Soza’s eyes flicked toward Cohen so briefly that Li wouldn’t have seen the look unless some part of her was already watching for it.
“Oh,” she said. “So that’s how it is.”
She turned and stared at Cohen. Cohen cleared his throat and glanced at Soza. “I believe you have just been let off the hook,” he told him.
Soza looked at Li hesitantly.
“Fine, go,” she said. “And get the briefing back on track. I’ll pull whatever I miss off Kolodny’s feed.” “I’m just following orders,” Soza said apologetically.
Li shrugged, smiled. “I know it.”
Cohen closed the door behind Soza and set his back against it.
“Well?” Li said once it was obvious he wasn’t going to volunteer anything.
“Well, what?” he asked, smiling the little-boy-in-trouble smile she’d seen shunted through a dozen different interfaces.
Today’s ’face was another of Cohen’s soft-skinned boys—or was it even a boy? Either way it was beautiful, and just far enough over the threshold of adulthood to fill out the expensively tailored suit. Where did Cohen find these kids? And assuming even half of them were as young as they looked, how did he finesse the laws about implanting shunts in minors?
Well, at least it’s not Roland, she thought. That was one mistake she didn’t need to be reminded of at the moment.
“Were you even planning to tell me?” she asked.
“I can’t,” Cohen said. “ Desolée.”
“Can’t? Or won’t?”
“Can’t. Truly.” He looked embarrassed. “I’m persona non grata at Alba ever since the Tel Aviv fiasco.”
“Yeah,” Li said. She’d thought Cohen would never work for TechComm again after Tel Aviv. If he was on Metz, then Nguyen must be after something so important that she had to use the best AI she could find—even though the best meant Cohen. “What happened in Tel Aviv, by the way?”
“The usual story. Good intentions gone sour.”
“Gone rancid, from what I hear. There’s a rumor going the rounds that they tried to strip you of your French citizenship.”
He glanced sidelong at her, an enigmatic smile curving the ’face’s lips. “Is there?”
“Fine, don’t tell me. It’s none of my business anyway. Unlike Soza’s little secret.”
“My dear, I’d tell you that, of course. I’d tell you anything and everything if only I could be sure my confessions wouldn’t work their way back to the charming General Nguyen. But, as I’ve said once already, I can’t. TechComm made me give them every cutout and back door in my networks before they’d clear me for this job. Then they sicced one of their tame AIs on me. He fiddled me so good I can’t even find the kinks.” The soft girlish mouth twitched. “Humiliating.”
“So why take the job?” Li asked. “And don’t tell me the money. I know better.” Cohen looked away.
“Jesus wept! You’re getting paid in tech? On a shooting mission? How could you do that to Kolodny? To all of us?”
He fished in his trouser pocket and pulled out a slim enameled cigarette case. “Smoke?” he asked.
“No,” she said angrily. But then she said yes and took one; Ring-made cigarettes were too good to pass up, even on principle. And Cohen only smoked the best.
He reached over and lit it for her—not touching her, not leaning too far into her space, not making eye contact. All the elaborate nots of friends who have been lovers but no longer are.
They smoked in silence. She wondered what he was thinking, but when she glanced at him he was just staring at the floor and blowing smoke rings.
“Listen,” he said when she was about to tell him it was time to get back into the briefing room. “We need it. I wouldn’t do this to you, to Kolodny, if we didn’t.”
“We need it? We who?”
“We me.” He spoke with the typical Emergent AI’s disregard of individual boundaries. Pronouns meant nothing to him; me and not me changed every time he signed a network share or associative contract. Wecould be no one or a hundred someones. But at least it sounded like he wasn’t planning to auction the tech off to the highest bidder. That was something, Li supposed.
She threw down her cigarette and crushed it under a bootheel. The virufactured alloy floor mobilized its scrubbers as soon as the butt landed, and within seconds there was no sign on its matte gray surface that the cigarette had ever been there.
“I hate those floors,” Cohen said, scowling prettily at the place where the cigarette had been. “I have yet to see one that can actually tell the difference between something you meant to throw out and something that just fell out of your pocket. I’ve lost some really nice jewelry that way. Not to mention the address of the prettiest boy I never slept with.”
“You’re a martyr,” Li drawled.
“Yes, well. We all have our trials.” He looked at her, waiting. “What are you going to do about this one?”
“Call up Nguyen and ask for my orders in writing,” Li said, her voice heavy with sarcasm. “What else?” Cohen gave her a long straight serious look. “You could always trust me.”
He watched her in absolute inhuman stillness—a puppet whose electronic strings had been cut. Li had learned to notice that stillness over the years, to track it along the horizon of their friendship like a climber tracks the thunderhead looming over the next mountain range. She didn’t know what it meant, any more than she knew what the weather meant. But it was a sign. It was the only one she had sometimes.
She stared at him. At the eyes that changed with every new ’face he shunted through. At the shifting mystery behind the eyes. He was the closest thing she’d found to a friend in the fifteen years since she’d enlisted—the only years that were backed up in Corps data banks. And that was as good as saying he was the closest thing to a friend she’d ever had. She knew his luxurious habits, his sly feints and twists of humor, the beautiful bodies that he put on as easily as the soft shirts his tailor made him. She knew what countries he called home, what God he prayed to. But whenever she tried to touch anything real, anything solid, he poured through her fingers and left her dry-mouthed and empty-handed.
She didn’t know him. She doubted anyone could know him.
And trusting him? Even the thought of it was like diving blind into dark water.
* * *
“You see it?” Kolodny asked, throwing back the bolt of her carbine with such machine precision that Li had a sudden vision of microrelays ratcheting back ceramsteel filaments. Only long familiarity told her that Cohen was off-shunt and Kolodny herself had asked the question.
They were coming in low, hiding the hopper’s trace in Metz’s violent predawn dust storms. Checkerboard-square fields flashed beneath them. Flatlands faded into a featureless horizon that had never known glaciers or river flows. The hopper whipped up black plumes of virufactured topsoil in its backwash, filling Li’s nose with the hot exotic spice of rotting things.
She crossed the hopper’s bucking flight deck and leaned out into the wind, searching. Her GPS told her that the target was close, close enough to be visible in this flat country. But Metz was only partially terraformed, the atmosphere still swarming with active von Neumanns and virucules, and her optics struggled to pierce the haze of radiation. She squinted, switched to infrared, then quantum telemetry. Hopeless.
“Hey, Kolodny,” someone asked. “The AI. Is it on-line yet?”
Li didn’t have to turn around to know the speaker was one of the new recruits; newbies were always fascinated by the AIs.
“Not yet,” Kolodny answered. “And don’t call him an ‘it’ to his face unless you want to annoy him. AIs are ‘he’ just like ships are ‘she.’ ”
“What’s it feel like when it—when he’s on shunt?”
“Like running into a burning ho
use,” Kolodny said—and Li heard the grin in her voice even through the rattle and roar of the hopper. “Only you’re the house.”
She glanced over and saw Kolodny still cleaning the old carbine she always carried. She should have said something about it, of course. This raid was nonlethal arms only. But Kolodny had earned the right to break a few rules. And that was one rule Li was breaking herself, truth be told.
She looked out the door again and spotted the target, a bright point of silver tossed on the dark fields. It appeared and vanished with each pitch and yaw of the hopper. It grew, splitting into two buildings, then five. A gate. A tower. A double fence of bright, freshly milled razor wire walled the compound off from the surrounding fields. The fence enclosed a strip of hard-packed earth about the width of the warning track around a baseball diamond. Li upped the magnification on her optics and saw paw prints in the
dirt. Intel had said there were dog patrols, and it looked like they had it right for once.
Beyond the track rose a sleek virufactured alloy cube—a prefab office module that had been replicated through Metz’s orbital Bose-Einstein relay and dropped from orbit. Li guessed it was this little luxury that led to the lab’s discovery; the shipping bills must have set red lights blinking all the way back to Alba. The cube had glimmered like a pearl on the satellite feed, but today it was as drab as the sooty sky reflected in its windows. Just south of it, crouched behind long low Quonset huts full of farm equipment, lay the ramshackle bulk of the beet plant.
Li looked around at her team. Shanna, Dalloway, Catrall, and Kolodny were veterans. No worries there. Cohen was Cohen. He’d do his job superbly as usual, for his own incomprehensible AI reasons, and she didn’t have to worry about him getting hurt because he’d never be physically present except through Kolodny. Her big worry was the two fresh-faced privates, shipped in three days ago. They needed time, training. Well, they wouldn’t get it. They’d figure things out in the first minutes or not at all.
“Two minutes,” she shouted over the wind. No one answered; they were all waiting for Cohen to get the link up.
She ran a final check on her weapons: the long-muzzled pulse rifle, the Corps-issue neural disruptor— called a Viper because of its distinctive fanglike anode prongs—and her own hand-rebuilt Beretta. Then she moved around the flight deck, feet spread to counter the hopper’s bucks and slides, checking weapons, checking equipment, checking eyes.
She paid special attention to the new recruits, talking to them, mustering a confident smile that belied her fears about this mission. As she bent over the younger boy’s rifle, her crucifix slipped out of her shirt collar and swung forward in a brief gold flash.
“That’s nice,” the boy said. And then flushed and added a belated ma’am. “Where’d you get it?” She shoved it back into her shirt. “My father gave it to me.”
She finished with the others, came around to Kolodny, crouched in front of her. Not to check anything— Kolodny was too much of a pro for that. Mostly just to say good-bye before she went under the shunt.
“So,” Kolodny said. “This should be interesting. Total fuck fest, obviously.” Li shrugged. “Looks that way.”
“Too bad I won’t be around to see it.” Kolodny grinned her toothy grin. “You’ll have to catch me up when we get home.”
“I will,” Li said.
She leaned over to check Kolodny’s carbine. No harm in checking. And Kolodny knew her too well to get offended. As she reached across her, the crucifix swung forward again.
Kolodny caught it. Before Li could react, she tucked the chain in and hooked it around the top button of Li’s collar to hold it in place. “There. Better, no?”
Li turned to look into the gray eyes. “Cohen,” she said.
He smiled. “You always can tell,” he said. “How do you do it?”
Li pulled away, walked back across the flight deck, and sat down facing him. A moment later Kolodny’s husky alto sang out a few lines of a Charles Trenet song.
It was Cohen’s favorite—or at least his favorite when they were going into anything that looked like trouble. He’d told her to get her feet wet and look it up the one time she’d asked about it, but all she’d found were a few long-dead noninteractive sites and a cryptic reference to the French Foreign Legion that made her wonder just how old Cohen really was.
“Are we go?” she asked.
The only answer she got was a few more lines of the song, not in Kolodny’s voice this time, but on-line, in Cohen’s liquid tenor:
Quand tu souris, tout comme toi je pleure en secret. Un rêve, chérie, un amour timide et discret.
Her oracle translated the words for her, but damned if she knew what secret dreams or singing for money had to do with tech raids.
Then the link broke over her, and she was being swept out to sea on the massive undertow of the AI’s interlocking neural nets. He held her on the link, sharpened it, refined it, brought on the other squad members one by one until there were seven clean clear voices. Only Kolodny was missing; her reflexes and combat programming were at Cohen’s disposal, but she herself would be gone until the raid ended, her life riding on the choices Cohen made while he was on shunt.
She switched off her GPS and felt the others do the same. Then there was the long, frozen, disorienting
pause before Cohen picked up the slack and started supplying position corrections to her inertial systems. This was always the worst moment for Li. The sharp, subliminal anxiety at the missing datastream. The unnerving knowledge—unthinkable to someone who’d been wired her whole adult life —that she didn’t know where she was, that only Cohen stood between her and being lost.
Cohen’s nav feed came up at last, and Li felt her limbs go limp with relief. Then, without any warning of trouble, the link flickered and died. Kolodny surfaced where a few seconds ago Li had felt only the vast glacial sweep of the AI’s networks.
One of the new recruits groaned as the twisting backwash of net vertigo washed over them. Li’s stomach clenched, and she closed her eyes and waited, knowing that trying to pull out of the link would only make things worse now.
It passed.
Kolodny disappeared, and Cohen was back, as if nothing had happened.
But if there was one, he wasn’t admitting it.
* * *
They dropped into the northwest corner of the compound, snaking down rappelling ropes between the dog patrols. As they slipped into the shadow of the beet plant, Li saw her squad’s skinbugs cycle through their camo programs: sky gray, dirt brown, rusted orange.
The lab’s door was tucked into a sidewall of the processing plant, just where Intel had said it would be. Li stood aside while Catrall jiggered the lock. Then she and Dalloway triple-timed down a corrugated virusteel staircase, secured the landing, and brought the others in after them.
According to Soza’s schematics, the landing fed onto a long gangway that accessed the outer row of labs. Li tossed off a quick and dirty heat scan to make sure the adjoining labs were empty, then sprinted down the gangway at eighty-two kilometers an hour by the clock—just the way they’d marked it out. As she ran, she felt a warning twinge in her left knee. She’d pay for that burst of speed later; bones and ligaments couldn’t keep pace with ceramsteel. But right now, time was everything.
She reached cover and pumped her first fire team down behind her. She listened, scanned, eyeballed. Then she brought up her second team and leapfrogged the whole squad around the corner in textbook fashion. They regrouped at one end of a long ultramodern virufacture bay. The whole lab was built from ceramic compounds. White walls, white lights, white floors and ceilings. The only flash of color was a stylized biohazard red sunburst stenciled on the floor. No corporate name below it. But then there wouldn’t be. Not in a lab that was so obviously illegal.
Open virufacture tanks stretched down the length of the bay between a bewildering tangle of feedlin
es and biomonitors. Half the tanks were empty. Half were filled with clear, high-grade viral matrix.
<?> Li shot to Cohen.
They secured the lab and moved on.
They swept the next three labs on schedule, still finding nothing that piqued the AI’s interest. In Lab Four, Li guarded Kolodny’s back while Cohen jacked in and made a first cautious foray into the mainframe. It took him less than a second to confirm the Intel data. Lab Five stood out like a black hole on the lab net: a total absence of output. Whatever illicit wetware work was going on here, Lab Five was its epicenter.
A blind corner led into Five—the only blind corner in the complex. Li reached it first. She paused, scanned, motioned Catrall over to the far wall to cover her. On his nod, she juiced her internals and accelerated around the corner—straight into a withering blast of white light.
She pushed forward and through it; no matter what the danger the worst possible response was to lose momentum, risk being stranded in the kill zone. Then she rolled behind a stack of sterile saline canisters and stopped to tally the damage.
None.
She’d run through an automated irradiation beam, installed at the door to protect the contents of the lab’s unsealed virufacture tanks. Her skinbugs handled it, masking her presence, killing the intrusion alarm before her passage tripped it, protecting the weapons-grade virucules on her skin and uniform from the assault of the radiation. No problem.
Except there was a problem. The beam should have been on the schematics Intel gave them. Should have been, and wasn’t. She wondered what else Intel had missed—and if the next surprise would be this harmless.
As soon as she was sure she hadn’t set off any alarms, she waved in the rest of the squad. They had twelve minutes and twenty-three seconds left before the hopper returned. No time to waste on unnecessary precautions. When the perimeter was secured, she split the squad in pairs and had them scan the tanks. She set her realspace feed to toggle if anyone’s pulse rose above combat-normal. Then she picked up Cohen’s feed and rode in on his shoulder while he jacked the system.
Spin 01 - Spin State Page 2