She hit the junction with just fourteen seconds left. She was overheating. Her internals were hitting the red zone, warning lights flashing all over her peripheral vision. Too bad. They’d either fail or they wouldn’t. And if they failed, she wouldn’t be around to regret it. She hauled herself forward, internals blaring, her heart banging out a tempo as hot and urgent as the warning lights.
02:52:38.
She hit the end of the chute suddenly, with less than twelve seconds left, and slammed into the miter seal.
It wouldn’t budge.
At first she thought it was locked, that the inside man had betrayed her. Then she saw the problem; the hinges were clogged with a greasy coat of dust, hair, and organic matter from the hydroponics bays, all the things that drifted on the air currents of the station and washed ashore in the stagnant back eddies of the outtake ducts.
Now that she saw it, it was so obvious she could have kicked herself. But then the things that got you killed always were obvious. Obvious and stupid. This door hadn’t been opened in years. Decades maybe. Not since the last mold epidemic. And because it wasn’t really life-support vital, it would be chronically neglected. A system you could shortchange without getting caught. A system that went to the bottom of the list when it needed a new part—and stayed there.
Korchow’s man had done what he promised all right; she had heard the sharp snick of the catch flipping open, could still hear a trapped-fly buzzing from the hinge hydraulics. But flipping a switch with the name and number of the vent on it was one thing. Actually getting the door to open in realspace was something entirely different. And Li was stuck in realspace.
She poked her fingers through the parts of the door she could reach and scrabbled frantically at the scummy deposits. Her breath rasped in her throat. Her nails scratched on metal. Cohen had warned her about the need for silence, told her there could be people in the bays next to the vent, but she was beyond caring. The whole universe had narrowed into one pure and burning thought—getting out alive.
Finally she felt some give. She twisted in the cramped duct, wrenching her body around, using feet, hands, anything, to get a purchase. She gave a tremendous kick and drove into the seal shoulder first. It held. She felt a wrenching pain in her shoulder and a cold burn like a blade being drawn down the length of her triceps. She backed up the chute and rammed the seal again. It gave a little. But not enough. Not nearly enough.
Twenty meters below her, she heard a click, then the whirr of circuits flipping on to feed power to the turbines. She tried to get her left shoulder forward, protect her bad one, but she didn’t have the space or the time to get turned around. She flung herself at it again, right shoulder first. A lick of cold ran down her arm from shoulder to wrist and her hand went numb… but the vent opened. She shot through just as the outer vent opened, and found herself hanging along the wall above an algae tray.
A full atmosphere of air pressure hit the miter seal. It slammed shut behind her like a bear trap, and she dropped into the bright, humid air of the hydroponics dome.
02:53:19.
She crept into a sheltered space between the dome struts and a dripping-full rack of algae trays. She crouched there, panting, waiting for her internals to settle down a little, waiting while she pulled her head together.
Evaluate and adapt, she told herself. Accept what is, and act on it. She was behind schedule. They had somehow gotten bad information. Bad information that could still make or break the mission. Her arm was numb, weak, close to useless. But she was in. She was through the most dangerous part of the run, and the only way out now was through.
She checked the open sunlit expanse of the dome in front of her. Empty. She stepped forward—and slipped on something slick and wet. She caught her balance, looked down and saw blood dripping from her right hand and pooling on the decking.
Her combat-application virucules would break her blood down, destroying telltale genetic evidence, leaving only the sterile universal-type plasma the field medics needed for their IV feeds. But in the meantime, there was still blood on the floor. A lot of it. Rose red drops on the silver deck plating, a glistening gingerbread trail for the guards to follow—straight to her.
She unzipped her pressure suit, pulled up the thermal shirt she wore under it, and ripped, wincing at the loud sound of tearing fabric. It ripped easily though, and it was elastic enough to make a tourniquet. She knotted it around her arm and sealed up her pressure suit again, being careful to activate the reflective visor; it wouldn’t do to get caught on vid there. When she had stanched the bleeding, she surveyed the damage to her suit. It was repairing itself, or trying to. But the tear was so big that she doubted the smart fibers would form a solid seal again. And if the suit wasn’t spacetight, how the hell would she ever get back to the Starling?
She shook her head, forced everything out of her mind but the immediate problem. Get to the lab comp. And don’t bleed all over the floors doing it. She’d worry about the pressure suit and all the rest if and when she had to.
Alba: 28.10.48.
03:12:09.
Getting to the comp was easy. Li had expected to have trouble with the DNA reader at the start of the last corridor, but to her surprise, the field dropped almost instantly to let her through. She shivered with apprehension. Did Nguyen know more than Li had told her? Had she slipped her an ace under the table for her own inscrutable reasons? Or was someone else at work here?
She slipped down the corridor, alert for patrols, scanning the labyrinth of ducts and wires that lined the ceilings for the faint pulses of security cameras. Nothing. Could a high-security lab really be so lightly protected? Or was it just that this was Alba, and the Corps knew that no thief who managed to breach the orbital fortress would ever get out safely? She counted down the doors until she reached the one that separated her from the lab spoke’s mainframe. Here goes, she thought. She slipped the lockpick kit out of her suit’s kangaroo pocket and unrolled it on the deck.
The lock work went slowly; she was used to having Catrall do this. But Catrall was dead. And even if he weren’t, he wouldn’t be helping her on this job. Not when it meant selling out Alba to the people who had killed so many of their comrades on Gilead.
03:19:40.
Footsteps. She froze. Were they coming toward her or moving away? Toward. She rolled up her tools, ducked around the curve, and climbed into the shadows of the ceiling.
Two women walked by. Guards, not scientists; she could hear their lug-soled boots, and the coarse, hard-edged slang that was the UN grunt’s native tongue. “Catch the spins today?” one of them asked. “Assembly voted PKs to Compson’s to get the mines open.”
“What a shit hole. Well, long as we don’t have to do it.”
“Do what? Go to Compson’s or open the mines?”
“Either. I didn’t sign on to shovel coal. Or shoot miners. Whole planet’s fucked, ever since the Riots. Ask me, we oughta just cut ’em loose and kick ’em into hard vac.”
“And we would if they could get those synthcrystals over in Lab Eight to format properly.”
“Yeah, yeah. And if wishes were horses…”
“…horses wouldn’t be extinct!”
The guards laughed and their voices faded away down the corridor.
Li counted to twenty, holding her breath, then dropped to the floor. When she got back to the lab door, she saw something that nearly stopped her heart: her own quantum pick, sticking out of the control panel like a hangnail.
For one panicked moment she thought the patrol had seen it, that they were coming back for her, that the whole lazy gossiping act had been nothing but subterfuge. Then she got a grip on herself. It had been no trick. Luck had been with her; the two women had walked right past the pick, busy talking, and never seen it. The one plus of storming an impregnable fortress was that no one expected to turn a corner and catch an intruder.
Inside the lab, Li saw her target immediately: a Park 35-Zed, the biggest mainframe made by any of t
he top military contractors. She walked around it apprehensively, looking for the input port. She found the port on one side of the mainframe, in a little tech’s cubbyhole equipped with a fold-down desk and rolling stool. She deactivated her pressure suit and peeled back the hood to bare the socket at her temple. She sat on the stool, keeping her feet planted beneath her center of gravity so she could get up fast if she had to. She pulled the wire out of her pocket.
She thought of the times she’d ordered Kolodny to jack into hostile systems. Then she told herself that she wasn’t jacking into a hostile system this time. She was just accessing the external communications program and dialing out to Cohen, waiting on the Starling. And the system wasn’t going to be hostile, because if everything went right, it would never know she’d been there. It didn’t help. She opened the main menu and began scanning through the settings, going as fast as she could without alerting any AI or human sysops, trying to make sure she wasn’t setting off any unseen trip wires. The Zed was more powerful than the smaller comps she was used to manipulating, and the direct line gave her a disorienting, vertiginous speed of connection.
It was like diving into the spinstream—but a stream without VR, a stream of pure numbers. The numbers fed directly into Li’s brain, and her oracle processed them at speeds beyond reach of any keyboard operator. But she still had to process them. And, even skewed by her own interface settings, there was something in the feel of these numbers that hinted at the vast, alien mind of the semisentient behind them. There was no mistaking this for surfing the spinstream, not if you had a feel for the code you were running. Streamspace was alive, in its own way, but only as a planet or a star system was alive. This was different. Here Li felt with every calculation, every operation, that she was inside something. Or someone. She found herself ducking and dodging mentally, not wanting to come to grips with the presence behind the Zed’s operating programs. She thought of Sharifi, trapped in the pit, locked mind-to-mind with the semisentient field AI of Compson’s orbital relay, and shuddered. It was an image burst straight from the subterranean depths of her nightmares.
Still, the lab AI remained comfortingly passive as she accessed screen after screen, gradually closing in on the back door that Cohen had shown her in their final planning sessions. All that changed when she tried to dial out. The moment she opened the outside line, she felt a shift, a push in the system. It reminded her of the ear-popping wall of air that swept through a ship when someone breached a pressure seal. And whatever was doing the pushing was more than the sum of the lab comp’s files and operating platforms. It was aware of her, Li. Knew she was on the move. Knew she’d dialed out. And it was thinking about it. At eight billion parallel-processed operations per picosecond.
Though any speed she could muster was meaningless, she hurried. The call went out. The dedicated line on the Starling lit up like a distant star in the darkness.
First ring.
No answer.
“Come on, Cohen. Be there!”
Second ring. Li felt the AI rising up like a great beast, flexing its computational muscles, gathering its immense bulk to flick off the irritating mote that was her.
“Don’t do this to me, Cohen!”
Third ring. And the Zed was on top of her.
It spun through its security operations so fast that the whole dataspace became an incomprehensible dizzying blur. Li was sinking, spinning. She knew she should jack out, but she couldn’t navigate the system, couldn’t orient herself or even control her own body. Code twisted and convulsed as the Zed overloaded her systems. Her internals froze, jerked, skittered off course. The datastream corrupted. Her own mind, unable to process the overload, betrayed her. She began to hallucinate. The numbers came alive. They pulsed with a cold, deep-sea wakefulness. A mind moved within them, dark, sightless, unsleeping. A mind without words. A mind forged in the pressure of a hundred atmospheres. It circled, searching for her. Stalking her. And she knew with bone-crushing certainty that when it found her she would die.
Far away someone else’s body convulsed and a stool skittered across the deck, wheels shrieking. The phone rang again, but the external datastream was so slow and uncompressed next to the Zed’s dizzying parallel calculations that the ring reached Li’s brain only as a low, Dopplered groan. Even the white noise on the line stretched out until each click and rasp of static became a distorted howl. The darkness within the darkness gathered itself and slid toward her.
Click.
She sensed Cohen’s arrival more than she actually saw it. A river of light washed through the numbers, driving back the darkness. It shone white, as pure and deceptively placid as the sweep of a Himalayan ice field. But it was crushing the Zed, cutting through the semisentient as implacably as a glacier grinding at a mountain. If she’d ever wondered what it was to be the scrap of flesh two sharks fought over, she knew now. She felt… nothing. She heard only her pulse pounding in her skull, and behind that a rushing, whirling silence. She was lost, floating, watching from a tremendous height while two battling giants tore apart the universe.
The lab comp writhed and twisted, desperately spinning through its programs in search of anything that would blunt Cohen’s relentless attack. Then it focused on her, and an icy finger of fear brushed down her spine.
‹Cohen!› she called. And with that one betraying thought, the darkness was upon her.
03:42:12.
The next thing she saw was Cohen. Not the implacable and terrible light, but his normal on-line self. He was running the numbers, doing the job he always did, the job any cracker did. ‹You’re back with us?› he asked, when she mustered enough energy to try a cautious operation.
‹What happened?›
‹No need to worry about it now. I’ll explain later.›
She waited, still weak. There was something comforting about watching him dial through the comp, watching the security codes untangle themselves under his touch and the numbers smooth out and tick past easily, the way they always did for him. Something was off though. ‹How come you’re not singing? › she asked.
‹What?›
‹You always sing when you’re cracking a system. Unless something’s wrong. Is something wrong?›
Digital laughter swirled around her, flickering through the numbers like brush fire. ‹Just because you can’t hear me doesn’t mean I’m not singing.›
‹Don’t try to snow me.›
‹Hang on a minute.› He scanned a promising file and cursed as it came up empty. ‹I’m thinking about the lab AI.›
‹It’s not coming back?› Li asked, feeling panicky.
‹No,› Cohen said. ‹He’s not coming back.› The emphasis on he was slight but unmistakable. A reproach.
‹Then what?›
When he answered, Li could feel the unease in his voice even across the remote line. ‹Ever watched flat film of a horse race?›
‹Sure. Beautiful.›
‹Know what a heartbreaker is?› He went on without waiting for a reply. ‹A heartbreaker is a horse so fast he doesn’t just beat his competitors, he breaks them. Beats them so badly they never run to win again. Horses used to die of it.›
‹You made that up. You’ve probably never seen a horse.›
‹No. Truly. Running to win is what racehorses were. The ultimate single-purpose organism. They couldn’t feed themselves, couldn’t even walk without special shoes humans made for them. But they could run. And they’d run themselves to death, run until their bones shattered. There’s footage of horses doing just that, coming apart on the track like ships burning up on reentry.›
‹That’s crazy, Cohen.›
‹Not crazy. Just human. They were human-built running machines. Just like I’m a thinking machine. Just like you’re a working machine, and every planet in UN space is a food-and-air machine. And when humans are building a machine, everything but the one thing they want it to do tends to fall by the wayside.›
Cohen paused, sidetracked to search a dead-end direct
ory. ‹Anyway, AIs are like racehorses. They’re built to play games. Chess games, probability games, war games. They’re built so that the win is all they want, all they are.›
‹Why are you telling me this?›
‹You just watched a heartbreak race.›
‹With the lab AI?› Li couldn’t get her mind around this vision of how Cohen saw the Zed. ‹Is it… he… dead?›
‹No.› Cohen riffled through a new directory faster than Li could identify it, dropped it, moved on to the next one. ‹He’s still here. Can’t you feel him?›
Cautiously, Li probed the network. She felt something, a dark, vaguely sentient presence. But it was confused, chaotic, diminished. As if the Zed had crept into some dark corner of the network to lick its wounds. ‹So now what?›
‹If he owned his own code, he could contract with a larger AI and try to make his way as an associate system, get some workout equity. Or he could get psychiatric help, reprogramming. But he doesn’t own his code. Alba does. So what will actually happen is this: The techs will come in tomorrow and find, first, that he got cracked by an outside AI, and second, that their top-of-the-line semisentient has just turned into an unbelievably expensive calculator. They’ll try to salvage him, because of the cost if nothing else, and when they can’t they’ll activate his terminal feedback loop, core out the mainframe, and install a new AI.›
Li felt something come through the numbers. Something that was partly indecipherable AI emotion and partly a feeling she didn’t need anyone to explain to her: guilt.
‹Christ, Cohen. It’s not your fault. What else were you supposed to do?›
‹Nothing. But that doesn’t make it any nicer, does it?›
‹You think you have to tell me that?›
Another long silence. ‹No.›
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