“What better way to get hold of illegal wetware without leaving a paper trail than to seize it in a TechComm raid?”
Li rolled her eyes. “Oh, come on!”
“Sharifi wasn’t just a victim, Catherine. She was involved. She came here to do a very specific job. A job she needed the intraface to do—or why would someone like her have risked experimental implants?”
“Fine. But to say that there was UN involvement—”
“Of course there was. Sharifi was working for TechComm. They controlled her budget. They controlled access to the mine. They controlled the old construct genelines, Sharifi’s included. And if TechComm controls something, that means the Security Council controls it. Which means Helen. Helen who sent you to Compson’s World before Sharifi was even cold. Or should I say before she was even dead?”
Li caught her breath.
“Come on, Catherine. Don’t be an idiot. I put transit time from Metz to Compson’s World at almost three weeks. You hit planet ten days after the fire. That means she decided to send you here at least a week before Sharifi died.”
“I know,” Li said reluctantly. “You think I hadn’t thought of it?”
“But you damn well haven’t done anything about it, have you? Have you considered asking her why she really sent you here?”
“I considered it. And I decided not to.”
“Why the hell not?” She didn’t answer, and after a moment Cohen continued. “I’ll tell you why not. Because you don’t want to know. You don’t want to think about what she’s doing, about what you’re doing. You don’t want to think, period.”
“Are you finished, Cohen?”
He stood up, cursing, and paced in a tight circle before the viewscreen. “My God,” he said, when he was facing her again, “that’s why she loves you so much. She gives her orders and it’s over. You don’t question, you don’t think, you don’t hesitate. You’re her creature!”
“No. I’m a soldier. And I’m loyal. Something you wouldn’t understand.”
“Don’t bait me. You need me. Our little chat in the white room back there? Whoever engineered that was toying with us, playing with us like a cat plays with a dead bird. And they’re targeting you, Catherine.”
Li stood in front of the screen, looking at the floor. The roach she’d flicked away was still rolling around on its back trying to right itself. She stepped toward it, set the toe of her boot on it, and crushed it.
“It’s not just Helen,” Cohen continued. “There’s an Emergent involved. And not just any Emergent. Someone’s using AMC’s field AI. Someone who’s managed to turn me back every time I tried to track them. Someone strong enough to trap me, play with me. And they’re after you.”
“I thought you said AIs weren’t interested in people, Cohen.”
“Maybe I was wrong. Or maybe you’ve done something that’s made them interested.”
Li swallowed. Her mouth felt dry, metallic. “Or maybe they’re using me to get at you,” she said. “Did you tell someone about us?”
“‘Us’?” Cohen looked like he was about to laugh. “‘Us,’ as you so delicately put it, lasted all of thirty-six hours. When exactly would I have had time to tell anyone?”
“Then what are they after, Cohen? What do they want from me?”
He looked away, and she saw his throat tense as he swallowed. “How the hell would I know?”
AMC Station: 21.10.48.
Game one.
Li shouldered her way into the All Nite Noodle at the bottom of the second inning. Hamdani was on the mound, dark socks pulled up to his knees, right leg shooting up in his high angular windup kick. The Mets’ big Cuban designated hitter had just crushed a line drive off the center field wall and put himself on second with the help of what Li thought should have been considered an error. The outfield was playing in close, looking nervous.
The line cook touched a finger to his hat and nodded as she walked in. Before Hamdani had retired the next batter, Li was settled at a quiet back table with a beer and a bowl of noodles. When someone sat down at the table next to her in the top of the sixth, she assumed it was the line cook coming to pass time with a fellow Yanks fan. She turned, smiling—and saw a man her oracle claimed she’d never met before.
She nodded, thinking he was just taking the empty chair, and looked back to the game just as Hamdani trotted to the mound. So far he’d held off the heart of the Mets batting order and kept the Yanks their tenuous two-one lead. But he had thrown far too many pitches. And he was looking shaky, fussing with his bad elbow between batters.
He was one of the great ones, but he was getting old, injury-prone. His fastball was slowing down. His curve and slider had lost their bite. He wasn’t unhittable anymore. And it looked to Li like he was about ten pitches away from exhaustion.
He wound up and threw a sharp slider that just caught the outside of the plate. “Fantastic!” Li said under her breath. A taste of the old magic there.
“Ball one!” the umpire said.
“God dammit!”
“Major,” said the man across the table from her, “I had no idea you were so passionate about this.”
Li’s attention snapped away from the game. The man smiled at her—a carefully rationed smile in a young-old face that revealed nothing. She took a closer look, trying again to place him. He reminded her of someone, but in a generic way. As if it were not a single person he brought to mind, but a whole type of person. A type of person that gave her a bad, uncomfortable, guilty feeling.
A thrill of apprehension ran down her spine as she made the connection. He was Syndicate. And he reminded her particularly of the diplomatic rep from… where? MotaiSyndicate? KnowlesSyndicate? Whichever Syndicate he was from, that must mean he was A Series. But what the hell was an A Series construct doing on Compson’s World? And how could his talking to her spell anything but trouble?
“I don’t think I know you,” she said. Best to tread cautiously.
“Oh, but I know you,” the A Series answered. “I know quite a lot more about you than you might imagine.”
“Then you have the advantage.”
He smiled again. A diplomat’s smile. A spy’s smile. “I think there are few areas in which I’d have any advantage over a woman of your… what’s that word humans are so attached to? Talents?”
The crowd cheered, and Li’s eyes snapped back to the screen. The Cuban was up again. “Big game,” she said, hoping her new friend would take the hint and leave.
“Hmmm. I wouldn’t know. Not a fan. Actually, I came because I hoped I might get the chance to talk to you.”
Sure, Li thought. The chance to talk her straight into a full-scale internal affairs investigation. “Great,” she said. “Why don’t you come by the office in the morning?”
“Ah,” said the stranger. “Well. This isn’t official. I believe it’s something we might most profitably discuss in private.”
Li turned and looked straight at him, her recorder’s status light winking in her peripheral vision. “In private is not an option. You can either talk to me on the record here or on the record in the office tomorrow. Those are the rules.”
“The rules.” The man spoke musingly, drawing the single syllable out, considering it, interrogating it. “But there are rules and rules, aren’t there? Wasn’t that how it was on Gilead?”
Li’s stomach plunged as if a high-altitude chute had just snapped open and snatched her out of free fall. Then she forgot her stomach, forgot the game, forgot Gilead, because her head was throbbing and her eyes were watering and the room was spinning around her.
“Andrej Korchow at your service,” the man said. “Privately, anyway.”
Li shook her head, sniffed, sneezed. She felt like she had something up her nose, but she knew the feeling was an illusion. In fact Korchow had simply jammed her recorder, and her internals were spinning their computational wheels, desperately trying to fend off whatever he was throwing at them.
“What do you want
?” she asked. Her coolness surprised her. She knew people who’d been approached. It was inevitable. If the Syndicates didn’t hit you up, internal security would. Or corporate agents. She’d expected to feel outrage, fear. But all she felt now was a cold, calculating conviction that she had to keep her head and pick a careful path through the minefield that stretched before her.
“I don’t want anything, Major. Other than a chance to introduce myself. You strike me as someone with whom I might have… common interests.”
“I doubt that.”
“Ah, but how can you be sure if we don’t discuss them?”
She looked back to the livewall, delaying. Hamdani was tightening up even under his thick turtleneck. He blew on his hands, got called for going to the mouth, stalked off the mound in a fury, came back, stalled. When he finally delivered, the pitch got away from him and drifted invitingly over the heart of the plate.
“Shit,” Li muttered, just as the crack of the bat sounded through the room. She sighed in relief as the ball died over the warning track.
“You’re a curious woman,” Korchow said smoothly. “An enigma, one might almost say. I confess to a powerful interest in you.”
Li kept silent.
“When I learned you’d been posted here, I was, quite frankly, astonished. Your service record shows… an impressive ability to get results. It seemed to me that you deserved more. Had a right to expect more.”
“I don’t see it that way,” Li said. “And even if I did, I have plenty to lose. And plenty to be grateful for.”
“Grateful. For what? For the chance to tend the colonial sheep and take orders from inferiors? Or is there some other explanation for the hero’s anticlimactic homecoming? Some people”—Korchow’s voice shifted subtly, got harder, colder—“idealistic people… gullible people… have surmised that your fall from grace shows the Security Council has repented of some of its… harsher attitudes. I am not one of those people.”
“If you have something to say, Korchow, say it.”
“I have nothing to say, Major. I’m merely curious. Call me a student of human nature. Or is human the right word here? By the way, has anyone ever told you how much you look like Hannah Sharifi? Amazing the strength of the XenoGen genesets. Their work was crude, of course. Human, after all. But some of the prebreakaway designers had real genius.”
“I doubt you’ll find many fans of their work around here.” Li shook her head again, not making any progress against Korchow’s jammer.
“No, alas. By the by, was Sharifi really murdered?”
“That’s not established.”
“But I’d been told you have suspects.”
“You were told wrong, then.”
“Indeed. So hard to get accurate information. A thorny problem, that. It makes reliable information particularly valuable.”
Li started to lick her lips, then caught herself, realizing how it would look. Korchow was skirting the edge of deniability. Asking about Sharifi. Asking for information. Unmistakably offering… something. But so slyly that Li couldn’t explicitly reject the offer without appearing to have raised the subject herself.
Was this a UN internal affairs sting? A genuine approach by a Syndicate agent? Or just the corporate espionage department of some multiplanetary fishing for tidbits about Sharifi’s work? Whichever it was, they were surely being recorded. The only question was who the wire belonged to. “I can’t give out information about an ongoing investigation,” she said.
“I wouldn’t dream of prying into a Controlled Technology Committee investigation,” Korchow answered. “My interests are more properly described as… tangential to yours.”
On-screen, the Cuban was up again. The game was tied, the Yanks one out shy of a win. It was Hamdani’s to lose.
“I don’t know why you’d think TechComm has anything to do with my being here,” Li said.
“Really, Major. The problem with being as honest as you clearly are is that it doesn’t equip you to lie competently when necessary.”
“Hah!” Li said. Her defensive software had finally managed to outflank Korchow’s block. They were back on tape again.
“Well,” Korchow said, standing up. “It was a pleasure talking to you.” He reached into his breast pocket, pulled out a narrow card, and set it on the table in front of her. “My card. I run a store in the capital. Antiques. Compson’s World is a treasure trove of remarkable artifacts. I’d be honored if you paid me a visit and allowed me to show you what the planet has to offer.”
“I doubt I’ll have time,” Li said. She plucked the card off the table and tried to hand it back to him.
“No, no,” he said. “It is one of my firm beliefs that one should never close any door in life until one is quite certain that one does not want to walk through it.”
Li watched him slip through the crowd and vanish. Then she looked down at the card in her hand. It was made of some matte fiber that looked like, but was not, paper. And instead of printed words and pictures it bore a precise geometric lacework of punch holes. A Hollerith card.
She’d seen Holleriths before, and she recognized the implicit status message. It was written in decimal code, and in a format that no machine for two centuries had been able to process. It embodied a technofetishist, antiquarian, nose-thumbing aesthetic. And it assumed that anyone you handed the card to could recognize and process the antique code without an external computer.
She was certain, looking back over their conversation, that Korchow was KnowlesSyndicate. Knowles was the diplomat’s syndicate, the spy’s syndicate. Their A Series were mavericks within the close-knit conformity of Syndicate society, artists of information and manipulation, as formidable as they were unpredictable.
The surface address punched into the Hollerith card put Korchow’s shop in Helena. Behind the punch holes the card’s surface bore an intricate engraved logo that reminded Li of the patterns in Cohen’s Persian carpets. Where had she seen that design before? On an advertisement? She searched her hard files for a match and found one in the top layer of her actives. Recent, then.
She accessed the file, saw the digital image of a leather-bound journal with a dozen business cards tucked into the front flap pocket. And there, peeping out from behind several slips of shiny fiche, was the corner of Korchow’s Hollerith card.
The notebook was leather. Brown leather as soft and expensive as butter. Sharifi’s.
On-screen, the Cuban had carried Hamdani deep into the count, fouling off pitch after pitch, though Hamdani was throwing everything he had at him. It was only a matter of time until he turned on one of those not-quite-fast-enough fastballs.
“Walk him, you idiot,” Li muttered. “Don’t throw the game away.”
But Hamdani wasn’t going to walk him. Couldn’t bring himself to walk him, though he must know in every cell of his aging body that he’d already been beaten. He wound up, looking stiffer and older than Li had ever seen him look. The ball left his hand a split second too early and floated across the plate square in the middle of the strike zone.
The Cuban saw it as soon as Li did. His eyes snapped around. His arms extended. His broad back turned toward the camera as he rounded on the ball. The bat cracked like rifle fire, and Li didn’t need to hear the roar of the crowd to know it was all over.
The windup. The pitch. It’s gone.
She stood up and tucked Korchow’s card into her pocket, feeling the prickle of unseen eyes on the back of her neck. Then she walked—slowly, carefully, expressionlessly—back to her quarters.
* * *
The next morning, four hundred and seventy-six hours after the rescue crew found him in Trinidad South 12, James Reynold Dawes came out of his coma and started talking.
As soon as she found out, Li shuttled down to the Shantytown hospital to see him. When she got there, Sharpe and Dawes’s wife were standing in the corridor outside his room arguing with two AMC mine guards.
“We have orders,” one of the guards was saying. �
�No one’s supposed to see him, and that’s that.”
Li flashed a smile and her ID. “I think we could let his wife in, don’t you?” she said.
“That’s not what I was told.”
“By who? Haas? Call him. In the meantime, this hospital is a public institution. AMC may run the mine and the town, but here you’re on planetary militia territory. Which means that, until someone with a militia commission shows up, I have jurisdiction.”
“Thanks,” Sharpe said as Dawes’s wife slipped into the room.
Li shrugged. “I have to talk to him too, actually.” She gave Dawes a few minutes with his wife, then knocked at the door.
“Come in,” called a young man’s voice.
She stepped into the room and saw Dawes lying in a raised bed between cheap viruflex curtains. “How’re you feeling?” she asked.
“Pretty good. Considering.”
“Up to a few questions?”
He shrugged.
“Should I go?” his wife asked.
“Not unless you have somewhere else to be.”
“Well…” A look passed between the couple. She slipped out of the room, and Li heard the sharp sound of her heels receding down the tiled corridor.
“So,” Li said when she and Dawes were alone. “I bet that was a shocker of a wake-up.”
He grinned. “Just like sleeping fucking beauty.”
“I hope you at least got a kiss for your trouble. Sorry if I interrupted it.”
He laughed at that, then gasped and paled. “Three broken ribs,” he said. “The doc told me if I’d slept another week and a half I’d have woken up and not even known about them.”
“Well, you know what they say. It’s an ill wind that doesn’t blow someone’s house down.”
“Ouch!”
“Sorry,” Li said. “So do you remember anything?”
His face clouded. “Like what?”
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