Free Spin 01 - Spin State by Chris Moriarty

looked freshly pressed even at this impossible hour of the morning. “We were cleaning out Voyt’s, um, your desk. We didn’t expect you so soon.”
    “Obviously,” Li said.
    McCuen fidgeted with the stack of fiche in his hands; he looked embarrassed about the situation and too young to hide his embarrassment.
    Kintz, on the other hand, just stood there smirking at her like he didn’t give a shit what she thought. “Someone better tell Haas she’s here,” he said, and brushed past Li into the hall without even excusing himself.
    Li let him go; no percentage in starting a fight until she was sure she could win it.
    “I’m really, really sorry about this,” McCuen said. “We should have gotten the office cleaned up, met you at Customs. We’ve been running around like maniacs since the fire, is the problem. Rescue, body ID, cleanup. We’re really shorthanded.”
    She looked at the boy’s face, saw the telltale puffiness around his eyes that said he’d been through not one but several sleepless nights in the last few station cycles. “Well,” she said mildly, “at least you had time to make sure my bags got here.”
    He coughed at that, and Li watched a red flush spread over his fair skin. “That was on Haas’s orders,” he said after glancing up and down through the gridplating to make sure no one was in the adjoining rooms. “I didn’t have anything to do with it.”
    “Haas. He’s the station exec?”
    McCuen nodded.
    “That how the militia works here, Brian? You pulling down a corporate paycheck on the side?” “No! Look at my file. I just want out of here and into the War College.”
    So. McCuen wanted a ticket into the freshman class at Alba. That made all kinds of sense on a periphery planet like Compson’s. Bose-Einstein transport fueled an interstellar economy in which data, commercial goods, and a few properly wired humans could cross interstellar distances almost instantaneously. But uplinks, VR rigs, and spinstream access time still cost so much that most colonials spent their entire lives planetbound, stuck in the ebbs and deadwaters of the interstellar economy. The military was the best way out for ambitious colonials—sometimes the only way out. It was certainly the way she had taken.
    Li sent her oracle on a fishing trip through McCuen’s files, and it came back with a stream of data, from his primary-school grades to records from a government school in Helena to a string of applications to Alba, all denied.
    “You must want it bad,” she said. “You applied three times.” McCuen started. “That doesn’t show up in my file. How—?” “Voyt wouldn’t recommend you,” she said, twisting the knife a little. “Why not?”
    His flush deepened. Li looked into his face and saw distress, embarrassment, earnest hopefulness. “Never mind. You do a good honest job while I’m here and you’ll get to Alba.”
    McCuen shook his head angrily. “You don’t need to cut deals with me to get me to do my job.”
    “I’m not cutting deals,” Li said. “It’s your choice. Do a bad job, I’ll show you the door. Do a good job, I’ll make sure the right people know it. Got a problem with that?”
    “Of course not.” He started to say something else, but before Li could hear it, quick steps rattled on the hall gridplate.
    The footsteps stopped and Kintz stuck his head through the doorway. “Haas wants to see her. Now.”
    * * *
    Haas’s desk floated on stars.
    It was live-cut from a single two-meter-long Bose-Einstein condensate. Sub-–communications grade, more of a curiosity than anything else, but still it must be priceless. Its polished face revealed the schistlike structure of the bed that had calved it. Its diamond facets mirrored the stars beyond the transparent ceramic compound floor panel so that the desk seemed to hang above empty space in a pool of reflected starlight.
    Haas was a big man, bullish around the neck and shoulders, with an aura of resolutely clamped-down