Spin 01 - Spin State (28 page)

“I said that’s exceptionally nasty, even for you.”

The room suddenly felt too small, too hot. Li turned away and began checking the walls, trying to find some chink in them.

“Look,” she said after a long, uncomfortable pause. “I didn’t mean—” “Forget it. It was stupid of me.”

“So what’s with the kid?” Li asked when the white silence had become too thickly oppressive to stand any longer.

“Ah.” Cohen undid the laces of his sneakers and started putting them back on his sock-clad feet. “I thought you knew that. This is Hyacinthe.”

“I thought you were Hyacinthe.”

“He’s one of the things I am. He’s my original, bedrock interface program. And, of course, the man who invented me.”

Li had a sudden urge to laugh. “As a ten-year-old?”

“Actually he was fourteen when this was done. It’s old video footage. He used it to create the original VR interface. I guess you could say it was my first ’face. I tend to fall back on it when I’m pushing the limits of my processing capacity. As at present, unfortunately.”

“Can’t we get out?” Li paced the room’s perimeter again.

“No. And sit down before you drive me incurably mad. You’re safe as long as I’m here.”

But just as he said the words—as if someone were playing a nasty joke on them—he was gone again.

* * *

Li was back in the dark place.

This time she knew she was underground, in the mine. But that was all she knew. Water dripped from an unseen ceiling, splashed in an unseen pool. A damp, chill air current wafted up from some underground river too far off for her to hear.

She cut to infrared. No good. She was instream; she saw only what the person controlling the simulation wanted her to see.

“Light a lamp,” Cohen’s voice whispered from somewhere near her left ear.

Her hand reached out to where it knew the lamp was. Picked it up. Primed it. But her fingers fumbled with the wick, as if they had become sudden strangers to this familiar task. As she adjusted the flame, she brushed the inside of her hand against the hot barrel of the oil reservoir and heard the sizzle of burning skin.

“Shit!” she said, putting her hand to her mouth instinctively, sucking at the blistered crescent of flesh. “Sssh,” Cohen said. “You’re fine. Tell me what you see.”

She held up the lamp and saw an uneven floor of hewn rock running away in all directions. Pillars of light marched in long ranks from one end of the space to the other, gleaming like ivory in the lamplight. The ceiling arched overhead, supported by undulating veins that fanned from one Bose-Einstein node to another in an infinitely repeating, fractally complex spider’s web.

“It’s the glory hole,” she told Cohen. “Sharifi’s glory hole.”

But it was the glory hole intact, unburnt and unflooded and full of softly whirring and clicking equipment. The glory hole before the fire. A generator hummed in one corner. Optical cables snaked across the floor between thickets of diagnostic machinery. Crooked teeth of crystal jutted from floor and ceiling.

The mouths of the earth
, Li thought. Wasn’t that what Compson had called them? “Is this where the hijacker took you?” Cohen asked.

She raised the lamp and turned in a slow circle. To her left a steepening upslope followed the line of the vein, echoing the mined-out chamber on the level above. To her right, the portable virusteel ladder led to the chamber and drift above, and to the long slippery stairs out of the Trinidad.

“Is this it?” Cohen whispered—and she realized for the first time that the whisper was not behind her but inside her. “Is it your memory or someone else’s?”

“Someone else’s.” “Whose then? Think.”

Her hand moved reluctantly, as if she were keying instructions over a bad link. She squinted at it. It was hers, all right. Short nails. Strong, brown, blunt-ended fingers. Still. There was something not quite right about it. She turned it so the palm faced her.

No wires.

She looked at the hand again, more carefully. The nails were longer than hers, better cared for. She counted old scars that weren’t there, new ones that shouldn’t have been there. And the fresh burn, a slim crescent of raised scar tissue between thumb and forefinger.

“It’s Sharifi,” she said. “It’s Sharifi’s memory.”

Then Sharifi turned at the sound of approaching footsteps, and Li was helpless, along for the ride like any other ghost.

It was the same sequence she’d seen in the last hijacking. But this time she understood what she was seeing. The strange patterns chasing each other across the cavern were light from Sharifi’s lantern. The pinging sound was dripping water. The booming rifle reports were bootheels slapping on bedrock.

“What are you doing here?” Sharifi said, as Voyt climbed down the ladder.

He reached the bottom, turned, and grinned nastily. “Just keeping an eye on the merchandise.” “Fine. Stay out of the way then.”

“Where’s our honored guest? Off stealing the silverware?”

“Right here,” Bella said, stepping into the lamplight.

Li watched through Sharifi’s eyes as Bella approached. This was not the subdued woman she had met on-station. This Bella met Voyt’s stare and returned it. This Bella moved with the arrogant loose-limbed grace of a fighter, smiled the cool smile of someone who knew she could outsmart you, humiliate you. No matter what the game was. “Are you ready to deliver?” she asked.

Sharifi looked hard at her, frowning a little. “Are you?”

Bella opened her mouth to answer, and the flickering, lamplit shadows of the glory hole gave way to a blast of white light.

Li was back in her quarters. “Cohen?”

“Here.” Her livewall flickered on to reveal Cohen, shunting through Chiara again, sitting in his sunfilled Ring-side drawing room.

“Do you know what we just saw?” Li asked.

“I know what you think we saw.”

“It’s there, in Sharifi’s memory. Everything we need to know. We have to go back.”

“We have to do no such thing. We almost got trapped there. And you still don’t know if what we saw was real or not.”

“I’ll chance it.”

“No you won’t. And if you decide to be stupid about it, I’ll personally lock you offstream.”

A dark suspicion tugged at the back of Li’s brain. “Why are you so scared? What are you not telling me?”

“I’ve told you everything I know, Catherine.”

She laughed. “How can someone who’s had two hundred years to practice be such a shitty liar?”

She expected him to at least smile at that, but he just sat staring at the ground, arms crossed, swinging one sandal-shod foot back and forth in a nervous rhythm. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, hands clasped together so tightly that Chiara’s knuckles whitened.

“Listen. Drop this investigation. Tell Nguyen you’re sick, or you need maintenance. Which you do, obviously; I haven’t seen you pick anything up with that arm since you hit station.”

Li stared. A roach crawled across the floor and started up the livewall. She saw it with surreal clarity, each leg arcing forward, setting itself down against the glowing matrix of the viewscreen. When the roach began to crawl across Cohen’s leg, she reached out and flicked it away.

“I can’t drop it,” she said. “I’m one mistake away from getting chaptered out.” “I can think of worse fates than a discharge.”

“Well, I can’t.” She paced around the narrow room. “You got me into this mess. And I’m not talking about just now. I’m talking about Metz. Whatever you know, I want to hear it.”

Cohen sighed, and Li wondered, not for the first time, how he managed to stamp his personality so strongly on his shunts. It was impossible to imagine Chiara’s lovely face wearing that tired, ancient expression—just as it was impossible to imagine Cohen not suffusing every ’face with that selfdeprecating irony born out of a thousand lies, half lies, and compromises.

“I don’t know anything,” he said. “I only suspect. Helen, for one. Where else could Sharifi have gotten the intraface?”

“That’s crazy, Cohen. And anyway, Nguyen never had the intraface. The raid on Metz failed.”

“Did it? Look at the timing, for God’s sake. We pull the source code and wetware for the intraface off Metz and a few weeks later Sharifi’s on Compson’s World, wearing it? You run the numbers.”

“But you said that wetware couldn’t just be grown in viral matrix. That it had to be tanked in place, in a clone. So if Sharifi used it, it must have been cultured for her. And if TechComm was in on this from the get-go, then … why would Nguyen steal something she already owned?”

“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 thirtysix 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?”

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?