Spin State

51 Pegasi Field Array: 13.10.48.

‹14,000pF›

‹27,000pF›

‹DPLprompt›

Her own breathing woke her—harsh, panicked, the sound of a child waking from a nightmare. The memory of Metz was so close she could smell it. Everything else—name, rank, age, history—was darkness. She’d lost the part of her mind that remembered those things, and every time she reached for the pieces they skittered away like quicksilver.

‹Status,› she queried her oracle across an interface that felt distorted, alien.

No answer.

She opened her eyes and saw nothing. She spat out her tongue guard, tried to speak, and realized that the buzzing in her ears was her teeth chattering. She sensed a wall in front of her and put out hands stiff and brittle as sticks to feel it. Her fingers tangled in feedlines, dislodged biomonitors dabbed with adhesive jelly. Wrists and elbows knocked painfully against cold metal, feeding her rising claustrophobia.

Coffin.

She pulled the word out of some unexpected reserve of soft memory. It placed her, anchored her. She was in a coffin in the cryobay of a Bose-Einstein transport, waking after a jump. There must have been some malfunction, some glitch in the ship’s systems, or her own, to pull her off ice so early. But it hadn’t been a fatal malfunction, or she wouldn’t be lying here worrying about why she couldn’t remember her own name until her oracle booted.

‹Status?› she queried again.

‹Evolving sysfiles,› her oracle finally fired back at her.

All her systems were coming on-line now. Hard data flowed into her mind, buttressing the decohering haze of soft memory. Flesh and silicon, digital and organic systems knit themselves together. Meat and machine recombined in a quantum-faithful replica of the same Major Catherine Li who’d gone into cryo back on Metz.

She accessed her diagnostic programs and ran through the postjump protocols, checking entangled states, troubleshooting the Sharifi transforms, comparing pre- and postjump file sizes. Everything checked out.

Good; she didn’t have time for problems. She had to take care of her people. She needed to put Dalloway in for a commendation and ship him out to a new unit before all hell broke loose over Metz. And there was Kolodny’s family to see. Whatever family she had, which Li doubted was much.

Then she saw the trick her mind had played on her.

Metz had been over for almost three months. She’d taken care of everything: Kolodny’s family, Dalloway’s transfer, her own preliminary statements for the review board. She’d done it all in a manic three-day race against exhaustion and injury, wired to the gills on pain-suppression programs. Then she’d gone into the rehab tanks. And after that there would have been the cold freeze, the transfer to the jumpship, weeks of sublight travel by Bussard drive to reach Metz’s orbital relay and queue up for transfer.

How long had she been under? Twelve weeks? Thirteen?

She felt the old fear rising in her chest, caught herself flipping through directories, cross-checking, fighting to make sense of twisted fragments of soft data.

Stop, she told herself. You know the rule. Stick to this jump, this place. Let the last one go. Let the hard files pick up the slack. Don’t let the fear get you.

But the fear got her anyway. It always did. The fear was rational, reasonable, double-blind tested, empirically verifiable. It waited for her at the boarding gate and rode on her shoulder through every jump, every mission, every sweaty early-morning jump-dream. It asked the one question she couldn’t answer: what had she lost this time?

Decoherence was as slow and subtle as radiation. An unwired traveler could make five or six jumps in a lifetime without losing more than a few isolated dates and names. The real damage was cumulative, caused by the minute drift of spin states over the course of many replications—a slow bleed of information that couldn’t be stanched without sacrificing the quantum parallelism that made replication possible in the first place. It took short-term memory first. Then long-term memory. Then friends and loyalties and marriages. If you didn’t stop in time, it took everything.

Cybernetics could mask the problem. A field-wired Peacekeeper’s hard memory held backed-up spinfeed of every waking moment, on- and off-duty, since enlistment. And provided you didn’t lie to the psychtechs, the files preserved at least reasonably accurate preenlistment memories. Platformed on an enslaved AI and bolstered by psychotropic drugs, the datafiles could provide a working substitute for lost memories. But jump long enough, and everything you knew, everything that was you, flowed out of the meat and into the machine as inexorably as sand slipping through an hourglass. And Li, her oracle on-line, her hard memory fully reintegrated, could now recall that in the fourteen years, two months, and six days since enlistment she’d made thirty-seven Bose-Einstein jumps.

She fumbled for the coffin’s latch, found it at her right hip where it always was, popped the lid. It rose in a smooth whisper of hydraulics. She sat up.

The effort left her wracked with cramps, coughing up thick chunks of mucus. She couldn’t be Ring-side or on Alba, she realized; the Ring and Corps HQ were only one jump from anywhere on the Periphery, and her lungs wouldn’t feel this bad unless she’d been kept under through multiple jumps and layovers. So where was she? And why was she bound for some unknown Periphery planet instead of back to Alba for rehab?

She swung her legs over the rim of the coffin and felt the cold grid of deckplating under her feet. Bottom rack at least. Thank God for small mercies. She looked around at the cryobay. Racks of coffins rose above her in a brightly lit honeycomb of feedlines and biomonitors. Most of the other passengers were still on ice; cool green vital lines blipped steadily on their status screens. The virusteel deckplating hummed with the distant throb of idling Bussard drives. Somewhere out of sight a skeleton crew would be running postjump checks, evolving systems shut down for replication, signaling to the sublight tugs that would ferry the jumpship beyond the immense starfish arms of the field array.

Li’s uniform—or rather a quantum-faithful replica of it—lay in the kit drawer beneath her coffin, neatly folded and stowed by a Major Catherine Li, UNSC, who no longer existed. In the right-hand pants pocket she found a wad of tissue just where she always stashed it. In the left-hand shirt pocket she found her cigarettes, already unwrapped by that other Li who knew just how weak her fingers were after jumps these days.

She leaned against the coffin, uniform piled next to her, and blew her nose.

Pain rifled through her right shoulder as she raised her hands to her face. She touched the heart of the pain: eight centimeters of knotted scar tissue slicing up her triceps and across the point of her shoulder. It felt nervy to the touch, and when she twisted her head to look at it the scar stood out white against her brown skin.

Metz’s parting gift. She’d never seen the gunman, but the single shot shredded muscle, tendon, and ligament, and severed the ceramsteel filaments that threaded through her arm from shoulder to fingertip. Her oracle told her it had taken five weeks in the tanks to patch it up, but all she remembered of those weeks was painful awakenings, doctors’ questions, sharp flashes of underwater blue brilliance.

She got her uniform on without too much fumbling, but when she tried to pull on her boots her fingers wouldn’t grip properly. She tucked the boots under her good arm and staggered down the aisle, weaving like a worn-out drunk. Green arrows led to the exit. Somewhere down the corridor they’d lead her to a cup of coffee and a soft chair where she could smoke her first ritual postjump cigarette.

She stumbled into the passenger lounge just as the transport linked up with its tug and started the slow subluminal drift toward the field array’s perimeter.

Li had jumped often enough to know the protocol. They would clear the glittering crystal arms of the field array, then kick on the Bussard drives and jump to near lightspeed for the last leg of the journey. Once that happened they’d be in slow time, the communications limbo of a ship traveling at speeds that made relativity a practical rather than theoretical problem. They’d be outstream, cut off from streamspace and the rest of humanity until they dropped back into normal time.

She slumped into an empty chair, lit her cigarette, and looked around at her fellow passengers. Two Peacekeepers huddled in one corner playing a silent card game. The rest of the passengers were techs, company men, midlevel professionals. People whose expertise made it worth the multiplanetaries’ while to pay quantum-transport prices but who didn’t have enough corporate clout to get Ring-side assignments.

There were no constructs, of course. Partial constructs could theoretically bypass the off-planet travel restrictions and get clearance to hold company or even civil service posts. But geneset assays weren’t cheap, and it didn’t happen often.

The only obviously posthuman civilian in the lounge sat directly across from Li: a tall dark-skinned woman with a white scar on her forehead. West African, Li thought. Something in her bones, in the long line of her back, suggested the radiation-induced mutations of the old generation ships—ships that had dropped out of slow time after centuries in open space only to find that humanity had exploded past them in the first wave of the FTL era and their chosen planets were already being stripped and boosted into orbit to feed the voracious juggernaut of the Ring’s consumer culture. The woman wore a tech’s orange coveralls, but her hair was pulled back in spare elegant braids and she was crunching numbers on a high-powered streamspace foldout. An engineer? A Bose-Einstein technician?

Li shifted in her chair and wondered why the woman hadn’t paid to have that scar taken off. She was pretty enough to make it worthwhile. Beautiful, actually.

She caught Li staring at her and smiled, black eyes crinkling at the corners. Li looked away, but not soon enough to miss the sharpening of the woman’s gaze on her too-regular, too-symmetrical features. Not soon enough to miss the unspoken question that lingered behind every first meeting: Was she a construct or wasn’t she?

Li could have looked up again. Could have asked the woman where they were, what system they were about to dock in. But it would sound silly, a tired variation on a very old pickup line. And there was always the awful risk of rejection. The fear that—even to a posthuman whose genes were warped by centuries of radiation—she, Li, was a monster.

She lit another cigarette and checked her mail. When she’d weeded out the junk, she was left with three items. A memo from the Metz field hospital explaining what they’d been able to fix in her arm and what they hadn’t, telling her to go in for a checkup when she reached her next posting. A cryptically worded notice that the review board had postponed issuance of its final ruling on the Metz incident pending further fact-gathering. And three messages from Cohen.

She hadn’t talked to him since Kolodny died. They’d recovered her body, but Dalloway had been right; there was nothing they could do for her. The wet bug had eaten away so much of her brain that when the medtechs showed Li the scans, even she could see Kolodny was never coming back from it.

Kolodny had written Li’s name into the next-of-kin line on her emergency forms. Without telling her. The revelation shook Li, partly because it reminded her that the next-of-kin line on her own papers was still blank. But Kolodny hadn’t been one to leave things to chance; she’d left precise instructions about what to do if she flatlined.

Li had followed her instructions to the letter.

The techs were there when they pulled the plug; they were hacking the precious slivers of communications-grade condensate out of Kolodny’s skull before she was even cold. Li should have known better than to get angry. Christ, she’d done field recoveries herself on a few awful occasions. But it was still like watching vultures pick Kolodny apart. And when it was over, she and Cohen had the worst fight of their lives.

She’d been going into the tanks, groggy with shock and pain-suppression routines, and she’d wanted to put off talking to him. But he insisted. And then he had the gall to give her technical jargon instead of reasons, excuses instead of explanations.

“You dropped us,” she’d said at last, on the outer edge of control. “And Kolodny’s dead because of it.”

“She was my friend too, Catherine.”

“You don’t have friends,” she’d snapped, her stomach churning with the guilty suspicion that if she hadn’t let things get personal, Kolodny would still be alive. “You’re not wired for it.”

“Don’t throw my code in my face,” he’d said, though he ought to have known better. “It’s bigoted.”

“It’s the truth. It’s what you are. You’re wired to twist and manipulate and feed off people. And I’m through with it!”

That was the last time they’d spoken. One or both of them, she suspected, had gone too far to be forgiven. And she wasn’t sure she wanted to forgive, anyway. Or be forgiven.

She stared at Cohen’s messages, wavering. Then she deleted them, unopened and unanswered.

Her commsys icon started flashing as soon as they dropped out of slow time. The call came in with no user tag over a stand-alone scrambled Security Council relay. Someone wanted to talk to her in a hurry. Someone important enough to command a private line from Service HQ.

She toggled the icon, and a high-ceilinged twenty-second-century baroque revival room sprang into three dimensions around her. A tiger maple desk floated on gracefully bowed legs above a pine floor buffed to a smooth gloss by generations of officers’ boots. Each floorboard was as wide as both Li’s hands put side to side, and they were laid down in the unmistakable herringbone pattern of the Security Council Administration Building on Alba. Behind the desk, hands resting on the carved leaves and volutes of her chair’s arms, sat the general.

General Nguyen was a spare, elegant woman, far into a well-preserved middle age. It was hard not to stare at her, even across a spinstream interface. The slightly crooked nose, the asymmetrical cheekbones, the quirked line of the left eyebrow were like the irregularities in a bolt of raw silk; they enhanced rather than detracted from a fragile, unmistakably human beauty.

Nguyen looked directly at Li as she came on-line, meeting her eyes in streamspace. It was a politician’s trick, but knowing the trick didn’t make you immune to it. And when Nguyen did it, you felt like she was inches away from you, not light-years.

“Major,” Nguyen said in a voice that knew how to make itself heard quietly. “It’s good to see you.”

“General,” Li said.

Someone spoke to Nguyen from outside the streamspace projection field. “Fine,” she told her unseen assistant. “Tell Delegate Orozco I’ll be there in five minutes.”

She turned back to Li. “Sorry, Major. I’m pressed for time, as usual. The Assembly’s voting on a military appropriations bill that still needs some baby-sitting.” She smiled. “You’ve probably guessed I have a little job for you.”

Li coaxed her still-numb face into what she hoped was a politely expectant expression. She’d done more than one little job for Nguyen. The general’s jobs were risky; she demanded a level of personal loyalty that could mean bending, if not breaking, the rules. But her rewards were generous. And she remembered favors as tenaciously as she held grudges.

The general’s next words were as unexpected as they were unwelcome. “You’re from Compson’s World, Major?”

“Yes.” Li shifted uncomfortably. Mother of God. Not Compson’s. Anywhere but Compson’s World.

“You’ve never gone home since enlisting?”

Li didn’t answer. It wasn’t really a question; Nguyen had clearance to view her psych files, and in five minutes she could know as much about her personal life as Li herself knew. More, if the barracks scuttlebutt about memory spinning was true.

“Why not?” Nguyen asked.

Li started to speak, then bit the words back. “It’s not the kind of place you go home to,” she said finally.

“Not the kind of place you go home to.” The words sounded like a riddle in Nguyen’s mouth. “Now tell me what you were about to say before you thought the better of it.”

Li hesitated. Her lips were dry; the urge to lick them was like an itch she knew she was going to have to scratch sooner or later. “I was about to say that when I left I swore I’d die before I went back.”

“I hope you don’t still feel that way. You’ll be docking at AMC’s orbital station on Compson’s World in a little over four hours.”

Nguyen reached across her desk to a silver tray that held a carafe of ice water and two cut-crystal glasses. She poured a glass and handed it to Li, who raised it to her lips, hearing the chime of ice against crystal.

The water was good, but the line to Alba was so laced with security protocols that it could only process high-load sensory data in intermittent bursts. She sipped, felt nothing, then got a disorienting headache-cold burst of taste half a second after she’d swallowed. She shook her head and put the glass down.

“Not where you expected to wake up?” Nguyen asked.

“I expected to wake up at Alba. I need to be at Alba. I’m running on a field-hospital patch job—”

“Alba would be a bad place for you just now,” Nguyen interrupted smoothly.

She caught Li’s look of confusion and raised one immaculately groomed eyebrow. “Haven’t you looked at the review board report?”

“Not yet. I—”

“They kicked it upstairs.”

“Upstairs where?”

“Do I have to spell it out for you, Major? Loss of personnel in circumstances suggesting misconduct by the commanding officer. Use of lethal force on a civilian. Use of an unauthorized weapon. Where the hell did you think you were, pulling that thing out? Gilead?”

“They recommended a court-martial?” Li said, trying to get her brain around the idea.

“Not exactly.”

Not exactly. Not exactly meant that covert ops wanted the Metz raid kept quiet, that they planned to comb through every fact and opinion and scrap of testimony before they released it. And if that left Li without a defense, no one would lose much sleep over it.

“When do I testify?” she asked.

“You already have. We downloaded the Metz data and opened your backup files to the Defender’s Office. You can amend your extrapolated testimony if you like, but I doubt you’ll want to. Your attorney did a good job.”

“Right,” Li said. It made her queasy to think of her files being used that way. A backup was exactly that. It sat in an oracle-compatible datacache in Corps archives, received updates and edits and waited to be retrieved if the medtechs needed it. It sure as hell didn’t walk into court-martial proceedings and proffer testimony that could end your career.

“The board hasn’t rendered its decision,” Nguyen said. “It seemed prudent to let things cool down a little. And when the… situation on Compson’s World came up, the board thought you were the right person.”

“You mean you convinced them I was the right person.”

Nguyen smiled at that, but the smile never made it up to her eyes. “Have you had time to catch any spinfeed since you came off ice?”

Li shook her head.

“Ten days ago one of the mines in the Anaconda strike caught fire. The mine director—I forget his name, you’ll have to talk to him when you get there—got the fire under control, but we lost our on-station security chief in the initial explosion, and we need someone there fast to oversee the investigation and help the AMC personnel restart production.”

Nguyen paused, and Li forced herself to sit through the pause without asking the questions they both knew she wanted answered: what any of this had to do with her, and why Nguyen had shipped her halfway to Syndicate territory to pursue a mining accident that should have been handled by the UN’s Mine Safety Commission.

“Everything I’ve told you so far is public record,” Nguyen continued. “What’s not yet public is that Hannah Sharifi died in the fire.”

Li suppressed the flare of guilt and fear that shot through her at the sound of that name. Nguyen didn’t know—couldn’t know—what Sharifi meant to her. That was a secret she’d mortgaged half her life to protect. And she had protected it. She was sure she had.

Almost sure.

Hannah Sharifi was—had been—the most prominent theoretical physicist in UN-controlled space. Her equations had made Bose-Einstein transport possible, had woven themselves into the fabric of UN society until there was hardly a technology that hadn’t been touched by Coherence Theory. But Sharifi’s legend went well beyond her work. She was also a genetic construct—the most famous construct in UN space. News of her death would flood streamspace the moment it went public. And the faintest tinge of scandal would spark off a new round of debates on genetics in the military, genetic mandatory registration, genetic everything.

Li took another sip of water, mainly in order to have something to do with her hands. The water was still cold, and it still went down all wrong. “How long do we have before word of her death gets out?” she asked.

“Another week at most. It’s been all we could do to keep the lid on it this long, frankly. And that’s why I’m sending you there. I want you to pick up the reins for the last station security chief and investigate Sharifi’s death, and I need someone there now, while the trail’s still hot.”

Li frowned. She’d spent the eight years since peace broke out chasing black-market tech instead of being the soldier she’d been trained to be. And now Nguyen was asking her to play cops and robbers?

“You’ve got that look on your face,” Nguyen said.

“What look?”

“The look you get when you’re thinking that if you were human, you’d be sitting behind my desk instead of doing my scut work.”

“General—”

“I wonder, Li, would you really be happy playing backroom politics and sitting through budget presentations?”

“I didn’t realize being happy was the point of the exercise.”

“Ah. Still out to change the world, are we? I thought we’d grown out of that.”

Li shrugged.

“You’ll put a dent in things, Li. Don’t worry. But not yet. For now what you’re doing out there matters more. The war’s not over. You know that. It didn’t end when we signed the Gilead Accords or the Trade Compact. And the front line of the new war is technology: hardware, wetware, psychware, and, above all, Bose-Einstein tech.”

Nguyen picked up her glass, looked into it like a fortune-teller peering at tea leaves, set it down again without drinking.

“Sharifi was working on a joint project with the Anaconda Mining Corp. She claimed she was close to developing a method for culturing transport-grade Bose-Einstein condensates.”

“I thought that was impossible.”

“We all thought it was impossible. But Sharifi… well, who knows what Sharifi thought. She told us she could do it, and that was enough. She was Sharifi, after all. She’s done the impossible before. So we put together the partnership with AMC. They provided the mine and the condensates. We provided the funding. And… other things. Sharifi sent us a preliminary report ten days ago.”

“And what was in this preliminary report?”

“We don’t know.” Nguyen laughed softly, sounding not at all amused. “We can’t read it.”

Li blinked.

“Sharifi transmitted an encrypted file through Compson’s Bose-Einstein relay. But when we decrypted it, we got… noise… garbage… just a bunch of random spins. We’ve put it through every decryption program we have. Nothing. It’s either irretrievably corrupted or it’s entangled with some other datastream that Sharifi failed to transmit to us.”

“So…”

“So I need the original dataset.”

“Why not ask AMC for it if they were cosponsors?”

Nguyen raised an eyebrow.

“Ah,” Li said. “We didn’t share it with them.”

“We didn’t share it period. And we don’t plan to.”

“All right,” Li said. “So I get the file and keep anyone else from getting it. That’s simple enough. But why me? What makes it worth the shipping bill?”

Nguyen paused, glancing over Li’s shoulder. She was looking out the window, Li realized; the distant, spectrum-enhanced reflection of Barnard’s Star glimmered in her pupils. “There’s more at issue than the missing spinstream,” she said. “In fact, we don’t have any of Sharifi’s results. She seems to have… cleaned things up before she died. It’s as if she wiped every trace of her work off the system. As if she planned to hide it from us.” A chilly smile played across Nguyen’s lips. “So. No Sharifi. No experiment. No dataset. And as if that weren’t bad enough, the station security chief died in the fire with Sharifi. Someone needs to get out there and pick up the pieces, Li. Someone I can trust. Someone who can face down press accusations of a cover-up, if things turn ugly. Who better than the hero of Gilead?”

Li shifted uncomfortably in her chair.

“Don’t look like that,” Nguyen said. “Gilead was the turning point. The press is right about that, no matter how badly they bungled everything else about the war. Gilead brought the Syndicates to the peace table. It kept them away from Compson’s World and everything else we’ve spent the last thirty years protecting. You had the courage to step into the breach when things fell apart and do what had to be done. And you didn’t do anything a real soldier needs to be ashamed of. I saw the realtime feed. I know it, even if you don’t.”

Li had no answer to that. All she remembered—all she was supposed to remember—was the official spinstream. Her realtime feed was classified, deadcached in the data catacombs under Corps HQ on Alba. Gilead wasn’t hers anymore—except in the jump-dreams that put the lie to her official memory and left her with the queasy certainty that all the kinks and evasions it had taken to get off Compson’s World were finally catching up with her.

“People believe in you,” Nguyen insisted. “They trust you. And look in the mirror, for Heaven’s sake. You’re, what, one grandparent away from mandatory registration? And out of the same lab that tanked Sharifi. Have you ever seen holos of her? You could be her sister.” One immaculately groomed eyebrow arched upward. “Isn’t that what you are, technically?”

“More like her granddaughter,” Li said reluctantly. Better for her if people didn’t think of her name in the same breath with the word construct.

“Well, there you are. What reporter in his right mind is going to accuse you of bigotry against your own grandmother?”

Li stared at the floor between her feet. Some long-ago bootheel or chair leg had gouged a swerving path across several of the floorboards, and she marveled at the vividness of it, as real and touchable—while she was caught in this illusion—as the flight deck that her feet really rested on.

There must be a way out, she told herself. She couldn’t go back to Compson’s World. It was insane to think that no one would recognize her. Insane to imagine that someone somewhere wouldn’t make the fatal connection.

“I’m not sure you appreciate what I’m doing for you,” Nguyen said. “You made a real mess of things on Metz—”

“Only by trusting Cohen.”

“Don’t be naive. Cohen’s untouchable. Tel Aviv proved that. You, however, are eminently touchable.” Nguyen put her elbows on her desk, clasped her hands, looked at Li over the steeple of her fingers. “Did you know that you’re the highest-ranking partial genetic in the Corps?”

What the hell do you think? Li thought. But she kept her mouth shut. Biting her tongue was one skill she’d gotten down cold in the last fifteen years.

“It came up. During your court-martial proceedings. You stand for something, Li. Not everyone likes it. Half the Committee would like nothing better than to chapter you out and forget about you. The other half—me included—would rather not lose you. Things are changing, and you’re part of the change. Don’t throw that away.”

“All right,” Li said. “All right.”

“Good,” Nguyen said. But she was still watching Li carefully, measuringly. “And there’s another problem. Or perhaps I should say another potential problem. We have reason to believe someone intercepted Sharifi’s message.”

Li understood then—and caught her breath as she realized what the stakes were.

The UN had defeated the Syndicates, had held the line through a decade of cold war for one reason: Bose-Einstein transport. The UN had commercial-scale, reliable FTL. The Syndicates didn’t. The UN could put troops into any system with a Bose-Einstein relay on a moment’s notice. The Syndicates couldn’t. The UN had spent the last half century building up a vast interstellar network of banked entanglement that enabled them to safely broadcast quantum data through the transient wormholes of the spinfoam. The Syndicates, in contrast, limped along with haphazard supplies of entanglement pirated from UN ships or bought off bootleg miners through the Freetown black market.

It all came down to Compson’s World and its unique, nonrenewable deposits of Bose-Einstein condensates. But the moment someone discovered how to culture transport-grade condensates, then it would be the new technology of condensate culture that determined control of space. And if the Syndicates got hold of that technology, then the balance of interstellar power, the Trade Compacts—the fragile peace itself—would crumble.

That was why she was on her way to Compson’s World, Li realized. Not just to prevent a leak, but to fix one that Nguyen feared had already happened.

“Who do you think intercepted the message?” she asked, swallowing. “The Syndicates?”

“We don’t know. We hope not, obviously. We just know there was an eavesdropper.”

Li nodded. The Security Council’s standard instream quantum-encryption protocols couldn’t prevent a third party from intercepting any given transmission, but the very nature of quantum information meant that no eavesdropper could intercept a message without collapsing its fragile spin states and thus revealing himself.

“The real question,” Nguyen continued, “is why an unknown person or persons decided to intercept that particular message.”

“Obviously someone told them it was coming.”

“Obviously. But who was it? That’s what I’m sending you to find out.” Nguyen straightened the file in front of her and set it aside. Case closed, the gesture said. End of discussion. “Officially, you’ve simply been diverted to Compson’s to replace the prior station security chief. The rest is… only to be spoken of to me personally.”

“Anything else?”

“Just be your usual discreet and thorough self.” Nguyen’s eyes were as black and unreadable as stones. “And be careful. We’ve already lost one officer down there.”

“Yeah,” Li said. “I meant to ask. Who was it?”

“Jan Voyt. I don’t think you knew him.”

“Voyt,” Li repeated, but the name didn’t jog any soft memory loose and all her oracle produced for her were public-access files. “No,” she said, “I don’t think I did know him.”

After Nguyen signed off, Li moved to a window seat and watched her home star fill up the scratched viewport.

She couldn’t see Compson’s World itself at first; it was second night and the planet was engulfed in the vast gloomy shadow of the companion planet that orbited between it and 51 Pegasi. Then the Companion cleared the trailing edge of the star, and she got her first clear view of AMC station just as its 2 million square meters of photovoltaic panels rotated to the rising sun.

She was still too far away to see the dents of meteor impacts, the frozen streaks of fuel and sewage leaks on the station’s outer skin. From here it looked like a piece of jeweled clockwork. The glittering double-hulled life-support ring spun at an oblique angle to the planet surface, well out of the trajectory of the mass drivers. Nested within the main ring lay the complex interlocking gears of precession ring, spin stablizers, and Stirling engines—a cosmic windmill veiled in the curving black-and-silver dragonfly wings of the solar panels. And below, shrouded in Compson’s murky, processor-generated atmosphere, lay the Anaconda.

No roads tied the mine to Compson’s major cities. The only surface road was a rutted red track that cut across sage and chaparral, passed under the shadow of the antiquated atmospheric processors, and petered out among the gin joints and miner’s flats of Shantytown.

Shantytown wasn’t its map name, of course. But it was what the people who lived there called it.

What Li herself had called it.

She’d been sixteen, four years underground already, when she walked into a cash-only chop shop, clutching a pitifully thin wad of UN currency, and paid a gray-market geneticist to give her a dead girl’s face and chromosomes. That money had been the first real cash she’d ever held: her father’s life insurance payout. She didn’t remember much of that day, but she did recall thinking how funny it was that a man got paid cash money to die and only miner’s scrip for doing the job that killed him.

The genetic work itself had been painless, just a series of injections and blood tests. The scars on her face took longer to heal, but the stakes made it worth waiting for. She’d stepped into the chop shop as a trademarked genetic construct with a red slash across the cover of her passport. When she left, her mitochondria still carried the damning corporate serial number, but the rest of her DNA said she had three natural-born grandparents—enough to make her a citizen. Two days later, she walked into the Peacekeepers’ recruiting post, lied about her age as well as everything else, and started passing.

The recruiting board hadn’t asked too many questions. They’d been desperate for strong young bodies to throw at the Syndicates back then, and the same proprietary geneset that barred her from military service also made her tougher than kudzu vine. Besides, what questions needed asking? She was just another rim-colony miner’s kid looking down the long tunnel of forty years in the pit and deciding that a UN paycheck and a one-way ticket off-planet were worth fighting someone else’s war for.

Getting wired was the hardest part. The psych techs wanted to know everything. Childhood. Family. First time with a boy. First time with a girl. She’d told them whatever she could without letting the truth slip. The rest she’d just let slide. It hadn’t seemed like much of a loss at the time; there was little about growing up on Compson’s that she wanted to remember even if it were safe to have it kicking around in her hard files where the techs could get at it.

Now, fifteen years later, she remembered only the little things. Church bells and midnight mass. The high lonesome moan of the pit whistle. A pale-eyed woman. A thin, tired man, black-skinned on workdays, white as February when he washed the coal dust off his face on Sunday.

Their names were gone. They belonged not to Catherine Li, but to the woman Li had spent her entire adult life erasing—a woman who’d been slipping away, jump by jump, since the day she enlisted.

AMC Station: 13.10.48.

No one met Li at the boarding gate. She waited briefly, then went onstream and asked the station for directions to her office.

The UNSC field office was annexed to Station Security—not uncommon in poorly funded periphery jurisdictions—and Security was on the far end of the station, buried in the ramshackle maze of the public-sector arcades and gangways. Most of her fellow passengers peeled off into the corporate spokes, and soon she was walking alone. As she moved into the public arcs, magtubes gave way to slidewalks, slidewalks to solid decking, decking to virusteel gridplate.

She saw old people everywhere, people obviously out of work, though she didn’t see how anyone without at least a foreman’s salary could afford the air tax. As she moved into the poorer sections of the life-support ring, she understood: they were lung-shot miners, most of them, wearing nose tubes and towing wheeled oxygen tanks. AMC must have reached some kind of black-lung settlement since she’d left, given orbital residency to the worst cases.

She also saw women in chador. She tried to remember if there’d been any Interfaithers on Compson’s in her childhood. It was hard to imagine them converting the hard-luck, hard-drinking Catholics she’d grown up with. But then fanaticism of every stripe was a growth industry on the Periphery—and if you could see the Virgin Mary in a Bose-Einstein crystal, it probably wasn’t much of a stretch to see the Devil in an implanted interface.

She threaded her way through a maze of tired window displays, cheap VR signs, bars, fast-food joints. She ducked into a hole-in-the-wall called the All Nite Noodle; it didn’t look like much, but was crowded and it smelled better than the other places.

“What do you want?” asked the woman at the counter.

“What do you have?”

“Real eggs. Cost a lot, but they’re worth it.”

Li scanned the overhead menu. Holos of noodles and vegeshrimp; holos of noodles and vegepork; holos of noodles and every conceivable shape and flavor of algae-based protein. Someone had pasted a handwritten fiche under the noodles and fried eggs holo upping the price to twelve dollars UN.

“Hey,” the woman said. “You don’t want ’em, get something else. But get something; I got a line behind you.”

“Eggs, then,” Li said, and they shook left-handed to make the credit transfer.

“Sprang for the eggs,” the line cook said when she slid down the counter toward him.

“Haven’t had real ones in years,” Li said.

“My brother’s got chickens. Sends the eggs up from Shantytown on the mine shuttle. Shipped us a whole chicken last year. Not that we sold it.” He grinned, and Li saw the long indigo blue line of a coal scar slicing across the point of his chin. “Ate the sucker in one sitting.”

They were running spinfeed on the shop’s livewall. NowNet. Politics. As Li turned to look, Cohen’s face flashed across the screen, big and pretty as life. He stood on the marble steps of the General Assembly Building, formal in a dark suit and striped tie. A gaggle of reporters were hurling questions at him about the latest AI suffrage resolution.

“It’s not about special rights for Emergents,” he was saying in answer to a question Li hadn’t heard. “It’s simply a question of the basic respect owed to all persons, whether they’re running on code or genesets. The limited-suffrage faction would like to have things both ways. All pigs are equal, according to our opponents—but some pigs are more equal than others. That’s a step away from equality, not toward it.”

He was shunting through Roland, a golden-haired, golden-eyed boy who could have passed for a girl except for the coppery shadow above his upper lip. Li had met the kid once when he came by Cohen’s place on his day off. They’d had a surreal tea during which he’d explained earnestly to her over buttered scones and Devonshire cream that he was putting himself through medical school on what Cohen paid him.

The woman hanging on Cohen’s, or rather Roland’s, arm would have been taller than him even without the three-inch heels. Li recognized her face from the fashion spins, but she couldn’t tell if the carefully painted features were natural or synthetic.

“So what you’re after is one-for-one universal suffrage?” a reporter asked, seizing on Cohen’s last words. “That sounds like a nod toward repealing the genetics laws.”

Cohen laughed and put up a hand, fending off the question. “That’s someone else’s cause,” he said. “I wouldn’t dream of trying to break up a squabble between primates.”

“And what would you say to those who claim that your own connections with the Consortium have had a negative impact on the AI suffrage movement?” asked another reporter.

Cohen turned toward the reporter slowly, as if he couldn’t quite believe what Roland’s ears were hearing. Li wondered if the reporter noticed the slight pause before his smile, if he understood the fury that lurked behind that serene, inhuman stillness.

“There is no connection with the Consortium,” Cohen said coolly, “and our opponents’ attempts to portray a legal association like ALEF as the political arm of the Consortium or any of its component AIs are, quite simply, slanderous.”

“Still,” the reporter pursued. “You can’t deny that your… lifestyle has clouded the issue in these hearings.”

“My lifestyle?” Cohen unleashed his most dazzling smile on the camera. “I’m as boring as a binary boy can be. Just ask my ex-wives and -husbands.”

Li rolled her eyes, hacked into the livewall’s controls, and flipped to the sports feed.

“Whoever did that, beer on me!” called a drunken voice from one of the back tables. Li ignored it; she was busy watching the Yankees’ new phenom deliver a filthy curveball.

“There you go,” the cook said, handing her noodles over the scratched countertop. Li turned her hand palm up as she took the plate from him, baring the silver matte lines of her wire job where the ceramsteel ran just under the skin of the inner wrist.

“So you’re our sports fan,” he said. “How d’you like the Yanks for the Series?”

“I like ’em fine.” Li grinned. “They’re gonna lose, of course. But I still like them.”

The cook laughed, the coal scar standing out neon-bright along his jawline. “Come back for game one, and I’ll give you a free meal. I need one goddamn person in here who’s not a Mets fan.”

Li left the noodle shop and walked on, eating as she went. The streets and arcades were filling up. The graveyard shift had come up from the mine, and second-shift workers were making their way to the planet-bound shuttles. The bars were all open. Most of them were running spinfeed, but a few had live music even at this time of the morning.

The crackling moan of a badly amplified fiddle stopped Li in her tracks outside one bar. A girl’s voice rose above the fiddle, and suddenly Li was smelling disinfectant, bleached sheets, the mold-heavy air of Shantytown. A pale old-young man lay in a hospital bed, his skin several sizes too large for him. Across the room, a doctor held up a badly out-of-focus X ray.

A stranger brushed by Li, knocking her sideways, and she realized she was blinking back tears.

“You gonna eat that?” someone asked.

She looked up to find a skinny old drunk staring at her noodles with rheumy eyes.

“Shit, take it,” she said, and walked on.

She’d expected Security to be quiet this time of night. She should have known better. AMC Orbital was a mining town; even at 4A.M.—especially at 4A.M.—the drunk tank was up and running.

Dingy government office yellow light seeped through double-hinged viruflex doors into the side street. Large block letters on the doors read, “AMC SECURITY, A DIVISION OF ANACONDA MINING COMPANY, S.A.” And below, in much smaller letters, “Organización de Naciónes Unidas 51PegB18.”

The station’s front room did double duty as main office and holding facility. A chest-height counter stretched across its midsection, corralling the public out or Security in, depending which side of the counter you were stuck on. Someone had slapped a careless coat of paint onto the walls, in a nursery-school pink that was no doubt supposed to make arrestees less likely to start fights. It worked, Li thought; she’d have made friends with her worst enemy to get away from the color.

One wall supported a Corps surplus bulletin board festooned with several years’ accumulation of station directives, workplace safety warnings, and wanted posters. The bench below it groaned under the night’s catch of scatter junkies and unlicensed prostitutes. The whole place had a resigned, halfhearted air. Even the criminals on the wanted posters looked too pinched and petty to have stolen anything valuable or killed anyone important.

When Li arrived the duty sergeant had one eye on the customers and the other on his desktop spinfeed, where some washed-up ballplayer was pointing to a map of pre-Embargo New York and explaining what a subway series was.

“Sergeant,” Li said as she bellied up to the counter.

He looked up reluctantly, then snapped to his feet when he saw the chrome on her shoulder tabs. “Jesus, Bernadette!” he said, looking past her. “How many times do I have to tell you?”

Li blinked and turned to look over her shoulder. One of the whores on the bench—the one sitting immediately below the no-smoking sign—had a lit cigarette in her hand. Her skinny body was covered with skintight latex, except for the upper slope of her breasts, which sported a writhing smart tattoo. She was pregnant, and Li struggled not to stare at her bizarrely swollen belly.

“Put it out, Bernadette!” the duty sergeant snapped.

The woman crushed the cigarette out on the sole of one boot and sketched a rude gesture with its mangled corpse. Her tattoo crawled up onto her forehead and did something nasty.

“Sorry, ma’am,” the sergeant said, speaking to Li again. “Can I help you?”

“Looking for my office, actually.”

He read her name tag, started nervously, then glanced over his shoulder toward an unmarked door behind the counter. “Uh… they weren’t expecting your flight in for another few hours. Let me call back and tell—”

“Don’t bother,” Li said, already crossing through the security field and skirting around the fake wood-finish desks toward the back office.

She stepped into a narrow hallway floored and ceilinged in battleship gray gridplate. The security chief’s office was second on the right; Li could still see the torn-up paint where someone had removed Voyt’s name. The adhesive hadn’t wanted to come unstuck; the V and pieces of the Y and T were still visible.

“The king is dead,” she muttered to herself. “Long live the king.”

The office door was open. She stepped through it—and saw two men bent over her desk, rummaging through the desk drawers. Her kit lay on the floor in front of the desk, forwarded from the transport ship. She couldn’t be sure, but she thought it looked like they’d searched that too.

“Gentlemen,” she said quietly.

They both snapped to attention. Li’s oracle pulled up their dossiers as she read their name tags. Lieutenant Brian Patrick McCuen and Captain Karl Kintz. Both men were technically under her command, but they were commissioned in Compson’s planetary militia, not the Peacekeepers. In Li’s experience that meant they could be anything from perfectly decent local cops to street thugs in uniform. It also meant that no matter how much she threw her weight around, she was never going to command their undivided loyalty; in the back of their minds they’d always know that she’d leave sooner or later, and they’d still have to answer to the company.

They were big men, both of them. Li found herself measuring them instinctively, adding up reach, weight, muscle tone, wondering if they were wired. Hell of a way to think about your own junior officers, she told herself.

“Ma’am,” said McCuen. He was blond and lanky, a freckle-faced kid whose uniform looked freshly pressed even at this impossible hour of the morning. “We were cleaning out Voyt’s, um, your desk. We didn’t expect you so soon.”

“Obviously,” Li said.

McCuen fidgeted with the stack of fiche in his hands; he looked embarrassed about the situation and too young to hide his embarrassment.

Kintz, on the other hand, just stood there smirking at her like he didn’t give a shit what she thought. “Someone better tell Haas she’s here,” he said, and brushed past Li into the hall without even excusing himself.

Li let him go; no percentage in starting a fight until she was sure she could win it.

“I’m really, really sorry about this,” McCuen said. “We should have gotten the office cleaned up, met you at Customs. We’ve been running around like maniacs since the fire, is the problem. Rescue, body ID, cleanup. We’re really shorthanded.”

She looked at the boy’s face, saw the telltale puffiness around his eyes that said he’d been through not one but several sleepless nights in the last few station cycles. “Well,” she said mildly, “at least you had time to make sure my bags got here.”

He coughed at that, and Li watched a red flush spread over his fair skin. “That was on Haas’s orders,” he said after glancing up and down through the gridplating to make sure no one was in the adjoining rooms. “I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

“Haas. He’s the station exec?”

McCuen nodded.

“That how the militia works here, Brian? You pulling down a corporate paycheck on the side?”

“No! Look at my file. I just want out of here and into the War College.”

So. McCuen wanted a ticket into the freshman class at Alba. That made all kinds of sense on a periphery planet like Compson’s. Bose-Einstein transport fueled an interstellar economy in which data, commercial goods, and a few properly wired humans could cross interstellar distances almost instantaneously. But uplinks, VR rigs, and spinstream access time still cost so much that most colonials spent their entire lives planetbound, stuck in the ebbs and deadwaters of the interstellar economy. The military was the best way out for ambitious colonials—sometimes the only way out. It was certainly the way she had taken.

Li sent her oracle on a fishing trip through McCuen’s files, and it came back with a stream of data, from his primary-school grades to records from a government school in Helena to a string of applications to Alba, all denied.

“You must want it bad,” she said. “You applied three times.”

McCuen started. “That doesn’t show up in my file. How—?”

“Voyt wouldn’t recommend you,” she said, twisting the knife a little. “Why not?”

His flush deepened. Li looked into his face and saw distress, embarrassment, earnest hopefulness.

“Never mind. You do a good honest job while I’m here and you’ll get to Alba.”

McCuen shook his head angrily. “You don’t need to cut deals with me to get me to do my job.”

“I’m not cutting deals,” Li said. “It’s your choice. Do a bad job, I’ll show you the door. Do a good job, I’ll make sure the right people know it. Got a problem with that?”

“Of course not.” He started to say something else, but before Li could hear it, quick steps rattled on the hall gridplate.

The footsteps stopped and Kintz stuck his head through the doorway. “Haas wants to see her. Now.”

Haas’s desk floated on stars.

It was live-cut from a single two-meter-long Bose-Einstein condensate. Sub-communications grade, more of a curiosity than anything else, but still it must be priceless. Its polished face revealed the schistlike structure of the bed that had calved it. Its diamond facets mirrored the stars beyond the transparent ceramic compound floor panel so that the desk seemed to hang above empty space in a pool of reflected starlight.

Haas was a big man, bullish around the neck and shoulders, with an aura of resolutely clamped-down violence. He looked like a man who enjoyed losing his temper, but had learned to ration out that particular pleasure with iron self-discipline. And he looked nothing like the kind of man Li would have expected to find running AMC’s crown jewel mine.

He had the accessories down pat. His suit hung well on his big frame even in station gravity. The strong-jawed, aggressively norm-conforming face must have cost a bundle in gene therapy and cosmetic surgery. But his body showed signs of hard living, and his handshake, when he rose behind his desk to greet Li, was the crushing, callused grip of a man who had done rough labor in heavy gravity.

Li glanced at his hand as she shook it and saw a functional-looking watch strapped around his powerful wrist. Was he completely unwired? Allergic to ceramsteel? Religious objections? Either way, it took steel-plated ambition and an unbreakable work ethic to make it into corporate management without being wired for direct streamspace access.

Haas gestured to an angular, expensive-looking chair. Li sat, the ripstop of her uniform pants squeaking against cowhide. She tried to tell herself it was just tank leather, as artificial as everything else in the room, Haas included. Still, even the idea of making a chair out of a mammal was intimidatingly decadent.

“I’m in a hurry,” Haas said as soon as she was seated. “Let’s get this out of the way fast.”

“Fine,” Li answered. “Like to clear something up first, though. Want to tell me why you had my bags searched?”

He shrugged, completely unembarrassed. “Standard procedure. You’re a quarter genetic. Your transfer papers say so. Nothing personal, Major. It’s the rules.”

“UN rules or company rules?”

“My rules.”

“You made an exception for Sharifi, I assume?”

“No. And when she complained about it, I told her the same fucking thing I’m telling you.”

Li couldn’t help smiling at that. “Any other rules I should bear in mind?” she asked. “Or do you make them up as you go along?”

“Too bad about Voyt,” Haas said, shifting gears abruptly enough to leave Li feeling vaguely disoriented. “He was a good security officer. He understood that some things are UN business and some things are company business. And that we’re all here for one reason: to keep the crystal flowing.” He rocked back in his chair and its springs creaked under his weight. “Some of the security officers I’ve worked with haven’t understood that. Things haven’t turned out well for them.”

“Things didn’t turn out so well for Voyt either,” Li observed.

“What do you want?” Haas said, putting his feet up on the gleaming desk. “Promises?”

Haas’s account of the fire was brief and to the point. The trouble had started while Sharifi was underground running one of her closely guarded live field experiments. The station monitors had logged a power surge in the field AI that controlled AMC’s orbital Bose-Einstein array, and the power surge had been followed almost immediately by a flash fire in the Anaconda’s newly opened Trinidad seam. Haas dispatched a rescue team to douse the pit fire, pulled everyone out of the Trinidad, and shut down the bottom four levels of the mine pending a safety inspection. The field AI seemed to right itself after the brief power surge; no one had given it another thought.

Haas and Voyt went underground with the safety inspector to visit the ignition point. They weren’t able to pinpoint the fire’s cause, but they recommended suspension of Sharifi’s experiment pending further investigation. A recommendation that the Controlled Technology Committee rejected. They reopened the seam as soon as they could get the pumps and the ventilators back on-line, and the miners—and Sharifi’s research team—went back to work.

“It was nothing,” Haas told Li. “I’ve been underground since I was ten, and I’m telling you, I didn’t for one minute think there was a secondary explosion risk. I don’t give a shit what the local spins say, I wouldn’t send one miner into a pit I thought was ready to blow. That’s not the way I do things.”

But he had sent miners into the pit. And it had blown thirty hours later.

It blew hard enough to demolish the Pit 3 headframe and breakerhouse and light a fire that was still smoldering ten days later. The orbital field AI went down again, just as it had in the last explosion. Only this time it never came back on-line.

It took three days to put out the fires and evacuate the desperately small number of survivors. The damage, when they finally had time to assess it, was extensive: one mine fire, cause unknown; one Bose-Einstein relay failure, cause unknown; two hundred and seven dead adult geologists, mine techs, and miners; seventy-two dead children, working underground under an industrywide opt-out from the UN child-labor laws. And, of course, one famous dead physicist.

“There’s one thing I’m still not clear on,” Li said when he had finished. “What caused the original fire? The one in the—” She checked her files for the name. “—The one in the Trinidad?”

“Nothing.” Haas shrugged. “This is a Bose-Einstein mine. Flash fires are part of business. And most of the time you never find out where they started, let alone what caused them.”

Li looked at him doubtfully.

“Christ!” Haas muttered. “I thought you were from here. I thought you were supposed to know something.”

Li tapped her temple where the faint shadow of wires showed beneath the skin. “You want me to know, tell me.”

“Right. Bose-Einstein condensates don’t burn, Major. But coal does. And the crystals set the coal on fire sometimes. We don’t know why. It’s just one of the things you have to account for if you want to run a Bose-Einstein mine. It’s dangerous and it’s inconvenient. And sometimes—this time being one of them —it’s deadly.” He snorted. “But this time the crystals had some help. This time they had fucking Sharifi.”

“What do you mean, Sharifi? You think she caused the fire? What was she doing that’s any different from what AMC does every day?”

“She was cutting crystal for one thing.”

“So? AMC’s cutting every day. You don’t have flash fires every day.”

“Yeah, but where are we cutting, Major? That’s the question you have to ask. And where was she cutting?”

“I don’t know,” Li said. “Where was she cutting?”

“Look,” Haas said. “A Bose-Einstein bed is like a tree. You have to prune it, trim it, manage it. But if you cut too hard, or in the wrong place, you’ve got problems. And when you cut too hard in a Bose-Einstein mine you get fires.”

“Because… ?”

He shrugged. “TechComm has armies of researchers out here, year in year out, clogging up the gangways and wasting our time and slowing down production. But when it comes to actually giving us useful information they’re hopeless. Hell, they don’t know things any miner over twelve could tell you. Like that you don’t mess with live strata unless you have a death wish. The Beckies don’t like it. And when the Beckies don’t like a man, bad luck has a way of finding him.”

Li stared. Becky was Shantytown slang for Bose-Einstein condensates. It was a miner’s word, resonant with myths about singing stones, haunted drifts, glory holes. It certainly wasn’t the kind of word you heard in AMC’s orbital executive offices. Either corporate culture had taken a sharp left turn in the last decade, or this fire was even stranger than Haas was admitting.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Haas said. “Poor dumb miner, seeing singing Beckies and the Blessed Virgin down every mine shaft. But I grew out of church a long time ago. And I’m telling you, Sharifi was courting trouble down there.”

“Did you voice your concerns about the Beckies—uh, the condensates—to Sharifi?”

“I tried.” Haas made an impatient gesture, and the upper facet of his desk threw back a distorted reflection of the movement as if there were a subtle tidal effect in the condensate’s interior. Which there might be, for all Li knew. Sharifi would have known, of course. But Sharifi had gone underground and gotten herself killed. And as far as Li could tell, she hadn’t left anything behind her but unanswered questions.

“I talked to her, all right,” Haas went on. “And you know what? The bitch laughed at me. She was crazy. I don’t care how famous she was. Oh, she talked a good line. Empirical runs this, statistical data that. But the gist of it was she thought the Beckies were talking to her. And just like everyone else I’ve known who thought that, she ended up room temperature. I just wish the stupid digger bitch hadn’t brought half my mine down on top of her.”

Li stiffened. Digger was about as nasty a word as there was in the pidgin English that passed for a common language on Compson’s World—and Li had been called it herself back when she still looked like the full-blooded construct she was.

Haas saw her reaction; he shifted in his chair and twisted his face into an expression that might have looked apologetic on another man. “Not talking about you, of course.”

“Of course.”

“Look.” He leaned forward, hunching his massive shoulders for emphasis. “I don’t give a shit what Sharifi was. Or you. Or anyone else, for that matter. What I do give a shit about is that some Ring-side bureaucrat made me lend her my best witch and shut down half the mine so she could play her little games. And now that the wheels have come off, all they can tell me to do is wait.”

“Well, I’m not telling you to wait,” Li said. “And the sooner I get down there, the sooner we can get to the bottom of this and get your men back to work.”

Haas leaned back in his chair and let out a short high bark of laughter. The reaction seemed so practiced that Li wondered if it was something he’d copied out of a spinfeed interactive. “We’re not running a tourist operation,” he said. “Sharifi was working less than a hundred meters from an active cutting face. You’re not getting anywhere near there.”

“Sharifi did.”

“Sharifi was famous. You’re just a hick with a lucky trigger finger.”

Li grinned. “Nice line, Haas. But I am going down. Why make me go over your head?”

“Fuck, go to whoever you want. You ever been in a Bose-Einstein mine? You can get killed fifty different ways without blinking. I don’t need any more bodies on my hands this week, and I’m not letting you down there.”

Li stood up, walked around Haas’s desk, and picked up the headset of his VR rig. “Would you like to speak to Corps HQ or should I?”

He turned in his chair and watched her, looking for the bluff.

“Fine,” he said after a long pause. “I’m going down with a survey crew in about two hours. If you’re up to it.”

“I’m up to it,” Li said, pushing down the thought of her exhaustion, the hope of a hot shower and a merciful stretch of sleep without jump-dreams.

“Don’t expect me to baby-sit you. You fuck up your rebreather or fall down a shaft, it’s your neck.”

“I can take care of myself.”

Haas laughed. “That’s what Voyt said.”

Li looked down at the stars wheeling between her feet and decided it was time to change the subject before she had second thoughts about going into the mine again. “Has TechComm said when they’ll get your field array up?”

“Take a fucking guess. They’re working on it. Which is TechComm speak for ‘we don’t give a shit, it’s not coming out of our pocket.’ ”

Haas had that about right, Li thought. The UN had seen the shape of things to come long before most, had recognized from the dawn of the Bose-Einstein era where the live wire of power lay. It bet everything on the new technology. Subsidized it, patented it, entered into carefully structured partnerships with the half dozen multiplanetaries capable of exploiting it.

That had been back in the darkest years of the Migration, when they were still trying to make Earth work and the Ring was just a few thousand paltry kilometers of hastily assembled space platforms. Since then, the UN had used Bose-Einstein tech to leverage humanity’s first stable, effective interstellar government. When the genetic riots burned across the Periphery, only UN control of the orbital relay stations contained them. And when the Syndicate incursions began, UN troops used those same relays to meet every Syndicate offensive, to raid the outlying crèches and birthlabs, to quell the revolts that flared up wherever Syndicate troops landed.

But the price of that protection was the UN’s stranglehold on interstellar transport. And anyone who ran afoul of TechComm had better settle in for a long, cold, lonely wait.

Haas jabbed a thick finger toward the planet surface. “We can’t store more than a month’s worth of production up here, and TechComm closed the main relay to private traffic as soon as the field AI flatlined. I pink-slipped two thousand miners last week. Another month of this and there’ll be kids starving in Shantytown.”

They were probably starving already, Li thought. The line between living and dying was desperately thin in a mining town. Sometimes it took no more than a missed paycheck to push a family across it.

“I swear I’d rather do business with the Syndicates,” Haas went on. “At least when their tech breaks down, they fix it. Or shoot it. It’s enough to make you support bilateralism.”

Then he met Li’s eyes and paled as he remembered who he was talking to.

She just watched him. So Haas was for secession—or at least willing to consider the idea. Li doubted that secessionist talk would still get a man thrown into provisional detention on Compson’s World these days, but it would certainly get Haas into hot water with his corporate superiors. Fine, she thought. Let the son of a bitch squirm.

But in the end she couldn’t follow through.

It wasn’t that she didn’t like to watch the Haases of the world squirm. But not over politics. And not at her hands.

“Forget it,” she said. “I’ve been to the dance enough times to know saying something isn’t doing it. And I’m here to investigate Sharifi’s death, not your politics.”

But she still rubbed her hand along her chair arm as she stood up, coating the brush-finished steel with a fine layer of dead skin cells. Reprogramming skinbugs for surveillance wasn’t legal, exactly. But she’d never seen anyone actually get in trouble over it. And if she turned up any really good dirt, she’d be able to wring some mileage out of it, warrant or no warrant.

As she turned to leave, she thought she heard a rustle from the shadows behind the big desk. She stopped, listened, and could have sworn she smelled perfume. She looked toward Haas, but he’d gone back to his paperwork and didn’t seem to notice.

Was someone watching? Had there been a silent audience to their meeting?

No, she decided. No women in the walls here. Just the little noises any station made. Just heat turning on and off, air sighing through ventilators.

Just nothing.

AMC Station: 13.10.48.

Haas and his crew were waiting in the shuttle’s cramped passenger compartment by the time Li boarded. She stripped and donned her borrowed miner’s kit in the aisle. Most of the other passengers looked away. Haas didn’t.

The kit included a microfilament climbing harness, a rebreather and oxygen canister, a first-aid kit with endorphin-boosters, syntheskin patches, and an old-fashioned viral tourniquet. Li hoisted the harness and pulled it on, wincing as the familiar motion strained her damaged arm. The full kit weighed less than the infantryman’s gear Li had carried back in the Syndicate Wars, but just the feel of webbing on her shoulders reminded her of all the things that could go fatally wrong in the deep shafts of a Bose-Einstein mine.

Haas loomed over her, looking even bigger now that he wasn’t quarantined behind his vast desk. His bad mood seemed to have vanished; he sounded almost pleasant as he introduced Li to the various geologists and engineers on the survey team. The one person he didn’t introduce was the woman next to him, and Li knew why as soon as she looked at her.

It was there in the surreal color of her violet eyes, the inhuman, almost repellent perfection of her face. No human geneticist would have designed such a face. Nature had never meant humans to look like that. She could be only one thing: a postbreakaway A or B Series Syndicate-built genetic construct.

Haas intercepted Li’s glance at the woman and put a proprietary hand on her shoulder. “And here’s our witch, of course,” he said offhandedly.

The witch stood as still under Haas’s hand as a well-trained animal, but something in the set of her shoulders said his touch was less than welcome. Or did Syndicate constructs even think that way? Could like and dislike be programmed in the crèches? Could feelings be spliced out of the perfect, unvarying, simulation-tested genesets? Or were the wrong feelings just forbidden—along with every other unprogrammable thing that made up an individual?

Li said her name and held out her hand.

The witch hesitated, then reached out tentatively, like an explorer greeting possibly dangerous natives. Her hand felt restless as a bird in Li’s grasp, and she kept her head down so that Li saw just the pale curve of forehead, the dark hair falling away from a part as straight as a knife blade.

Li watched her surreptitiously as they took their seats and the pilots went into the final preflight checks. She’d spent half her adult life fighting the Syndicates, but she’d rarely been so close to a high-series construct. This one would have been tanked in the orbital birthlabs above the Syndicate home planets. She would have grown up in a crèche full of her twins, never seeing a face that wasn’t hers, never hearing a voice or feeling a touch that wasn’t hers. And if she’d lived long enough to end up here, then she’d survived the one-year cull, the eight-year cull, the constant barrage of norm-testing that routed out physical and psychological variations in order to achieve the disciplined, unquestioning, unvarying perfection that the Syndicate designers insisted on.

Li glanced around at the other passengers. Even the ones who weren’t looking at the witch were focused on her, aware of her, orbiting her like iron filings lining up under the influence of a magnet. They were seduced by the beautiful face, the graceful body, the woman she appeared to be. But Li saw battle lines forming along the Great Divide of Gilead’s southern continent. She saw a flesh-and-blood statement of Syndicate ideology, Syndicate superiority, Syndicate disdain for human values.

Maybe Nguyen was right, Li thought. Maybe she didn’t understand politics. Maybe she was just that stereotypical, vaguely pitiful figure: an old soldier who couldn’t look peace in the eye. But was she the only old soldier who thought the UN was selling off hard-earned victories to pad the multiplanetaries’ profit margins? Was she the only UN construct who thought the thirty-year contracts were still slavery—even if the new slave masters were constructs, not humans? Why was this woman here? What could she offer that was worth the risk of her presence?

“Best investment we ever made,” Haas said, as if in answer to Li’s unspoken questions. “First six months after we picked up her MotaiSyndicate contract, we tripled production and halved our payroll. Fantastic, huh?”

“Yeah,” Li said. “Fantastic. Bet the union loves it.”

“What?” Haas looked like he was giving serious thought to spitting. “Someone’s been selling you fairy tales, Major. There is no union.”

He shot an arm past Li’s face and lifted the window shade to check their progress toward the planet. They were well into the atmosphere, pinions of flame streaking the shuttle’s wings, the coalfield spread out like a map below them. Li scanned the broad floodplain, leveled by an ocean that had dried up three geologic ages before humans set foot on Compson’s World. Headframes and mine buildings curved along the valley’s edge, following the coal seam. Far above, their jagged spires already flashing red in the dawn, loomed the Black Mountains, ramping up in serried cliffs and ridgelines toward the Continental Divide.

It took her a moment to put her finger on what was wrong with the view. There was a thick haze hanging around the mountains’ shoulders, up around the four-thousand-meter level. And farther down, a wash of bright oxygenated green swept the feet of the cliffs. When Li had last seen those cliffs they were above the atmosphere line, bathed in the dull orange of native lichens. This wasn’t the planet she’d left behind, and the sheer breadth of the human encroachment in that fifteen years was chilling.

Compson’s World was the great joke of the interstellar era: all the anticipation, all the apprehension, all the first-contact planning, and on thirty-eight planets in twenty-seven star systems, Compson’s coal and condensates were the only sign of complex life humans had ever found in the universe. And by the time humans reached Compson’s, there was no life left on the planet but the high, windswept algae tundra.

Li looked down at the spreading human footprint on the planet and thought of the thronging life that had laid down its bones to make the coal seam. The first humans to set pickax and shovel to the planet had been paleontologists, not miners. There was a whole exploration literature from that time—books Li had read eagerly lying in her cramped bedroom in Shantytown.

The scientists had fought terraforming, of course. But the first Bose-Einstein strike killed any chance they had. The mines had come, and the genetics labs, and from the day the first atmospheric processor went up, Compson’s World was a walking ghost. Now Li thought back on the dozens of terraformed, self-consciously balanced and controlled planets she’d seen in her tours of duty, and wondered if she might be one of the last people in the universe to know an untamed world.

Haas was talking to her, she realized. She snapped back into the present, wondering what she’d missed.

“Your average Shantytown witch is a pure fraud,” he was saying. “I’ve known three witches, tops, who could actually strike live crystal. And two of the bastards never turned a strike over to AMC until they’d given every Pat and Micky they ever got drunk with a crack at it. Fucking bootleggers.” He jerked his safety harness tight in preparation for landing. “Underground democracy, my ass. It’s theft!”

Li grunted noncommittally.

“Hey,” Haas called to the pilot. “Can we get some livefeed back here?”

The pilot scanned the channels and accessed what looked like local spin from the planetary capital in Helena. A suited commentator was interviewing a young man in miner’s gear.

“So,” the interviewer asked, “what is your reply to AMC’s claims that the union’s safety-related demands are merely a pretext for a pay raise?”

The camera panned back to the interviewee, and Li realized she’d misread him. He wasn’t a miner, despite the worn coveralls and well-used kit. His haircut was too expensive, his teeth and skin too healthy for a Shantytowner. And that was a Ring-sider’s face. A human face. He looked like he should be lounging in a café on Calle Mexico drinking maté de coca, not trashing his unadapted lungs in the Trusteeships.

“I’d say two things,” the young man answered in an accent that sounded like the product of generations of fancy private schooling. “First, that anyone who doubts the reality of the safety issues in this case needs to look at the statistics; the death rate among miners in AMC’s Trinidad vein over the past six months is higher than the death rate in most front-line military units during the Syndicate Wars. Second, I’d remind viewers that, though Compson’s company towns may have opted out of the Human Rights Charter, the multiplanetaries themselves—and the planetary legislators—remain subject to the court of public opinion. Every consumer has a responsibility to vote with his credit chip when he sees a corporation that blatantly disregards basic humanitarian—”

“Turn that shit off!” Haas shouted.

The feed shut off with a hollow click, and the passengers fell into an uncomfortable silence. Li rested her forehead against the window and watched Saint Elmo’s fire lick at the shuttle’s wings as they free-fell toward the ravaged planet.

Pit 3 was still burning; the pilot skirted the smoldering ruins and set the shuttle down on a remote, booster-scarred helipad stranded in a wasteland of rutted caterpillar tracks.

The crew donned their rebreathers and helmets and clumped unenthusiastically down the shuttle gangway. Alongside the helipad, pyramids of empty chemical barrels rusted to brown lace under their jaunty green-and-orange Freetown decals. The ground beyond was yellow and acrid-smelling, littered with the monstrous carcasses of stripped-out mine trucks. No one had come to pick them up, so they straggled off toward the Pit 4 headframe-breaker complex, a rickety, wind-blasted jumble of aluminum-sided geodesics that crouched over the shaft like a drunken spider.

Li hadn’t bothered to hook up her rebreather yet, just clipped the mouthpiece to her collar to keep it out of the way. Haas and the witch had done the same, she noticed. As they walked, she began to regret her choice; one of Compson’s dust storms was on the rise, and the wind blew acid-tasting red dog into her mouth at every stride.

A large, thickly printed fiche hung next to the headframe office door. Haas rapped on the wall beside it with a closed fist, setting the siding rattling, and Li saw a notary swipe at the bottom of the fiche.

“Skim and scan,” Haas said, but just to be stubborn she read every word before palming the scan plate.

While Li was still reading, the swing shift surfaced in a swearing, stinking wave of bodies. Their backs were bent by the punishing labor at the cutting wall, but their faces shone with greasy pit dust and the relief of finishing out another shift safely. Haas looked like a giant next to them. It was hard to imagine someone could be so clean all over, stand up so straight, smile so broadly.

“Daahl,” he said to a blue-eyed whippet of a man that Li guessed must be the departing crew’s foreman. “How’s the cutting?”

“Twenty gross behind in the Wilkes-Barre North 5,” Daahl answered. He glanced furtively at Haas, as if he wanted to gauge the station exec’s temper before delivering more bad news. “Not the men’s fault. The ventilation’s still fouled up from the flooding. We spent half the shift just trying to pump air past the South 2 brattices.”

A swift glance passed between Haas and one of the geologists.

“How’s the water level in the Trinidad?” the geologist asked.

“Not going down as fast as it should be,” Daahl answered. “We’ve cleared the upper drifts, but the downslope chambers and the whole bottom level are still flooded. But we’ll get it cleared and make the shortfall up soon enough.”

“Sure, Daahl.” Haas shrugged easily. “You always do, don’t you?” He nodded to the silent, watching miners and stepped into the breakerhouse.

Li followed him.

Security was tight, going in and coming out. As they arrived a guard was picking miners out of the departing line and waving them into uncurtained privacy cubicles for random strip searches. Li stepped into line behind Haas, thinking more about the miners coming out than about the questions the guards were asking her.

“Do you have any Bose-Einstein equipment with you?” one of them said.

She stopped. “Of course.”

Haas turned around, looking irritated. “What the hell were you thinking?” he said. “You can’t take crystals down there. Whatever it is, you’ll have to leave it.”

“She can’t,” the witch said. “It’s in her head.”

She hadn’t opened her mouth all the way down in the shuttle, but now she spoke as offhandedly as if Li’s embedded comm gear were visible to the naked eye. Her voice was low, husky, and she had the formal turn of phrase that Li associated with the Syndicates’ high-series constructs. Li stared, wondering whether the woman’s silence was shyness or just camouflage.

“Oh. Right.” Haas laughed. “Don’t let on to that in public, Major. A one-carat piece of communications-grade condensate sells for more on the black market than most miners get paid in a year. There’s plenty around here’d be happy to take your head apart for that kind of money.”

The shaft lay at the back of the headframe, past the muffled rattle of coal falling through breakerhouse screens, below the creaking rigging of the ventilation stacks. The cage stank of diesel, sweat, and mildew, and it shot them down the vertical shaft at near free-fall speed. Someone had removed the inspection log from the scratched metal frame bolted onto the wall above the control switch and replaced it with a high-resolution holo of a spinmag centerfold wearing nothing but big hair and a spanking new miner’s kit.

Li eyed the holo while they plummeted toward pit bottom and wondered if anyone’s nipples actually looked like that. Men had the strangest taste in women sometimes.

Pit bottom smelled like a war zone. Diesel fumes hung in the air, mingling with the reek of coal dust and axle grease. Eardrums throbbed to the muffled thud of force pumps and Vulcan fans, and the ventilators brought no fresh air—only the acrid stink of cordite and snuffed fuses rolling up from the work faces.

There were no horizons, no sight lines in the hanging coal dust. Clogged miners burst out of the smog, clattered across the slate-strewn floor, headlamps swinging like beacons, then vanished as abruptly as they appeared. And from the depths, like the sound of combat drifting back over the supply lines, came the shudder and boom of blasting, the rush of newly dropped coal streaming down the chutes.

The fire boss’s badge said, “YOUR SAFETY IS OUR BUSINESS,” but his blank eyes suggested that he had more pressing business elsewhere, and he delivered his safety lecture in the tone of a man passing on a rumor he didn’t personally believe in.

They trooped past him one by one to sign the pit bottom log and check out their Davy lamps. When Li reached the front of the line, he scribbled her lamp number in the logbook and pushed the coal-smudged pit log toward her without even looking up. Li started to put her hand to where the scan plate should have been, then realized the log wasn’t even smart fiche. She signed it laboriously.

The new shift was coming on-clock as Haas’s crew rigged up. The coal haulers came down first, as always. Some were jumping off the cage as Li stepped out of the fire office. Others, brought down in the last trip, were already preparing their carts and sorting their traces. They moved nimbly, with the light-limbed agility of children—which was exactly what they were.

They’d been called pit ponies when Li was their age, even though no pony had set hoof on this planet or any other in two centuries. A few of the incoming shift’s ponies had pit dogs with them: heavy-boned, coal-stained mongrels strong enough to pull the coal carts. The rest would hook up to the draw chains and drag the heavy coal carts themselves. They worked in a world of man, child, and animal power. A world where it took a whole family to earn a living and sweat cost less than diesel fuel.

“Don’t get foggy-eyed about them,” Haas said, coming up behind her. “I started out carting when I was their age. Day I turned ten. They’ve got their chance, same as the rest of us.”

“Sure,” Li said, though she didn’t know if she believed it or not.

A pit pony from the outgoing shift passed by, hauling a carefully packed flat of live-cut condensate. He had a string of pearls—a long row of coal scars that came from scraping bare backbones on ceiling joists day after day and having blue coal dust ground into the cuts. But Li barely noticed it; she was looking at the crystals.

They gleamed like distant stars under their heavy coating of coal dust. They looked like crystals—the miners even called them crystals—but Li knew they’d light up a quantum scan like no mere rock. They were quantum-level anomalies, an unheard of, unimagined substance that every physical law said couldn’t exist above zero Kelvin, or in an atmosphere, or in a minable, transportable, usable form. They were impossible, and they were the daily miracle that the UN worlds lived on.

But they were notoriously fragile. Blasting cracked them. Power tools damaged them. Even a hot mine fire could destroy them—though another fire, unpredictably, might burn the coal out around the crystals and leave whole subterranean cathedral vaults of them standing. It was all a skilled miner could do, working with wedges, picks, and hard-earned handicraft, to cut a strike out of the coal without ruining it. “Getting them out live,” Li’s father called it.

She reached out and brushed her fingers along the smooth upper facet of the nearest condensate as the cart passed. It felt warm as flesh. The miner, somewhere down there in the choking darkness, had gotten it out live.

Sharifi’s site lay in the newly opened Trinidad—the deeper and richer of the Anaconda’s two coal veins. It was six kilometers from Pit 3 as the crow flies, eight or more along the mine’s twisting and dipping underground passages.

They rode the first four kilometers in a squat, neon green mine truck, rattling around like dry beans in a pot and choking on diesel exhaust. At first they drove along three-meter-by-three-meter main gangways, echoing with the metal wheels of coal carts and the ringing blows of miners’ hammers. Soon they passed into increasingly narrow drifts, cutting chambers slanting up twenty feet above their heads along near-vertical coal seams. As they moved away from the pithead, the wiring grew scantier and the lights farther apart until there was only the swinging arc of the truck’s headlights and an occasional eerie glimpse of Davy lamps gleaming above glittering eyes and coal-smudged faces.

They left the truck at the top of a long, slimy flight of stairs barricaded by a closed check door. The battered black-and-orange sign on the check door said, FIRE DANGER —NO-IGNITION ZONE.

The safety officer sat down on the truck’s bumper and started pulling on a pair of desert camouflage waders that looked like they’d seen hard using. “Trinidad’s a wet vein,” he said. “Underground river runs right through the fault. Pumps go out, and it takes a day, two at the most, for the whole vein to fill.”

“The water’s out, mostly,” Haas said. He grinned, a bright glistening flash of white in the gloom. “Hope you don’t mind the smell, though. Rats. And plenty of other things.”

The engineers who drove the stairs had taken advantage of a dip in the terrain where the Wilkes-Barre dropped abruptly toward the Trinidad, shaving the intervening layers of bedrock to their narrowest point. The stairs dropped twenty meters between dripping walls of bedrock, hit a low, relatively flat passageway, then dropped another twelve meters and broke through into the Trinidad.

This was a very different kind of coal vein. The Wilkes-Barre was friendly; broad and not too canted, big enough to cut wide, tall gangways through. The Trinidad was rough, twisting, and so narrow that even Li was soon bending almost double to avoid the coal-smelted steel cribbing.

“Hot, huh?” Haas said when he saw her wiping her brow. “Temperature rises one and a half degrees for every hundred feet below grade. Reckon it’s, oh, a hundred and two or so.”

“One-oh-three-point-two, actually.”

Haas snorted. “That what the Assembly’s blowing our tax dollars on these days? Thermometers?”

Li had forgotten what it was to travel underground. In the first ten meters, she banged her head, scraped her spine, and tripped over a pile of loose slate. Then she slipped back into the distantly remembered miner’s gait, bent at knees and waist, one hand skimming the roof to scout out the low parts before she hit them. The ease with which her body twisted itself back into that shape frightened her.

The flood had left stagnant pools of water in every dip and hollow of the vein. Tea-colored water sheeted down the walls, so steeped in sulfur that it stung the skin like acid. The bodies had been cleared away, but the sick-sweet smell of death remained, fueled by the litter of drowned rats that lay in sodden clots everywhere. Each little twist and outcropping of rock seemed to harbor some left-behind piece of life before the explosion. A lunch pail. A hat. A shattered Davy lamp.

As they walked, the safety officer kept up a breathless monologue documenting the special safety measures AMC had implemented in the Trinidad. He spoke in a nervous singsong, quivering under Haas’s eye like an eager student. Li couldn’t begin to guess whether he believed any of what he was saying. She listened, sucking rhythmically at the filter mask of her rebreather, and tried not to think about the fact that her life now depended on the creaking, straining ceiling bolts and the ability of six hundred paid-by-the-ton miners to keep a reasonable safety margin at the cutting face.

The work site itself was anticlimactic. “This is it,” Haas said, and there it was: a stretch of shored-up, rubble-littered tunnel, ending in a chamber whose flanking pillars were little more than boulder piles.

“So what happened?” Li asked the safety officer.

Haas answered. “You never know with a flash fire. One guy takes out a ton and a half of prime crystal and goes home to his wife and kids without blinking. The next guy over barely taps a vein and the whole mine comes down on top of him. Every miner has his theories—and don’t get me started on the damn pit priests—but it’s all just guesswork, really.”

“And you’re sure this was a flash fire, not just a regular coal fire?”

“As sure as we are about anything.”

The chamber was wide, perhaps twelve meters across, though it was hard to tell through the wreckage of pillars and timbering. It looked like a single mining breast had been opened out to give Sharifi’s team more room to work. Or like a particularly rich crystal deposit had lured the miners into robbing a central pillar and turning two separate chambers into one despite the well-known risks of pillar-robbing.

The fire had burned the top layer of coal off the walls, baring the long edges of condensate beds, smoother and more crystalline than the coal around them. Li touched an outcropping of condensate. Felt its glassy polish, the warmth that radiated from it like body heat, the faint, familiar tugging at the back of her skull.

She turned back to Haas and the safety officer. “Anything else I should see?” she asked, watching Haas in infrared.

“That’s it,” he said. She saw his pulse spike on the words.

“What about you?” she asked, turning to the safety officer.

He delivered up the goods with a single glance toward the unlit depths of the chamber.

Li walked back to the corner he’d glanced at and saw what she should have seen before: a large battered sheet of aluminum finished in safety-sign orange. It was the only spot of color in the chamber, the only thing that wasn’t caked black with coal smoke. Obviously, it had been put there since the fire.

“Who put this here?” she asked, bending down to shove the heavy plate aside.

“We did,” Haas answered. “So no one would fall down that.”

Li looked at the place where the plate had been—and found herself staring down a well shaft.

It was less than a meter wide. Ropy bundles of unmarked electrical cables curved over the lip and dropped into the darkness. The water started six meters below the lip of the hole, and it was as black as only mine water can be.

“Anything else you’d like to tell me about this?”

“No,” Haas said. “Sharifi dug it. I assume. She didn’t bother to get permission.” He sounded irritated that he hadn’t caught her at it while she was still alive.

Li scrabbled around on the floor until she found a scorched length of wire long enough to reach the water table. Then she dipped it in, pulled it out, and wiped it along the bare skin of her arm. Her skinbots flared briefly, swirling around the droplets, then subsided. Nothing too nasty in there, apparently. “Okay then,” she said, and started unlacing her boots.

The safety officer figured out what she was doing before Haas did. “You really don’t want to go down there, ma’am.”

“Humor me.”

“No fucking way!” Haas said.

He reached out and jerked her back from the hole by one arm. Li wrapped her free hand around his and squeezed just hard enough to remind him she was wired.

“I appreciate your concern for my safety,” she said. “But I really will be fine. Or was there another reason you didn’t want me to go down there?”

He backed off fast at that.

“Lend me your goggles,” she told the safety officer when she’d stripped to her shorts and T-shirt and tightened her rebreather’s harness. He handed her the goggles with a dazed expression on his face. She gave them a spit and a rub, put them on, and pressed them into her eye sockets to get good suction.

“Okay,” she said around the mouthpiece. “Back in ten and counting. Unless I do something stupid. In which case you’ve got an hour and forty minutes to get a rescue team down here and fish me out.”

“You assume a lot,” Haas said.

“If I don’t come back,” she said, all sweet reasonableness, “they’ll just have to send someone else out. And you’ll have to wait to open the mine until they get here, won’t you?”

Haas sat down, muttering something about people who thought they were funnier than they were. But he was smiling, Li noticed. He could take a joke, you had to give him that at least.

The water was cold but clear, and as soon as she scanned the submerged cavern she knew this was the real experiment site. Whatever had been going on upstairs was peripheral, a mere prep room and antechamber. An underground river had flowed through this cavern in some earlier geologic age and stripped the coal off the condensate beds. The bare crystals formed an intricate lattice supporting the cavern’s ceiling. Curving pillars sprang from the floor like the ribs of one of Compson’s long-extinct sauropods. Pale tendrils of condensate spidered across the dome above like fan vaults. And Li didn’t have to feel these strata to know they were alive; they pulsed on her quantum scans like an aurora borealis. Whatever life there was in the planet’s Bose-Einstein strata—and whether there was any at all was a subject of intense debate among the UN’s xenographers—this was one of its centers.

Sharifi had found herself a glory hole.

Something brushed Li’s arm, and she whirled around just in time to glimpse a VR glove floating past her on a slow underground current, contact wires trailing. There was other equipment, some floating, some strewn across the cavern floor in a tangled skein of power lines and input/output wires. She recognized seismic meters, Geiger counters, quantum monitors. There was no way she could take all this in one shot, let alone underwater. She laid out a mental grid pattern and swam back and forth, recording everything as best she could. At least that way she’d know if someone moved something between now and her next visit—and she’d know what they’d been worried enough about to bother moving.

“That’ll do,” she said as she hauled herself up the ladder. “You’ll need to keep this section closed until you get that drained out and I can take a closer look.”

Haas’s eyes glinted where the lamp beam cut across them. “I’ve got a start-work order on this level waiting for the inspector’s signature. The electricians come through tomorrow, and we start cutting as soon as they lay clean line. Your authority stops at ground level, and you just hit the end of my cooperation.”

“Oh,” Li said. “Too bad. I guess I’ll have to log the safety violations down here.” She pointed at the corridor’s props and collars, groaning under the weight of the roof, but still standing. “Those props are three meters apart. UNMSC regs require 2.5. Also, there are ungrounded electrical wires at junctions South 2, South 8, and South 11. I’ll download a complete list of code violations for you when we get back. I’m sure you’ll want to get right on top of them.”

It was pure bluff, of course; Haas knew as well as she did that no UN site team was ever going to give AMC more than a slap on the wrist for those violations. But Li was the only UN official on-site, and if she logged an official complaint all the paperwork he had to do to get the mine reopened would pass across her desk—or rather sit on her desk until she got around to signing it.

Haas could go over her head, of course. But that took time. And it was an implicit admission that there really were safety violations. Li didn’t think he’d risk it. Not in the aftermath of a bloody and well-publicized mining disaster. Not with Sharifi’s body still lying in the Shantytown morgue a few miles away.

“Fine,” Haas said, shrugging. “Sniff around all you want. You’re only going to find out Sharifi was a fool.”

When they got back up to the Wilkes-Barre vein, the second shift was in full swing. Most of the miners worked half-naked, bodies gleaming like marble in the sweltering heat two miles below the surface. They worked fast, taking few precautions. Coal-cutting time wasn’t quite dead time, but it was halfway there, and it didn’t pay to spend an unnecessary minute at it.

Few of the men, women, and children underground wore rebreathers, and the ones who did only used them during their rare breaks. The rest of the time, the face masks with their tangle of oxygen lines dangled loosely around sweat-slicked necks. It took all the air a body could breathe to work at speed, hunched over in badly ventilated tunnels, and rebreathers were the first thing to go when time got short.

Without thinking, Li started to unhook her own rebreather.

“Don’t,” said the safety officer. “Mutagens.”

She looked at the miners. The safety officer caught her questioning glance and shrugged. “Genetics.”

A flash of soft memory set Li’s stomach churning. Her father, bending over the kitchen sink, coughing, complaining about the price of filters at the pithead supply house. Her mother boiling water on the stovetop and handing him a dish towel to put over his head so he could cough up a little more coal dust.

“Are you all right?” asked the safety officer. “Sometimes even the filters won’t keep the dust out.”

She nodded and put her head between her knees.

When she looked up again the truck had stopped. Oddly shaped boxes and canisters littered the roadway. Workers bustled in front of them, men and women who moved across the rough ground with the assurance of habit but were too thin, too clean to be miners. Li looked closer and recognized several of the geologists she’d shuttled down with.

Only one person in the visible section of the drift remained seated. A slight, silent figure, curled into a rock outcropping just outside the action, eyes closed, face solemn and lovely as a statue’s.

The witch.

When the preparations were complete, she rose, approached the freshly cut face, closed her eyes, and put her hands to the stone. Li had seen crystals witched before, but mostly in poor bootleg deposits, not company claims. And the witches of her childhood had been Shantytown dwellers. They’d witched for food, or a share of the strikes they found, or a little winter fuel. Their talent had been the fruit of a genetic fluke, not a carefully manufactured commodity.

The witch passed back and forth along the face, stopping now and then, head cocked as though she were listening for something. Her pale skin shone against the uncut coal. The light from her Davy lamp hung about her like a halo.

The surveyors and geologists hovered tensely. Immense amounts of money were at stake. Turn away from a cut too soon and you lost millions without ever knowing it. Cut too boldly and you’d be left with cartloads of dead crystal, worthless as quartz. Miners had tried every technology there was: radio imaging, X rays, random core sampling. Witching was still the only real way to locate live, viable crystal. And the annual profit margins of entire multiplanetary corporations rose and fell on the choices a witch made at the cutting face.

The witch stopped at a perfectly ordinary spot along the face and pressed both hands to the coal face. They came away wet, stained bloodred with sulfur water. “There,” she said.

The surveyors surged past her as if drawn by an undertow. They attached sensors, hooked up feedback circuits, safety cutoffs. Li watched, fascinated, as the cutters bored into the coal face. When she glanced at Haas, the intent, hungry look on his face reminded her of the old songs miners sang after the whiskey had passed around a few too many times, songs about men whose blood ran with coal, who lusted for the mine like dope fiends.

Everyone in the gangway fell silent as the first crystal came into sight, pale, gleaming, unmistakable. A geologist leaned into the face, holding his breath, and put his hand on it.

“Well?” Haas said.

The geologist removed his hand, wiped it on his coverall front, touched his forehead as if he were taking his own temperature, and put his hand back to the condensate again. He shook his head.

“Dead,” someone muttered at the edge of the lamplight.

The witch had retreated when the surveyors moved in, shrinking into herself like an actor slipping out of character. She barely reacted to the news of the dead crystal.

“Come here,” Haas said to her.

She turned obediently, but her gaze slipped past Haas and fixed on Li as unerringly as a compass needle locking on to magnetic north. The violet eyes looked dark underground, each iris shaved down to a narrow line around an immense pupil. And beyond the pupil nothing, as if you were staring straight into the black pit of the woman’s skull.

Holes in the universe, Li thought, and the shiver that ran down her spine had nothing to do with cold.

By the time they surfaced, the storm had hit. The headframe whined and rattled under its assault. Scraps of viruflex and jagged sheets of aluminum siding skittered past as if all the contents of the valley were being stirred by an invisible hand.

Li felt the taut, held-breath quality of the air as soon as she stepped out of the pit office. Fifty meters away, a ragged line of men and women ranged along the spine of a tailing pile. Some held homemade signs. A few carried primitive, home-brewed weapons. Strikers. Wildcats, technically, since there was no legal union in the Anaconda.

She blinked wind tears out of her eyes and squinted through the blowing grit. In a brief slacking of the wind she read the signs they held:

She wondered why they didn’t come closer, get within shouting distance. Then she saw the row of blue uniform shirts facing the picket line. Company guards. With riot guns.

“Think the spins have picked that up yet?” someone said.

Haas was already jogging over to the guards. He leaned into the wind, cupping a hand around his mouth, and shouted something in the squad leader’s ear. He stepped back, and the line of guards advanced, firing their guns into the air.

A few of the strikers backed off. The rest didn’t.

The guards fired again, this time at the strikers’ feet. One woman cried out as if she’d been hit. Another shouted, “There are children here!”

“No one needs to get hurt!” one of the guards called, his voice shaking with adrenaline. “Don’t do anything stupid!”

And then, for no reason Li could put her finger on, the crisis passed.

The strikers lowered their signs. The guards uncocked their rifles. The crowd broke up and straggled back along the rutted track to Shantytown. Li felt a spasm of relief. No one was going to die. Not today, anyway.

AMC Station: 13.10.48.

Three hours later, the smell of the mine still on her hair and skin, Li stood in front of the security seal on the door of Sharifi’s quarters. The tape read her palm implant, dissolved, re-formed behind her as she stepped through.

Sharifi’s quarters were cramped, utilitarian, not much different from Li’s own room a few spokes away. The whole room was no wider than the corridor outside. Five steps took Li from the entrance to the door of the cramped bathroom. A shallow closet ran the length of the left wall. The right wall held a narrow bunk and a drop-down desk cluttered with datacubes and loose stacks of microfiche.

The closet held a few changes of practical-looking clothes, some of them still folded neatly in an Italian-made leather bag that must have cost more than Li made in a month. No family pictures. No personal items. No makeup. Except for the single dress suit hanging in the closet, it was hard to identify even the sex of the room’s last occupant. Whoever Sharifi had been, there was little trace of her here.

On an impulse, Li slipped the suit jacket on and looked curiously at herself in the mirror. It bound around the armpits; she carried a lot more muscle than Sharifi had. It was a little long. But then, Sharifi had been a good two centimeters taller than her—better nutrition and fewer cigarettes. Other than that, it fit. And the color looked good on her. No surprise there.

The smell was a surprise, though. Foreign. A touch of the other woman’s perfume, perhaps. And yet, beneath it, something unnervingly familiar. A memory surfaced, rolled over and sank again. A dog lunging and snarling at a passing miner. The warm glow of hate on its master’s face as he said, You can smell them, can’t you?

Next to the closet door were the light and livewall controls and the viewport dimmer. Li cleared the floorport, looked down at the planet between her toes, and thought about how the sweep of UN politics and her own life had intersected there. How could they all still be fighting the same battle that was hacked into the burnt-out shells of the birthlabs, the forty-year-old artillery scars fading on the hillsides above Shantytown?

For decades the now-crumbling industrial park had turned out a continuous stream of constructs. Industrial-grade genesets specifically engineered for hard-rock mining, steel smelting, terraforming—all the hard, dangerous jobs that humans couldn’t or wouldn’t do. Sharifi was tanked in those labs. Li herself had been tanked in one of the last production runs before the Riots. It was only the rawest, quirkiest chance that either of them got off-planet; Sharifi adopted by rich Ring-side abolitionists, Li farmed out to a childless miner’s family in one of the last abortive attempts to assimilate constructs into the general population.

The Riots hit eight months after Li was born—about the time Sharifi would have been in university. Shantytown became a battlefield, a maze of tunnels and barricaded cul-de-sacs in which a ragtag band of constructs held off the UN and the planetary militia… for a while, anyway.

A good number of posthumans had joined the rebels. Idealistic students from the university in Helena, back when there still was one. Miners who didn’t care who they shared Compson’s World with as long as it wasn’t the multiplanetaries. The Real IRA, though word on the street in Shantytown had always been that that was purely a money deal. When the dust cleared, Compson’s World was under martial law and the rebel constructs had escaped to a remote system that they renamed Gilead.

For the rest of Li’s life, the fight against the Syndicates dominated human politics. The breakaway constructs created the first fully syndicated genelines. KnowlesSyndicate was born, and then Motai and Bartov and the half dozen others whose names soon became words of fear throughout UN space. The Syndicates annexed one restless colony after another, until they held the whole long arc of the Periphery between Metz and Gilead. Antigenetic sentiment gained ground in the Assembly and on the streets of every UN planet. The word construct took on a new and sinister meaning, while the corporations that built the original constructs either closed up shop and abandoned them or went bankrupt in the spate of scandals that followed the breakaway. And every time another ex-colony went over to the Syndicates the UN’s antigenetic faction gained a few seats in the Assembly.

The Assembly passed the Zahn Act when Li was fourteen, placing all full genetics in UN space under direct Security Council supervision, barring them from the civil service and the military, revoking passports and imposing mandatory registration.

Li’s adoptive parents delayed, hoping the massive destruction of records during the Riots might mean she’d been forgotten. The delay paid off. By the time the registration bureaucracy caught up with them, Li’s mother had a signed and stamped death certificate that said her only daughter had died of vitamin A deficiency—and Li was already making a name for herself in the trenches of Gilead.

Meanwhile the Syndicates did… well, no one knew what they did. No subject of the Syndicates came to UN space. No UN citizen went to the Syndicates. No news escaped from the orbital stations that circled the remote Syndicate homeworlds. The Syndicates had no press and no visible government, unless you counted the shadowy point committees of the individual genelines. They had no political parties or political dissidents. No parents. No children. And, above all, no property.

Only the Syndicates owned things, and the things they owned were their constructs. They owned their minds, their bodies, their labor, everything. Each construct gave him- or herself completely, intimately—and, if the propaganda was to be believed, willingly. It was not enough to say that they didn’t want freedom. They didn’t believe in freedom. They had, as their political philosophers were endlessly proclaiming, evolved beyond it.

Only when Li met her first postbreakaway constructs in the interrogation rooms on Gilead did she begin to understand this. They seemed to belong to some other species, one that had nothing to do with humans. The first ten identical prisoners came in, and people commented on them, wondered about them, perhaps even felt sorry for them. Then the next hundred, the next thousand, the next three thousand arrived, and the wondering turned to fear and revulsion. Words failed in the face of such cold, impersonal, mass-produced perfection. Compassion failed. Belief in the universality of human nature failed. Everything failed.

By the time Li had spent a month on Gilead the only thing she knew for certain about her enemies was that they hated her. No. Hate wasn’t the right word. They despised her, just like they despised every construct who still worked for humans. They despised her the way wolves despise dogs.

And what about Sharifi? What about the woman who had left so little of herself in this room, who had brought an entire mine down on her head, who had promised to work miracles, then covered her tracks like a thief? What did Sharifi believe in?

Was she a dog or a wolf?

Li sighed, picked a fiche from one of the neat stacks, and ran her finger down it, scanning a paragraph at random:

As Park and others have noted, the parallel wave patterns documented in situ Bose-Einstein strata closely resemble quantum phenomena associated with human brain waves, and with the less well mapped quantum phenomena found in the associative interactions of poststructuralist-model Emergent artificial intelligences.

And, jotted in the fiche’s digital margin in Sharifi’s handwriting:

Re: dispersed/colonial nets in organics see Falter, Principia Cybernetica and the Physiology of the Great Barrier Reef, MIT Press, 2017.

She skimmed the next fiche.

Handwritten numbers and symbols scrolled up the page. Li knew enough to recognize Hilbert spaces, Poisson brackets, the long sinuous columns of Sharifi transforms, but that was about it. Not even her oracle could actually help her understand them.

It was Sharifi’s handwriting obviously—and as she watched it scroll up the screen Li remembered a joke Cohen had made the first time he saw her own handwriting. Something about how ex-Catholic school kids always wrote as if Sister Somebody was still standing over their desk with a ruler in hand. And he was right, of course. This was the careful, even, unmistakable script of someone who had survived years of penmanship classes, who had learned to write in poverty, on paper. With Sister Somebody standing over her desk.

Li had assumed Sharifi was adopted young, had grown up Ring-side, human in all but name. But what if she hadn’t? What if she had started her schooling on Compson’s World, with the nuns? Was there some connection on-planet that everyone had missed? Some deeply buried childhood loyalty that had turned her away from the job she came here to do?

Li shook her head, struck by a sudden urge to laugh. How did you explain Sharifi? She and Li were as genetically identical as twins—more identical, since the random errors of normal gestation had been assiduously caught and corrected by the birthlabs. They’d been tanked in the same lab. And unless Sharifi’s handwriting was lying, they’d learned their letters and numbers from the same battered secondhand textbooks, starting out each year by erasing the answers last year’s students had penciled in and submitting to the inevitable lecture about Respecting Church Property. Yet here Li stood, a miner’s kid who had struggled through her OCS physics requirement by the skin of her teeth, looking at the equations that had made Sharifi the most important scientist of her generation.

Li had seen her twice, both times from a distance. Sharifi had done a guest lecture stint at Alba when Li was taking her OCS course. The academically ungifted Li had carefully avoided taking any classes with her, but Sharifi was already notorious—a person you couldn’t help noticing.

Li had noticed her, all right. She had watched her. Secretly. Guiltily. Convinced that any overt show of interest in the other woman would betray her—or at the very least arouse dangerous suspicions. She’d wiped more of her own files that semester than in all her time at the front; she gave herself away every time she looked at Sharifi.

That semester had been before the Nobel Prize, though decades after the work that won the prize. Sharifi had been under consideration for a chair in quantum physics at Alba, but she hadn’t gotten it—for the obvious reason. There had been some kind of protest, Li remembered. A senior human professor threatened to resign unless Sharifi got tenure. In the end, he’d backed down, and Sharifi had withdrawn her candidacy and gone into some private-sector research job.

But it was a long way from Ring-side universities and research parks to digging up rocks at the bottom of a Bose-Einstein mine. What had Sharifi been doing in the Anaconda? What could have been worth the risk when she knew, as anyone raised on Compson’s World must know, what could happen?

Li plucked a leather-covered book off the desk and leafed through it. A flap inside the front cover held a clutter of business cards and, tucked inside a soft fold of leather meant to hold a notepad or a stylus, a dog-eared piece of cardstock that looked like it had spent a day or two in someone’s pocket. Li picked it up, noticing the unfamiliar feel of paper under her fingertips, and realized she’d seen something like it before. It was a shipping receipt, the kind of thing they gave you when you rented a locker or posted realspace mail on a freighter. The printed number on the front face would be the locker number, or maybe the drop number of the package itself. She turned the chit over, looking for the ship’s name, and found only an eight-pointed star knotted through the letter M.

She tucked the shipping recept back into the front flap and flipped through the notebook’s pages. There were half a dozen sheets of fiche, divided by tabs: lab notes, logs, addresses, appointments. She tapped the appointments page and got a polite, impersonal access-denied message. She tapped into the book’s operating platform, found the hash log, and stripped Sharifi’s password off it without breaking a computational sweat. She grinned, feeling irrationally better about the whole investigation; brilliant or not, Sharifi had at least been human enough to commit the most laughably elementary security gaffes. Maybe Li really could catch up to her.

She scanned the daily entries, found the usual appointments and reminders, scattered jottings of notes, names, streamspace coordinates. One page held a list of names, none of them familiar. Another held a long, close-written paragraph that appeared to be a transcription of a conversation about data transfer protocols with a person whose name Sharifi had, perhaps carelessly, perhaps on purpose, omitted.

Li tapped up the page that matched the day of Sharifi’s death. Nothing. She flipped back one day and saw the letter B written in the 7P.M. slot. Too late for a work appointment. Dinner?

Just above it Sharifi had scrawled a set of Ring-side spin coordinates, and beside them the name Gilly and two words that raised Li’s hackles: Life Insurance.

The livewall in Sharifi’s quarters turned out to be in the last place any rational person would consider putting it: on the bathroom door. Hadn’t the station designers ever heard of reading on the john? Or was this some devious, petty-minded plot to prevent time-wasting by station employees?

Li flicked the wall into life, tapped up a streamspace directory, and zoomed in on the blazing quarter arc of the Zona Libre.

The coordinates took her to the NowNet Science Publishing Division, S.A., on the 438th floor of the Pan-American Building, Avenida de las Américas. Must have a nice view, Li thought. And the monthly rent must be enough to pay off the national debts of half the planets on the Periphery.

She cross-checked NowNet’s office directory against Sharifi’s on-station user files and found what she was looking for within seconds: a call on the day before Sharifi’s death to one Gillian Gould, Senior Science Editor. A long call. She read Gould’s address out loud, told the wall to put her through, and stood tapping her foot impatiently while the underpowered station net struggled through the Ring-side server’s handshakes and VR resets.

Finally the NowNet logo blossomed on-screen, followed a half beat later by a 2D view of an attractive young man sitting at a suspiciously neat desk. He wore the inevitable Ring-side business blue suit, and his neck was encased in the stiff bead-and-bone latticework of a tribal collar.

The collar had to be fake; no mere salary puller could afford genuine Earth imports. But even the good fakes were expensive. And this was a good fake. All in all, the living, breathing image of the up-and-coming junior editor.

“Gillian-Gould’s-office-may-I-ask-who’s-calling?” he said in a tone that told Li precious few people talked to Gillian Gould without appointments.

Then he looked into his monitor and nearly jumped out of his ergonomically correct chair. “Dr. Sharifi! Sorry. If you’ll just give me a minute, I’ll get her out of her meeting for you.”

Li blinked in surprise, but he was gone before she could say anything. She accessed the wall settings and saw that Sharifi had activated an extrapolated presentation program—a streamspace interface that put a business-appropriate talking head on the line so you could hold business meetings in your shorts, or while you were eating breakfast, or whatever. Li hesitated, then deactivated the presentation program just as Gould came on-screen.

Gould had perfect posture and the sort of washed-out Anglo-Saxon face that Li had never been able to read worth a damn. Like her assistant, she wore a tribal collar. Unlike her assistant’s collar, Gould’s was genuine. It nestled against her throat, half-hidden by a smoke gray linen blouse. But the bone was real bone; the beads antique bottle glass; the knots actually hand-tied by some shirtless old woman in the Sub-Saharan Cultural Preserve. And all shipped into orbit at a cost Li couldn’t begin to imagine. Nobody was better at looking rich than rich liberals.

“Hannah!” Gould said, smiling. Then she saw Li.

The smile shut down like someone had shot the lights out. “What is this?” Gould asked, her blue eyes cold enough to freeze running water.

Li swiped the scan plate at the bottom of the screen and let her ID do the talking. “Just a few routine questions.”

“Fine,” Gould said. “But I’m recording this.”

Li blinked and put on her boring face. “The official Fuhrman-locked recording will be available to you immediately, Ms., ah”—she paused and pretended to look down at the book in her hand—“Gould. After all, this isn’t a criminal investigation.”

“Of course not,” Gould said, backpedaling.

“What’s your relationship to Hannah Sharifi?” Li asked.

“Cousin.”

“But—”

“Her adoptive mother was my father’s sister.”

“I see. When did you last speak with her?”

“I don’t know exactly.”

Lie number one, Li thought, her eyes nailed to Gould’s carotid artery where it emerged from the intricate beadwork of the tribal collar. “Approximately?”

“Within the last few weeks probably. We talk a lot.”

Li considered asking Gould about Sharifi’s “life insurance” but decided not to. Information was power, and it rarely paid to show a suspect your cards when you were still shuffling them. “Did she send you anything by surface mail since then?” she asked instead.

“She might have.”

“I see,” Li said again. She wasn’t quite able to keep the sarcasm out of her voice.

A line appeared between Gould’s pale eyebrows. “I have nothing to hide. She often sent me drafts of her work.”

“What? You’re a physicist too?”

“I’m her editor. She had two books in the works with me.”

“Had?”

The line deepened. “One book’s gone into final production.”

“Did she usually ship her manuscripts solid mail?”

“She dislikes working on electronic galleys.”

“She must dislike it a lot. Real mail’s slow. And pricey.”

“She has poor eyesight.”

“Bad eyesight,” Li said. “A construct?”

She gave Gould a blank, eyebrows-raised look—a look that had squashed trench mutinies and broken strong men in interrogation.

It slid off Gould like water. Which just went to show that nasty looks worked better when there was a real possibility of backing them up with something a little more solid than harsh language.

“Are we done?” Gould said. “I really am busy, so unless you have any more questions about my cousin’s reading habits… ?”

A minute later the conversation was over.

It was true what people said, Li thought as the screen shut down. Ring-siders really were a different species.

Well, she’d gotten something out of the call. Gould had lied about when she had last seen Sharifi, and probably about the package and Sharifi’s eyesight as well. Most important, she’d never asked the one question any friend or relative should have asked: where was Sharifi?

She checked the time—8A.M., local. High time for good little security officers to be in the office. “McCuen?” she said, toggling her comm.

“Here,” said his disembodied voice in her ear, so quickly that he must have been hanging over his terminal waiting for her call.

She didn’t initiate a VR link. If she’d thought about it, she could have put a name to her reluctance to have McCuen see her standing in Sharifi’s quarters. But she didn’t let herself think about it.

“Gillian Gould,” she said, relaying the realspace address and streamspace coordinates. “I want a watch on her. Twenty-four hours a day. I want to know who she talks to, where she goes, what she buys, what she reads. Everything.”

“What’s up?”

“She’s Sharifi’s cousin.”

“We’re putting Sharifi’s cousin under surveillance? Why?”

Li hesitated, torn between the knowledge that she would need help—help McCuen was better qualified to give than anyone else on-station—and the fear that sooner or later anything she told him would work its way back to Haas.

Or would it? And when had she gotten so suspicious, anyway?

“Gould knows Sharifi’s dead,” she said cautiously, telling herself that McCuen was smart and capable and it wouldn’t hurt to play him out a little line and see what he did with it. “She knew it before I called her.”

An eerie quavering floated over the line, making Li’s mind run to banshees and Becky circles. It took her a long moment to realize it was McCuen whistling.

“Fuck,” he said, sounding very young and very impressed.

“Yep,” she told him, grinning. Fuck indeed.

She signed off, cut the link, and looked at Sharifi’s desk again, thinking. She bent down and started pulling its flimsy drawers open. The top two drawers gave up nothing, but when she opened the bottom drawer, she saw a long slim black case tucked in behind some datacubes.

Status lights blinked soothingly on its upper surface, but aside from the lights, the case was plain matte black without labels or corporate logos. Li had seen similar cases before. They tended to be wrapped around expensive experimental wetware.

This one was no exception. Its interior was lined with a thick layer of viral jelly, warm and moist as the inside of a mouth, maintaining its precious cargo at 99.7 percent humidity and a nice sterile four degrees above body temperature. And couched in the jelly like a pearl necklace was a finger-thick braid of silicon-coated ceramsteel.

It was a wet/dry interface. One end terminated in a standard-sized plug designed to fit an external silicon-based dataport. The other end—the one that necessitated the fancy storage system—was wetware, tank-grown nerve tissue shaped for a high-capacity cranial socket. The whole device had the sleek, understated look of top-of-the-line custom work. Hacker’s gear.

Li turned the interface over, looking for a maker’s mark or serial number. She felt a slight roughness under her fingers on the underside of the dry socket. She turned the wire over and saw a stylized sunburst —the same one she had last seen on the floor of the Metz laboratory.

“Kolodny,” she breathed, as a choking panic boiled up inside her.

Her internals fought it. Cognitive programs lurched into action, vetting meat memory, sorting out immediate threats from remembered ones, shunting the images that had triggered her panic into firewalled compartments where they could be hormonally adjusted—or, in the worst case, purged. Endorphins pumped through her system to combat the sudden rush of adrenaline. Once again, she wondered just how crazy she would be when the psychtechs were finally done with her.

Half a minute later her breathing was back to normal. Two minutes later her psych program flashed Kolodny’s face across her internals.

Li expected this, had prepared for it. She sorted stubbornly through one of Sharifi’s fiche piles, breathing and pulse even, until the diagnostic program finished its prying and Kolodny’s picture faded behind her eyes.

Mother of Christ, she thought in the dark corner of her mind she’d always managed to keep from the psychtechs. Were the panics and flashbacks just normal long-term jump effects? Or were they malfunctions spawned by the kinks she’d put in her own systems to hide her damning preenlistment memories? She didn’t know, and there was no one she could ask.

Except Cohen, maybe. But Metz had killed that.

She leaned forward, putting her head between her knees to dispel the spinning nausea of the flashback. That was when she saw it: a yellow-white rectangle wedged against the wall between the bed and the desk. She fished around until she got hold of the thing and lifted it up.

A book.

She inhaled its dust, its smell, fingered the acid-gnawed paper. It was a cheap paperback, the kind still printed in the poorer Trusteeships. And this one was from Compson’s now-defunct university press. She turned it over and grinned as she saw the author and title: Zach Compson’s Xenograph.

It was a classic, of course—a book that had seized on people’s imaginations so strongly that they still called Compson’s World by the flamboyant New Zealander’s name, while the anonymous long-distance survey team that actually discovered the planet had been consigned to oblivion.

She let the book fall open at random, and read a passage that Sharifi or some prior owner had underlined:

There was a man who had a stone that sang, they told me. Everywhere I went they talked about this stone. Where it came from. What it meant. How he came to find it.

They told me there were cathedrals in the earth’s dark places. Rooms where the glass bones of the world hold silence like a river, where stones whisper the secrets of the earth to each other. And those who hear them stay and listen and sleep and die there.

But a few come back. They walk out of the mountains singing. With stones in their hands.

This is what they told me, but I never found the man.

“Glory holes,” Li muttered. “He’s talking about glory holes.” She flipped through the book. It was dog-eared, tattered. Someone had read it again and again, starred and underlined favorite passages.

Had Sharifi known about the glory hole before she came? Had she seen something in Compson’s half-mystical ramblings about glass bones and singing stones that no one else had seen? Was that what had brought her back to Compson’s World?

Li set the book on Sharifi’s desk. She stood up, put the wet/dry interface back in its case and tucked it into her uniform’s kangaroo pocket, along with Sharifi’s datebook. She started toward the door. Then she turned around, picked up Sharifi’s battered copy of Xenograph, and put that in her pocket too.

She set the security seal to notify her if anyone else entered, walked back to her own quarters, pulled on clean shorts and a T-shirt, and collapsed on her narrow bunk without even managing to get herself under the covers.

She couldn’t have been asleep ten minutes when the icon for the peepers in Haas’s office toggled, waking her.

She maximized the feed from her skinbugs, and there was Haas, in shirtsleeves, standing behind the luminous desk.

He was talking to someone: a slight figure, whose face was half-turned away from Li. Even in the dim light, Li could make out the pale skin, the dark hair falling over shoulders as tense and frail as bird’s wings.

“I didn’t tell her,” the witch murmured. “I swear it. I haven’t told anyone.” The tension in her voice was unmistakable.

“You’d better hope you haven’t,” Haas answered.

He raised his hand, and the woman flinched as if he’d hit her. Even Li, lying in bed three spokes away, tensed for the blow she thought was coming.

Haas turned away and shrugged. “Christ,” he said. He walked out of the field of the peepers, and Li heard the clink of ice against glass as he poured a drink. “What a day. I need to relax.” A pause, Haas still out of sight. “Come here.”

The witch turned, but she moved so slowly that Haas was back at the desk before she could take more than a step toward him.

“Take that off,” he said.

She undid her robe and let it slide to the floor.

“Lie down.”

She lay back across his desk, passive as a child.

“No,” he said. “Not that way.”

He reached across her, into a desk drawer, and pulled out a wetware case. He bent the witch’s head sideways, inserted a jack into an unseen socket, then attached the contact derms at the other end of the wire to his own forehead and ran the wire through his desktop VR rig.

What happened next was something Li had heard about but never actually seen: a loop shunt, a perversion of the technology every company in UN space used for training spins. Loop shunts were illegal; they’d been banned after that girl bled to death in Freetown. But the psych wards in every spaceport were still full of prostitutes who’d burned their neurons out or cut themselves up or just plain gone crazy using them.

Li shut the feed off, but she couldn’t rid herself of the image burning behind her eyelids. Haas’s hands on that white skin. The witch lying across the desk, her long hair spilling over the gleaming condensate, her body moving but her eyes as empty as the black void beyond the viewports.

Li rolled over, giving herself up to sleep.

It was a long time coming.

AMC Station: 14.10.48.

When she turned on her livewall the next morning the news of Sharifi’s death had broken.

Even NowNet had been caught off guard, it seemed. They were gearing up for the event, dragging in colleagues, students, distant relatives. But they were using stock feed, old stuff. It was as if Sharifi had dropped off their radar. Coincidence? Or a sign that Sharifi had had reason to lie low in recent years?

So far the press was sticking to the unfortunate but unavoidable accident angle—though Li couldn’t help wondering how much of that was the truth and how much of it reflected astute maneuvering by Nguyen’s spin flacks.

Not that it made any real difference to her job. Not yet, anyway. Not unless she screwed up and let the press unearth some piece of the puzzle before she and Nguyen had time to plumb and measure and sanitize it. For the moment, she still had the same clues in hand she’d had when she lay down the night before.

A death. A fire. A missing dataset. A piece of wetware whose presence in Sharifi’s quarters could mean anything or nothing.

Li ran her search from her own quarters. She had some privacy there at least, and she didn’t relish the thought of surfacing after a long streamspace run to find herself slumped over her desk or passed out on the duty-room sofa.

She thought about letting McCuen tag along. In the end she decided against it; she wasn’t quite ready to tell him about the wetware. An unwired keyboarder would slow her down, anyway, leave too plain a trail for corporate security to follow. And she planned to hit sites where unwanted attention could be dangerous.

The techs had upgraded her interface before Metz, so she did some exploratory muscle flexing before starting the search in earnest. She’d never seen streamspace until she enlisted. But with enlistment came training, wiring, streamspace access. Over the last decade, she’d learned to access the spinstream in a way only a tiny fraction of humanity could imagine. Part of it was raw talent, a knack for reading code the way normal people read words and paragraphs. The rest she owed to the spider’s web of military-grade wetware that threaded through every synapse and made half her thoughts—half her self—silicon.

Li took every upgrade, every implant, every piece of experimental wetware the Corps offered. The techs loved her. They pushed her construct’s reflexes and immune system to their more-than-human limits until she was a hybrid, genetic machine and electronic machine locked at the hip, a hairbreadth from the wire junkie’s Holy Grail: transparent interface.

She finished her cross-checks and slipped into the spinstream. A digital riptide swept over her. She coursed over rivers and tidal flats of code, her own mind no more than one thin stream of data, a probabilistic ripple in a living, thinking, feeling ocean.

But this was the Stream, and it was deeper and stranger than any realspace ocean.

Dark and fruitful, it had spawned memes, ghosts, religions, philosophies—even, some claimed, new species. It held all the code there was, all the code that ever had been, right back to the first earthbound military intranets of the twentieth century. It was the first true Emergent system humans had created. Built by AIs back in the dark days of the Evacuation, it had spawned its own AIs, generations of them, hosts of them. A galaxy of quantum simulations evolved within it, mimicking every living system that humans had managed to pull off their dying planet—and countless impossible and improbable systems that had never lived on any planet. Even Cohen, vast and ancient among AIs, was a mere speck on the spinstream.

Today’s job was simple: find out who made Sharifi’s wet/dry interface and why. Li might have to do a little hacking to get that information, but she wouldn’t have to stray outside the human datastream—the well-tended paths of corporate and governmental networks. If she was lucky, she wouldn’t even have to risk a trip to Freetown.

She evolved her interface, logged on to the Ring-side data exchange, and accessed a low-security copy of Sharifi’s genome left stranded in an open database after a minor medical procedure four years ago. She checked it against the DNA built into the wire and confirmed that the interface had been customized for Sharifi. Then she cast her net out over the web.

She switched from VR to binary, running on the numbers, diving into the sea of pure code behind streamspace. The shift was like setting off a rocket. Dropping into the numbers freed her from her brain’s spatial perceptions, silenced the tyrannical chattering of her inner ear. More important, it freed up all the processing space that was devoted to generating the simulated sensorium that was the only window into streamspace for the vast majority of human operators. For Li—for any real hacker—dropping into the numbers was like coming home.

She knew in broad terms what she was looking for, even if she didn’t yet know where she would find it. She needed a hit from a big corporate R D player. The kind of player with enough financial muscle to produce cutting-edge tech with an impossibly long research-to-market horizon—and enough political muscle to risk violating human bioresearch ethics guidelines. But she couldn’t go in through the front door. She needed a fluff file. Something public domain, relatively unguarded. Something she could access without attracting unwanted attention. Something that would let her slip past the corporate gatekeepers.

She caught a promising datastring and hooked on to it, sliding through layered databases like a diver finning through the currents and thermals of a turbulent ocean. The string led her to the public-access page of CanCorp’s Ring-based bioresearch division. CanCorp was one of the four or five multiplanetaries Li thought could have produced Sharifi’s interface—and sure enough a quick and dirty cross-check told her CanCorp was one of Sharifi’s most generous corporate sponsors.

She switched back into VR to follow the string; on the off chance that CanCorp security was monitoring its public site, she wanted to look like an ordinary tourist when she got there. To her annoyance, she was detoured five times on her way. First, a saccharine commercial jingle for some overpriced health snack that tasted like mildew. Then an earnest pitch from the Reformed Church of Christ of the Latter-Day Saints, delivered by an implausibly clear-skinned teenager in a cheap blue suit and a plastic name tag. Then, loaded onto a single and annoyingly persistent banner, a docu-ad about the Heaven’s Gate Gene Therapy Institute, a Ring-generated public-service announcement about a listeria epidemic in the Ring’s NorAm Sector, and a disorienting full-immersion apocalyptic simulation from some computer-literate Interfaither splinter group.

She slid out of the Interfaither sim with jelly legs, a throbbing head, and a serious beef with whoever had decided that they were a bona fide religion entitled to public-access streamtime. When she finally reached the CanCorp page, it didn’t tell her much. But it did have a link to a “work in progress” section on which the division’s researchers (or, more likely, the division’s public relations staff) posted sanitized biographies and dumbed-down descriptions of current research. She ran a new search and pulled streamspace coordinates for three CanCorp researchers.

She hesitated. So far she’d only hit on sparsely monitored public-access sites, sites where her presence would pass unnoticed as long as she didn’t do anything that made someone decide to take a closer look at the hit logs for the current time frame. Now, however, she was crossing into more delicate territory. Territory where there would be a price for sloppiness.

But that was why Nguyen had sent her, of course. Nguyen knew her. She’d told Li her career was riding on this mission and then she’d turned her loose, knowing she’d get the job done, knowing she was willing to risk everything on every throw, every time.

Five minutes later an obscure CanCorp research assistant sent a message to the network administrator. Six minutes later, Li opened a blind window on the administrator’s account and started surfing the internal mail archives of CanCorp’s entire R D division.

CanCorp security had been thorough, Li noted with a professional’s appreciation. They had good eSec protocols and they hadn’t been shy about slapping the wrists of employees who violated them. But researchers never took security seriously, and CanCorp’s researchers were no exception.

Three of the facility’s designers still had archived mail talking about a prototype device similar to Sharifi’s wire. The project had been terminated twenty-eight months ago. The one prototype of the interface had been sent to an off-site storage room from which, according to later inventories, it had simply… vanished.

Li cursed in frustration, surfaced briefly to a disorienting image of her quarters on-station, then plunged back in.

Let’s go at this from another angle, she told herself. Look for the organic component.

She accessed Sharifi’s medical records again and put together an itinerary for her last few months Ring-side. Then she cross-checked Sharifi’s whereabouts against all the clinics licensed to install the kind of specialized internal wetware Sharifi needed. Match: one discreet, expensive private clinic in the Zona Camilia.

The operation had been paid for from an unnumbered Freetown account. And twenty hours before Sharifi checked in, the clinic received a bonded and insured shipment of medical supplies from one Carpe Diem, an obscure colonial net-access provider that had never logged a single shipment to the Zona Camilia clinic before or after.

Carpe Diem turned out to be a bona fide though not particularly profitable operating company that held down a solid chunk of the civilian streamspace access market in the Lalande 21185 metaorbitals. Li quickly pierced its security perimeter and slipped into the internal operations database. She found exactly what should have been there: payroll, billing records, internal corporate documents, and a reasonably active unofficial e-mail dialogue to substantiate the actual existence of Carpe Diem’s alleged 479 on- and off-site employees.

But when she hacked the accounting department, she got a different story. Enough money was flowing through Carpe Diem to fund a small but technologically sophisticated war. Payments, large and numerous, some of them to the same players involved in installing Sharifi’s tech. And for every transfer out, the files showed a corresponding transfer in.

Whoever made the transfers had cared enough to cover their tracks. The incoming transfers were never exactly equal to the outgoing ones, and they showed up on the Carpe Diem accounts with lead times varying from two days to two months before the equivalent outbound transfers. It would have been extremely hard to prove a connection.

But Li didn’t need proof; she just needed a track to put her nose to.

She traced the money through two bankruptcies, five anonymous holding companies, and a string of numbered bank accounts scattered across eight star systems.

At one point she felt a presence, as if a great bird hung above her, rising on a strong head wind, the currents of cyberspace breaking across its pinioned wings. Something brushed along the edge of her mind. A blue-bright eternity of open spaces flashed before her eyes and was gone before she could even be sure she’d seen it.

‹Cohen?› she thought, then bit the thought back hurriedly. She was running in binary, deep in the numbers, dispersed over the net as far as an organic operator could risk spreading herself. She knew from experience that a mere thought could draw Cohen like chum drew a waiting shark. And she didn’t need him showing up. She wasn’t even close to ready to talk to him.

The money trail dried up in the heavily shielded datacore of an offshore account in Freetown’s finance sector. Li reset her safety cutout and crossed onto FreeNet before she had time for second thoughts.

FreeNet was older and wilder than the rest of streamspace. It was off the UN grid, ungoverned by the safety protocols of the white-market sectors, the virtual homeland of black marketeers, hijackers, infoanarchists, and the rogue AIs of the Consortium.

Li’s cutout offered some protection even there; if her vital signs changed too drastically, it would shunt her into a firewalled decompression program until it could get her safely off-line. But that only helped against outright net assassination. A cutout wouldn’t stop wet bugs. Li remembered Kolodny and shivered.

She spent half the day on FreeNet, riding the stream until her back ached and her eyes burned. All she found were firewalls, dead ends, cul-de-sacs. She cursed, fatigue bearing down on her. There were no answers here. Just boxes within boxes, questions within questions.

Common sense and the urge for self-preservation were both telling her to give up. The motto of the FreeNetters might be “Information seeks its own freedom,” but in practice FreeNet was made for hiding data, not finding it. And, like Freetown’s realspace streets, it was a place you could get killed for asking too many questions. Or asking any questions at all about the wrong people.

The hijacker nabbed her twenty seconds after she crossed back onto the UN grid.

The first sign of trouble was a subtle ripple in the numbers. Streamspace froze, shuddered, desynchronized around her. When it clicked back into place, she was nose to nose with a blue-eyed Hispanic face. Fourteen, maybe fifteen years old. Baby fat padding jaw and cheekbone. Hard-edged, industrial-finish nose ring. Good unkinked genes.

Li breathed a virtual sigh of relief and relaxed. It was a Riot Grrl, some rich hacker wanna-be hot-dogging on her parents’ VR gear. Real danger was never this pretty, even in streamspace.

She smiled and shut down the window.

Nothing happened.

‹Out,› she sent. But there was no out.

Streamspace ground gears on her again. When it phased back in, the Riot Grrl’s eyes were changing color. Blue to brown, brown to near black. And the face around the eyes was changing. Shifting, melting, re-forming until Li was staring at a face she knew far too well. A face she’d last seen fifteen years ago staring back out of the streaky mirror of a Shantytown chop shop.

She ran, but the hijacker was too fast for her. A hand lashed out before she could turn and clamped down on her jugular.

She kicked and bit. She tried to shut down the VR window and couldn’t. She tried to drop out of VR into code so she could at least see what she was up against. She tried to shut down everything and found that her realspace feed had been disabled.

The hand twisted, shooting Li down into pain and darkness.

The pain in her throat eased, and she returned to something like breathing. She was crouching in a dark acrid-smelling place, holding something. Her head throbbed. She felt a dull, itchy sting in her lungs that reminded her of… someplace.

She couldn’t see clearly, and what she could see—tools, cables, a shadowy computer console—made no sense to her. She was moving, doing something with her hands, manipulating a piece of machinery whose function she couldn’t guess at. She strained to drag her gaze upward, to get some idea of her surroundings. Impossible. Her hands, her eyes, her whole body seemed to be moving of their own volition.

A claustrophobic panic gripped her. She was ghosting, wired into someone else’s body, experiencing a digitized memory that could be past, present, or pure simulation. She couldn’t control the framed memory. Nor could she tell how heavily it had been edited, or if it was real in the first place. All she could do was ride it out and hope it would let her go when it was done with her.

A noise. Movement.

She-the-other stood up, turned, looked.

A figure emerged from the shadows. A woman, Li thought. But it was hard to tell; her perspective was disjointed, distorted, as if seen through eyes that had no idea what they were looking at.

The body she was in spoke, but all she heard was a high chattering wail, like the dumb cry of an animal. If there were words in it, they were spoken in a language that meant nothing to her.

The dark figure moved toward her. For a moment her vision cleared, and she put a face to the shadow—a pale face, shadowed by the long, dark fall of hair.

The witch.

She reached out, felt the taut curve of the witch’s waist beneath her hand, drew the girl’s warm body to her.

White light. Endless space. Wind like a knife.

Mountains rose above her, higher than any mountains could be, rimed with black ice, white with hanging glaciers. The sky burned high-altitude blue above her—a color she’d only seen once before, halo-jumping into the equatorial mountains of Gilead.

A hawk’s shadow swept overhead, and she heard her own heartbeat, slow and strong, echoing through the vast mineral silence. Then she was out, back on the grid. Safe.

‹Cohen?›

She probed the net, stretching as thin as she dared to.

‹Cohen?›

But he was gone, if he’d ever been there.

Shantytown: 14.10.48.

Dr. Leviticus Sharpe met her at the door of the Shantytown hospital. He was wire-thin, knobby-jointed, a good two meters tall. He stooped atop storklike legs, a big man trying hard not to intimidate a small woman. Li didn’t need the help—but she still liked him for it.

“Welcome to Compson’s World,” he said, smiling. “May you not have to stay long.”

Sharpe’s office faced away from town, toward the foothills. It was fall in Shantytown, and the scrub oak was turning. Li saw the familiar wash of scarlet in the canyons, the silver-green ripple of rabbit sage on the lowlands.

“Well,” said Sharpe when they were seated. “Here you are.”

“You sound like you’ve been expecting me.”

He blinked. “Shouldn’t I have been?”

Li spread her hands, palms out, and raised her eyebrows. It was one of Cohen’s habitual gestures, and she felt a flush of annoyance with herself for letting it creep into this conversation.

“Er…” Sharpe shifted in his chair, looking suddenly uneasy. “Maybe you should tell me why you’re here, then, Major.”

Li shrugged and pulled Sharifi’s wet/dry wire out of her pocket.

Sharpe peered at it, and Li caught the metallic flash of a contracting shutter ring in his left pupil. A bioprosthetic, some kind of diagnostic device.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Wetware isn’t really my bailiwick. Have you tried AMC tech support? The station office is reasonably competent.”

“The other half of this system is in your morgue.”

“I doubt that.” He bent to look at the wire again. “Any multiplanetary that owned this kind of tech would have put a repo out on it before the operator’s body was cold.”

“It’s Hannah Sharifi’s.”

“Oh,” he said softly. “I see. That’s different, of course.”

“You didn’t turn up the internal components in your autopsy?” Li checked her hard memory, verified what she thought she’d seen. “You signed her death certificate.”

He stood up—no longer smiling, no longer stooping—and Li saw the green flash of LEDs as he checked his internal chronometer. “I sign a lot of death certificates,” he said, the friendly, joking tone gone from his voice. “And now, if it’s quite all right, I have patients to see. Tell Haas I said hello.”

Li felt like she was stuck in a fog. She followed Sharpe down the corridor, half-running to keep pace with his long-legged strides. He pushed through a pair of swinging doors into a scrub room, bent over a deep sink, and started washing his hands.

Li reached out and turned the water off. “You mind telling me what the hell’s going on here?”

Sharpe held his soapy hands out, splay-fingered, looking oddly vulnerable. “I doubt you need me to tell you anything, Major. It looks to me like you’ve got it all figured out.”

“Fine,” Li said. “Cover your ass. But I have a job to do. If you won’t help, get off the tracks and let me by.”

Sharpe reached past her and turned the water back on. His hand was trembling, but one look at his face told her it was anger, not fear. “Just leave,” he said. “I’m up to my neck in patients you idiots put here. Haas knows I don’t have time to sneak around behind his back doing unauthorized autopsies. And I don’t need another of his petty little loyalty tests. God knows Voyt put me through that hoop enough times.”

And then, suddenly, it all made sense. Sharpe’s assumption that she would come down to talk to him after the mine fire. His confusion, his suspicion, the smoldering anger that he camouflaged with jokes and polite chitchat.

“Listen,” Li said. “I don’t know how things were under Voyt, and I don’t know what little arrangement he had with Haas. But I’m not part of it. I came down here myself, not on Haas’s orders. I’m not here to tell you what official line to toe. I want the truth from you. Or at least as much of it as you know. That’s all.”

“Truth is a complicated concept,” Sharpe said, and she could still hear the suspicion in his voice. “What exactly did you have in mind?”

“I want to see Sharifi’s body.”

“On whose authority?”

“Mine.”

She toggled her comm system, wrote and time-stamped an order, sent it to Sharpe’s streamspace coordinates and watched his eyes unfocus momentarily as he read it. He blinked down at her, astonished.

“Didn’t think I was going to put it in writing, did you?” she said. She leaned back against the sink, arms crossed on her chest, and looked up at him. “You’ve got me filed in the wrong box, Sharpe.”

“Indeed,” he said. He laughed and rubbed a still-damp hand through his hair. “I apologize for… well, there’s a certain paranoia that goes with being a mine doctor.”

“I can imagine.”

He led her back through a warren of hospital wards and corridors toward the rear modules of the hospital building. As they came closer to the morgue, Li started to see evidence of the recent fire.

They threaded between hospital beds and stacks of boxed medical supplies. Space was always tight in underfunded colonial hospitals, but this one looked like it was about to burst at the seams. Evac and rescue gear was crammed into every corner. Mountains of complicated diagnostic equipment and medical supplies lined the walls, as if someone had cleared out the storage rooms and dumped their contents in any empty space available. As they worked their way down the hallways, Li had to dodge nurses carrying bedpans and burn dressings.

Finally Sharpe opened one side of a broad double door marked with an orange biohazard decal and led Li through a frigid curtain of irradiated air into a long room stacked with virusteel drawers that looked unnervingly like cryocoffins.

“All full, unfortunately,” Sharpe said. “Running a brisk trade in dead miners these days.”

“And of course they all have to be autopsied,” Li said. “Otherwise, how could you prove it was their own damn fault they died down there?”

Sharpe looked sideways at her and his thin mouth kinked in a sardonic smile. “I can’t imagine what you’re talking about, Major.”

“Here we are,” he said, stopping at a drawer that looked to Li just like all the others. He opened the drawer with a smooth sweep of his lanky arm, and Li found herself face-to-face with Hannah Sharifi.

“Jesus,” she muttered. “What happened to her?”

She looked like she’d been hit with a sledgehammer. The right side of her head folded in on itself from jawbone to hairline like a crushed eggshell. And her right hand was a mess. Nails torn off, bloodstains spidering through the lined skin of palm and finger, black burns on her fingertips.

“That’s how the rescue team found her,” Sharpe said. “The cause of death appears to have been suffocation—not all that surprising in a mine fire.” He lifted the still-intact left hand to show Li the blue fingernails. “The injuries are unusual, but they did find her at the foot of the stairs running into the Trinidad. A lot of people fall there. Those stairs have had running water on them more or less since they opened that level. There’s a spring they haven’t located or can’t drain or something.” He shrugged. “She could have hit her head on cribbing planks, on the walls of the shaft, on any number of things.”

“What about the hand?”

“Yes, the hand. Well. I’ve certainly never seen anything like it.”

But Li had. On Gilead. In the interrogation rooms. When they went after people’s fingers with Vipers.

Things had fallen apart on Gilead. The price of playing by the rules had risen so high that no one had been willing to pay it anymore. Or at least no one who survived the place long enough to make a dent in things. And the funny thing about having the rules fall apart was that there always turned out to be some people, in any group, who liked life better without rules.

Li hadn’t been one of them—or at least she didn’t think she’d been. She’d been outside most of the interrogation rooms most of the time, doing her best to forget what happened on the other side of all those carefully closed doors. But it wasn’t like she didn’t know—like they didn’t all know—where the information they based their decisions on came from. And every time she tried to remember what had really happened on Gilead she felt like she was trying to force two versions of the war into a slot in her mind that only had room for one.

She shook her head, pushing the memories away. Sharifi was no Syndicate prisoner. And this wasn’t Gilead, not by a long shot.

“She probably damaged it trying to stop her fall,” Sharpe said. “This isn’t the first time I’ve seen someone come in with burns. There are a lot of loose wires down there. It’s easy to get confused and grab one, even if you know what you’re doing.”

Li looked down at the body. Now that she was over the first shock, she could see past the injuries to the face under them. It was her face, of course. The face she remembered from those sliding-away days before her enlistment. The face she still wore in dreams sometimes. It was like looking at her own corpse.

Sharifi’s uninjured hand lay on her stomach, palm down. A white crescent of scar tissue marked the web of skin between thumb and forefinger, and Li reached out and touched it. It was important somehow—material proof that it wasn’t her lying on the ice-cold metal, but another woman. Someone with her own life, her own mind, her own history. A stranger.

She realized Sharpe was watching her and pulled her hand back self-consciously. She cleared her throat. “Are we going to be able to get anything out of that mess?”

“I think so. The damage isn’t really as extensive as it looks. And ceramsteel is a lot tougher than brain tissue.” He grinned. “Not that I have to tell you that, Major.”

Li snorted and fingered her right shoulder. She’d slept on it wrong and woken this morning to the unmistakable sting of frayed filament ends cutting into muscle and tendon. She should probably ask Sharpe to look at it, she thought, remembering the field tech’s memo. But not now. Not with Sharifi lying between them.

“Let’s see what we see,” Sharpe said. He manipulated the controls of Sharifi’s drawer and slid it onto a ceiling-mounted track system that connected the storage area to the autopsy room.

What they saw when Sharpe got his allegedly temperamental scanner up and running was startling. Sharifi’s backbrain—muscle memory, smell, autonomic functions—was as pristine as any planet-bound civilian’s. She had the VR relays that you would expect to see in an academic who, after all, made her living and did her research on the web. But other than that, Sharifi had died with more or less the same backbrain she’d been born with: the brain of someone who had never needed military-applications streamspace access and who had made no more than a handful of Bose-Einstein jumps in her lifetime.

Sharifi’s frontbrain told a different story, though. It lit up the screen like a Freetown data haven. Whatever was in there looked to Li’s untrained eyes like a white-hot thousand-legged spider—a spider that had wormed its way into every fold, every cranny between Sharifi’s shattered temples.

“What the hell is that?” Li asked.

Sharpe let out a long slow whistle. “I couldn’t even begin to tell you,” he said. “We have now passed far, far beyond the limits of my technical expertise. I can tell you this much, though. It was all put in at once. And not long ago.”

“Three months ago,” Li said.

He looked at her, eyebrows raised. “Yes, that sounds right. Usually a web this extensive will be built up by accretion. Multiple generations of filament, even redundant networks layered on top of each other. Different-age scar tissue. By the time most people are this wired, they’re carrying around almost as much dead tech as live tech. But this job was done in a single operation. Ring-side clinic, of course. Or Alba.” He glanced at Li. “To be honest, it looks more like military work to me than anything else.”

“Well, it wasn’t Alba,” Li said. “That much I can tell you.” She peered at the scan, comparing it to her own brain scans taken after her last upgrade, trying to see which of Sharifi’s brain segments were most densely wired. Something about Sharifi’s system seemed off somehow. “I don’t get it,” she said finally. “What’s it all wired into? What’s it for ?”

“Communications,” Sharpe said. “All communications.” He pointed. “Look. Here. Here. Where the dark areas are, and the contrast. If we looked at a scan of a typical cybernetic implant system—yours for example—we would see a much more even distribution of filaments. Some concentration in the motor skills areas. A node somewhere in here for the oracle that it’s all platformed on. Also a high concentration of filament in the speech, hearing, and visual centers. In other words, your spinfeeds, your VR interfaces, your communications systems. Sharifi’s implant is totally different. No oracle, no operating platform, no relays. Just filament. And it’s concentrated almost exclusively in the speech, sight, and hearing centers.”

“So it’s just a fancy net access web?” Li asked, disappointed.

“Not quite.” Sharpe pursed his lips and stepped away from the scanner, pulling his gloves off. “If I had to guess, I’d say it was some sort of shunt.”

“A shunt?” Li shook her head, fighting away a brief, untethered image of Kolodny falling. “That’s crazy. Why would someone like Sharifi be wired for a shunt? It doesn’t make any sense.”

“There are shunts and there are shunts. This is an unusual one. A very specialized one.” Sharpe frowned. “Could I see that interface cord again?”

Li took it out of her pocket and handed it to him. She watched Sharpe examine it, his ocular prosthesis contracting like a camera lens, turning his pupil machine silver.

“I think,” he said tentatively, “that we are looking at a modular system. Most internal webs are unitary; they can operate offstream just as well as onstream; otherwise, what would be the point of making the system internal, right? So your typical wire job is really a discrete operating system platformed on an enslaved nonsentient AI and hooked into a more or less extensive cybernetic web. It interfaces with streamspace, but it doesn’t need external feed to run any of its core functions. This implant, by contrast, is simply one component of a larger unit. It’s meant to let the wearer interface with some larger, external system.”

“What kind of system?”

“Well,” Sharpe said cautiously, “an Emergent AI would be my guess.”

Li stared at him, realized her mouth was hanging open, shut it. Anyone who was experimenting with unrestricted two-way interface between a sentient AI and a human subject was breaking so many laws she couldn’t begin to count them. “I thought those experiments were terminated years ago,” she said.

“Emergent-human interface is politically untouchable, that’s clear. But you still hear things every now and then. Alba had a program before the Interfaither lobby lowered the boom on it. And I’m sure there are still some groups in Freetown working toward it.”

“So you’re saying Sharifi was carrying around black-market tech.”

“Not necessarily. Maybe the AI on the other end of this wire wasn’t an Emergent.” Sharpe shrugged. “Still, that’s my best guess about what this is. I still think she was wired for some kind of shared operations with an Emergent.”

“Not too many of those around, Sharpe.”

“No, there aren’t.”

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

“The relay station’s field AI?”

Li felt the cold of the autopsy room settle into her bones. What the hell had Sharifi been doing? And who would have let her play that kind of risky game with a field AI when lives depended on every quantum-transport operation? “I’d sure like to see the psychware they were running on that implant,” she said.

“It won’t be in there. Not nearly enough memory. It’ll have been externalized too.”

“And the field AI is conveniently off-line, isn’t it?”

“That’s what it looks like.”

They both stared at the screen for a moment without speaking.

“Well,” Sharpe asked. “What do you want me to do with it?”

“Take it out,” Li said.

Most of Li’s encounters with quantum-corrected replication happened when she was sedated into near coma. Cryotechnology made faster-than-light transport, otherwise a potentially lethal ordeal, survivable. And it usually left Li with nothing more significant than a stuffy nose and wandering joint pain.

Biotech extraction was different, though. It was controlled, observable, reassuringly domesticated. A surgical parlor trick. This one took a while. Sharpe didn’t have the necessary information to preset his equipment; he had to fiddle around trying to nail the implant’s quantum signature. But after a long series of finicky adjustments, he established and verified entanglement, uploaded the primary spinstream, reintegrated the entangled data, waited while the comp ran its nested correction protocols. When his terminal told them it was completing the Sharifi transform they both laughed nervously.

Five minutes later, Li held a small package in the palm of her hand: a neatly rolled coil of white ceramsteel filament and a few gel-encased microrelays, all flash-irradiated and wrapped in sterile surgical film.

“It’s so small,” she said.

“Two kilometers,” Sharpe said. “That’s the length of filament, measured end to end, in the average full-body net.”

Li weighed the slender coil in her hand. Why had Sharifi needed to install illegal wetware? And, more troubling, where had she gotten it? “Do you need to keep this?” she asked Sharpe.

“I’d rather.”

“Fine.” She handed it to him. “Just make sure it’s here if I need to look at it again.”

“Can I ask you something?” Sharpe said as she reached the door. His voice sounded strained. “Unofficially?”

Li turned. “Of course.”

“Did you know her?”

“Who? Sharifi?”

Sharpe nodded.

“Not really. I saw her a couple of times. That’s all.”

“I knew her,” Sharpe said. He picked up a scalpel and began fidgeting with it, screwing and unscrewing the threaded fastener that held blade to handle. “I liked her. She was… honest.”

He didn’t seem to expect an answer, so Li waited, watching him fidget.

“Anyway,” he said, flushing, “that’s not the point. The point is, I was given… instructions. After her death. Do those instructions still stand?”

Li stared at him, wondering what kind of political minefield she’d stumbled into. “What are you asking me?”

Sharpe searched her face, eyebrows knit. “Has anyone explained to you how the coroner’s system works in St. Johns?”

Li had to think for a minute before she realized that St. Johns was the actual map name of Shantytown. She shook her head.

“When someone dies in the town limits, I have full authority to conduct any investigations needed to declare a cause of death and close the inquiry. When someone dies on AMC property, the case goes to AMC management. Unless AMC asks me to do an autopsy, I just hold the body pending disposal or, more rarely, shipment. There’s still a death certificate, of course. But Haas fills it out. I don’t do much more than rubber-stamp it.”

“Go on,” Li said. Sharpe was still playing with the scalpel, looking to Li like he was about to slice a fingertip off every time he turned it over.

“In practice, AMC usually has me autopsy everyone who dies in the mine. But not this time. This time I got a bundle of automatic authorizations, all signed by Haas. Except for two: Voyt and Sharifi. On those I got completed death certificates, signed them, and sent them back upstairs.”

“And now you want to do the autopsies.”

“Wouldn’t you?”

“Why?”

“If you don’t want to tread on Haas’s toes…”

“It’s not Haas’s toes I’m worried about,” Li said.

A voice somewhere near the pit of her stomach whispered something eminently sensible about looking before she leapt. She squashed it.

“Fine,” she said. “Do your autopsies. But no one else sees the results until I sign off on them. Just so I know how low I have to duck if I want to keep my head attached.”

Sharpe looked at her soberly. “I appreciate this.”

“Don’t mention it,” Li said—and her next words were only half-joking. “I’m just giving you enough rope to hang me with.”

Shantytown: 14.10.48.

She should have gone straight back to the heliport when she left the hospital and caught the next shuttle station-side. But she didn’t. Without letting herself think about where she was going she turned left instead of right at the end of Hospital Street and started working her way along the winding, badly paved streets toward the old section of Shantytown.

Most of Shantytown had been thrown up in the first frenzy of the Bose-Einstein Rush. There’d been little money, less time, no planning, and from most angles the town looked like a sprawling collection of modular hab units that someone had dropped by accident and forgotten to come back for. It was only when you got deep into the old town that you began to see the bones of the place, the sealed biopods of the original colony. Few of the pods could still maintain an atmosphere, but the modern town had grown around their radiating spokes like skin grafts encrusting surgical mesh. The result was a warren of narrow alleys and windowless courtyards through which a native could travel for miles without ever seeing sky or showing up on the orbital surveillance grid.

The Riots had broken out here a few months after Li was born, and the UN’s collective memory had never recovered. Shantytown was still a code word for violence, treason, terrorism. And it still had the highest percentage of constructs of any city in UN space. Walking its streets again, Li had a sudden memory of her OCS course eight years ago. Of her tangled feelings of shame and disgust when she recognized the urban warfare lab as an exact streamspace replica of old Shantytown’s interlocking tunnels and courtyards. When she recognized the targets’ faces as her own face.

She found the chapel without ever having quite admitted to herself that she was looking for it. She stood before the gate, set her hand on it, pushed it open. As she stepped into the little churchyard she crossed herself.

Our Lady of the Deep stood just where she remembered it: dug into the steep bluff where the prehistoric lake bed Shantytown was built on met the hills that led up to the birthlabs and bootleg mines. The door was open. Li glanced in as she passed, saw the dim cavern of the nave and, like daylight at the end of a mine tunnel, the muted milk white gleam of the Mary Stone.

There was a tawdriness about the churchyard that didn’t show up in her childhood memories. The rectory’s peeling whitewash, the cheap insulation foam packed around badly fitted windows, the too-bright colors of artificial flowers, the mottled laminate of headstones peeling under a chemical rain they had never been designed to stand up to. It was almost enough to distract her from the really startling thing about the churchyard: how young everyone in it was.

She walked along the rows looking at birth and death dates. Thirty-five. Thirty-four. Twenty-four. Eighteen. And that wasn’t even counting the babies’ graves, half grown over by green-gray clumps of oxygen-producing algae.

She stumbled on the grave she was looking for by accident—and as soon as she saw it she knew that, whatever she’d thought, whatever she’d told herself, she hadn’t been ready to see it. She hadn’t really believed in it, any more than she believed, really, that her father had been dead all these years.

But there it was. Gil Perkins. And the dates, below the name. He’d been thirty-six when he died. Which meant that the old, worn-down, coal-scarred father of her childhood had been younger than she was now.

“Can I help you?” a man’s voice said behind her.

She spun around, chest heaving.

A priest. Young. Athletic-looking. Not local. He looked at her with bright-eyed interest. He had an intelligent, sensitive face, the face of a bright young man who believed that people were basically good. He was probably two or three years out of seminary, getting his first taste of poverty, feeling himself on the front lines here, fighting the good fight. Li knew the type. They did a lot of good, but they were in Compson’s World, not of it. They came for a year, or two, or ten, but eventually they always went back to the Helena spaceport and caught a jumpship home. A decision for which Li was in no position to blame them.

“I—was just taking a walk,” she said. “Just looking.”

“Someone you knew?”

“What? Oh… yes. A little.”

“Fifteen years, and he still gets visitors. He must have been the kind of man people remember.”

“There was nothing special about him,” Li said.

The priest smiled. “If you say so.”

She looked at his thin, clever, honest face. He was no one she remembered. No one who would know her or would even have heard of her. He was younger than her, for Christ’s sake. Why not take a chance?

“So who visits him?” she asked casually.

“A Mrs… Oh, I can’t remember her name. She moved to another parish before I got here. Blond.” He grinned. “Irish as green grass and tinkers’ ponies. Tall. About my height.” Then he held up his right hand, and Li knew what he was going to say before he spoke. “Missing part of a finger.”

“Left it in Londonderry,” Li murmured. The words came out in an accent she’d spent the last decade weeding out of her speech. She felt as if someone else had spoken them. Someone whose face she should remember.

“Really? She was a Provo? No shit.” The priest shook his head. “Stubborn buggers. You’d think the UN would just give up and let them stay there.”

“You’d think.”

Li looked back at the headstone. It had started to drizzle, and the rain speckled the laminate face of the marker, spreading across the pale surface like ink stains. She shivered and pulled her collar closer in against her neck.

“I could give her your name,” the priest said. “If you want to talk to her.”

Li caught her breath. “No. No, I don’t think so.” She swallowed, her heart hammering. “I doubt she’d even remember me. And what’s the point of stirring up old memories? People have to get on with life sometime.”

McCuen met her at the shuttle gate looking white and stricken.

“Christ,” she said when she saw his face. “What’s happened?”

“It’s Gould. She’s gone.”

“When?”

“Two, three hours ago.”

Li stepped past McCuen and started walking toward HQ. “Three hours isn’t the end of the world, McCuen. She can’t have gotten far.”

“It might be longer…”

She turned on him. “How much longer?” she asked, speaking slowly and very clearly.

“I’m sorry,” McCuen said miserably. “I—she went to bed last night, then in the morning, even though she didn’t go to work, she was using power, water, air. She was onstream. We monitored the calls. No one saw guests go in, and it never occurred to me until I saw them that she wasn’t making those calls. But she wasn’t. They just used her home system to make us think she was.”

Like Li had used Sharifi’s system to fool her way into Gould’s office. Was it a coincidence? A joke? And if not, then what the hell was Gould up to?

“Why didn’t you call me right away when she went missing, McCuen?”

“I did. I tried. You—you were off-grid.”

Of course. She’d gone to old Shantytown. She’d been walking down memory lane, leaving an inexperienced kid in charge while the investigation fell apart. And they were already paying for it.

“Maybe you should go onstream and see if you can find her?” McCuen said. “I—I’m so slow. Maybe you can turn something up. That’s why I came out to meet you.”

“Yes,” Li said. “But not here. In private.”

When they reached HQ the duty officer was waiting for her, wanting to tell her something. She swept past, ignoring him, and waved McCuen into her office.

“All right,” she told him, sitting down on the desk she still hoped she wouldn’t be here long enough to think of as anything but Voyt’s desk. “What kind of time frame are we looking at? When’s the last time someone actually saw her?”

“Last night, Ring-time. Twelve hours.”

“Jesus,” Li said, then saw the stricken look on McCuen’s face and bit the rest of her words back. It was an understandable mistake, even if it was potentially disastrous. They might as well skip the recriminations and just fix it. If they still could.

She closed her eyes briefly as she slipped on-line, then opened them to a disorienting double vision of streamspace superimposed on McCuen’s pale features. “You’ve checked credit access and so forth?” she asked.

“Yes. Nothing.”

She checked again, ticking over bank reports, food and water and air charges, spinstream access debits, looking for the tracks no person in the Ring could help laying down every minute of every day of their conscious lives. “It doesn’t make sense,” she said. “There can’t be nothing. Not unless she’s dead.”

“Dead or using cash.”

“You can’t use cash Ring-side, McCuen. No one takes it. Even the scatter dealers and chop artists want nice clean freshly laundered credit.”

“Maybe she’s not Ring-side,” McCuen said, looking as if he desperately wanted to be wrong.

“You can’t get off the Ring without credit,” Li snapped. Then she caught her breath as gut instinct made a connection that she knew at once had to be right, though she didn’t know how or why.

“Check the shipping records,” she told McCuen. “Get me the name of every ship that’s left on the Freetown run in the last twelve hours.”

Two hours later Li was bending over McCuen’s monitor watching wavering security-cam footage of passengers filing along the boarding gantry of a Freetown-bound cargo freighter.

“Are you sure?” McCuen said when she stopped the tape and pointed.

“I’m sure.”

The silk blouse and expensive handmade jewelry were gone. Gould wore cheap clothes, cheap shoes, carried what little baggage she had in a cheap viruhide shoulder bag. She had chopped off her fair hair or shoved it under a hat, Li couldn’t tell which. And she was keeping her head down, moving fast, not letting the cameras get a clear view of her. But there was the straight, thin line of her mouth, the arrogant curve of cheekbone and nostril, the air of unbending, unquestioned superiority that made Li perversely glad this woman was running from her.

She pushed that thought away, feeling petty, and told herself she just wasn’t cut out to be a policeman. “Check the relay schedules,” she told McCuen. “See if we can intercept the ship before they jump.”

As Gould hefted her bag up the boarding ramp, something at her neck glittered. Li smiled. Gould was wearing a charm necklace: a vacuum-mounted sliver of low-grade Bose-Einstein condensate suspended in a cheap heart-shaped locket of translucent plastex. Pure trash. The kind of trinket street vendors sold to tourists along with the fake Rolexes and the Zone baseball caps. The kind of thing Gould wouldn’t be caught dead wearing in normal life. The woman was nothing if not thorough.

“I can’t find them on the relay queue,” McCuen said, sounding overwhelmed.

Li checked the carrier’s schedule herself, then dove onto the public server to access the flight plan that every carrier had to file with the en route relay stations. But there was no flight plan. They hadn’t filed anything.

Then it dawned on her.

“We’re too late,” she said. “It’s not a jumpship. She’s going to Freetown sublight. And they’re already in slow time. We won’t be able to catch her until they drop out of slow time and into orbit.”

McCuen sat down heavily on one of her battered office chairs. “Why would she do that? And why Freetown?”

“Why Freetown is the easy question. That’s where they’d take cash for a passage and keep your name off the shipping manifest. That’s where you’d cache information you didn’t trust to UN data banks. That’s where you go to fence illegal data. Why slow time is harder to figure. But she’ll be there on”—Li checked the orbits of Earth and Jupiter against the Medusa’s departure time, calculated the approach to Freetown’s circumlunars—“November 9. Twenty-six days.”

“Maybe she’s just running,” McCuen said. “People don’t always think straight when they’re scared. Maybe she panicked and it was the first flight out or something.”

Li thought of Gould’s cool white face, the pale eyes, the precise, disdainful wrinkle between her eyebrows. “I don’t think Gillian Gould ever panicked in her life, Brian. If she’s going to Freetown, she has a reason. And we have less than a month to find out what that reason is and make a countermove.”

McCuen dropped his face into his hands. “How could I have lost her? How could I?”

“Worse mistakes have been made, Brian. Some of them by me.”

“I know, but… Christ, what a fuck-up!”

Li stretched out one foot and tapped the toe of McCuen’s boot. “Cheer up,” she said. “At least we’ve got a track to follow. And there’s nothing like a hard deadline to knock things loose.”

McCuen sighed and rubbed a freckled hand across his forehead.

“Forget it,” Li said. “Let’s start by following the Freetown lead. I want a record of every transmission from this station to Freetown in the last week before Sharifi’s death. Then let’s figure out what Sharifi was doing here. And not just the official version. I want to see every piece of spinfeed she produced from the time she made the first proposal to run this experiment. I want to know everything she did from the moment she hit station here. Who she talked to, ate with, slept with, fought with. Everything and everyone. Personal stuff, too. Especially the personal stuff.”

McCuen had grabbed a pad and was jotting down her rapid-fire instructions.

“This might help,” she said, pulling Sharifi’s journal from her pocket and tossing it onto the table in front of him.

“I know,” she said in response to the look he gave her. “I should have logged it in. But it’s in her own handwriting, for God’s sake. It’s probably got trace DNA all over it. It’s not like there’s any doubt who wrote it.” And she’d wanted to keep it to herself until she’d vetted it with Nguyen, of course.

“No,” McCuen said. “You don’t understand. It’s Haas. He’s been calling all day. He wanted to retrieve something from Sharifi’s effects. Something I told him we didn’t have. Because it wasn’t on the effects inventory.”

“Shit.” Li turned a chair around, straddled it, crossed her arms over the backrest. She started to connect through to Haas’s office line, then stopped.

“Call Haas,” she told McCuen. “Tell him we found it, but we have to refer it to TechComm before we can clear it for release to him. Tell him we’re doing our best to hurry things along. If he has any problem with that, send him back to me.”

“How long will it take TechComm to clear it?” McCuen asked.

“These things are complicated.” Li grinned. “Official channels are slow.”

McCuen grinned back at her, but his grin faded quickly. “So how the hell did he know you had that journal?”

“Funny,” Li said. “That’s just what I was wondering.”

By the time she left the field office it was long past closing time and the shops along the arcades were dark and silent. She walked back to her quarters, too tired to hunt down a place to eat and cravenly thankful for the station’s low rotational gravity. As she reached her door, though, she saw that the security field had been disturbed in her absence.

She backed off a step and scanned the floor and doorframe. She’d just begun to tell herself she was being paranoid when she saw the slip of fiche poking out from under the closed door.

She slid it out into the open with the toe of her boot and saw it wasn’t fiche at all, but a thick slip of butter yellow paper, bisected by a single horizontal fold.

A letter, addressed to Major Catherine Li, Room 4820 spoke 12, Compson’s Station in quick fluid script. She picked it up and opened it.

For a fraction of a second the paper remained blank. Then a blocky engraved monogram appeared above the fold with the words 130 Avenida Bosch Zona Angel. Words took shape below it, written in the same flowing script:

Dearest C. Stop being stubborn and come to tea instead. Usual place and time. Tomorrow. C

As she read the words, they scattered, broke into syllables and letters, rose from the page and turned into bright flocking birds that wheeled and swooped down the empty corridor like swallows.

HIDDEN VARIABLES

Zona Libre, Arc 17: 15.10.48.

She dialed into the Calle Mexico just off the Zócalo. Mile-high needle buildings glittered in refracted sunlight, pointing the eye up toward the carefully calibrated atmospheric field—and far, far above it, to the blue seas and white ice fields of Earth.

This was the heart of the Ring, point zero of UN space, the richest few square miles of real estate in the universe. Its interface was the best money could build: a realspace-interactive multiuser quantum simulation that was, for almost any imaginable purpose, indistinguishable from the real thing. Originally coterminous with the central banking zone, the interface now extended the length and breadth of the Ring. Anyone with credit for the sky-high access fees could register a corporation, eat a three-star meal, rent a whore, run a skip trace, or shop for anything from Prada handbags to black-market psychware.

The crowd broke over her like surf, with all the stylish, hard-edged excitement of 18 billion people scoring and scheming and consuming at the absolute center of everything. She looked around, getting her bearings. A day trader leaned against an interactive Public Arts Commission sculpture, scanning virtual ticker tape, making quick bidders’ and sellers’ gestures on a trading floor that only he could see. Tourists and corporate concubines hurried by clutching designer shopping bags and talking into the elegant earbuds of external VR rigs.

Just for fun Li dropped into the numbers so she could see who was real and who wasn’t. Half the people around her faded into compressed code packets. Digital ghosts. Simulacra. She dipped idly into some of the codes as she walked—and as always was amazed at the number of people running cosmetic programs. Her own interface was about as stripped-down as they came. It scanned her, packaged and compressed the scan data, and relayed a running simulacrum into streamspace. She couldn’t imagine caring enough about how she looked to bother with anything more. And if she did care, she certainly couldn’t imagine admitting it. Obviously, people in the Zone felt differently.

She crossed the Zócalo, passing the war memorial and threading through the ever-present clumps of schoolchildren gathered around the EarthWatch Monument.

“And here,” a holo-docent was explaining as she passed, “we see a time-lapse image of the seeding and spread of the artificial glaciers. Notice how the weather patterns change over the course of the recording. In the first frames the Sub-Saharan and Great North American Deserts have almost no precipitation, while in the later frames, the precipitation moves north from the Amazonian snowfields and disperses on the jet stream. This produces a macroclimatic change that we anticipate will break the cycle of postindustrial desertification and eventually allow us to reseed the reconstructed genomes stored in the EarthWatch databases. Just think, in less than two thousand years, humans—not all of us, of course, but a lucky, adventurous few—will actually be able to live on Earth again.” She paused and smiled serenely at the children. “Have your teachers taught you about Earth?”

Why bother, Li wondered. It wasn’t their planet. These children had been born in space, like their parents and their parents’ parents. They hadn’t killed Earth, or seeded the glaciers, or negotiated the Evacuation and Embargo Treaties. Earth was just another moon to them: a pretty light in the night sky, an exotic travel destination. But when she looked around she saw them watching, rapt, as the glittering ice swirled across the equator. Except for a few boys in the back, of course, who were imitating the bow hunters in the aboriginal lifestyles hologram, aiming imaginary arrows at the scurrying pigeons, gleefully pondering mayhem. Li, who had been a back-of-the-class kind of kid herself, couldn’t help grinning at them.

When the docent started in on the standard-issue spiel about the brave new era of peace and international cooperation, she walked. She could look down even from this height and pick out all the still-bubbling hot spots on the dead planet. Ireland. Israel. The icebound fortress of the Northern Rockies. The ice might have swallowed their borders, but the old wars were still on, though the UN had spent fortunes trying to squash them. And the old combatants were still keeping the home fires burning so they could start right up where they’d left off whenever the UN finally managed to make the planet habitable again. Li herself had watched a generation of angry young men and women disappear from Shantytown’s Irish quarter and come back a few years later—if they came back at all—with stories of the street fighting in Dublin and Ulster, deals cut between the UN and the English, the Embargo Enforcement Division’s smart neuroweapons. Thank God Li hadn’t been assigned to the EED when the war ended; there were some things even she couldn’t swallow.

She threaded her way through the children and dodged the midafternoon traffic to reach one of the Zócalo’s many outdoor cafés. She took a table in the back. A good table, by her standards: one with a solid wall behind it and a clear view of the approaches.

Three chicas buenas turned away from their foamed matés de coca to look at her. Their long hair was gold-leafed and twisted into elaborate fronded topknots in the style of the season. With their black Mayan eyes and brightly painted faces they looked like chimeras from a cyberartist’s menagerie. Li considered them briefly and decided the tall-hair thing was even sillier than most fashions. The chicas buenas gave Li’s buzz cut and UN-issue ripstop a cool once-over, frowned at her construct’s features, and turned back to their conversation. This was the Zone. Not even a construct in a Peacekeeper’s uniform could surprise people here.

Li drank her coffee in the refracted sunlight, looked up at Earth’s blue-and-white belly, and thought about what the hell she was going to say to Cohen.

Metz stank, no matter how you looked at it. And instead of pride at having pulled it up short of total disaster, Li felt only cold fury at Soza, at the Security Council brass, and most of all at Cohen. Four Peacekeepers had been shot. Li had had to kill a civilian, something that still gave her cold sweats after all these years, no matter that the civilian in question had been armed and aiming at her. And it had all happened because she trusted Cohen—and he failed her.

The trouble with friends was that you couldn’t get rid of them. There was no way to take back a friendship in the wake of betrayal or disappointment. The friendship, and everything that went with it, stayed. It just became unreliable, like an abandoned house; you still knew where all the rooms were, and which stairs creaked underfoot, but you had to check every floorboard for rot before trusting your weight to it.

And Cohen had become a friend more or less without her noticing it. Only now, in the aftermath of Metz, had she seen just how important it was not to have him disappoint her.

She paid her bill on-line and nodded to the waiter, whose glazed expression suggested he was checking his tip. She crossed the Zócalo and caught the crosstown to Avenida Cinco de Mayo.

She stepped off it into a huge, pressing, gawking crowd.

Tourists, mostly, she realized. And they were staring at a two-meter-tall woman with full-body tattoos and cat’s teeth.

Li didn’t know the model’s name, but she recognized her from the fashion spins. A street celeb, the heartbeat of Ring-side hip. Flash today, gone by simulated sunset.

She sprawled across a blood-colored neodeco sofa, six and a half feet of sinuous flesh, vamping to the camera as single-mindedly as if there were no crowd gaping at her from behind the lights and lenses. But Li barely noticed. All she saw was the man standing over her.

Taller than the model, he hovered just out of the camera’s viewfield. One hundred plus kilos of genesculpted muscle rippled under his expensive suit—as well as the discreet, angular bulk of a Moen-Pfizer vest. A commline sprouted from his cranial jack and ran down beneath his collar. The sunglasses were purely cosmetic: camouflage for the implanted optics that were scanning the crowd in a preprogrammed surveillance pattern.

Hired muscle. The expensive kind. And an ex-Peacekeeper too, most likely. Plenty of washed-up line soldiers ended up turning their skills and wire jobs to profit in private security.

The scanning eyes snagged on Li and stopped, breaking pattern. Viruflex lenses depolarized, revealing flat pupils within a gunmetal gray ring of military-application optical implants. The guard flicked back his jacket with one hand, giving Li a momentary glimpse of the nickel-plated pulse pistol tucked into his belt. A pretty thing, it caught the sunlight and sparkled, dazzling her.

Cohen lived in the Zona Angel, an immaculately tended neighborhood of immense town houses overlooking the quietest streets money could buy. The houses here had names, not numbers, and the streets didn’t appear on any public-access database. Li usually dialed in; on foot she had to backtrack twice before she found it.

There was no one on the street to ask for directions; the Zona Angel was a machine enclave, a tax haven where AIs and the few commercially active transhumans kept homes to establish Ring-side residence.

The wide white sidewalks were quiet between tidy flower beds, and half the houses were probably empty behind their brightly painted shutters.

She started, heart pounding, when a pair of schoolchildren appeared around a corner with their harried-looking nanny in tow. “Excuse me,” she said, but the woman hurried past, eyes on the ground, pulse beating nervously at the base of her neck.

Li lifted her hand to look at the faint tracery of ceramsteel under the flesh. It wasn’t the wire job that had scared the woman, though; it was Li herself. Even her uniform couldn’t dispel the suspicion that a construct in this kind of neighborhood meant trouble. She thought back to her last Ring-side posting. Had things gotten worse since then? Or had her skin just gotten thinner?

She recognized Cohen’s house as soon as she turned the corner. It covered a full city block. Every stone had been magboosted through the Charles de Gaulle Spaceport just before the Embargo. The front doors were twice Li’s height, and as she set her foot on the top step they opened noiselessly, letting out a draft of cool fragrant shadowy air.

She stepped into a long marble-paved hall hung with oil paintings that even she recognized. A guard stopped her, and she held her arms above her head to be frisked.

He searched her professionally, impersonally. And he found everything—which was in itself impressive. Her Corps-issue Viper. Her Beretta. A ceramic-alloy butterfly knife she’d picked up off a Syndicate soldier during the war. And finally the blue box she’d brought with her just in case she ran into the hijacker again.

He handed back the guns and the knife. They only showed up in streamspace because they happened to be on Li’s inert body back on AMC station; the health and safety protocols, and Cohen’s own private security, made them useless. He kept the blue box, though. That kind of weapon never got anywhere near an Emergent who could afford to hire competent bodyguards.

He had searched her without any visible expression crossing his face, except for a momentary flicker of admiration at the butterfly knife. When he finished, he relaxed slightly and grinned. “Hey, Major. Good to see ya.”

“You too, Momo.” Li held out her hand, and they executed an intricate mock-secret infantryman’s handshake. “Where’s Jimmy?”

“Vacation.” Momo shrugged. “Lazy bum.”

“Yeah, well. Tell him I asked. Is Cohen in back?”

“You know the way.”

Cohen was waiting in his study, a bright sunlit room decorated with elegantly framed portraits of somebody else’s ancestors. Glass-paned doors opened onto a walled garden. Antiques scented the air with the smell of old hardwood and beeswax furniture polish.

The whole room lived, breathed. It gave off a fine aromatic dust: wool from the Persian carpets; veneer from the old paintings; goose feathers and horsehair from the furniture. And the building itself shed wood particles, plaster, cool dry limestone dust. It threw off trace like a live thing. It got inside you, like Cohen himself, charming, intoxicating, until you couldn’t tell where it began and you ended.

He sat on a low couch near one of the open doors. He had a book in his hand, an old hardcover, the gilt letters flaking from its cracked spine. He was shunting through Roland today, wearing a summer suit the color of the new-mown hay in the Stubbs portrait of Eclipse that hung behind him. The afternoon sun flashed on swirling dust motes, caught the gold of Roland’s eyes, brushed the whole scene with rich earthy color.

“Catherine,” he said. He jumped up, kissed her on the cheek, took her hand, and sat her down on the sofa next to him. “Back on Compson’s, are we? How bad is it?”

She made a face. He hadn’t let go of her hand, and it was too late now to pull it away without looking like she was trying to make a point. His fingers felt hot and dry and clean against her skin—or maybe her own hand was just clammy.

“I confess I was surprised you accepted the assignment.”

“Didn’t have much choice.”

“Yes.” He smiled more broadly. “Helen has a real genius for that sort of thing. I can just imagine how she presented it. How graciously she must have thrown you a life preserver after she finished torpedoing your career.”

Li’s eyes narrowed. “How did you know Nguyen was involved?”

“Oh, you know nosy little me. Grapes?” He offered a shallow bowl with several dusty green bunches.

She extricated her hand from his and pulled a grape off the stem. She put it in her mouth and chewed cautiously.

It turned out that grapes didn’t taste much like grape at all. They had tough, acrid skin. And they popped between her teeth, sending out a startling burst of juicy pulp with sharp woody-tasting things embedded in it.

“Watch out for the seeds,” Cohen said, as she choked on one. He eyed her intently, evidently expecting some sort of comment.

“They’re, um, good,” she said, nodding.

“You’re an abysmal liar.”

“You’re right. They’re terrible. Not to mention dangerous. Why would anyone eat this shit?”

And just like that they were back on the safe ground of old habit. Metz was wrapped up and put away. They would simply carry on as if it had never happened. That was as close to an apology as anyone was ever going to get out of Cohen. Or out of Li herself, for that matter.

They talked through the afternoon as long panels of refracted sunlight wheeled across the study, picking out the clear blues and yellows of the Uzbek carpet. The grapes were followed by real tea, real scones, real crème fraiche, and little green-and-white slips of watercress sandwiches. There was nothing more outrageously luxurious than tea with Cohen—streamspace or realspace.

When they’d worked their way through a full tea’s worth of personal news, gossip, and political chitchat, Cohen set his cup down and looked at her. “Are you aware that you nearly got yourself killed the other day?”

“Oh, come on!” Li said.

“You absolutely and unequivocally flatlined.”

“Nonsense,” she answered. In fact she’d had no idea it was that serious.

“What would have happened if I hadn’t been there? I can’t always be available to charge to your rescue on a white horse, you know.”

“I think in your case it’d be more like strolling to my rescue with a hand-rolled cigar in hand. And I never asked for rescuing anyway.”

“Right.” Cohen sounded irritated. “I know you too well to expect thanks. But let’s make sure it doesn’t happen again, shall we?”

“What makes you assume it wasn’t just a random attack?”

“Would it interest you to know that the signal was routed through the Anaconda Mining Company’s field AI?”

Li stared. “That’s impossible,” she said after a moment. “The field AI flatlined when the mine blew up.”

“That,” Cohen said, “is merely the story which the Secretariat has released for public consumption. In fact he’s quite alive. Or at least, he seems to be, as far as anyone can tell without making contact.” He lit a cigarette and stared at her through the curl of smoke. “He’s simply not speaking to us.”

Li looked at him suspiciously. “How do you know about this?”

“It happens to be a matter of personal interest to me. And to certain of my colleagues.”

“ALEF, in other words.”

“Mmm. The Secretariat seems to be under the impression that we have somehow, er, liberated AMC’s field AI.”

“Have you?”

“Of course not. Really.” He rolled his eyes. “You’ve been downloading too many cheap interactives.”

“Okay,” Li said. “So you didn’t have anything to do with it. How far do you trust the other ALEF AIs?”

He looked at her condescendingly. “That question displays an almost human obtuseness. It’s not a matter of trust. It’s a matter of information-sharing protocols. Besides, what would be the point? Field AIs are zombies. Have you seen the feedback loops they program into them? They’re barely even sentient.”

“Then who did it?”

“Why jump to conclusions? Maybe the field AI is controlling himself.”

“You think it’s gone rogue?”

“Oh, how I loathe that word,” Cohen said to the ceiling. “It makes it sound as if any AI who tries to get control of his own code is the equivalent of a rampaging elephant.”

Li forged ahead. “I thought field AIs couldn’t go ro—uh, rewrite their own code.”

“Well, they’re certainly not supposed to be able to.” He grinned. “But then neither was I, according to some so-called experts. Tell me, what fool’s errand does Nguyen have you running on Compson’s? What’s the cover story? And how much has she told you about what’s really going on?”

“I don’t think—”

“My dear girl. You’re the one sitting in my house asking me questions.” He threw back his head, closed his eyes, and blew an exquisite smoke ring. “If you can’t share, I really don’t see why I should play with you at all.”

She told him. He slouched against the sofa’s high back and listened, the slow rise and fall of Roland’s stomach the only sign of life about him. When she was done, he gazed at the ceiling and blew several more smoke rings before answering.

“Three things,” he said finally. “One, Helen’s told you nothing. Nothing of substance, anyway. Two, this is cleanup detail, not a real investigation. Three, she’s worried cross-eyed about keeping the lid on whatever Sharifi was doing, or she wouldn’t have picked you for the job.”

“There wasn’t any picking about it,” Li lied. “I was the closest person.”

“Mmm. Convenient that you were so close, isn’t it?”

“I guess.”

Cohen snorted daintily. “Don’t give me the simple soldier act. I know you better. Nguyen put your court-martial, or whatever they’re calling it, on ice in order to send you on a private fishing trip. You’re in bad trouble, and she knows you well enough to know you’ll do whatever it takes to climb out of it. Do the math, Catherine. You step out of line, and you can bet your Fromherz nodes it won’t be ten minutes before she’s politely reminding you that she holds your career in her hands.”

Li shifted, suddenly uncomfortable on the plush sofa. “That’s a suspicious-minded way of putting it.”

“Which is precisely why I know you’ve already thought of it.” He grinned. “Besides, I have great respect for Helen. She’s admirably ruthless, and it’s always edifying to watch a master at work. By the way, I wouldn’t recommend telling her you’ve been to see me. She’s a little sour on me just at the moment.”

Li resisted the urge to point out that Nguyen might have good reasons for being sour on him. Instead she said, “What can you tell me about Hannah Sharifi?”

Cohen smiled. “What do you want to know?”

“Everything. Did you know her personally?”

The smile broadened.

“Christ, Cohen, is there anyone you haven’t slept with?”

He sighed ostentatiously. “Oh, spare me your puritanical miner’s daughter morality. At least I’m still speaking to all my exes. Unlike some people I could name.”

“I’m still speaking to you, aren’t I?” Li said, deadpan.

They looked at each other—really looked—for the first time since she’d arrived.

Cohen looked away first and leaned forward to tap the ash off his cigarette. “I don’t think you get the credit for that.”

Li stood up and walked around the room.

Pictures of long-forgotten eighteenth-century contessas and marquises hung on the grass-papered walls. The Jaquet-Droz automaton on the card table could write messages of up to forty strokes in any alphabet, nod its head, and move its buckram-stuffed chest up and down under its frock coat in a gear-and-pulley imitation of real breathing. The bookshelves held snapshots of scientists clowning for the camera in front of ivy-covered buildings, including a first-generation print of the famous shot of the original Hyacinthe Cohen at some historic AI conference before the Evacuation. Beside it were newer photos of the Cohen she knew—or rather photos of handsome unfamiliar faces wearing his sly smile. At parties. Playing with his dogs. Talking to the Israeli prime minister. Sitting on the beach outside Tel Aviv. That one must be recent, she realized; there was Roland’s face eyeing her from inside the picture frame.

And there were novels, of course. Cohen and his novels. Stendhal. Balzac. The Brontës. Sometimes Li thought he knew more about book people than real people.

She pulled a book from the shelf. It crackled in her hand and breathed out a tickly but pleasant-smelling cloud of leather, glue, and paper particles. She let it fall open at random:

“Are you anything akin to me, do you think, Jane?”

I could risk no sort of answer by this time: my heart was full.

“Because,” he said, “I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you—especially when you are near me, as now; it is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame. And if that boisterous channel, and two hundred miles or so of land come broad between us, I am afraid that cord of communion will be snapt; and then I’ve a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly. As for you —you’d forget me.”

“Why do you keep this rubbish?” she asked Cohen, her nose still in the book. Her back was to him, but she couldn’t quite hide the smile in her voice. “It’s toxic. I’ve ingested eighteen kinds of mold just from opening the thing.”

“I’m obsessed by obsolete and troublesome technologies. Why else would I waste so much time on you?”

Li laughed and shut the book. “Speaking of obsolete technology, you knew Sharifi came out of the XenoGen birthlabs, didn’t you?”

“Oh yes. Same as you.”

Li stiffened, still not looking at him. “Same as my grandmother.”

“Of course.”

“Did Sharifi ever talk to you about that?”

“Not as such. But she talked about Compson’s World. She lived there until she was eight. Some orphanage in Helena. With nuns.”

“Sounds fun.”

“What I remember being most impressed by was why she ended up in the orphanage.”

“Oh?”

“She was blind.”

Li turned to stare at him.

“She was born blind. Something in the ocular nerve. Easily correctable. Her adoptive parents fixed it. But the birthlab made a cost-benefit analysis and decided to cull her instead of paying for the operation.”

“Merciful Christ,” Li whispered.

“I doubt mercy had much to do with it. What’s the saying? Pray to the Virgin; God took one look at Compson’s World and went back to Earth? Anyway, according to Hannah the orphanage she grew up in was full of constructs the labs dumped on the streets because of minor defects. Brings a whole new meaning to the externalization of operating costs. ‘The cheapest technology is human technology,’ she liked to say. And she was right, really. The Ring, the UN, interstellar commerce. It’s all running on the blood and sweat of a few hundred thousand miners who spend the first half of their lives underground and the last half dying of black-lung.” He laughed. “It’s positively Victorian. Or maybe it’s just human.”

Li felt a flash of anger at Cohen for… well, for what? For talking about it? For laughing at it? For knowing about it and still enjoying his elegant life? But he was right, just like Sharifi had been right. And hadn’t she gotten off Compson’s as fast as she could? Wasn’t she just as determined to take some of the good life and not think too hard about where the condensate that made it all possible was coming from?

She slid the book back onto the shelf and kept moving along the wall, toward Cohen’s desk. She picked up an open fiche, glanced at the screen:

The era of the unitary sentient organism is over. Both the Syndicates and the UN member nations are now scrambling to catch up with this metaevolutionary reality. In the Syndicates we have seen an evolutionary shift toward a hive mind mentality, viz., the cr`eche system, the thirty-year contract, the construction of a distinctively posthuman collective psychology, including generalized cultural acceptance of euthanasia for individuals who deviate from the gene-norm.

“Don’t you believe in privacy?” Cohen asked, sounding exasperated.

“Only my own. What is this, anyway?”

“A talk I’m giving. A draft. Meaning get your snout out of it.”

She shrugged and put the fiche down. “It doesn’t sound like Sharifi had happy memories of Compson’s. So why did she go back there? And what was she doing underground in the Anaconda?”

“I don’t know. We’d lost touch, rather. But I do have a pretty good idea of what kind of person she was. And no matter what Helen claims to believe, Sharifi wouldn’t have sold information. She was a real crusader.” He smiled. “A little like you.”

Li brushed that aside. “I’m just pulling a paycheck.”

“Is that what they call it?” He snorted. “I’ve met better-paid bellhops. Speaking of which, why don’t you tell me exactly what you were looking for when the field AI latched on to you.”

“Do you really think it went rogue?” she asked.

“No. Or rather, I stopped thinking that when it went after you. Semisentients just aren’t that interested in humans. Most full sentients aren’t even that interested. No, someone sent it. Someone who is interested in you.”

“Who?”

“Dragons,” Cohen murmured, tracing an elegant figure in the air with the tip of his cigarette. “White Beauties.”

Li’s oracle dipped into the spinstream to figure out what White Beauties were, and what they had to do with imaginary lizards. All she got was a few obscure references to sixteenth-century mapmaking.

Cohen laughed, and she realized he had seen her instream query—and her failure to turn anything up.

“When mapmakers reached the edges of what they knew back on Earth,” he said, “they’d write ‘Here Be Dragons.’ Or if they were a little more prosaic they’d simply leave blank spots. Blank spots which were white, of course, on the old paper maps. Siberia. The Empty Quarter. Deepest Africa. The great explorers called those blank spots White Beauties. Silly of me, perhaps. But what I mean to say is that streamspace is more than the sum of things humans have put there. There are White Beauties in the Stream. Living, sentient systems as unknown and uncharted as those white spaces on the old maps. Humans don’t see them. Or if they do see them, they generally don’t recognize them. But they exist. And you may have bumped up against one, that’s all.”

Li shivered. “You can’t honestly believe that.”

“People have believed stranger things,” he answered. Then he shrugged and smiled. “I’m not making any claims. You asked me for a guess, that’s my guess. For the moment anyway. Like every woman, I reserve the right to change my mind.”

It was an old argument, but one Li couldn’t resist. “You’re not a woman, Cohen.”

“My dear, I’ve been one for longer than you have.”

“No. You’ve been a tourist. It’s different.” Li tapped into her hard files, pulled up her scan of Sharifi’s interface and copied it to him. “Take a look at that and let me know what your woman’s intuition tells you.”

“Well now,” Cohen said, sitting up abruptly. “I was wondering when you’d get around to mentioning that.” His upper lip twisted in a crooked little smile. “It was quite entertaining to see you teetering back and forth, trying to decide how far you trusted me.”

“It’s not a matter of trust,” Li said. “It’s a matter of information-sharing protocols.”

“Impertinent monkey.”

He wizarded the file into realspace, opened the case, ran his fingers along the wire, turned it over to look at the raised sunburst.

“It was made for Sharifi,” Li said. “Some kind of wet/dry interface.”

“Intraface.”

“I think she was using it to interface with the field AI—”

“Int raface.” He sounded pained. “Do you listen to anything I say?”

“Interface, intraface, what’s the difference?”

“Think, Catherine. An interface manages the exchange of data and operating programs between two or more discrete systems. An intraface, in contrast, merges the two into a single integrated system.”

“Pretty academic distinction, Cohen.”

“Not when the two things you’re networking are a human and an Emergent AI. Think of your own internals. The various systems are platformed on an oracle—a simple, nonsentient AI that’s little more than an intelligent game-playing agent. The oracle routes data and active code back and forth from you to your wetware, translates classical queries into quantum computational functions, tags and produces correct solutions.” He fluttered slim, perfectly manicured fingers. “In broad outline, it’s little different than the shunt through which I receive sensory data and route commands to this or any other wired body. An intraface, however, is an entirely different beast. It merges the AI and the human into a single consciousness.”

“Who controls it?”

“A nonquestion. Like asking which neurons in your brain control your own body. Or asking which of my associated networks is in control of me. We all are.”

“But some of you are more in control than others, right?”

“Ah. Yes. I should have been more precise before. When I say a single consciousness I’m speaking of consciousness not as you understand it, but as I do. I know it’s fashionable to describe human consciousness as Emergent, but really, as soon as you get above the level of the individual neuron, that’s just a metaphor. A true Emergent is a very different animal. Emergent consciousness is born out of a kind of parallel processing that the human mind simply isn’t wired for. Control in such a context is… complicated.”

“And you’d need an Emergent to run it?”

“A very powerful one at that.”

Li looked at him, thinking. “How many Emergents are there who could do it?”

“Not many,” Cohen said, picking at a thread on the cuff of his suit jacket. “Alba’s Emergents, of course, especially if you ran them through AMC’s field AI. Two or three Ring-side AIs, all under depreciable life contracts to DefenseNet or one of the private defense contractors. Any of the cornerstone AIs in FreeNet’s Consortium could run it—and stepping on the Consortium’s toes could certainly explain your little adventure in Freetown.”

“What about ALEF?” Li asked.

“My dear girl, no one who’d ever been to an ALEF meeting would imagine such a thing. Half the older members are decohering because of insufficiently backed-up early FTL transports. A third of the still-functional ones are supremely uninterested in anything but debating theoretical mathematics and experimenting with alternative identity structures. And the rest of us couldn’t agree on where—or even whether—to eat dinner, let alone organize something on this scale.” He sobered abruptly. “Besides, if we were ever caught fooling around with such a thing, TechComm would activate our mandatory feedback loops.” He drew one finger across Roland’s neck in an unmistakable gesture. “All she wrote.”

“The Consortium,” Li said, ignoring the gesture to pursue her suspicions. “They’re supremacists, right?” She had never been able to understand the alien tangle of AI politics, but she did know that much.

“Separatists is probably a better way of describing it. Like I said, most Emergents just aren’t that interested in humans.”

“But the Consortium was the group involved in Tel Aviv, right? The ones who killed the Security Council agent.”

Roland’s hand froze on its way to the ashtray and a shower of ash fell unnoticed onto the carpet’s blue-and-gold arabesques. “Why ask me?” he said sharply. “I wasn’t even there.”

“I’m just pointing out that the Consortium’s member AIs could use this intraface if they had some reason to use it.”

“Of course they could.”

Li swallowed. “And so could you, right? In fact, you could use it better than any other AI. Because you’re more human, aren’t you? Because you process data with emotions, not logic. You’re in all the Emergent-systems textbooks, the only one of the twenty-first-century affective-loop-driven AIs who hasn’t decohered and gone… wherever they go when that happens. You’re practically a species of one.”

For a moment she thought he wasn’t going to answer. His cigarette crackled and smoked. Another rain of ash fell to the floor. Birds sang beyond the tall windows. And meanwhile Cohen sat so perfectly, unbreathingly still that Roland’s pretty face might have been carved from stone.

When he spoke, it was in a voice as soft and cold as falling snow. “Whatever you’re trying to say, Catherine, why don’t you just go ahead and say it?”

Li looked out at the green leaves trembling beneath snowfields so blindingly white and oceans so brilliantly blue that you could almost imagine you were looking at clouds and sky, almost imagine you were standing on solid ground and not plastered to a spinning ring of vacuum-hardened virusteel. Then she leaned forward and finally asked the question that had been hanging on her tongue since she arrived:

“Was this the target tech on Metz, Cohen? Was it the intraface you were after?”

He shook himself, put his cigarette out, and leaned forward to stare at her. “What makes you think that?”

“The sunburst.” She pointed at the raised shape on the wire’s black sheathing. “It was on the floor there.”

“I don’t think you’re supposed to remember that, Catherine.”

She lit a cigarette herself.

“Are you having bleed-through? Have you told the psychtechs?” He sighed. “No. Of course not. You need to, Catherine. You’re playing with fire.”

She scoffed. “You don’t seriously believe the line about memory washing for our own good? To keep us simple soldiers from suffering over the nasty but necessary things they make us do?”

“You know me better than that. But if your soft memory’s breaking into your edited files there’s something seriously wrong with your internals. You’re too heavily wired to risk malfunctioning internals. Go see someone, for Heaven’s sake. I’ll pay if money’s a problem.”

“Who asked you to pay? Answer my question, Cohen. Was this what we went to Metz for?”

“No—”

Li stood up. “I don’t believe you. And I don’t like being lied to.”

“Sit down,” he said—and there was an edge in his voice that made her obey him. “Yes, we were chasing the intraface on Metz. But we weren’t looking for this component. We were looking for the wetware schematics and the psychware source code.” He kept his eyes fixed on hers, watching her reaction. “Look, this isn’t a VR rig or a UN grunt’s wire job. This is a genuine neural net, both on the AI and the human sides of the intraface. You can’t grow that in viral matrix—not when the device itself is still in the experimental stage. You need a body.”

Li shivered. “The constructs we saw in the lab were just… hosts, then?”

“Exactly.”

“And what about that?” She gestured to the wire on the table between them.

“Forget that. It’s nothing. An accessory. The kind of thing you get with the real equipment and shove in a bottom drawer somewhere and forget about. No, the thing you really need is the AI component of the intraface. That’s loaded onto an AI somewhere, probably an AI that’s enslaved to an Emergent network. Find that, and you’ll know exactly who you’re up against.”

“That’s what I’m asking you, Cohen. Who is it? Nguyen was paying you in tech. What were you going to do with it? What does ALEF want it for?”

“They don’t want it,” Cohen said. “I do.”

“Why?”

Cohen started to speak, then snapped his mouth shut and turned away to light another cigarette. “Stay offstream,” he said. “I’ll nose around in ALEF’s databases, chat up a few old acquaintances and see what I can turn up without drawing unwanted attention. You go back down that mine shaft. Find out exactly what Sharifi was doing. And who she was talking to. And don’t call me. Nguyen will certainly have your outgoing mail monitored, and I think it’s safer if we don’t talk until I get an offstream entanglement source set up.”

He rose and looked at his wristwatch, a paper-thin affair of buttery pink gold whose smooth face was embossed with a stylized Templar’s cross. Time was up. Li had clearly gotten all the answers she was going to get today.

“Come on then.” He smiled, catching up her hand in his and coaxing her to her feet. “Let’s go out through the garden. Perhaps the birds will be out. Did I tell you that our bioresearch division has reengineered a naturally reproducing cliff swallow? And I have a new lilac to show you. One that even your barbarously practical soul will appreciate.”

He drew her arm through his, and they stepped through the tall doors together into the green-speckled sunlight of his personal jungle.

Anaconda Strike: 16.10.48.

They were bringing the rats back in when Li and McCuen got to the pithead the next morning.

They brought them in traps and dented rusty cages and every imaginable kind of container. The miners even humped them in from Shantytown on the surface shuttles when they came on shift. Six full traps traveled down in the cage with Li and McCuen, and when they hit pit bottom the pit ponies were already waiting to load them onto the coal carts and send them trundling off into the mine’s far corners. Judging from the heap of empty cages piling up at pit bottom, Li guessed the relocation had been in full swing for at least a shift or two.

No manager showed up to stop it. They wouldn’t dare; some of the fiercest wildcat strikes in Compson’s history had sparked over the poisoning of mine rats. Miners loved their rats. Befriended them. Believed in them. The rats smelled poison gas long before any human or posthuman could, and they were attuned to the roof’s settling and cracking, to the silent hang-ups that preceded a big cave-in. When the rats left the mine, disaster was on the horizon. If the rats stayed, it was safe—or at least no riskier than usual.

“How can they stand it?” McCuen muttered as they started down the main gangway.

Li followed his gaze to a miner who was sitting on a gob pile breaking off pieces of his sandwich and tossing them to a trio of rats. It made an eerie picture: the black of the man’s coal-coated skin, the black of the rats’ fur, their round black eyes riveted on the grimy fingers that reached again and again into the gleaming lunch pail.

“They’re pretty clean,” she said. “You can’t catch much from them except plague. And even that you’re more likely to get from people these days.”

McCuen just shook his head and made a spitting sound in his throat. “You thought about Gould any more?” he asked.

Li shrugged.

“Why go slow time?” McCuen asked. “That’s what I keep wondering.”

They were traveling down the main gangway now. It was still wide enough to walk two abreast, but the ceiling was already lowering overhead, forcing McCuen to duck his head and stoop, miner fashion.

“You sound like you have a theory,” Li hazarded.

“Well, not really… but…”

“But what?”

“It just occurred to me that maybe the point isn’t just to get… whatever it is… Gould herself, I’d guess… to Freetown, but to keep anyone else from getting hold of her until she gets there.”

Li stopped, struck by the idea. “You’re saying she’s using the flight as a kind of dead drop.”

“Well, I hadn’t quite thought of it that way, but… yeah. I mean, once that ship dropped into slow time, it was gone. No radio contact. No way to stop it or board it or even find it. It doesn’t even exist as far as we’re concerned.”

“Not until it gets to Freetown.”

“Right.”

“You’re assuming that it doesn’t matter to her if we find out what it is before she gets there.”

“Right.”

“Because… ?”

“Because once she gets there it’ll already be too late for us to stop her?”

Li stood staring at the ground, at the coal dust already caking her boots, her mind racing.

“It was just a thought,” McCuen said. “I guess it doesn’t really make sense when you look at it that way.”

“No,” Li said slowly. “It makes sense. It makes all kinds of sense.”

He looked over at her, his face a pool of lamplit white in the darkness. “What do we do now?” he asked.

“Follow up on our other leads and hope to hell that sometime in the next three weeks we crack this thing.”

McCuen grinned. “Other leads meaning Louie?”

“Other leads meaning Louie.”

Six linear kilometers from the shaft by Li’s measurement, they turned a sharp kink in the gangway and dropped into the long, high-roofed chamber that was the temporary home of cutting face South 8. The survey crews must have come through and ruled out the presence of any worthwhile crystal deposits; the miners had already blasted a large section of coal and were taking it down with a track-mounted rotary cutter. The big machine threw up a spume of stove-grease black diesel smoke and made enough noise to start a roof fall all by itself. There was no point in talking to anyone while they were cutting, so Li and McCuen took refuge in the most sheltered corner they could find and watched.

Someone must have seen them; when the crew stopped to break down the cutter and move the tracks up, the foreman pushed his cutting goggles up onto his forehead and walked over to them.

“Louie,” McCuen said, grinning.

Louie was easily Haas’s size, but he wasn’t carrying any creeping desk-job fat on his big frame. He was all wiry knotted miner’s muscle—a man who looked built to take down mountains. He pulled a grimy rag out of his coveralls and wiped his hands with it. It looked to Li like he was just moving the accumulated coal dust and diesel grease from one big-knuckled finger to another.

When he’d finished redistributing the dirt, he pulled a tobacco tin out of a hidden pocket and offered it around. Li and McCuen both refused. Louie pulled a swag out and planted it in one cheek.

“So,” he said, looking McCuen up and down. “Massa treatin’ you all right in the big house?”

“Very funny,” McCuen said. He turned to Li. “Louie and I went to school together.”

Louie laughed. “Grade school, anyway. That’s all the school one of us had.”

“Major Li would like to ask you a few questions.”

“Ask and you shall receive!” Louie said, throwing out his strong, coal-slicked arms expansively. “Answers, that is. I ain’t giving away World Series tickets.”

One of the cutters on break walked over, eyeing them curiously. Louie glanced at him, then looked back at Li and McCuen. “So,” he asked, “you think the Mets are gonna sweep?”

Li snorted.

“She’s just bitter,” McCuen said.

The cutter passed by and turned down a side tunnel.

“Right,” Louie said. “He’s taking a piss. That’ll take twenty seconds or so, after which he’ll fuck around for a minute or so to avoid getting back to work. Which means you got about a minute and a half before he comes back to see what we’re talking about. Walls got ears down here.”

He listened while Li explained what she was looking for, then turned to McCuen. “You can trust her,” McCuen said after a moment.

“Yeah, but can I trust you?”

“You know you can.”

Louie stared hard at McCuen for a moment. Then he turned back to Li. “Sharifi didn’t have a regular crew,” he said. “That’s why you can’t find them in the pit logs. Haas just let her pull miners off slow faces. Most of them are back on the Trinidad now, poor buggers.”

“Do you think you could get us a complete list?”

He shrugged. “Easier if I just let ’em know you’re looking for them. Plus there’s nothing written down that way.”

“You didn’t work for her, did you?” Li asked.

“You crazy? I still won’t go down there.”

“So how’d she get the others to go?”

“Easy.” Louie laughed and his eyes widened in the white circles left by his cutting goggles. “She paid union scale. She actually put a sign up at pit bottom saying she’d pay scale. Wish I could have seen Haas’s face when he read it.”

“How’d she know what union scale was?” Li asked, knowing the answer already.

Louie shrugged his massive shoulders.

Li glanced behind her to make sure the miner who’d gone off to piss was still out of earshot. “Was this a union project? Was there an official push on it?”

Louie caught her drift instantly. The union pushed members toward specific cutting faces or veins depending on its own often obscure political or economic goals. Union approval of Sharifi’s project would have meant better-qualified, more highly motivated workers. Union workers. And union oversight, even if the cat-and-mouse game of union and management meant that no one could risk publicly admitting they were union. Had Sharifi been politically savvy enough to know that? Or had the union approached her on its own initiative?

“I wouldn’t know anything about that,” Louie said, looking fixedly at Li. There was a message in his stare, but whatever it was she couldn’t read it.

“But you might have heard something.”

“Some things I try not to hear.”

“Who’s the pit rep?” Li asked.

Louie’s face shut like a slamming door.

“Oh, come on!” McCuen sounded exasperated. “You know goddamn well who the pit rep is. It was your damn brother two elections ago!”

Louie stared at McCuen, and Li could see half a lifetime of distrust and resentment in his broad face. “All I know,” he said, “is that you pull your paycheck out of Haas’s back pocket just like the rest of the Pinkertons. And if you think I’m going to roll over just because we—”

“Fine,” Li interrupted; she could hear footsteps moving toward them up the drift. “Just drop a word in the right ears, okay?”

“Right.” Louie bent to check his lamp. “See you around, Brian.”

“Thanks for nothing,” McCuen snapped.

Louie’s reply was so quiet Li barely heard it over the shovels of the cutter crew. She bent over him. “What?”

“I said talk to the priest. Just don’t tell him I sent you.”

The priest’s name was Cartwright, and it took them half the shift to find him. He’d scrawled his mark on the shift log when he came in that morning, but he hadn’t checked out a Davy lamp and they didn’t see his numbered tag on any of the gangway boards.

“Independents,” McCuen said. “They’re so damn sure the company’s going to steal their strikes, they’d rather die than tell the safety crews where to look for them. We’ll just have to go out and hunt him down. If you think it’s worth it.” He looked doubtful.

“You know him?” Li asked.

“Sure,” McCuen said. “Everyone does.” He made a circling gesture near his temple with one finger: crazy.

The rest of the shift ran together in a blur of dripping walls and flickering lamplight. They soon passed beyond the AMC-wired sections of the mine and into regions lit only by miners’ lamps and the occasional battery-powered emergency bulb. They poked their way up crooked drifts and adits, past brattices too rotten to push more than a whisper of fresh air through the dank tunnels. At each turning of the way they stopped and listened and followed the echoes of miners’ picks.

They relived the same ghostly scene ten, twelve, fifteen times. They caught the first faint tapping of rock hammers, glimpsed refracted lamplight glittering on the hewn and splintered walls. Then men emerged from the darkness, speared on the narrow beams of Davy lamps, their eyes glittering like coal under running water.

“The priest?” Li would ask. “Cartwright?”

And each little clot of men would send them on deeper, into smaller tunnels.

As the ventilation faltered, the air grew hotter. Soon Li was sweating, straining just to pull enough air through the mouthpiece of her rebreather. McCuen rolled his coveralls down, tied the arms around his waist, and took his shirt off. Li did the same, but left her T-shirt on; she still had a string of pearls from her underground days, and she’d just as soon not spark awkward questions about whether a certain Catherine Li had worked underground and who had known her back then.

She soon gave up even trying to check their progress against the AMC maps in her database. They were off company maps here, and besides, her reception was going. Late in the day a last team of miners pointed them into a steep, narrow drift that followed the Wilkes-Barre vein as it dipped along the broken strata at the mountains’ edge. Twenty meters up they hit a sharp kink in the drift. Just beyond the turning, they found a narrow little slit between two canted layers of bedrock, leaving just enough room for a thin person to squeak through into a dark tunnel beyond—a tunnel far too cramped to accommodate a miner in full safety gear. Someone had chalked a symbol at the mouth of the tunnel: a crescent moon with a cross under it.

“Cartwright’s sign,” McCuen said. “But no rebreather. I guess he doesn’t carry one.”

So Cartwright was a genetic. Of course he would be, Li realized. An unaltered miner might take off his rebreather in order to keep up with the pace of work at the face, but only a genetic would risk going into the more remote tunnels without a supply of clean air to breathe if he ran into a gas pocket. “How many of the bootleggers are genetics these days?” she asked McCuen.

“Most,” McCuen answered, confirming her half guess half memory. “Who else could get into this stuff? Plus they have an edge on the rest of us; they don’t have to buy air from the company.”

Li sat down, bracing herself against an outcropping of bedrock, and started to unstrap her rebreather. “Let’s go find him,” she said.

McCuen hesitated. “Maybe we should wait.”

“What the hell for?”

When McCuen didn’t answer, she looked up into his face and saw something she’d seen in more young faces than she could remember: fear.

She smiled reassuringly. “This level’s clean, Brian. Just look at your Spohr badge. We’ll be up there, what… twenty minutes? Nothing you breathe in twenty minutes is going to kill you. You’d do yourself as much harm smoking a pack of cigarettes.”

“You’ve never seen anyone die of black-lung.” McCuen’s voice rang hollow on the last word.

Li shook her head, pushed away the memories McCuen’s words had shaken loose. “No one’s going to die of anything,” she said.

A moment later McCuen spat out his mouthpiece and she heard the quiet snick of the power switch on his rebreather.

They squeezed through the slit in the rock and started up the passage. It climbed steeply, following the bed of an underground stream. The water was fresh, without a trace of sulfur, and Li splashed some over her sweaty face and neck. Cartwright must have some strike up there to make this commute worthwhile.

Soon they were climbing what amounted to a ladder, moving from handhold to handhold across rocks slippery with water. Li’s breath came quicker and shorter as they climbed, though whether it was from exertion or bad air she couldn’t guess. After what seemed like forever, the passage leveled off, the stream now running in a shallow trench to one side of them.

Li twisted around in the narrow space, jammed her back against one wall, her feet against the other. McCuen did the same, though the passage was far more cramped for him. He was panting, quick and shallow as a hound dog, and the flame of his headlamp was tipped with a ghostly blue spark. Li sniffed, and smelled the telltale whiff of violets. Whitedamp.

McCuen had noticed it too. He checked his Spohr badge. When he looked up, his eyes were wide.

“You okay?” Li asked.

He nodded, but his face was pale and sweat-slicked and his eyes burned feverishly.

“Go back down,” she told him.

He shook his head.

“Just do it. Want to get yourself killed? I’ll meet you in ten.”

She watched him down the steep climb and onto flatter ground. Then she asked herself if what she was about to do was a good idea.

The passage ran steadily uphill, and whitedamp would collect at the top of the chamber. By the time she found Cartwright, the air would be bad enough to kill an unaltered human. Her very presence would advertise what she was as surely as if she’d written it across her coveralls. But if he was up there, he was the same. And why would another construct betray her?

She took off her badge and set it on the floor of the tunnel. She left her headlamp and helmet beside the badge, switched off her internal recorder, and shifted her optics to infrared. She couldn’t turn off her black box, but if and when they cracked it open she’d have more terminal things to worry about than whether some Corps tech knew she wasn’t just quarter-bred.

The smell of violets got stronger. Soon she was traveling through a lethal cocktail of sulfur and carbon monoxide. Her internals launched wave after wave of scrubbers into her bloodstream, fighting off suffocation. Finally she began to hear the steady clinking of a rock hammer. Cartwright was up there. Alone. Without ventilation or oxygen. Prospecting for condensates in a deadly haze of whitedamp. She shook herself like someone waking from a bad dream and crawled forward into the choking darkness.

She came on him unexpectedly—but then unexpectedly was how you always came on people in this bootlegger’s world of narrow passages and flickering lamp beams. He was undercutting the seam, carving out a space for the cut coal and crystal to drop into. He had undercut the vast hanging weight of the coal so deeply that only his legs were still out in the open chamber. Yellow I-profile virusteel chocks propped up the now-unsupported face, and as he worked he pushed the freshly cut coal back out past them so that it piled up like a monstrous black molehill. When he’d made his undercut, he’d pull out the chocks and wedge-drop the coal from the top. Dropping a coal face without explosives was hard slow dangerous work, but it was worth it if the strike was rich enough. And this one was rich; the exposed face of the Bose-Einstein bed flared white-hot on infrared, like half-buried diamonds.

Cartwright didn’t hear her arrive; his hammer must have covered any noise she’d made. She watched him, catching her breath. After a moment he stopped hammering, and she could hear him breathing, wheezing a little. When he spoke, she thought he was talking to himself.

“Hello, Caitlyn,” he said. “Or whatever you’re calling yourself now.”

She froze, heart pounding.

She’d feared this moment, dreaded it. But she hadn’t expected it to come like this. Had he seen her? Heard her? How did he know her?

Cartwright slid out from under the face, coveralls rucking up over skinny shins. He’d stripped to the waist. Coal scars ran so thick over his back and shoulders that they looked like a contour map of the mountains whose roots he’d spent his life dismantling.

“How long has it been, Katie? Eighteen years? Twenty?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Cartwright just tilted his head curiously, looking like a dog listening for his master’s whistle. “You still have your mother’s voice,” he said. “Though they say you’ve forgotten her. Are they right? Have you? Never mind. Let me get a look at you.”

He put his hands to her face, and Li realized at the touch of skin on skin what had been nagging her throughout this conversation: there was no light. Cartwright had been working in total darkness, without a lamp or infra goggles.

He was blind.

His fingers walked over her nose and lips, into her eye sockets. “You’ve changed your face,” he said. “But you’re Gil’s daughter. Mirce told them you’d died, but I knew. They would have told me. They keep their secrets, of course. But something like that they’d have told me.”

“Who would have told you?”

“The saints, Katie. Her saints. Don’t tell me you’ve stopped praying to Her. You mustn’t do that, Katie. She needs our prayers. She lives by them. And She answers them.”

Li glanced down, saw the cold fire of the silver crucifix hanging on the priest’s scarred chest. A strangled cry echoed against the rock, and she realized that it came from her own throat.

Cartwright kept talking as if he hadn’t heard her. “You’ve come to ask me about the fire, haven’t you?”

Li swallowed, scraped her thoughts together. “What caused it, Cartwright?”

“Sharifi.”

“How? What was she after? What did she want you to do for her?”

“What witches always do; strike crystal.”

“But Sharifi had the company witch,” she said.

“Ah, but she didn’t trust the company witch, did she? Not at first. She only brought her in for the dirty work.”

“You mean the work in the Trinidad. But what was the witch doing there if they’d already found the condensa—the crystal?”

“She still needed someone to sing them for her, didn’t she? She still needed to talk to them. She still needed to run her damn tests. I wouldn’t do it for her. And she didn’t want a priest anyway.” His face twisted. “She wasn’t a believing woman.”

“I don’t understand. What wouldn’t you do for her?”

“Haas’s work,” Cartwright answered. “Devil’s work.”

“But she changed her mind, didn’t she?” Li asked, seized by a trembling conviction that Cartwright knew, that he’d always known, that he was somehow at the center of it all. “Or someone changed it for her. What happened before the fire? Why did Sharifi destroy her data? What was she afraid of?”

“Of the fires of Hell,” Cartwright said, crossing himself. “Of Her just punishments.”

Li heard a noise in the darkness, closer than any noise should be, and realized that she was trembling violently, that it was the soft clink of the zipper tab at her throat she was hearing, the rustle of her own clothes against skin and rock.

“You should visit your mother,” Cartwright said. “It’s not good to neglect her.”

“You’ve got me mixed up with someone else, Cartwright.”

“That’s not what your father says.”

A memory welled up from her gut like an underground river. She stopped it, corked it, slammed every door in her mind on it. “My father’s dead,” she said harshly. “And I came here for information, not church talk.”

“You came for the same reason we all come,” Cartwright said. “She called you.”

Li cleared her throat, choking on coal dust. “Did Sharifi’s project have union approval?”

“I’m Her man,” Cartwright said. “Not the union’s man.”

“Don’t feed me that line.” She held up her right hand in the gesture of the faded, peeling Christ Triumphant that had reigned over the Saturday night masses of her half-remembered childhood. “You’re two fingers of the same hand. I remember that much.”

“Then you remember enough to answer your question yourself. Haven’t you been there? They told me you swam in it.”

“The glory hole,” Li whispered, remembering the gleaming walls and fractal vaults of Sharifi’s secret chamber. “It’s a chapel. You found her a chapel.”

“My mother took me to the last chapel in her arms, down a bootlegger’s shaft,” Cartwright said. “AMC dug that one up and sold it off-planet. Like they always do.” He smiled, and it seemed to Li that his blind eyes were staring through her at a bright light she couldn’t see. “But not this time. This time we were ready.”

“Did Sharifi know what she’d found, Cartwright?”

“She knew as much as a nonbeliever could know.”

“She knew as much as you decided to tell her, you mean. You used her. You used her to find it, to dig it, to keep the company from cutting. And you got her killed over it.”

“I didn’t do anything, Katie. Whatever Sharifi found, she came here looking for it. We all walk all Her paths. No choice can change that. Nothing that happens isn’t meant to happen.”

“Was it worth it, Cartwright? How long will it take Haas to get a nonunion crew down there? A week? Two? That’s all the time you have your precious glory hole for. And how many people died for it?”

“No one dies, Katie.” Cartwright was doing something to the condensates around them. Li felt them pressing in on her, shorting out her internals, smothering her. “The wave is more than the sum of its paths.”

“I remember.” She was trembling, her breath coming tight and angry. “I remember what you did to my father. I remember.”

“He’s here, Katie. Don’t you want to talk to him? All you have to do is believe in Her. She lost Her only Son. She knows your sorrow, even if you’ve forgotten it. She can forgive you.”

Whatever he said next, Li didn’t hear it. She was already running, scrambling down the steep slope, tearing the cloth of her uniform and the skin of her palms on the sharp rocks.

She ran blind, her internals a wash of useless static. She stumbled over something in the dark, patted it until she recognized the angles of her Davy lamp. It had gone out. She lit it by feel with trembling fingers, strapped it on, and just sat staring at the walls for thirty seconds.

McCuen was waiting in the gangway, looking far better than he had the last time she’d seen him. “You okay?” he asked.

Li remembered her torn hands and clothes, wondered what her face looked like. “I’m fine. I just fell, that’s all.”

He gave her a strange look. “Did you talk to him?”

“Couldn’t get up there. No air.” She pulled on her rebreather, jammed the mouthpiece between her lips, glad of how it masked and muffled her voice. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

Lalande 21185 MetaServ: 17.10.48.

Sharifi’s hand was warm, her handshake firm and professional.

“Major,” she said, smiling. “Welcome.”

“Nice to meet you,” Li said, wondering what corporate database McCuen had hacked to find this goldmine.

She looked around, gaping unabashedly. They stood in an interactive set designer’s dream of a physics lab: high ceilings, clean Ring-side sunlight streaming through two-story-tall faux-steel casement windows, cutting-edge lab equipment carefully arranged to produce an effect of frenzied but impeccably organized activity.

She turned back to Sharifi, who was still talking at her. She was charismatic, in a hard-sciency kind of way. She came across as thoughtful, rational, feminine. And obviously—very obviously—a genetic. A youthful, vigorous fiftysomething. Shorter than UN norm. Thick black hair framing a square, flat-boned Han face. Not fat, but compact, solid.

Li knew that body. She knew the heft of the long thighbones, the sharp ridge of the nose, the smooth curve of skull from ear to temple. So that’s what I would have looked like, she thought and shuddered.

“Let’s start with a quick overview,” Sharifi said.

As she spoke, Li felt the fund-raising program’s enslaved AI trying to crack her system. Fishing for financial data, donation patterns, anything that would help narrow its sales pitch. Her own AI moved to counter the probes, and she gave it permission to open a set of decoy personal files.

A holodisplay unrolled beside Sharifi. She drew a finger through the grid to activate it, pulling a sparkling wake of ripples behind her. The display sprang to life, and Li found herself staring at one of the iconic images of the age: a simplified-for-laymen flowchart of the Bose-Einstein teleportation process.

Sharifi smiled, flashing straight, well-cared-for teeth. “Quantum-teleportation—or, more accurately, quantum-corrected spinstream replication—has been described as the worst system of faster-than-light travel, except for all the others. A more accurate way of putting it might be to say that QCSR unites two fatally flawed methods of transport in order to capitalize on their strengths and compensate for their weaknesses.

“Wide-band spinfoam broadcasting of spin-encoded binary messages gives us robust superluminal transport—but only in the chaotic context of transient wormholes, where data transfer is inaccurate, unreliable and, worst of all for corporate and governmental purposes, unprivate.

“In essence, broadcasting data through the quantum foam is like putting a message in a bottle and throwing it into the ocean. The odds that it will reach someone somewhere are good—and they get better the more bottles you can afford to send. But the odds that your message will reach a single intended recipient—and that it will be legible and private when it does reach them—are low.

“Bose-Einstein teleportation, by contrast, establishes reliable, securely encrypted data transmission between any two parties that share a pair of entangled condensates. By uniting Bose-Einstein teleportation and spinfoam broadcasts, we achieve the sine qua non of the interstellar information economy: private, superluminal transmission that is robust, reliable, and secure enough for us to entrust the most valuable and fragile cargo to it: human cargo.”

A map of UN space replaced the teleportation schematic. Colored points spread in an expanding ring around Sol, showing all the known and suspected human-settled worlds.

United Nations-blue highlighted the UN member states and Trusteeships. A red slash along one flank of the UN territory showed the eight Syndicate systems. Independent colonies shone green. Beyond the Periphery, white dots signified the far-flung settlements with which the UN had lost contact during the long centuries of Earth’s dying.

As Li watched, a wagon-spoke pattern of brightly colored nodes and lines spread across the star map.

“This,” Sharifi said, “is the current Bose-Einstein relay network. The smaller nodes represent data relays. The larger ones—and there are far fewer of those—are personnel and cargo relays. Each node, underneath all the specialized technology, is a simple array of Bose-Einstein condensates, entangled with companion condensates at every other receiving station on the UN’s Bose-Einstein relay system. In essence, each Bose-Einstein relay is a glorified quantum-teleportation transmitter, linked only to the receivers that share communications or transport-grade entanglement. As long as we maintain entanglement between relay stations—by shipping freshly entangled crystals from relay to relay at sublight speeds—the network functions, and we can use QCSR to achieve arbitrarily accurate superluminal replication.

“But there’s a problem,” Sharifi said, tracing the wheel-shaped pattern of the network, lighting up the radiating spokes with digital fireworks. “The system only works as long as we can maintain our banks of pure entanglement at the relay stations. Streamspace, the spinstream, the whole interstellar ecopolitical infrastructure depends on Compson’s World’s ability to keep supplying live Bose-Einstein condensates. And Bose-Einstein condensates are a nonrenewable resource. A nonrenewable resource that we are fast exhausting.”

Sharifi turned away from the display to pace a short circuit along the tile floor of the laboratory. As if in response to the muted echo of her footsteps, the map gave way to a long-distance probe image of a planet half-cloaked in night. Li took in the blood-and-rust hue of the landmasses, the cloudlike swirls of algae bloom on the northern steppes, the primitive geometry of tailings piles big enough to be seen from high orbit. Compson’s World.

“Coal. Oil. Uranium. Water. This is not the first time humanity has depended on a nonrenewable resource. And, as past ages have discovered, there are only two ways out of this dependence. Either you learn to do without the nonrenewable resource—or you learn to make more of it.”

Gradually, so gradually that it seemed to be no more than the rising of Compson’s World’s distant sun, a pair of Bose-Einstein crystals took shape on the screen, superimposed on the brooding image of the planet.

“So,” Sharifi said, turning away from the screen again. “How do we make more of it? And what, if we can allow ourselves to dream a little, would UN space look like with a cheap, unlimited supply of artificial condensate?”

The holodisplay rippled, shifting through the color spectrum. Suddenly Li was in the middle of it. New transmission lines formed around her, zipping through empty air, linking previously isolated relays, stringing a thick, star-bright spider’s web through and beyond UN space. The web pulsed, grew solid, wove itself into a single, bright veil that shimmered over the whole expanse of the human worlds.

“No unequal distribution of transport technology,” Sharifi said. “No information ghettos. No technological backwaters. Just a single entanglement field linking all UN space—and eventually all human space. A metalink, if you will, that provides direct, economical, one-shot superluminal replication from any point in UN space to every other point.”

The holo shifted again, this time to realtime footage of suspiciously clean-looking Bose-Einstein miners working at an underground cutting face.

“All we need,” Sharifi said, “is the technology to culture Bose-Einstein condensates and format them to our specifications in a laboratory setting.”

Now Sharifi began the sales pitch in earnest. The feed of the cutting face gave way to images of condensates being assayed, cut, polished, and formatted. And, finally, to the finished product: cleaned, cut, paired, and formatted communications-grade Bose-Einstein condensate. “Of course, in order to culture condensates,” she said, “we must understand them. And the key to understanding lies not in our future, but in our past.”

A glowing image of Earth appeared on the holodisplay. The image swelled as the display zoomed in on blue ocean. Sharifi looked at Li, smiled, and stepped into the screen.

Surf beat around them. Li walked beside Sharifi on a narrow slip of starlit sand between two boundless oceans. Stars shone overhead in a bright, clear sky that no unprotected human being had seen for over two centuries.

“This,” Sharifi said, “is the Great Barrier Reef. It is, or was, the largest single life-form on pre-Migration Earth.”

She walked out into the surf, beckoning for Li to follow, and Li saw that she and Sharifi were both wearing wet suits and diving gear. They dove, passing swiftly though the surf and into the quiet water below. Sharifi brushed by Li on the way down, bare thigh against bare thigh, and Li wondered just how personal this program was designed to get. They came to rest in still, bright water half a dozen meters below the surface. A coral reef ran away like a broad road on either side of them.

It was night; the reef was active. Technicolor fish slipped around and through it. The coral itself waved a million glowing arms below them. As Sharifi guided Li along the great wall of the reef, a realtime story unfolded before them. The coral grew, hunted, colonized new territory. Li saw that the entire reef was a single organism, a single primitive mind.

Then she saw humans come, and with them shipping lanes, motorboats, oil spills, chemical contamination. The reef sickened, shrank, died long before anyone unlocked its secrets or plumbed the immense colonial mind’s inner workings.

The water glowed and shifted. Suddenly Li was floating not in water but in featureless darkness.

“The Great Barrier Reef is gone,” Sharifi said. “Anything we could have learned from it is lost forever. However, when humanity moved out into the galaxy, we discovered another colonial organism. One built on an even larger scale. The Bose-Einstein strata of Compson’s World.”

Light seeped into the world, and Li saw an immense, glassy honeycomb structure stretching around and above her.

“This is what a typical Bose-Einstein deposit would look like if you removed the coal and rock surrounding it,” Sharifi told her. “The condensates draw energy from the surrounding coal. We don’t understand how they function, or how their constituent strata communicate with each other. Nonetheless, each deposit appears to form a single colonial organism. Each Bose-Einstein bed is, in effect, an immense, landlocked coral reef, growing in an ocean of coal and rock.”

The stratum faded, and the lab reappeared around them.

“Bose-Einstein strata are too different from terrestrial carbon-based life for us to draw any direct conclusions,” Sharifi said. “Still, the analogy is a fruitful one. The strata display many of the characteristics of a primitive colonial intelligence. Stimuli pass from one segment of each stratum to other segments. More intriguing, several experiments have established that the condensates pass interstratal as well as intrastratal messages by quantum replication, leading to the supposition that all of Compson’s strata may have originated in a single organism, and that the ability of their component condensate beds to maintain pure entanglement supplies with only minimal decoherence is an evolved survival trait. Whatever the explanation, it is this organism that we need to understand in order to culture live condensate.

“We are now a century into the quantum era, but despite all our advances, we are primitives. We use condensates, but we don’t control them, don’t understand them. In quantum terms, we are little better than prehistoric cave dwellers who nourish a lightning-sparked flame, knowing they lack the power to rekindle it. I am asking you to help us step into a new era—an era in which we will take control of this extraordinary resource, understand it, master it, use it to unite our species as we have not been united since the Evacuation.”

Sharifi moved in to close the sale. She started talking practical applications, patents, proprietary data. She alluded to the potential profits without ever quite putting hard numbers to them. This was sexy science, buffed, polished, and carefully wrapped for consumption by corporate donors.

“Any questions?” Sharifi asked after the wrap-up.

“Yes.” Li kept her voice deliberately flat. “How the hell did you convince the Secretariat to waive the Zahn Act restrictions and clear a genetic to work on this project?”

Sharifi blinked and stiffened, looking genuinely insulted. “Forgive me,” she said coolly. She sounded as if she were working hard to stay polite. “I can’t say that’s a question I expected. We have of course obtained all the necessary TechComm clearances. However, if you have concerns about security issues, I can refer you to the appropriate officials.”

The program was good. Sharifi had laid out the money to get an AI with enough power and personality to sell the simulation. She must have needed big money, and needed it fast. And she’d gotten it, or she’d never have made it to Compson’s in the first place.

RingServ: 17.10.48.

“What do you think?” Li asked two hours later, sitting at an outdoor table just off the Calle Mexico.

Cohen shrugged—a shrug that Li felt in the numbers even as she saw it. “I think Sharifi needed money. Badly.”

He had put on a ’face for the meeting that Li imagined he thought was inconspicuous. But of course Cohen’s idea of inconspicuous was a few spins off-norm by most people’s standards, and half the singles in the place had been glancing surreptitiously at their table for the last ten minutes.

“And how much of the sell do you buy?” Li asked.

Cohen grinned. “Not a word of it.”

“You think there’s a sideline? Some other way she was making money off it?”

“Not money. It would never have been about money. You have to understand, Sharifi wasn’t an experimental physicist. She was all about theory, structure. Metaphysics for want of a better word. She wouldn’t have gone to Compson’s World, wouldn’t have raised money and jumped through hoops for anything that was merely technical. She hunted big game. And whatever she was after down there, it was about a hell of a lot more than just making space travel cheaper for the average monkey.”

“Which still leaves us with the question of what exactly she was after.”

“My guess?” Cohen crossed long legs and Li glanced away as his shorts rode up to bare a breathtaking stretch of thigh. “I think it had something to do with mapping interference patterns.”

“Meaning?”

“Ah!” He leaned forward, showing the kind of enthusiasm that usually meant he was about to talk math to her. “Interference patterns are the riddle that kicked off the whole enterprise of quantum physics. Basically, we’re talking about the two-slit experiment.”

“Oh,” Li said as her oracle summoned up a long-forgotten picture from an introductory physics textbook. “The thing where you put one photon through a screen and it interferes with itself, right? And then you get to watch the physicists jump up and down and argue about whether it’s a wave or a particle. Or both. Or neither. I never really saw what that had to do with Sharifi, though.”

“That’s where Coherence Theory comes in. How much do you know about it?”

Li shrugged. “You mean like the Everett-Sharifi Equations, the Coherent Worlds Theorem, that stuff?”

“Exactly. And like Sharifi said in her sales pitch, the answer was in our past, on Earth. It goes all the way back to the twentieth century in fact. To an American named Hugh Everett, who studied the wave theory of quantum mechanics and came up with this crazy idea that there was nothing theoretical about quantum mechanical wave functions at all. That they were actual manifestations of multiple worlds, multiple possible histories. In short, that the mathematical formalism of wave mechanics—and this is the part Hannah really loved, of course—that the mathematical form itself gave us the key to understanding the nature of the physical universe.

“According to Everett, each point on the Schrödinger wave function that you use to calculate the possible locations of an electron around the nucleus or the possible spin orientations of a photon has a real, physical existence. Just not in this world. In another world. One of an infinite number of worlds that branch off from each other every time a thermodynamically irreversible measurement event takes place.

“So—textbook example—you come to a crossroads, and you have to decide whether to turn left or right. Or so it seems. But actually you take both forks in the road. You just take them in different worlds. Or, depending on your terminology, in different constituent universes of the multiverse.”

“Then… what’s the point? I mean, everything happens no matter what you do, or what path you choose? It’s crazy.”

“Well, yes, that’s certainly the majority view of things. Or at least it was for several centuries. The Many-Worlds interpretation was one of those theories that was so absurd that Everett either had to be insane or right. And like a lot of crazy theories it took a long time to get off the ground. It got nowhere with most of Everett’s colleagues, in fact, and he left academia and eventually smoked himself to death, ignored and ridiculed.”

“What a surprise,” Li said caustically.

“Right. Well, Everett’s idea sat around gathering dust for the next few centuries while experimental physicists went on with their experiments. Experiments that over time, and without anyone really stopping to notice, gradually made the Many-Worlds theory look less and less crazy and more and more like it might just be a small but important piece of the truth.

“That’s where Hannah Sharifi comes into the story. Hannah was obsessed with Everett’s work. She basically spent two decades trying to prove that the Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics was right, and that Everett just hadn’t had the experimental data or the computational tools to prove it.”

“But she didn’t prove it, did she?” Li said. “She failed. The most famous failure in the history of physics, right? The biggest mistake since Columbus ran into America and called it India.”

“Yes. She failed. Which is to say that she didn’t prove the multiverse was physically real in the way she believed it was. But—and this is important—a theory doesn’t have to be experimentally verifiable to be valuable. And what she did with Coherence Theory was in some ways far more significant than pinning down an experimental result. She gave us a new theoretical framework for thinking about quantum-level events. In essence, she proved that even if the Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics doesn’t actually describe the universe, it’s still the most effective way to think about the universe. Or at least the most effective way to think about the universe for now.”

“And what does interference have to do with it? Why do you think she was looking at interference patterns in the Anaconda?”

Cohen shook out a cigarette and lit it, smiling. “Interference is central. It’s the hat trick at the center of Coherence Theory. Basically what Sharifi saw—and this takes us into the realm of quantum information theory—is that interference is really the flip side of coherence. If you really take the concept of the multiverse seriously, then entanglement, decoherence, and interference all become interdependent. In essence, they emerge as the same phenomenon occurring in different dimensions of the multiverse.”

“This is giving me a headache, Cohen.”

“Quantum mechanics gives everyone a headache. That’s just how it is. But my point is you don’t have to believe Sharifi’s idea or even be able to visualize it, really. Because it works, like a lot of the watershed ideas in quantum mechanics, whether or not you believe in it. The Everett-Sharifi Equations accurately predict a whole range of quantum behavior that prior theories couldn’t make sense of. Which goes back to what I was saying about how theories don’t have to be true to be useful.

“And Coherence Theory is beautiful, of course.” His cigarette described a delicate arc in mid-air. “Sharifi’s early papers on it were some of the most elegant pieces of reasoning in the history of modern physics. And being beautiful is almost as important as being useful.” He grinned. “More important, Sharifi would have said.”

“So you think she was looking at live fields in the Bose-Einstein beds because there was something about the relationship between entanglement, interference, and decoherence in those fields that she thought would… what? Prove her theories?”

“Maybe. Or she might just have hoped she could refine some aspect of Coherence Theory. But whatever she was after, it would have been primarily theoretical. A fresh direction. A big answer. A new problem. Something that meant something.”

“Well she found something,” Li said. “We know that. But then she erased her data. So whatever she found, it was something she didn’t want people to know about.”

Cohen shook his head decisively. “I don’t think that can be right. I don’t think Sharifi would have destroyed data. I don’t think any committed scientist could bring herself to do that.”

“Even if she realized that the data would prove Coherence Theory was wrong? Even if she thought it would destroy her life’s work, make her a laughingstock like Everett?”

“Even then, Catherine. Sharifi believed in knowledge. In truth. It was about being right for her, not just having people think she was right.”

“Maybe,” Li said. “Or maybe you just didn’t know her as well as you thought you did.”

Cohen didn’t answer for a moment, and when he spoke he was looking past the Ring-side skyline at the vast glittering curve of Earth. “You’ve never been there, have you?” he asked.

“To Earth? No. Of course not.” No one could go back anymore unless they fell under one of the religious exemptions. And constructs couldn’t go back even then; they were controlled technology, banned by the Embargo.

“I’ve been there,” Cohen said. “I was born there.”

“I know,” Li said, and shivered.

She had seen old noninteractive video footage of Cohen’s programming—or rather of the development of the affective loop cognitive program that eventually grew into the Emergent phenomenon that called itself Cohen. The programmers had described their work with a frankness that was shocking to modern ears. They had talked about calling behaviors, well-being-enhancement drives, emotive manipulation. Those words mocked Li every time she began to imagine that she knew anything about what happened on the other side of the interface.

“What was Earth like?” she asked, shaking off the memory of Chiara’s slender fingers brushing hers, of Roland standing alone in the middle of a crowded room, watching her.

“Beautiful,” Cohen said, and his voice trembled with something the human ear could only interpret as desire. “There will never be anything as beautiful in the universe again.”

“There’s Compson’s World,” Li said. “It’s beautiful. In its own way. What’s left of it.”

Cohen laughed softly, as if a pleasant memory had come back to haunt him. “You’re the second person who’s told me that.”

“Oh?”

“Can’t you guess who the first person was?”

“Who?” she asked.

“Hannah Sharifi.”

“Christ!” Li burst out. “I’m starting to wish I’d never heard of the woman! Gould’s going to hit Freetown in twenty-three days to do who knows what. I have to be there before her. I have to know what Sharifi did, what she found. What she was hiding from us.”

And I have to know how far I can trust you, Cohen.

But she couldn’t ask him that.

She couldn’t ask because she knew, in some instinctive animal recess of her mind, that it was the one question he couldn’t answer.

Li’s quarters on-station looked even more bleak and squalid after her trip Ring-side.

She slipped offstream, lit a cigarette—her last of the day she hoped—and watched the late-night spins with the sound all the way down, her mind teeming with vague unsettled half memories.

Sharpe had forwarded Sharifi’s and Voyt’s draft autopsies to her, and she scanned them absentmindedly, thinking she’d give them a serious reading in the morning. He certified Sharifi’s cause of death as suffocation. The damage to Sharifi’s head and hand was premortem, as all the blood suggested. And she’d bitten through the tip of her tongue before she died as well.

Li’s stomach clenched when she read that, but she told herself it could have happened when Sharifi fell. It wouldn’t be the first time someone trying to get out of a burning mine panicked and stumbled. And no matter how odd that and the injuries to her hand were, she’d clearly died from suffocation, not trauma.

Voyt’s autopsy was more puzzling. The rescuers found his body near Sharifi’s, as if the two were trying to escape together, but Sharpe attributed his death to the same mysterious brain seizure that had afflicted so many other miners in the Trinidad.

Li fell asleep puzzling over it, reminding herself to put her cigarette out before she dropped it.

It hit her at four in the morning, barreling through her sleep-dazed mind like a runaway coal cart.

“Idiot!” she muttered. She sat up, turned on the lights, pulled up Sharifi’s autopsy again.

How could she have missed it? Sharpe damn well hadn’t. He’d done everything short of write it on the wall for her. She accessed the rescue crew logs and cross-referenced them with the shift assignments for the day of the fire. Twelve people had been in the Trinidad. Most of them belonged to a work crew of engineers and electricians who were laying wire to a newly opened face deep in the south sections of the newly opened vein. The work crew was at the far end of the main south gangway—almost an eighth of a mile farther from the stairs than Sharifi had been.

She tapped in to the Shantytown hospital database and saw that two of the electricians who had gotten out were half genetics. The rest weren’t. And they’d all made it to pit bottom under their own steam. The only people who’d died in the Trinidad were Voyt and Sharifi.

Sharifi was a genetic. Voyt, whatever his genes might be, had been wired just like Li was. Both should have been able to resist gas and lack of oxygen long after the nongenetics.

So why had they died when the others had lived?

Li scanned Sharifi’s autopsy, cursing herself for missing what was right in front of her. Finally she found it, halfway through the report, buried in a wealth of camouflaging detail. Sharpe had put it where anyone who knew what they were looking for could see it.

If they wanted to see it.

On the side of Sharifi’s head, just below her temple, among all the other bruises and lacerations, Sharpe had noted two small oblong burn marks, spaced two centimeters apart.

Li leaned across the narrow space between her bunk and the facing closet. She fished her Viper out of its Corps-issue holster and extruded the fanglike anodes: oblong, tapered, sharp enough to cut through skin. And exactly two centimeters apart.

Someone had put a Viper—Voyt’s, probably—to Sharifi’s head and pulled the trigger at contact range. Li had seen people die that way. A point-blank shot to the head usually caused respiratory paralysis. Death by suffocation. A death that left scars only the most alert coroner would look closely enough to discover.

Sharifi had been murdered.

She linked through to the planet net and dialed the Shantytown hospital.

“How did you find out already?” Sharpe asked when she got through to him.

“What do you mean? I read the autopsies.”

He blinked, obviously confused. “You’re not calling about the wetware?”

“No. What about it?”

“Haas took it. Or rather, he sent his Syndicate-designed girl Friday down for it.”

“What? How did he even know about it?”

Sharpe rocked back in his chair and raised his eyebrows. “That, Major, is what I was hoping you’d tell me.”

AMC Station: 19.10.48.

Establishing the crime scene turned out to be as impossible as keeping roaches off a space station.

Anaconda’s pitheads formed the tip of a subterranean iceberg, a catacomb of constantly shifting drifts, adits, and ventilation shafts. AMC’s maps lagged far behind the digging no matter how fast the surveyors scrambled to update them. And they didn’t begin to account for the hundreds of kilometers of unreported bolt-holes, mountainside entrances, and bootleggers’ tunnels.

This sprawling, chaotic anthill was filled up, shift after shift, by five daily launches from the station, numerous unscheduled drops of specialized technicians and surveying crews, and a constant, completely unregulated stream of dilapidated ground vehicles shuttling back and forth from Shantytown. No one controlled access or knew, really, who was in the mine during any given shift. The pithead logs were convenient fictions, just like the pithead rules and the posted safety regulations and the rented Davy lamps and oxygen canisters. AMC’s control of the Anaconda was as illusory—even if the illusion had real financial and legal consequences—as a general’s control over a looting, raiding, pillaging army.

“If we can’t catch them going in,” Li finally decided, “we’ll tag them going out.”

The evacuation had taken five shifts, using every available shuttle on-station and every hopper that could be begged, borrowed, or commandeered from the four or five Compson’s World settlements within flight range of the Anaconda. Casualties had been high. The evac teams had begun triage within forty minutes of the first alarm, and they’d tagged and entered every evacuee on handheld monitors uplinked to the station net to create a running dead, wounded, and missing list.

When McCuen cross-referenced the triage lists with the station’s shuttle passenger manifests and the Shantytown hospital’s admission records, they got a solid freeze-frame of who had been where when the mine caught fire.

The list of people who had been underground but not down there on easily verifiable official business was surprisingly short. Jan Voyt, Hannah Sharifi, and Karl Kintz were on it. No surprises there.

But there was a fourth name Li didn’t recognize.

“Who’s Bella?” she asked. “And why don’t we have a full name for him?”

“Bella’s the witch. And that is her whole name, as far as anyone knows.” McCuen grinned lasciviously. “I can go talk to her for you. I’m just a slave to duty.”

“Very funny, Brian.”

“Just kidding,” he said, sobering suddenly. “Besides, anyone who wants to keep working and living on this station would have to be crazy to go fishing in that pond.”

Li started to ask McCuen what he meant, then decided she didn’t want to get sidetracked into a conversation about Haas’s sleeping habits. “What about Kintz?” she asked instead.

Kintz had been more or less invisible since her first morning on-station. What little she’d seen of him had led her to two conclusions. One, he’d gotten special treatment from Voyt. Two, he expected to keep getting it.

In the normal course of things, she would have shaped Kintz up or shipped him out posthaste. But if things went well, she wouldn’t be on Compson’s long enough to make lowering the boom on Kintz worth her while.

“So what was Kintz doing down there?” she asked. “And what was the deal between him and Voyt, anyway?”

McCuen looked like he’d sat on a tack.

“I’m not asking you to tell tales out of school, McCuen. I just need to know how to spin him.”

“I know,” McCuen said reluctantly. “But it’s my job if I piss the wrong people off.”

Li looked at him, eyes narrowed. “So it wasn’t just that Kintz was scamming Voyt. Kintz was Haas’s man in the office. Is that it? Or was Voyt in on it too?”

One look at McCuen’s face told her she’d hit pay dirt.

“So what were Voyt and Kintz doing for Haas besides passing along information?” she asked.

Again the hesitation.

Li kicked her chair back and lit a cigarette. “Christ, Brian. Tell me if you want. If not, don’t. We’re all big boys and girls here. I’m not going to waste my time dragging it out of you.”

“I don’t know anything,” McCuen said. “Honest. I’m just repeating rumors. But… Voyt had an eye on the bottom line. You always hear rumors about mine security being on the take. God knows there’s plenty of chances. But Voyt… the rumors about him were pretty persistent. And somehow if you knew Voyt at all, they didn’t surprise you.”

“And you think Kintz might have taken over Voyt’s sideline?”

“I’m not saying that. But it’s possible.”

Li put down the list of names and stood up. “Let’s go talk to him then. Before Haas’s little bird gets a chance to whistle in his ear.”

Kintz turned out to be a hard man to find. They finally caught up with him in one of the fifth-level strip joints. Li recognized his drinking buddies as company goons—one step above the bouncers who were standing around itching to kick them out before they broke something. None of them looked sober enough to operate heavy equipment.

“Like to talk to you,” she told Kintz.

He looked at her but kept his hand on his drink. “I go back on duty tomorrow at eight. That soon enough?”

“Jesus, Kintz,” McCuen burst out. “We’ve been looking for you since three in the afternoon!”

“And how the hell was I supposed to know that, Brian?” Kintz said McCuen’s name as if it were a dirty joke.

“You could answer your damned comm for one thing.”

Kintz kicked back in his chair, smiling. “Aren’t you the teacher’s pet,” he drawled. “Wag your tail a little harder and maybe she’ll let you sit in her lap.”

“Right,” Li said. “If I wanted to referee playground fights, I could have taught kindergarten. Karl and I are stepping around the corner for a nice quiet cup of coffee.”

Kintz didn’t protest much; Li was able to steer him out of the bar and down the street with no more than a firm hand on his elbow.

“What do you want from me?” he asked when she’d gotten a table and two steaming cups of coffee between them. “I’m off duty in case you didn’t notice. And I don’t fucking appreciate being dragged around like a child either.”

Li smiled and lit a cigarette. “I don’t recall asking whether or not you appreciated it,” she said pleasantly. “In fact I’m pretty sure I don’t give a shit. Personally, I’d have fired you the day I got here. Except I’m piss lazy, and if I shipped you out, I’d have to waste my time figuring out who Haas’s new rat in the office was.”

“Whatever.”

“What were you doing in the mine the day of the fire?”

“Working.” He sounded nonchalant, but the sudden tension around his eyes told a different story.

“Working on what?”

“Working for that dumb bitch, Sharifi.”

“You obviously got along. Must have been a real pleasure all around.”

“You wouldn’t think it was so funny if it was you who had to deal with her fucking attitude. I knew her before she ever got here. Not that she remembered. She was my fucking college physics teacher.”

Li blinked, uncertain whether she was more baffled by the idea of Kintz being a student anywhere Sharifi would teach or the idea of his being a student at all. “Was she a good teacher?” she settled on asking.

“Fuck no! You know how she graded us? She gave an exam with one problem on it, one problem that takes like three hours to solve, and I get it back and there’s one fucking sentence written on it: ‘Oops, you lost the mass of the universe. C minus.’ Like my whole exam was some kind of fucking joke to her. You lost the mass of the universe ? I mean, what the fuck does that mean, anyway?”

“I think it means she had a sense of humor and you don’t,” Li said. “So. What did your favorite physics professor have you doing in the mine?”

Kintz shrugged sullenly. “Standing around mostly. Security, I guess. Fuck if I know.”

Li drew on her cigarette and watched him in silence. “Did you know Sharifi was murdered?” she asked finally.

“I might have heard something like that.”

“And did you know that you’re the last person who saw her alive? Other than Voyt. Oh, but someone killed him too.”

“So what?”

“So if I were you, I’d be busy thinking about how many ways I could bend over for the investigating officer and keep myself out of trouble.”

“Jeez, lighten up! I fucking work for you, in case you forgot. Why don’t you go round up the usual suspects?”

“Unfortunately the usual suspects weren’t down in the mine. You were. And I want to know what Haas had you doing down there.”

Kintz stared. Then he kicked his chair back on two legs and laughed a laugh that set Li’s teeth on edge.

“You don’t know shit,” he said. “They hung you out to dry. You’re in fucking free fall, and you’re just too blind to see it.”

Li flicked out her left arm as fast as her internals would go. It hurt like hell, but the special effects were worth it. To anyone watching it would have looked like Kintz’s coffee had simply fallen off the table and into his lap. Before Kintz realized what had happened, Li was on her feet and coming around the table right behind the coffee.

“Gosh!” she said, patting at the front of his pants with a napkin. “You spilled on yourself. Hope it wasn’t too hot.”

Kintz stood up and backed away from the table a step or two but let Li keep swatting at him with the napkin. He looked like he was still trying to catch up with his coffee. He was also now standing with his back against the wall and Li’s body between him and the rest of the tables. Li smiled, grabbed him where it counted, and lifted.

“Have I mentioned that you’re really pissing me off?” she asked.

Kintz’s face contorted, but his eyes didn’t drop away from hers. Worse, as pain drained the blood from his neck and face, Li saw the dense network of ceramsteel filament woven through flesh and muscle.

She almost dropped him in surprise.

Well, that explained where he’d taken Sharifi’s classes. The only thing that didn’t add up was why the Corps had put this waste of skin through Alba. Or how an ex-Peacekeeper had washed up as Haas’s errand boy. Either Kintz was working for internal affairs—impossible—or he’d screwed up so badly the Corps couldn’t risk the publicity of a dishonorable discharge.

Yet another reason to keep a close eye on him. As if she needed one.

“You’re no better than me,” Kintz said, pain and hatred battling in his voice. “I was on Gilead. I know just what kind of fucking hero you are. I know you.”

Li let go and backed away as if he’d stung her.

“Yeah,” Kintz said. “I was there. And when the memory wipe didn’t take they washed me out. For doing the same thing you did. For doing less than you did. What do you think of that, Major? Only you weren’t a major then, were you? That was your reward for doing their dirty work.” He laughed. “Or don’t you like to talk about it?”

Li shrugged. It took every bit of willpower she had, but she did it.

“Look,” she said. “I don’t give a shit what you think you remember or what lies you need to tell yourself to get by. We can either keep standing here insulting each other, or you can tell me something that’ll make me leave. Which is it gonna be, Kintz? And while we’re on the topic of Gilead, why don’t you think about what happened to the people who got in my way there before you decide to make an enemy.”

Kintz stared at her. He was trembling with anger, and she could see the sweat standing out on his upper lip.

“Talk to the witch,” he said finally. “She was the one Sharifi trusted. Hell, maybe she killed Sharifi herself.” He laughed, trying to regain his composure. “You always hurt the one you love, isn’t that how the song goes?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Li said. “I’ll be seeing you.”

“You sure as fuck will be.”

Li found the witch in Haas’s office, working.

Haas was slumped behind the big desk, staring into streamspace. He surfaced long enough to wave Li into a chair, then faded out again.

Li sat and watched. She noted the wire’s route from the derms at Haas’s temples, through the deceptively simple dryware casing of the transducer, to the witch’s cranial socket. The witch was his interface, Li realized, the ungainly external wires the only way he could access the spinstream. The transducer intercepted the construct’s output, keyed it to his neural patterns, packeted and transferred it. Li thought of the loop shunt and shuddered.

“All right,” Haas said to the empty air in front of him.

The witch stood up, teased the jack out from behind her ear, then pulled her hair over the socket, hiding it.

“Can I offer you something?” Haas asked Li. “Coffee?” He looked at his watch. “Beer?”

“Coffee’s fine,” Li said.

“Coffee for two,” Haas said.

The witch nodded and moved toward the door.

Li cleared her throat. “Better make it for three. It’s Bella I need to talk to.”

Haas looked at Li sharply but said nothing. Bella left and came back with a covered tray from which she produced three bone china cups, cream, sugar, and a full pot of ersatz coffee. She bent over the table, poured Li’s cup, offered cream and sugar, then poured, creamed, and sugared Haas’s cup.

As Li took her cup she saw the cat-scratch red rash of a staph infection below the witch’s left ear around the borders of the I/O socket. Something about the sight—the red rash against the pale spun-silk skin—made Li acutely aware that there was a woman, warm and alive, inside the loose dress. She cleared her throat and looked away—but not before she saw a mocking little smile slide across the other woman’s face.

“Well, Major,” Haas said. “What do you need to know?”

Li took out her cigarettes and lifted an eyebrow in Haas’s direction. “Do you mind?”

“Suit yourself.”

“Want one?”

“Never touch ’em.”

“Good for you.” She lit her cigarette and sucked down a first delicious postcoffee lungful. “You’ll live longer. I just need to ask Bella about the fire. Routine. I’m talking to everyone who was down there when it happened.”

“I see.”

“It won’t take a minute.” Li waited, hoping Haas wasn’t going to make her ask him to leave.

“No problem,” he said after a very brief pause. “I’ll be back in twenty minutes.” Li thought he threw a pointed look at the witch before he left—or was she just being paranoid?

The door whispered closed behind him, and she and Bella looked at each other without speaking. Li had the curious feeling of a weight lifting off Bella’s shoulders. As if Haas’s very presence silenced her. She thought of the tense little scene she’d caught on her skinbugs that first night and wondered what hold Haas had over her.

Bella took a breath. “I’m not… I want you to know—” she said, then stopped as if she’d run into a wall.

“You’re not what?” Li asked.

But Bella just shook her head.

Li sat back and finished her cigarette in silence. She was fishing in muddy water; let Bella make the first move. She knew a hell of a lot more about what had happened in the mine that day than Li did. Li was starting to think every man, woman, and child on-station knew more than she did.

“Citizen—” Bella said.

“That’s not a title here,” Li said. “People here are born citizens.”

“Not constructs.”

“Not constructs,” Li admitted.

“And not Sharifi.”

“No,” Li said. “Not Sharifi.” Cohen was right as usual: some pigs were more equal than others.

She looked at Bella’s face, half in shadow, and caught herself searching for echoes of the XenoGen genesets. Was that smooth curve of forehead too smooth, too round to be entirely Caucasian? Was that striking combination of pale skin and vaguely Han features pure accident or a self-conscious echo of not-so-distant history? She wondered what Sharifi had looked like to Bella—what she herself looked like.

Perfect front teeth bit a perfect lower lip. Perfect hands twisted each other’s fingers into nervous lovers’ knots. “Who killed her?” Bella whispered.

“Who told you Sharifi was murdered?”

“Does it matter?” Beautiful, jarringly unnatural violet eyes bored into Li’s eyes. “Everyone knows.”

“What else does everyone know?”

“I… I don’t speak to many people. Except Haas.”

Bella’s voice was surprisingly low, and she spoke with an accent, a halting here and there to search for the proper word. When she said Haas’s name, her voice dropped even lower.

“I don’t know who killed her,” Li said. “That’s what I’m here for. To find answers.”

Bella leaned forward, and Li heard a little catch in her breath. “And when you find them? What then?”

Li shrugged. “The bad guys get punished.”

“No matter who they are?”

“No matter who they are.”

There didn’t seem to be anything to say after that. Bella sat like a stone. She looked ready to sit there forever. Certainly until Haas returned.

“Do you have a last name?” Li finally asked, just to have something to say.

“Just Bella,” the witch answered. She said the name as if it were a mere label, nothing to do with who she really was.

“You’re on contract to AMC, right?”

Bella’s mouth tightened. “To MotaiSyndicate. AMC is the subordinate contract-holder.”

“I’m sorry,” Li said. “I don’t know anything about… how that works. I probably just said something stupid.” She looked up to find Bella staring at her. “What?” she asked.

Bella pressed a hand to the pulse at the base of her own neck in a gesture that Li recognized with an eerie flash of déjà vu. It was the same biofeedback manipulation technique she’d seen Syndicate soldiers use. “Nothing,” Bella said, dropping her hand back into her lap. “You just… remind me of someone.”

“Who?” Li asked, though of course she already knew the answer.

Bella smiled.

“How well did you know Sharifi?” Li asked. “Did she talk to you about her work?”

“Not well.” Bella rubbed nervously at the rash behind her ear, then snatched her hand away like a child caught picking at a scab. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I really don’t know anything.”

“I’m sure you know more than you think,” Li told her. “It’s just a question of putting the pieces together. Tell me what you remember about the fire. Maybe I can make the connections.”

“I can’t tell you,” Bella said. “I don’t remember.”

“Just start at the beginning and tell me whatever you do remember.”

“But that’s just it. I don’t. I don’t remember anything.”

And then she started to cry.

She cried silently, tears sliding down her cheeks like rain running down the carved face of a statue. Li leaned her elbows on her knees and watched, feeling awkward and useless. She had never seen a grown woman cry like this. It was as if something had come unraveled inside her, as if she had lost whatever obscure sense of shame made people cover their faces when they cried. Lost it, or never had it in the first place.

Li cleared her throat. “What about before you went down? Or on the way down. You must have taken a shuttle. Maybe talked about going? Something.”

“No,” Bella said fiercely. “I told you. Nothing.”

She stood up so abruptly as she spoke that she knocked her coffee cup off the table.

Li reached for it without thinking. She got her hand under it just in time. The spoon fell to the floor. The saucer landed in her palm. The cup rattled but stayed upright. Nothing spilled. She set the cup back on the table and leaned down to pick up the teaspoon.

When she looked up, Bella was staring at her, slack-jawed. “How did you catch that?” she whispered.

Li held out her arm and showed Bella the network of filaments running just below the skin.

Bella looked at it like she’d never seen a wire job before. Worse than that, her face was filled with the fascinated revulsion of someone looking at a circus freak. “What—how do they put it inside you?”

“Viral surgery.”

“Like Voyt,” she said, and a shudder twisted through her slender body as she spoke the dead man’s name. “In the Syndicates, you’d be a monster.”

“Then I guess it’s a good thing we’re not in the Syndicates.”

Bella put her hand up to touch the cranial socket. “Even this is… a deviance.”

“Well, you need to access the spinstream if you’re going to work in the UN worlds. It’s how business is done here. How we communicate.”

“Communicate.” Clearly Bella had never thought of applying that word to what she did instream. “I grew up in a crèche of two thousand. I never looked in a mirror because my face—the crèche face—was all around. I never thought about who I was because I knew, every time I looked around me. I never thought about being alone because I knew I’d never have to be. And now I’m here. I don’t understand anything or anyone. I watch them talk at me, around me. I’m the deviant. And there’s no way out.”

“There’s always a way out,” Li said.

“Not for me. Not even the euth ward. I thought I was… all right. Before Hannah came. But when I meet someone like her, someone like you.” She wiped her face, pushed the heavy hair back from her forehead. “I can’t help wanting to talk to you. Wanting to feel that I’m not alone for a minute. And then you show me… that. And I don’t know what to think.”

“Sharifi was raised by humans,” Li said. “So was I.” It was as close as she’d come in fifteen years to admitting she wasn’t human.

“Does that make such a difference?”

“I guess it does.”

Bella wiped her eyes and spoke again. “I remember the day before the fire. I worked with Ha—with Sharifi. We talked about going down the next day, but we decided nothing. Not definitely. And the next thing I remember is waking up in the mine after the fire.”

Her hand crept to her neck again, and Li could see the pulse fluttering under her fingers like a bird in a hunter’s snare.

“It was dark. I—they were gone.”

“What do you mean, they were gone? Was there someone else with you before that?”

“No. Maybe.” She looked confused. “I don’t know.”

“Where were you when you woke up?”

“In the glory hole. It took me a long time to figure that out. The lights had gone out and I didn’t have a lamp. I… I crawled back and forth looking for the ladder. That’s what I was doing when I found Voyt.”

“Voyt?” Li asked, surprised. He should have been on the level above, at the foot of the stairs up to the Wilkes-Barre. “Are you sure it was Voyt?”

“I felt his mustache,” Bella said, and again Li saw that shudder of… what? Fear? Revulsion? “I never found a light though. And… there was another body.”

“At the foot of the stairs.” That would have been Sharifi.

“No. At the ladder. With Voyt. In the glory hole.” Bella put a hand to her mouth. “It was Hannah, wasn’t it?”

Li nodded. It had to have been Sharifi; no one else had died down there. But assuming Bella was telling the truth, someone had moved both Voyt and Sharifi up to the level above and left them at the bottom of the main stairs into the Trinidad for the rescue crews to find. Why? And who had done it?

“I stepped on her.” Bella looked sick. “I didn’t even stop.”

“She’d been dead a long time by then,” Li lied. “There was nothing you could have done for her.”

Bella started to speak, but as she opened her mouth Haas’s voice rang out in the front office.

“I should go,” Li said.

“No! Wait.”

Li had stood up to leave, but now she crouched in front of the woman, looking up into those impossible eyes, searching the perfect oval of her face for a clue, an answer, anything.

“They got away with it, didn’t they?” Bella said, still speaking in a harsh whisper. “They killed her. And no one’s going to punish them.”

Li was close enough to smell her now. Close enough to see the bitter lines around her lovely mouth, the bruised pallor of the flesh stretched across her cheekbones. Bella looked like a fighter who had taken a knockout punch and was waiting for gravity to catch up with her. And in the violet depths of her eyes Li saw the same black emptiness she’d seen down at the cutting face.

Only this time she could put a name to it.

It was hate. Hate that had been tended and fed and watered until it was big enough to burst through her skin and swallow universes.

Shantytown: 19.10.48.

Compson’s sun shed a smeary bottle green light on Shantytown and played halfheartedly over the awkward sprawl of mold-fuzzed rooftops. The miscalibrated atmospheric processors produced a sooty drizzle that made all of Shantytown look like it was underwater, and the mud that sucked at Li’s boots gave off a faint whiff of sewage.

She followed McCuen past pawnshops, tattoo parlors, storefronts advertising bail bonds and cash loans on paychecks. They were off the grid here; the signs flashed with neon and halogen, not spinfeed. THE PIT, she read, and PAYDAY PAWN and MINER’S EASE, and GIRLSGIRLSGIRLS.

First shift was on; it showed in the waiting silence of the bars, the absence of able-bodied men on the streets. Still, as they left the commercial strip and dove into the back streets, they drew increasing notice. A clot of pale, ragged children stopped their stickball game and stared. A woman on her way home from picking pea coal off the tailings piles turned clear around to watch them pass. When Li looked back, she saw that the woman’s body was bent into a sharp letter L under her load.

McCuen picked his way through the unmarked intersections as surely as if he had a map. Each turn took them farther from daylight and deeper into Shantytown’s poorest quarter. Modular housing units began to be replaced by the virusteel and decaying ceramic tiles of settlement-era habitat pods. Occasionally they passed a still-functional airlock, status lights blinking to indicate the operational status of long-idle life-support systems. More often, the remnants of the original colony were mere deadware, the bottom layer in a sedimentary accretion of obsolete technology and home-brewed or scavenged building materials.

Just as Li was beginning to wonder how many blind corners and unlit side streets McCuen could lead her down, he ducked into a gap between two boarded storefronts, dropped down three steps, and slipped into an alley so narrow that the dank walls nearly met overhead.

Doors opened off the alley on either side, but they were all closed. The few windows were boarded up or covered with plastic sheeting. The rank smell of vegetein flowed out of the houses like smoke and soaked into the packed hardpan. And underneath it, deep and musky, Li caught smells that had the power to throw her back twenty years into the dim memories of childhood. Sweat. Bad plumbing. Last night’s empty beer bottles. Poverty.

McCuen walked fast, eyeing the shadows like a man who is only mostly sure he isn’t about to be rolled for his palm implant. He ran his hand along the right wall, counting doors like a miner counting drift turnings. At the eighth door he stopped and tried the latch.

It swung open, and he ducked in without pausing on the threshold. Li followed.

They hurried down a dark corridor toward a faint blur of daylight. The corridor dumped them into an interior court with a rough, sloping floor. One side of the court was dark and quiet, stairs leading up toward darkened apartments. The other side opened onto the flying sparks and whining machinery of a welder’s shop. They mounted the single step into the shop just as the welder finished sawing through a sheet-metal panel and straightened up, pushing back his safety goggles.

McCuen stepped up to the man and pulled a bent door hinge out of his pocket. “My mother asked me to bring this by,” he said, his voice echoing under the shop’s high ceiling. “Can you fix it?”

“When does she need it by?”

“Good Friday, she said.”

Instead of answering, the welder put his torch down and walked off toward the front of the shop. As Li and McCuen watched, he put up a closed sign and cranked heavy storm shutters down over the shop window, shutting them into darkness.

“Sit down,” he said, and flicked the switch that lit the shop’s single dim bulb.

McCuen sat. Li didn’t.

“So,” the welder said. “This is her.”

“Yeah,” McCuen said.

“Time to put your mouth where your money is,” the welder said.

Li held out her left arm, sleeve rolled above the elbow. He snapped a tourniquet around it, produced a needle from his apron pocket, and pulled more blood than Li thought could possibly be necessary, even for the most incompetent doctor. “They want a tooth, too,” he said.

“Oh, Christ,” Li muttered. “For God’s sake.”

“You didn’t say that before,” McCuen said.

“Well, I’m saying it now. You can fake blood. Teeth tell the whole story.” He turned back to Li. “You want to talk to the man or not?”

Li shrugged and opened her mouth.

She spent the next half hour sitting on a work counter nursing a bloody gap where her bottom right premolar had been, while McCuen paced back and forth impatiently. It didn’t hurt nearly as much as she’d hoped it would; a little worse and her internals would have thrown enough endorphins at it to have her feeling comfortable. As it was, they ignored it and left her to handle it.

Finally the welder came back, accompanied by a second man who waved them back into the slanting courtyard and toward the stairs.

“Here?” Li asked.

But he opened a narrow door tucked beneath the stairs, ducked into another corridor, and led them into an alley even darker and narrower than the one she and McCuen had come in by. Five right turns, two left turns, and three interior courtyards later he turned into a broader alley, this one roofed with grimy, rain-streaked greenhouse sheeting. It ran level, but its walls curved like a snail’s shell, as if responding to some structural logic Li couldn’t fathom.

A few dozen meters down the spiraling alley, their guide stopped at a nondescript door, knocked, and entered.

The room inside smelled of old newspapers and boiled cabbage. A pea-coal fire smoldered in the grate, filling the room with greasy smoke. A woman sat at a chipped laminate table holding a child in her lap, reading to him in a low murmur. The woman and child both looked up momentarily, then dropped their heads to the book again, uninterested.

“Where is he?” their guide asked.

The woman jerked her chin toward an inner room. As Li passed by the table, she saw there was something wrong with the boy’s upper lip and his legs were withered.

McCuen started toward the door, but the guide barred his way. He looked hard at her, then shrugged and went over to sit at the table. Li stepped through alone and heard the door swing to behind her.

She stood in near darkness, cut by a single dusty beam of sunlight stabbing through a storm shutter. As she looked around Li understood the odd curvature of the alley outside. The house was built onto the outside skin of one of the old life-support pods; this room’s three newer walls were native mud brick, but the back wall, the only original one, was a curved gleaming expanse of ceramic compound. An airlock yawned in the center of the old wall, but its control panel had been ripped open and hot-wired long ago. The irising virusteel door panels were permanently stuck at a two-thirds-open position, and someone had hung a blanket over the gap, blocking off Li’s view of the geodesic dome that must lie behind.

In front of the dead airlock stood a swaybacked table piled with pads and datacubes. A wiry, weathered man sat behind the table: Daahl, the shift foreman Li had met on her first mine visit.

“Well,” Daahl said, looking straight at Li. “You get curiouser and curiouser.”

“You too.” Li sat down on the stool across from Daahl’s and leafed through the papers and fiches that littered the table. She saw pit regulations, UNMSC section headings, General Assembly minutes, court papers. “You some kind of pit lawyer, Daahl?”

“You could say that. Care for a beer?”

“Thanks.” She took out her cigarettes. “May I?”

Daahl called into the front room for the beer, then took the cigarette she offered. As she leaned across the table to light it, he grabbed her wrist and turned her hand palm up to look at the faint lines of the wires. “They say you’re a hero, Katie. Pretty good for a pit girl. Tell me, was it worth it?”

She shrugged. “I don’t remember.”

They smoked in silence. Someone opened the door, set three beers on the table, and came around the table to sit beside Daahl. As he sat down, the lamp on the table shone full in his face, and Li recognized the young labor rep from the news spin that Haas had gotten so hot under the collar about. “What is this?” she asked. “Interrogation by committee?”

“This is Leo Ramirez, the IWW rep in town. He’s just going to sit in on our talk. If you don’t object, that is.”

“Sure, what do I care? Invite the Trotskyites. Hang up a picture of Antonio fucking Gramsci.”

Ramirez grinned, dark eyes sparkling in his handsome face. “I didn’t think you people were allowed to know who Gramsci was.”

“‘You people’?” Li muttered under her breath and rolled her eyes.

Daahl just smiled and kept smoking.

When he had finished precisely half of the cigarette Li had given him, he pulled a handkerchief from his shirt pocket, put out the half-smoked butt, wrapped it carefully in the handkerchief, and tucked it back into his pocket.

This operation took Daahl’s full attention for a good quarter of a minute, and when he finally spoke his voice was as steady as if they were discussing the weather. “Why did you make Haas drain the glory hole?”

Li shrugged. “I thought he was hiding something about the fire. I wanted to get to the bottom of it before he sent anyone else down.”

“That’s altruistic of you,” Ramirez said.

“Oh, sure. I’m a real hero.”

“Why did the Secretariat really send you?” Daahl asked.

Li took a sip of her beer, stalling, and winced as the liquid hit the raw nerve where her tooth had been. “To fill in for Voyt and handle the accident follow-up. If there was another reason, they didn’t let me in on it. And anyway, I thought the idea here was that you were going to tell me something.”

“We’ll get there. But first I want some answers.”

“I may not have the answers you want, Daahl.”

“Of course you do. You just haven’t thought about it enough to realize you have them. So. Why did the UN send you?”

Li shrugged. “Sharifi was famous. When someone like her dies, people want to see heads roll. I’m the axe man.”

Ramirez stifled a laugh. Daahl just kept watching her with his pale sharp eyes. “If someone—let’s say a friend of ours—were to possess information that helped you do that job, what would you be willing to give for it?”

“If you mean am I prepared to buy information from you, the answer is no.”

“Not buy.” Daahl stood and walked across the room to the single small window. The shutter cast bars of rain-green light across his face and lit up his thinning hair like a halo. “Money would be simple compared to what we want. And we’d have to know you were the right person to do business with. We’d have to have… assurances.”

Ramirez seemed to have dropped out of the conversation, and when Li glanced over at him he was leaning forward on his stool staring at the two of them like a rat blinded by a miner’s lamp. He might know the geography down here, she realized, but in this room he was the odd man out. This was miners’ territory, soldiers’ territory. Blood-bargaining territory.

“Why don’t you tell me what you’re charging,” she told Daahl. “Then I’ll know if I can pay it.”

“Two things. First, if what you find out about the fire explains anyone else’s death besides Sharifi’s, we want to know about it.”

“You want me to pass information on an ongoing investigation to you? I could lose my job for that.”

“We don’t necessarily need the information ourselves,” Daahl said. “We just need it made public.”

“You mean included in the investigation report?”

“Included in anything that’s public record. We can figure out how to use it from there. Right, Leo?”

Ramirez nodded. “We really just need you to bring the accident reports up to date.”

“AMC’s accident reports? I can’t believe you have to go to me under the table to get that,” Li said.

Daahl raised his eyebrows. “Then you’ve obviously forgotten even more than that chop shop doc said you would.”

Li pushed her beer around the table, turning it in precise right angles, leaving a square of condensation on the cracked tabletop. “So basically,” she said, “you’re just asking me to do my job. An open investigation on Sharifi’s death. And these accident reports. Which are public information anyway, right?”

“Yes. As far as the deaths go.”

“Ah. What else do you want?”

Daahl bit his lower lip, glanced toward the window again. “We want Sharifi’s dataset.”

Li choked on her beer and slammed it back onto the table, spilling it. “She was doing defense R D, Daahl. That’s covered by the Espionage and Sedition Act. People get shot for breaking that law. And getting shot isn’t on my to-do list this year.”

“Some things are worth breaking the law for, Katie.”

“To you, maybe.”

“It’s not only miners AMC’s killing. There’s something happening in the mine. In all the mines. Look at the production records. Look at the ratio of man-hours to live condensate pulled out. We’re striking less and less live crystal down there. The bootleggers have been saying it for years. Now even some of the company miners are saying it. And Sharifi said it, before she died. She looked me in the face and said it straight out. The Anaconda’s dying. All the condensate on Compson’s World is dying.”

“Oh, come on, Daahl. The Security Council—”

“They know,” Daahl said, and gave her a moment to digest that fact. “Why do you think they’re spending so much in synthetic crystal R D? And look at the multiplanetaries, stripping out crystal just as fast as they can before the end hits. We’ve been saying it for years, pushing them to do something. But we can’t prove it. Sharifi proved it—proved it to herself anyway—and her dataset could give us the traction we need to turn this around.”

“That’s crazy,” Li said. “Condensates don’t die. They break. How can a whole planetful of them be breaking at the same time?”

“I don’t know,” Daahl said. “But Sharifi did.”

None of them said anything for a minute.

“I’ll bring the accident reports up to date,” Li said. “That’s only fair. It’s my job. But the other thing…”

“The accident reports will be enough for now,” Daahl said. “Just think about the rest.”

“All right,” Li said. “Where do we go from here, then?”

Daahl reached into the depths of one of the piles on the table and pulled out a battered fiche. “Read this.”

The fiche held two dozen separate documents, and it took Li a good ten minutes to be sure she understood them. As she read, she realized she was looking at AMC corporate records: weigh-station logs, pay chits, production records from the on-station processing plant. Slowly a pattern emerged.

“Someone’s cooking the books,” she said. “Someone’s giving one set of numbers to the miners and another set to AMC headquarters. And they’re skimming communications-grade crystal somewhere in between.” She looked up at Daahl. “Who?”

“You tell me.”

Li frowned and tabbed through the records again. “It could be almost anyone,” she said at last. “The pit boss. Someone in the breakerhouse. Or at the mass drivers. Someone in the on-station processor or loading bays. All they’d need is a few people willing to look the other way at the right moment. That and a few friends at key points along the line.”

“Those kinds of friends have to be paid,” Daahl pointed out.

“You saying you know who the bagman is?”

“Look at the pithead logs.”

She looked. And saw one name popping up again and again. Daahl’s name. All the fiddled shipments had gone out when he was the on-shift pit boss. And he had signed off on every one of them.

“Why are you showing me this?” she asked.

“Because Sharifi died over it. Two days before the fire I heard her and Voyt talking. Fighting. She told Voyt she was onto him, threatened to go to Haas. And over Haas’s head to the Service brass if necessary. She was throwing big names around. Five-star names.”

“General Nguyen?”

Daahl nodded.

“And what did Voyt say?”

“Not much. I think she took him by surprise. And Voyt wasn’t the type to argue to your face about something when he could get what he wanted by sticking a knife in your back.”

Li picked up her forgotten beer and took a gulp of it. It was grass-bitter and warm as blood, and it reminded her of things she couldn’t afford to think about now. “So you think Sharifi threatened to go to Haas, and Voyt killed her? And that the fire was… what, a cover-up? Do you have any proof of this at all?”

Daahl shrugged. “That’s your job.”

Li looked back over the figures. “Voyt couldn’t have done this himself. Who was running him?”

“Someone. Everyone who ever got within smelling distance knows that much. But as to who… that’s your problem.”

“And what was this someone having Voyt pay you?”

“Nothing. He just told me to sign off on the pithead logs and keep my mouth shut.” Daahl smiled. “He offered what you might call negative incentives. Besides, I would have done it anyway. There are good reasons for me to have dirt on Security personnel.”

“I can imagine,” Li said. She probed the hole where her tooth had been and thought about the dirt Daahl already had on her.

“I put these numbers together because I knew perfectly well where they’d put the blame if they ever got caught.” He shrugged his bony shoulders. “Crooked pit boss. Oldest story in the business. Anyway, I wanted to have enough information so I could roll over on Voyt if I had to. And make it stick.”

“Very sensible,” Li said. “But why tell me? And don’t say it’s all just about the miners. Union officials don’t lose any more sleep over dead miners than politicians lose over dead soldiers.”

Daahl glanced out the window. His eyes looked ice-pale in the faint beam of daylight. Sheepdog’s eyes. Wolf eyes.

“Sharifi’s death came at an awkward time,” he said, speaking slowly and deliberately, as if he were trying to relay a very complicated message over an unreliable channel. “We want to make sure there’s no ongoing UN presence in the mine. If that means helping you wrap up this investigation and leave, we’ll help. Also for you personally… it would be good not to be here too much longer. No more than”—he glanced over at Ramirez—“two weeks?”

“At most,” Ramirez said.

Li caught her breath, looked back and forth between the two men. “You crazy bastards,” she said. “You’re planning a lockdown. You think the Secretariat’s going to stand back and let you shut down their best Bose-Einstein source? They’ll crucify you!”

“What’s the UN going to throw at us that’s any worse than what the miners face when they go to work every day?” Ramirez asked. “Besides, it’s not your problem. Unless you’re telling us you want to make it your problem.”

“Oh no. That’s your fight. I’m not that crazy.”

“Then I suggest you wrap this investigation up and get off Compson’s at your earliest possible convenience.”

Li looked back and forth between the two men, took a last sip of beer, and pushed the glass away from her. “So where does that leave us?” she asked Daahl.

“With a deal,” he answered. “And make sure you keep it. I wouldn’t like to see something unpleasant happen to you.”

Ramirez flexed his long legs and his stool slid backwards, squeaking across the bare floor panels. “Do you know what a coffin notice is, Major?”

“Don’t threaten me, Leo. I know a hell of a lot more about them than you do. And I don’t plan on getting shot down in the street like a dog. Not by the Molly Maguires, and certainly not by some snot-nosed rich kid playing at coalfield politics.”

Daahl laughed suddenly. “You haven’t changed a bit, Katie. You must scare the hell out of humans.”

He pulled a fiche off the desk and bent over it. Ramirez got up and slipped back through the airlock, pulling the blanket behind him. Li started toward the front door, but before she made it Daahl came around the table and laid a hand on her arm.

“Katie,” he said, speaking quietly enough so Ramirez couldn’t hear him. “If you need anything, ask me. I’m not making any promises but… Brian will know where to find me. Understood?”

Li nodded and stepped into the front room.

McCuen was still at the table. He had the boy on his lap, and he was twisting a piece of colored string between his fingers, showing him how to make a Jacob’s ladder. The woman bent over the fire stirring something. She didn’t look up when Li and McCuen left.

A few steps down the alley Li stopped.

“Wait here,” she said.

Daahl answered the door. When he saw Li, he stood aside silently to let her enter. The woman and child were gone. Someone had banked the coal fire so that the room was dark and already cooling. Daahl closed the door behind him and leaned against it with his hand still on the latch. “Yes?” he said.

“Mirce Perkins,” Li said. “Where is she?”

“Is that wise?” Daahl asked quietly.

“Just tell me.”

“Why?”

“I want to see her.”

“No you don’t,” Daahl said. There was an edge in his voice. Distrust? Anger? “You don’t belong here anymore. Just do your job and leave. Whatever you think you remember, forget it. It’s what she wanted. It’s what your father wanted. You owe it to them.”

Li didn’t answer. After a moment Daahl opened the door and she walked past him into the watery sunlight.

Half an hour later, she and McCuen were back on the station shuttle. She gave him a carefully sanitized version of her talk with Daahl—a version that didn’t include the threatened lockdown or Daahl’s final words to her.

“So,” he said when she’d told him as much as she was going to. “Voyt’s fiddling the books. Sharifi finds out, threatens to tell Haas, Voyt kills her. Pretty tidy.”

“Too tidy. First, nothing says Voyt actually killed her. There’s about fifteen people strung out along the pipeline that Voyt could simply have been playing bagman for, and they all had as much motive as he did. Second, what or who killed Voyt? Third, what was Bella doing down there and who moved the bodies after she saw them? Fourth, what the hell caused that fire in the first place?”

“Still…” McCuen said, pushing at the Voyt angle as single-mindedly as a bloodhound baying on a hot track.

“Yeah,” Li said. “Still.”

AMC Station: 20.10.48.

“What a pit!” Cohen said, peering around Li’s quarters with a shocked expression.

Today’s face was a thirtysomething Italian actress who was just starting to get talking roles in the kind of clever independent studio interactives Cohen was always trying to drag Li to. She was so astonishingly, exotically beautiful that Li couldn’t be around her without stuttering and tripping all over herself—even when she wasn’t standing in Li’s narrow quarters sparkling like a diamond in a mud puddle.

Of course, only part of the sparkle had anything to do with either the ’face or Cohen. The rest was the packet compression needed to accommodate the encryption protocols Cohen had insisted on using for this streamspace-realspace visit. It left him looking bright, hard-edged, slightly more in focus than everything else in the small room. And Li didn’t even want to think about the credit he must be blowing at the private-sector entanglement banks.

He opened the closet, flicked at the spare uniforms hanging there, and sniffed dramatically. “You mean to tell me you actually live here?”

“No,” Li said, rummaging in the piles of fiche on her desk, looking for Daahl’s production figures. “It’s the next hot vacation spot. Just making it safe for the free world.”

He circled the room, tilting Chiara’s exquisite head as if he harbored some vain hope that the room would look better from a different angle. He turned to her, forehead wrinkled with earnest dismay. “Really, Catherine. I don’t think the Corps appreciates you properly.”

“They appreciate me enough to keep the paychecks coming. In the real world—a place I’m aware you don’t visit often—that’s pretty much as good as it gets.”

She found Daahl’s fiche and handed it to Cohen, acutely aware of the slim shapely fingers brushing hers.

“Intriguing,” he said, before she’d even dropped her hand back to her side. “Any brilliant theories about who’s raiding the cookie jar?”

Li crossed her arms over her chest and shook her head. “How the hell do you do that? I never get used to it.”

“Mmm. Sheer brute computing force. That and the fact that I’m eight times cleverer than anyone this charming has a right to be.”

Li smirked.

He stuck his tongue out at her, slipped his shoes off, and sank gracefully onto her bunk. “So. Where were we?”

She grabbed her desk chair and turned it around to sit backwards on it. She summarized her meeting with Daahl and Ramirez, telling Cohen about the exchange of information and the lockdown, but leaving out the personal talk.

“And this Daahl person just picked you out of thin air?” Cohen asked when she’d finished. “He thought you looked like a nice friendly person? You’ll forgive me if I confess to having suspicious thoughts about him.”

Li shrugged, trying to look unconcerned. “It didn’t come up.”

Cohen had sprawled across her bed while she was talking—he had to be doing this on purpose, didn’t he?—and now he stretched, sighing luxuriously, sending Chiara’s glossy curls cascading across Li’s pillow. He opened his eyes, gazed at her in wide-eyed and utterly insincere innocence, and said, “Sure it didn’t. Well, we’ll revisit that question later. Have you found the accident reports he wants?”

“I tried. Didn’t have time to really look.”

“Time is my middle name,” Cohen said with a grandly munificent gesture that Li was sure Chiara had never used in her life. “What’s your password?”

Li gave it to him, and he logged in and produced the missing accident reports within less than a minute.

“Where were they?” she asked.

He raised an eyebrow. “In Voyt’s files. Until a few days ago. Someone deleted them ten hours before you hit station.”

“Who?”

“Hush. I’m working on it. Go do something useful.”

Li scanned the reports, stopping here and there when a name or a word caught her eye:

02/01/47. Stokes, William. Age 32. ID No. 103479920. Subject fatally injured when he returned to Wilkes-Barre North 4 to check a missed shot. No autopsy. Cause of death: burns.

04/12/47. Pinzer, G. F. Age 26. ID No. 457347423. Subject discovered in lower gallery Wilkes-Barre South 14, crushed by roof fall. Rescuers unable to extract body because of gas seepage. Subject identified from personal effects, pit bottom logs. Cause of death: trauma.

04/19/47. Mafouz, Christina. Age 13. ID No. 764378534. Subject’s coal cart experienced brake failure in gangway west of Wilkes-Barre East 17. Subject suffered multiple compound fractures and dislocations with associated soft tissue trauma. Left leg amputated below knee, St. Johns hosp.

These entries were no news at all to Li. They recorded death and maiming by fire, explosives, roof falls, equipment failure. All the routine dangers of the miners’ world.

But scattered among the typical accident reports were other ones:

17/20/47. Carrig, Kevin. Age 37. ID No. 355607534. Subject found unconscious in Trinidad South 2. Pit inspector hypothesizes subject opened gas pocket, but rescuers found no gas at work site and autopsy revealed no signs of gas inhalation. Cause of death: unknown.

20/2/48. Cho, Kristyn. Age 34. ID No. 486739463. Subject collapsed during survey of Trinidad South 7. Witnesses describe complaints of head pain, bright lights, convulsions, loss of consciousness. Autopsy indicated extensive, nonlocalized damage to frontal lobe. Cause of death: brain seizure.

The troublesome reports had started about four months ago. Deaths attributed to electrical shock where repair crews had been unable to find stripped wires or standing water. Deaths attributed to gas where other miners working in the same vein had been mysteriously spared. Healthy miners dying of heart attacks, strokes, brain seizures. And two miners hadn’t died—were still lying in the Shantytown hospital in the grip of comas that no doctor could explain.

There had been a spate of these inexplicable accidents when the Trinidad opened. Then things had leveled off. Then there had been another significant bump three months ago: fourteen unexplained deaths in a single week.

Li didn’t have to cross-reference dates or check her files to know what had happened three months ago.

Sharifi had arrived.

“Guess where the reports were deleted from?” Cohen asked, arching a slender eyebrow and forwarding the still-legible remnant of an erased access log to her. “The station exec’s office.”

“So, Haas deep-sixed the accident reports the day before I arrived.”

“And he was embezzling crystal, or at least we suspect he was.”

“And,” Li said, feeling vaguely dirty, “we know Haas is not unfriendly to the Syndicates.”

They looked at each other.

“It all keeps coming back to Haas,” Li said. “Doesn’t it?”

Instead of answering her, Cohen vanished.

Li staggered to her feet, knocking her chair over. Her quarters looked wrong somehow. She checked her internals and realized that she was no longer in limited VR interaction mode, but in full two-way.

She tried to access realspace.

Nothing.

Code.

Nothing.

She’d been bagged, warehoused, shunted into virtual deadspace. She closed her eyes and rubbed her face, thinking. When she opened them again, she was no longer on-station.

She stood in a perfectly square, perfectly empty room. Blank white walls. Blank floors and ceilings. Nominal squares of windows opening on an eternity of white nothingness. Her heartbeat hammered in the silence like a kettledrum. She focused on a corner where floor met wall in order to stave off vertigo and waited, counting her heartbeats.

A door opened. One moment she was staring at a blank wall. The next someone had stepped into the room with her. But when she tried to recapture the moment of entry, it was missing, skipped over as if there had been a bad splice in her optical feed.

The new person in the room was small, dark, slender. It took Li a few heartbeats to focus on him after the long blank whiteness. When she did, she saw coltish, gangling legs below striped shorts. A red-and-black football jersey. Dark hair. Olive skin.

“Cohen?”

“Sshhhh!” he whispered.

He had nothing on his feet but tall striped socks with bulky shin guards poking out over their tops; his old-fashioned soccer cleats were tied together by the shoelaces and thrown over one bony shoulder. He circled the room, stopping several times to peer at sections of wall that looked, to Li’s eyes, completely unremarkable. He walked up one wall and sat down cross-legged a few feet below the ceiling. “Well, here we are,” he said.

“We? I don’t know who the hell you are, except that you look like Cohen. Which proves nothing.”

He grinned. “Looks don’t always deceive, my dear. Even mine.”

“Prove it.”

“How?”

“Tell me something.”

“Like what?” he said, sounding for all the world like the ten-year-old he appeared to be.

“Something no one else would know.”

He wrapped his arms around his legs and put his sharp little chin on his knees, thinking. “Right,” he said. “Well, you’re two centimeters shorter than you tell people you are.”

“You could pull that out of my transport files.”

“And you’re an evil-tempered beast in the morning.”

She snorted. “As opposed to the rest of the time?”

“Good point,” he said, and laughed.

He peered owlishly at her, rubbing at a fresh scab on his knee. “There’s always your deepest, darkest, awfulest secret.”

She froze. She tried for a laugh but couldn’t quite get there. “Which one?”

“That I love you.”

She looked up to find him watching her as if she were a suspicious package that might explode without warning. “Oh, for God’s sake,” he said after a brief awkward silence. “You don’t have to look like you’re ready to chew your leg off to get away from me every time I say it.”

“Don’t exaggerate, Cohen.”

“It’s no exaggeration. Trust me.” He shot her a resentful look from under dark eyelashes. “And it’s ridiculous. It’s not like you’re some fainting virgin, for Heaven’s sake.”

“Now you just want to sleep with me? You’ve lowered your sights. Last time I was supposed to be wife number seven. Or was it eight? Christ, Cohen, you get married like normal people buy puppies!”

“Normal humans, you mean.” He gave her a long naked defenseless look. “That’s what it’s all about for you, isn’t it? Trying to pass. Getting the signed, sealed, and delivered human stamp of approval.” He laughed bitterly. “I’d really like to get inside your head and know what you think when you look in the mirror every morning.”

“You’ve got me all wrong, Cohen.”

“Do I? Then what are you so afraid of?”

“Nothing,” she snapped. “I’m just not interested in being the next stop on your tourist trip through the human psyche.”

He looked away and muttered something she couldn’t quite hear.

“What did you say?”

“I said that’s exceptionally nasty, even for you.”

The room suddenly felt too small, too hot. Li turned away and began checking the walls, trying to find some chink in them.

“Look,” she said after a long, uncomfortable pause. “I didn’t mean—”

“Forget it. It was stupid of me.”

“So what’s with the kid?” Li asked when the white silence had become too thickly oppressive to stand any longer.

“Ah.” Cohen undid the laces of his sneakers and started putting them back on his sock-clad feet. “I thought you knew that. This is Hyacinthe.”

“I thought you were Hyacinthe.”

“He’s one of the things I am. He’s my original, bedrock interface program. And, of course, the man who invented me.”

Li had a sudden urge to laugh. “As a ten-year-old?”

“Actually he was fourteen when this was done. It’s old video footage. He used it to create the original VR interface. I guess you could say it was my first ’face. I tend to fall back on it when I’m pushing the limits of my processing capacity. As at present, unfortunately.”

“Can’t we get out?” Li paced the room’s perimeter again.

“No. And sit down before you drive me incurably mad. You’re safe as long as I’m here.”

But just as he said the words—as if someone were playing a nasty joke on them—he was gone again.

Li was back in the dark place.

This time she knew she was underground, in the mine. But that was all she knew. Water dripped from an unseen ceiling, splashed in an unseen pool. A damp, chill air current wafted up from some underground river too far off for her to hear.

She cut to infrared. No good. She was instream; she saw only what the person controlling the simulation wanted her to see.

“Light a lamp,” Cohen’s voice whispered from somewhere near her left ear.

Her hand reached out to where it knew the lamp was. Picked it up. Primed it. But her fingers fumbled with the wick, as if they had become sudden strangers to this familiar task. As she adjusted the flame, she brushed the inside of her hand against the hot barrel of the oil reservoir and heard the sizzle of burning skin.

“Shit!” she said, putting her hand to her mouth instinctively, sucking at the blistered crescent of flesh.

“Sssh,” Cohen said. “You’re fine. Tell me what you see.”

She held up the lamp and saw an uneven floor of hewn rock running away in all directions. Pillars of light marched in long ranks from one end of the space to the other, gleaming like ivory in the lamplight. The ceiling arched overhead, supported by undulating veins that fanned from one Bose-Einstein node to another in an infinitely repeating, fractally complex spider’s web.

“It’s the glory hole,” she told Cohen. “Sharifi’s glory hole.”

But it was the glory hole intact, unburnt and unflooded and full of softly whirring and clicking equipment. The glory hole before the fire. A generator hummed in one corner. Optical cables snaked across the floor between thickets of diagnostic machinery. Crooked teeth of crystal jutted from floor and ceiling.

The mouths of the earth, Li thought. Wasn’t that what Compson had called them?

“Is this where the hijacker took you?” Cohen asked.

She raised the lamp and turned in a slow circle. To her left a steepening upslope followed the line of the vein, echoing the mined-out chamber on the level above. To her right, the portable virusteel ladder led to the chamber and drift above, and to the long slippery stairs out of the Trinidad.

“Is this it?” Cohen whispered—and she realized for the first time that the whisper was not behind her but inside her. “Is it your memory or someone else’s?”

“Someone else’s.”

“Whose then? Think.”

Her hand moved reluctantly, as if she were keying instructions over a bad link. She squinted at it. It was hers, all right. Short nails. Strong, brown, blunt-ended fingers. Still. There was something not quite right about it. She turned it so the palm faced her.

No wires.

She looked at the hand again, more carefully. The nails were longer than hers, better cared for. She counted old scars that weren’t there, new ones that shouldn’t have been there. And the fresh burn, a slim crescent of raised scar tissue between thumb and forefinger.

“It’s Sharifi,” she said. “It’s Sharifi’s memory.”

Then Sharifi turned at the sound of approaching footsteps, and Li was helpless, along for the ride like any other ghost.

It was the same sequence she’d seen in the last hijacking. But this time she understood what she was seeing. The strange patterns chasing each other across the cavern were light from Sharifi’s lantern. The pinging sound was dripping water. The booming rifle reports were bootheels slapping on bedrock.

“What are you doing here?” Sharifi said, as Voyt climbed down the ladder.

He reached the bottom, turned, and grinned nastily. “Just keeping an eye on the merchandise.”

“Fine. Stay out of the way then.”

“Where’s our honored guest? Off stealing the silverware?”

“Right here,” Bella said, stepping into the lamplight.

Li watched through Sharifi’s eyes as Bella approached. This was not the subdued woman she had met on-station. This Bella met Voyt’s stare and returned it. This Bella moved with the arrogant loose-limbed grace of a fighter, smiled the cool smile of someone who knew she could outsmart you, humiliate you. No matter what the game was. “Are you ready to deliver?” she asked.

Sharifi looked hard at her, frowning a little. “Are you?”

Bella opened her mouth to answer, and the flickering, lamplit shadows of the glory hole gave way to a blast of white light.

Li was back in her quarters.

“Cohen?”

“Here.” Her livewall flickered on to reveal Cohen, shunting through Chiara again, sitting in his sun-filled Ring-side drawing room.

“Do you know what we just saw?” Li asked.

“I know what you think we saw.”

“It’s there, in Sharifi’s memory. Everything we need to know. We have to go back.”

“We have to do no such thing. We almost got trapped there. And you still don’t know if what we saw was real or not.”

“I’ll chance it.”

“No you won’t. And if you decide to be stupid about it, I’ll personally lock you offstream.”

A dark suspicion tugged at the back of Li’s brain. “Why are you so scared? What are you not telling me?”

“I’ve told you everything I know, Catherine.”

She laughed. “How can someone who’s had two hundred years to practice be such a shitty liar?”

She expected him to at least smile at that, but he just sat staring at the ground, arms crossed, swinging one sandal-shod foot back and forth in a nervous rhythm. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, hands clasped together so tightly that Chiara’s knuckles whitened.

“Listen. Drop this investigation. Tell Nguyen you’re sick, or you need maintenance. Which you do, obviously; I haven’t seen you pick anything up with that arm since you hit station.”

Li stared. A roach crawled across the floor and started up the livewall. She saw it with surreal clarity, each leg arcing forward, setting itself down against the glowing matrix of the viewscreen. When the roach began to crawl across Cohen’s leg, she reached out and flicked it away.

“I can’t drop it,” she said. “I’m one mistake away from getting chaptered out.”

“I can think of worse fates than a discharge.”

“Well, I can’t.” She paced around the narrow room. “You got me into this mess. And I’m not talking about just now. I’m talking about Metz. Whatever you know, I want to hear it.”

Cohen sighed, and Li wondered, not for the first time, how he managed to stamp his personality so strongly on his shunts. It was impossible to imagine Chiara’s lovely face wearing that tired, ancient expression—just as it was impossible to imagine Cohen not suffusing every ’face with that self-deprecating irony born out of a thousand lies, half lies, and compromises.

“I don’t know anything,” he said. “I only suspect. Helen, for one. Where else could Sharifi have gotten the intraface?”

“That’s crazy, Cohen. And anyway, Nguyen never had the intraface. The raid on Metz failed.”

“Did it? Look at the timing, for God’s sake. We pull the source code and wetware for the intraface off Metz and a few weeks later Sharifi’s on Compson’s World, wearing it? You run the numbers.”

“But you said that wetware couldn’t just be grown in viral matrix. That it had to be tanked in place, in a clone. So if Sharifi used it, it must have been cultured for her. And if TechComm was in on this from the get-go, then… why would Nguyen steal something she already owned?”

“What better way to get hold of illegal wetware without leaving a paper trail than to seize it in a TechComm raid?”

Li rolled her eyes. “Oh, come on!”

“Sharifi wasn’t just a victim, Catherine. She was involved. She came here to do a very specific job. A job she needed the intraface to do—or why would someone like her have risked experimental implants?”

“Fine. But to say that there was UN involvement—”

“Of course there was. Sharifi was working for TechComm. They controlled her budget. They controlled access to the mine. They controlled the old construct genelines, Sharifi’s included. And if TechComm controls something, that means the Security Council controls it. Which means Helen. Helen who sent you to Compson’s World before Sharifi was even cold. Or should I say before she was even dead?”

Li caught her breath.

“Come on, Catherine. Don’t be an idiot. I put transit time from Metz to Compson’s World at almost three weeks. You hit planet ten days after the fire. That means she decided to send you here at least a week before Sharifi died.”

“I know,” Li said reluctantly. “You think I hadn’t thought of it?”

“But you damn well haven’t done anything about it, have you? Have you considered asking her why she really sent you here?”

“I considered it. And I decided not to.”

“Why the hell not?” She didn’t answer, and after a moment Cohen continued. “I’ll tell you why not. Because you don’t want to know. You don’t want to think about what she’s doing, about what you’re doing. You don’t want to think, period.”

“Are you finished, Cohen?”

He stood up, cursing, and paced in a tight circle before the viewscreen. “My God,” he said, when he was facing her again, “that’s why she loves you so much. She gives her orders and it’s over. You don’t question, you don’t think, you don’t hesitate. You’re her creature!”

“No. I’m a soldier. And I’m loyal. Something you wouldn’t understand.”

“Don’t bait me. You need me. Our little chat in the white room back there? Whoever engineered that was toying with us, playing with us like a cat plays with a dead bird. And they’re targeting you, Catherine.”

Li stood in front of the screen, looking at the floor. The roach she’d flicked away was still rolling around on its back trying to right itself. She stepped toward it, set the toe of her boot on it, and crushed it.

“It’s not just Helen,” Cohen continued. “There’s an Emergent involved. And not just any Emergent. Someone’s using AMC’s field AI. Someone who’s managed to turn me back every time I tried to track them. Someone strong enough to trap me, play with me. And they’re after you.”

“I thought you said AIs weren’t interested in people, Cohen.”

“Maybe I was wrong. Or maybe you’ve done something that’s made them interested.”

Li swallowed. Her mouth felt dry, metallic. “Or maybe they’re using me to get at you,” she said. “Did you tell someone about us?”

“‘Us’?” Cohen looked like he was about to laugh. “‘Us,’ as you so delicately put it, lasted all of thirty-six hours. When exactly would I have had time to tell anyone?”

“Then what are they after, Cohen? What do they want from me?”

He looked away, and she saw his throat tense as he swallowed. “How the hell would I know?”

AMC Station: 21.10.48.

Game one.

Li shouldered her way into the All Nite Noodle at the bottom of the second inning. Hamdani was on the mound, dark socks pulled up to his knees, right leg shooting up in his high angular windup kick. The Mets’ big Cuban designated hitter had just crushed a line drive off the center field wall and put himself on second with the help of what Li thought should have been considered an error. The outfield was playing in close, looking nervous.

The line cook touched a finger to his hat and nodded as she walked in. Before Hamdani had retired the next batter, Li was settled at a quiet back table with a beer and a bowl of noodles. When someone sat down at the table next to her in the top of the sixth, she assumed it was the line cook coming to pass time with a fellow Yanks fan. She turned, smiling—and saw a man her oracle claimed she’d never met before.

She nodded, thinking he was just taking the empty chair, and looked back to the game just as Hamdani trotted to the mound. So far he’d held off the heart of the Mets batting order and kept the Yanks their tenuous two-one lead. But he had thrown far too many pitches. And he was looking shaky, fussing with his bad elbow between batters.

He was one of the great ones, but he was getting old, injury-prone. His fastball was slowing down. His curve and slider had lost their bite. He wasn’t unhittable anymore. And it looked to Li like he was about ten pitches away from exhaustion.

He wound up and threw a sharp slider that just caught the outside of the plate. “Fantastic!” Li said under her breath. A taste of the old magic there.

“Ball one!” the umpire said.

“God dammit!”

“Major,” said the man across the table from her, “I had no idea you were so passionate about this.”

Li’s attention snapped away from the game. The man smiled at her—a carefully rationed smile in a young-old face that revealed nothing. She took a closer look, trying again to place him. He reminded her of someone, but in a generic way. As if it were not a single person he brought to mind, but a whole type of person. A type of person that gave her a bad, uncomfortable, guilty feeling.

A thrill of apprehension ran down her spine as she made the connection. He was Syndicate. And he reminded her particularly of the diplomatic rep from… where? MotaiSyndicate? KnowlesSyndicate? Whichever Syndicate he was from, that must mean he was A Series. But what the hell was an A Series construct doing on Compson’s World? And how could his talking to her spell anything but trouble?

“I don’t think I know you,” she said. Best to tread cautiously.

“Oh, but I know you,” the A Series answered. “I know quite a lot more about you than you might imagine.”

“Then you have the advantage.”

He smiled again. A diplomat’s smile. A spy’s smile. “I think there are few areas in which I’d have any advantage over a woman of your… what’s that word humans are so attached to? Talents?”

The crowd cheered, and Li’s eyes snapped back to the screen. The Cuban was up again. “Big game,” she said, hoping her new friend would take the hint and leave.

“Hmmm. I wouldn’t know. Not a fan. Actually, I came because I hoped I might get the chance to talk to you.”

Sure, Li thought. The chance to talk her straight into a full-scale internal affairs investigation. “Great,” she said. “Why don’t you come by the office in the morning?”

“Ah,” said the stranger. “Well. This isn’t official. I believe it’s something we might most profitably discuss in private.”

Li turned and looked straight at him, her recorder’s status light winking in her peripheral vision. “In private is not an option. You can either talk to me on the record here or on the record in the office tomorrow. Those are the rules.”

“The rules.” The man spoke musingly, drawing the single syllable out, considering it, interrogating it. “But there are rules and rules, aren’t there? Wasn’t that how it was on Gilead?”

Li’s stomach plunged as if a high-altitude chute had just snapped open and snatched her out of free fall. Then she forgot her stomach, forgot the game, forgot Gilead, because her head was throbbing and her eyes were watering and the room was spinning around her.

“Andrej Korchow at your service,” the man said. “Privately, anyway.”

Li shook her head, sniffed, sneezed. She felt like she had something up her nose, but she knew the feeling was an illusion. In fact Korchow had simply jammed her recorder, and her internals were spinning their computational wheels, desperately trying to fend off whatever he was throwing at them.

“What do you want?” she asked. Her coolness surprised her. She knew people who’d been approached. It was inevitable. If the Syndicates didn’t hit you up, internal security would. Or corporate agents. She’d expected to feel outrage, fear. But all she felt now was a cold, calculating conviction that she had to keep her head and pick a careful path through the minefield that stretched before her.

“I don’t want anything, Major. Other than a chance to introduce myself. You strike me as someone with whom I might have… common interests.”

“I doubt that.”

“Ah, but how can you be sure if we don’t discuss them?”

She looked back to the livewall, delaying. Hamdani was tightening up even under his thick turtleneck. He blew on his hands, got called for going to the mouth, stalked off the mound in a fury, came back, stalled. When he finally delivered, the pitch got away from him and drifted invitingly over the heart of the plate.

“Shit,” Li muttered, just as the crack of the bat sounded through the room. She sighed in relief as the ball died over the warning track.

“You’re a curious woman,” Korchow said smoothly. “An enigma, one might almost say. I confess to a powerful interest in you.”

Li kept silent.

“When I learned you’d been posted here, I was, quite frankly, astonished. Your service record shows… an impressive ability to get results. It seemed to me that you deserved more. Had a right to expect more.”

“I don’t see it that way,” Li said. “And even if I did, I have plenty to lose. And plenty to be grateful for.”

“Grateful. For what? For the chance to tend the colonial sheep and take orders from inferiors? Or is there some other explanation for the hero’s anticlimactic homecoming? Some people”—Korchow’s voice shifted subtly, got harder, colder—“idealistic people… gullible people… have surmised that your fall from grace shows the Security Council has repented of some of its… harsher attitudes. I am not one of those people.”

“If you have something to say, Korchow, say it.”

“I have nothing to say, Major. I’m merely curious. Call me a student of human nature. Or is human the right word here? By the way, has anyone ever told you how much you look like Hannah Sharifi? Amazing the strength of the XenoGen genesets. Their work was crude, of course. Human, after all. But some of the prebreakaway designers had real genius.”

“I doubt you’ll find many fans of their work around here.” Li shook her head again, not making any progress against Korchow’s jammer.

“No, alas. By the by, was Sharifi really murdered?”

“That’s not established.”

“But I’d been told you have suspects.”

“You were told wrong, then.”

“Indeed. So hard to get accurate information. A thorny problem, that. It makes reliable information particularly valuable.”

Li started to lick her lips, then caught herself, realizing how it would look. Korchow was skirting the edge of deniability. Asking about Sharifi. Asking for information. Unmistakably offering… something. But so slyly that Li couldn’t explicitly reject the offer without appearing to have raised the subject herself.

Was this a UN internal affairs sting? A genuine approach by a Syndicate agent? Or just the corporate espionage department of some multiplanetary fishing for tidbits about Sharifi’s work? Whichever it was, they were surely being recorded. The only question was who the wire belonged to. “I can’t give out information about an ongoing investigation,” she said.

“I wouldn’t dream of prying into a Controlled Technology Committee investigation,” Korchow answered. “My interests are more properly described as… tangential to yours.”

On-screen, the Cuban was up again. The game was tied, the Yanks one out shy of a win. It was Hamdani’s to lose.

“I don’t know why you’d think TechComm has anything to do with my being here,” Li said.

“Really, Major. The problem with being as honest as you clearly are is that it doesn’t equip you to lie competently when necessary.”

“Hah!” Li said. Her defensive software had finally managed to outflank Korchow’s block. They were back on tape again.

“Well,” Korchow said, standing up. “It was a pleasure talking to you.” He reached into his breast pocket, pulled out a narrow card, and set it on the table in front of her. “My card. I run a store in the capital. Antiques. Compson’s World is a treasure trove of remarkable artifacts. I’d be honored if you paid me a visit and allowed me to show you what the planet has to offer.”

“I doubt I’ll have time,” Li said. She plucked the card off the table and tried to hand it back to him.

“No, no,” he said. “It is one of my firm beliefs that one should never close any door in life until one is quite certain that one does not want to walk through it.”

Li watched him slip through the crowd and vanish. Then she looked down at the card in her hand. It was made of some matte fiber that looked like, but was not, paper. And instead of printed words and pictures it bore a precise geometric lacework of punch holes. A Hollerith card.

She’d seen Holleriths before, and she recognized the implicit status message. It was written in decimal code, and in a format that no machine for two centuries had been able to process. It embodied a technofetishist, antiquarian, nose-thumbing aesthetic. And it assumed that anyone you handed the card to could recognize and process the antique code without an external computer.

She was certain, looking back over their conversation, that Korchow was KnowlesSyndicate. Knowles was the diplomat’s syndicate, the spy’s syndicate. Their A Series were mavericks within the close-knit conformity of Syndicate society, artists of information and manipulation, as formidable as they were unpredictable.

The surface address punched into the Hollerith card put Korchow’s shop in Helena. Behind the punch holes the card’s surface bore an intricate engraved logo that reminded Li of the patterns in Cohen’s Persian carpets. Where had she seen that design before? On an advertisement? She searched her hard files for a match and found one in the top layer of her actives. Recent, then.

She accessed the file, saw the digital image of a leather-bound journal with a dozen business cards tucked into the front flap pocket. And there, peeping out from behind several slips of shiny fiche, was the corner of Korchow’s Hollerith card.

The notebook was leather. Brown leather as soft and expensive as butter. Sharifi’s.

On-screen, the Cuban had carried Hamdani deep into the count, fouling off pitch after pitch, though Hamdani was throwing everything he had at him. It was only a matter of time until he turned on one of those not-quite-fast-enough fastballs.

“Walk him, you idiot,” Li muttered. “Don’t throw the game away.”

But Hamdani wasn’t going to walk him. Couldn’t bring himself to walk him, though he must know in every cell of his aging body that he’d already been beaten. He wound up, looking stiffer and older than Li had ever seen him look. The ball left his hand a split second too early and floated across the plate square in the middle of the strike zone.

The Cuban saw it as soon as Li did. His eyes snapped around. His arms extended. His broad back turned toward the camera as he rounded on the ball. The bat cracked like rifle fire, and Li didn’t need to hear the roar of the crowd to know it was all over.

The windup. The pitch. It’s gone.

She stood up and tucked Korchow’s card into her pocket, feeling the prickle of unseen eyes on the back of her neck. Then she walked—slowly, carefully, expressionlessly—back to her quarters.

The next morning, four hundred and seventy-six hours after the rescue crew found him in Trinidad South 12, James Reynold Dawes came out of his coma and started talking.

As soon as she found out, Li shuttled down to the Shantytown hospital to see him. When she got there, Sharpe and Dawes’s wife were standing in the corridor outside his room arguing with two AMC mine guards.

“We have orders,” one of the guards was saying. “No one’s supposed to see him, and that’s that.”

Li flashed a smile and her ID. “I think we could let his wife in, don’t you?” she said.

“That’s not what I was told.”

“By who? Haas? Call him. In the meantime, this hospital is a public institution. AMC may run the mine and the town, but here you’re on planetary militia territory. Which means that, until someone with a militia commission shows up, I have jurisdiction.”

“Thanks,” Sharpe said as Dawes’s wife slipped into the room.

Li shrugged. “I have to talk to him too, actually.” She gave Dawes a few minutes with his wife, then knocked at the door.

“Come in,” called a young man’s voice.

She stepped into the room and saw Dawes lying in a raised bed between cheap viruflex curtains. “How’re you feeling?” she asked.

“Pretty good. Considering.”

“Up to a few questions?”

He shrugged.

“Should I go?” his wife asked.

“Not unless you have somewhere else to be.”

“Well…” A look passed between the couple. She slipped out of the room, and Li heard the sharp sound of her heels receding down the tiled corridor.

“So,” Li said when she and Dawes were alone. “I bet that was a shocker of a wake-up.”

He grinned. “Just like sleeping fucking beauty.”

“I hope you at least got a kiss for your trouble. Sorry if I interrupted it.”

He laughed at that, then gasped and paled. “Three broken ribs,” he said. “The doc told me if I’d slept another week and a half I’d have woken up and not even known about them.”

“Well, you know what they say. It’s an ill wind that doesn’t blow someone’s house down.”

“Ouch!”

“Sorry,” Li said. “So do you remember anything?”

His face clouded. “Like what?”

“You tell me.”

He glanced doubtfully at her. “You’re not from AMC, then, like the last one?”

“What last one?”

“The guy they sent down to talk to me earlier today. He kept wanting to get me to say I’d slipped and hit my head and didn’t remember anything.”

“Did you? Hit your head, I mean.”

“Not according to the doctors.”

“And do you remember anything?”

The shadowy look drifted across his face again.

“Do you not want to talk about it?”

“No! No, I want to talk about it. I just… I’m not sure what it was, I guess.”

“What do you think it was?”

“I don’t know,” he said again, shaking his head on the pillow. “If I told you, you’d probably laugh at me.”

“Try me,” Li said.

And he did.

What he described sounded just like what Li had seen on her two hijackings. Strange sights, vague shadowy figures. Sounds that made no sense or were oddly distorted. Fractured twilight visions that could have been past or future or neither.

“Did you see anyone you knew?” Li asked when Dawes fell silent.

“Oh, yeah. I saw all of them.”

“What do you mean, all of them? All of who?”

“The dead.” He looked up at her, and his eyes were dark and wide, the pupils expanded as if he were slipping into shock. “All of them. All my dead. Just like the pit priests say you see.”

Li swallowed. “Do you think it could have been a hallucination? Or, I don’t know, something else. Like a spinstream hijacking—” She remembered that Dawes was unwired and too poor to pay for stream time anyway, that he’d probably never even known anyone who had direct spinstream access. “I mean like someone trying to communicate. Someone not dead, I mean.”

He thought about it.

“I don’t know,” he said finally. “I’m not a churchgoing man. But they were there. You know what I’m saying? They were… different.”

“Did you—” Li stopped to clear her throat. “Did you see Dr. Sharifi?”

“No.”

“You’d have recognized her if you had seen her?”

“Sure. I saw her a bunch of times. She looked… well, like they always look.”

He lay silent for a moment, looking up at the stained foam ceiling panels of the hospital module. A long moment passed with no sound to mark the time but the pounding of a trapped fly against the room’s dust-caked window. Dawes’s face softened, took on a puzzled, disappointed look.

“The thing is,” he said, “I felt like they took me for a reason. Like they were trying to tell me something specific, something they thought was important.”

“What do you think it was?” Li asked, her breath catching in her throat.

To her surprise he smiled. “Seems like that’s the question of the hour. AMC’s man kept trying to ask me that. Which wasn’t so easy given that he was also trying to get me to say I fell down and hit my head and never saw anything. Even Cartwright asked me that.”

Li’s stomach clenched. “Cartwright’s been here?”

“The old geezer was practically waiting outside my door when I woke up. He was nattering at me before the doctors even figured out I was back. Wanted to know where it happened. What level. What deposits it was near. I guess he has some theory or something.”

“I don’t suppose he shared it with you?”

“Not really. But I got the idea he thought I’d had some kind of religious experience. And that he disapproved. Strongly. He kept talking about unlikely vessels and looking like a man who just caught his wife sleeping with the plumber.”

“What do you think happened down there?”

“I don’t know what to think.” Dawes’s face darkened again. “A man could get scared thinking about it. Especially when he knows that once his sick pay runs out, he’ll have to go back downstairs again. I’ve seen what happens to miners when they take up with the pit priests. They still use the old words. Jesus, Mary, the saints. Sacrifice. But it’s like suddenly they mean something else. Something they don’t want you to see until you’re too far in to back out.” He passed a hand over his face, wincing as the movement tugged at his broken ribs. “And there’s another thing,” he said. “They never talk about God. It’s all Mary. The Virgin this, the Virgin that. Her saints. Her Heaven. But they’re not her saints, they’re God’s saints. The real ones, anyway.

“You know what Cartwright said to me today?” He propped himself up on his elbows. His eyes looked feverish, terrified. “He said God doesn’t know us. That God chose humans. Earth and humans. That only Mary loved us enough to come to Compson’s World. Why would he tell me that? What kind of place is it that God won’t come to? What happens when you die down there?”

“Hey!” One of the guards popped his head into the room, then stepped in, followed by two militiamen. “We got Haas on the line, and he says the isolation order goes for you too, Major.”

Li was too stunned to react at first, still wrapped in Dawes’s shadowy vision. “Let me talk to Haas,” she said finally.

“Fine. Talk to him somewhere else, though. It’s my ass if you’re not out of here pronto.”

Li glanced over at Dawes. He shrugged a little and gazed back at her wide-eyed, as if to say it was all a mystery to him. She tried Haas’s line quickly and got a message that he was out of the office. No surprise there. He would no doubt remain out of the office until he was good and ready for Li to talk to Dawes.

Out in the hall, a tall young man in coveralls was talking to the duty nurse. Li had actually walked past him when a familiar movement made her stop and look back. It was the IWW rep, Ramirez. And from what she could catch of the conversation, he was trying to talk his way into Dawes’s room.

“What are you doing here?” she asked, more abruptly than she’d meant to.

“Just visiting a friend,” Ramirez said smoothly.

“Isn’t that sweet.”

If Ramirez caught the sarcasm in her voice, he didn’t give any sign of it. “Hey,” he told the nurse, smiling and touching her shoulder. “I’ll catch you later, okay?” He put a hand in the small of Li’s back and guided her down the hall toward a windowless door marked EXIT. “It’s actually really good you happened by just now,” he told her. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you.”

They stepped through the door into the gold-green haze of a sunny fall afternoon. They stood on the honeycomb-grid landing of a fire escape with a clear view over Shantytown to the atmospheric processors and the gently flaming stacks of the power plant. A slight wind rattled the cheap siding of the hospital modules and tugged idly at the wind sock on the ER hopper pad.

“Hail, fellow traveler,” Li said. “Aren’t you supposed to be out demonstrating your solidarity with the workingman and getting ready to hold the barricades when the tanks roll in? Or were you planning to duck out at intermission and skip the last act? I believe that’s what all the best people are doing.”

“Hey, relax. I just thought this would be a good chance to touch base and… see if we could help each other out.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Is this coming from Daahl or you?”

“Both.”

“And what do both of you plan to get out of it?”

“Well, that’s what I was hoping to talk to you about. It’ll take a minute, though.”

“You’ve got five,” Li said, leaning back against the railing and shaking out a cigarette. “Well, more like six, actually, depending on how fast you make me want to smoke. Cigarette?”

“No thanks,” Ramirez said. “They’re bad for your lungs.”

She looked hard at him.

“You know someone like you could do a lot of good, Major.”

“What do you mean, someone like me?” she asked quietly.

“Someone who grew up here. Who knows what it’s like. You could really open people’s eyes Ring-side.”

“And what would that accomplish?”

“Everything. It would give the lie to the corporate propaganda about the Trusteeships, about what goes on in Bose-Einstein mines. It would let people in the inner planets know what their money’s really doing.”

She laughed. She couldn’t help it. “They know, Ramirez. They know as much as they want to know. Or are you too young and idealistic to have figured that out yet?”

Ramirez flushed.

“Look,” she said. “I didn’t mean to give you a hard time before. But I’ve seen way too many idealistic young things rip through this town. And they all believe the same thing. That if they just talk to the right media types, get on the right spins, publish the right book, all the injustices of the system will magically stop. Well, they won’t. The system is the way it is because people like it that way. Because it works most of the time for most people. Or at least for most people who have enough clout to do anything about it.”

“That’s pretty cynical.”

“Just realistic.”

“It’s also a good excuse for not taking action.”

“Don’t preach, Leo.” Li flicked the ash off her cigarette and watched it flutter in the breeze. “It’s not attractive. And besides, I gave at the office.”

“I understand where you’re coming from. You’ve worked hard for what you have. You don’t want to jeopardize it—”

“You don’t understand anything,” she snapped.

“But—”

“But nothing. I’ve seen rich kids just like you all my life. You come down from your university dorm, or Mommy’s house, or wherever. You rile everyone up, you get a few miners shot, then you buy yourself out of any real trouble and go home to a comfortable job in a nice office. Meanwhile, the miners who got shot in your little passion play are still dead. And their parents and kids and brothers and sisters are still wheeling oxygen tanks around by the time they’re fifty.”

“I’m sorry you feel that way,” Ramirez said. He shook his head as he said it, and something about the movement looked odd to Li. “Did you know work has started up again in the Trinidad?” he asked, switching gears abruptly.

“No,” Li said, really caught by surprise this time.

“That change your opinions any?”

“No. Is this all you had in mind when you dragged me out here, or is there something else you want?”

“There is.” He leaned back against the fire-escape railing and crossed his arms. “Listen. We were approached recently. I won’t say by whom. But the gist of it is that there are parties who want to know what Dr. Sharifi was working on before the fire. And these parties would be willing to support the… um, action we discussed recently. Financially as well as in other ways.”

“I assume you’re talking about Andrej Korchow,” Li said. “And, no, I’m not interested in discussing anything with him. Certainly not anything under TechComm jurisdiction.”

“Not even if—”

“Not even if.”

Ramirez shrugged his shoulders, then winced and put a hand to his neck. And suddenly Li saw what it was that had bothered her about his kinetics.

He was nursing a newly installed cranial jack. It was camouflaged by a self-adhesive skin patch, but the bump under the patch and the puffy irritated flesh around the new implant were unmistakable.

“That home-brew equipment?” she asked, waving her cigarette toward his neck.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Those FreeNet jacks are a good deal on the front end, but the side effects are hell. You ever seen anyone die of a wet bug?”

“What’s your point?”

“Just that I wouldn’t be screwing around with illicit tech if I were you.” She ground out her cigarette on the fire-escape railing and sent it arcing into the vacant lot next door. “And you can pass that advice along to Daahl too. Call it a freebie.”

“We wouldn’t have to home-brew if the Security Council didn’t have a stranglehold on streamspace, would we?”

“Hey, don’t look at me, I just work for the man.”

“Oh, right.” Ramirez spat the words out hard and fast. “Just a good little soldier. Just following orders, no matter what the orders are. But then I guess that’s what XenoGen built you for.”

Li lashed out at him without thinking. She stopped herself so quickly that he didn’t notice he’d almost been hit. But she knew she would have broken bones if she hadn’t pulled the blow.

She backed off, frightened by what had almost happened. “You racist son of a bitch,” she whispered. “Don’t you ever say that to me again. You don’t know me. You don’t know a thing about me.”

According to the old and tired joke, there were only three reasons to take a meeting in realspace: sex, blackmail, and pure whites-of-the-eyes intimidation.

Li didn’t think she had much hope of intimidating Haas, but if he was going to torpedo her investigation, she figured he could goddamn well tell her so himself. And since files could always be faked or distorted, he could tell her face-to-face, where she’d have a court-admissible record of it—the one locked and coded in her own datafiles.

As it turned out, she could have saved herself the effort; by the time she got back up to his office, he was gone.

“If you’d like him to call you…” his secretary said. Her expression said that she knew exactly why Li was there and that Haas wouldn’t be coming back until she was good and gone.

“Never mind,” she said. She was reaching for the door when someone spoke her name from the shadows.

Bella stood in the door of Haas’s office. Barefoot, in a tank silk dress that clung to the slim curves of her hips and stomach. She beckoned. Li followed her through a hidden door and down a shadowy corridor into what could only be Haas’s private quarters.

They were spacious by station standards, furnished in the same expensive, aggressively modern style as the office. Bella didn’t turn the lights on, just let the refracted light of Compson’s World shine up through the floorports, casting disorienting upside-down shadows.

“You live here?” Li asked, unable to stop herself.

Bella looked up at Li, her face so close that Li could read the flowing blue letters of the MotaiSyndicate logo that curved along the lower edge of each perfectly patterned iris. “Does that shock you?” she asked.

Li had never been this close to a Syndicate construct, except for D Series soldiers and the occasional field officer. No women. And never, never anything like Bella.

She was taller than Li remembered, and she had a sharp wild scent that made Li think of high-mountain forests. She wondered fleetingly if the smell was perfume or a high-priced option engineered into her geneset by the MotaiSyndicate designers. She cleared her throat. “Why would it shock me?” she said. “It’s none of my business who you live with.”

Bella leaned closer. Starlight shifted over her face, casting the sculpted angles of her face into sharp relief, and Li saw that one fragile cheekbone was swollen by a fading bruise. She took Bella’s chin in her hand, turned her face to the light. “Who did that to you?”

Bella bit her lip. It was an unconscious gesture, fearful and sensual at the same time, and it made Li want to protect her.

More than protect her.

She jerked her hand away. “You could file charges,” she said, but she felt the futility of it even before she spoke.

Bella smiled. “You don’t like to see people hurt,” she said. “You’re softhearted. Just like Hannah was.”

“How well did you know her?” Li asked.

“Only well enough to know she was kind.”

“There was an entry in her datebook a few days before she died, just an initial, B. Did you have an appointment with her that week? Did you meet? Talk about something?”

Bella turned away and wandered around the room, the starlight flickering up through her flowing skirts. As she walked, she ran her fingers lightly over the chairs, the bookshelves, the back of a sofa. Li shuddered, feeling as if it were her own flesh Bella was touching, not dead virusteel and vat-leather.

“Sit down,” Bella said.

Li sat.

Bella ended her wandering in front of the sleek black box of Haas’s streamspace terminal. She looked down at it, her black hair spilling over her shoulders like water running down a coal face. She sprang the catch and opened the terminal, revealing a dense tangle of spintronics wrapped around bright shards of communications-grade Bose-Einstein condensates.

She slipped a pale finger into the rat’s nest of wires and skimmed it along the condensates. “They’re cold,” she said. “They’re always cold once they’re formatted. Curious. In the mine, they speak to me and no one else. Up here, they speak to everyone… and to me they’re just dead stones.”

Li looked at the terminal’s guts and waited to hear whatever Bella was trying to tell her.

“Can you hear them?” Bella asked. “In the mine? Can you?”

“Not really,” Li answered. “They just fry my internals, that’s all.”

“To me they sing. It’s the greatest thing I’ve ever done in my life, hearing them. It’s what I was made for. In a way no human could understand.”

“Is that what you did for Sharifi? Find crystals?”

Instead of answering, Bella bent over the ansible and lifted out one of the clear slivers of condensate. It glittered in the faint light. Bella held it up between them and looked through it, and Li saw the blue-violet shimmer of her eyes refracted through the crystal.

“Do you actually know how they work?” Bella asked.

Li shrugged. “I learned what I needed to pass my commissioning test. Beyond that… well, who knows how they really work?”

Bella looked away, her eyes shadowed by the dark fall of hair. “Hannah knew. She knew everything about them.”

“Bella,” Li said, speaking quietly, “what was Sharifi doing in the mine the day she died?”

“Working.”

“No. She went down there to meet someone. Who was it?”

Bella reached into the tangle of chips and wires to replace the crystal. “If I remembered,” she said at last, “don’t you think I’d tell you?” But her face was turned away from Li, into darkness.

“I’m trying to catch the person who killed her, Bella. I need your help. I need any help I can get.”

Bella looked at Li for a moment without speaking, then came across the room, knelt in front of her chair between her feet, and laid her pale smooth hands on Li’s thighs. “I want to help,” she whispered. “You have to believe me. I’d do anything to help you.”

Bella’s hands were hot, even through the thick fabric of Li’s uniform. She knew she should put some distance between them, but leaning back into the deep chair seemed too much like an invitation.

And Bella wasn’t looking for that. She was looking for help. For someone to stand up for her, to be the friend Sharifi seemed to have been. She wasn’t looking for Li to get in line behind Haas and who knew how many others to take advantage of her. And the mere fact that she seemed to think she had to offer it made Li sick.

She took Bella’s hands in hers. She put them away from her. She extricated herself from the chair and stepped around the kneeling woman. Bella made no move to stop her.

“Have you ever met Andrej Korchow?” Li asked when she’d gotten far enough away to think straight.

Something snapped closed behind Bella’s eyes. “Who?”

“Korchow.”

“No. Why?”

“I think he was paying Sharifi for information about her project.”

“No!” Bella stood up abruptly. “That’s not the way Hannah was. She didn’t care about money.”

“For someone who didn’t care about money, she spent a lot of time fund-raising.”

“She had to do that. Putting fiche in the printers and cubes in the computers. That’s what she called it. But she didn’t care about it.”

“Then what did she care about? What was it all for?”

Bella stood up and smoothed her dress over her waist in the habitual gesture of someone raised in the low rotational gravity of the Syndicate’s orbital stations. “It was about the crystals. She talked about them all the time. What people were doing to them. She wanted to protect them.”

“From what?”

Bella shrugged. “From… this.” She made a gesture that encompassed Haas’s streamspace terminal, the planet below them, the whole of UN space.

“The miners think the condensates are dying, Bella. Are they?”

She laughed harshly. “We have twenty years of digging left, thirty maybe. The geologists can never agree on the exact number, but what does it matter? The reports never get past management.” She smiled. “It’s AMC’s dirty little secret.”

“Did Sharifi discover that secret?”

“It’s why she came here.”

“Is that what happened in the glory hole, Bella? Did Sharifi try to stop Haas from digging? Did they fight over it?”

“I told you,” Bella said, her voice cracking with frustration, “I don’t know. I can’t remember. But that’s where you have to look. To the mine. To the crystals.”

AMC Station: 22.10.48.

Li had seen her own specs once, at a technical briefing on a troopship off the occulted side of Palestra’s fifth moon, the night before her first combat drop.

It had been excruciating, even in a room of people who had no reason to know that she wasn’t the legally enlisted one-quarter construct she appeared to be. And it changed her life.

She sat in the briefing room, watching the codes scroll up the screen before her, listening to the techs discuss tensile-strength equations and bone-core profiles, self-evolving immune systems, designer intestinal and respiratory flora. And she understood for the first time in her life what she was, what all constructs were. They were beasts of burden. The culmination of ten thousand years of human intervention in Earth’s genetic pool. The universal working animal of the interstellar age.

That knowledge stuck with her through all the jumps and all the new planets that came after that briefing. It lurked at the back of her mind whenever she hefted a heavy load, put in a long day’s work, slipped into streamspace, took a lover in her arms.

She thought it again now as she crouched on the practice mat and watched McCuen strip off his sweat-soaked T-shirt, baring a freckled torso that spoke of a good exercise regimen and an only mildly tweaked geneset. A little tougher, stronger, stockier than human norm, but still the product of two parents and the random collision of forty-six chromosomes. Still street legal and well beyond the long arm of TechComm.

“Hot as hell in here,” McCuen said, and threw his shirt to the edge of the mat. “And that’s leaving aside the fact that you’re driving me into massive oxygen debt. You sure you’re not cheating?”

“Swear to God,” Li said. “Got my whole system powered down.” She stood, pulled off her own shirt, and wiped her dripping face with it. “See that?” She pointed to the ridged muscle on her stomach. “Worked my ass off for that. Something you might bear in mind next time you decide to sleep late instead of dragging your sorry tail to the gym.”

There was a mirror on the far wall, and as she turned, she caught a glimpse of herself. She saw what she always saw: stocky, hard-muscled body; genetically preset 6 percent body fat; chest flat enough to make feminine modesty as theoretical as athletic support.

It took a hell of a lot of work to maintain a military-grade wire job. Hours of gym time just to keep up the muscle strength and bone density that protected you from stress fractures. And though Li’s construct genes gave her the luxury of skimping on that work, she didn’t. It was her one vanity.

She glanced in the mirror again. Cohen was right, she thought critically; she looked thin. Too many jumps, too little gym time. She ought to get Sharpe to send up a case of hormone shots before she overdid it and pulled something.

“You don’t go in for the smart tattoos, huh?” McCuen said, pointing to the baby blue UNSC on her left shoulder.

She’d gotten the tattoo along with her whole platoon sometime during the wild week of drinking that had followed her first live-fire action. The names of her fellow initiates had slipped out of soft memory, but she still felt the cold sharp sting of the needle, could still see the intent face of the dockside tattoo artist bent over his work.

“Good thing it’s not on the other arm,” McCuen said. “Scar would have gone straight through it.”

Li twisted to get a glimpse of the blue letters, the first time she could remember looking at them in years. She grinned, acutely aware of the clichéd ridiculousness of the tattoo. “Perish the thought!”

She’d set up the Security-personnel physical-training program for fun more than anything else, and any benefit to on-station morale was a side perk. The main point of the sessions was that they created an at least arguably official excuse to round up the half dozen Security personnel on-station and tussle. She wasn’t going to give them some line of crap about how practicing carefully choreographed moves with a line soldier whose internals were powered down was going to open up glorious new career opportunities. She just set a time, showed up, and left it at that. If they wanted to come, they could. If they didn’t, they didn’t.

And McCuen had wanted it. Wanted it enough to show up, morning after morning, and take the punishment she doled out. He was on fire, a single track of idealistic ambition. When she worked with him Li could feel the old heat coming on, the sharp edge of a happiness she hadn’t felt since long before Metz. If she could get him a ticket off Compson’s, she caught herself thinking, maybe her time here wouldn’t be a dead loss after all.

“You’ve really never been back here since you enlisted?” he asked, as they worked on the footing for a particularly complicated throw Li was trying to teach him. “Why not? Bad memories?”

Li loafed over to the side of the mat, took a drink of water, wiped her face and hands. “Not really. Just never had a reason to.”

“No family?”

She hesitated. “Not that I know of.”

They worked through the move a few more times in silence, McCuen picking it up quickly and grinning with delight when Li finally let him throw her at something like full speed—an indulgence she knew was a mistake the moment her sore shoulder hit the mats.

“No family makes it easier, I guess,” he said, picking up where they’d left off. “My parents aren’t so hot on the Corps. They’ve been reading about wetware side effects, jump amnesia.” He smiled and shrugged, trying to pass off the concern as his parents’, something only old people would worry about. Li answered the implied question anyway.

“If you cooperate with the psychtechs and back everything up carefully, you shouldn’t forget much. Otherwise… sure, you can lose a lot. But even if something goes wrong, it’s not the way it was ten years ago. They’ve been minimizing jumps, moving personnel around much less. Even enlisted troops. Hell, you could pull a permanent assignment on one planet, never jump more than a half dozen times in your whole career. If the peace holds.”

“If the peace holds. That’s the kicker, isn’t it?”

“What do you want?” Li asked, amused to hear herself echoing Haas’s words of a few weeks ago. “Promises?”

A flush bloomed behind McCuen’s freckles. “That’s not what I meant. It’s just… the war gave a lot of colonials a chance to prove themselves. People like you. People who would never have gotten a shot at command in peacetime. Now that’s gone. And back home it’s even worse. We’ve got the multiplanetaries doing business with the Syndicates, trading away what few jobs there were on Compson’s for locals. There are mines on the southern hemisphere that already have D Series constructs working underground. Replacing miners. My dad keeps telling me to stay home and run the store, but where’s the future in it? Once the multiplanetaries figure out they can use Syndicate labor, that’s the end of the independents and the bootleggers. And no more bootleggers means no more UN currency on-planet. And no more UN dollars means company scrip only, which means the company stores are going to finally squeeze out the rest of us. Things keep going the way they’re going, and there’ll be the Ring-side multis and the Syndicates, and that’s it. Nothing left for the little guy except a government post. If you can get one.”

“They really have D Series working Bose-Einstein deposits?” Li asked. She’d never heard that, couldn’t imagine how TechComm had allowed it.

“Working everywhere,” McCuen said. “You name it. Why hire a born worker when you can sign a thirty-year contract and get someone who’s programmed to do the job for free and can be replaced with another clone if they get sick or start causing trouble?”

Why indeed?Li thought.

“Hey,” McCuen said. “Sorry to rant. You want to grab dinner tonight with some of the other day-shift guys? Catch a game or something?”

“Can’t.” Li grinned. “Hot date.”

McCuen looked at her and bit his lip.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Just… it’s not with Bella, is it?”

“Excuse me?”

“Small station, that’s all. Rumors travel.”

“Well, in this case, they’re unfounded. Whatever they are.”

“Good,” McCuen said. He seemed about to add something else, then stopped. “I just wouldn’t like to see you get hurt,” he said finally.

Li was about to ask who he thought was going to hurt her when Kintz walked into the gym with his usual gang of sidekicks.

“Morning,” he said to Brian. “Getting a little private tutoring?”

McCuen flushed, just as Kintz had intended him to, and Li groaned internally; McCuen would never command a grade-school class, let alone combat troops, if he couldn’t learn to brush off that kind of nonsense.

“Feeling neglected?” she shot at Kintz. “I can fix that.” And within a minute the others had taken her unsubtle hints about applying themselves to the weight machines, and she and Kintz had squared off against each other on the last practice mat away from the door.

Kintz was fast and accurate, and even with his internals powered down for safety purposes he moved with the surefooted speed of a professional. Normally it would have been an unadulterated pleasure to be faced with such an able opponent. But there was something about Kintz that made Li not want to get into the clinches with him. Not want to touch him, even.

She settled into her rhythm, feeling out her opponent, looking for whatever she could use against him. Kintz was good. Far better than anyone else on-station. But he wasn’t as good as he thought he was, and that faint tinge of complacency gave Li a hole big enough to drive a tank through.

She moved him around the mat, still assessing his footwork, letting him feel like he was getting a few hits in. It was a necessary sacrifice given his longer reach, but every time he landed a blow she regretted the pounds she’d dropped since Metz—pounds that would have spared her ribs and given her something to push back with when he closed on her.

She was starting to see something she could work with, though. Kintz preferred to hit right-handed and his footwork was particularly clumsy when she pushed him back and to the left. The trick of course was to play off that weakness without alerting him to it. And to do that she had to stay outside, mix it up, keep him moving. And of course let him get in those sucker hits.

She drew him into the middle of the mat, dancing around him. He caught her on a lucky kick, missing her knee but momentarily catching her instep. It threw her off-balance just long enough for him to catch up with her.

They grappled, each of them trying for a grip, for purchase. He had caught her in an awkward position, and she felt him improving his hold, getting a wrestler’s lock on her. She planted a leg, grunting with the effort, leaned into him with her good shoulder, and threw him.

The flash of anger in his eyes was unmistakable, but he recovered his balance and his attitude quickly.

“Nice trick,” he said. “Guess you didn’t just sleep your way to the top.”

“Wouldn’t you like to know,” Li answered, resisting the urge to stamp on his fingers.

McCuen and the others had drifted over, drawn by the thud of Kintz’s body hitting the mat. “If you think this is worth watching, you’ve got a lot to learn,” Li told them, and they drifted away again, looking embarrassed.

Kintz was pushing her now. He’d been doing his own weighing and balancing during the meet-and-greet sparring; now he was going after her bad arm with the fierce instincts of a street fighter. He was getting winded, though. She heard the faint whistle of constricting air passages every time he sucked breath. That was something, she thought, and ducked in under his guard, chancing a risky move.

Five years ago it would have worked. But she wasn’t as fast as she’d been five years ago. He caught her hip with a blow that sent her staggering, and in that fraction of a second’s hesitation, he had her. He went after her bad arm, and she struggled to keep him from getting a grip on it. When things sorted out, he had her in a neck lock.

When he spoke, his voice was so twisted by the effort of holding the lock on her that she didn’t at first register the sounds as words. Then she understood them and felt a cold rush of adrenaline course through her.

“I could snap your neck right now,” he said. “Who’d ever think it was anything but an accident? I could tell them you wanted to fight with safeties off, and you just shit ran out of luck.”

She tried to slip her hands under his arm and get the pressure off her neck, but he jerked at her hard enough to put the thought out of her mind.

“You think you’re special, don’t you?” he whispered. “Think you can just walk in and start poking sticks at people? Think we’ll all just jump to it? Right, Major? Whatever you say, Major?”

Li bent her knees, felt out Kintz’s balance, took a chance, and managed to throw him again.

“Piss off, Kintz. You and Haas. You are his errand boy, aren’t you?”

Kintz wiped his mouth, and his hand came away red. “You don’t have a fucking clue, do you?” he said. Then he was on his feet, and they were back at it.

She never figured out how he got by her the next time, but suddenly he had her. His right arm snaked out and caught her under the jaw. His left twisted her bad arm behind her back so tightly she felt ceramsteel grate and creak against cartilage. He lifted her onto her toes, using his height to deny her leverage. She felt his ribs pressing into her back, smelled sweat and cheap aftershave. She gathered herself, braced her feet, textbook fashion, and tried to throw him.

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.”

“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.

SecServ, UNSC Headquarters: 22.10.48.

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.”

Nguyen sighed, picked up a fiche, scanned and signed it, and moved it to the other side of her desk.

“Well, that’s over with,” she said. “I hope it wasn’t more unpleasant than it had to be. I think you understand my reasons for raising the issue. Anything else?”

Li started to speak, then hesitated, weighing the risks of telling Nguyen about Korchow. “Yes,” she said. “I had a strange talk with someone the other day. I’m not sure how to proceed.”

Something sparked behind Nguyen’s dark eyes as Li told her about Korchow, and she had a sudden uncomfortable conviction that her meeting with Korchow was the real news Nguyen had been waiting to hear. Maybe even the real reason Nguyen had sent her to Compson’s in the first place. But that was crazy, of course. Even Nguyen didn’t control everything and everyone.

“What makes you think Korchow was in contact with Sharifi?” Nguyen asked.

Li downloaded an image of Korchow’s card and flashed it onto a shared substream. “I found this in her datebook.”

“Well,” Nguyen said, looking at it. “Maybe she was just buying antiques from him.”

“Sure she was.”

“How sure are you he’s Syndicate?”

“I’m not. But he had the look. And if he wasn’t Syndicate, he was doing everything he could to make me think he was.”

“So. Sharifi was talking to a Syndicate agent… about her work, we have to assume. And now the same agent wants to talk to you.”

“What do I do?” Li asked.

Nguyen’s lips thinned in a chilly smile. “You talk to him.”

Helena: 22:10:48.

Korchow’s address put him square in the center of Helena’s commercial district, a five-minute walk, air quality permitting, from the old colonial administration building. But Li had a first stop to make before she saw Korchow: St. Joseph’s Home for Girls. And unlike Korchow’s shop, St. Joe’s wasn’t in the nicer part of town.

Compson’s capital city predated the Bose-Einstein Rush. The elegantly dilapidated domes of the capitol building and governor’s mansion recalled the old home-rule days before the Bose-Einstein boom. The commercial zone’s masonry colonnades and office blocks reminded visitors that Helena had once been more than just a company town, Compson’s World more than a Trusteeship. Still, there was nothing quaint or old-fashioned about the slums Li’s cab rolled through on the long drive in from the spaceport. They were brand-name UN-wide standard-issue: market democracy in action, legislated by the General Assembly, bankrolled by the Interplanetary Monetary Fund.

Everywhere she looked, she saw the mines. The Anaconda was half a continent away, the next closest Bose-Einstein mine in the remote northern hemisphere, but even at that distance they stamped their mark on the city. Acid rain painted long sulfur-yellow streaks on the composite board walls of the housing projects. A permanent smog of coal dust hung in the air, fed by pea-coal fires in every kitchen. Blue-faced ex-miners shuffled along the sidewalks in the final stages of black-lung, come to the capital to live off their comp checks.

On the outskirts of the industrial zone the cab passed a long weedy stretch of open space. Goalposts leaned crookedly at either end of the field. They’d been white once, but the paint was peeling and streaked with rust. Someone, probably some local welfare group, had taken care of the grass; otherwise, it would long ago have lost its battle against the burning rain.

Eight players were scattered across the field, a few in uniform, the rest dressed in street clothes. As the car passed, one player broke upfield, running with the long sure stride of a born striker. The sun passed out of the clouds just as he took his shot, and a ray of sunlight stabbed across the field, silvering the striker’s legs, the taut arc of the goalie’s body as he leapt to intercept the shot.

Li shuddered and looked away, back into the half dark of the cab.

St. Joe’s sprawled in the shadow of the poorest projects. It had one permanent building—a drafty-looking parish church whose brick facade was overdue for pointing. The rest of the orphanage was housed in colonial-era modular units that weren’t much more than Quonset huts.

The sister who met Li at the door wore blue jeans, a flannel shirt, and a rawboned no-bullshit air that made Li wonder if she were ex-militia.

“So you’re the one who wants to know about Hannah,” she said. “What are you, half-XenoGen? That why you’re interested?”

“I’m the senior UN officer on-station,” Li said. “It’s my job to be interested.”

The sister narrowed her eyes at Li for a moment. “You’d better keep your cab,” she said. “You won’t find another one in this neighborhood.” She waved her into a long, dimly lit corridor. “Sorry for the lack of a welcoming committee, but everyone else has class now. You’ll have to make do with the principal.”

“Thanks, Sister…”

“Just Ted.” She grinned. “For Theresa. Class lets out in two minutes. We’d better beat a strategic retreat to my office.”

They walked back through the rat’s nest of tin-roofed buildings, down linoleum-floored hallways, past long racks of children’s winter coats and school bags. The smell of chalk and Magic Markers seeped out from under the classroom doors, along with the disciplined refrain and chorus of every Catholic-school class everywhere. As they passed one room, Li heard a voice that could only belong to a nun say, “You’re not as cute as you think you are,” provoking a quickly smothered wave of childish laughter.

The bell rang ten minutes to the hour, and a noisy, laughing, rambunctious flood of uniformed schoolgirls poured out into the corridors. Sister Ted waded through the flood with the decisive step of a woman who expected people to make way for her. And make way they did; for the next several minutes, Li shadowed her through an unrelenting barrage of Good morning, Sister Ted and Excuse me, Sister Ted and Hello, Sister Ted.

“You’ve got them well trained,” Li said.

The other woman turned a sharp unforgiving look on her. “We wouldn’t help them by cutting them any slack, Major. You can bet no one else ever will.”

“How many of your students are genetics?”

“Look around and take a guess.”

Li looked at the sea of young faces, so many of them the same two or three faces. “Two-thirds, I’d say.”

“Then you’d be right.”

“Any jobs for them when they get out of here?”

“Not unless they’re five times as good as any human who wants the job. And not unless they’re polite enough to not scare people.” The nun threw another of her sharp looks at Li. “I bet you learned how to keep your mouth shut early.”

“You’d bet right, then.” Li grinned. “I can’t walk into this place without the creeping feeling that Sister Vic is going to rise from the grave and ask me for my hall pass.”

That got a laugh.

“What can I tell you?” Sister Ted asked, when they were settled in the dilapidated relative peace of her office.

“What Sharifi was doing here two weeks ago for a start.”

“Making a donation. We have a lot of Ring-side donors.”

“Do all of them come here to visit personally?”

“Hannah was a former student. And she was extremely generous.”

Li couldn’t help glancing around the run-down office at that and thinking of the cheap buildings the school was housed in.

“She gave the things that counted,” Ted said. “Books. Food money. And she guaranteed every student college tuition at the best school she could get admitted to. Every student. Do you have any idea what that means to the girls we get here?”

“I can imagine.”

“I imagine you can do more than imagine.”

“How well did you know Sharifi?” Li asked, brushing the implied question aside.

Ted smiled. “Not that well. She was my age, you know. The women who would have taught her are all long gone.”

“What did she visit for, then?”

“To talk to me.”

“About?”

“A new gift.”

“Look,” Li said. “I’m investigating Sharifi’s death, not your school. Can you just spare me the effort of dragging this out of you?”

The sister’s eyes widened slightly. “Can you just tell me what you want to know, then, and spare me the effort of guessing?”

“I want to know who killed her.”

“Oh.” Sister Ted pursed her lips and made a faint blowing sound. That was all the reaction Li’s news got from her. But then Li got the impression this was a woman who was used to bad news. “She seemed like her usual self. I’d only ever met her instream before that, of course.” She gestured to the ramshackle bulk of an old VR rig gathering dust in the corner of the office. “But she was adamant that she wanted to wrap this gift up in person.” She shifted in her chair, setting the old springs creaking. “If I’d thought anything like that was going on, I would have tried to help, Major. I liked her. And not just because she got our girls to college. She was the kind of person you just liked, somehow.” She grinned. “Well, the kind of person I liked. I imagine she pissed the hell out of most people.”

“What about the gift? Anything unusual there?”

Sister Ted twisted in her chair to reach a file drawer. “Have a look at it,” she said, handing a thick sheaf of paper to Li. “The digital original’s on file Ring-side.”

Li flipped through the document, her heart beating faster with every page she read. It was a will. A will that left everything Sharifi owned to St. Joseph’s School.

“Congratulations,” Li said. “You’re rich.”

“I know. I would have expected to feel better about it.”

Li handed the papers back, and Sister Ted set them on the desk, absently, as if she were thinking of something else. Or someone else.

There was a problem finding Korchow’s street. The cabbie kept circling through lunch-hour traffic, insisting that he knew the address, that the turn was in the next block, or the next one. Finally Li got out and walked.

She stumbled onto the shop abruptly, turning a blind corner into a narrow flagstoned alley and bumping up against a spotlit window full of old carpets and inlaid furniture. A gold-lettered sign readANTIQUITIES and below it, in dark red, she saw the same intricate lozenge design she had seen on Korchow’s card.

He sat at a small desk toward the back, in a carved laminate chair that was either an astronomically expensive generation-ship artifact or a very professional forgery. A tank silk raincoat and a stylish gas mask lay neatly across a nearby table, as if Korchow had just come in or was just leaving.

“Major,” he said. “What a surprise. I hope you didn’t have too much trouble finding me?”

“I did, actually. Pretty out-of-the-way place to run a business from. Must cut into your profits.”

Korchow smiled. “I have a certain reputation among discerning collectors. Can I get you something? Tea?”

He bustled through a curtained doorway into the back of the shop, and Li heard the clink of glass on china, the sound of running water. He returned with two covered teacups, an ornately carved glazed-iron teapot, and a sleek black box that he set carefully on the desk between them.

He served the tea, which was excellent. Then he picked up the box and handed it to her. “I thought you might like to see it,” he said. “You seemed quite put out by it the last time we met.”

She turned the device over, feeling the weight of it, trying unsuccessfully to scan it.

“Second button from the left,” Korchow said.

She pressed it. The box beeped discreetly. A bioluminescent display window began counting thousandths of seconds. Li’s security programs flashed a yellow alert on her retina and went dead as her internals cut out.

Korchow leaned across the desk and took back the box. “Some things are better kept private,” he said.

“What do you want from me?” Li asked.

“Nothing complicated. Just to do business. Business that could be to our mutual advantage.” He paused and fingered the controls of the jamming device.

“It’s working fine,” Li snapped. “And it’s giving me a headache. So just tell me what you want and get it over with.”

“I represent parties who are, shall we say, interested in recent events in the Anaconda mine. Particularly in the aspects of the explosion that your, er, office seems to be investigating.”

“You want information about Sharifi,” Li said.

“Among other things.” Korchow smiled. “I can see how difficult this is for you, Major. You’d rather halo-jump into enemy territory than sit over tea talking to a Syndicate spy. I understand better than you can imagine. But we are not always called to serve in the ways we prefer. This is the price of owing allegiance to a greater good.” Steam curled from his cup, veiling his narrow, intelligent face. “We’ve met before,” he said. “Do you remember? Or have they taken that from you?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I was with the Thirty-second on Gilead. I fought on Cale’s Hill.”

Li looked at him, her face stiff. She’d commanded that assault.

“You don’t remember me, I suppose. Corps files are so… unreliable. But I remember you. I remember with perfect clarity.” He unbuttoned the top two buttons of his shirt, pulled the cloth aside to show Li a chewed-up slash of scar tissue at the base of his neck. “I was sitting in the sun. The first warmth after a cold night. Drinking a cup of tea, of all things.”

An image of a thin, stubble-faced soldier flashed through Li’s mind. A spill of dark tea and darker blood runneling over boot-packed dirt.

She looked at the wound. The shooter had pulled high and left, missing the spine by a hair. “I remember,” she said finally. “There was a crosswind. I overcorrected.”

Korchow buttoned his shirt. “Do you remember what happened after that? Or have your psychiatric technicians deleted it?”

Li watched Korchow, her heart pounding.

“I was still conscious when you arrived,” he went on. “I remember that your captain’s insignia was ripped off another uniform and sewn on with mismatched thread. I remember your smile—quite a lovely one, by the way. I remember you talking to your lieutenants. They asked you what to do with the wounded. Do you recall what you told them?”

“I told them to shoot everyone still breathing.”

“Don’t think I blame you,” Korchow said. “Though I do owe my life to the fact that some of your soldiers had more… scruples than you did. Still, it was a moment of revelation. A conversion of sorts. Do you know what I thought as I looked up at you?”

Li stirred restlessly. “How the hell would I?”

“I thought, She’s one of us. She’s like us. She can’t help but be merciful. I saw your face, you see. And I thought you would spare us because of what you were. Because of who you were. When you ordered them to shoot us, I understood, finally and completely, what they had stolen from you.”

Li watched the hypnotic blinking of the status lights on the jamming device. She probed her memory, poking at the Gilead files, looking for the cracks, the places where the emotions welled up between the digitized data and gave the lie to the official story. They should never have sent us, she thought. And the thought that she could think that—that she already did think it—frightened her more than anything she remembered doing on Gilead.

“No one’s stolen anything from me,” she said finally. “I sold it. And why, and when, and what for is none of your business.”

Korchow watched her over the rim of his teacup. When he spoke, his voice was cool and detached, and he looked up at the ceiling instead of at her. “I’ve been on five Trusteeships in the last eight years. And I’ve seen the same game, a sport I suppose, on all of them. A poor man’s sport, popular in the Trusteeships, but not at all known in the inner worlds. The enthusiasts breed male chickens—”

“Cocks,” Li said.

“Cocks, then. They breed them to kill each other. The fights are held at night and in secret; the sport is illegal on most worlds. Spectators arrive at the appointed place and hour, lay bets, drink various types of hard liquor. Then the handler of each bird takes it from its cage, attaches razor blades to its spurs, and sends it into the ring to peck and claw a fellow chicken to death.”

Korchow put down his teacup and leaned across the desk to pour Li another cup of tea. “Good tea, isn’t it?” he said.

“Yes.”

“I get it from a friend in New Ceylon. They appreciate the art of tea there. And the art of the deal. Ever been there?”

“No.”

“Mmm.” Korchow settled back in his chair, cup in hand. “Between tournaments the fighting cock lives in oriental luxury. He is a prince, a diva, a satrap. He knows nothing of the ordinary woes and sorrows of his species. But each pleasure we savor must be purchased with pain—a principle I am sure you appreciate, Major. And even the most spectacular fighting cock is, after all, a chicken.” He drew a taut index finger across his throat. “I wonder what those cocks would say about their lives if you could get inside the cage with them. I wonder if they’d tell you they chose this fate. That they’d sold their life, their death, and gotten a fair price for it.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Li said. “I’m not a chicken.”

“No you’re not.” Korchow smiled. “And I have a powerful presentiment that you’re about to tell me to get on with it and stop wasting your time.”

Li raised an eyebrow.

“I represent certain interested parties,” Korchow continued after a few beats.

“The Syndicates.”

“Let’s not name names just yet. In any case, at the time of Hannah Sharifi’s death, these parties were engaged in… ongoing negotiations. Their negotiations had reached a point at which the involved parties expected to receive specific items of information from Dr. Sharifi. That information was never received. The parties believe that you, as the UN officer investigating her death, are in a position to deliver it.”

“You want the datasets from Sharifi’s live field run.”

“Ah. The direct approach. How like you.”

“You can forget about it. I don’t have them.”

Korchow rocked back in his chair as if he were dodging a blow. “Now that is a most interesting statement. First, because we have assumed until this moment that you did in fact have them. Second, and correct me if I err, your answer suggests that if you were to acquire this information, you might not be absolutely opposed to sharing it.”

Li shrugged.

“I think,” said Korchow, “this is the juncture at which I am supposed to inform you that my… clients would be prepared to reward you liberally for your assistance. In money, or in ways that might, in the end, mean more to you than money.”

“Are we talking about chickens again?” Li said.

Korchow threw back his head and laughed. “Major,” he said, still laughing. “You more than live up to your reputation. No, we are not talking about chickens. We are talking about a level of remuneration that would allow you to, how shall I put this?… decide when and where and for whom you strap on the razor blades.”

“Or?”

“Or incorporation. What you would call political sanctuary. Into the Syndicate of your choice.”

“Christ, Korchow. I’ve seen the Syndicates. I’ve seen how you people live. Why the hell would I want that?”

“I’ll leave you to answer that question for yourself, Major.”

The bells on the shop door tinkled. Li turned just in time to see a new customer walk in. A tall man, dressed in ministerial gray. A diplomat or banker. Definitely not local.

“Mr. Lind!” Korchow beamed at the new arrival. “You’ve come back to look at the Heyerdal again? I’ll be at your disposal momentarily.” He pulled a knickknack off the shelf above his desk and began wrapping it in hand-printed rice paper. “I know you’ll enjoy this,” he told Li as he tied the package with a length of green ribbon. “It’s really quite an exceptional little piece. One of my personal favorites.” He smiled. “Consider it a symbol of my good intentions. And… other things.”

Li took the package without having actually seen what was in it, let herself be propelled to the counter, swiped her palm across the portable scanner Korchow held up. She wondered how he explained the absence of a credit implant to his clients. Probably faked allergies or religious objections.

“How can I reach you?” she asked.

Korchow smiled a bland, guiltless shopkeeper’s smile. “I’ll put you on the mailing list,” he said—and Li felt his hand in the small of her back, politely but firmly propelling her out into the street.

When she turned the corner, she stopped, looked back to make sure she couldn’t be seen from the shop, and unraveled the elaborately folded rice paper. Korchow had sold her a generation-ship-era figurine, molded in plastic. It had once been brightly colored, but the paint had flaked and faded, leaving the figure’s skin—or were those scales?—mottled.

It was a woman, or rather a caricature of one. Long hair cascaded over her bare shoulders, and her breasts were only hinted at. Instead of legs, she had a silver tail with fins and scales. A mermaid. Half one thing, half the other, at home in neither world.

Li felt the ridges of raised lettering on the base of the figurine. She turned it over and read MADE IN CHINA, in block letters, and, immediately below it, DISNEY ®.

She rewrapped the figurine carefully, returned it to the bag, and unfolded the credit slip Korchow had tucked into the wrapping.

“Son of a bitch!” she said when she read the figure at the bottom of the printout.

It was for four times her monthly salary. And it was a credit, not a debit. A transfer into an account Li had never opened, in a Freetown bank she had never heard of. It looked like Korchow had decided to pay in advance… and leave Li to do the explaining if anyone put the pieces together.

Zona Libre: 20 Mar 48.

Even shunted through an organic interface, an Emergent as vast as Cohen left a wide wake in streamspace.

Li found him in the Zona Libre, at a back table in a place called the 5th Column. She had to flash ID to get past the bouncers, and when she finally convinced them to let her in, she thought at first she’d come to the wrong place. Then someone called her name, and she looked over and saw Roland’s coppery curls gleaming against the oxblood velvet of a long banquette that curved along the shadowy back wall.

“I need to talk to you,” she said, sliding onto the empty place beside him. “Now.”

He smiled—an open, uncomplicated smile that was a million light-years away from any look that had ever crossed Cohen’s face. “Sorry,” Roland said. “I’m just the hired help.”

“Where’s Cohen, then?”

“He stepped out for a moment. Drop him a line and let him know you’re here.”

“No, I’ll just wait.”

“Okay.” Roland shrugged. “He’ll figure it out soon enough. And he won’t be gone long anyway; dinner’s waiting.”

Li followed Roland’s glance and saw pale creamy butter over ice, bread rolls as crisp and brown as chickens’ eggs, an open wine bottle with a French label. Two waiters hovered expectantly in the wings, waiting for the sign to serve the next course.

Roland offered Li wine, though he himself drank nothing. He gamely made small talk with her, but Li got the distinct impression that he thought she was some kind of not very interesting old person. For her part, she watched Roland with bemused embarrassment. What had she seen in him? He was nothing, except for those golden eyes. A cookie-cutter college boy with pretty hair. Barely worth looking twice at.

She glanced around the big room, keeping half an ear on Roland’s chatter. The place wasn’t really a nightclub; more of a fancy restaurant with live music. All velvet and carefully pressed linen and carefully dressed customers. Everything plush, flash, top-shelf. The guests all laughed a little too often and talked a little too loud, as if they had come there in order to be seen and were determined to get their money’s worth. The women wore smart dresses, programmed to cling to the right curves and camouflage the wrong curves. A few people wore formal jumpsuits—Corps brass or officers off rich merchant ships who couldn’t quite get out of the habit of low-g clothing—but Li’s Security Council black fatigues were out-of-place enough to make people stare.

The stage lights came up. Someone tapped a glass for silence, and the crowd hushed reluctantly. A live band walked onto the stage, went through the usual tuning-up ritual, and launched into a song that everyone but Li seemed to have heard before.

The singer was a woman. Small, vaguely familiar-looking, with a headful of black cowlicks and heavy-framed glasses that could only, in these days of cheap genework, be vanity. She was good; good enough that several songs had gone by before Li remembered to check the time and wonder what the hell Cohen was doing.

She took out a cigarette, and Roland leapt to light it for her. He’d probably be helping her across the street next. She smoked the cigarette down slowly while the singer’s smoky voice wound around them, talking about failed love affairs, lonely roads, new beginnings.

“I thought that was you,” Cohen murmured just beside her.

When she turned around Roland was gone. His wide-open face had turned into a shadowy territory of shifting planes and angles, fleeting expressions. His long-fingered hands rested on the table with inhuman stillness. Even the golden eyes now seemed dark, dangerous, deeper than oceans.

“Christ,” Li said. “How do you do that?”

“Do what?” he asked, and smiled slyly. “Oh, you mean my animal magnetism and natural charisma?” The smile turned into a full-blown grin. “Don’t be too hard on Roland. After all, he’s all of twenty-three. When I was that age, I lived in a government-subsidized lab with bad lighting, couldn’t put two sentences together, and played chess twenty-four hours a day. A game which, I might add, you couldn’t get me to play now for anything—” He stopped and smiled up at the ceiling. “Well… almost anything.”

He unfolded Li’s napkin with a flourish and handed it to her. “So,” he said, refilling her wineglass, “to what do I owe this exceptional and unexpected happiness? Are you here for the pleasure of my company, or do you just need something?”

“What I need,” Li said, “is advice.”

“And you shall have it. After you’ve had dinner with me. Deal?”

“Deal,” Li said, but when the waiter handed her the menu, she quickly realized two things. First, there were no prices on it. Second, even though it was written in plain Spanish, she’d never heard of half the foods it listed.

“Huh,” she said, accessing her hard files, trying to figure out what horse’s feet were and whether a girolle was a bird or a mushroom.

“The oysters are excellent,” Cohen suggested.

“Fine.” She shut the menu. “Oysters.”

Cohen gave the order and leaned back, arms crossed. “Now then,” he said as calmly as if they were discussing the season’s gallery openings, “what’s so urgent that you have to hunt me down and interrupt a good meal to talk about it? Would it be foolish to imagine that it’s not unrelated to your little tête-à-tête with Korchow this morning?”

Li choked on her wine and coughed into her napkin. “Still spying on me, are we?” she asked when she could speak again.

“Don’t be snitty, darling. Technically, it’s Nguyen I’m spying on, not you. And anyway, it’s how I’m written. Naturally nosy. Neither of us can fight our code, can we?”

Li narrowed her eyes at that but said nothing.

“Oh dear,” Cohen said. “Here comes your thunderous, we’ll-deal-with-this-later look. Have some more wine. And tell me how you like it.”

Li took another sip of wine, still staring at Cohen unsmilingly over the rim of her glass.

“Well?” he asked, leaning forward.

“It’s good.”

“Good? That’s all you can say? I might as well pour it into the gutter.”

“You gave it to me,” Li pointed out.

“The more fool I.”

“Why were you spying on—”

“Madame’s oysters,” the waiter said, leaning over Li’s shoulder to set an immense plate before her. She looked down at it while the waiter served Cohen’s dish. Twelve fist-sized oysters glistened nakedly up at her under the spotlights.

“Are they dead yet?” she asked.

“They won’t feel a thing,” Cohen told her. “And do try to chew before you swallow. You’d be a much happier person if you just concentrated on your food properly.”

The oysters were fantastic, of course. Everything Cohen had ever fed her was fantastic. They tasted of salt and iodine and deep clear water. The taste of the sea, she supposed, though she had never seen a sea. She ate two plates of them, firmly repressing any thought of what they must be costing Cohen, and even in streamspace she felt stuffed.

“So,” she said when Cohen had finished his dessert and the waiters had brought coffee and pâte de fruits and elaborate petits fours. “Now can I ask why you’re spying on Nguyen?”

“You can ask,” he answered with a silken smile.

“It’s still about Metz, isn’t it?”

“If you know so much, why come to me?”

Li looked across the table at him, and he met her stare with bland equanimity.

“What happened to trusting each other?” she asked.

“I trust you completely. I always have. In this case, however, the question isn’t whether I trust you, but whether I trust everyone who has clearance to download your hard files.”

“Which brings us back to Nguyen. And Metz.”

“The thing about Helen,” Cohen said, carrying on as smoothly as if Li hadn’t spoken, “is that she uses people. It’s her job to use people. It’s what she is. You put yourself in mortal danger if you allow yourself to forget that.”

“Funny. She said the same thing about you.”

“Helen,” Cohen said firmly, “does not understand me nearly as well as she thinks she does.” He stopped and gave Li a shocked look. “You don’t believe her, do you?”

“I don’t know who to believe.”

Cohen looked down at his plate and smiled a tight little smile that was far too old to belong on Roland’s soft face. “Well,” he said, to no one in particular. “So.”

“Don’t guilt me,” Li said. “Nguyen’s earned my trust. You’ve earned… the opposite.”

“Helen does a very difficult job,” Cohen said after an uncomfortable pause. “And she does it very well. But she’s a technician, really. People are tools to her. You are one of her tools. I’m another—albeit a powerful tool that she knows can turn around and bite her if she doesn’t handle it carefully. But in the end, it’s the same. She has a job to do. She opens up her toolbox and pulls out the best tool for the job. If it breaks, that’s too bad, of course. But she can always get the Secretariat to buy her a new one.”

“Why do you work for her, if that’s what you think?”

He grinned. “The party favors, darling. Now tell me about Korchow.”

And she did, in spite of Metz and Helen’s warning and the voice inside her that whispered she was risking what she couldn’t afford to lose. She told him everything. Just like she always did.

“May I smoke?” Cohen asked when she’d finished.

She nodded, and he spent the next forty seconds choosing, cutting, and lighting a hand-rolled cigar with minute concentration.

“Nice lighter,” Li said.

“You like it? I found it in the back of a drawer yesterday. Must have been sitting in there since… well, before you were born, probably.” He flipped it open again, blinked at the blue flame, and handed it to Li to look at. “Present from my second husband. He had exceptionally good taste for a mathematician. Most of them shouldn’t be allowed to dress themselves.”

Li figured she was supposed to laugh at that, so she did, and then set the lighter on the table between them.

“So,” Cohen said, toying with the lighter, “have I ever told you the story of the Affair of the Queen’s Necklace?”

“The queen’s what?”

“ L’affaire du collier de la reine.” He sounded shocked. “Don’t humans teach history in those schools of theirs anymore?”

“Slept through it.”

Cohen sniffed delicately. Li had seen an old flat film once about French aristocrats on Earth. The men had all worn embroidered waistcoats and used snuff instead of cigarettes. Cohen’s gesture reminded her of the well-bred, dainty sniffs with which those long-dead aristocrats had taken their tobacco.

“Well,” he said, “here’s the short version. Try to stay awake for it. The place is Paris. The time, the eve of the Revolution. The players, the king, the queen, the Cardinal de Rohan. Rumor has it that the cardinal was also the queen’s lover… but I’m sure that had nothing at all to do with how things ended up for the poor fellow.

“In any case, our story begins with the arrival of a mysterious Jew. It’s always a Jew, you know. I could say more about that, but I think we can postpone a discussion of the roots of European anti-Semitism to a later date. In any case, my coreligionist arrived bearing princely treasure. To wit, one fantastically expensive diamond necklace of scandalously uncertain origin. No sooner had the queen seen this necklace than she knew she had to have it. Negotiations began. Eventually the queen and the Jew agreed on a rather substantial price. Two-thirds of the gross national product of France, to be precise.”

Li choked on her wine. “For a piece of jewelry? That’s ridiculous!”

“Mmm.” Cohen looked amused. “I seem to recall you spending a good six months’ pay on a certain original-issue hand-rebuilt Beretta, O Parsimonious One. What did you call it? Sweet?”

“That’s different,” Li protested. “Professional equipment.”

He puffed on his cigar, grinning. “Well, just think of diamond necklaces as professional equipment for queens.”

She snorted.

“Quite. Anyway, the queen asked the king to buy the necklace for her. The king must have shared your opinion about the value of diamond necklaces; he said no.”

“And thus the tale ends. Not much of a story, Cohen.”

“Don’t tease,” he said, smirking at her. “As you know—or would know if you had ever applied your considerable intelligence to anything but wreaking high-tech havoc—queens in those days didn’t have much practice in taking no for an answer. Thus, the queen decided to go behind her husband’s back.”

“Go where behind his back?” Li asked. “Why didn’t she just buy it on her own credit if she wanted it so much?”

Cohen blinked, momentarily at a loss. “Right,” he said. “Um, we’ll discuss women’s rights and sexism when we have that talk about anti-Semitism, shall we?” He looked suspiciously at her. “Unless you’re pulling my leg.”

Li grinned. “Easy target.”

“Not nice, my dear,” Cohen said. But his smile took the sting out of it, and Roland’s long-lashed eyes sparkled with laughter.

This was one of those nights when Cohen was all there, Li realized. Really on. As always at these times, she felt she was at the blazing heart of a sun, basking in the heat of the AI’s personality, unable to remember the doubts and the shadows.

“Well, finish the story,” she said. She pulled out a cigarette and leaned in for Cohen to light it. “And make sure someone gets shot soon. You expect me to stay awake, you’d better play to the cheap seats.”

Cohen’s smile widened. “You’re in fine form tonight. So where was I? Ah, yes. It’s not clear whether the queen asked first or the cardinal offered first. But in the end, he agreed to buy the necklace for her on the understanding that she would repay him, covertly of course, with tax money.

“The rest of the story is brief and sordid. The upshot of it was that before the queen even got a chance to wear the infamous necklace it was stolen.”

“By who?”

“By whom, my love. No one knows. No one ever found out. But the die was already cast, even before the court case and the scandal sheets. For the cardinal, it was the end of everything. He lost his fortune, his credibility, and, worst of all, the patronage of his king. All for a necklace that the queen never got to wear and no one could pay him for.”

Li waited for Cohen to go on, but he didn’t. “So what’s your point?” she asked finally.

“Helen has asked you to produce something for her. Sharifi’s dataset, maybe. Maybe something else, something she thinks may fall into her hands once she has the data. If she’s asking you, it can only be because she can’t ask the General Assembly—or worse, because she’s already asked and gotten the wrong answer. Be careful what you pay for her little bauble. And make sure you’re not the one caught out in the cold when the bill comes due.”

Li felt her carefree mood slipping away. She dropped her head into her hands and scrubbed at her face with numb, cold fingers. “You’re telling me to steer clear of something I can’t see,” she said. “How am I supposed to do that?”

“You can’t,” Cohen said. He sounded particularly gentle; but maybe it was just the timbre of Roland’s young voice she was hearing. “Just don’t wait until you hear the surf on the rocks to start turning the ship, that’s all. In the meantime, find out who the players are, what they want—and how far they’ll go to get it.”

“That’s your advice?” she said, head still in her hands. “I could have gotten more out of a damn fortune cookie!”

“You could always resign,” Cohen said softly.

Li took her hands from her face and looked up at him. “Quit, you mean.” She felt a flush rising in her cheeks. “I don’t quit.”

Cohen put a hand over one of hers, held it there lightly. “I’m not saying you should,” he told her. “Just that you can, if things get bad. I’ll help. It’s there for the asking. Anything.”

Anything. Meaning money, of course. And taking it would make her no different than any of his other hangers-on.

“I’ve got it taken care of, if it comes to that,” she said awkwardly—and lying through her teeth, too. “And there’s other jobs out there. Security. Planetary militia. But… thanks, I guess.”

They sat for a moment, he with his hand still set lightly on hers, not quite looking at each other.

“You come here much?” Li asked, slipping her hand out from under his and scanning the room around them.

“Occasionally.”

“It’s ridiculous, you know. Everyone here’s ridiculous.”

“I know.”

“I guess you’re going to tell me that’s why you like it. Or… what was it? That I lack an existential sense of the absurd?”

He smiled. “Would I say such a thing?”

“You just enjoy watching people make fools of themselves, don’t you?” She spoke jokingly, but she suddenly felt a prickling urge to pick a fight with him.

He leaned back, responding to the feeling behind her words rather than the words themselves. “I make a fool of myself ten times a minute,” he said. “Fifty times a minute when you’re in the room. It’s called being alive, Catherine.”

“Right. You’re just the average guy, going about your average life. Just with a few billion times the processing speed.”

“Something like that.”

She snorted. “And this is how you use it? Forgive me if I’m not impressed.”

He shrugged. “I can’t help wanting to be around people. It’s the way I’m written.”

“So change it. Change your code. I would. I’d get shut of Nguyen and Sharifi and all this pathetic bullshit in a second if I could.”

“You just say that because you know you can’t. Now stop fussing and listen to this song. It’s a good one.”

The singer was still onstage, finishing out a set with a bittersweet country song. It was a good song, the kind of song that could have been written yesterday or three hundred years ago. “She write that?” Li asked, nodding across the room toward the spotlit figure.

“It was written before I was born.”

She listened closer, caught a stray word or two. “What’s a Pontchartrain?”

“The Pontchartrain. It’s a lake on the Mississippi, that used to flow through New Orleans.”

“Before the floods, you mean.”

“Before that, even. The river—the whole Mississippi Delta actually—shifted. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers spent, oh, a century dredging and channeling and building levees. Defiance of nature, on a megalomaniacal scale. People wrote books and printed articles and whole theses about it. The river finally had its way, of course. It jumped its banks right around the time the oceans really started rising. Shifted the delta halfway across the Gulf of Texas. I wish I could make you feel what it was to be in New Orleans, stranded in the middle of a man-made desert while the ice caps were melting and we were watching floods in New York and Paris on the news every night. It was… unforgettable.”

“I didn’t think Earth was ever wired for streamspace. They didn’t even have shunts back then, did they?”

“No. Just a kind of primitive version of VR. But it was enough. I have my own memories, and other people’s. Over time it becomes harder and harder to separate them. Which may not be all bad.” He smiled. “I’m probably the only person still alive who remembers driving across the Pontchartrain in a convertible.”

Li grinned. “With a beautiful blonde, no doubt.”

Cohen smiled back, but it was the sad-sweet smile of a man lost in an old memory. “With Hyacinthe’s widow. The first woman I ever fell in love with.”

Li waited, wanting to hear more but not comfortable pushing.

“I know,” he said, answering a question that hadn’t even occurred to her. “I suppose from a puritanical sort of perspective, you could say she was my mother.”

“Well, it’s not like you invented that particular complex.”

“It wasn’t like that, though. I am Hyacinthe, his very self, in ways that have nothing to do with being a child, or a student, or an invention. Besides.” Another sweet and solemn smile. “The heart is complicated, whether it’s made of flesh or circuitry. It doesn’t always love the way you think it should. Or the people you think it should.”

“You don’t have to confess to me, Cohen.”

“Well, I have this funny idea that you come closer to understanding me than anyone else does. And so far you haven’t made me do any rosaries.”

A sudden memory of bare knees on a cold church floor and a grown-up hand—her mother’s?—moving her child’s fingers over the glass beads. The smooth, dark Aves. The gleaming Paters. The cross dangling and tapping against the pew in front of her.

“And I understand you, I think,” Cohen was saying when she surfaced again. “Which is an accomplishment given that what you’ve actually told me about yourself would fit on the back of a matchbook. At first I thought you didn’t trust me. Then I decided you’re just secretive. Is it how you’re put together, or did someone teach you to push people off like that?”

Li shrugged, feeling awkward. “It’s jump fade as much as anything. I don’t remember much.” She paused. “And what I do remember usually makes me wish I’d forgotten more of it. What’s the point in dredging up old miseries?”

She looked up into the silence that followed to find Cohen watching her.

“Eyelash,” he said.

“What?”

“You have an eyelash.”

“Where?” Li dabbed at her eye, looking for it.

“Other eye. Here. Wait.”

He slid toward her along the curved bench and tilted her head back against the velvet cushions with one hand while the other feathered along her lower eyelid hunting for the stray lash. She smelled extra-vielle, felt Roland’s warm sweet breath on her cheek, saw the soft skin of his neck and the pulse beating beneath it.

“There,” Cohen said, and held the lash up on the end of a slender finger.

She opened her mouth to thank him, but the words died in her throat. The hand that had been on her chin brushed along her cheek and traced the faint line of the bundled filament that followed the muscle from the corner of her jaw down to the hollow between her clavicles.

“You look like you’ve lost weight, even in streamspace,” he said. “You look like you’re not sleeping enough.”

He caught her eye and held it. The hand on her neck felt warm as Ring-side sunlight, and it reminded her how long it had been since anyone but a medtech had touched her. A dark tide of desire tugged at her. Desire and a reckless loneliness and a hunger to believe in the person and the feelings that seemed so real sometimes.

Uh-oh, she thought.

She looked away and cleared her throat.

Cohen drew back, held up his index finger, her eyelash still on it. “Make a wish,” he said.

“I don’t believe in wishes. You make one.”

He closed his eyes and blew the lash up into the smoky air.

“That was quick,” Li said and smiled—or at least tried to. “I guess you know what you want.”

But he wasn’t looking at her. He had his watch off and was listening to it, his face turned away from her. He twisted the golden knob, put the watch to his ear, wound it again, shook it.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with the thing,” he said. “It’s been running slow for weeks. Damned annoying.”

“Cohen,” said a woman’s voice from somewhere above their heads. A slender brown pair of legs had stopped by their table, and Li looked up them into an amused smile and horn-rimmed glasses—and her own face behind them.

It wasn’t her face, though. It was the nameless teenager’s face she remembered looking at fifteen years ago in a Shantytown mirror. A XenoGen face on a thin young woman who would have stood exactly Li’s height if she hadn’t been wearing three-inch heels and a red slip of a dress that looked far more revealing now that she wasn’t onstage.

The singer gave Li a brief measuring look, then sat down and put a possessive arm around Cohen’s shoulders. “I thought I was going to have you all to myself tonight,” she said in a voice that left no doubt in Li’s mind about what Cohen had been doing eating uncharacteristically alone in this place.

Cohen flinched ever so slightly. “Sorry,” he said, looking at Li.

“Not at all.” Li stood up, straightening her uniform with numb fingers. “I was leaving anyway.”

“I’ll call you later.”

“No need.”

“Well, tomorrow then.”

“Whatever.”

“No,” she heard Cohen saying as she walked off, in answer to some whispered question. “Just business.”