“Not until Bella walks out of here,” Voyt said. “Not until you walk out of here.” He stepped toward her.
Sharifi flipped the safety off her gun. Her aim wavered and she was trembling with adrenaline, but she was still acting like a woman who meant business.
“I’ll shoot you if I have to, Voyt, but I’d rather deal. What’s your price?”
“My price?” Voyt laughed. “I’m a soldier, not a whore.”
“There’s a difference?”
He took another step toward her.
She pulled the trigger. Sparks arced from the rock floor a few centimeters from his right foot.
He stopped. Not scared exactly; he was Li’s kind, and it would have taken more than a stray bullet from a civilian’s hand to really frighten him. But he was at least wary.
“Take his gun,” Sharifi told Bella.
Bella stepped up to Voyt and wrapped her hand over the Viper’s blocky barrel. He let her take it from him. He even smiled when she took it—a smile that raised Li’s hackles.
“Good girl,” Sharifi said. “Now give it to me.”
* * *
We have a problem, Cohen said.
Christ, not now!
A realtime problem. Someone just fired a surface-to-air missile from the planet. Li felt the shock of the news pulling her out of Sharifi, jerking her out of step with Sharifi’s dream memory. They’re aiming at the orbital relay.
Cohen didn’t voice the next thought, but she caught it anyway: Maybe Korchow had made his move early.
What do we do?she asked.
But she knew the answer before she asked the question. The missile would hit the relay in a matter of minutes whether they did anything or not, and if the relay went down when it hit, then so would Cohen’s link with the outside world. And any hope of getting Sharifi’s information—or Cohen himself—out of the mine would go with it.
They had to get out before that happened.
* * *
“What’s Haas paying you?” Sharifi asked. “I can top it.”
Voyt laughed again. “No one’s paying me shit. You may have caught me dipping into the till, but that’s not treason, and I’m not a traitor. And speaking of payments, what’s Korchow offering besides Haas’s little piece of bought-and-paid-for hospitality?”
“Shut your mouth, Voyt!”
“That got to you, huh? Don’t like the idea that you’re selling state secrets in exchange for used merchandise?”
Sharifi glanced at Bella. She stood frozen between them, her face a pale blur in the lamplight.
“I’m not selling them,” Sharifi said. “Knowledge doesn’t belong to anyone. Life doesn’t belong to anyone.”
“Save your justifications for someone who gives a shit.”
Bella made her move so fast that it caught even Li by surprise. In one smooth gesture, she had her arm around Sharifi’s neck and the Viper against her temple. “Drop the gun,” she said.
Sharifi tried to turn and stare at her, but Bella just tightened her hold on her neck and jabbed her with the Viper’s sharp prongs. Sharifi dropped the gun. It skittered across the slate floor of the cavern and fetched up under a correction channel monitor.
“Get the gun, Jan,” Bella said. It took Li a heartbeat to remember that Jan was Voyt’s name. “We’ll need it if she gives us trouble.”
“Korchow?” Sharifi asked. Her voice was trembling. Her whole body was trembling. Bella laughed.
I know that laugh, Li thought. And even as she thought it, she knew Sharifi had recognized him too. “Haas.” Sharifi said. “I need to see Nguyen.”
“Bullshit,” Haas said.
“Can you really afford to gamble? It’s not your choice to make. Nguyen needs to know about this.”
“Oh, she’ll know about it.” Haas jerked Sharifi around and pushed her up the ladder. “Don’t you worry about that.”
Sharifi turned at the top of the ladder. “Listen, Haas—”
“No, you listen.” He spun her around, laid the Viper against her temple. “You open your mouth again,” he said, very quietly, “and it’ll be the last time you open it.”
Sharifi looked into Bella’s violet eyes and saw Haas looking back at her. Something passed along the line of that gaze, some backbrain survival instinct that Sharifi had no words for, but that Li knew from a hundred killing fields.
Sharifi ran.
Anaconda Strike: 8.11.48.
She might have made it if she hadn’t slipped on a slick bit of slate and fallen.
Voyt caught Sharifi as she set her foot on the bottom step of the stairs up out of the Trinidad. The edge of his hand slammed into her head, and she crumpled.
She heaved herself up and tried to run, but it was hopeless. Li knew, even if Sharifi didn’t, that Voyt had pulled that first blow, afraid of killing her outright. He hadn’t pushed through the hit, hadn’t put anything but unenhanced muscle into it. He hadn’t needed to.
Voyt did everything Li would have done, and he did it with the precise savagery of hardwired reflexes and ceramsteel-reinforced muscles. He tackled her, driving with his legs so that the force of his impact knocked her up and backward, and when she hit the ground he delivered four swift, carefully calibrated kicks to her ribs. Li felt the jerk and snap of breaking ribs. She didn’t need internal monitors to know that one of those ribs had punctured Sharifi’s lung. Nor did she doubt what was going to happen if Voyt kept delivering this kind of punishment.
But he didn’t. He backed off as soon as he was sure she couldn’t get up, and waited. He did nothing when Sharifi got to her hands and knees. Even when she tried to drag herself up the steps, he waited. Haas caught up to them just as Sharifi collapsed in pain. He looked over Voyt’s shoulder.
“What she said just now,” he told Voyt. “About Nguyen. Ask her what Nguyen needs to know.”
Voyt rolled Sharifi onto her back and took her hand in his. He did it slowly, almost gently, and suddenly Li understood the way Bella had always talked about him. She knew it in her gut, with a guilty certainty that made her want nothing for Sharifi but a quick painless death. Because no matter what else Voyt had done, no matter what uniform he’d worn or what excuses he’d made for himself, he had the heart of a torturer.
He smiled. He had a nice smile; he’d been a good-looking man, she realized. He explained, calmly, the risk of biting through one’s tongue during questioning. He pulled a rag out of his pocket, handed it to Sharifi, showed her how to put it in her mouth. Gave her time to do it. Time to think about it.
Li watched the sickening dance unfold. She felt Sharifi’s pulse slow. She felt her skin go clammy and then dry. She felt her eyes lock on to Voyt’s and begin to follow his every glance as if he were a lover she couldn’t bear to disappoint, as if her very life depended on his happiness.
There’d been a Voyt on Gilead. Lots of Voyts. Li had tried not to be around when they’d done their work. But she’d used the information, God help her. She’d hung on every bloody word of it.
* * *
Catherine?
Shame clutched at Li’s heart. Later, Cohen. You don’t need to see this.
This can’t wait, he said.
She was so wrapped up in Sharifi’s fear and pain that she didn’t immediately understand him. The missile’s almost at the field array.
Then they had to get out. Before the field AI died—before they were trapped in the mine, cut off from Cohen’s backups, dependent on a home-brewed Freetown network that couldn’t support his systems without the field AI’s processing capacity.
I can get you out, he said, plucking the thought from her backbrain as effortlessly as if she’d spoken it aloud. And she read his unspoken thoughts just as easily. He could get her out. But only her.
Then we stay and take our chances, she told him.
* * *
And back in the glory hole, the dance went on.
Voyt tied Sharifi’s hands. He spoke to her quietly, reasonably. He pulled out a small knife and
set it on her chest, just where she had to crane her neck a little to see it.
Behind Voyt, Bella was a slim, watching shadow. She stepped forward a little as Voyt went to work, and Li saw in her face—in Haas’s face—the guilty fascination that the first sight of hard interrogation always brings, even to people who are used to ordinary violence.
Voyt made Sharifi wait to tell him. His timing was so perfect, so by the book, that Li could predict each groan he would ignore, each desperate plea he would pretend to misunderstand. Just enough of them that when he finally pulled the gag from her mouth and let her speak, she would tell him everything she could possibly think of that might make it be over.
But she didn’t tell. And when Li probed her mind looking for the source of her strength, she found something that made her stomach curl: the hope—no, the sure and certain belief in a rescue. Sharifi was gambling like she’d always gambled. Gambling that she was more valuable to Nguyen alive than dead. Gambling that she was too famous to die like this. Gambling that she was too important a pawn for Nguyen to lay down willingly, no matter what betrayals she had committed.
She’d always been right before. Her luck, like Li’s own luck, had always held. She had a whole lifetime of being right to back up her faith in her gambler’s instincts. And this shuffle might have broken her way too if not for Bella.
* * *
When the missile hit, Li thought it was just the Viper again.
Then she was out of the glory hole, struggling to find her bearings, reorienting herself, unbelievably, in the shadowy clutter of Korchow’s antique shop.
Korchow sat at his desk, head bowed, face in shadow, the orange circles of contact derms pulsing at his temples. Outside, lithe and furtive shadows flitted past the shop front. From the back room, Li heard the muted clink of a metal buckle knocking against a carbon compound rifle stock.
Half a heartbeat later, the shop exploded into motion. The flare of a pulse rifle arced out from behind the back curtain toward Korchow. Camouflage-clad figures burst through the front door—masked paras with UN-issue weapons and blackout tape patched over their unit insignia.
She lost the image. She dialed around frantically, desperate to know what was happening, who had rolled up Korchow’s network. She found the gunman’s feed, on a narrow band UNSC channel, and tapped in to it just as he put out a booted foot and rolled Korchow’s body over.
But the face that turned into the light wasn’t Korchow’s at all. It was Arkady’s.
She started to ask Cohen if he’d seen it, if he knew who’d sent the gunmen, but before she could get the thought out, they were in real-time trouble.
Korchow’s shop was gone. Cohen was gone. She was alone, truly alone, for the first time in days. And she was buried alive in some past, present, or future of the glory hole that had nothing to do with anything else the worldmind had shown her.
She stepped forward and stopped, unable to see the ground before her. “Careful.”
Hyacinthe stood behind her. He looked tired and drawn. His face was smudged with coal dust, and the shoelaces looped over his shoulder were broken and knotted.
Li watched him the way she would have watched a tiger.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
She stepped forward to stare into the dark eyes.
It was Cohen, after all. She was sure of it. “Are you all right?” she asked. “For now.”
“What does that mean?”
“The worldmind is running on my network. Using me like it’s used the field AI since the first fire. I don’t think it has any other way to organize its thoughts … not in any way that we would understand.”
“But you don’t have to hold out for long,” Li said. “Nguyen—”
“Nguyen didn’t even try to intercept the missile that blew the field AI,” Cohen said. “She seemed more interested in wrapping up Korchow.”
He caught his breath and shuddered. The image of Hyacinthe flickered ominously. “What’s wrong?” Li asked.
“Nothing,” he said quickly. But there was a telltale hesitation in his voice. “I’m afraid,” he said at last. “It wants me to hold it up. Hold it together. And … I can’t.”
“Cohen—”
“It’s taking me apart in order to put itself together. It’s doing what it did to Sharifi, to your father, to all the people who died down here. Except that it figured out with the field AI that an AI is much, much better for what it needs. That if it goes through an AI, it can get into streamspace, understand it, use it.”
He was talking fast now, the words rushing and tumbling. “You need to go to ALEF, Catherine. You’re taken care of. I’ve made sure of that. It’s all yours. Everything. You’ll lose some networks. Some won’t accept you, won’t accept any human. Don’t worry about it. You’ll hold on to enough to make it all work. The ALEF contact is—”
“Stop it! You’ll go yourself.” “But if something happens—” “Nothing will happen!”
He put a hand up to touch her face, but she jerked away, her throat tight with panic. “Don’t you sacrifice yourself for me and leave me to live with it. I won’t let you. And I’ll hate you for it.”
“Don’t say that, Catherine.”
“Well, what the hell do you want me to say?” she shouted.
I want you to say you love me.
He took a step toward her, and this time she didn’t back away.
“Fine. I’ll buy you a drink somewhere when this is all over and say it.”
“Say it now,” he whispered. “Just in case.”
She said it. She couldn’t believe it, couldn’t even get the words out without stuttering. But she said it.
Then he set a hand on her hip, and she stepped into his arms, and it was all so, so simple. Something shivered and let go at his touch, something she’d never even known she was holding on to. And with a jerk of recognition, she found that dark unmapped territory in her own heart that was his already— shaped to him, made for him, the exact width and breadth and depth of him.
This time there was no chasing, no hiding. Just everything they wanted spilling through their hands and running away like water.
* * *
“We’re getting the truth now, I think,” Voyt said. His voice was level, but there was a brightness, a loose-limbed alertness to him that turned Li’s stomach to acid.
Sharifi was still sprawled across the steps. Li could feel the cold stone biting into her back, setting shattered ribs grinding. She blinked, and a razor’s edge of agony shot through her now-blind right eye. God, what had they done to her?
“Is she dying?” Haas asked. Li recognized the doubting hitch in his voice: a civilian’s cautious uncertainty about just what kind and what degree of violence a human body can tolerate.
“I know my business,” Voyt said. “She’s not going anywhere.” “Your recorder off?”
Voyt twitched irritably. “I’m not a complete fool.”
“Good.” Haas had been drawing closer as they spoke. Now he stretched Bella’s slender hand toward the Viper, “Give me that.”
Voyt hesitated, then handed it to him.
Haas stepped around Voyt and pressed the tongue of the weapon against Sharifi’s head.
“Careful,” Voyt said. He spoke in the even, artificially calm voice of a soldier watching a civilian do something stupid with a gun and not wanting to scare him into making a big mistake out of a little one.
“Oh, I will be,” Haas said.
Voyt relaxed slightly. But Li could see, through Sharifi’s single good eye, what Voyt couldn’t. She could see the look on Haas’s face.
“Did you think I didn’t know?” he asked Sharifi. “Did you think I’d just stand back and let you fuck her?”
But Sharifi didn’t hear him.
All she heard was Bella’s voice. All she saw was a beloved face bending over her. All she felt was Bella’s hand touching her, taking the pain away.
She reached out with one hand, a gesture that was no more
than a breath, a tremor. Li was the only one who heard the soft snick of the trigger.
As Sharifi died something gave in the rock above them, booming and cracking. A hot blast of air pulsed down the gangway, hitting hard enough to knock Bella to her knees.
“Run!” Voyt yelled, but his voice was lost in the roar of falling rock. It’s going to kill them, Cohen said.
She heard Voyt scream and fall, but the sound seemed to come from far, far away. She saw Haas pass a hand over Bella’s brow. She felt him slip off the shunt just in time, just the way he must have planned it. Then the last barrier broke, and the worldmind was running free, unfettered, ripping through Voyt, through Bella, through Li and Cohen like wildfire sweeping through dry grass.
For one wild, surreal moment she saw it all. The dark cavern around her. The flesh and ceramsteel mélange inside her own ringing skull. The blazing silicon vistas of Cohen’s networks. The antique shop, smelling of tea and sandalwood. Arkady’s unconscious figure sprawled among the sleek curves of the generation-ship artifacts. And above, around, and through all of it, the endless weight and darkness, the million voices of the worldmind.
The stones were singing.
* * *
In the end Cohen, or whatever was left of him, cut her out of the link. She begged, in that last moment, not even sure he could hear her. She cursed him, cursed herself, Korchow, Nguyen, the whole killing planet.
Then she was alone in the darkness, and there was nothing left of Cohen but the hole inside her where he should have been.
The Anaconda Strike: 9.11.48.
Adry breeze blew across her face, winding from nowhere to nowhere like a desert river.
Her internals were shattered. Ghosts, fragments. She felt the abuse her body had taken through the long hours in the pit. And behind it, worse than the physical pain, the memory of what Voyt had done to Sharifi, and of the whirling, chaotic, living darkness Cohen had cast himself into to save her.
Bella and McCuen were staring down at her, their faces white, drawn, terrified. “Did you see that?” Li asked, sitting up.
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