Spin 01 - Spin State by Chris Moriarty Read Free Book Online

lives.
    She’d been going into the tanks, groggy with shock and pain-suppression routines, and she’d wanted to put off talking to him. But he insisted. And then he had the gall to give her technical jargon instead of reasons, excuses instead of explanations.
    “You dropped us,” she’d said at last, on the outer edge of control. “And Kolodny’s dead because of it.” “She was my friend too, Catherine.”
    “You don’t have friends,” she’d snapped, her stomach churning with the guilty suspicion that if she hadn’t let things get personal, Kolodny would still be alive. “You’re not wired for it.”
    “Don’t throw my code in my face,” he’d said, though he ought to have known better. “It’s bigoted.”
    “It’s the truth. It’s what you are. You’re wired to twist and manipulate and feed off people. And I’m through with it!”
    That was the last time they’d spoken. One or both of them, she suspected, had gone too far to be forgiven. And she wasn’t sure she wanted to forgive, anyway. Or be forgiven.
    She stared at Cohen’s messages, wavering. Then she deleted them, unopened and unanswered.
    * * *
    Her commsys icon started flashing as soon as they dropped out of slow time. The call came in with no user tag over a stand-alone scrambled Security Council relay. Someone wanted to talk to her in a hurry. Someone important enough to command a private line from Service HQ.
    She toggled the icon, and a high-ceilinged twenty-second-century baroque revival room sprang into three dimensions around her. A tiger maple desk floated on gracefully bowed legs above a pine floor buffed to a smooth gloss by generations of officers’ boots. Each floorboard was as wide as both Li’s hands put side to side, and they were laid down in the unmistakable herringbone pattern of the Security Council Administration Building on Alba. Behind the desk, hands resting on the carved leaves and volutes of her chair’s arms, sat the general.
    General Nguyen was a spare, elegant woman, far into a well-preserved middle age. It was hard not to stare at her, even across a spinstream interface. The slightly crooked nose, the asymmetrical cheekbones, the quirked line of the left eyebrow were like the irregularities in a bolt of raw silk; they enhanced rather than detracted from a fragile, unmistakably human beauty.
    Nguyen looked directly at Li as she came on-line, meeting her eyes in streamspace. It was a politician’s trick, but knowing the trick didn’t make you immune to it. And when Nguyen did it, you felt like she was inches away from you, not light-years.
    “Major,” Nguyen said in a voice that knew how to make itself heard quietly. “It’s good to see you.” “General,” Li said.
    Someone spoke to Nguyen from outside the streamspace projection field. “Fine,” she told her unseen assistant. “Tell Delegate Orozco I’ll be there in five minutes.”
    She turned back to Li. “Sorry, Major. I’m pressed for time, as usual. The Assembly’s voting on a military appropriations bill that still needs some baby-sitting.” She smiled. “You’ve probably guessed I have a little job for you.”
    Li coaxed her still-numb face into what she hoped was a politely expectant expression. She’d done more than one little job for Nguyen. The general’s jobs were risky; she demanded a level of personal loyalty that could mean bending, if not breaking, the rules. But her rewards were generous. And she remembered favors as tenaciously as she held grudges.
    The general’s next words were as unexpected as they were unwelcome. “You’re from Compson’s World, Major?”
    “Yes.” Li shifted uncomfortably. Mother of God. Not Compson’s. Anywhere but Compson’s World . “You’ve never gone home since enlisting?”
    Li didn’t answer. It wasn’t really a question; Nguyen had clearance to view her psych files, and in five minutes she could know as much about her personal life as Li herself knew. More, if the barracks