He turned around—and she nearly cried out in surprise.
It wasn’t Korchow at all.
It was Arkady.
But it was an Arkady so changed that Li barely recognized him. She had last seen him on Earth, in Jerusalem, just over a decade ago. In that span of time Li had changed only slightly, but Arkady had aged two decades. And this wasn’t a soft, well-cared-for, comfortable age. The years since Jerusalem had clearly been brutal ones, marked by poverty, work, and sickness. He was still handsome. He was a Rostov Syndicate A Series, after all; nothing could change that. His body was still slender and graceful under the rough clothes. He still had the pale, wide-eyed, finely drawn face of a Russian icon. But he didn’t look like a saint anymore, let alone an innocent; he looked like a martyr in the final stages of his personal calvary.
Arkady recognized Li instantly, as if he had been expecting her. He didn’t say hello, though. He just put down his tools and walked off the foundry floor, beckoning her with a curt nod of his ravaged head to follow him.
She followed him down the line of foundries until they came to the dark archway of a foundry whose fires had been doused after some long-ago but still visibly catastrophic structural failure. Li smiled in pure aesthetic appreciation. Eight-foot-thick steel-clad walls arced up to the partially shattered vault of the foundry’s ceiling. The ruined chimney clawed the sky high overhead, shooting down a twilight-dim blade of daylight that made Li wonder if there were stained-glass windows in hell. It was the perfect place to talk to a doomed martyr.
Don’t go in there! Router/Decomposer warned, as if he thought she had a choice. And then they stepped through the door, past the eight-foot steel-clad walls of the old foundry, and Li’s struggling internals cut out completely.
As always, the fall out of streamspace was accompanied by a turbulent wash of vertigo as a body habituated to constant input, lost GPS signals, stream uplinks, and the constant, tidal back-and-forth of backups, parity checks, and wetware updates that were as much a part of Li’s body as the flow of blood through her veins. She recovered quickly—but not in time to block Arkady’s stinging slap to her face.
“Stupid stupid woman! What are you doing here? And how many of Nguyen’s bloodhounds are on your tail?”
She squinted through the gloom at her attacker—if you could really call being slapped in the face an attack. She had moved instinctively to neutralize the threat, and now she was gripping his wrist in her left hand hard enough to make him wince in pain.
“Sit down and talk to me like a grown-up, Arkady. And while you’re at it, tell me when the Syndicates started using DNA-platformed AI.”
“When we started building Drift ships and couldn’t breed pilots fast enough to stop UNSec from exterminating us.” He squinted at her. “How did you know, anyway?”
She shrugged. “You were never fast enough to get the jump on me before. Something had to have changed. Besides, all the cool kids seem to have AI in the blood these days. I’m starting to feel downright obsolete.”
Arkady laughed at that—and Li saw a trace of the soft boy he’d been when she last knew him.
“I’m surprised the Syndicate Central Committee didn’t think bloodborne AI was a fate worse than death.”
“It’s unorthodox, of course. But it’s not contrary to Syndicate philosophy.” He cast a distasteful glance at Li’s own all-too-visible wire job. “It’s not putting machines in your body. It’s just using an existing natural process for information processing.”
“Why do I suddenly feel like we’re arguing over how many Turing machines can dance on the head of a chromosome?”
“And why do I feel like this isn’t what you came to the Crucible to talk about?”
“Fair enough. I want to know what Cohen was doing on New Allegheny, and why Korchow was helping him.”
Arkady’s rage flared again, like a fire exploding back to life when it finds a new source of oxygen. “How could you have come here, when you know perfectly well that—” Arkady broke off, looking as dizzy and disoriented as Li had felt a moment ago. “Cohen didn’t tell you?”
“He barely even told me he was leaving.”
Arkady seemed to collapse in front of her eyes. He sighed and slumped onto a block of fallen masonry. In the dimness he looked younger, softer, more like the Arkady Li remembered. He needed a shave and a bath, of course, but none of that blunted his extraordinary physical perfection. No natural-born human could ever be that perfect. And no human-designed genetic construct would be that perfect. They’d broken the bones of his face, long ago, when he first started working for Korchow; Li remembered him telling her that his head ached when the weather changed. But even with the damage, he was still mind-numbingly handsome. And of course if you knew the AR-11 face, you could piece it back together, realign the fine-bridged nose, tweak the right cheekbone into perfect symmetry, smooth the line of his jaw so that it conformed once more to the classical Rostov aesthetic. You could see what he should look like—and how he no doubt would look the minute he was permanently assigned back to his home Syndicate.
“You really don’t know anything?” he asked once more, as if hoping against hope that her answer would change this time.
“No.”
“Then it’s already over. They’ll follow you, and they’ll find us. And they’ll kill us.”
“There has to be something we can do, Arkady.”
“There’s not.” He stared at her, his eyes dark and his face haggard. And then he dropped his head into his hands in a gesture of mortal weariness. She sat watching him for several minutes, but he seemed locked in some private space beyond words.
“How long’s it been since Jerusalem?” she asked at last. “Eight years? Nine?”
“Twelve. And four months and three days. Sol standard.”
“You always did have an orderly mind.” And obviously he’d been keeping count, too. From when, she wondered? But then she realized that she already knew the answer to that question. And his mind was running the same memories hers was: snow on the desert, an ancient house in a more ancient city.
She flexed her right hand, which suddenly ached sharply, and Arkady noticed the gesture.
“Last time I saw you on a news spin you hadn’t gotten that fixed.”
“Yeah, well, I decided it was a little too conspicuous for this job.”
He snorted. “You’re a little too conspicuous for this job.”
“Thanks for the compliment. If it was one. But I’d like information more.”
“I still haven’t decided what I’m willing to tell you,” he said in his soft, docile voice. “Don’t rush me.”
“How ’bout a little catch-up then? What have you been doing all these years?”
“Working with Korchow.” And more than working, Li thought, if the look on his face is any indication.
She couldn’t stop looking at him, even though she knew she was staring and he resented it. He didn’t just look older. He looked different, in ways she hadn’t even imagined could be part of his geneset. Pretty little Arkady had become a man somewhere along the way, as wolfish and predatory as Korchow had ever been. But he didn’t have the sense of humor that had leavened the mix in Korchow. The Syndicate spymaster’s humor had been hard to take sometimes: mocking, saturnine, and (Korchow being Korchow) always double-edged. But it had softened him. It had veiled the anger and the idealism that drove him. It had made him seem human. And that made him easier to deal with for the part of Li that was most human.
Arkady, on the other hand, didn’t bother to veil the anger. You could see it twisting and coiling behind his beautiful eyes. You could hear it in every deceptively soft word that came out of his choirboy’s mouth. You could feel it driving him. Arkady had become a hard and dangerous man. And quite possibly a crazy one.
Which, Li reminded herself, only made him more dangerous.
“Weren’t you on your way to Novalis last time I saw you?”
“Yes. And then we went
home.”
“To Gilead?” Li asked in surprise. The last she’d known, Novalis was locked down under a system-wide quarantine in order to contain a terraforming virus that allowed both radiation-damaged humans and Syndicate series constructs to reproduce naturally … and thereby dealt a crippling blow to the political systems on both sides of the Line. “But what about the quarantine?”
Arkady just shrugged instead of answering.
“How’s Arkasha?” Li asked, watching for a change in his face and knowing before she spoke that he wouldn’t give her the satisfaction—any more than she would if Arkady called turnabout fair play and pushed her on Cohen.
“He’s still on Earth, as far as I know.”
“You don’t keep track?”
The temperature in the room seemed to drop twenty degrees. “If I did, would I tell you?”
“You’ve changed, Arkady. You didn’t used to be so angry.”
“Yes. Your little gift to me. I never had the chance to thank you for it.”
“Excuse Arkady,” Korchow said behind her. “His sense of humor’s wearing a little thin at the moment. Professional hazard.”
She spun around—and there was Korchow, in the flesh, smiling at her.
God, she hated that smile. She could never catch her balance with Korchow—with his stark, unapologetic individuality—whatever individuality meant for a Syndicate series member tanked in a birth lab and stamped with a serial number.
“An unexpected pleasure, Major. Class reunions are so touching, don’t you find?”
“I didn’t know Arkady was working for you. Doing Knowles-Syndicate’s wet work seems like quite a change from studying ants and building ecosystems.”
“Well, Arkady did go back to Gilead for a while and even got assigned to a few terraforming missions. But he had a bit of trouble fitting in, and … hmm … his home Syndicate felt he had picked up some unacceptably un-Rostov-like ideas during his time with me. So since KnowlesSyndicate broke him … well, you know the old saying: ‘You break it, you own it.’ ”
“So you bought out his thirty-year contract? Lovely.”
“Better than a one-way trip to the renorming center,” Korchow said with a placid smile that belied the horror behind his words.
“So what’s this he’s telling me about the Syndicates breaking the Novalis quarantine?” Li said after a momentary silence.
“Oh that.” Korchow waved a hand dismissively. “Ancient history.”
“You found a cure?”
“Funny you should put it that way, actually. There’s another old human saying. I’m sure a poor girl from the Periphery like you must know it: ‘How do you stop an itch? Scratch it!’ ”
“You have to be joking, Korchow.”
“Not at all. It turns out that constructs are astonishingly good at making babies. And repulsive as I might find the idea of extralineal … er …”
He couldn’t even bring himself to say the word, Li noticed with growing amusement.
“Anyway.” He cleared his throat. “I’m of the older generation. Our younger cohorts have proven much more adaptable.”
“No doubt. And I suppose that would be why you’re suddenly so interested in the Drift planets?”
“I see you’re still as perceptive as ever.”
But somehow Li thought she wasn’t quite getting the whole story. There was something about the look in Korchow’s eye—even more slyly humorous than usual—that made her think she hadn’t guessed the half of it.
“And how are you going to control your unruly little clones now that you’ve handed them the keys to the kingdom?”
“Exactly the question some of our own hard-liners asked, Major. O ye of little faith—and they don’t even have your excuses. No. They speak the words, but they don’t believe them. Or they don’t believe enough. Just like you, they can’t get beyond those primitive human approximations of freedom. They can’t see the real face of altruism. They’re blind to the beauty of self-sacrifice for a common good.”
“Poor dears. They don’t know what they’re not missing.”
“Exactly.” He sounded warmer and more human than she’d ever heard him. “I couldn’t have said it better myself. That is exactly how I see it.”
“So that’s it? Mother Nature knows best? You’re shutting down the birth labs and putting your faith in your mass-produced Madonnas?”
“Certainly not! Still, it turns out that doing it the old-fashioned way has certain practical advantages. Birth labs take up a lot of cargo space. And then there are all the specialized technicians to service them, and the supplies, and resupplies. That’s a lot of weight to boost in and out of a gravity well. The built-in version is much more suitable for on-surface colonies.”
“I see,” Li said. And suddenly she did see—with the sharp clarity of a revelation that she had already been suspiciously waiting for. “You’re going with the UN model: labor at the bottom of the gravity well and management in orbit. Everyone who counts—everyone who lives on-station and has access to FTL travel—will be creche-grown. But if the dirt grubbers want to breed like bunnies, so much the better. It’ll help you get ahead of the UN in the race to grab every habitable planet in the Drift.”
“Well, that’s an uncharitable way of putting it, but I can’t deny that some strategic advantages do accrue to an expanding population.”
“But why here? New Allegheny already has settlers. What interest can you possibly have in—” Li had been about to say: What interest can the Syndicates possibly have in the human refuse that the UN won’t consider worth shipping home when they pull out? But then her mind jumped to the obvious conclusion. “Oh. You actually want them. On-site grunt labor. And a nice, big, diverse gene pool to dip your toes into whenever one of your precious genelines hits a genetic bottleneck. Does NALA know you’re planning to turn them into broodstock? Assuming it is NALA you’re working with.”
“Improved broodstock, my dear. We like to flatter ourselves that we bring at least a little something to the table in that regard. I mean, look at these people, Major. Speaking from one construct to another, do you honestly think that they won’t benefit from having a few tens of thousands of Syndicate constructs working for and breeding with them?”
She would have liked to be able to utter some ringing affirmation of the sanctity of the individual or the free market or whatever … but given what she’d seen in the Crucible this morning, it was hard to argue with Korchow. New Allegheny was over, as anything but a wholly owned subsidiary of one interstellar power block or the other. And Li was neither young nor stupid enough to think that it would make much difference to the man on the street whether his off-planet masters were bred in beds or birth labs.
“Did you tell Cohen about this?”
“Yes.”
“And what did he say?”
“He said the UN was doing the same thing, except in streamspace.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“That’s what I said. But he told me it would make sense when he showed me what he was working on at the Navy shipyards.”
“Why the hell would he do that?”
“Because he wanted me to smuggle it off-planet.”
“To the Syndicates?”
Korchow smiled. “To everywhere.”
“He trusted you to do that?”
“He said he didn’t have to. He made a little joke of it. He said”—Korchow cocked his head as if straining to hear the words Cohen was speaking in his memory—“he said it wasn’t about trust …”
Li finished the sentence herself before the words were out of Korchow’s mouth: “It’s not a matter of trust, it’s a matter of informationsharing protocols.”
“Yes. He said he was going to give me code, active code. And that the code itself would make sure I kept my promise.”
Li could hear the blood in her head and the breath moving in and out of her lungs. “And?”
“And nothing.”
“Don’t fuck
with me, Korchow!”
“I assure you, Major, I wouldn’t dream of—” Korchow glanced at Arkady and then raised his eyebrows in surprise. “Ah. We’ve been speaking at cross-purposes. I thought Arkady had told you. Cohen never showed up. He arranged a meeting with us, in detail and with security measures that would only have made sense if he believed that UNSec or the AI police were on his tail. But … he never showed up.”
Li grew still, suddenly realizing that there was a way everything she’d heard might fit together. “What day were you supposed to meet him?”
Korchow named it.
“That’s the day he died. Two miles away on the other side of the Crucible.”
“You know,” Korchow told her with a smile that seemed almost gentle, “you really shouldn’t be here.”
“But Cohen said—”
“I know what he said. And I know this is all still fresh news to you. But for us it was four months ago.”
“What—”
“We’re facing a rapidly evolving situation, Major. New players have entered the game. The odds have shifted. I can’t help you now.”
“So you’re just going to warn me off? Don’t you have some useful information for me? Anything?”
“Useful is a rather complicated concept, isn’t it? But interesting … well, I think I can promise that you’ll find what I have to say interesting.”
“Then stop playing footsie and tell me!”
“Major, I’m hurt. I sometimes get the impression that you don’t like me.”
“I see you’re as perceptive as always, too, Korchow.”
He smiled at that. It was a smile that Li would have called affectionate if she’d seen it on anyone else’s face. “Would it interest you to know that our mutual friend left a viable fragment behind?”
“A ghost. I know.”
“You don’t know. I’m not talking about one of those pathetic amputated remnants that most people mean when they speak of ghosts. I’m talking about Cohen. Himself. Or at least enough of him to call by the name.”
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