“Well, someone called a Freetown-based Consortium front company the night before Sharifi died. From Haas’s private terminal. With Haas’s password.”
A chill spread through the pit of Li’s stomach at the thought that Nguyen had been right all along, that ALEF and the Consortium lay at the bottom of Sharifi’s betrayal, and not the Syndicates.
McCuen’s eyes flicked to the aisle. Li followed his gaze and saw Bella standing a few rows up, waiting for a seat. Bella glanced at her and immediately glanced away, her lips set in a pale furious line. She passed by without speaking and found a seat four or five rows back from them.
“Oops,” McCuen said, and the look he shot at Li was full of questions she didn’t want to answer.
She tapped into the in-flight computer and watched the inevitable safety disclaimers scroll up her seatback screen. “If you feel unable to sit in an exit row,” she told McCuen brightly, “please ask the crew for a change of seating assignment.”
* * *
“I have to piss,” Li said, as they stepped out of the boarding gate. Weak, but the ladies’ room was the one place in the airport she could think of that McCuen couldn’t follow her.
“Sure you don’t want to hit the town with us?” he asked, hovering.
“No. I need to check up on a few things. Talk to that nun again, maybe. You go on.”
They were cleaning the bathroom when she stepped in, two skinny, undergrown girls swabbing listlessly at the floor with mops so filthy that Li figured the net exchange of disinfectant and bacteria had reversed itself years ago. As she skirted the wet floor the flash of a gemstone at the older girl’s neck caught her eye.
It was a necklace. A stupid, tacky little charm that you could buy anywhere. But that wasn’t synthetic diamond glittering at the end of the chain. It was condensate. And she’d seen something like it before. Somewhere or someplace that she ought to remember if her hacked and kinked and decohering memory wasn’t playing tricks on her.
“Pretty,” she said, pointing. “Where’d you get it?”
The girl giggled and put a protective, embarrassed hand to her throat. “My boyfriend?” she half-said halfasked, giggling again.
“What’s it made of?”
“Crystal? It’s entangled?” Another giggle. “With his?”
“Oh. Right,” Li said. “It’s pretty,” she added, since some comment along those lines was obviously required at this point. After all, someone must think the gimmicky little things looked good; she’d been seeing them everywhere lately.
Then her oracle shook loose the right file, and she remembered who she’d last seen one on. Gillian Gould.
Li turned back to stare at the pendant. The girl flinched and stepped backward under the intensity of her gaze. “Are you all right?” she asked, looking frightened.
“Yeah,” Li said. “Yeah, I’m fine. Sorry.”
She stepped into a stall and squatted to relieve herself, trying not to touch anything she didn’t have to. When she opened the door and stepped out again she ran head-on into Bella.
“Christ!” she gasped, heart pounding. “You scared me. Why the hell didn’t you say something?” Bella didn’t answer. The cleaning girls had vanished, though the smell of standing water lingered. “What are you doing here, Bella?”
The construct turned without acknowledging the question and walked toward the door. “Follow me,” she said, the words barely a murmur. “Not close. They’ll be watching.”
Li trailed her down the main axis of the spaceport, through the baggage claim, out past the taxi lines, into the yawning cement-smelling darkness of the underground parking. She must have let her guard down, because though she knew that she was gradually losing satellite access she didn’t see the trap until it had already closed on her.
“How ya doing?” said a voice high overhead, just as she heard the soft click of a safety being eased back.
She was crossing a ramp with no cover in sight—and even if there had been cover it was far, far too late to take advantage of it. She looked up and saw McCuen’s friend Louie sitting one level above her, legs swinging lazily, sighting down the snub-nosed barrel of a rebuilt Sten. “Too bad about those Yankees,” Louie said.
“It’s not over yet. McCuen know what you’re up to down here?”
Louie grinned. “Let’s just say Brian doesn’t know me as well as he thinks he does.”
A flick of his eyes drew Li’s own gaze to the shadows below the ramp, and she found herself staring down the black barrel of a Colt Peacemaker, close enough to see just how long it had been since the gun had had a proper cleaning.
“Take it easy,” Ramirez said from the driver’s end of the Colt. “Both of you.”
Li glanced toward Bella and saw her standing halfway down the garage’s central aisle, looking poleaxed. “Let Bella go, Ramirez. She’s got nothing to do with this.”
“Sorry,” he said. “Not an option.” He gestured to Bella. “Go on. Over by Li. Now!”
Bella scurried to Li’s side and stood there shivering while Ramirez frisked both of them with depressing thoroughness.
“I’d better get that back,” Li said when he took the Beretta, but it was pure bravado and they both knew it. She’d seen enough of Ramirez underground to know he wouldn’t hesitate or lose his nerve. And even if he did, Louie was up on the exit ramp training the Sten on them.
“I hate to burst your bubble,” Li told Ramirez, “but jail time for kidnapping isn’t going to look good on your college transcripts.”
“I got my master’s degree two years ago,” Ramirez said. “And they have to catch me before they can put me in jail, don’t they? Turn around and put your hands behind your back.”
Li did it, knowing it was a bad idea but unable to think of an alternative. Ramirez pulled a pair of virusteel cuffs out of his pocket and snapped them around her wrists, locking her arms behind her. As the cuffs snapped shut Li felt a slight sting at the nape of her neck and realized Ramirez had slapped a derm on her.
“Forgive me,” she heard him say through the rising haze of a sedative that must have been specially designed to outsmart her internals, “but better safe than sorry. You see that van over there? The white one? The back’s open. Get in and shut the door behind you.”
Li walked toward the van as slowly as she could, trying to catch Bella’s eye. Who’s following us? she wanted to ask. Where are they? Is help coming if we can wait it out a little longer?
But no one came. No one was intended to come. And as Li stepped into the van she glanced up toward the garage ceiling and saw why: the van had been parked a little crooked in its space, tail end facing out into the aisle, just where the garage’s security cameras could catch prime-time quality spinfeed of the kidnapping.
“Smile for the cameras,” Louie said, and the last thing she remembered before she passed out was his wide-open Irish laugh.
* * *
The next few hours were a dope-smeared blur. Sprinting across a rain-swept landing pad, half-held halfdragged by Ramirez. A brief struggle with Louie during which she refused, childishly, to let him scan her palm implant and he pulled a knife and told her he’d damn well cut it off her if she didn’t cooperate. A thwonking, shuddering hopper flight.
When she woke they were still in the air and someone had strapped an oxygen mask over her face. She opened her eyes to a bird’s-eye view of the granite teeth of the Johannesburg Massif, the vast rolling red ocean of the algae steppes. She started, feeling as if she were falling forward into the abyss, then blinked and twisted her head around and made sense of her surroundings.
She was on the deck of an old cropduster-rigged Sikorsky, an Earth-built antique that must have been broken down to its gearboxes and shipped out in the airless cargo hold of some long-abandoned generation ship. Like most of Compson’s presettlement tech, the Sikorsky had been rerigged to run on fossil fuel—and Li guessed from the grumbling shudder beneath her that it had been flying seeder runs for the terraforming author
ity ever since then.
Li had been tucked between the pilot’s and copilot’s seats and was now staring straight through the smooth Plexiglas bubble of the windshield. When she looked up she saw Louie at the pilot’s controls and Ramirez on her other side, staring at a handheld navcomp and frowning.
“Where are we?” she rasped, and Ramirez looked down, frowning.
“I thought that derm was supposed to last longer,” he said.
Louie glanced over and shrugged. “Tough motherfucker, isn’t she?”
“I don’t have another one, though. And she wasn’t supposed to wake up until we got there.”
“So what? She’d know the place in her sleep anyway.” He laughed a laugh that didn’t sound quite as friendly to Li as it once had. “They all do.”
Ramirez scowled over her head at Louie, and she found herself wondering just who was in charge of this kidnapping.
They landed twenty minutes later, setting down on a dusty stretch of hardpan that seemed implausibly level until Li realized it was an old shuttle runway.
“We’re there,” Ramirez said unnecessarily. “We’re going to get out and walk to the buildings, okay? Just cooperate and it’s all going to be fine.”
She could walk under her own steam now, and as she stumbled along trying to clear her hazed vision she heard Bella’s thin-soled shoes whispering across the ground just beside her. She knew this place, though she couldn’t yet put a name to it. She’d been here, not once but many, many times. She knew that the rutted jeep track beyond the landing strip would take her through the foothills to Shantytown if she had the strength to walk for a few hours in the unprocessed air of the foothills. She knew that the box canyon hidden behind that ridge harbored a steep-walled wash that she and her father had once used for target practice.
But she didn’t quite understand where they were until she squinted at the long-empty airplane hangar looming over the lab building and read the words that sent an atavistic fight-or-flight reaction flooding through every cell of her body:
XENOGEN MINING TECHNOLOGIES RESEARCH DIVISION
XenoGen Research Division: 26.10.48.
The sprawling lab complex had stood empty for decades, and the rats, roaches, and kudzu vine had had their way with it. As their captors steered them into the back corridors they stumbled over abandoned equipment and office supplies, ducked under torn-out wiring, waded through snowdrifts of shredded insulation tile.
The air was musty with rat dung and mildew. But under those smells—the smells humans and their pests had brought—Li could still catch a sharp desert scent that tugged at her childhood memories. It was a smell you only caught high in the foothills, under the dark wall of the mountains. The planet’s own smell. Compson’s World was taking back the birthlabs. Just as it would take back the whole planet if the thread of the UN’s far-flung trade lines ever snapped and the atmospheric processors and seeding operations ever shut down.
They turned a corner just like every other corner, and Ramirez stopped so abruptly that Li ran into him. “In there,” he said, and pushed her into a small windowless room.
As the door clanged shut, Li realized he had locked her into one of the lab’s old holding cells. It was a box. A box with soundproofed walls, a metal-sheathed door, with no furniture or windows or running water. A box built for a person. She heard footsteps echo beyond the door and the clang of another door slamming shut. Then silence.
A scrap of memory floated into her mind: a ghost story about a group of kids who had come up to the labs and locked one of their friends into a holding cell as a prank. They had been called back down to Shantytown in some childishly implausible plot twist. When they returned the next morning, they couldn’t find the cell their friend was in. They ran up and down the windowless corridors, trying every rusty lock, throwing open the food slots of a thousand dark bolt-holes. The boy was dead when they finally found him. Killed, according to the internal logic of the tale, by the ghost of some bloodily murdered construct.
Li shivered. How many psych-norm-deviant constructs had waited out cold nights and lightless days in this cell? How many had died in it? And how many of the people who walked free on the streets of Shantytown were the children of those dead, or of the lab guards and lab technicians and paper pushers who had helped kill them? The children remembered, even if no one else did; they told ghost stories about the very skeletons their parents couldn’t bury deep enough.
* * *
The door scraped open on protesting hinges. A line of light seeped into the cell, unbearable after the long darkness. Ramirez appeared in the doorway, bright and terrible as Gabriel.
Li struggled into a sitting position, back against the wall, head spinning. Her internals told her to lie back down. She ignored them.
He put a finger to his lips. Sshhhhh.
She stood, shaking, shocked and ashamed that simply sitting alone in the dark for a few hours had so undone her. She knew she should be wondering where Ramirez meant to take her, thinking about how to get control of the situation. But all she could really think about was getting out of this ghost-ridden hole. That and trying not to fall down.
Follow, Ramirez signaled. She followed.
Another man walked beside Ramirez, one whose name she didn’t know and whom she had never seen before. Not Louie. After a few turnings, Ramirez disappeared and Li and the nameless hijacker continued on without him. Someone else joined them as they slipped down the dark corridor, but when Li tried to look back the man just grunted and pushed her forward.
They moved deeper into the complex, back into the windowless labs under the shadow of the cliff face. They had traveled almost a kilometer when the hijacker opened an unmarked door and Li felt a waft of cold underground air hit her face. He stood aside and waved her through. As she passed she heard the gentle snick of a bullet being chambered.
That’s it then, said a small voice in the pit of her stomach. She saw a blank wall in her mind’s eye, heard a single shot.
“Down,” the hijacker said and pushed her down a steep flight of stairs into darkness.
Thirty narrow steps of steel-reinforced concrete. A turn. A passage. Then forty more steps, these rough and uneven underfoot. Then a long, twisting passage that dipped and jigged but nonetheless kept trending unmistakably downward.
The person behind Li stumbled and cried out. Bella.
As they descended, the walls and floor began to run with water. The rock came alive around them, cracking and moaning like a house built on quicksand. Somehow, unbelievably, they were in the mine. Li tried to recall the location of the birthlabs. No drifts, no shafts, no passages ran within a kilometer of the complex. She was sure of that. Still, they were in a mineworks. It just wasn’t one that showed up on the company maps. And if her internals were to be trusted, someone was stockpiling live-cut condensate here.
They hit a junction. Their captor lifted his lantern, and its light threw watery reflections on pooled runoff, picked out the stubbed-off ends of mined-out crystal deposits. It took him two turns around the walls to find what he was looking for: faint marks scratched into the rock at face level. Before the lantern moved on, Li saw a crescent moon, a pyramid, an eight-legged beast.
“This way,” he said, and pushed them toward the left-hand turning.
* * *
Li had grown so used to the dark by the time they surfaced that the first glimpse of daylight was painful. They clattered up a flight of gridplate stairs, passed down a long hallway full of uninsulated wiring, and reached a tall steel door bolted from the inside.
Bella leaned against the wall, panting and shivering. The hijacker reached into his pack and handed them each a rolled-up piece of cloth. “Put these on.”
Li unfolded the cloth and saw that it was an Interfaither’s chador. She wrapped the long bolt of green cloth around her, pulling it over her head and face, and helped Bella do the same. Then they stepped into the hazy sunlight of a late-fall afternoon in Shantytown.
For the
next half hour, they hurried through a bewildering series of alleys and courtyards, spiraling deep into the heart of the old quarter. Just when Li had finally accepted that she was lost beyond any possibility of reorienting herself, they turned aside and stepped through an unmarked door into a low dark passage.
The hallway smelled of rust and boiled vegetein, and it was so dark that Li heard rather than saw Bella behind her. The guard gestured toward a closed airlock at the far end of the passage, and Li put her hand to the touchplate. The door irised open. She stepped through, blinking in the dusty, sun-strafed air of the dome beyond—and saw just who she should have expected to see.
Daahl.
As her eyes adjusted to the bright hazy air under the dome, she realized that Cartwright stood in the halfopen airlock behind him—an airlock that could only lead to the little office where Daahl and Ramirez had talked to her less than a week ago. Cartwright shifted restlessly as she walked in, craning his head like a dog listening for distant footfalls. She’d never seen him outside the mine, she realized; he carried a blind man’s stick up here in the daylight world and his eyes were vague, milky, moonblind.
“What the hell is going on?” she asked as Bella stepped through into the dome behind her.
Daahl bent over the comm terminal on the table. “Arkady?” he said when the connection went through. “Tell him we’re ready.”
For a moment nothing happened. Daahl and Cartwright just sat staring across the table, waiting. It took Li a moment to realize they were watching Bella, not her.
Bella gave a little shiver as the shunt came on-line, and then she was gone.
“Excellent,” Korchow said, standing up. “Excellent. And the kidnapping was caught on tape? You made it look convincing?”
“The ransom note’s on its way to AMC station right now. We should have an answer in a few hours.” Daahl grinned. “Though of course the negotiations could be lengthy.”
“Right,” Korchow said. “Then I believe our business with each other is concluded.” “Not quite,” Daahl said.
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