Chris Moriarty - Spin State

“Help wasn’t what I had in mind, Daahl. I don’t know what little game you two are playing but—”

Daahl met someone’s eyes over Li’s shoulder, froze for a split second, then relaxed again as if he’d made a conscious effort to look natural. Li turned to see who he was looking at and found herself staring into a pair of ceramsteel-cold blue eyes set in the face of a tough-looking woman in EMT gear.

The woman nodded to Daahl, gave Li a measuring look, then just stood, hands thrust into her overall pockets, sharp eyes flicking back and forth between the two of them.

Li looked at Daahl, then glanced at the woman, hesitating. Should she know her? She shook her head and turned back to Daahl.

“Go ahead,” he said, without introducing the woman. “No secrets here.”

“No secrets?” Li snorted. “You must be joking. I can’t walk a step without tripping over one.”

“Just because something’s none of your business doesn’t mean it’s a secret.”

“None of my business? People are dying down there.”

“People have been dying down there every day since you left here,” Daahl said, his voice as hard as Shantytown’s gypsum flats in August. “I haven’t noticed that you cared until now.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You can’t fight in two armies, Katie.”

“I—”

“I’m not laying blame. Hell, I’m proud of you, of what you’ve accomplished. But in a few days there’ll be UN troops dropping in here. And they’ll be aiming at us. So don’t ask me to trust you because of some little girl I knew way back when. She’s dead. You killed her the day you enlisted.”

That brought her up short. She looked at the unnamed woman and saw ice-blue eyes staring back at her. She looked back at Daahl and saw the same pale eyes, the same cold mistrustful look. He despises you , she thought. The words floated to the surface of her mind before she could suppress them. He despises you, and he’s right to. When did you become such a hypocrite?

She shoved the thought down savagely. “You make it sound like war,” she said.

“It is war. And you chose your side fifteen years ago.”

She looked out the window toward the helipad and saw a group of guards clotted around the perimeter.

No. Not a group. A line. Behind the line stood the white-and-orange coveralls of company techs, the blue of pit management. This side of the line there was only a roiling tide of miners and Shantytowners.

They stood, heads down, shoulders hunched, not quite facing the company men. A low buzz rose from their mouths, a sound as subtle and menacing as a wasp’s nest waking to a careless footfall.

Li knew that sound. It was the sound of a mob getting ready to hurt someone. The strike had begun.

“Go!” Daahl said.

As she walked away, she felt the two pairs of pale eyes boring into her back, as if they could see right through skin and ceramsteel to the coward she had somehow become.

She must have slept on the shuttle; she had no memory of the journey back to the station.

When they finally docked, she stumbled to her quarters, ignoring the littered corridors, the open doors, the rescue personnel flooding in from every other mining station in-system. She could barely see straight, and her eyes and throat felt like they’d been peeled.

She pressed her palm to her door seal and swayed unsteadily in the corridor while it read her implant. She had stepped inside before she felt the faint twinge of alarm that told her something was out of place.

Before she could react—before she could even think about what had triggered the feeling—a hard hand closed over her mouth.

“Leave the witch alone,” a man’s voice whispered in her ear, “and don’t ask questions you don’t want the answers to.”

She scanned to see if her attacker had a weapon and found none. That was the good news. The bad news was that he had the kind of probe shielding that could only go with a wire job.

He spun her around and slammed her head into the wall hard enough to make her eyes water.

“Accidents can happen on-station too,” he whispered, “not just underground.”

Then he was gone—just in time for Li to realize that the stink filling her nose was Kintz’s cheap aftershave.

The knock came at her door well after two in the morning station time.

“Who is it?” Li asked hazily, trying to remember if she’d put on enough clothes when she went to bed to be decent now. The whispered reply was enough to jolt her wide-awake and halfway to the door.

Bella all but fell into Li’s arms as the door hissed open. Li supported her to the bed. Bella clung to her as if she were drowning while Li brushed her hair back from her face to reveal a new bruise blossoming over the old ivory stain of the last one.

Her first thought was that Haas had done it. Then she caught herself. Had Bella ever come out and accused him? Had she ever done more than deal in hints and innuendo? Haas had been off-station for days, first in Helena, then dealing with rescue operations on the surface. Did this mean he was back? Or had someone else done it? And what, in the end, did she really know about Bella?

“Haas doesn’t know I’m here,” Bella said, shuddering. “He… fell asleep.”

“Let’s go down to Security, Bella. You can file a report.”

“No,” Bella whispered. “You’ll leave, sooner or later. Then there’ll be no one to protect me.”

Li stared at her, knowing what she said was true, hating it, hating herself for not being able to change it.

Bella started and pulled out of Li’s arms.

“Where did you get this?” she asked, picking up Sharifi’s copy of Xenograph from the floor where Li had dropped it when she fell asleep. “It’s Hannah’s.”

“I took it from her room.”

Bella looked at her, and that calculating look drifted across her face again. “Read to me,” she said. “Like Hannah did.”

Li hesitated.

“Please. I just need to hear your voice.”

Li thumbed through the book, wondering what passages Hannah would have read to Bella. What she would have said about them. She remembered the secretive habits she’d developed during a childhood of reading library books: cracking their spines so the next person who checked them out couldn’t spot her favorite passages, couldn’t read over her shoulder and trace her own reactions in the rut of her reading. Had Sharifi been like her, a private, furtive, guilty keeper of secrets? Li doubted it; the Sharifi she remembered watching, the Sharifi that Bella and Sharpe and Cohen talked about, hadn’t been interested in hiding.

She held the book up and let it fall open. Sure enough, she saw a line of Sharifi’s neat writing in the margin. She read out the words Sharifi had underlined:

I write these words sitting in our field camp. Behind me rise the eight thousanders of the Johannesburg Massif, still unclimbed every one of them. To my left lie the salt flats of that ancient ocean whose banks I spent two years walking. To my right, the highlands that Cartwright and Dashir mapped. All untouched, alien, perfect as it was on the first day we saw it.

But on my way to camp, I passed the terraforming plant. I passed algae flats, the furrows of farmers’ fields. And I have now a wheat ear lying across the page I write on. I plucked it from the trailside. Life in a blade of grass.

Life for another planet. For this one, death—and the slow, fatal rot that follows the map of our best intentions.

We were mapmakers. Monks and worshipers. We came into the country like saints coming to the desert. We came to be changed.