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.”