She found Daahl’s fiche and handed it to Cohen, acutely aware of the slim shapely fingers brushing hers.
“Intriguing,” he said, before she’d even dropped her hand back to her side. “Any brilliant theories about who’s raiding the cookie jar?”
Li crossed her arms over her chest and shook her head. “How the hell do you do that? I never get used to it.”
“Mmm. Sheer brute computing force. That and the fact that I’m eight times cleverer than anyone this charming has a right to be.”
Li smirked.
He stuck his tongue out at her, slipped his shoes off, and sank gracefully onto her bunk. “So. Where were we?”
She grabbed her desk chair and turned it around to sit backwards on it. She summarized her meeting with Daahl and Ramirez, telling Cohen about the exchange of information and the lockdown, but leaving out the personal talk.
“And this Daahl person just picked you out of thin air?” Cohen asked when she’d finished. “He thought you looked like a nice friendly person? You’ll forgive me if I confess to having suspicious thoughts about him.”
Li shrugged, trying to look unconcerned. “It didn’t come up.”
Cohen had sprawled across her bed while she was talking—he had to be doing this on purpose, didn’t he?—and now he stretched, sighing luxuriously, sending Chiara’s glossy curls cascading across Li’s pillow. He opened his eyes, gazed at her in wide-eyed and utterly insincere innocence, and said, “Sure it didn’t. Well, we’ll revisit that question later. Have you found the accident reports he wants?”
“I tried. Didn’t have time to really look.”
“Time is my middle name,” Cohen said with a grandly munificent gesture that Li was sure Chiara had never used in her life. “What’s your password?”
Li gave it to him, and he logged in and produced the missing accident reports within less than a minute.
“Where were they?” she asked.
He raised an eyebrow. “In Voyt’s files. Until a few days ago. Someone deleted them ten hours before you hit station.”
“Who?”
“Hush. I’m working on it. Go do something useful.”
Li scanned the reports, stopping here and there when a name or a word caught her eye:
02/01/47. Stokes, William. Age 32. ID No. 103479920. Subject fatally injured when he returned to Wilkes-Barre North 4 to check a missed shot. No autopsy. Cause of death: burns.
04/12/47. Pinzer, G. F. Age 26. ID No. 457347423. Subject discovered in lower gallery Wilkes-Barre South 14, crushed by roof fall. Rescuers unable to extract body because of gas seepage. Subject identified from personal effects, pit bottom logs. Cause of death: trauma.
04/19/47. Mafouz, Christina. Age 13. ID No. 764378534. Subject’s coal cart experienced brake failure in gangway west of Wilkes-Barre East 17. Subject suffered multiple compound fractures and dislocations with associated soft tissue trauma. Left leg amputated below knee, St. Johns hosp.
These entries were no news at all to Li. They recorded death and maiming by fire, explosives, roof falls, equipment failure. All the routine dangers of the miners’ world.
But scattered among the typical accident reports were other ones:
17/20/47. Carrig, Kevin. Age 37. ID No. 355607534. Subject found unconscious in Trinidad South 2. Pit inspector hypothesizes subject opened gas pocket, but rescuers found no gas at work site and autopsy revealed no signs of gas inhalation. Cause of death: unknown.
20/2/48. Cho, Kristyn. Age 34. ID No. 486739463. Subject collapsed during survey of Trinidad South 7. Witnesses describe complaints of head pain, bright lights, convulsions, loss of consciousness. Autopsy indicated extensive, nonlocalized damage to frontal lobe. Cause of death: brain seizure.
The troublesome reports had started about four months ago. Deaths attributed to electrical shock where repair crews had been unable to find stripped wires or standing water. Deaths attributed to gas where other miners working in the same vein had been mysteriously spared. Healthy miners dying of heart attacks, strokes, brain seizures. And two miners hadn’t died—were still lying in the Shantytown hospital in the grip of comas that no doctor could explain.
There had been a spate of these inexplicable accidents when the Trinidad opened. Then things had leveled off. Then there had been another significant bump three months ago: fourteen unexplained deaths in a single week.
Li didn’t have to cross-reference dates or check her files to know what had happened three months ago.
Sharifi had arrived.
“Guess where the reports were deleted from?” Cohen asked, arching a slender eyebrow and forwarding the still-legible remnant of an erased access log to her. “The station exec’s office.”
“So, Haas deep-sixed the accident reports the day before I arrived.”
“And he was embezzling crystal, or at least we suspect he was.”
“And,” Li said, feeling vaguely dirty, “we know Haas is not unfriendly to the Syndicates.”
They looked at each other.
“It all keeps coming back to Haas,” Li said. “Doesn’t it?”
Instead of answering her, Cohen vanished.
Li staggered to her feet, knocking her chair over. Her quarters looked wrong somehow. She checked her internals and realized that she was no longer in limited VR interaction mode, but in full two-way.
She tried to access realspace.
Nothing.
Code.
Nothing.
She’d been bagged, warehoused, shunted into virtual deadspace. She closed her eyes and rubbed her face, thinking. When she opened them again, she was no longer on-station.
She stood in a perfectly square, perfectly empty room. Blank white walls. Blank floors and ceilings. Nominal squares of windows opening on an eternity of white nothingness. Her heartbeat hammered in the silence like a kettledrum. She focused on a corner where floor met wall in order to stave off vertigo and waited, counting her heartbeats.
A door opened. One moment she was staring at a blank wall. The next someone had stepped into the room with her. But when she tried to recapture the moment of entry, it was missing, skipped over as if there had been a bad splice in her optical feed.
The new person in the room was small, dark, slender. It took Li a few heartbeats to focus on him after the long blank whiteness. When she did, she saw coltish, gangling legs below striped shorts. A red-and-black football jersey. Dark hair. Olive skin.
“Cohen?”
“Sshhhh!” he whispered.
He had nothing on his feet but tall striped socks with bulky shin guards poking out over their tops; his old-fashioned soccer cleats were tied together by the shoelaces and thrown over one bony shoulder. He circled the room, stopping several times to peer at sections of wall that looked, to Li’s eyes, completely unremarkable. He walked up one wall and sat down cross-legged a few feet below the ceiling. “Well, here we are,” he said.
“We? I don’t know who the hell you are, except that you look like Cohen. Which proves nothing.”
He grinned. “Looks don’t always deceive, my dear. Even mine.”
“Prove it.”
“How?”
“Tell me something.”
“Like what?” he said, sounding for all the world like the ten-year-old he appeared to be.
“Something no one else would know.”
He wrapped his arms around his legs and put his sharp little chin on his knees, thinking. “Right,” he said. “Well, you’re two centimeters shorter than you tell people you are.”
“You could pull that out of my transport files.”
“And you’re an evil-tempered beast in the morning.”
She snorted. “As opposed to the rest of the time?”
“Good point,” he said, and laughed.
He peered owlishly at her, rubbing at a fresh scab on his knee. “There’s always your deepest, darkest, awfulest secret.”
She froze. She tried for a laugh but couldn’t quite get there. “Which one?�
�
“That I love you.”
She looked up to find him watching her as if she were a suspicious package that might explode without warning. “Oh, for God’s sake,” he said after a brief awkward silence. “You don’t have to look like you’re ready to chew your leg off to get away from me every time I say it.”
“Don’t exaggerate, Cohen.”
“It’s no exaggeration. Trust me.” He shot her a resentful look from under dark eyelashes. “And it’s ridiculous. It’s not like you’re some fainting virgin, for Heaven’s sake.”
“Now you just want to sleep with me? You’ve lowered your sights. Last time I was supposed to be wife number seven. Or was it eight? Christ, Cohen, you get married like normal people buy puppies!”
“Normal humans, you mean.” He gave her a long naked defenseless look. “That’s what it’s all about for you, isn’t it? Trying to pass. Getting the signed, sealed, and delivered human stamp of approval.” He laughed bitterly. “I’d really like to get inside your head and know what you think when you look in the mirror every morning.”
“You’ve got me all wrong, Cohen.”
“Do I? Then what are you so afraid of?”
“Nothing,” she snapped. “I’m just not interested in being the next stop on your tourist trip through the human psyche.”
He looked away and muttered something she couldn’t quite hear.
“What did you say?”
“I said that’s exceptionally nasty, even for you.”
The room suddenly felt too small, too hot. Li turned away and began checking the walls, trying to find some chink in them.
“Look,” she said after a long, uncomfortable pause. “I didn’t mean—”
“Forget it. It was stupid of me.”
“So what’s with the kid?” Li asked when the white silence had become too thickly oppressive to stand any longer.
“Ah.” Cohen undid the laces of his sneakers and started putting them back on his sock-clad feet. “I thought you knew that. This is Hyacinthe.”
“I thought you were Hyacinthe.”
“He’s one of the things I am. He’s my original, bedrock interface program. And, of course, the man who invented me.”
Li had a sudden urge to laugh. “As a ten-year-old?”
“Actually he was fourteen when this was done. It’s old video footage. He used it to create the original VR interface. I guess you could say it was my first ’face. I tend to fall back on it when I’m pushing the limits of my processing capacity. As at present, unfortunately.”
“Can’t we get out?” Li paced the room’s perimeter again.
“No. And sit down before you drive me incurably mad. You’re safe as long as I’m here.”
But just as he said the words—as if someone were playing a nasty joke on them—he was gone again.
* * *
Li was back in the dark place.
This time she knew she was underground, in the mine. But that was all she knew. Water dripped from an unseen ceiling, splashed in an unseen pool. A damp, chill air current wafted up from some underground river too far off for her to hear.
She cut to infrared. No good. She was instream; she saw only what the person controlling the simulation wanted her to see.
“Light a lamp,” Cohen’s voice whispered from somewhere near her left ear.
Her hand reached out to where it knew the lamp was. Picked it up. Primed it. But her fingers fumbled with the wick, as if they had become sudden strangers to this familiar task. As she adjusted the flame, she brushed the inside of her hand against the hot barrel of the oil reservoir and heard the sizzle of burning skin.
“Shit!” she said, putting her hand to her mouth instinctively, sucking at the blistered crescent of flesh.
“Sssh,” Cohen said. “You’re fine. Tell me what you see.”
She held up the lamp and saw an uneven floor of hewn rock running away in all directions. Pillars of light marched in long ranks from one end of the space to the other, gleaming like ivory in the lamplight. The ceiling arched overhead, supported by undulating veins that fanned from one Bose-Einstein node to another in an infinitely repeating, fractally complex spider’s web.
“It’s the glory hole,” she told Cohen. “Sharifi’s glory hole.”
But it was the glory hole intact, unburnt and unflooded and full of softly whirring and clicking equipment. The glory hole before the fire. A generator hummed in one corner. Optical cables snaked across the floor between thickets of diagnostic machinery. Crooked teeth of crystal jutted from floor and ceiling.
The mouths of the earth, Li thought. Wasn’t that what Compson had called them?
“Is this where the hijacker took you?” Cohen asked.
She raised the lamp and turned in a slow circle. To her left a steepening upslope followed the line of the vein, echoing the mined-out chamber on the level above. To her right, the portable virusteel ladder led to the chamber and drift above, and to the long slippery stairs out of the Trinidad.
“Is this it?” Cohen whispered—and she realized for the first time that the whisper was not behind her but inside her. “Is it your memory or someone else’s?”
“Someone else’s.”
“Whose then? Think.”
Her hand moved reluctantly, as if she were keying instructions over a bad link. She squinted at it. It was hers, all right. Short nails. Strong, brown, blunt-ended fingers. Still. There was something not quite right about it. She turned it so the palm faced her.
No wires.
She looked at the hand again, more carefully. The nails were longer than hers, better cared for. She counted old scars that weren’t there, new ones that shouldn’t have been there. And the fresh burn, a slim crescent of raised scar tissue between thumb and forefinger.
“It’s Sharifi,” she said. “It’s Sharifi’s memory.”
Then Sharifi turned at the sound of approaching footsteps, and Li was helpless, along for the ride like any other ghost.
It was the same sequence she’d seen in the last hijacking. But this time she understood what she was seeing. The strange patterns chasing each other across the cavern were light from Sharifi’s lantern. The pinging sound was dripping water. The booming rifle reports were bootheels slapping on bedrock.
“What are you doing here?” Sharifi said, as Voyt climbed down the ladder.
He reached the bottom, turned, and grinned nastily. “Just keeping an eye on the merchandise.”
“Fine. Stay out of the way then.”
“Where’s our honored guest? Off stealing the silverware?”
“Right here,” Bella said, stepping into the lamplight.
Li watched through Sharifi’s eyes as Bella approached. This was not the subdued woman she had met on-station. This Bella met Voyt’s stare and returned it. This Bella moved with the arrogant loose-limbed grace of a fighter, smiled the cool smile of someone who knew she could outsmart you, humiliate you. No matter what the game was. “Are you ready to deliver?” she asked.
Sharifi looked hard at her, frowning a little. “Are you?”
Bella opened her mouth to answer, and the flickering, lamplit shadows of the glory hole gave way to a blast of white light.
Li was back in her quarters.
“Cohen?”
“Here.” Her livewall flickered on to reveal Cohen, shunting through Chiara again, sitting in his sun-filled Ring-side drawing room.
“Do you know what we just saw?” Li asked.
“I know what you think we saw.”
“It’s there, in Sharifi’s memory. Everything we need to know. We have to go back.”
“We have to do no such thing. We almost got trapped there. And you still don’t know if what we saw was real or not.”
“I’ll chance it.”
“No you won’t. And if you decide to be stupid about it, I’ll personally lock you offstream.”
A dark suspicion tugged at the back of Li’s brain. “Why are you so scared? What are you not telli
ng me?”
“I’ve told you everything I know, Catherine.”
She laughed. “How can someone who’s had two hundred years to practice be such a shitty liar?”
She expected him to at least smile at that, but he just sat staring at the ground, arms crossed, swinging one sandal-shod foot back and forth in a nervous rhythm. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, hands clasped together so tightly that Chiara’s knuckles whitened.
“Listen. Drop this investigation. Tell Nguyen you’re sick, or you need maintenance. Which you do, obviously; I haven’t seen you pick anything up with that arm since you hit station.”
Li stared. A roach crawled across the floor and started up the livewall. She saw it with surreal clarity, each leg arcing forward, setting itself down against the glowing matrix of the viewscreen. When the roach began to crawl across Cohen’s leg, she reached out and flicked it away.
“I can’t drop it,” she said. “I’m one mistake away from getting chaptered out.”
“I can think of worse fates than a discharge.”
“Well, I can’t.” She paced around the narrow room. “You got me into this mess. And I’m not talking about just now. I’m talking about Metz. Whatever you know, I want to hear it.”
Cohen sighed, and Li wondered, not for the first time, how he managed to stamp his personality so strongly on his shunts. It was impossible to imagine Chiara’s lovely face wearing that tired, ancient expression—just as it was impossible to imagine Cohen not suffusing every ’face with that self-deprecating irony born out of a thousand lies, half lies, and compromises.
“I don’t know anything,” he said. “I only suspect. Helen, for one. Where else could Sharifi have gotten the intraface?”
“That’s crazy, Cohen. And anyway, Nguyen never had the intraface. The raid on Metz failed.”
“Did it? Look at the timing, for God’s sake. We pull the source code and wetware for the intraface off Metz and a few weeks later Sharifi’s on Compson’s World, wearing it? You run the numbers.”
“But you said that wetware couldn’t just be grown in viral matrix. That it had to be tanked in place, in a clone. So if Sharifi used it, it must have been cultured for her. And if TechComm was in on this from the get-go, then… why would Nguyen steal something she already owned?”
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