Chris Moriarty - Spin State

He was nursing a newly installed cranial jack. It was camouflaged by a self-adhesive skin patch, but the bump under the patch and the puffy irritated flesh around the new implant were unmistakable.

“That home-brew equipment?” she asked, waving her cigarette toward his neck.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Those FreeNet jacks are a good deal on the front end, but the side effects are hell. You ever seen anyone die of a wet bug?”

“What’s your point?”

“Just that I wouldn’t be screwing around with illicit tech if I were you.” She ground out her cigarette on the fire-escape railing and sent it arcing into the vacant lot next door. “And you can pass that advice along to Daahl too. Call it a freebie.”

“We wouldn’t have to home-brew if the Security Council didn’t have a stranglehold on streamspace, would we?”

“Hey, don’t look at me, I just work for the man.”

“Oh, right.” Ramirez spat the words out hard and fast. “Just a good little soldier. Just following orders, no matter what the orders are. But then I guess that’s what XenoGen built you for.”

Li lashed out at him without thinking. She stopped herself so quickly that he didn’t notice he’d almost been hit. But she knew she would have broken bones if she hadn’t pulled the blow.

She backed off, frightened by what had almost happened. “You racist son of a bitch,” she whispered. “Don’t you ever say that to me again. You don’t know me. You don’t know a thing about me.”

According to the old and tired joke, there were only three reasons to take a meeting in realspace: sex, blackmail, and pure whites-of-the-eyes intimidation.

Li didn’t think she had much hope of intimidating Haas, but if he was going to torpedo her investigation, she figured he could goddamn well tell her so himself. And since files could always be faked or distorted, he could tell her face-to-face, where she’d have a court-admissible record of it—the one locked and coded in her own datafiles.

As it turned out, she could have saved herself the effort; by the time she got back up to his office, he was gone.

“If you’d like him to call you…” his secretary said. Her expression said that she knew exactly why Li was there and that Haas wouldn’t be coming back until she was good and gone.

“Never mind,” she said. She was reaching for the door when someone spoke her name from the shadows.

Bella stood in the door of Haas’s office. Barefoot, in a tank silk dress that clung to the slim curves of her hips and stomach. She beckoned. Li followed her through a hidden door and down a shadowy corridor into what could only be Haas’s private quarters.

They were spacious by station standards, furnished in the same expensive, aggressively modern style as the office. Bella didn’t turn the lights on, just let the refracted light of Compson’s World shine up through the floorports, casting disorienting upside-down shadows.

“You live here?” Li asked, unable to stop herself.

Bella looked up at Li, her face so close that Li could read the flowing blue letters of the MotaiSyndicate logo that curved along the lower edge of each perfectly patterned iris. “Does that shock you?” she asked.

Li had never been this close to a Syndicate construct, except for D Series soldiers and the occasional field officer. No women. And never, never anything like Bella.

She was taller than Li remembered, and she had a sharp wild scent that made Li think of high-mountain forests. She wondered fleetingly if the smell was perfume or a high-priced option engineered into her geneset by the MotaiSyndicate designers. She cleared her throat. “Why would it shock me?” she said. “It’s none of my business who you live with.”

Bella leaned closer. Starlight shifted over her face, casting the sculpted angles of her face into sharp relief, and Li saw that one fragile cheekbone was swollen by a fading bruise. She took Bella’s chin in her hand, turned her face to the light. “Who did that to you?”

Bella bit her lip. It was an unconscious gesture, fearful and sensual at the same time, and it made Li want to protect her.

More than protect her.

She jerked her hand away. “You could file charges,” she said, but she felt the futility of it even before she spoke.

Bella smiled. “You don’t like to see people hurt,” she said. “You’re softhearted. Just like Hannah was.”

“How well did you know her?” Li asked.

“Only well enough to know she was kind.”

“There was an entry in her datebook a few days before she died, just an initial, B. Did you have an appointment with her that week? Did you meet? Talk about something?”

Bella turned away and wandered around the room, the starlight flickering up through her flowing skirts. As she walked, she ran her fingers lightly over the chairs, the bookshelves, the back of a sofa. Li shuddered, feeling as if it were her own flesh Bella was touching, not dead virusteel and vat-leather.

“Sit down,” Bella said.

Li sat.

Bella ended her wandering in front of the sleek black box of Haas’s streamspace terminal. She looked down at it, her black hair spilling over her shoulders like water running down a coal face. She sprang the catch and opened the terminal, revealing a dense tangle of spintronics wrapped around bright shards of communications-grade Bose-Einstein condensates.

She slipped a pale finger into the rat’s nest of wires and skimmed it along the condensates. “They’re cold,” she said. “They’re always cold once they’re formatted. Curious. In the mine, they speak to me and no one else. Up here, they speak to everyone… and to me they’re just dead stones.”

Li looked at the terminal’s guts and waited to hear whatever Bella was trying to tell her.

“Can you hear them?” Bella asked. “In the mine? Can you?”

“Not really,” Li answered. “They just fry my internals, that’s all.”

“To me they sing. It’s the greatest thing I’ve ever done in my life, hearing them. It’s what I was made for. In a way no human could understand.”

“Is that what you did for Sharifi? Find crystals?”

Instead of answering, Bella bent over the ansible and lifted out one of the clear slivers of condensate. It glittered in the faint light. Bella held it up between them and looked through it, and Li saw the blue-violet shimmer of her eyes refracted through the crystal.

“Do you actually know how they work?” Bella asked.

Li shrugged. “I learned what I needed to pass my commissioning test. Beyond that… well, who knows how they really work?”

Bella looked away, her eyes shadowed by the dark fall of hair. “Hannah knew. She knew everything about them.”

“Bella,” Li said, speaking quietly, “what was Sharifi doing in the mine the day she died?”

“Working.”

“No. She went down there to meet someone. Who was it?”

Bella reached into the tangle of chips and wires to replace the crystal. “If I remembered,” she said at last, “don’t you think I’d tell you?” But her face was turned away from Li, into darkness.

“I’m trying to catch the person who killed her, Bella. I need your help. I need any help I can get.”

Bella looked at Li for a moment without speaking, then came across the room, knelt in front of her chair between her feet, and laid her pale smooth hands on Li’s thighs. “I want to help,” she whispered. “You have to believe me. I’d do anything to help you.”

Bella’s hands were hot, even through the thick fabric of Li’s uniform. She knew she should put some distance between them, but leaning back into the deep chair seemed too much like an invitation.