Chris Moriarty - Spin State

“I hate to burst your bubble,” Li told Ramirez, “but jail time for kidnapping isn’t going to look good on your college transcripts.”

“I got my master’s degree two years ago,” Ramirez said. “And they have to catch me before they can put me in jail, don’t they? Turn around and put your hands behind your back.”

Li did it, knowing it was a bad idea but unable to think of an alternative. Ramirez pulled a pair of virusteel cuffs out of his pocket and snapped them around her wrists, locking her arms behind her. As the cuffs snapped shut Li felt a slight sting at the nape of her neck and realized Ramirez had slapped a derm on her.

“Forgive me,” she heard him say through the rising haze of a sedative that must have been specially designed to outsmart her internals, “but better safe than sorry. You see that van over there? The white one? The back’s open. Get in and shut the door behind you.”

Li walked toward the van as slowly as she could, trying to catch Bella’s eye. Who’s following us? she wanted to ask. Where are they? Is help coming if we can wait it out a little longer?

But no one came. No one was intended to come. And as Li stepped into the van she glanced up toward the garage ceiling and saw why: the van had been parked a little crooked in its space, tail end facing out into the aisle, just where the garage’s security cameras could catch prime-time quality spinfeed of the kidnapping.

“Smile for the cameras,” Louie said, and the last thing she remembered before she passed out was his wide-open Irish laugh.

The next few hours were a dope-smeared blur. Sprinting across a rain-swept landing pad, half-held half-dragged by Ramirez. A brief struggle with Louie during which she refused, childishly, to let him scan her palm implant and he pulled a knife and told her he’d damn well cut it off her if she didn’t cooperate. A thwonking, shuddering hopper flight.

When she woke they were still in the air and someone had strapped an oxygen mask over her face. She opened her eyes to a bird’s-eye view of the granite teeth of the Johannesburg Massif, the vast rolling red ocean of the algae steppes. She started, feeling as if she were falling forward into the abyss, then blinked and twisted her head around and made sense of her surroundings.

She was on the deck of an old cropduster-rigged Sikorsky, an Earth-built antique that must have been broken down to its gearboxes and shipped out in the airless cargo hold of some long-abandoned generation ship. Like most of Compson’s presettlement tech, the Sikorsky had been rerigged to run on fossil fuel—and Li guessed from the grumbling shudder beneath her that it had been flying seeder runs for the terraforming authority ever since then.

Li had been tucked between the pilot’s and copilot’s seats and was now staring straight through the smooth Plexiglas bubble of the windshield. When she looked up she saw Louie at the pilot’s controls and Ramirez on her other side, staring at a handheld navcomp and frowning.

“Where are we?” she rasped, and Ramirez looked down, frowning.

“I thought that derm was supposed to last longer,” he said.

Louie glanced over and shrugged. “Tough motherfucker, isn’t she?”

“I don’t have another one, though. And she wasn’t supposed to wake up until we got there.”

“So what? She’d know the place in her sleep anyway.” He laughed a laugh that didn’t sound quite as friendly to Li as it once had. “They all do.”

Ramirez scowled over her head at Louie, and she found herself wondering just who was in charge of this kidnapping.

They landed twenty minutes later, setting down on a dusty stretch of hardpan that seemed implausibly level until Li realized it was an old shuttle runway.

“We’re there,” Ramirez said unnecessarily. “We’re going to get out and walk to the buildings, okay? Just cooperate and it’s all going to be fine.”

She could walk under her own steam now, and as she stumbled along trying to clear her hazed vision she heard Bella’s thin-soled shoes whispering across the ground just beside her. She knew this place, though she couldn’t yet put a name to it. She’d been here, not once but many, many times. She knew that the rutted jeep track beyond the landing strip would take her through the foothills to Shantytown if she had the strength to walk for a few hours in the unprocessed air of the foothills. She knew that the box canyon hidden behind that ridge harbored a steep-walled wash that she and her father had once used for target practice.

But she didn’t quite understand where they were until she squinted at the long-empty airplane hangar looming over the lab building and read the words that sent an atavistic fight-or-flight reaction flooding through every cell of her body:

XENOGEN MINING TECHNOLOGIES RESEARCH DIVISION

The sprawling lab complex had stood empty for decades, and the rats, roaches, and kudzu vine had had their way with it. As their captors steered them into the back corridors they stumbled over abandoned equipment and office supplies, ducked under torn-out wiring, waded through snowdrifts of shredded insulation tile.

The air was musty with rat dung and mildew. But under those smells—the smells humans and their pests had brought—Li could still catch a sharp desert scent that tugged at her childhood memories. It was a smell you only caught high in the foothills, under the dark wall of the mountains. The planet’s own smell. Compson’s World was taking back the birthlabs. Just as it would take back the whole planet if the thread of the UN’s far-flung trade lines ever snapped and the atmospheric processors and seeding operations ever shut down.

They turned a corner just like every other corner, and Ramirez stopped so abruptly that Li ran into him. “In there,” he said, and pushed her into a small windowless room.

As the door clanged shut, Li realized he had locked her into one of the lab’s old holding cells. It was a box. A box with soundproofed walls, a metal-sheathed door, with no furniture or windows or running water. A box built for a person. She heard footsteps echo beyond the door and the clang of another door slamming shut. Then silence.

A scrap of memory floated into her mind: a ghost story about a group of kids who had come up to the labs and locked one of their friends into a holding cell as a prank. They had been called back down to Shantytown in some childishly implausible plot twist. When they returned the next morning, they couldn’t find the cell their friend was in. They ran up and down the windowless corridors, trying every rusty lock, throwing open the food slots of a thousand dark bolt-holes. The boy was dead when they finally found him. Killed, according to the internal logic of the tale, by the ghost of some bloodily murdered construct.

Li shivered. How many psych-norm-deviant constructs had waited out cold nights and lightless days in this cell? How many had died in it? And how many of the people who walked free on the streets of Shantytown were the children of those dead, or of the lab guards and lab technicians and paper pushers who had helped kill them? The children remembered, even if no one else did; they told ghost stories about the very skeletons their parents couldn’t bury deep enough.

The door scraped open on protesting hinges. A line of light seeped into the cell, unbearable after the long darkness. Ramirez appeared in the doorway, bright and terrible as Gabriel.

Li struggled into a sitting position, back against the wall, head spinning. Her internals told her to lie back down. She ignored them.

He put a finger to his lips. Sshhhhh.