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

territory to pursue a mining accident that should have been handled by the UN’s Mine Safety Commission.
    “Everything I’ve told you so far is public record,” Nguyen continued. “What’s not yet public is that Hannah Sharifi died in the fire.”
    Li suppressed the flare of guilt and fear that shot through her at the sound of that name. Nguyen didn’t know—couldn’t know—what Sharifi meant to her. That was a secret she’d mortgaged half her life to protect. And she had protected it. She was sure she had.
    Almost sure.
    Hannah Sharifi was—had been—the most prominent theoretical physicist in UN-controlled space. Her equations had made Bose-Einstein transport possible, had woven themselves into the fabric of UN society until there was hardly a technology that hadn’t been touched by Coherence Theory. But Sharifi’s legend went well beyond her work. She was also a genetic construct—the most famous construct in UN space. News of her death would flood streamspace the moment it went public. And the faintest tinge of scandal would spark off a new round of debates on genetics in the military, genetic mandatory registration, genetic everything.
    Li took another sip of water, mainly in order to have something to do with her hands. The water was still cold, and it still went down all wrong. “How long do we have before word of her death gets out?” she asked.
    “Another week at most. It’s been all we could do to keep the lid on it this long, frankly. And that’s why I’m sending you there. I want you to pick up the reins for the last station security chief and investigate Sharifi’s death, and I need someone there now, while the trail’s still hot.”
    Li frowned. She’d spent the eight years since peace broke out chasing black-market tech instead of being the soldier she’d been trained to be. And now Nguyen was asking her to play cops and robbers?
    “You’ve got that look on your face,” Nguyen said. “What look?”
    “The look you get when you’re thinking that if you were human, you’d be sitting behind my desk instead of doing my scut work.”
    “General—”
    “I wonder, Li, would you really be happy playing backroom politics and sitting through budget presentations?”
    “I didn’t realize being happy was the point of the exercise.”
    “Ah. Still out to change the world, are we? I thought we’d grown out of that.” Li shrugged.
    “You’ll put a dent in things, Li. Don’t worry. But not yet. For now what you’re doing out there matters more. The war’s not over. You know that. It didn’t end when we signed the Gilead Accords or the Trade Compact. And the front line of the new war is technology: hardware, wetware, psychware, and, above all, Bose-Einstein tech.”
    Nguyen picked up her glass, looked into it like a fortune-teller peering at tea leaves, set it down again without drinking.
    “Sharifi was working on a joint project with the Anaconda Mining Corp. She claimed she was close to developing a method for culturing transport-grade Bose-Einstein condensates.”
    “I thought that was impossible.”
    “We all thought it was impossible. But Sharifi … well, who knows what Sharifi thought. She told us she could do it, and that was enough. She was Sharifi, after all. She’s done the impossible before. So we put together the partnership with AMC. They provided the mine and the condensates. We provided the funding. And … other things. Sharifi sent us a preliminary report ten days ago.”
    “And what was in this preliminary report?”
    “We don’t know.” Nguyen laughed softly, sounding not at all amused. “We can’t read it.” Li blinked.
    “Sharifi transmitted an encrypted file through Compson’s Bose-Einstein relay. But when we decrypted it, we got … noise … garbage … just a bunch of random spins. We’ve put it through every decryption program we have. Nothing. It’s either irretrievably corrupted or it’s entangled with some other datastream that Sharifi