Spin 01 - Spin State

by Chris Moriarty

  A tall figure appeared in the airlock behind them, its face shadowed by the sunbeams raking down through the streaky geodesic panels. Ramirez.

  But he looked sleeker, glossier, finer. He had never moved with that fey, walking-on-eggshells grace. His eyes had never burned with the cold fire that now shone behind them.

  He bent over her, touched a fleck of dried blood at the corner of her mouth. “Catherine,” he said. “Are you all right? If I’d suspected things would get that exciting, I’d have made them find another way to get you here.”

  “Cohen,” she whispered, not knowing how to begin to ask him what was happening.

  Ramirez was so much taller than Li that she had to throw her head back to meet his eyes. It bothered her. She was used to looking Cohen in the eye, used to being able to dominate him physically—a domination that mattered to her, she now saw, even if it was meaningless to him.

  “He wasn’t to be involved,” Korchow said, speaking to Daahl and Cartwright. Daahl shrugged. “ALEF approached us.”

  “ALEF!” Korchow spat the word out as if it were a curse.

  “God works through unlikely hands,” Cartwright said.

  “Oh for pity’s sake,” Korchow snapped. “What did the AIs promise you?” “A planetary network,” Daahl answered. “Under union control.”

  “Then they’re lying. They can’t possibly deliver that.”

  “We already have,” Cohen said. “The beginnings of one, anyway. What do you think I’m shunting through?”

  “I brought you in to do a job,” Korchow told Cohen. “This isn’t it.”

  Cohen made an impatient movement, a neat flick of one hand that was so characteristic of him it took Li’s breath away. “I’ll do your little job, Korchow. But not routing through your network. I’ve spent three centuries making sure no one had that kind of power over me. I’m not about to hand it to you.”

  “So why go to them?” Korchow jerked Bella’s head toward Daahl and Cartwright. “And don’t tell me it’s selfless interest in the cause. Or are they your pet terrorist group of the week?”

  Cohen flexed Ramirez’s big hands until Li heard the knuckles crack. “They had what I needed,” he said. “An on-site Emergent with Bose-Einstein capacity.”

  Korchow started.

  “Yes.” Cohen smiled. “The field AI.” “How—”

  “I don’t know. But Cartwright says he can speak to whoever or whatever is using the field AI. That he can control it.”

  “And you’d trust yourself to that?”

  “Sooner than I’d trust myself to you.”

  “Why?” Korchow asked, turning to Daahl. “Why this? Why him?”

  Daahl shrugged. “It’s not that complicated, Korchow. We don’t like the idea of running from the UN straight into the arms of the Syndicates. We want to run Compson’s World for the natives, for the miners. And to get that we need a planetary net that we control. We need access to streamspace, to Freetown and FreeNet, without going through the UN relays, without being at the mercy of the Security Council and the multiplanetaries. And we need a Bose-Einstein relay intact, on our net. That’s what ALEF’s giving us.”

  “Come on, Korchow,” Cohen said. “We’re going to pull off a good deed together. A blow for freedom and planetary self-determination. After all, you need to put something on the white side of the ledger book every lifetime or so.”

  “So the deal’s off?” Korchow asked, white with fury .

  “Not at all,” Cohen answered, smiling glossily. “It’s just that the price has gone up.”

  Barnard’s Star Field Array: 28.10.48.

  They jumped into Alba in a KnowlesSyndicate Starling, a sleek swallow-winged craft whose cabin had been stripped to its ceramic compound struts and refitted with a tangled rat’s nest of fractal absorption gauges, x/r monitors, and assorted black boxes whose functions Li could only guess at.

  There were three of them: Li, Arkady, Cohen. Or part of Cohen, anyway. Arkady piloted the ship— though Li never figured out if he was the same Arkady she’d talked to at the meet in Shantytown or just another number in the same series. She also never found out how he got them there. She guessed he’d piggybacked through Alba’s high-traffic Bose-Einstein relay on a legitimate cargo flight. However he’d done it, the Syndicates weren’t about to let Li in on their back door into the system; Arkady knocked her out before they took off from Compson’s World and kept her under until the Starling dropped into Alba’s lee side thirty-eight hours later.

  She woke up with a hammering headache that had less to do with the sedatives than with her rising apprehension about the run ahead of them, and listened halfheartedly as Arkady and Cohen talked through the bones of the run again. Her new wire jack itched atrociously, a nagging reminder of the irritation of the last few days in the union safe house. She reminded herself not to scratch it, scratched anyway, cursed Korchow, and brooded about staph infections.

  Korchow and Cohen had infested the safe house like locusts, shunting haphazardly through Bella, Arkady, Ramirez until even Li hadn’t known who the hell she was talking to. Not that it would have made much difference; Cohen had been harder to talk to than Korchow recently. Was he just angry, or was this new distance more than anger, an obscure symptom of some shift in the tidal flow of the AI’s associated networks?

  They had taken Cohen off-line for the run—dumped his systems into the Starling so that there would be no interstellar communications to give them away while they drifted off the station’s dark side. No shipboard comp could even come close to accommodating Cohen’s vast web of associated intelligences and enslaved subsystems, of course. Li doubted there was a self-contained net that big anywhere in UN space, outside of a few zealously defended corporate and military sites. So Cohen had dumped systems, left them behind, wherever “behind” was, and downloaded only what he thought was needed.

  He had sworn it wouldn’t be a repeat of Metz, that when they powered down the Starling for the run and gave him control of the ship comp he would be there, willing and able to pull her out safely. But now that they were committed, all Li knew for certain was that Cohen, her Cohen, wasn’t there. He had stranded her in hostile space with no one to cover her back but a Syndicate agent and a stranger who didn’t seem to remember any of the promises the Cohen who claimed to be her friend had made her.

  “Let’s go over it again,” said the disembodied ship’s comp voice that she still couldn’t think of as his. Li and Arkady settled at the narrow crew’s table, and they ran through the whole intricately choreographed plan again.

  It was getting Li on-station that had been the real problem. And though it had taken days to work out the details, the solution was still the same blindingly simple one Li had spotted in the station schematics: the ventilation system.

  Like most spacer-designed technologies, Alba’s O/CO2cycle was obsessively efficient. It built on existing systems, recycling every available piece of material and energy, rolling many problems and purposes into one solution. It pushed breathable air down the long curve of the station’s inhabited zones, insulated the station’s pressurized inner bladder, sucked excess CO2out into space, and powered the motors that turned the long dragonfly wings of the solar arrays. Air, warmth, and life-giving power all from one system. And the fuel that drove the system was always there, always free: space itself.

  The pressure differential between the void outside and the full atmosphere of breathable air inside pulled freshly oxygenated air through the station, into the remote cold-storage bladders whose robot retrieval systems used no oxygen and created no CO2load. When the CO2-loaded air reached the end of its journey inside the life-support bladder, it flowed through vents into the soft vacuum of the station’s outer bladder, a second skin that provided insulation and radiation shielding, that protected the inner bladder’s life-support zones from the hard vac beyond the viewports.

  The returning air served three functions in the outer bladder. First, it put a baffled, compartmentalized pa
rtial vacuum around the life-support bladder—a safety feature so universal in UN-designed stations that the station-killing blowouts of the colonial era were nearly forgotten, marked only by the sad little streams of wreckage that orbited so many periphery planets. Second, the rush of stale air venting the external turrets drove the big turbines that powered the solar arrays. Third, the turret vents served as a last line of defense against the parasitic plague that haunted all closed systems, orbital stations, and settlement biospheres alike: mold.

  Mold thrived in the recycled, condensation-rich air of orbital stations, and an unchecked infestation could make a station uninhabitable in a matter of months. Some epidemics—and every station with any history remembered one or two of them—were so resistant that the only cure was to evacuate the station, void the atmosphere, and rebuild the O/CO2cycle with fresh flora. Alba’s turret vents had been designed with that in mind. Each turret contained both an outer and an inner vent. The outer vents opened into the unused space off the station’s outer rim. The inner vents opened into the huge oxygen-producing algae flats. Faced with an incurable mold infestation, the station engineers could open both inner and outer vents and blow algae, air, condensation, and mold out into open space.

  What Li’s soldier’s eye had seen was that, stripped down to its bones, the emergency venting system was an airlock. The inner vent separated life-support zones from the soft vacuum of the outer bladder; the outer vent staved off the void outside. In normal operations the outer vents opened only during the turbine’s power cycles. The inner vents never opened, except in the worst emergency. However, if they could open an inner vent, briefly, while the outer vent was closed, all that would show up on the station monitors was a barely noticeable local pressure drop as a few cubic meters of air flowed into the unsealed turret. And someone who had managed to slip through the turbine arms and into the duct at the end of the last power cycle could simply push the miter vent open and breach the station’s inner bladder.

  If that someone was small enough to fit through the vent. If she was fast enough to climb the turret in the few minutes between venting cycles. If she was strong enough to push the inner vent open against a full g of rotational gravity and hoist herself through it.

  But Li was all those things.

  It was a risky way in. If it worked, though, it would put Li on-station undetected, and already through the manned security checks that separated the top-security labs from the station’s unrestricted zones.

  Korchow’s inside man would open the inner seal for her. This was Li’s least favorite part of the plan. It introduced a dangerously large risk of human error. It left her life hanging on the actions of someone she had never met and had no reason to trust. Worse, she had to be down the duct when the seal opened, ready to drop through instantly. And to get there, she would have to shinny twenty meters against a full rotational g, up a chute so narrow that even her small shoulders would just pass through it. If the door failed to open, if anything went wrong, if the inside man failed her, there would be no way out except through the spinning turbines.

  Li had laughed when she saw the schematics and told Cohen it was a good thing she’d started smoking young. She wasn’t laughing now.

  “Let’s go over the plan again,” Cohen said, when they finished the run-through.

  Li rolled her eyes. They’d gone over it four times already—which was three more than she wanted to. “Cohen,” she said, “don’t waste my fucking time, okay?”

  Arkady turned to look at her, surprised. Cohen had no body on board the little Starling, but his disapproval came through the comp boards loud and clear as a bad day.

  “I need food,” Li said into the suddenly silent cabin, and pushed off toward the galley.

  The galley racks yielded nothing but a small sack of algae-colored imitation kasha and a thoroughly squashed packet of reconstituted vegetables. The kasha tasted like mold, and the vegetables looked worse, but they were food. Li fought the urge to skip dinner, telling herself she had a long cold night ahead of her. She shook the bags to jump-start the internal heating elements, dumped the now-lukewarm contents into a battered suckbag, and drifted back toward the foredeck.

  “We have to work through your timing again,” Cohen said when she swam back into the main cabin. “Later,” she said. “I need to put my kit together. I just came up to tell you I’m going down to the cargo deck.”

  “That can wait.”

  “No it can’t.” It was impossible to stare down someone without a body, but she shot her best glare at the main instrument panel. “You know your job, and I know mine. I need to get the arms and gear squared away more than I need to do another run-through. We’ll do that after. If I have time.”

  “Make time,” Cohen said.

  If they hadn’t been in zero g, Li would have kicked something.

  * * *

  Her mood improved briefly when she inventoried the weapons. Korchow had sent everything she had asked for. Even her most extravagant demands had been satisfied without murmur.

  Two long sleek boxes held RPK midrange tactical precision non-structure-piercing pulse rifles, each fitted with custom-milled optical sights and refillable wipe baffle system silencers. Another blockier box, guarded with a double layer of vacuum seal, cradled the self-sealing pressure suit that Li would wear to crawl through the CO2vents—and whose interactive camouflage overskin would hide her face if things went wrong and someone spotted her. A big crate held the rest of her gear and tackle: carabiners, grappling hooks, and rope for the climb outside the station; a handheld number cruncher; a lockpick’s kit for getting into the lab itself; a hacked passkey—provided by Korchow—that he claimed would get her out of the high-security lab and into the public-sector airlock where Arkady would pick her up when she had retrieved the target code.

  It took an hour and forty minutes to unpack the lot and get it serviceable. The best hour and forty minutes of the last few weeks. If this was what the supply side of being private muscle was like, Li thought, she could get used to it.

  When she had coiled her rope, ordered her climbing tackle, and stripped, oiled, and reassembled the pulse rifles, she stood back and surveyed the whole kit critically. Then she pulled herself forward to her cabin to retrieve the small, carefully wrapped package that she had hidden there just as a precaution.

  She swam back to the cargo hold, unwrapped the Beretta, field-cleaned it, and loaded it, grunting with satisfaction at the clean, familiar snap of the ammo clip engaging the firing mechanism. She weighed the gun in her hand and glanced back toward the foredeck. She thought about the bulge it would make in her jumpsuit, the likelihood that Arkady would notice and take it away from her. She thought about just how crazy it would be to get into a solid-ammo fight on the little stripped-down Starling.

  She sighed and tucked the Beretta into the pocket holster of the pressure suit. The pocket had been designed for bigger, more standard weapons; a Viper, maybe, or a snub-nosed pulse pistol. The Beretta slid in easily and barely made a bulge in the suit after she’d folded it.

  “Just in case,” she whispered, and went back forward.

  * * *

  “I need to check ammo,” she told Arkady when she reached the foredeck. Hard as she tried, she couldn’t help letting her eyes flick to the fully charged pulse pistol at his belt.

  “You checked it back on-planet.”

  “And I need to check it again. Just because I saw it on the loading dock doesn’t mean it actually got on board.”

  Arkady frowned. “You can do a visual check, that’s all.”

  “Not good enough.”

  “It has to be. Cohen checked it manually when we loaded it. Ask him.”

  Right now, Li thought, Cohen was the last person she wanted to ask anything.

  “It’s all there,” Cohen volunteered. “There’s no reason to check it again.”

  “Gee, thanks for the help.” She shot a nasty glance at the comp board.

  “Well, go look in th
e airlock.”

  Li glanced at the instrument board again, then turned and left without meeting Arkady’s eyes. She made her way to the airlock and looked out the viruflex check-port.

  She saw the sun. The white, unbearably bright sun of space, seen through no atmosphere. She ducked her head away from the port, blinking burning tears out of her eyes.

  “Jesus wept!”

  “It was Korchow’s idea,” Arkady said. As if he were apologizing, for Christ’s sake.

  She looked again, and understood what she was seeing through the check-port. The airlock was open to the void, completely unpressurized. Hard vac, right there, one triple-glazed viruflex porthole away from her. All her ammo for the run was neatly taped to the airlock wall. Two pulse rifle clips, their green charge lights blinking at her like eyes. A fully charged Viper for close fighting. Even her Syndicatemade butterfly knife, which Arkady had lifted from her without comment before letting her board the Starling back on Compson’s World. What the hell had they expected her to do, anyway? Cut his throat and steal their damn ship?

  “The outer seal will close and the airlock will pressurize two minutes and four seconds before you’re scheduled to disembark,” Arkady said. “You’ll have four seconds to step into the airlock, two minutes to inspect the ammo and load and stow your weapons. Then you’re out. The same protocol applies when you come back; you’ll deposit any remaining live ammunition in the airlock stow compartment, lock it, and jettison the key. The outer door won’t close and the chamber won’t pressurize until I visually confirm that you’ve disarmed yourself.”

  Li stared at him, but he just shrugged, pushed off the wall with the ease of a born spacer, and pulled himself back toward the foredeck.

  He was deep in conversation with Cohen by the time Li joined them. “Can we run through it again, Major?” he said. “Please?” He sounded apologetic, as if he were asking for a favor instead of giving orders to an enemy agent Korchow was blackmailing.