“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.