Li scuffed her feet in the dirt, kicking up red dust puffs from the furrow bottoms. She reached out to Cohen, felt the shape and breadth and complexity of him. He reached out just as she did, and they got tangled in each other and backed away again. They were dancing around each other, she realized, putting up a new wall for each one they dismantled, closing another door for each door they opened. Acting as if they had all the time in the world, instead of none at all.
“Cohen?” she asked.
“What?” He had gone on a little ahead, and now he drifted back and stood facing her.
“What you said back on Alba about… AIs. About the way they’re put together. Do you think a person can change something like that? Change their code? Change what they were made to be?”
“Are we still talking politics?” She felt the flurry of unspoken questions behind his words.
“No. Or… not only politics.”
He gave her one of those looks he’d gotten into the habit of throwing at her lately. A look that put everything in her hands, that laid everything he wanted right out in front of her and left her with no excuses, no evasions.
She met his eyes. The moment when she could have laughed, or glanced away, or turned aside passed.
“I think a person can try to change,” Cohen said. “I think trying means something, even if you fail. I think even wanting to try means something.”
Li screwed up her nerve as if she were forcing herself out of a high window. “I hope we get out of here in one piece,” she said. She couldn’t bring herself to look at him while she said it, but she had said it.
And she had said it knowing that he knew what she meant by it. It wasn’t much, maybe, but it was something.
“I hope so too,” Cohen said. A sly smile played around his lips. “Now what’s this nonsense with Bella?”
Li flushed. “Nothing. What you said. Nonsense.” She looked up to find the hazel eyes measuring her. “What?”
“Prove it.”
His voice was light, making a joke of it, but just for a moment Li caught a flash of the want behind the words. Her stretched out on top of him. Her mouth on his. Her knee pushing Chiara’s thighs apart.
“And just what the hell would that prove?” she asked.
He shrugged.
“Sex isn’t a promise, Cohen.”
“Not even a promise to try to want to try?”
“Well. Maybe it’s that.” She stepped toward him. “Prove it, huh? Do you have any idea how childish that sounds? Who knew you were such a baby?”
Chiara was enough taller than Li that she had to stand a little on her toes to reach her lips. She thrust her hands into the honey-colored curls, smelling the clean, warm, safe smell that followed Cohen everywhere. Feeling the flush of desire that coursed through him at her touch.
That first kiss was slow, tentative. As if they had suddenly, after all the time and all the battles and secrets they shared, become shy with each other. Even on the link, Cohen was silent. He gave her Chiara’s lips, soft, open, yielding. But the rest of him—the things she had glimpsed among the wild roses, the feelings he had always spoken of even when she least wanted to hear him—all that was as ghostly and insubstantial as second-hand memories.
Li pulled back and looked up into the hazel eyes. “Are you going to help, or were you just planning to stand there?”
She felt Cohen’s brushfire laughter licking along the link between them. And something below the laughter. A doubting, trembling, questioning something. “I’ve been chasing you for a long time,” he said. “Maybe I need to be chased a little.”
She smiled—and she didn’t know whether she was smiling at him or at herself or at the whole hopeful ridiculous mess they’d made of things.
“I think I can manage that,” she said.
* * *
She was cold when she woke, cold to the point of pain. Her head ached. Her mouth felt as dry as if she were coming out of cryo. Someone was shaking her.
She opened her eyes and saw Bella.
No. Korchow. It had to be Korchow.
“I’m paying you to do a job,” he said, “not fuck in the fields. What exactly do you two think you’re doing?”
She opened her mouth to answer him, but all that came out was a weak croak.
McCuen’s face appeared above and behind Bella’s. “She’s going into shock,” he said.
Korchow brushed the words aside impatiently. “Where’s Cohen?” he asked.
She panicked. Where was he? What had he said when they first felt the worldmind? That it was tasting them? Using them? How much of Cohen could it use before what made him Cohen was gone? How much time did they have?
Korchow pulled her into a more or less sitting position and trickled some water into her mouth. Her thirst shocked her, and when she checked her internals she saw it had been almost two hours since they’d reached the glory hole. How much time was unfolding for every minute she spent in those visions? Were these the dreams Dawes had spoken of? The dreams the first settlers had warned Compson about?
Those who hear it stay and listen and sleep and die there.
She shuddered hard enough to knock her teeth against the rim of the bottle Korchow was holding to her lips.
“You need to make contact again,” Korchow said.
She laughed bitterly. “They contacted us,” she said. But that was Cohen speaking—speaking through her mouth in a way that had somehow come to seem normal, reasonable. “They’ve been doing it for days, weeks. From the first time Catherine came down here.”
The blood drained from Korchow’s face. “Sharifi said that.”
“So Sharifi woke them up,” Cohen said. “Or blasting that galley through the Trinidad did. And now that they’re awake they expect to be listened to.”
“Then God help us,” Korchow whispered.
Li’s heart skittered and locked in to a fast uneven rhythm. “What really happened down here?”
“One minute everything was fine,” he answered. “The next I was off the shunt. As if an immense arm had reached out and… pushed me. I never got back on.”
He’s telling the truth, Cohen whispered in her head. Don’t you see what happened? What must have happened?
Li caught the edge of the thought as it swirled through his mind. But all she saw was a confused image of Sharifi, betrayed and frightened. And whether the image sprang from Cohen’s mind or hers she couldn’t tell.
Then she was back in the glory hole.
* * *
“I’m on,” Sharifi said.
Bella started. Voyt turned away from the monitor he’d been watching, his eyes flicking back and forth between the two women. As if, Li realized, he too were waiting for something.
She heard Cohen echo the thought and knew that he was there with her. She reached out cautiously, touched him, was comforted.
Bella stepped forward. “You have the dataset?”
“Can you see what Bella sees, Korchow? Can you hear them?”
“No.”
“Then you don’t know yet.” Sharifi smiled. “But you will.”
Voyt made a spitting noise.
“Remember,” Sharifi said. “You have two weeks to get it there. Miss that deadline and all deals are off.”
Korchow dipped his head in an almost courtly gesture. Then he was gone, and Bella was standing there, blinking, swaying a little as she took back her own posture and balance.
Sharifi reached out and smoothed Bella’s hair back from her face. It was a protective gesture, a gesture that could have been a mother’s as easily as a lover’s, and Bella moved her head like a cat to meet the caress. She stared into Sharifi’s eyes, devouring her, surrendering to her. She drank up Sharifi as if she were the only real thing in the universe.
Sharifi touched her temple and flipped a contact switch. She held out her left hand, palm open. Bella set her own palm against it, and Li saw subliminals flicker into life in Sharifi’s peripheral vision.
‹Data transf
er initiated,› Sharifi’s internals announced. Numbers spun down, counting out the units of a massive data transfer.
Her eyes on the numbers, Sharifi didn’t see Voyt step toward her. But Li saw him. And she saw the charged and primed Viper in his hand.
The next thing she knew, Sharifi was picking herself up off the ground and pulling a gun out of her coverall pocket. “You’re too late, Voyt. It’s already done.”
“Not until Bella walks out of here,” Voyt said. “Not until you walk out of here.”
He stepped toward her.
Sharifi flipped the safety off her gun. Her aim wavered and she was trembling with adrenaline, but she was still acting like a woman who meant business.
“I’ll shoot you if I have to, Voyt, but I’d rather deal. What’s your price?”
“My price?” Voyt laughed. “I’m a soldier, not a whore.”
“There’s a difference?”
He took another step toward her.
She pulled the trigger. Sparks arced from the rock floor a few centimeters from his right foot.
He stopped. Not scared exactly; he was Li’s kind, and it would have taken more than a stray bullet from a civilian’s hand to really frighten him. But he was at least wary.
“Take his gun,” Sharifi told Bella.
Bella stepped up to Voyt and wrapped her hand over the Viper’s blocky barrel. He let her take it from him. He even smiled when she took it—a smile that raised Li’s hackles.
“Good girl,” Sharifi said. “Now give it to me.”
* * *
We have a problem, Cohen said.
Christ, not now!
A realtime problem. Someone just fired a surface-to-air missile from the planet. Li felt the shock of the news pulling her out of Sharifi, jerking her out of step with Sharifi’s dream memory. They’re aiming at the orbital relay.
Cohen didn’t voice the next thought, but she caught it anyway: Maybe Korchow had made his move early.
What do we do?she asked.
But she knew the answer before she asked the question. The missile would hit the relay in a matter of minutes whether they did anything or not, and if the relay went down when it hit, then so would Cohen’s link with the outside world. And any hope of getting Sharifi’s information—or Cohen himself—out of the mine would go with it.
They had to get out before that happened.
* * *
“What’s Haas paying you?” Sharifi asked. “I can top it.”
Voyt laughed again. “No one’s paying me shit. You may have caught me dipping into the till, but that’s not treason, and I’m not a traitor. And speaking of payments, what’s Korchow offering besides Haas’s little piece of bought-and-paid-for hospitality?”
“Shut your mouth, Voyt!”
“That got to you, huh? Don’t like the idea that you’re selling state secrets in exchange for used merchandise?”
Sharifi glanced at Bella. She stood frozen between them, her face a pale blur in the lamplight.
“I’m not selling them,” Sharifi said. “Knowledge doesn’t belong to anyone. Life doesn’t belong to anyone.”
“Save your justifications for someone who gives a shit.”
Bella made her move so fast that it caught even Li by surprise. In one smooth gesture, she had her arm around Sharifi’s neck and the Viper against her temple. “Drop the gun,” she said.
Sharifi tried to turn and stare at her, but Bella just tightened her hold on her neck and jabbed her with the Viper’s sharp prongs. Sharifi dropped the gun. It skittered across the slate floor of the cavern and fetched up under a correction channel monitor.
“Get the gun, Jan,” Bella said. It took Li a heartbeat to remember that Jan was Voyt’s name. “We’ll need it if she gives us trouble.”
“Korchow?” Sharifi asked. Her voice was trembling. Her whole body was trembling.
Bella laughed.
I know that laugh, Li thought. And even as she thought it, she knew Sharifi had recognized him too.
“Haas.” Sharifi said. “I need to see Nguyen.”
“Bullshit,” Haas said.
“Can you really afford to gamble? It’s not your choice to make. Nguyen needs to know about this.”
“Oh, she’ll know about it.” Haas jerked Sharifi around and pushed her up the ladder. “Don’t you worry about that.”
Sharifi turned at the top of the ladder. “Listen, Haas—”
“No, you listen.” He spun her around, laid the Viper against her temple. “You open your mouth again,” he said, very quietly, “and it’ll be the last time you open it.”
Sharifi looked into Bella’s violet eyes and saw Haas looking back at her. Something passed along the line of that gaze, some backbrain survival instinct that Sharifi had no words for, but that Li knew from a hundred killing fields.
Sharifi ran.
Anaconda Strike: 8.11.48.
She might have made it if she hadn’t slipped on a slick bit of slate and fallen.
Voyt caught Sharifi as she set her foot on the bottom step of the stairs up out of the Trinidad. The edge of his hand slammed into her head, and she crumpled.
She heaved herself up and tried to run, but it was hopeless. Li knew, even if Sharifi didn’t, that Voyt had pulled that first blow, afraid of killing her outright. He hadn’t pushed through the hit, hadn’t put anything but unenhanced muscle into it. He hadn’t needed to.
Voyt did everything Li would have done, and he did it with the precise savagery of hardwired reflexes and ceramsteel-reinforced muscles. He tackled her, driving with his legs so that the force of his impact knocked her up and backward, and when she hit the ground he delivered four swift, carefully calibrated kicks to her ribs. Li felt the jerk and snap of breaking ribs. She didn’t need internal monitors to know that one of those ribs had punctured Sharifi’s lung. Nor did she doubt what was going to happen if Voyt kept delivering this kind of punishment.
But he didn’t. He backed off as soon as he was sure she couldn’t get up, and waited. He did nothing when Sharifi got to her hands and knees. Even when she tried to drag herself up the steps, he waited. Haas caught up to them just as Sharifi collapsed in pain. He looked over Voyt’s shoulder.
“What she said just now,” he told Voyt. “About Nguyen. Ask her what Nguyen needs to know.”
Voyt rolled Sharifi onto her back and took her hand in his. He did it slowly, almost gently, and suddenly Li understood the way Bella had always talked about him. She knew it in her gut, with a guilty certainty that made her want nothing for Sharifi but a quick painless death. Because no matter what else Voyt had done, no matter what uniform he’d worn or what excuses he’d made for himself, he had the heart of a torturer.
He smiled. He had a nice smile; he’d been a good-looking man, she realized. He explained, calmly, the risk of biting through one’s tongue during questioning. He pulled a rag out of his pocket, handed it to Sharifi, showed her how to put it in her mouth. Gave her time to do it. Time to think about it.
Li watched the sickening dance unfold. She felt Sharifi’s pulse slow. She felt her skin go clammy and then dry. She felt her eyes lock on to Voyt’s and begin to follow his every glance as if he were a lover she couldn’t bear to disappoint, as if her very life depended on his happiness.
There’d been a Voyt on Gilead. Lots of Voyts. Li had tried not to be around when they’d done their work. But she’d used the information, God help her. She’d hung on every bloody word of it.
* * *
Catherine?
Shame clutched at Li’s heart. Later, Cohen. You don’t need to see this.
This can’t wait, he said.
She was so wrapped up in Sharifi’s fear and pain that she didn’t immediately understand him.
The missile’s almost at the field array.
Then they had to get out. Before the field AI died—before they were trapped in the mine, cut off from Cohen’s backups, dependent on a home-brewed Freetown network that couldn’t support his systems wit
hout the field AI’s processing capacity.
I can get you out, he said, plucking the thought from her backbrain as effortlessly as if she’d spoken it aloud. And she read his unspoken thoughts just as easily. He could get her out. But only her.
Then we stay and take our chances, she told him.
* * *
And back in the glory hole, the dance went on.
Voyt tied Sharifi’s hands. He spoke to her quietly, reasonably. He pulled out a small knife and set it on her chest, just where she had to crane her neck a little to see it.
Behind Voyt, Bella was a slim, watching shadow. She stepped forward a little as Voyt went to work, and Li saw in her face—in Haas’s face—the guilty fascination that the first sight of hard interrogation always brings, even to people who are used to ordinary violence.
Voyt made Sharifi wait to tell him. His timing was so perfect, so by the book, that Li could predict each groan he would ignore, each desperate plea he would pretend to misunderstand. Just enough of them that when he finally pulled the gag from her mouth and let her speak, she would tell him everything she could possibly think of that might make it be over.
But she didn’t tell. And when Li probed her mind looking for the source of her strength, she found something that made her stomach curl: the hope—no, the sure and certain belief in a rescue. Sharifi was gambling like she’d always gambled. Gambling that she was more valuable to Nguyen alive than dead. Gambling that she was too famous to die like this. Gambling that she was too important a pawn for Nguyen to lay down willingly, no matter what betrayals she had committed.
She’d always been right before. Her luck, like Li’s own luck, had always held. She had a whole lifetime of being right to back up her faith in her gambler’s instincts. And this shuffle might have broken her way too if not for Bella.
* * *
Spin State Page 47