Kintz must not have been expecting them to come after him. He’d let his men straggle. He was acting like he expected Li to run, like he thought he’d have to corner her before she’d fight. What did he know that she didn’t?
She took down the first man with a single shot; no hope of surprise anyway, and the best tactic now was speed. Unfortunately, her shot took him in the neck, shattering the feedlines of his oxygen tank. She listened to the air whistling out of the tubes and cursed herself for being impatient. For not having thought things through more carefully. For having hands that shook too much. For not being as sharp as she’d been five years ago. Five months ago, even.
Behind him was another man she’d never seen before. Probably planet-side mine security. He had the instincts and training to duck for cover before she could shoot him, but she’d chosen her point of attack well; there was no cover.
She would have shot him down where he stood if he hadn’t been wearing a rebreather. But he was wearing one. And since Kintz was wired, it might be the only rebreather left down there.
She leveled the Beretta at the guard’s chest, and he froze, staring at her. She listened for Kintz, but all she could hear was Bella’s dress rustling as she shifted nervously from foot to foot.
“You might as well come on out,” Li called up the drift. “I can smell your cheap aftershave from here.”
“I wouldn’t shoot him,” Kintz said from behind a protruding piece of lagging about three meters away. “He’s got the last full tank. And I believe you need one of those.”
“Take off the rebreather,” Li told the guard, “and push it toward me.”
He didn’t move.
“I will shoot you if you don’t do it.” She spoke calmly. She didn’t have to put on a play to convince him; the body of his friend was still steaming on the ground in front of him.
She saw the man’s gaze flick back toward Kintz, behind the lagging. That glance might as well have been a map. She could see where Kintz must be braced between lagging and rock face. She could see the gun that must be in his hand. And she could see what the guard had clearly seen: that Kintz would shoot him down himself if that was what it took to keep Li from getting the oxygen tank.
“Come here,” she told Bella. “And stay back against the wall.”
Bella crept forward, slowly, reluctantly. The look on her face said that Li had let her down somehow by even making her witness this scene. Li pulled McCuen’s gun out of the back of her pants where she’d stowed it.
She looked at it. She looked at the expression of fascinated revulsion on Bella’s face. She thought about the recoil on a big revolver like that, the way joints loosen on an old gun and the long uneven pull it would probably take to fire it.
She gave Bella the Beretta.
“Look,” she whispered, keeping her hand over Bella’s and the gun trained on the guard while she spoke. “Elbows locked. Bead lined up on his chest. And if he moves—if he even breathes too fast—shoot him.”
Bella nodded, tight-lipped. You lose your nerve and we’re both dead, Li wanted to say. But she didn’t. There was such a thing as too scared. And Bella looked like she was halfway there already.
Li flexed her hand around the Colt, felt its weight and balance. She wished to God she’d had a chance to fire it before, but wishing was beside the point. She gave the guard a warning look and started working her way down the drift toward Kintz.
The guard’s eyes followed her, telegraphing her movements, but there wasn’t much she could do about it short of shooting him outright. And Kintz would figure out what she was doing anyway. The thing was to get there fast. And to get there quietly enough that he couldn’t be quite sure where she was and when she was going to round the corner on him. She didn’t need absolute surprise. Just relative surprise. That, and a little help from Bella.
She got one of those things.
She turned the corner around the lagging, leading with her elbows, dropping the gun toward Kintz as soon as she was sure he wasn’t going to kick it out of her hands. And there they were, facing off against each other, each one with a gun to the other’s head. The next stage in the deadlock.
“Drop it,” Kintz said.
She hit him instead of answering. She’d thought it out, run the possibilities and options down in her mind, troubleshot her plan, and now she moved so fast that even Kintz’s enhanced reflexes couldn’t counter her. She turned into him, shoving him into the angle between lagging and rock face, where he couldn’t put his superior reach and height to use. She slammed her foot into his groin, and as he staggered under the kick she spun her gun butt-first and hammered it down on the side of his head.
He was a tough son of a bitch. He didn’t pass out. He didn’t fall. He didn’t even lose his grip on his gun. But he dropped its muzzle a few inches—all the opening Li needed. Before he regained his balance, she shoved McCuen’s gun under his jaw.
“Empty it,” she said.
He hesitated.
She cocked the hammer. He emptied his pistol, bullets ringing and skittering across the rough floor. “Now drop it.”
He dropped the gun at her feet, not taking his eyes off her, and she kicked it away down the drift. They looked at each other.
“I don’t want to kill you this fast,” she said. “I’d like to see you suffer, you son of a bitch.” She said the words without thinking, and the sound of them shocked her. But they were true, God help her. She’d killed more people than she could count or even remember, but this was the first time she’d actually wanted to murder someone.
“Got you where it hurt, huh? Who was that bitch whose throat I cut, anyway? Another girlfriend? Too bad I didn’t have more time to spend on her.”
Li forced the gun’s muzzle farther up under his jaw, as if she thought she could shut his mouth with the sheer pressure of it.
“They’re waiting for you,” he said, eyes on her trigger finger. “You’ll never get out of here alive, even if you kill me.” He licked his lips. “Especially if you kill me.”
Li backed off a step or two, keeping the gun leveled on him. That was when the other guard made his move.
She didn’t see it herself, but she saw the quickly suppressed flash in Kintz’s eyes that told her something was happening behind her back. She glanced around, Kintz still in her sights. The guard was inching toward her, slowly, deliberately, his eyes locked on Bella’s. And Bella was letting him.
“Shoot him!” Li screamed. But Bella was frozen, shut down with terror, standing on the edge of a cliff she couldn’t force herself over. Li spun around, snapped her elbows straight, and fired a single shot over Bella’s head and through the guard’s eye socket.
Kintz was on top of her before she could swing back around. He went for the hurt arm, of course. She had known he would. What she hadn’t known was how fast the arm would fail her.
Bella tried to help. Li saw her out of her peripheral vision, circling around them, holding the Beretta stiffly out in front of her, trying to decide where to aim the gun. As if she even knew how to aim it.
“No, Bella!” she barked. “No shooting. Just take the air tank and leave. I’ll catch up if I can.”
Kintz didn’t even give her time to notice if Bella had obeyed her. He wasn’t her match in skill, but she was handicapped by her stripped-out arm, and the punishment she’d gone through in the past few hours. And by the five years and eight inches and thirty kilos Kintz had on her.
He slammed her against the drift wall, threw her hard, and was on top of her before she could get her arms or legs under her. He jerked her onto her stomach, jammed his knee into the small of her back, and bent her bad arm back so savagely that she couldn’t breathe without feeling the twinge of stretched-to-snapping tendons.
She heard him reach for his belt, heard the click of handcuffs releasing. “I’d kill you right here,” he said, “but Nguyen almost had our heads over Sharifi. Your lucky day.”
“Not behind my back,” she said as he sla
pped the first cuff on. “Not unless you want to carry me up.”
He stopped, rolled her over, let her hold her hands out in front of her while he locked the second virusteel ring around her wrist and single-keyed in a preset compressed code.
He was in no hurry now that he had subdued her. He almost seemed to be waiting for something. He frisked her, ran his hands up and down her legs, into her crotch. She watched him think about the fact that they were alone.
“You must really have fucked up on Gilead,” she said, needling him. “Or were you just too pissant incompetent for them to trust you with a real Corps job after that?”
“You need to learn to shut up,” he said, and put a hand down her shirt.
She let him get a good feel. She saw his mouth open a little, his breath come faster. “You’re pathetic,” she said.
He took hold of her legs and jerked her flat on the floor. “Roll over.”
“Don’t have the balls to look me in the face?”
He hit her so hard she didn’t even feel the blow. When she came to, he was on top of her and already fumbling at her belt. He got that unfastened all right, but the pants and the tie-down of the Beretta’s empty holster took two hands. She waited, eyes closed, until he had both hands engaged. Then she balled her hands into a double fist and swung them, letting the weight of the cuffs add to the momentum of her internals.
She caught him on the right temple. Not ideal, but she stunned him—and opened up a long gash in his skull that would bleed into his eyes with a little luck.
He staggered to his feet and aimed a crushing kick at her ribs, but she was already rolling away from him.
She glanced around as they squared off against each other. The gun was too far away. She’d never get there in time. But Kintz couldn’t get to it either—not without risking a kick from Li’s still lethal legs.
This would be a good time, Bella, she thought. But of course, Bella was nowhere.
“You fucking digger bitch,” Kintz said. “Fucking stinking dirty half-bred cunt!”
Li laughed. She didn’t know where the laugh came from, but suddenly it all seemed pathetically ridiculous, from Kintz’s tired insults to the fact that they were fighting for the same planet both their ancestors had wasted lifetimes trying to escape from. “Guess you should have stuck to the half-breeds you could buy in Helena,” she gasped.
After that, they didn’t talk anymore; they were both short of breath, and they knew that the next time they went down one of them wasn’t getting up again.
Li would have liked to be able to wait Kintz out, let him get impatient. But she couldn’t afford to. She was too tired, too battered. She would flag before he did. She had to draw him into doing something stupid, and she had to do it while she still had the strength to take advantage of his mistake.
She danced in, let him get a glancing hit on her, jumped away, deliberately stumbling a little. He took the bait; he reached for her, missed his hold, reached again.
This time she let him catch up to her. She forced herself not to think what would happen if this ploy didn’t work, if he really did get her down. She kept her hands up, locked together. As he gripped her, she braced her feet and drove her hands toward his face with all the strength she had, fingers rigid.
He screamed and staggered back, clutching his eyes. She threw herself down the drift without even looking to see if he was following and reached the Colt in a cloth-ripping, face-forward slide.
His first kick connected just as her fingers touched the gun. He slammed into her ribs, her kidneys, her stomach in a flurry of blows so violent that only the certainty of death if she failed kept her hands locked around the revolver.
She rolled over, baring her stomach, and looked up at him. One eye was still open, though the skin around the socket was torn and bleeding. The other was a gushing mess.
She raised the gun only to have him kick it aside. He fell on her, trapping the gun between them, scratching and grabbing for it, his breath roaring in her ears with the tight scream of adrenaline and agony. They wrestled, grunting like dogs fighting for a bone, locked in a deadly tug-of-war. She felt Kintz prying her fingers from the sweat-and-blood-slicked grip. Her pulse drummed in her skull. Her lungs and fingers burned. Her grip slipping, belly to belly with Kintz, hardly knowing where the gun was aimed, she fired.
She heard the wet thump of bullet hitting flesh, felt hot blood rush over her legs and stomach.
It took a long time for him to die, and she didn’t dare move the gun, even to flick the safety back on, until she was sure his fingers had slacked. When she finally pushed him off her his one remaining eye was open and his limbs loose and heavy. She wiped the blood off her face and stood up—only to find herself staring down the barrel of her own gun.
“Bella,” she said.
“Not quite.” Haas’s smile looked all wrong on Bella’s pale face, and in the construct’s dark eyes Li saw the same frozen, uncomprehending panic she’d seen when she’d gone under the loop shunt.
“You took your time,” she told Haas.
“I had other fires to put out,” he said. “And I didn’t want to get on the shunt and show my hand too soon. Bella’s been getting… difficult.”
“Christ,” Li whispered, sick at the thought of what Haas had done, at the sure knowledge that this had been the nightmare behind Bella’s eyes every time she’d spoken of Sharifi’s death. She might not have remembered, but she had suspected. And she had used Li to chase down that suspicion—hoping all the while that it would turn out to be wrong, that Li would find some other explanation.
Haas bent over Kintz, pulled a second pair of cuffs out of his belt and tossed them to Li. “Cuff your ankles,” he said, and watched while she did it. “Now give me your hand,” he said.
Fear prickled down Li’s spine. Haas wanted her dataset, the record of her interface with the condensates. And once he got it, there would be no reason at all to take Li above ground.
Haas saw her hesitation. “Nguyen may want the data enough to play games with you,” he said, his voice level, “but I personally don’t give a shit. Bear that in mind.” He nodded toward the cuffs already encircling her wrists. “You might crack those given a few hours, of course. But you don’t have a few hours. I leave you here without air and you’ll be dead inside of one hour. I’m your ticket out of here, my friend. You better fucking keep me happy.”
Li stretched out her hands, fingers spread wide, palms toward him. He put Bella’s left hand against hers, clasped Bella’s fingers around hers, and started the data transfer.
It was a strange thing to feel information being pulled out of her internals without her consent, to feel Haas taking the last chip she had to bargain with.
Or was the data all she had now? There was something else. Something Cohen had been ready to use. Something she could use too—if she was willing to put it all on the table and gamble everything, the way Sharifi had. She hesitated, knowing that the hard knot in her stomach was simple fear. Then she looked into the cold black pit of Bella’s dilated pupils and knew she was already risking everything. She closed her eyes, took a last, trembling breath, and stepped into the memory palace.
The numbers hit her like a riptide. Code coursed through her, rolled her over, dragged her under. She reached out—tentatively at first, then more confidently—to the myriad sentient systems that made up Cohen. She felt their squabbling, bickering personalities—and the glue of shared goals, shared memories, shared passions that bound them together. None of these splintered shards was Cohen. But they remembered him. They remembered everything he had felt and believed and wanted. They shared that with her, even if they shared nothing else.
She just hoped it would be enough.
She found the communications AI almost before she began looking. His fury spun at the core of the memory palace like a dead star, sucking her in, absorbing the dead AI’s last functioning subsystems, devouring every remaining bit of heat and warmth and light in the place.
“We can’t get a line to Freetown without the field AI. We have no network.”
“Yes we do,” she said. “We have the worldmine. The worldmine can give us streamspace access completely outside UN control or oversight. All we have to do is get Daahl’s network up. All we have to do is finish the job Cohen started.”
A cold shiver ran through the numbers. “Why should we?”
“It’s what Cohen would have done if he were still here.”
“He was different. We believed in him. Trusted him. He earned that. You, on the other hand, had better have something to bargain with.”
So she bargained.
She gave them the intraface. She promised to do what she had already promised Cohen she would do. What they would have known she would still do if they’d trusted her as he had.
She promised to set them free.
The Anaconda Strike: 9.11.48.
She rode Cohen’s networks like a hawk riding an updraft.
She wheeled and soared, sideslipping into subnetworks, enslaved systems, communications programs. She felt out beyond them to the static-charged web of local communications that hung like an electronic smog over Compson’s World, to the miners’ primitive radio communications, to Helena, to the orbital stations. And then she dove, surrendering herself to the black depths of the worldmind.
It was waiting for her, just as she’d known it would be; but it was no longer the alien, incomprehensible presence of the glory hole that she felt. Instead she heard the echoes of half-remembered voices in it. Mirce. McCuen. Her father. And, worst of all, Cohen.
He had been right, of course. The worldmind needed him. It had cannibalized him, anchoring a new structure in the ruins of his systems, and in the flimsy beginnings of the planetary net that he had helped Ramirez create for it. Because it was the worldmind that Ramirez’s net had been meant to serve all along. That was the secret that had taunted Li from behind Cartwright’s blind eyes. That was the secret her father had known, the secret Cohen himself had known, even if he had figured it out too late to save himself. And now Li watched the worldmind explode into orbit, crackle through the Bose-Einstein relays of every planet along the Periphery, across the unmonitored, uncontrolled tributaries of FreeNet and out into the deep, swift, living tide of the spinstream.
Spin State Page 50