“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.