“Okay! Okay. Shit. It’s Kintz. And two more.” He said two names she didn’t recognize. “They weren’t supposed to kill anyone. They were supposed to wait until Korchow and the AI were taken care of, and then take you and Bella in. Alive, if they could.”
Li’s breath caught in her throat. “What do you mean until the AI was taken care of?” “I don’t know.”
She twisted the knife.
“I swear I don’t! All she said was that she’d get rid of it. That we wouldn’t have to worry about it.” All she said?
Of course, she realized. It had been right there in front of her all the time. The answer that she had blinded herself to because she didn’t want to see it, couldn’t afford to see it.
This was a chess match, and one that had gone on far too long to be anything but a deadly fight between two equally devious and experienced opponents. Haas wasn’t the player on the other side of the chess board from Korchow. He never had been.
All along, every time Haas railroaded her or sabotaged her investigation, she had gone running to Nguyen like a little idiot. Never quite listening to Cohen’s warnings. Never looking up long enough to see the shadowy hand that hovered behind Haas, behind Voyt, behind McCuen. And now, when it was too late, she saw with painful clarity.
Who was the one person in a position to control both her and Sharifi? To orchestrate Metz and the mine investigation and the secret work at Alba? Who was the one person who knew just what Cohen would risk to save her? Who knew so well how to sow the seeds of mistrust that would keep her from confiding in Cohen even as she used him to save herself? And who, ever since Tel Aviv, had more or better reasons to want Cohen dead?
“What else did Nguyen say?” she asked casually, her eyes fixed on McCuen’s, praying that he was too scared and too confused to hear the question that hid behind her words.
“I don’t know. Oh, God, Li! Don’t! I swear I don’t know. I only talked to her that once.”
“Tell me exactly what she said, Brian. That’s all I’m asking. Do that and I won’t have any reason to hurt you.”
“She said to go with you. Keep an eye on you. That Kintz would bag you afterward.” “And the AI?” Li couldn’t stop herself from asking.
“She just said she’d take care of it. It’d be gone when you came off the link.”
Holy Mother of Christ, she thought—and then thrust aside the knowledge of what she had helped Nguyen do to Cohen. “What is Kintz supposed to do with us?”
McCuen hesitated.
“What, Brian?”
“He’s supposed to try to take you alive.”
“Try?”
“If he can’t, he’s supposed to kill you. You and Bella both.”
A cold knot ground itself into the pit of Li’s stomach. “What about Gould and the Medusa ? What about Sharifi’s package?”
“Nguyen’s going to catch both ships in open space when they drop out of slow time. Intercept Gould before she can get the package.”
“What did she give you, Brian? Money? A promotion? What did she come up with that was worth killing Mirce and Cohen for?”
McCuen looked at her, his eyes round and childish above the rebreather’s insectlike mouthpiece. “She told me you were a traitor.”
Li went slack, let the blade drop away from the feedline.
“What if I told you I wasn’t?” she asked finally.
“I would have believed you. Until today.”
She looked into his eyes, forgetting that he couldn’t see her. “And you would have been right,” she said, “until today.”
“What are you going to do with me?” McCuen asked. His voice sounded very small—a child asking his mother to tell him that nightmares weren’t real, that monsters didn’t really exist.
“I don’t know,” Li said truthfully. Kintz must have heard her shot, must already be on the move. “Brian, I need to know where Kintz is going to ambush me.”
“I can’t tell you.”
“Let’s not do this again, Brian.”
“No! I really don’t know. They were supposed to pick up Mirce and bag us when we got to the rendezvous with her. So … well, you saw. They’re not doing what they said they would.”
Li laughed bitterly. “It looks like Kintz has already decided he’s just not going to be able to bring us in alive.”
“Yeah,” McCuen said. If he wondered what Kintz’s decision meant for him personally, he didn’t say so. “Listen,” he said after a moment. “You can contact the station, can’t you? You could call Nguyen. It’s not too late. Maybe you can’t fix everything. But enough. Enough not to get killed down here. Enough to keep the Syndicates from getting what they want.”
“And then what?”
“I don’t know what. But it has to be better than getting killed!” He shivered. “Or going over to the Syndicates. Come on, Li. I can’t believe you want that.”
She looked down at his pleading face. She thought about dying in the mine. She thought about the long list of ugly, violent things she would have to do to get back to the surface alive. She thought about Nguyen, about what she might be willing to trade Li’s life for.
What difference would it make to anyone? Mirce was already dead. Cohen was gone. What did she care about what happened to a planet she’d never thought of as anything but a trap to escape from?
“But Nguyen’s going to kill the crystals,” she said. “She’s going to kill the whole planet.”
She knew it was the truth as soon as she spoke the words. It wasn’t a plan or a conspiracy; even now she didn’t believe that Daahl’s stolen memo had been more than an unfortunate turn of phrase. But it would happen. It was already happening.
The UN couldn’t survive without live condensate. Left to its own devices it would swallow Compson’s World whole, just as the worldmind had swallowed Cohen, just as the Security Council had swallowed Kolodny and Sharifi and all the other quiet casualties of their covert tech wars. Not out of malice, but with the best intentions. Not because they wanted to, but because they had to. Because that was how their code was written.
And Sharifi—Sharifi had known that the only way to stop them was to take the choice out of their hands.
“It’s not our job to decide those things,” McCuen said, as if he had tracked every turn and twist of her thoughts.
Li knew he was saying no more than she’d have said a few short weeks ago. He hadn’t seen what she’d seen. He hadn’t lived it. He could only see the choice she faced as black or white, loyalty or treason, UN or Syndicate.
And if she chose the side he wanted her to choose? The side that loyalty to comrades dead and alive made her want to choose, that everything in her long years of training and service had taught her to choose? Then the UN would be saved from the Syndicates, for a while anyway. It would survive, feeding off the condensates in a kind of cannibal existence that was no worse, when all was said and done, than any other creature’s struggle to survive at the expense of all the other life in the universe.
But the condensates—Cartwright’s sainted dead, Li’s father, Sharifi, Cohen—would die. And this time there would be no second birth, no dreaming afterlife, however alien. This time they wouldn’t be coming back.
“I’m sorry,” she said. She sat back on her haunches and took the knife off the rebreather line.
McCuen’s body turned to water under her as terror collapsed into shivering relief. “Jesus, Li, you scared the hell out of me. I really thought—”
She slit his throat cleanly, making sure the first cut finished it. It was messy, but it was kinder than anything else she could do for him. He died with a confused expression on his face, an idealistic little boy who still couldn’t believe this game of cops and robbers had turned real.
“It’s not personal,” she whispered into the void of his dilating pupils. But that was a lie too, the biggest lie of all. And she knew it even if McCuen didn’t.
* * *
Bella was waiting by their packs. She started
to say something, then saw the blood covering Li’s hands and clothes and stopped, backing up a step.
Li hated her for that step, for the disgusted, fearful look on her face. She hated her so much she could feel her hands shaking with it. She emptied McCuen’s pack, took what she could carry, and left the rest for the rats. She didn’t trust herself to look at Bella.
“Did he … did you find out how many of them there are?” Li held up three fingers.
“Kintz?”
“Yes.”
Li was drowning. Suffocating. She shouldered her pack and started down the drift, leaving Bella to follow any way she could.
Neither of them said McCuen’s name, then or later.
The Anaconda Strike: 9.11.48.
Kintz must not have been expecting them to come after him. He’d let his men straggle. He was acting like he expected Li to run, like he thought he’d have to corner her before she’d fight. What did he know that she didn’t?
She took down the first man with a single shot; no hope of surprise anyway, and the best tactic now was speed. Unfortunately, her shot took him in the neck, shattering the feedlines of his oxygen tank. She listened to the air whistling out of the tubes and cursed herself for being impatient. For not having thought things through more carefully. For having hands that shook too much. For not being as sharp as she’d been five years ago. Five months ago, even.
Behind him was another man she’d never seen before. Probably planet-side mine security. He had the instincts and training to duck for cover before she could shoot him, but she’d chosen her point of attack well; there was no cover.
She would have shot him down where he stood if he hadn’t been wearing a rebreather. But he was wearing one. And since Kintz was wired, it might be the only rebreather left down there.
She leveled the Beretta at the guard’s chest, and he froze, staring at her. She listened for Kintz, but all she could hear was Bella’s dress rustling as she shifted nervously from foot to foot.
“You might as well come on out,” Li called up the drift. “I can smell your cheap aftershave from here.”
“I wouldn’t shoot him,” Kintz said from behind a protruding piece of lagging about three meters away. “He’s got the last full tank. And I believe you need one of those.”
“Take off the rebreather,” Li told the guard, “and push it toward me.” He didn’t move.
“I will shoot you if you don’t do it.” She spoke calmly. She didn’t have to put on a play to convince him; the body of his friend was still steaming on the ground in front of him.
She saw the man’s gaze flick back toward Kintz, behind the lagging. That glance might as well have been a map. She could see where Kintz must be braced between lagging and rock face. She could see the gun that must be in his hand. And she could see what the guard had clearly seen: that Kintz would shoot him down himself if that was what it took to keep Li from getting the oxygen tank.
“Come here,” she told Bella. “And stay back against the wall.”
Bella crept forward, slowly, reluctantly. The look on her face said that Li had let her down somehow by even making her witness this scene. Li pulled McCuen’s gun out of the back of her pants where she’d stowed it.
She looked at it. She looked at the expression of fascinated revulsion on Bella’s face. She thought about the recoil on a big revolver like that, the way joints loosen on an old gun and the long uneven pull it would probably take to fire it.
She gave Bella the Beretta.
“Look,” she whispered, keeping her hand over Bella’s and the gun trained on the guard while she spoke. “Elbows locked. Bead lined up on his chest. And if he moves—if he even breathes too fast—shoot him.”
Bella nodded, tight-lipped. You lose your nerve and we’re both dead, Li wanted to say. But she didn’t. There was such a thing as too scared. And Bella looked like she was halfway there already.
Li flexed her hand around the Colt, felt its weight and balance. She wished to God she’d had a chance to fire it before, but wishing was beside the point. She gave the guard a warning look and started working her way down the drift toward Kintz.
The guard’s eyes followed her, telegraphing her movements, but there wasn’t much she could do about it short of shooting him outright. And Kintz would figure out what she was doing anyway. The thing was to get there fast. And to get there quietly enough that he couldn’t be quite sure where she was and when she was going to round the corner on him. She didn’t need absolute surprise. Just relative surprise. That, and a little help from Bella.
She got one of those things.
She turned the corner around the lagging, leading with her elbows, dropping the gun toward Kintz as soon as she was sure he wasn’t going to kick it out of her hands. And there they were, facing off against each other, each one with a gun to the other’s head. The next stage in the deadlock.
“Drop it,” Kintz said.
She hit him instead of answering. She’d thought it out, run the possibilities and options down in her mind, troubleshot her plan, and now she moved so fast that even Kintz’s enhanced reflexes couldn’t counter her. She turned into him, shoving him into the angle between lagging and rock face, where he couldn’t put his superior reach and height to use. She slammed her foot into his groin, and as he staggered under the kick she spun her gun butt-first and hammered it down on the side of his head.
He was a tough son of a bitch. He didn’t pass out. He didn’t fall. He didn’t even lose his grip on his gun. But he dropped its muzzle a few inches—all the opening Li needed. Before he regained his balance, she shoved McCuen’s gun under his jaw.
“Empty it,” she said. He hesitated.
She cocked the hammer. He emptied his pistol, bullets ringing and skittering across the rough floor. “Now drop it.”
He dropped the gun at her feet, not taking his eyes off her, and she kicked it away down the drift. They looked at each other.
“I don’t want to kill you this fast,” she said. “I’d like to see you suffer, you son of a bitch.” She said the words without thinking, and the sound of them shocked her. But they were true, God help her. She’d killed more people than she could count or even remember, but this was the first time she’d actually wanted to murder someone.
“Got you where it hurt, huh? Who was that bitch whose throat I cut, anyway? Another girlfriend? Too bad I didn’t have more time to spend on her.”
Li forced the gun’s muzzle farther up under his jaw, as if she thought she could shut his mouth with the sheer pressure of it.
“They’re waiting for you,” he said, eyes on her trigger finger. “You’ll never get out of here alive, even if you kill me.” He licked his lips. “Especially if you kill me.”
Li backed off a step or two, keeping the gun leveled on him. That was when the other guard made his move.
She didn’t see it herself, but she saw the quickly suppressed flash in Kintz’s eyes that told her something was happening behind her back. She glanced around, Kintz still in her sights. The guard was inching toward her, slowly, deliberately, his eyes locked on Bella’s. And Bella was letting him.
“Shoot him!” Li screamed. But Bella was frozen, shut down with terror, standing on the edge of a cliff she couldn’t force herself over. Li spun around, snapped her elbows straight, and fired a single shot over Bella’s head and through the guard’s eye socket.
Kintz was on top of her before she could swing back around. He went for the hurt arm, of course. She had known he would. What she hadn’t known was how fast the arm would fail her.
Bella tried to help. Li saw her out of her peripheral vision, circling around them, holding the Beretta stiffly out in front of her, trying to decide where to aim the gun. As if she even knew how to aim it.
“No, Bella!” she barked. “No shooting. Just take the air tank and leave. I’ll catch up if I can.”
Kintz didn’t even give her time to notice if Bella had obeyed her. He wasn’t her match in skill, but she was h
andicapped by her stripped-out arm, and the punishment she’d gone through in the past few hours. And by the five years and eight inches and thirty kilos Kintz had on her.
He slammed her against the drift wall, threw her hard, and was on top of her before she could get her arms or legs under her. He jerked her onto her stomach, jammed his knee into the small of her back, and bent her bad arm back so savagely that she couldn’t breathe without feeling the twinge of stretched-tosnapping tendons.
She heard him reach for his belt, heard the click of handcuffs releasing. “I’d kill you right here,” he said, “but Nguyen almost had our heads over Sharifi. Your lucky day.”
“Not behind my back,” she said as he slapped the first cuff on. “Not unless you want to carry me up.”
He stopped, rolled her over, let her hold her hands out in front of her while he locked the second virusteel ring around her wrist and single-keyed in a preset compressed code.
He was in no hurry now that he had subdued her. He almost seemed to be waiting for something. He frisked her, ran his hands up and down her legs, into her crotch. She watched him think about the fact that they were alone.
“You must really have fucked up on Gilead,” she said, needling him. “Or were you just too pissant incompetent for them to trust you with a real Corps job after that?”
“You need to learn to shut up,” he said, and put a hand down her shirt.
She let him get a good feel. She saw his mouth open a little, his breath come faster. “You’re pathetic,” she said.
He took hold of her legs and jerked her flat on the floor. “Roll over.” “Don’t have the balls to look me in the face?”
He hit her so hard she didn’t even feel the blow. When she came to, he was on top of her and already fumbling at her belt. He got that unfastened all right, but the pants and the tie-down of the Beretta’s empty holster took two hands. She waited, eyes closed, until he had both hands engaged. Then she balled her hands into a double fist and swung them, letting the weight of the cuffs add to the momentum of her internals.
Spin 01 - Spin State Page 49