in the—” She checked her files for the name. “—The one in the Trinidad?”

“Nothing.” Haas shrugged. “This is a Bose-Einstein mine. Flash fires are part of business. And most of the time you never find out where they started, let alone what caused them.”

Li looked at him doubtfully.

“Christ!” Haas muttered. “I thought you were from here. I thought you were supposed to know something.”

Li tapped her temple where the faint shadow of wires showed beneath the skin. “You want me to know, tell me.”

“Right. Bose-Einstein condensates don’t burn, Major. But coal does. And the crystals set the coal on fire sometimes. We don’t know why. It’s just one of the things you have to account for if you want to run a Bose-Einstein mine. It’s dangerous and it’s inconvenient. And sometimes—this time being one of them —it’s deadly.” He snorted. “But this time the crystals had some help. This time they had fucking Sharifi.”

“What do you mean, Sharifi? You think she caused the fire? What was she doing that’s any different from what AMC does every day?”

“She was cutting crystal for one thing.”

“So? AMC’s cutting every day. You don’t have flash fires every day.”

“Yeah, but where are we cutting, Major? That’s the question you have to ask. And where was she cutting?”

“I don’t know,” Li said. “Where was she cutting?”

“Look,” Haas said. “A Bose-Einstein bed is like a tree. You have to prune it, trim it, manage it. But if you cut too hard, or in the wrong place, you’ve got problems. And when you cut too hard in a Bose-Einstein mine you get fires.”

“Because… ?”

He shrugged. “TechComm has armies of researchers out here, year in year out, clogging up the gangways and wasting our time and slowing down production. But when it comes to actually giving us useful information they’re hopeless. Hell, they don’t know things any miner over twelve could tell you. Like that you don’t mess with live strata unless you have a death wish. The Beckies don’t like it. And when the Beckies don’t like a man, bad luck has a way of finding him.”

Li stared. Becky was Shantytown slang for Bose-Einstein condensates. It was a miner’s word, resonant with myths about singing stones, haunted drifts, glory holes. It certainly wasn’t the kind of word you heard in AMC’s orbital executive offices. Either corporate culture had taken a sharp left turn in the last decade, or this fire was even stranger than Haas was admitting.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Haas said. “Poor dumb miner, seeing singing Beckies and the Blessed Virgin down every mine shaft. But I grew out of church a long time ago. And I’m telling you, Sharifi was courting trouble down there.”

“Did you voice your concerns about the Beckies—uh, the condensates—to Sharifi?”

“I tried.” Haas made an impatient gesture, and the upper facet of his desk threw back a distorted reflection of the movement as if there were a subtle tidal effect in the condensate’s interior. Which there might be, for all Li knew. Sharifi would have known, of course. But Sharifi had gone underground and gotten herself killed. And as far as Li could tell, she hadn’t left anything behind her but unanswered questions.

“I talked to her, all right,” Haas went on. “And you know what? The bitch laughed at me. She was crazy. I don’t care how famous she was. Oh, she talked a good line. Empirical runs this, statistical data that. But the gist of it was she thought the Beckies were talking to her. And just like everyone else I’ve known who thought that, she ended up room temperature. I just wish the stupid digger bitch hadn’t brought half my mine down on top of her.”

Li stiffened. Digger was about as nasty a word as there was in the pidgin English that passed for a common language on Compson’s World—and Li had been called it herself back when she still looked like the full-blooded construct she was.

Haas saw her reaction; he shifted in his chair and twisted his face into an expression that might have looked apologetic on another man. “Not talking about you, of course.”

“Of course.”

“Look.” He leaned forward, hunching his massive shoulders for emphasis. “I don’t give a shit what Sharifi was. Or you. Or anyone else, for that matter. What I do give a shit about is that some Ring-side bureaucrat made me lend her my best witch and shut down half the mine so she could play her little games. And now that the wheels have come off, all they can tell me to do is wait.”

“Well, I’m not telling you to wait,” Li said. “And the sooner I get down there, the sooner we can get to the bottom of this and get your men back to work.”

Haas leaned back in his chair and let out a short high bark of laughter. The reaction seemed so practiced that Li wondered if it was something he’d copied out of a spinfeed interactive. “We’re not running a tourist operation,” he said. “Sharifi was working less than a hundred meters from an active cutting face. You’re not getting anywhere near there.”

“Sharifi did.”

“Sharifi was famous. You’re just a hick with a lucky trigger finger.”

Li grinned. “Nice line, Haas. But I am going down. Why make me go over your head?”

“Fuck, go to whoever you want. You ever been in a Bose-Einstein mine? You can get killed fifty different ways without blinking. I don’t need any more bodies on my hands this week, and I’m not letting you down there.”

Li stood up, walked around Haas’s desk, and picked up the headset of his VR rig. “Would you like to speak to Corps HQ or should I?”

He turned in his chair and watched her, looking for the bluff.

“Fine,” he said after a long pause. “I’m going down with a survey crew in about two hours. If you’re up to it.”

“I’m up to it,” Li said, pushing down the thought of her exhaustion, the hope of a hot shower and a merciful stretch of sleep without jump-dreams.

“Don’t expect me to baby-sit you. You fuck up your rebreather or fall down a shaft, it’s your neck.”

“I can take care of myself.”

Haas laughed. “That’s what Voyt said.”

Li looked down at the stars wheeling between her feet and decided it was time to change the subject before she had second thoughts about going into the mine again. “Has TechComm said when they’ll get your field array up?”

“Take a fucking guess. They’re working on it. Which is TechComm speak for ‘we don’t give a shit, it’s not coming out of our pocket.’ ”

Haas had that about right, Li thought. The UN had seen the shape of things to come long before most, had recognized from the dawn of the Bose-Einstein era where the live wire of power lay. It bet everything on the new technology. Subsidized it, patented it, entered into carefully structured partnerships with the half dozen multiplanetaries capable of exploiting it.

That had been back in the darkest years of the Migration, when they were still trying to make Earth work and the Ring was just a few thousand paltry kilometers of hastily assembled space platforms. Since then, the UN had used Bose-Einstein tech to leverage humanity’s first stable, effective interstellar government. When the genetic riots burned across the Periphery, only UN control of the orbital relay stations contained them. And when the Syndicate incursions began, UN troops used those same relays to meet every Syndicate offensive, to raid the outlying crèches and birthlabs, to quell the revolts that flared up wherever Syndicate troops landed.

But the price of that protection was the UN’s stranglehold on interstellar transport. And anyone who ran afoul of TechComm had better settle in for a long, cold, lonely wait.