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

scuttlebutt about memory spinning was true.
    “Why not?” Nguyen asked.
    Li started to speak, then bit the words back. “It’s not the kind of place you go home to,” she said finally.
    “Not the kind of place you go home to.” The words sounded like a riddle in Nguyen’s mouth. “Now tell me what you were about to say before you thought the better of it.”
    Li hesitated. Her lips were dry; the urge to lick them was like an itch she knew she was going to have to scratch sooner or later. “I was about to say that when I left I swore I’d die before I went back.”
    “I hope you don’t still feel that way. You’ll be docking at AMC’s orbital station on Compson’s World in a little over four hours.”
    Nguyen reached across her desk to a silver tray that held a carafe of ice water and two cut-crystal glasses. She poured a glass and handed it to Li, who raised it to her lips, hearing the chime of ice against crystal.
    The water was good, but the line to Alba was so laced with security protocols that it could only process high-load sensory data in intermittent bursts. She sipped, felt nothing, then got a disorienting headachecold burst of taste half a second after she’d swallowed. She shook her head and put the glass down.
    “Not where you expected to wake up?” Nguyen asked.
    “I expected to wake up at Alba. I need to be at Alba. I’m running on a field-hospital patch job—” “Alba would be a bad place for you just now,” Nguyen interrupted smoothly.
    She caught Li’s look of confusion and raised one immaculately groomed eyebrow. “Haven’t you looked at the review board report?”
    “Not yet. I—”
    “They kicked it upstairs.” “Upstairs where?”
    “Do I have to spell it out for you, Major? Loss of personnel in circumstances suggesting misconduct by the commanding officer. Use of lethal force on a civilian. Use of an unauthorized weapon. Where the hell did you think you were, pulling that thing out? Gilead?”
    “They recommended a court-martial?” Li said, trying to get her brain around the idea. “Not exactly.”
    Not exactly. Not exactly meant that covert ops wanted the Metz raid kept quiet, that they planned to comb through every fact and opinion and scrap of testimony before they released it. And if that left Li without a defense, no one would lose much sleep over it.
    “When do I testify?” she asked.
    “You already have. We downloaded the Metz data and opened your backup files to the Defender’s Office. You can amend your extrapolated testimony if you like, but I doubt you’ll want to. Your attorney did a good job.”
    “Right,” Li said. It made her queasy to think of her files being used that way. A backup was exactly that. It sat in an oracle-compatible datacache in Corps archives, received updates and edits and waited to be retrieved if the medtechs needed it. It sure as hell didn’t walk into court-martial proceedings and proffer testimony that could end your career.
    “The board hasn’t rendered its decision,” Nguyen said. “It seemed prudent to let things cool down a little. And when the … situation on Compson’s World came up, the board thought you were the right person.”
    “You mean you convinced them I was the right person.”
    Nguyen smiled at that, but the smile never made it up to her eyes. “Have you had time to catch any spinfeed since you came off ice?”
    Li shook her head.
    “Ten days ago one of the mines in the Anaconda strike caught fire. The mine director—I forget his name, you’ll have to talk to him when you get there—got the fire under control, but we lost our onstation security chief in the initial explosion, and we need someone there fast to oversee the investigation and help the AMC personnel restart production.”
    Nguyen paused, and Li forced herself to sit through the pause without asking the questions they both knew she wanted answered: what any of this had to do with her, and why Nguyen had shipped her halfway to Syndicate