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.