Chris Moriarty [Spin 01] Spin State (v5.0) (epub)

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.“Besides, it’s not your problem.Unless you’re telling us you want to make it your problem.”“Oh no.That’s your fight.I’m not that crazy.”“Then I suggest you wrap this investigation up and get off Compson’s at your earliest possible convenience.”Li looked back and forth between the two men, took a last sip of beer, and pushed the glass away from her.“So where does that leave us?” she asked Daahl.“With a deal,” he answered.“And make sure you keep it.I wouldn’t like to see something unpleasant happen to you.”Ramirez flexed his long legs and his stool slid backwards, squeaking across the bare floor panels.“Do you know what a coffin notice is, Major?”“Don’t threaten me, Leo.I know a hell of a lot more about them than you do.And I don’t plan on getting shot down in the street like a dog.Not by the Molly Maguires, and certainly not by some snot-nosed rich kid playing at coalfield politics.”Daahl laughed suddenly.“You haven’t changed a bit, Katie.You must scare the hell out of humans.”He pulled a fiche off the desk and bent over it.Ramirez got up and slipped back through the airlock, pulling the blanket behind him.Li started toward the front door, but before she made it Daahl came around the table and laid a hand on her arm.“Katie,” he said, speaking quietly enough so Ramirez couldn’t hear him.“If you need anything, ask me.I’m not making any promises but … Brian will know where to find me.Understood?”Li nodded and stepped into the front room.McCuen was still at the table.He had the boy on his lap, and he was twisting a piece of colored string between his fingers, showing him how to make a Jacob’s ladder.The woman bent over the fire stirring something.She didn’t look up when Li and McCuen left.A few steps down the alley Li stopped.“Wait here,” she said.Daahl answered the door.When he saw Li, he stood aside silently to let her enter.The woman and child were gone.Someone had banked the coal fire so that the room was dark and already cooling.Daahl closed the door behind him and leaned against it with his hand still on the latch.“Yes?” he said.“Mirce Perkins,” Li said.“Where is she?”“Is that wise?” Daahl asked quietly.“Just tell me.”“Why?”“I want to see her.”“No you don’t,” Daahl said.There was an edge in his voice.Distrust? Anger? “You don’t belong here anymore.Just do your job and leave.Whatever you think you remember, forget it.It’s what she wanted.It’s what your father wanted.You owe it to them.”Li didn’t answer.After a moment Daahl opened the door and she walked past him into the watery sunlight.* * *Half an hour later, she and McCuen were back on the station shuttle.She gave him a carefully sanitized version of her talk with Daahl—a version that didn’t include the threatened lockdown or Daahl’s final words to her.“So,” he said when she’d told him as much as she was going to.“Voyt’s fiddling the books.Sharifi finds out, threatens to tell Haas, Voyt kills her.Pretty tidy.”“Too tidy.First, nothing says Voyt actually killed her.There’s about fifteen people strung out along the pipeline that Voyt could simply have been playing bagman for, and they all had as much motive as he did.Second, what or who killed Voyt? Third, what was Bella doing down there and who moved the bodies after she saw them? Fourth, what the hell caused that fire in the first place?”“Still …” McCuen said, pushing at the Voyt angle as single-mindedly as a bloodhound baying on a hot track.“Yeah,” Li said.“Still.”AMC Station: 20.10.48.What a pit!” Cohen said, peering around Li’s quarters with a shocked expression.Today’s face was a thirtysomething Italian actress who was just starting to get talking roles in the kind of clever independent studio interactives Cohen was always trying to drag Li to.She was so astonishingly, exotically beautiful that Li couldn’t be around her without stuttering and tripping all over herself—even when she wasn’t standing in Li’s narrow quarters sparkling like a diamond in a mud puddle.Of course, only part of the sparkle had anything to do with either the ’face or Cohen.The rest was the packet compression needed to accommodate the encryption protocols Cohen had insisted on using for this streamspace-realspace visit.It left him looking bright, hard-edged, slightly more in focus than everything else in the small room.And Li didn’t even want to think about the credit he must be blowing at the private-sector entanglement banks.He opened the closet, flicked at the spare uniforms hanging there, and sniffed dramatically.“You mean to tell me you actually live here?”“No,” Li said, rummaging in the piles of fiche on her desk, looking for Daahl’s production figures.“It’s the next hot vacation spot.Just making it safe for the free world [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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