Chris Moriarty - Spin State

“Haas told me. I still remember how he looked when he did it. Like he was proud of it. Like he was daring me to say something. The next day he moved my things here, and it’s been… what you see now, ever since.”

Bella had given up even pretending to eat. Li watched her twist her napkin between white-knuckled fingers and thought about Haas, and about the blank impersonalness of Sharifi’s quarters and the single unexplained initial Sharifi had written in her datebook the week she died.

Maybe it was time to risk a shot in the dark.

“Did you tell Sharifi this story when she came to dinner?” she asked.

“What?”

“When she had dinner with you. The night before she died. Was Haas here? Or was he conveniently off-station that night too?”

Bella stared, her mouth open, her face white. “Don’t,” she whispered. “Please don’t.”

“You were lovers, weren’t you?”

“I never said—”

“You never had to. It’s all over your face every time you talk about her.”

Bella scrubbed at her mouth with her napkin. The skin of her face looked as pale as the bleached linen. “You can’t tell anyone,” she said. “Haas would… I don’t know what he’d do.” Her hand twitched toward the faint remnant of the bruise on her cheek, but she forced it down into her lap again.

“Doesn’t he know already? Isn’t that what you’re trying to tell me?”

“No.” Bella stood up so quickly she jostled the table and set the glassware ringing. “No. Not possible.”

She moved to the side window and leaned her face against the viewport. Li followed.

It was second night, and the Companion cast its faint light into the room, etching the angles of Bella’s face in a red so dark it was almost black. “What can I do?” she whispered.

“Can’t you just go home, tell them you can’t finish it out?”

She shook her head violently.

“Well, then—”

“Forget it. You can’t help. No one can help.”

Bella turned. She was so close now, the light behind her, the beautiful face lost in shadow. Li touched her cheek, and the feverish heat of the pale skin shocked her.

Bella leaned into her, sighing, and Li shuddered at the soft flutter of breath against her skin. Bella’s lips played along her neck, around the angle of her jaw, over her earlobe, and Li turned her head for the kiss she wanted so badly.

But in the last breath before their lips touched, she looked into Bella’s wide-open eyes—and saw something that stopped her cold. Not fear. Not reluctance. But… something. Something as deliberate and calculated as the blue-on-black MotaiSyndicate logo set into the outer perimeter of the violet irises.

Li stepped back, hands dropping to her sides. The hot desire that had taken hold of her a moment ago was gone, replaced by a clammy, after-fever chill. “Who killed Sharifi, Bella?”

Bella turned back toward the window, and it seemed to Li that the hand she put on the sill was trembling. “I don’t know,” she said finally. “I told you, I don’t remember.”

“You remember something,” Li said. “Or you suspect. Why else would you have told me about Cory? Why else tell me the bodies were in the glory hole when they weren’t? Because they weren’t, were they? And you must have known they weren’t. You’re laying a trail for me. The only thing I can’t figure out is if you’re leading me to Haas or away from him.”

“I’m not leading you anywhere! I don’t know. I told you that!”

“And I don’t believe it. Lovers talk. Sharifi must have told you things. That she found something. Some new piece of technology. Some new information.” Li paused, then went on. “Something Korchow wanted you to get from her.”

“It wasn’t like that,” Bella said stubbornly.

“Then how was it?”

Bella moved impatiently. “Is that all you came for? To ask questions?”

“What did you expect?” Li asked.

She waited, but Bella didn’t turn around, and only the slight tremor in her shoulders told Li she was crying again.

“Hannah didn’t go to Korchow about the crystals,” Bella said finally. “And there was nothing illegal about it. She was going to buy my contract, with her own money.”

Li stood speechless for a moment, unable to muster a response. “She couldn’t have bought your contract, Bella. She couldn’t have afforded it.”

“She was rich,” Bella insisted, with the blind certainty of someone who didn’t understand what the word meant, what money meant.

“Not that rich.”

“You’re wrong. She was going to. She promised.”

“So what went wrong, Bella? What happened to the happy ending?”

“She changed,” Bella said after a long silence. “She found something that made her happier than I could.”

Halfway back to her quarters Li realized she wasn’t even close to sleep and turned aside to catch the next surface-bound shuttle.

The pithead guards knew her by now; they searched her perfunctorily, almost apologetically. Twenty minutes later, just as the graveyard shift was turning, she climbed down the ladder into the glory hole.

The crystals were in full voice, overloading her internals, wreaking havoc on her scan systems. By the time she set her foot on the bottom rung of the ladder her infrared and quantum scans had cut out completely. She could have lit her lantern, but she didn’t want to. There was something terrible about the smallness of a light in this ancient airless darkness. She sat in the dark with her back against the ladder and retraced the twisting course of the investigation.

She saw no straight sight lines, no clear cause and effect, nothing but blind corners and dead drops. Had she accomplished anything at all here? Or was she just stuck in rewind, projecting her own ghosts onto Sharifi, dredging the sterile runoff of a dead girl’s pathetic memories?

Ask yourself who the players are , Cohen had said, and what they want. Well, what did they want?

Daahl and Ramirez wanted what the union always wanted. To wrest control of the mines away from the UN defense contractors, to build their workers’ paradise—a paradise that Li didn’t want any part of but that would probably be no worse than anyone else’s misguided little piece of heaven on earth.

Cartwright’s goals were tangential to the union’s, as Korchow would say. But he’d stand with the union —if only because the union was most likely to protect his precious crystals. If Daahl and Cartwright had to take Li down to get what they wanted, they would. Otherwise, they’d stay clear of her, if only because of their loyalty to the family she barely remembered.

Haas wanted to keep the mine running. And, when he thought he could get away with it, he’d wanted to keep Li out of the glory hole. Why? To avoid drawing the miners’ attention to it? No; they already knew, thanks to Cartwright and the wagging tongues of the miners Sharifi had paid union scale to dig it out for her. Was it simply the fierce multiplanetary’s drive to prevent a slowdown and protect profits? Or was it something more personal? Hiding his embezzling? Avenging himself for Bella’s betrayal?

Nguyen wanted Sharifi’s dataset. And she wanted to make sure no one else got it. That she knew things she wasn’t telling Li was a given, part of the price of working for her, of trusting her. But what were those things? Did she know what Sharifi had found in the mine? Who she had talked to about it? Did she know about Korchow? Was it just paranoia for Li to think she was following a track Nguyen had foreseen, even laid down for her?

And what about Korchow? He wanted the same information Nguyen wanted. He wanted it desperately enough to take the chance of approaching Li, of risking the sting he must know was a real possibility. And he had suggested—more than suggested—that Sharifi had already betrayed some of her secrets to him.