Chris Moriarty - Spin State

A hawk’s shadow swept overhead, and she heard her own heartbeat, slow and strong, echoing through the vast mineral silence. Then she was out, back on the grid. Safe.

‹Cohen?›

She probed the net, stretching as thin as she dared to.

‹Cohen?›

But he was gone, if he’d ever been there.

Dr. Leviticus Sharpe met her at the door of the Shantytown hospital. He was wire-thin, knobby-jointed, a good two meters tall. He stooped atop storklike legs, a big man trying hard not to intimidate a small woman. Li didn’t need the help—but she still liked him for it.

“Welcome to Compson’s World,” he said, smiling. “May you not have to stay long.”

Sharpe’s office faced away from town, toward the foothills. It was fall in Shantytown, and the scrub oak was turning. Li saw the familiar wash of scarlet in the canyons, the silver-green ripple of rabbit sage on the lowlands.

“Well,” said Sharpe when they were seated. “Here you are.”

“You sound like you’ve been expecting me.”

He blinked. “Shouldn’t I have been?”

Li spread her hands, palms out, and raised her eyebrows. It was one of Cohen’s habitual gestures, and she felt a flush of annoyance with herself for letting it creep into this conversation.

“Er…” Sharpe shifted in his chair, looking suddenly uneasy. “Maybe you should tell me why you’re here, then, Major.”

Li shrugged and pulled Sharifi’s wet/dry wire out of her pocket.

Sharpe peered at it, and Li caught the metallic flash of a contracting shutter ring in his left pupil. A bioprosthetic, some kind of diagnostic device.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Wetware isn’t really my bailiwick. Have you tried AMC tech support? The station office is reasonably competent.”

“The other half of this system is in your morgue.”

“I doubt that.” He bent to look at the wire again. “Any multiplanetary that owned this kind of tech would have put a repo out on it before the operator’s body was cold.”

“It’s Hannah Sharifi’s.”

“Oh,” he said softly. “I see. That’s different, of course.”

“You didn’t turn up the internal components in your autopsy?” Li checked her hard memory, verified what she thought she’d seen. “You signed her death certificate.”

He stood up—no longer smiling, no longer stooping—and Li saw the green flash of LEDs as he checked his internal chronometer. “I sign a lot of death certificates,” he said, the friendly, joking tone gone from his voice. “And now, if it’s quite all right, I have patients to see. Tell Haas I said hello.”

Li felt like she was stuck in a fog. She followed Sharpe down the corridor, half-running to keep pace with his long-legged strides. He pushed through a pair of swinging doors into a scrub room, bent over a deep sink, and started washing his hands.

Li reached out and turned the water off. “You mind telling me what the hell’s going on here?”

Sharpe held his soapy hands out, splay-fingered, looking oddly vulnerable. “I doubt you need me to tell you anything, Major. It looks to me like you’ve got it all figured out.”

“Fine,” Li said. “Cover your ass. But I have a job to do. If you won’t help, get off the tracks and let me by.”

Sharpe reached past her and turned the water back on. His hand was trembling, but one look at his face told her it was anger, not fear. “Just leave,” he said. “I’m up to my neck in patients you idiots put here. Haas knows I don’t have time to sneak around behind his back doing unauthorized autopsies. And I don’t need another of his petty little loyalty tests. God knows Voyt put me through that hoop enough times.”

And then, suddenly, it all made sense. Sharpe’s assumption that she would come down to talk to him after the mine fire. His confusion, his suspicion, the smoldering anger that he camouflaged with jokes and polite chitchat.

“Listen,” Li said. “I don’t know how things were under Voyt, and I don’t know what little arrangement he had with Haas. But I’m not part of it. I came down here myself, not on Haas’s orders. I’m not here to tell you what official line to toe. I want the truth from you. Or at least as much of it as you know. That’s all.”

“Truth is a complicated concept,” Sharpe said, and she could still hear the suspicion in his voice. “What exactly did you have in mind?”

“I want to see Sharifi’s body.”

“On whose authority?”

“Mine.”

She toggled her comm system, wrote and time-stamped an order, sent it to Sharpe’s streamspace coordinates and watched his eyes unfocus momentarily as he read it. He blinked down at her, astonished.

“Didn’t think I was going to put it in writing, did you?” she said. She leaned back against the sink, arms crossed on her chest, and looked up at him. “You’ve got me filed in the wrong box, Sharpe.”

“Indeed,” he said. He laughed and rubbed a still-damp hand through his hair. “I apologize for… well, there’s a certain paranoia that goes with being a mine doctor.”

“I can imagine.”

He led her back through a warren of hospital wards and corridors toward the rear modules of the hospital building. As they came closer to the morgue, Li started to see evidence of the recent fire.

They threaded between hospital beds and stacks of boxed medical supplies. Space was always tight in underfunded colonial hospitals, but this one looked like it was about to burst at the seams. Evac and rescue gear was crammed into every corner. Mountains of complicated diagnostic equipment and medical supplies lined the walls, as if someone had cleared out the storage rooms and dumped their contents in any empty space available. As they worked their way down the hallways, Li had to dodge nurses carrying bedpans and burn dressings.

Finally Sharpe opened one side of a broad double door marked with an orange biohazard decal and led Li through a frigid curtain of irradiated air into a long room stacked with virusteel drawers that looked unnervingly like cryocoffins.

“All full, unfortunately,” Sharpe said. “Running a brisk trade in dead miners these days.”

“And of course they all have to be autopsied,” Li said. “Otherwise, how could you prove it was their own damn fault they died down there?”

Sharpe looked sideways at her and his thin mouth kinked in a sardonic smile. “I can’t imagine what you’re talking about, Major.”

“Here we are,” he said, stopping at a drawer that looked to Li just like all the others. He opened the drawer with a smooth sweep of his lanky arm, and Li found herself face-to-face with Hannah Sharifi.

“Jesus,” she muttered. “What happened to her?”

She looked like she’d been hit with a sledgehammer. The right side of her head folded in on itself from jawbone to hairline like a crushed eggshell. And her right hand was a mess. Nails torn off, bloodstains spidering through the lined skin of palm and finger, black burns on her fingertips.

“That’s how the rescue team found her,” Sharpe said. “The cause of death appears to have been suffocation—not all that surprising in a mine fire.” He lifted the still-intact left hand to show Li the blue fingernails. “The injuries are unusual, but they did find her at the foot of the stairs running into the Trinidad. A lot of people fall there. Those stairs have had running water on them more or less since they opened that level. There’s a spring they haven’t located or can’t drain or something.” He shrugged. “She could have hit her head on cribbing planks, on the walls of the shaft, on any number of things.”

“What about the hand?”

“Yes, the hand. Well. I’ve certainly never seen anything like it.”