Chris Moriarty - Spin State

She pushed that thought away, feeling petty, and told herself she just wasn’t cut out to be a policeman. “Check the relay schedules,” she told McCuen. “See if we can intercept the ship before they jump.”

As Gould hefted her bag up the boarding ramp, something at her neck glittered. Li smiled. Gould was wearing a charm necklace: a vacuum-mounted sliver of low-grade Bose-Einstein condensate suspended in a cheap heart-shaped locket of translucent plastex. Pure trash. The kind of trinket street vendors sold to tourists along with the fake Rolexes and the Zone baseball caps. The kind of thing Gould wouldn’t be caught dead wearing in normal life. The woman was nothing if not thorough.

“I can’t find them on the relay queue,” McCuen said, sounding overwhelmed.

Li checked the carrier’s schedule herself, then dove onto the public server to access the flight plan that every carrier had to file with the en route relay stations. But there was no flight plan. They hadn’t filed anything.

Then it dawned on her.

“We’re too late,” she said. “It’s not a jumpship. She’s going to Freetown sublight. And they’re already in slow time. We won’t be able to catch her until they drop out of slow time and into orbit.”

McCuen sat down heavily on one of her battered office chairs. “Why would she do that? And why Freetown?”

“Why Freetown is the easy question. That’s where they’d take cash for a passage and keep your name off the shipping manifest. That’s where you’d cache information you didn’t trust to UN data banks. That’s where you go to fence illegal data. Why slow time is harder to figure. But she’ll be there on”—Li checked the orbits of Earth and Jupiter against the Medusa ’s departure time, calculated the approach to Freetown’s circumlunars—“November 9. Twenty-six days.”

“Maybe she’s just running,” McCuen said. “People don’t always think straight when they’re scared. Maybe she panicked and it was the first flight out or something.”

Li thought of Gould’s cool white face, the pale eyes, the precise, disdainful wrinkle between her eyebrows. “I don’t think Gillian Gould ever panicked in her life, Brian. If she’s going to Freetown, she has a reason. And we have less than a month to find out what that reason is and make a countermove.”

McCuen dropped his face into his hands. “How could I have lost her? How could I?”

“Worse mistakes have been made, Brian. Some of them by me.”

“I know, but… Christ, what a fuck-up!”

Li stretched out one foot and tapped the toe of McCuen’s boot. “Cheer up,” she said. “At least we’ve got a track to follow. And there’s nothing like a hard deadline to knock things loose.”

McCuen sighed and rubbed a freckled hand across his forehead.

“Forget it,” Li said. “Let’s start by following the Freetown lead. I want a record of every transmission from this station to Freetown in the last week before Sharifi’s death. Then let’s figure out what Sharifi was doing here. And not just the official version. I want to see every piece of spinfeed she produced from the time she made the first proposal to run this experiment. I want to know everything she did from the moment she hit station here. Who she talked to, ate with, slept with, fought with. Everything and everyone. Personal stuff, too. Especially the personal stuff.”

McCuen had grabbed a pad and was jotting down her rapid-fire instructions.

“This might help,” she said, pulling Sharifi’s journal from her pocket and tossing it onto the table in front of him.

“I know,” she said in response to the look he gave her. “I should have logged it in. But it’s in her own handwriting, for God’s sake. It’s probably got trace DNA all over it. It’s not like there’s any doubt who wrote it.” And she’d wanted to keep it to herself until she’d vetted it with Nguyen, of course.

“No,” McCuen said. “You don’t understand. It’s Haas. He’s been calling all day. He wanted to retrieve something from Sharifi’s effects. Something I told him we didn’t have. Because it wasn’t on the effects inventory.”

“Shit.” Li turned a chair around, straddled it, crossed her arms over the backrest. She started to connect through to Haas’s office line, then stopped.

“Call Haas,” she told McCuen. “Tell him we found it, but we have to refer it to TechComm before we can clear it for release to him. Tell him we’re doing our best to hurry things along. If he has any problem with that, send him back to me.”

“How long will it take TechComm to clear it?” McCuen asked.

“These things are complicated.” Li grinned. “Official channels are slow.”

McCuen grinned back at her, but his grin faded quickly. “So how the hell did he know you had that journal?”

“Funny,” Li said. “That’s just what I was wondering.”

By the time she left the field office it was long past closing time and the shops along the arcades were dark and silent. She walked back to her quarters, too tired to hunt down a place to eat and cravenly thankful for the station’s low rotational gravity. As she reached her door, though, she saw that the security field had been disturbed in her absence.

She backed off a step and scanned the floor and doorframe. She’d just begun to tell herself she was being paranoid when she saw the slip of fiche poking out from under the closed door.

She slid it out into the open with the toe of her boot and saw it wasn’t fiche at all, but a thick slip of butter yellow paper, bisected by a single horizontal fold.

A letter, addressed to Major Catherine Li, Room 4820 spoke 12, Compson’s Station in quick fluid script. She picked it up and opened it.

For a fraction of a second the paper remained blank. Then a blocky engraved monogram appeared above the fold with the words 130 Avenida Bosch Zona Angel . Words took shape below it, written in the same flowing script:

Dearest C. Stop being stubborn and come to tea instead. Usual place and time. Tomorrow. C

As she read the words, they scattered, broke into syllables and letters, rose from the page and turned into bright flocking birds that wheeled and swooped down the empty corridor like swallows.

She dialed into the Calle Mexico just off the Zócalo. Mile-high needle buildings glittered in refracted sunlight, pointing the eye up toward the carefully calibrated atmospheric field—and far, far above it, to the blue seas and white ice fields of Earth.

This was the heart of the Ring, point zero of UN space, the richest few square miles of real estate in the universe. Its interface was the best money could build: a realspace-interactive multiuser quantum simulation that was, for almost any imaginable purpose, indistinguishable from the real thing. Originally coterminous with the central banking zone, the interface now extended the length and breadth of the Ring. Anyone with credit for the sky-high access fees could register a corporation, eat a three-star meal, rent a whore, run a skip trace, or shop for anything from Prada handbags to black-market psychware.