Chris Moriarty - Spin State

Li shrugged.

“Why go slow time?” McCuen asked. “That’s what I keep wondering.”

They were traveling down the main gangway now. It was still wide enough to walk two abreast, but the ceiling was already lowering overhead, forcing McCuen to duck his head and stoop, miner fashion.

“You sound like you have a theory,” Li hazarded.

“Well, not really… but…”

“But what?”

“It just occurred to me that maybe the point isn’t just to get… whatever it is… Gould herself, I’d guess… to Freetown, but to keep anyone else from getting hold of her until she gets there.”

Li stopped, struck by the idea. “You’re saying she’s using the flight as a kind of dead drop.”

“Well, I hadn’t quite thought of it that way, but… yeah. I mean, once that ship dropped into slow time, it was gone. No radio contact. No way to stop it or board it or even find it. It doesn’t even exist as far as we’re concerned.”

“Not until it gets to Freetown.”

“Right.”

“You’re assuming that it doesn’t matter to her if we find out what it is before she gets there.”

“Right.”

“Because… ?”

“Because once she gets there it’ll already be too late for us to stop her?”

Li stood staring at the ground, at the coal dust already caking her boots, her mind racing.

“It was just a thought,” McCuen said. “I guess it doesn’t really make sense when you look at it that way.”

“No,” Li said slowly. “It makes sense. It makes all kinds of sense.”

He looked over at her, his face a pool of lamplit white in the darkness. “What do we do now?” he asked.

“Follow up on our other leads and hope to hell that sometime in the next three weeks we crack this thing.”

McCuen grinned. “Other leads meaning Louie?”

“Other leads meaning Louie.”

Six linear kilometers from the shaft by Li’s measurement, they turned a sharp kink in the gangway and dropped into the long, high-roofed chamber that was the temporary home of cutting face South 8. The survey crews must have come through and ruled out the presence of any worthwhile crystal deposits; the miners had already blasted a large section of coal and were taking it down with a track-mounted rotary cutter. The big machine threw up a spume of stove-grease black diesel smoke and made enough noise to start a roof fall all by itself. There was no point in talking to anyone while they were cutting, so Li and McCuen took refuge in the most sheltered corner they could find and watched.

Someone must have seen them; when the crew stopped to break down the cutter and move the tracks up, the foreman pushed his cutting goggles up onto his forehead and walked over to them.

“Louie,” McCuen said, grinning.

Louie was easily Haas’s size, but he wasn’t carrying any creeping desk-job fat on his big frame. He was all wiry knotted miner’s muscle—a man who looked built to take down mountains. He pulled a grimy rag out of his coveralls and wiped his hands with it. It looked to Li like he was just moving the accumulated coal dust and diesel grease from one big-knuckled finger to another.

When he’d finished redistributing the dirt, he pulled a tobacco tin out of a hidden pocket and offered it around. Li and McCuen both refused. Louie pulled a swag out and planted it in one cheek.

“So,” he said, looking McCuen up and down. “Massa treatin’ you all right in the big house?”

“Very funny,” McCuen said. He turned to Li. “Louie and I went to school together.”

Louie laughed. “Grade school, anyway. That’s all the school one of us had.”

“Major Li would like to ask you a few questions.”

“Ask and you shall receive!” Louie said, throwing out his strong, coal-slicked arms expansively. “Answers, that is. I ain’t giving away World Series tickets.”

One of the cutters on break walked over, eyeing them curiously. Louie glanced at him, then looked back at Li and McCuen. “So,” he asked, “you think the Mets are gonna sweep?”

Li snorted.

“She’s just bitter,” McCuen said.

The cutter passed by and turned down a side tunnel.

“Right,” Louie said. “He’s taking a piss. That’ll take twenty seconds or so, after which he’ll fuck around for a minute or so to avoid getting back to work. Which means you got about a minute and a half before he comes back to see what we’re talking about. Walls got ears down here.”

He listened while Li explained what she was looking for, then turned to McCuen. “You can trust her,” McCuen said after a moment.

“Yeah, but can I trust you?”

“You know you can.”

Louie stared hard at McCuen for a moment. Then he turned back to Li. “Sharifi didn’t have a regular crew,” he said. “That’s why you can’t find them in the pit logs. Haas just let her pull miners off slow faces. Most of them are back on the Trinidad now, poor buggers.”

“Do you think you could get us a complete list?”

He shrugged. “Easier if I just let ’em know you’re looking for them. Plus there’s nothing written down that way.”

“You didn’t work for her, did you?” Li asked.

“You crazy? I still won’t go down there.”

“So how’d she get the others to go?”

“Easy.” Louie laughed and his eyes widened in the white circles left by his cutting goggles. “She paid union scale. She actually put a sign up at pit bottom saying she’d pay scale. Wish I could have seen Haas’s face when he read it.”

“How’d she know what union scale was?” Li asked, knowing the answer already.

Louie shrugged his massive shoulders.

Li glanced behind her to make sure the miner who’d gone off to piss was still out of earshot. “Was this a union project? Was there an official push on it?”

Louie caught her drift instantly. The union pushed members toward specific cutting faces or veins depending on its own often obscure political or economic goals. Union approval of Sharifi’s project would have meant better-qualified, more highly motivated workers. Union workers. And union oversight, even if the cat-and-mouse game of union and management meant that no one could risk publicly admitting they were union. Had Sharifi been politically savvy enough to know that? Or had the union approached her on its own initiative?

“I wouldn’t know anything about that,” Louie said, looking fixedly at Li. There was a message in his stare, but whatever it was she couldn’t read it.

“But you might have heard something.”

“Some things I try not to hear.”

“Who’s the pit rep?” Li asked.

Louie’s face shut like a slamming door.

“Oh, come on!” McCuen sounded exasperated. “You know goddamn well who the pit rep is. It was your damn brother two elections ago!”

Louie stared at McCuen, and Li could see half a lifetime of distrust and resentment in his broad face. “All I know,” he said, “is that you pull your paycheck out of Haas’s back pocket just like the rest of the Pinkertons. And if you think I’m going to roll over just because we—”

“Fine,” Li interrupted; she could hear footsteps moving toward them up the drift. “Just drop a word in the right ears, okay?”

“Right.” Louie bent to check his lamp. “See you around, Brian.”

“Thanks for nothing,” McCuen snapped.

Louie’s reply was so quiet Li barely heard it over the shovels of the cutter crew. She bent over him. “What?”

“I said talk to the priest. Just don’t tell him I sent you.”

The priest’s name was Cartwright, and it took them half the shift to find him. He’d scrawled his mark on the shift log when he came in that morning, but he hadn’t checked out a Davy lamp and they didn’t see his numbered tag on any of the gangway boards.