“You just get yourselves back to the drop,” Mirce concluded. “Once we rendezvous there we’ll evaluate the situation, and I’ll either get you out through the main gangway or up into the hills through the bootlegger tunnels.”
“You?” Li stared at her. “You’re not going. You can’t go.” “Of course I am,” Mirce said. “I’m the best.”
Li looked toward Daahl, but before she could speak she heard a sound that raised her hackles and sent Daahl and Mirce diving toward the window. Rifle shots. And the shots came from this side of the line.
Li stepped up behind Daahl and Mirce and tried to see out the window herself. Hopeless. All she could see was movement, out across the flat plain in the twisting fire-shot shadows. Then the movement turned into a shape, the shape into a man. A man walking, holding a white flag.
“Tell them not to shoot!” Daahl snapped, and Ramirez took off out the door, running. “Christ,” Li muttered. “That guy’s taking his life in his hands.”
“More than just his life,” Daahl said.
They waited. Ramirez reappeared in the doorway.
“We know who it is,” he said. “A militia officer seconded to Station Security. Shantytown kid too, I guess. Brian McCuen.”
Li caught her breath.
“Now why the hell would they send Brian?” Daahl asked slowly, quietly.
“Because,” Mirce said, her eyes as cold as the night side of a dead space station, “they think we won’t kill him.”
The miners outside, and maybe a few of the ones inside, got to McCuen before Li could. By the time she finally saw him, one eye was threatening to puff shut and he looked more than a little tattered around the edges.
“Are you crazy?” she said.
He just gave her a lost-puppy-dog look. “I need to talk to you alone.”
Li glanced at Daahl standing just behind her, at Mirce slouching in the open door. “We’ll give you ten minutes,” Daahl said.
Mirce said nothing, just detached herself from the doorframe as Daahl went by and pulled the door shut behind her. Li sure as hell hoped she’d never stared at any Syndicate prisoners the way Mirce stared at McCuen.
“I haven’t told them anything,” McCuen said when they were alone, “except that I had to talk to you.” “Well, you’re talking to me. What have you got to say for yourself?”
He just kept staring at her, trust, fear, suspicion chasing across his boyish face.
“Who sent you, Brian?”
His eyes evaded hers for a moment. “Don’t you know?”
“Haas?”
He glanced around the room hesitantly, searching the ramshackle walls for surveillance plants. Then he mouthed a single, silent syllable: Nguyen.
Don’t trust him, Cohen breathed into her backbrain. Not if he comes from Helen.
Li brushed the thought aside. She couldn’t afford not to trust Brian. Not if it might mean Nguyen had decided to slip her a much-needed ace under the table.
She pulled up a chair, sat down, and bent her head toward him so he could keep whispering at her. The room wasn’t bugged as far as she knew. And if it was bugged, then Mirce, for one, wasn’t going to waste much time beating whatever McCuen had whispered to her out of him. But if he wanted to play secret agent, let him. What harm could it do?
“She knows everything,” he told her, so close she could feel his breath in her ear. “I sent her the tape from airport security and she worked out the whole thing. Who’s holding you. Why. What Korchow wants from you.”
Li could just imagine. Nguyen would have pumped McCuen for every spin of data he had without his even realizing he’d been squeezed dry. She would have had him hypnotized, wrapped around her finger from that first riveting streamspace glance. But that was Nguyen’s job, of course. You could bet your life on her doing it right—and on her being there to bail you out when it really counted. As long as you delivered. As long as you were loyal. As long as it was in the Secretariat’s best interests to bail you out.
“What about Gould?” she asked, brushing Cohen’s nagging questions aside. “Any progress there?”
“That’s why Nguyen moved up the troop landings. To keep Korchow on schedule. To make sure we get this wrapped up before Gould gets to Freetown. She says to keep cooperating for now and just bide your time. I’m supposed to go down with you. Stay with you through the whole thing. I’m supposed to tell you that Korchow’s planning to turn on you. They think he’ll try to kill you when he has his data.”
That wasn’t exactly news, though Korchow seemed too pragmatic to kill anyone as long as he thought he could still wring a little more information out of them under threat of blackmail.
“And she says not to worry about Alba either,” McCuen added. “It’s taken care of.”
Li stared at McCuen, shocked, but he didn’t seem to have any idea of the enormity of what he’d just said. “So when do we make our move?” she asked when she had gotten her composure back.
“As soon as live field run’s over. You and me.” “And Cohen.”
McCuen blinked. “What?”
“You and me and Cohen. The AI.”
“Oh. The AI. Of course.” Had she imagined it, or was there the slightest hint of hesitation there? “And what are we supposed to do with Korchow?”
“Improvise.”
Li felt the slim hardness of her Beretta at her waist. She looked at McCuen. He looked away.
What had Nguyen really told him? Was he holding out on her, or was it just the nerves any new operative went through on a first covert mission? Could she afford to turn down an ally with a strong back and a steady trigger hand? She sure as hell didn’t want to be down in the pit with no one but Bella to back her up. Assuming Bella would back her up.
“Right,” she said after a pause she knew had lasted a few beats too long. “We’ll play it Nguyen’s way. You up to it?”
McCuen nodded.
“Then put on your game face and let’s get out there.”
* * *
Mirce moved through the mine with the surefootedness of a pit dog. Her deceptively slow stride ate up ground at a pace that seemed totally unaffected by the steep grades and rough shale layers. She wasted nothing. Every step was thought out, every flick of her pale eyes was calculated. Her gestures, her breath, her steadily pumping muscles all embodied a chillingly elegant syllogism: wasted motion was wasted air; wasted air was wasted time; and miners who ran out of time in a gas-logged mine died.
She made them take regular breaks “for safety reasons.” During the breaks, when everyone but McCuen took their masks off for a few brief minutes of unobstructed breathing, Mirce began to talk to Li.
She talked about her work, her new husband, her new children. Quietly. Not naming names. Not touching on the past. Just talking. She talked only during the breaks at first; then Li fell in next to her and she spoke while they walked, the blurred and impersonal voice that filtered through her rebreather oddly mismatched with the intimate daily details she was telling Li. She asked nothing about Li’s life. From little ends and pieces she let drop, Li realized that she knew a lot. But it was all just the same stuff anyone who’d been watching the spins would know. Nothing personal. Nothing dangerous.
As Mirce talked, Li realized that it wasn’t a bridge she was building between them with her words, but a wall. Whatever common ground the two of them might once have traveled, Mirce seemed to be saying, Li’s life was now a foreign country from which no road led back to Compson’s World. They’d chosen, back in that past Li no longer remembered. A father’s life for a few doctor’s visits. Li’s old future for a new, better future. And Mirce lived in a world where there was no room for regrets or refunds.
By the time Mirce left them at the stairs down to the Trinidad, Li knew she was right. There was no going home. From the moment she’d stepped into that chop shop, there’d been no home to go back to.
* * *
She felt the glory hole long before they reached it. The condensates had
been sleeping the last time she’d been there, she realized, dreaming fitfully. Now they were wide-awake.
Quantum currents licked through the dark mine, searching, scanning, questioning. You feel them too? Cohen asked.
She didn’t have to wonder why he asked; she could feel him, feel the havoc the crystals were wreaking on his all-too-fragile networks. As if whoever controlled them were looking for something. Or someone.
We won’t have to worry about setting up Korchow’s link, Cohen said before she could finish fitting words to the thought. They’ve already done it for us.
He had locked down all his systems in a last-ditch effort to hold off the condensates’ assault, and she was amazed for a moment that he could even speak over the intraface. But then he wasn’t speaking, was he? The link between them had gone beyond speaking. And when she answered him, she was just thinking to herself, thinking to the part of Cohen that was her.
What do we do?she thought, and the answer was there before she knew she had asked the question. We let them in.
Then there was just light facing off against darkness and a confused sensation of Cohen pushing her behind him with the hopeless bravado of a child trying to protect another smaller child.
It was like waiting for a tsunami to hit. The wave loomed, crested, crashed down on them. Then they were inside it, and its boiling undertow was sucking at their knees and ankles, threatening to topple them, leaving them soaked to the skin and in danger of losing their footing on the shifting sands beneath them.
The crystals probed more gently after the first assault. They moved in probability sets, long spiraling quantum operations as incomprehensibly elegant as the sinuous columns that filled Sharifi’s notebooks. But there was something behind the equations. A single presence. A presence as much bigger than Cohen as Cohen had been bigger than the semisentient on Alba. Li felt it thinking, seeking, considering. And most of all she felt its ominous fascination with Cohen. With the intricate manyness of this strange new not-animal. With what he was. With what he could be used for.
It’s the mine, Cohen thought. It wants to know us. Taste us.
But it was more than knowing that it wanted. More than tasting.
“Do you hear it?” Bella cried, oblivious to the life-and-death battle being waged along the intraface. “Don’t you hear it? They’re singing!”
* * *
Heat. Darkness. A dizzying flash of leaving, of arriving. Then Li was standing just where she’d been standing before, looking around the glory hole.
But not the same glory hole she’d stood in with Bella and McCuen a moment ago. This one rose higher above her head. Its fan vaults were clean, unstained by smoke. Her feet stood on hard living rock, not the fire and flood’s detritus. And this glory hole was cluttered with equipment—equipment Li herself had only seen in twisted ruins.
Sharifi’s equipment. Li raised her hand and saw the crescent of scar tissue between thumb and forefinger. Sharifi.
But she wasn’t just in Sharifi this time. She was her. She knew her thoughts, her memories, her emotions. And she knew that it was some unfathomable combination of Cohen and the mine itself who had made this possible. Even as she walked through Sharifi’s dreaming memory, the intelligence behind the crystals was using Cohen, reading him, threading itself through him as subtly and inextricably as ceramsteel twining through nerve and muscle. She felt the crystals’ exultation thrumming along the intraface just as clearly as she felt Cohen’s terror.
Sharifi knelt, reached for a gauge, tied off a loose wire. And with each little physical act she thought, considered, remembered. Li shuddered as she realized that Sharifi’s understanding didn’t end with her death, that it was tinged with the piercing regret of hindsight. Because what Sharifi had found in the glory hole was death. Her own death, in the place she least looked for it.
“Do you have to hang over me like that?” she asked Voyt.
He backed off. “So where’s Korchow? Off stealing the silverware?”
“I’m here.” A shape stepped out of the shadows. Bella. Of course. But Bella had never smiled that smile, never walked with that deliberate catlike stride. Where Bella crept—and Li realized only now that it was creeping—Korchow danced. “Ready?” he asked.
Sharifi frowned. “Just keep your end of the bargain.” “How could I forget it?”
Sharifi linked with the field AI, and Li felt the blossoming thoughtline run bright as new wire between Sharifi’s wetware and the orbital field array high above them. Sharifi’s link was nothing, she realized. A mere echo of the bond between her and Cohen. What Sharifi had done they could do. And more, much more. She felt a wild elation rising inside her, her excitement and Cohen’s feeding off each other in this still-strange alchemical union of her one and his many.
We need more, Cohen thought. We need to know what she’s doing.
Li snapped back into focus. Sharifi was still fiddling with wires and monitors, testing the link, readying herself. Meanwhile the mind behind the crystals was probing, exploring. Li felt it run through her, coursing up the line to the field AI high above them, enveloping woman and AI alike.
But Sharifi just kept fussing. Stalling. Couldn’t she feel that the link was up? Her precious dataset was there for the taking. What the hell was she waiting for?
Li knew the answer as soon as she asked the question. She could hear Sharifi think, feel her pulse, her breath, the stray ache of a pulled muscle. She wasn’t waiting for anything. She’d already gotten everything she’d come for. The experiment was over, run off the rails by the crystals themselves. She had her answers—the same answers she’d hidden from Li, from Nguyen, from everyone. Now she was playing out a script, playing Nguyen and Haas and Korchow off against each other, hoping she could do what she had to do before the bill came due.
Nguyen had been right all along; Sharifi had betrayed them.
But not to Korchow. Not for the Syndicates, not for money, not even for Bella. She’d done it for this— this first tentative contact with the life swirling through the fan vaults and pillars of the glory hole.
This was the thing that had brought her to Compson’s World. The money, the fame, the dream of cheap cultured crystal had been not lies, exactly, but merely surface reasons. The real reason had been the same one that brought Compson here, and so many explorers and scholars after him: life, the only other life in the universe besides humans and the creatures humans made.
It had been in front of Li’s eyes all the time, clear as clear water, scribbled in Sharifi’s dog-eared copy of Xenograph.
We came into the country like saints going to the desert, Compson had written. We came to be changed. But nothing changes. Everything men touch changes.
And Sharifi had answered, But you still gave them the maps, didn’t you?
This mine was Sharifi’s desert. She had come here to see, to understand, to be changed. And she wasn’t going to make the same mistake Compson had made. She wasn’t going to pass the maps up the food chain and trust TechComm to protect the crystals. She thought she had a better plan.
Li glanced at Voyt and Korchow. They had backed off a little, following Sharifi’s preparations. Haas’s man and the Syndicates’ man. One of them after the synthetic crystal the Syndicates needed so desperately. The other after … what? Who did Voyt answer to, Haas or the UN? And which one of them was going to kill Sharifi?
Suddenly Li knew that she didn’t want to be watching—let alone watching from inside Sharifi’s skin— when it happened. She didn’t need to see who had battered Sharifi’s head, mangled her hand. She didn’t need to watch them break her. She owed Sharifi at least that privacy.
Something shifted in the shadowed air. Something vast, slow, ancient. There was no breeze, no sound, no outer evidence of the change, but it was as clear as a door opening. The data shooting between Li and Cohen over the intraface spiked. Li felt the same waiting-for-the-flood feeling that had overpowered them when they first stepped into the glory hole. Then it was on
top of them.
It flowed through her like blood coursing through arteries. It filled her lungs, filled her mind, filled every hollow space of her. And when it had taken all of her there was to take, it made new spaces to fill, new universes inside her. Her skin stretched across oceans and continents. Her nerves were the petrified, planet-spanning rivers of carbon beds, her veins fault lines and ore seams, her eyes dusky stars burning in the dark heart of the earth.
She saw the change of seasons, and the slow seasonless passage of time in the Earth’s deep places. She watched the welling up of mountains, the shift of continents. She saw life rise and struggle and fall and pass into darkness without looking back. She looked out through the eyes of every creature that had lived in the depths, that had crawled on the planet’s skin or swum in its long dry oceans. And then, in what seemed but a moment, the water was gone and the wind swept across the steppes with nothing but the soft fur of algae and lichen to feel it.
She watched humans come. Saw the explorers and surveyors, the brief flickering lights of miners. She felt the stirring and pricking of a world waking to the thought that it had children again—even if they were strange, murdering, voracious children.
Sharifi had seen only a pale echo of this, filtered through the uncomprehending field AI. But it had been enough. She had known. And once she knew, there would be no room for deals or compromises or secrecy.
It was that simple. It was that impossible. Of course they had to kill her.
* * *
Something snapped, and Li was blind, cut loose in the void.
But not alone. This was a shared darkness. Someone waited in the many-trunked forest of crystals. A man, thin, dark-haired, his face lost in shadow. A man who slipped in and out of sight as she walked toward him, like stars flickering behind blowing cloud cover.
“Not him,” she whispered to whoever or whatever was listening. “Please, not him.”
Spin 01 - Spin State Page 45