Chris Moriarty - Spin State

But she couldn’t ask him that.

She couldn’t ask because she knew, in some instinctive animal recess of her mind, that it was the one question he couldn’t answer.

Li’s quarters on-station looked even more bleak and squalid after her trip Ring-side.

She slipped offstream, lit a cigarette—her last of the day she hoped—and watched the late-night spins with the sound all the way down, her mind teeming with vague unsettled half memories.

Sharpe had forwarded Sharifi’s and Voyt’s draft autopsies to her, and she scanned them absentmindedly, thinking she’d give them a serious reading in the morning. He certified Sharifi’s cause of death as suffocation. The damage to Sharifi’s head and hand was premortem, as all the blood suggested. And she’d bitten through the tip of her tongue before she died as well.

Li’s stomach clenched when she read that, but she told herself it could have happened when Sharifi fell. It wouldn’t be the first time someone trying to get out of a burning mine panicked and stumbled. And no matter how odd that and the injuries to her hand were, she’d clearly died from suffocation, not trauma.

Voyt’s autopsy was more puzzling. The rescuers found his body near Sharifi’s, as if the two were trying to escape together, but Sharpe attributed his death to the same mysterious brain seizure that had afflicted so many other miners in the Trinidad.

Li fell asleep puzzling over it, reminding herself to put her cigarette out before she dropped it.

It hit her at four in the morning, barreling through her sleep-dazed mind like a runaway coal cart.

“Idiot!” she muttered. She sat up, turned on the lights, pulled up Sharifi’s autopsy again.

How could she have missed it? Sharpe damn well hadn’t. He’d done everything short of write it on the wall for her. She accessed the rescue crew logs and cross-referenced them with the shift assignments for the day of the fire. Twelve people had been in the Trinidad. Most of them belonged to a work crew of engineers and electricians who were laying wire to a newly opened face deep in the south sections of the newly opened vein. The work crew was at the far end of the main south gangway—almost an eighth of a mile farther from the stairs than Sharifi had been.

She tapped in to the Shantytown hospital database and saw that two of the electricians who had gotten out were half genetics. The rest weren’t. And they’d all made it to pit bottom under their own steam. The only people who’d died in the Trinidad were Voyt and Sharifi.

Sharifi was a genetic. Voyt, whatever his genes might be, had been wired just like Li was. Both should have been able to resist gas and lack of oxygen long after the nongenetics.

So why had they died when the others had lived?

Li scanned Sharifi’s autopsy, cursing herself for missing what was right in front of her. Finally she found it, halfway through the report, buried in a wealth of camouflaging detail. Sharpe had put it where anyone who knew what they were looking for could see it.

If they wanted to see it.

On the side of Sharifi’s head, just below her temple, among all the other bruises and lacerations, Sharpe had noted two small oblong burn marks, spaced two centimeters apart.

Li leaned across the narrow space between her bunk and the facing closet. She fished her Viper out of its Corps-issue holster and extruded the fanglike anodes: oblong, tapered, sharp enough to cut through skin. And exactly two centimeters apart.

Someone had put a Viper—Voyt’s, probably—to Sharifi’s head and pulled the trigger at contact range. Li had seen people die that way. A point-blank shot to the head usually caused respiratory paralysis. Death by suffocation. A death that left scars only the most alert coroner would look closely enough to discover.

Sharifi had been murdered.

She linked through to the planet net and dialed the Shantytown hospital.

“How did you find out already?” Sharpe asked when she got through to him.

“What do you mean? I read the autopsies.”

He blinked, obviously confused. “You’re not calling about the wetware?”

“No. What about it?”

“Haas took it. Or rather, he sent his Syndicate-designed girl Friday down for it.”

“What? How did he even know about it?”

Sharpe rocked back in his chair and raised his eyebrows. “That, Major, is what I was hoping you’d tell me.”

Establishing the crime scene turned out to be as impossible as keeping roaches off a space station.

Anaconda’s pitheads formed the tip of a subterranean iceberg, a catacomb of constantly shifting drifts, adits, and ventilation shafts. AMC’s maps lagged far behind the digging no matter how fast the surveyors scrambled to update them. And they didn’t begin to account for the hundreds of kilometers of unreported bolt-holes, mountainside entrances, and bootleggers’ tunnels.

This sprawling, chaotic anthill was filled up, shift after shift, by five daily launches from the station, numerous unscheduled drops of specialized technicians and surveying crews, and a constant, completely unregulated stream of dilapidated ground vehicles shuttling back and forth from Shantytown. No one controlled access or knew, really, who was in the mine during any given shift. The pithead logs were convenient fictions, just like the pithead rules and the posted safety regulations and the rented Davy lamps and oxygen canisters. AMC’s control of the Anaconda was as illusory—even if the illusion had real financial and legal consequences—as a general’s control over a looting, raiding, pillaging army.

“If we can’t catch them going in,” Li finally decided, “we’ll tag them going out.”

The evacuation had taken five shifts, using every available shuttle on-station and every hopper that could be begged, borrowed, or commandeered from the four or five Compson’s World settlements within flight range of the Anaconda. Casualties had been high. The evac teams had begun triage within forty minutes of the first alarm, and they’d tagged and entered every evacuee on handheld monitors uplinked to the station net to create a running dead, wounded, and missing list.

When McCuen cross-referenced the triage lists with the station’s shuttle passenger manifests and the Shantytown hospital’s admission records, they got a solid freeze-frame of who had been where when the mine caught fire.

The list of people who had been underground but not down there on easily verifiable official business was surprisingly short. Jan Voyt, Hannah Sharifi, and Karl Kintz were on it. No surprises there.

But there was a fourth name Li didn’t recognize.

“Who’s Bella?” she asked. “And why don’t we have a full name for him?”

“Bella’s the witch. And that is her whole name, as far as anyone knows.” McCuen grinned lasciviously. “I can go talk to her for you. I’m just a slave to duty.”

“Very funny, Brian.”

“Just kidding,” he said, sobering suddenly. “Besides, anyone who wants to keep working and living on this station would have to be crazy to go fishing in that pond.”

Li started to ask McCuen what he meant, then decided she didn’t want to get sidetracked into a conversation about Haas’s sleeping habits. “What about Kintz?” she asked instead.

Kintz had been more or less invisible since her first morning on-station. What little she’d seen of him had led her to two conclusions. One, he’d gotten special treatment from Voyt. Two, he expected to keep getting it.

In the normal course of things, she would have shaped Kintz up or shipped him out posthaste. But if things went well, she wouldn’t be on Compson’s long enough to make lowering the boom on Kintz worth her while.