When the missile hit, Li thought it was just the Viper again.
Then she was out of the glory hole, struggling to find her bearings, reorienting herself, unbelievably, in the shadowy clutter of Korchow’s antique shop.
Korchow sat at his desk, head bowed, face in shadow, the orange circles of contact derms pulsing at his temples. Outside, lithe and furtive shadows flitted past the shop front. From the back room, Li heard the muted clink of a metal buckle knocking against a carbon compound rifle stock.
Half a heartbeat later, the shop exploded into motion. The flare of a pulse rifle arced out from behind the back curtain toward Korchow. Camouflage-clad figures burst through the front door—masked paras with UN-issue weapons and blackout tape patched over their unit insignia.
She lost the image. She dialed around frantically, desperate to know what was happening, who had rolled up Korchow’s network. She found the gunman’s feed, on a narrow band UNSC channel, and tapped in to it just as he put out a booted foot and rolled Korchow’s body over.
But the face that turned into the light wasn’t Korchow’s at all.
It was Arkady’s.
She started to ask Cohen if he’d seen it, if he knew who’d sent the gunmen, but before she could get the thought out, they were in real-time trouble.
Korchow’s shop was gone. Cohen was gone. She was alone, truly alone, for the first time in days. And she was buried alive in some past, present, or future of the glory hole that had nothing to do with anything else the worldmind had shown her.
She stepped forward and stopped, unable to see the ground before her.
“Careful.”
Hyacinthe stood behind her. He looked tired and drawn. His face was smudged with coal dust, and the shoelaces looped over his shoulder were broken and knotted.
Li watched him the way she would have watched a tiger.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
She stepped forward to stare into the dark eyes.
It was Cohen, after all. She was sure of it. “Are you all right?” she asked.
“For now.”
“What does that mean?”
“The worldmind is running on my network. Using me like it’s used the field AI since the first fire. I don’t think it has any other way to organize its thoughts… not in any way that we would understand.”
“But you don’t have to hold out for long,” Li said. “Nguyen—”
“Nguyen didn’t even try to intercept the missile that blew the field AI,” Cohen said. “She seemed more interested in wrapping up Korchow.”
He caught his breath and shuddered. The image of Hyacinthe flickered ominously.
“What’s wrong?” Li asked.
“Nothing,” he said quickly. But there was a telltale hesitation in his voice. “I’m afraid,” he said at last. “It wants me to hold it up. Hold it together. And… I can’t.”
“Cohen—”
“It’s taking me apart in order to put itself together. It’s doing what it did to Sharifi, to your father, to all the people who died down here. Except that it figured out with the field AI that an AI is much, much better for what it needs. That if it goes through an AI, it can get into streamspace, understand it, use it.” He was talking fast now, the words rushing and tumbling. “You need to go to ALEF, Catherine. You’re taken care of. I’ve made sure of that. It’s all yours. Everything. You’ll lose some networks. Some won’t accept you, won’t accept any human. Don’t worry about it. You’ll hold on to enough to make it all work. The ALEF contact is—”
“Stop it! You’ll go yourself.”
“But if something happens—”
“Nothing will happen!”
He put a hand up to touch her face, but she jerked away, her throat tight with panic. “Don’t you sacrifice yourself for me and leave me to live with it. I won’t let you. And I’ll hate you for it.”
“Don’t say that, Catherine.”
“Well, what the hell do you want me to say?” she shouted.
I want you to say you love me.
He took a step toward her, and this time she didn’t back away.
“Fine. I’ll buy you a drink somewhere when this is all over and say it.”
“Say it now,” he whispered. “Just in case.”
She said it. She couldn’t believe it, couldn’t even get the words out without stuttering. But she said it.
Then he set a hand on her hip, and she stepped into his arms, and it was all so, so simple. Something shivered and let go at his touch, something she’d never even known she was holding on to. And with a jerk of recognition, she found that dark unmapped territory in her own heart that was his already—shaped to him, made for him, the exact width and breadth and depth of him.
This time there was no chasing, no hiding. Just everything they wanted spilling through their hands and running away like water.
* * *
“We’re getting the truth now, I think,” Voyt said. His voice was level, but there was a brightness, a loose-limbed alertness to him that turned Li’s stomach to acid.
Sharifi was still sprawled across the steps. Li could feel the cold stone biting into her back, setting shattered ribs grinding. She blinked, and a razor’s edge of agony shot through her now-blind right eye. God, what had they done to her?
“Is she dying?” Haas asked. Li recognized the doubting hitch in his voice: a civilian’s cautious uncertainty about just what kind and what degree of violence a human body can tolerate.
“I know my business,” Voyt said. “She’s not going anywhere.”
“Your recorder off?”
Voyt twitched irritably. “I’m not a complete fool.”
“Good.” Haas had been drawing closer as they spoke. Now he stretched Bella’s slender hand toward the Viper, “Give me that.”
Voyt hesitated, then handed it to him.
Haas stepped around Voyt and pressed the tongue of the weapon against Sharifi’s head.
“Careful,” Voyt said. He spoke in the even, artificially calm voice of a soldier watching a civilian do something stupid with a gun and not wanting to scare him into making a big mistake out of a little one.
“Oh, I will be,” Haas said.
Voyt relaxed slightly. But Li could see, through Sharifi’s single good eye, what Voyt couldn’t. She could see the look on Haas’s face.
“Did you think I didn’t know?” he asked Sharifi. “Did you think I’d just stand back and let you fuck her?”
But Sharifi didn’t hear him.
All she heard was Bella’s voice. All she saw was a beloved face bending over her. All she felt was Bella’s hand touching her, taking the pain away.
She reached out with one hand, a gesture that was no more than a breath, a tremor. Li was the only one who heard the soft snick of the trigger.
As Sharifi died something gave in the rock above them, booming and cracking. A hot blast of air pulsed down the gangway, hitting hard enough to knock Bella to her knees.
“Run!” Voyt yelled, but his voice was lost in the roar of falling rock.
It’s going to kill them, Cohen said.
She heard Voyt scream and fall, but the sound seemed to come from far, far away. She saw Haas pass a hand over Bella’s brow. She felt him slip off the shunt just in time, just the way he must have planned it. Then the last barrier broke, and the worldmind was running free, unfettered, ripping through Voyt, through Bella, through Li and Cohen like wildfire sweeping through dry grass.
For one wild, surreal moment she saw it all. The dark cavern around her. The flesh and ceramsteel mélange inside her own ringing skull. The blazing silicon vistas of Cohen’s networks. The antique shop, smelling of tea and sandalwood. Arkady’s unconscious figure sprawled among the sleek curves of the generation-ship artifacts. And above, around, and through all of it, the endless weight and darkness, the million voices of the worldmind.
The stones were singing.
* * *
In the end Cohen, or whatever was
left of him, cut her out of the link. She begged, in that last moment, not even sure he could hear her. She cursed him, cursed herself, Korchow, Nguyen, the whole killing planet.
Then she was alone in the darkness, and there was nothing left of Cohen but the hole inside her where he should have been.
The Anaconda Strike: 9.11.48.
Adry breeze blew across her face, winding from nowhere to nowhere like a desert river.
Her internals were shattered. Ghosts, fragments. She felt the abuse her body had taken through the long hours in the pit. And behind it, worse than the physical pain, the memory of what Voyt had done to Sharifi, and of the whirling, chaotic, living darkness Cohen had cast himself into to save her.
Bella and McCuen were staring down at her, their faces white, drawn, terrified.
“Did you see that?” Li asked, sitting up.
Bella nodded. “Cohen?”
Li looked away.
“I’m sorry,” Bella said, and when Li searched her face she saw that she really was sorry. “He was… kind.”
Li checked her rebreather gauge instead of answering. She checked her internals, found with relief that at least the basic programs were working, and ran a quick air-use calculation.
“We’ve got to go,” she said. “We have twenty-eight minutes to get to Mirce and the fresh canisters. Maybe less.”
She glanced at McCuen. His face looked shockingly pale, but maybe it was just the lamplight. “I… didn’t see much of anything,” he said. “Just stuck around to pick up the pieces.”
“You didn’t miss much,” she said, hefting her rebreather.
“Catherine?” Bella asked. Where had she picked that habit up? “Can we make it to Mirce? How long will it take us?”
“Less than twenty-eight minutes,” Li said. “Or forever. Let’s go.”
The mine had come alive. It rumbled, rang, sang. The sound resonated in Li’s chest, set her fingers twitching and her teeth buzzing. And along the intraface, beyond her control but still flickering in and out of life according to some obscure rhythm, coursed a bustle and roar of high-speed traffic that shorted out her internals and flashed cryptic status messages across her retinas like tracer bullets.
She probed the intraface as they walked. It seemed to work regardless of whether Cohen was on the other end of it. At one point she almost managed to access the memory palace and its operating systems. But the framework wouldn’t evolve, and she ended up cut off, stranded in a blind alley of the loading program. Cohen himself was a ghost presence: an absence given flesh and substance by her own body’s refusal to admit that he was no longer part of her. That feeling, the sense that he was both there and not there, reminded her of stories about amputees who still kept waking up years later feeling the pain of lost limbs.
They reached the rendezvous at twenty-nine minutes and twenty seconds. Bella’s rebreather, which she had used sparingly, had four minutes to run. Li had already given her own rebreather to McCuen. Mirce wasn’t there to meet them, but as they turned the corner they saw the fresh tanks glimmering in the darkness.
“We’re still one tank short,” Li said, counting the tanks. She strained her ears for the sound of ropes and canisters being lowered, but heard only creaking lagging and the ominous silence of the hung-up roof.
She dropped to the ground beside the nearest tank and began hurriedly booting up the onboard comp and connecting the feedlines.
She couldn’t get the air gauge on the tank to light up, no matter what she did. And she didn’t have time to fiddle. She put the mask to her mouth, sucked at it experimentally. No. It wasn’t just the gauge. She wasn’t getting anything.
“What’s wrong?” McCuen asked. There was a nervous edge to his voice that hadn’t been there even when he’d watched his last tank running down before they reached the drop-off point.
“I don’t know,” Li said.
Then the gauge finally flickered into life. The arrow dropped into the red, quivered and stayed there. She fumbled for the fill valve, and when she touched it, it spun loosely at the touch of her fingers. No pressure.
And suddenly she did know what was wrong. Someone had opened the valve and emptied the tank. All the tanks.
They had no air.
“Mirce!” she shouted, already up and running down the twisting drift.
* * *
She found her twelve meters past the next bend, her hand still on the rope, the final canister of compressed air lying on the ground beside her. Li looked into the still-clear, still-blue eyes, looked at the head turned a little sideways, baring the strong, clean line of her jaw under the stretched skin. She thought, for no reason she wanted to remember, of magpies’ wings.
The cut ran diagonally across Mirce’s throat, from the collar of her coverall to the soft flesh below her ear. She had bled out fast. In seconds, probably. No sign of a fight; the spreading pool around her could have been water or rehab fluid, except for the rich copper-and-rust smell of it.
“Why?” Bella whispered. “Why?”
“To stop us,” Li said, wondering how that calm professional’s voice could be speaking out of the whirlwind inside her.
“What do we do?” McCuen asked.
“We find whoever killed her and take their air.”
* * *
When it finally happened, she was so ready for it that she knew some deep part of herself must have been expecting it. Reading the accumulation of clues, each one insignificant in itself, that told her they were being followed. Listening for the echo that wasn’t an echo. Waiting for the muffled step behind them.
What she wasn’t prepared for—hadn’t even suspected—was the flash of quickly suppressed recognition in McCuen’s eyes.
She’d made a fool’s mistake, she told herself as the hot flush of adrenaline flooded through her. McCuen had betrayed her. Somehow, by some hook she’d probably never know about, Haas had turned him. The proof was right there in front of her, in those wide-open little-boy-blue eyes.
She called a break, drifted to a stop against an outcropping in the passage wall, stretched, and sat down a few feet from him with her back safely against solid stone.
“How could they have known where to find her?” McCuen asked. He talked fast, seizing on the first thought that came to mind, trying to gloss over the footsteps that he too had heard, that he too had been waiting for. “I mean, we were fine before that. She makes the meet, and we all get out.”
“Except Cohen.”
She could see in McCuen’s face that he still didn’t know who she was talking about. He had never met Cohen, she realized, probably never thought of him as more than a piece of equipment. “Well, yeah,” McCuen said. “But… you know what I mean.”
“Sure,” she said. “I know.”
She strained her ears, listening to the darkness beyond the lamplight. Everyone has a weakness, she told herself. And their weakness would be their wire.
A flickering double vision swept over her as she tried to hold streamspace and realspace in her mind simultaneously. It was stomach-wrenching, but she couldn’t afford to drop all the way out of realtime. Not with McCuen three feet away from her and an unknown pursuer waiting at the edge of the lamplight.
She stepped into the memory palace.
The door was broken. The fountain had run dry. A storm howled over the turrets, setting roof tiles rattling and shutters flapping. Whole wings of the palace were open to wind and sky. Locked doors confronted her at every turn, and even when she got past them, she found only rain-strafed ruins behind them.
She couldn’t find the communications programs, couldn’t even figure out which networks they were on. She thought about dropping into the numbers to look, but the memory of the disaster Cohen had averted last time stopped her.
Then she heard something.
Footsteps. Echoing around the next turn in the hall, up the next flight of stairs, across the floor over her head. Footsteps and a mocking quicksilver laugh flickering across the dead link l
ike heat lightning.
She tracked the sound through cold dark halls, across vast, rubble-choked courtyards. She’d almost given up when she stumbled through a half-open door and saw the arches of the cloister, the wind-whipped, moonlit tangle of wild roses.
She stepped out from under the arcade, one hand up to shield her face from the wind. Someone was sitting on the bench under the roses. She saw the tarnished copper of rain-soaked curls. She saw Roland’s golden eyes glinting out of the shadows.
She ran.
Both of them were cold and slick with rain, and a dead leaf had blown against his face like a little black moth so that she had to brush it off before she could kiss him. “You came,” she whispered.
And then she was kissing him, searching for him with lips, hands, heart, her mind stripped of everything but her need for him.
He took hold of her shoulders and pushed her away from him. She looked into the golden eyes and saw… nothing.
“No,” she whispered. “ No.”
“He couldn’t come. I’m supposed to tell you he’s sorry.”
The rain stopped. The darkness around them deepened. She glimpsed tall windows flung open to the lowering clouds, and realized that they stood on the threshold of the hall of doors.
Roland pointed to a door like all the others. “There,” he said.
Then he was gone.
She pushed it open and stepped into a darkness blacker and more storm-charged than the sky outside.
“Who is it?” a voice said.
It was not a friendly voice. Not a friendly question.
“Me,” she said. “Catherine. Don’t you know me?”
“Oh, yes. We know you.”
The lights came on. She was alone in an empty room.
“Why did you come here?” the voice asked. It was the walls, or whatever was behind the walls, speaking to her.
“I need to access the AMC station net.”
Silence.
“I need to.”
“And why should we help you?”
We?
“Because—”
Spin State Page 48