“No,” Li whispered.
“Why not? If Korchow uncovered your secret, why couldn’t Nguyen uncover it too?”
“She doesn’t know. No one knows.”
“How sure are you of that?”
“I’d bet my life on it.”
“That’s exactly what you’re about to do, isn’t it?”
The moon had set while they were talking, and there was a cold breeze blowing. Li looked into the black shadows under the trees and shivered.
“Let me help you,” Cohen said, pleading with her.
“No.”
“That’s it? Just no?”
“Just no.”
Cohen came around to look into her face. Even in the faint light, he looked spent and defeated, a gambler who had put the one thing he couldn’t afford to lose on the table and watched the house take every hand. “If it’s about money—”
“It’s not about money. It’s about my life. About what I’ve earned. And what they want to take away from me. For nothing. Because of what some piece of paper says about me.”
“And you’d throw away your life for that?”
Li saw the ghost of a tremor around his mouth as he spoke, a suspicious shimmer in the hazel eyes. No, she told herself, squashing her reflexive response. Chiara’s mouth. Chiara’s eyes. Whatever she thought she saw in those eyes was mere physiological sleight of hand. A parlor trick generated by a code-driven superstructure and shot through a state-of-the-art biointerface. It didn’t mean anything. You might as well ask what rain meant.
She stepped back into the bright lamplight and began pulling her coat on. “What you’re offering… I appreciate it. But I don’t want it. Just let me know if you’ll do the job, okay?”
She had her hand on the door before he answered.
“You know I will.” He stood in the garden where she had left him, and all she could see when she looked back was the slow curve of a girl’s hip in refracted moonlight. “You knew I’d do it before you even asked.”
Li wavered, caught on the threshold. You could walk back into that room, she thought, and her heart flew up in her chest like a bird breaking cover in front of the gunsights. One word, one touch. You could change everything.
And then what?
Before she could decide whether to go or stay, Cohen spoke again. The voice from the shadows was quiet, measured, impersonaclass="underline" a silicon voice for a circuitry lover.
“Just close the door on your way out,” he said.
She started to speak, but a cold, hard knot rose up her throat and choked the words off. She backed into the hall and pulled the door shut behind her.
Anaconda-Helena Shuttle: 26.10.48.
Li made the shuttle gate an hour early, but ten minutes before the flight was supposed to leave she was still waiting for Station Security to search the throng of passengers in front of her.
The chaos at the gate echoed the chaos on the planet’s surface. The union had wildcatted, locked down the mine even before all the rescuers were out. Within a day the strikers had set up an armed perimeter and the first militia units had arrived to reinforce AMC’s cadre of Pinkertons. Now, on the satellite images that dominated the local spins, the whole tailings-littered plain of the AMC coalfields had become a militarized no-man’s-land between two dug-in armies.
On-station, AMC security was taking no chances. All flights to Shantytown and the coalfield were canceled. And until AMC loosened its de facto embargo, the only way in or out of Shantytown was the grueling dangerous jeep road over the mountains from Helena—a road that would become completely impassable as soon as winter’s dust storms set in.
Legally AMC couldn’t keep anyone on-station against their wilclass="underline" planetary access was a holdover civil right from the Migration-era days of indentured labor on corporate orbital stations. Still, rights or no rights, AMC controlled the streets, the air, the station-to-surface shuttles. And Li had seen the guards turn back eight Helena-bound passengers in the space of fifteen minutes.
She doubted anyone would be complaining to her office. And she was dead certain she couldn’t get her superiors to do anything about it if someone did complain. Daahl had been right. It was war, a war in which the UN would side with whichever combatant could get the Bose-Einstein production lines moving soonest. And unless the union pulled a trump card out of its sleeve, AMC looked like the likeliest candidate.
When Li finally stepped onto the shuttle twenty minutes after its scheduled departure time, she realized she’d never been in danger of missing it. A river of passengers filled the aisles and overwhelmed the crew, bickering over duplicate seating assignments and cramming luggage into every inch of open space. She checked her seat number, uttered a fervent prayer of thanks when she finally reached her row and found it empty, and settled down to wait.
“Hey, boss,” a familiar voice said just as she was finally drifting into an uneasy doze. She looked up to find McCuen grinning down at her.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
“Friends in Helena. It’s my day off, remember?”
“Oh.” She did remember now. “Yeah.”
“You?”
“Just going down for the day.” She hoped.
“Want to join us?” he asked, folding his long frame into the seat next to her. “We can show you around.”
“I have an appointment,” she said evasively, hoping she could get rid of McCuen before Korchow’s man showed up. This was one wrinkle she didn’t need.
“Oh, by the way,” McCuen said. “I figured out where that storage chit in Sharifi’s journal came from.”
Sharifi and the investigation had been so far from Li’s mind for the last thirty-six hours that it took her a moment to remember what McCuen was talking about. “Oh?” she asked. “Where?”
“Remember how all her researchers got so conveniently shipped out on that survey mission? Well, one of them didn’t. He shipped out the day after Sharifi died. On the Medusa, bound for Freetown. And it looks like he checked a package through for her.”
“Let me guess when the Medusa makes Freetown.”
McCuen nodded. “Thirteen days, sixteen hours, and fourteen minutes from now. Or, to answer your real question, about twenty minutes after Gould’s ship is supposed to drop into orbit.”
Li frowned, thinking. “Remember what Sharifi wrote on that page, McCuen? Next to Gould’s address? Life insurance. I looked at it and thought it had to be some kind of protective measure, something to save her life. But what if it wasn’t like that at all? What if it was really like an actual life insurance policy, something that would go into effect only if she died?”
“Well, that’s when it did go into effect, right? I mean the student shipped out the day after Sharifi died. And, whatever she may have suspected, Gould didn’t actually leave for Freetown until your call gave her solid confirmation that Sharifi was dead.”
If McCuen was right, then Nguyen had thirteen days to go fishing for Korchow with Li as bait. And Li had thirteen days to get that chop-shop receipt back from Korchow—while he still needed her enough to keep his promise. Because once Gould and the mysterious package reached Freetown all bets were off.