Chris Moriarty - Spin State

Kintz laughed. “That the best you can do, Major?” He was as solid as rock behind her. Or, more accurately, as solid as ceramsteel.

Adrenaline had kicked her internals on a few times already during the fight, and she had shut them off just as quickly. Now she turned them on and left them on. She twisted and strained, pushing protesting tendons and ligaments within a millimeter of breaking. Nothing budged. He had a solid grip on her, and even with her internals pushed as far as she could risk pushing them, he was just plain stronger than she was.

“The Corps isn’t juicing you guys like it used to,” Kintz said. “Or maybe you’re just behind the curve.”

He twisted her arm until her knees buckled and her vision shut down to a red-hazed tunnel.

“I know what you are,” he whispered, his breath hot in her ear. “I can buy half-bred cunts like you in every whorehouse in Helena. This isn’t Gilead. You don’t have an army to back you up here. And I’ll show you what that means if you don’t mind your nasty little digger business.”

Her first urge was to fight, driven by the massive dose of adrenaline her internals were shooting through her system. Then she thought it through and almost laughed at the ridiculous childishness of the situation. What the hell did she care? What point was there in damaging herself in order to not have Kintz be able to say he’d beaten her on the practice mat? She forced herself to go limp in his arms, waiting.

It worked, after a fashion.

“Stupid slut,” Kintz muttered under his breath. He let go of her arm, but as he did he slipped his foot in front of hers, almost sending her sprawling. Her internals kept her on her feet, but by the time she turned to face him he’d already crossed his arms and pasted his usual grin back onto his face.

She laughed, aware that her hands were shaking with rage. “That was fun. We’ll have to do it again sometime.”

“Sure.” Still grinning. “See you around.”

She stood in the middle of the mat, weight on her toes, and tracked him all the way to the door. She must have looked as shaken as she felt; before she could pull herself together, McCuen came and stood in front of her with a worried look on his face.

“Okay, Major?” She heard his voice through a haze of adrenaline, as if he were speaking from somewhere far away.

“I’m fine,” she said, running a dripping hand over her hair. “But that son of a bitch needs an attitude adjustment.”

The glory hole.

Light and silence. A fullness of space like the rush inside a conch shell. Pillars that were ribs leaping up into the wild geometry of the fan vaults, raising the roof of a living cathedral.

Li had last seen it in the dark and underwater. Now she was seeing it as the miners had seen it, as Sharifi had seen it. And Bella was right; it did sing. Li might not hear the music the witch heard, but her internals were going wild, overloaded by the quantum storm that raged in the glory hole’s gleaming belly.

There had been problems draining it. It had taken the cleanup crew much longer than expected to shore up the surrounding passages and run the pumps in. And for several tense days they had struggled to find an underground river, broken out of its banks by the fire and subsequent flooding, that kept refilling the Trinidad’s lower levels as fast as they could drain them.

The work went even slower because the miners, except for the pit Catholics, wouldn’t work the glory hole. It was a place surrounded by fearful superstition, as terrible to some people as it had been fascinating to Sharifi.

Something cracked and skittered away from Li’s foot. She bent, her headlamp raking the rough floor with shadows, and saw two glittering red eyes flashing back at her. She touched the thing and heard a little clack like the sound of two marbles kissing. She picked it up.

It was plastic. The kind of cheap, locally produced petroleum product that always cluttered up Compson’s markets. Two red marbles connected by a loop of black elastic. It was a Love-in-Tokyo, a cheap bauble to tie off a little girl’s ponytail. Li herself had worn one in some faded past in which she’d actually been a little girl with a ponytail. Reflexively, she pulled the elastic around her wrist and slipped the plastic marble through the loop. She heard the click as it fastened, felt the elastic bite into her wrist, the smooth pressure of plastic beads against her skin. A memory rose up out of the deep rift of her unconscious, fierce and precise, a child’s vision of night and fear.

It had been some other glory hole she had visited, not this one. A hole long since dug out and sold off piece by piece by AMC or some other company. Her mother had carried her. Her father was there, nearby but not with them. It was in another deposit; she remembered long hours on the rough mountain roads, borrowed rebreathers passed from hand to hand in the shaking, grinding truck bed under the flapping canvas. It was dark when they left, darker when they got there, darkest in the hot muttering mine. She had been terrified by the noises the mine made, by all those tons of mountain shifting and grumbling above her. I am inside a beast , she remembered thinking, swallowed alive, like Jonah .

The memory dropped away from her. She shook her head and looked around. What had they been doing in that other glory hole? Why had they gone there? She followed the vein of the memory, trying to pick it up further along, pry loose some concrete recollection. Nothing.

“What’s that?” McCuen asked, pointing at the Love-in-Tokyo.

Li jumped; she’d forgotten him. Then she held it out for him to see.

He grinned. “Doesn’t look like Sharifi’s style exactly.”

“Is it possible Cartwright or someone else would have been bringing children down here?”

McCuen looked uncomfortable. “Well, AMC tries to stop them. But what are they going to do? They can’t block off every borehole and ventilation drift. And even if they tried, there are plenty they don’t know about.”

“What do you know about glory holes, McCuen?”

He looked at her as if he thought she was asking a trick question.

“Really. I’ve forgotten a lot of what I knew before… before I enlisted.”

McCuen took a breath and frowned. “They’re what the geologists call white bodies—nodes in the beds that cross multiple strata. The best crystal’s always in the white bodies. Some of them are transport-grade straight through from end to end. When a company hits one… well, it’s the big money. Boom time.”

“But it’s more than money, right? Why’s Cartwright so worked up about it?”

“I’m Pentecostal,” McCuen said, and there was a knife edge of disapproval in his voice so subtle Li would have missed it if she hadn’t somehow known it would be there.

“And this is about the pit priests,” she said slowly. “And the union.”

“Is there a difference?” McCuen asked.

“Come on, Brian. It’s important.”

“I… only know what you hear. I’m not sure most of the Catholics know much more than that. It’s not like Rome approves of it.”

“And?”

“And nothing. The priests—the ones that believe in it—look for white bodies. That’s what Cartwright’s doing down here. Not that AMC knows he’s a priest. They’d flay him alive.”

“And what do they do when they find a glory hole?”

“Go down and gawk at it, mostly. I mean what do people do when the Pope comes?”

“And?”

His face shut down. “And nothing.”

“That wasn’t nothing I just saw cross your face. Tell me what you just decided not to tell me.”

“I didn’t decide not to tell you. I just don’t believe in repeating rumors. I mean, I haven’t mentioned all the guys who are supposed to have fought for the Provisionals, have I? Because obviously they haven’t. It’s just tongue wagging.”