She caught him on the right temple. Not ideal, but she stunned him—and opened up a long gash in his skull that would bleed into his eyes with a little luck.
He staggered to his feet and aimed a crushing kick at her ribs, but she was already rolling away from him.
She glanced around as they squared off against each other. The gun was too far away. She’d never get there in time. But Kintz couldn’t get to it either—not without risking a kick from Li’s still lethal legs.
This would be a good time, Bella, she thought. But of course, Bella was nowhere. “You fucking digger bitch,” Kintz said. “Fucking stinking dirty half-bred cunt!”
Li laughed. She didn’t know where the laugh came from, but suddenly it all seemed pathetically ridiculous, from Kintz’s tired insults to the fact that they were fighting for the same planet both their ancestors had wasted lifetimes trying to escape from. “Guess you should have stuck to the half-breeds you could buy in Helena,” she gasped.
After that, they didn’t talk anymore; they were both short of breath, and they knew that the next time they went down one of them wasn’t getting up again.
Li would have liked to be able to wait Kintz out, let him get impatient. But she couldn’t afford to. She was too tired, too battered. She would flag before he did. She had to draw him into doing something stupid, and she had to do it while she still had the strength to take advantage of his mistake.
She danced in, let him get a glancing hit on her, jumped away, deliberately stumbling a little. He took the bait; he reached for her, missed his hold, reached again.
This time she let him catch up to her. She forced herself not to think what would happen if this ploy didn’t work, if he really did get her down. She kept her hands up, locked together. As he gripped her, she braced her feet and drove her hands toward his face with all the strength she had, fingers rigid.
He screamed and staggered back, clutching his eyes. She threw herself down the drift without even looking to see if he was following and reached the Colt in a cloth-ripping, face-forward slide.
His first kick connected just as her fingers touched the gun. He slammed into her ribs, her kidneys, her stomach in a flurry of blows so violent that only the certainty of death if she failed kept her hands locked around the revolver.
She rolled over, baring her stomach, and looked up at him. One eye was still open, though the skin around the socket was torn and bleeding. The other was a gushing mess.
She raised the gun only to have him kick it aside. He fell on her, trapping the gun between them, scratching and grabbing for it, his breath roaring in her ears with the tight scream of adrenaline and agony. They wrestled, grunting like dogs fighting for a bone, locked in a deadly tug-of-war. She felt Kintz prying her fingers from the sweat-and-blood-slicked grip. Her pulse drummed in her skull. Her lungs and fingers burned. Her grip slipping, belly to belly with Kintz, hardly knowing where the gun was aimed, she fired.
She heard the wet thump of bullet hitting flesh, felt hot blood rush over her legs and stomach.
It took a long time for him to die, and she didn’t dare move the gun, even to flick the safety back on, until she was sure his fingers had slacked. When she finally pushed him off her his one remaining eye was open and his limbs loose and heavy. She wiped the blood off her face and stood up—only to find herself staring down the barrel of her own gun.
“Bella,” she said.
“Not quite.” Haas’s smile looked all wrong on Bella’s pale face, and in the construct’s dark eyes Li saw the same frozen, uncomprehending panic she’d seen when she’d gone under the loop shunt.
“You took your time,” she told Haas.
“I had other fires to put out,” he said. “And I didn’t want to get on the shunt and show my hand too soon. Bella’s been getting … difficult.”
“Christ,” Li whispered, sick at the thought of what Haas had done, at the sure knowledge that this had been the nightmare behind Bella’s eyes every time she’d spoken of Sharifi’s death. She might not have remembered, but she had suspected. And she had used Li to chase down that suspicion—hoping all the while that it would turn out to be wrong, that Li would find some other explanation.
Haas bent over Kintz, pulled a second pair of cuffs out of his belt and tossed them to Li. “Cuff your ankles,” he said, and watched while she did it. “Now give me your hand,” he said.
Fear prickled down Li’s spine. Haas wanted her dataset, the record of her interface with the condensates. And once he got it, there would be no reason at all to take Li above ground.
Haas saw her hesitation. “Nguyen may want the data enough to play games with you,” he said, his voice level, “but I personally don’t give a shit. Bear that in mind.” He nodded toward the cuffs already encircling her wrists. “You might crack those given a few hours, of course. But you don’t have a few hours. I leave you here without air and you’ll be dead inside of one hour. I’m your ticket out of here, my friend. You better fucking keep me happy.”
Li stretched out her hands, fingers spread wide, palms toward him. He put Bella’s left hand against hers, clasped Bella’s fingers around hers, and started the data transfer.
It was a strange thing to feel information being pulled out of her internals without her consent, to feel Haas taking the last chip she had to bargain with.
Or was the data all she had now? There was something else. Something Cohen had been ready to use. Something she could use too—if she was willing to put it all on the table and gamble everything, the way Sharifi had. She hesitated, knowing that the hard knot in her stomach was simple fear. Then she looked into the cold black pit of Bella’s dilated pupils and knew she was already risking everything. She closed her eyes, took a last, trembling breath, and stepped into the memory palace.
The numbers hit her like a riptide. Code coursed through her, rolled her over, dragged her under. She reached out—tentatively at first, then more confidently—to the myriad sentient systems that made up Cohen. She felt their squabbling, bickering personalities—and the glue of shared goals, shared memories, shared passions that bound them together. None of these splintered shards was Cohen. But they remembered him. They remembered everything he had felt and believed and wanted. They shared that with her, even if they shared nothing else.
She just hoped it would be enough.
She found the communications AI almost before she began looking. His fury spun at the core of the memory palace like a dead star, sucking her in, absorbing the dead AI’s last functioning subsystems, devouring every remaining bit of heat and warmth and light in the place.
“I need you,” she said. “I need to get a line out to Freetown.”
“We can’t get a line to Freetown without the field AI. We have no network.”
“Yes we do,” she said. “We have the worldmine. The worldmine can give us streamspace access completely outside UN control or oversight. All we have to do is get Daahl’s network up. All we have to do is finish the job Cohen started.”
A cold shiver ran through the numbers. “Why should we?” “It’s what Cohen would have done if he were still here.”
“He was different. We believed in him. Trusted him. He earned that. You, on the other hand, had better have something to bargain with.”
So she bargained.
She gave them the intraface. She promised to do what she had already promised Cohen she would do. What they would have known she would still do if they’d trusted her as he had.
She promised to set them free.
The Anaconda Strike: 9.11.48.
She rode Cohen’s networks like a hawk riding an updraft.
She wheeled and soared, sideslipping into subnetworks, enslaved systems, communications programs. She felt out beyond them to the static-charged web of local communications that hung like an electronic smog over Compson’s World, to the miners’ primitive radio communications, to Helena, to the orbital stations. And then she dove, surrendering herself to the black depths of the w
orldmind.
It was waiting for her, just as she’d known it would be; but it was no longer the alien, incomprehensible presence of the glory hole that she felt. Instead she heard the echoes of half-remembered voices in it. Mirce. McCuen. Her father. And, worst of all, Cohen.
He had been right, of course. The worldmind needed him. It had cannibalized him, anchoring a new structure in the ruins of his systems, and in the flimsy beginnings of the planetary net that he had helped Ramirez create for it. Because it was the worldmind that Ramirez’s net had been meant to serve all along. That was the secret that had taunted Li from behind Cartwright’s blind eyes. That was the secret her father had known, the secret Cohen himself had known, even if he had figured it out too late to save himself. And now Li watched the worldmind explode into orbit, crackle through the Bose-Einstein relays of every planet along the Periphery, across the unmonitored, uncontrolled tributaries of FreeNet and out into the deep, swift, living tide of the spinstream.
She followed, running on more tracks than she could consciously manage. She combed her subsystems, found two UN pension administration number crunchers and set them to work on the cuff locks. The communications AI wondered fleetingly if they had time to wait for them. She wondered along with him —and an instant later, so quick on the heels of the thought that she had no sense of having acted, she was on the FreeNet airspace control system searching the skies for a signal from a ship that had not yet reported in to the navigational authority.
She found Gould’s ship already in orbit, maintaining forced radio silence while the sleek, vicious shape of a UNSC frigate drifted above it, going through a search-and-seizure routine. She stayed just long enough to be sure that Nguyen’s net had closed around Gould. Then she was off and running, looking for the Medusa.
It wasn’t there. Not when she started looking, anyway. Then it exploded in-system at relativistic velocity, right on schedule, its navigational beacons howling in Dopplered harmonics, its retrorockets blazing like a man-made supernova.
Nguyen’s people lay in wait at the first system buoy. As the Medusa dropped into normal time, a second frigate detached itself from the buoy’s signal shadow and began pacing the civilian ship, hailing it.
As fast as the Medusa was moving, the hail couldn’t have come through as anything but twisted static. Still, it was on a closed military link. The ship slowed for it.
Li prowled through eight different Bose-Einstein-enabled networks before she could find a back door into the closed communications shooting between the two ships.
“—for boarding and security inspection,” the frigate’s captain was saying when she finally broke through the ship-to-ship encryption.
She didn’t wait to hear the freighter give the permission. She was accessing the Medusa ’s data banks before the frigate completed its request, looking for anything Sharifi could have deposited there, hoping desperately that the precious dataset wasn’t deadwalled into an unwired storage locker.
Then someone logged on and began executing a massive data dump into the ship’s computer core.
Sharifi’s unencrypted datasets. And more. As Li raced through the files she realized there was spinfeed with the datasets—feed that Sharifi must have thought was important enough to record live and send with the original data. Li looked to see who was doing the uploading and laughed at the obviousness of it when she finally saw it.
Sharifi had rented a locker with an automated data release. When the Medusa dropped into orbit over Freetown, the release program had looked for a streamspace signal—one Gould would presumably have sent had her own delivery been successful—and, not receiving it, had begun dumping its data into the ship’s comp. The ship in turn was programmed to broadcast the data on FreeNet when the upload was complete.
This was Sharifi’s insurance policy: dumping her raw data onto the most unregulated and chaotic sea in streamspace’s ocean. It amounted to little more than shouting out her discoveries in an electronic town square. Bella and Cohen and everyone else who knew Sharifi had been right about her all along. Sharifi hadn’t been trying to sell her information. She’d been trying to give it away, to anyone and everyone who could use it. And she had trusted that someone—enough someones to make a difference—would take care of Compson’s World.
The Medusa was too slow, though. Its onboard systems were hopelessly obsolete and in uncertain repair. Li spun through the ship comp, tweaking, adjusting, speeding things up wherever she could; but even so the first files had barely loaded before she felt the clank and pressure shift of the frigate’s boarding tube locking onto the Medusa ’s fragile skin.
Christ! All this, only to lose everything because of a slow ship’s comp? She pushed and prodded furiously, but still the numbers seeped through the shipboard systems as reluctantly as cold diesel fuel. And meanwhile it was just a matter of time until the frigate’s techs accessed the Medusa ’s systems and shut down the file transfer.
But they never did. They ran a cursory search that didn’t turn up anything—didn’t even seem intended to turn up anything. Then they closed the airlock and pulled away, leaving a welter of relieved, if confused, internal mail between the freighter’s crew and passengers.
Li breathed a sigh of relief and let her guard down. The frigate kicked in its attitudinals and pulled away. The Medusa continued its radically slowed drift toward Freetown.
Then she saw it. It was as chillingly, breathtakingly clear as sunlight in hard vacuum. The frigate’s crew hadn’t boarded the freighter to take Sharifi’s data off it, but to leave something else on it. Something that would be sitting in one of the dark cargo bays waiting for a signal from the frigate’s bridge.
Nguyen didn’t need the files on the Medusa anymore. She hadn’t fired on the field AI until she knew Li and Cohen had retrieved everything she needed. And the frigate’s crew hadn’t boarded the Medusa until Haas had Li’s hand locked in his and was already stripping the precious data out of her hard files.
Nguyen had the data now. So why would she run the risk that someone else might access the Medusa ’s files, that Sharifi’s message might get through? Why would she let the rest of the world in on TechComm’s most jealously guarded secret?
The others were with her before the thought was even a word. They hijacked every navigational buoy within broadcast distance of the Medusa. They hijacked the NowNet lines that ran through the Ring– Freetown axis and out to the Periphery. Then they started shooting Sharifi’s files over every open link they could find.
Your files too, the communications AI said—and before Li could argue he was shooting out the unedited spinfeed of all those long hours in the mine, broadcasting everything she and Cohen had seen and felt since the worldmind first engulfed them.
Watching through the Medusa ’s nav systems, Li saw the frigate slow and turn. Was she too late? Had it all been for nothing?
But no. They had caught the outbound transmissions. Li saw a quick FTL exchange of encrypted data between the frigate and Corps headquarters on Alba. Then the frigate turned tail, fired up its Bussard drives, and vanished into slow time.
The Medusa kept inching toward Freetown, its crew blissfully unaware of their deadly cargo. Meanwhile, Sharifi’s message flashed onto FreeNet and across a dozen Bose-Einstein relays onto a dozen planetary nets throughout the length and breadth of streamspace.
Li opened her eyes, amazed at her ability to act simultaneously in realspace and the whirling chaos of Cohen’s systems. The cuffs fell away from her wrists and ankles with a clatter. Haas looked at them unbelievingly for a split second, then jumped away from her.
Li jumped faster. She was on him before Bella’s body had taken a step, surrounding him, suffocating him, penetrating him. The station AI fought her, but she ground it to dust, barely stopping to think what she was doing, and slid toward Haas through the numbers, bright and pitiless as a shark. He cried out once. Then there was only Li. Her incandescent purpose. Her glacial, inhuman clarity. Her all-toohuman fury.
<
br /> She’d forgotten about the derms, though. At the last instant Haas quivered, mustered his strength, and ripped them off, leaving her with nothing but the empty vessel of Bella’s shunt-suppressed mind.
The last thing she heard as she collapsed was the cool, disembodied echo of Haas’s laughter.
* * *
She woke to pain and darkness. Her lungs burned. She put a hand to her face, and it came away wet with blood. Hers or Kintz’s, she couldn’t tell.
She sat up and saw Bella stretched out on the floor in front of her, unmoving but still breathing, thank God. There were voices in her ear. Not the whispers and echoes of the memory palace, but real human voices.
“Daahl?” she called. “Ramirez?”
No answer but crackling, hissing static.
After an eternity something came over the line. It was indistinct at first, lost in interference. But when it cleared, she heard Ramirez calling her name.
“We’re ready to come up,” she told him.
“Good. Hurry. We’d just about decided to let them go down and look for you.”
“Let who down?”
Another garbled, crackling stretch of static. “What?”
“I said the strike’s over. The troops are pulling out. And there’s a General Nguyen looking for you.” Nguyen. Christ.
“I need to send a message first. To ALEF.”
“Forget ALEF. It’s over. Just get up here. It’ll make sense as soon as you see the spinfeed.”
AMC Station: 9.11.48.
The news was all over the station. The streets were still, hushed, dark but for the flickering light of the livewalls and the low murmur of the crowds gathered around them.
Sharifi was on every channel. Interrupting news hour, NowNet programming, the last game of the Series. As they passed the All Nite Noodle, Li glanced at the livewall and saw the Mets and Yankees huddled on the infield, staring up at a two-story-high holomonitor Sharifi who smiled as she explained the unprecedented, unlooked-for, inconvenient miracle that was Compson’s World.
Spin 01 - Spin State Page 50