Chris Moriarty - Spin State

“That’s altruistic of you,” Ramirez said.

“Oh, sure. I’m a real hero.”

“Why did the Secretariat really send you?” Daahl asked.

Li took a sip of her beer, stalling, and winced as the liquid hit the raw nerve where her tooth had been. “To fill in for Voyt and handle the accident follow-up. If there was another reason, they didn’t let me in on it. And anyway, I thought the idea here was that you were going to tell me something.”

“We’ll get there. But first I want some answers.”

“I may not have the answers you want, Daahl.”

“Of course you do. You just haven’t thought about it enough to realize you have them. So. Why did the UN send you?”

Li shrugged. “Sharifi was famous. When someone like her dies, people want to see heads roll. I’m the axe man.”

Ramirez stifled a laugh. Daahl just kept watching her with his pale sharp eyes. “If someone—let’s say a friend of ours—were to possess information that helped you do that job, what would you be willing to give for it?”

“If you mean am I prepared to buy information from you, the answer is no.”

“Not buy.” Daahl stood and walked across the room to the single small window. The shutter cast bars of rain-green light across his face and lit up his thinning hair like a halo. “Money would be simple compared to what we want. And we’d have to know you were the right person to do business with. We’d have to have… assurances.”

Ramirez seemed to have dropped out of the conversation, and when Li glanced over at him he was leaning forward on his stool staring at the two of them like a rat blinded by a miner’s lamp. He might know the geography down here, she realized, but in this room he was the odd man out. This was miners’ territory, soldiers’ territory. Blood-bargaining territory.

“Why don’t you tell me what you’re charging,” she told Daahl. “Then I’ll know if I can pay it.”

“Two things. First, if what you find out about the fire explains anyone else’s death besides Sharifi’s, we want to know about it.”

“You want me to pass information on an ongoing investigation to you? I could lose my job for that.”

“We don’t necessarily need the information ourselves,” Daahl said. “We just need it made public.”

“You mean included in the investigation report?”

“Included in anything that’s public record. We can figure out how to use it from there. Right, Leo?”

Ramirez nodded. “We really just need you to bring the accident reports up to date.”

“AMC’s accident reports? I can’t believe you have to go to me under the table to get that,” Li said.

Daahl raised his eyebrows. “Then you’ve obviously forgotten even more than that chop shop doc said you would.”

Li pushed her beer around the table, turning it in precise right angles, leaving a square of condensation on the cracked tabletop. “So basically,” she said, “you’re just asking me to do my job. An open investigation on Sharifi’s death. And these accident reports. Which are public information anyway, right?”

“Yes. As far as the deaths go.”

“Ah. What else do you want?”

Daahl bit his lower lip, glanced toward the window again. “We want Sharifi’s dataset.”

Li choked on her beer and slammed it back onto the table, spilling it. “She was doing defense R D, Daahl. That’s covered by the Espionage and Sedition Act. People get shot for breaking that law. And getting shot isn’t on my to-do list this year.”

“Some things are worth breaking the law for, Katie.”

“To you, maybe.”

“It’s not only miners AMC’s killing. There’s something happening in the mine. In all the mines. Look at the production records. Look at the ratio of man-hours to live condensate pulled out. We’re striking less and less live crystal down there. The bootleggers have been saying it for years. Now even some of the company miners are saying it. And Sharifi said it, before she died. She looked me in the face and said it straight out. The Anaconda’s dying. All the condensate on Compson’s World is dying.”

“Oh, come on, Daahl. The Security Council—”

“They know,” Daahl said, and gave her a moment to digest that fact. “Why do you think they’re spending so much in synthetic crystal R D? And look at the multiplanetaries, stripping out crystal just as fast as they can before the end hits. We’ve been saying it for years, pushing them to do something. But we can’t prove it. Sharifi proved it—proved it to herself anyway—and her dataset could give us the traction we need to turn this around.”

“That’s crazy,” Li said. “Condensates don’t die. They break. How can a whole planetful of them be breaking at the same time?”

“I don’t know,” Daahl said. “But Sharifi did.”

None of them said anything for a minute.

“I’ll bring the accident reports up to date,” Li said. “That’s only fair. It’s my job. But the other thing…”

“The accident reports will be enough for now,” Daahl said. “Just think about the rest.”

“All right,” Li said. “Where do we go from here, then?”

Daahl reached into the depths of one of the piles on the table and pulled out a battered fiche. “Read this.”

The fiche held two dozen separate documents, and it took Li a good ten minutes to be sure she understood them. As she read, she realized she was looking at AMC corporate records: weigh-station logs, pay chits, production records from the on-station processing plant. Slowly a pattern emerged.

“Someone’s cooking the books,” she said. “Someone’s giving one set of numbers to the miners and another set to AMC headquarters. And they’re skimming communications-grade crystal somewhere in between.” She looked up at Daahl. “Who?”

“You tell me.”

Li frowned and tabbed through the records again. “It could be almost anyone,” she said at last. “The pit boss. Someone in the breakerhouse. Or at the mass drivers. Someone in the on-station processor or loading bays. All they’d need is a few people willing to look the other way at the right moment. That and a few friends at key points along the line.”

“Those kinds of friends have to be paid,” Daahl pointed out.

“You saying you know who the bagman is?”

“Look at the pithead logs.”

She looked. And saw one name popping up again and again. Daahl’s name. All the fiddled shipments had gone out when he was the on-shift pit boss. And he had signed off on every one of them.

“Why are you showing me this?” she asked.

“Because Sharifi died over it. Two days before the fire I heard her and Voyt talking. Fighting. She told Voyt she was onto him, threatened to go to Haas. And over Haas’s head to the Service brass if necessary. She was throwing big names around. Five-star names.”

“General Nguyen?”

Daahl nodded.

“And what did Voyt say?”

“Not much. I think she took him by surprise. And Voyt wasn’t the type to argue to your face about something when he could get what he wanted by sticking a knife in your back.”

Li picked up her forgotten beer and took a gulp of it. It was grass-bitter and warm as blood, and it reminded her of things she couldn’t afford to think about now. “So you think Sharifi threatened to go to Haas, and Voyt killed her? And that the fire was… what, a cover-up? Do you have any proof of this at all?”

Daahl shrugged. “That’s your job.”

Li looked back over the figures. “Voyt couldn’t have done this himself. Who was running him?”

“Someone. Everyone who ever got within smelling distance knows that much. But as to who… that’s your problem.”

“And what was this someone having Voyt pay you?”