Chris Moriarty - Spin State

“Actually,” Li said, “a lot of them have.”

McCuen stared. “No shit,” he said, and she could see the wondering look on his face even in the lamplight. “Like who?”

“Chuck Kinney, for one.”

“He’s a construct!”

“So? And the barkeep at the Molly. Obviously. Oh, and those two brothers, the redheads, four or five years older than me.”

“Mutt and Jeff?”

“Christ, they still call them that?”

“Well, look at them.”

Li laughed. “So what’s the supposedly not true rumor about what they’re doing down here?” she asked, hoping McCuen’s gossipy mood would survive the change of subject.

“Oh, it’s a lot weirder than the IRA thing. More like the kind of story you tell kids to scare them into doing what you want them to.” He grinned. “I bet it was my aunt or someone who told me. And… you really don’t know any of this?”

“Sometimes I do. Sometimes I forget.” She grinned. “You’ll get to find out all about that soon enough.”

“Right. Well, the story about the glory holes is that the priests take people down there and… feed them to something.”

Li laughed. “What, like ritual cannibalism?”

“I told you it was ridiculous.”

It is ridiculous, Li started to say. But before she could open her mouth, the vaults spun around her ears and she was in the grip of another flashback.

Her father and mother were there. But they were smaller than in the last memory, strangely reduced. It took her a moment to puzzle that out. Then she realized it was she who had changed, not them. This was a more recent memory.

She tried to see their faces but couldn’t. She knew who they were in an abstract sense, but their actual features were invisible to her. As if each of them wore a blank white mask that said Mother or Father. As if they had no faces.

Two men stood beside her father, cloaked in shadow. One she recognized by the set of his shoulders and the scar snaking down his throat: Cartwright. The other, thin, wiry, ducking his head into his collar, she couldn’t quite place. She looked at her mother and saw that she was crying silently, tears streaming down her cheeks. She looked back toward her father, and she almost fainted in terror.

His chest was gone. All she saw there was a dark hole that swallowed all the light of the crystals around them, that threatened to suck down into itself even the spanning ribs of the vaults overhead. He smiled at her—or perhaps he just smiled. Slowly, not taking his eyes from hers, he lifted a hand, plunged it into the black void within him, and pulled out a thick sheaf of paper.

Li saw the paper, the bony coal-scarred hand holding it, even the sooty rubber band tied off around the wad. She saw it all, registered it, digested it with the surreal accuracy of dream vision. What she did not see—not until it was too late, not until it was burning in her hand already—was what the paper was.

It was money. Money she’d spent fifteen years ago.

Nguyen sat at her desk under the tall windows. Ruddy sunlight glinted off her uniform jacket, struck fire off her epaulettes, haloed her straight-backed figure in red and gold.

“So,” she said. “The station exec was skimming. You think. But you don’t have proof, as far as I can see, other than the fact that you think he’s mistreating his girlfriend. Everyone is always skimming in any Bose-Einstein operation, Li. The rewards are too rich to resist. If he really is guilty, AMC probably knows already, and they won’t welcome hearing about—what did you say his name was?”

“Haas.”

“—hearing about Haas from us.”

Li didn’t answer immediately. Nguyen continued. “What about Gould?”

“She’ll reach Freetown in twenty days.”

“Then you need to have this wrapped up by then.”

“We may not be able to wrap it up without her.”

“No. That’s not acceptable. We may lose her again. She may manage to get some message out—God knows what or to whom—before we can intercept the ship. Twenty days. That’s all you’ve got. And you’re wasting time on some two-bit embezzler and his Syndicate-bred girlfriend.”

“But Sharifi’s murder—”

“You’re missing the point, Li. Sharifi’s murder—if she really was murdered—is a side issue. The real target is what she was working on and who she was leaking information to.”

“Yes, but the two things are tangled up together. Haas was—”

“Are you trying to tell me that Hannah Sharifi was ignoring her research in order to chase after a second-rate petty thief?”

“No, but—”

“Then we’re in agreement. I want Sharifi’s datasets. I want to know who she showed them to. And most of all I want to know what kind of damage control we need to do in order to prevent them from getting into the wrong hands.”

“The wrong hands being… ?”

“Anyone’s but ours.” Nguyen took a breath and leaned forward. “I have good news. I saw an internal draft of the board’s decision on Metz. It’s not official yet, but I think they’ll clear you.”

“Great,” Li said, but the muscles of her thighs and shoulders ratcheted even tighter as she waited for the other shoe to drop.

“If that happens, I want to talk to you about a new assignment. To Alba.”

“Great.”

“Assuming the board falls your way, that is. There are still a few members on the fence, as I understand it.”

Including Nguyen herself, no doubt. “What would it take to get them off the fence?” Li asked, playing the game and hating herself for it.

“A clean, fast resolution of this investigation, for one thing.”

First the carrot, then the stick.

“Also”—Nguyen paused delicately—“stay away from Cohen for the next little while. You’re a fine officer. A good soldier. But you’re in over your head with him. Cohen, despite all his charming eccentricities, is no harmless crackpot. Talk to him, and you’re talking to the board of directors and sole stockholder of the largest multiplanetary in UN space. He controls shipping lanes and streamspace links to a good third of the Periphery. He has a corporate espionage department that is, without exaggeration, twice the size of our internal affairs division—”

Li laughed. “I think he’s offered me a job in it.”

“Probably. I’m sure you’d be very useful to him. Which is exactly my point. It’s never personal when you talk to him. Don’t let the organic interface lull you into thinking you’re dealing with someone who feels things as we do. You can’t trust him. Except to act in his own best interest. That’s what he’s built to do. Nothing else. There is nothing else for him.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Li asked. “Cohen’s the best freelancer we have. Now he’s suspect?”

“Just because we work with him doesn’t mean we trust him. Some people are too powerful to be challenged. Cohen’s on the Security Council’s watch list, for Heaven’s sake. Don’t forget that. We may not have had enough to take him to court on it, but he deliberately caused the planetary net crash on Kalispell last year. That’s manipulating a network with intent to harm humans. If we’d nailed him on it, he’d have been stripped down to his switches. And Tel Aviv—”

“Tel Aviv was an accident.”

“An accident like Metz?”

Li’s stomach turned over. “What do you mean, Metz?”

“Catherine,” Nguyen said patiently, and Li felt a weird sense of disjuncture at hearing the name that Cohen always called her. “Forget Metz. I’m just asking you to remember he isn’t human.”

“Neither am I,” Li pointed out.

Nguyen gestured impatiently. “That’s not the point. What you are or aren’t… that’s semantics. A few divergent chromosomes. A grandmother whose geneset was assembled by design instead of chance. But in every way that counts, you are human. Cohen is something else entirely. Don’t let personal feelings get in the way of remembering that.”