Spin 01 - Spin State (3 page)
Li looked around at her team. Shanna, Dalloway, Catrall, and Kolodny were veterans. No worries there. Cohen was Cohen. He’d do his job superbly as usual, for his own incomprehensible AI reasons, and she didn’t have to worry about him getting hurt because he’d never be physically present except through Kolodny. Her big worry was the two fresh-faced privates, shipped in three days ago. They needed time, training. Well, they wouldn’t get it. They’d figure things out in the first minutes or not at all.
“Two minutes,” she shouted over the wind. No one answered; they were all waiting for Cohen to get the link up.
She ran a final check on her weapons: the long-muzzled pulse rifle, the Corps-issue neural disruptor— called a Viper because of its distinctive fanglike anode prongs—and her own hand-rebuilt Beretta. Then she moved around the flight deck, feet spread to counter the hopper’s bucks and slides, checking weapons, checking equipment, checking eyes.
She paid special attention to the new recruits, talking to them, mustering a confident smile that belied her fears about this mission. As she bent over the younger boy’s rifle, her crucifix slipped out of her shirt collar and swung forward in a brief gold flash.
“That’s nice,” the boy said. And then flushed and added a belated
ma’am
. “Where’d you get it?” She shoved it back into her shirt. “My father gave it to me.”
She finished with the others, came around to Kolodny, crouched in front of her. Not to check anything— Kolodny was too much of a pro for that. Mostly just to say good-bye before she went under the shunt.
“So,” Kolodny said. “This should be interesting. Total fuck fest, obviously.” Li shrugged. “Looks that way.”
“Too bad I won’t be around to see it.” Kolodny grinned her toothy grin. “You’ll have to catch me up when we get home.”
“I will,” Li said.
She leaned over to check Kolodny’s carbine. No harm in checking. And Kolodny knew her too well to get offended. As she reached across her, the crucifix swung forward again.
Kolodny caught it. Before Li could react, she tucked the chain in and hooked it around the top button of Li’s collar to hold it in place. “There. Better, no?”
Li turned to look into the gray eyes. “Cohen,” she said.
He smiled. “You always can tell,” he said. “How do you do it?”
Li pulled away, walked back across the flight deck, and sat down facing him. A moment later Kolodny’s husky alto sang out a few lines of a Charles Trenet song.
It was Cohen’s favorite—or at least his favorite when they were going into anything that looked like trouble. He’d told her to get her feet wet and look it up the one time she’d asked about it, but all she’d found were a few long-dead noninteractive sites and a cryptic reference to the French Foreign Legion that made her wonder just how old Cohen really was.
“Are we go?” she asked.
The only answer she got was a few more lines of the song, not in Kolodny’s voice this time, but on-line, in Cohen’s liquid tenor:
Quand tu souris, tout comme toi je pleure en secret. Un rêve, chérie, un amour timide et discret.
Her oracle translated the words for her, but damned if she knew what secret dreams or singing for money had to do with tech raids.
Then the link broke over her, and she was being swept out to sea on the massive undertow of the AI’s interlocking neural nets. He held her on the link, sharpened it, refined it, brought on the other squad members one by one until there were seven clean clear voices. Only Kolodny was missing; her reflexes and combat programming were at Cohen’s disposal, but she herself would be gone until the raid ended, her life riding on the choices Cohen made while he was on shunt.
She switched off her GPS and felt the others do the same. Then there was the long, frozen, disorienting
pause before Cohen picked up the slack and started supplying position corrections to her inertial systems. This was always the worst moment for Li. The sharp, subliminal anxiety at the missing datastream. The unnerving knowledge—unthinkable to someone who’d been wired her whole adult life —that she didn’t know where she was, that only Cohen stood between her and being lost.
Cohen’s nav feed came up at last, and Li felt her limbs go limp with relief. Then, without any warning of trouble, the link flickered and died. Kolodny surfaced where a few seconds ago Li had felt only the vast glacial sweep of the AI’s networks.
One of the new recruits groaned as the twisting backwash of net vertigo washed over them. Li’s stomach clenched, and she closed her eyes and waited, knowing that trying to pull out of the link would only make things worse now.
It passed.
Kolodny disappeared, and Cohen was back, as if nothing had happened.
But if there was one, he wasn’t admitting it.
* * *
They dropped into the northwest corner of the compound, snaking down rappelling ropes between the dog patrols. As they slipped into the shadow of the beet plant, Li saw her squad’s skinbugs cycle through their camo programs: sky gray, dirt brown, rusted orange.
The lab’s door was tucked into a sidewall of the processing plant, just where Intel had said it would be. Li stood aside while Catrall jiggered the lock. Then she and Dalloway triple-timed down a corrugated virusteel staircase, secured the landing, and brought the others in after them.
According to Soza’s schematics, the landing fed onto a long gangway that accessed the outer row of labs. Li tossed off a quick and dirty heat scan to make sure the adjoining labs were empty, then sprinted down the gangway at eighty-two kilometers an hour by the clock—just the way they’d marked it out. As she ran, she felt a warning twinge in her left knee. She’d pay for that burst of speed later; bones and ligaments couldn’t keep pace with ceramsteel. But right now, time was everything.
She reached cover and pumped her first fire team down behind her. She listened, scanned, eyeballed. Then she brought up her second team and leapfrogged the whole squad around the corner in textbook fashion. They regrouped at one end of a long ultramodern virufacture bay. The whole lab was built from ceramic compounds. White walls, white lights, white floors and ceilings. The only flash of color was a stylized biohazard red sunburst stenciled on the floor. No corporate name below it. But then there wouldn’t be. Not in a lab that was so obviously illegal.
Open virufacture tanks stretched down the length of the bay between a bewildering tangle of feedlines and biomonitors. Half the tanks were empty. Half were filled with clear, high-grade viral matrix.
Li shot to Cohen.
They secured the lab and moved on.
They swept the next three labs on schedule, still finding nothing that piqued the AI’s interest. In Lab Four, Li guarded Kolodny’s back while Cohen jacked in and made a first cautious foray into the mainframe. It took him less than a second to confirm the Intel data. Lab Five stood out like a black hole on the lab net: a total absence of output. Whatever illicit wetware work was going on here, Lab Five was its epicenter.
A blind corner led into Five—the only blind corner in the complex. Li reached it first. She paused, scanned, motioned Catrall over to the far wall to cover her. On his nod, she juiced her internals and accelerated around the corner—straight into a withering blast of white light.
She pushed forward and through it; no matter what the danger the worst possible response was to lose momentum, risk being stranded in the kill zone. Then she rolled behind a stack of sterile saline canisters and stopped to tally the damage.
None.
She’d run through an automated irradiation beam, installed at the door to protect the contents of the lab’s unsealed virufacture tanks. Her skinbugs handled it, masking her presence, killing the intrusion alarm before her passage tripped it, protecting the weapons-grade virucules on her skin and uniform from the assault of the radiation. No problem.
Except there was a problem. The beam should have been on the schematics Intel gave them. Should have been, and wasn’t. She wondered what else Intel had missed—and if the next surprise would be this harmless.
As soon as she was sure she hadn’t set off any alarms, she waved in the rest of the squad. They had twelve minutes and twenty-three seconds left before the hopper returned. No time to waste on unnecessary precautions. When the perimeter was secured, she split the squad in pairs and had them scan the tanks. She set her realspace feed to toggle if anyone’s pulse rose above combat-normal. Then she picked up Cohen’s feed and rode in on his shoulder while he jacked the system.
The lab’s security went far beyond the deadwall. There would be no slipping in under the radar; Cohen was going to have to meet their best stuff and better it. The network was broken into half a dozen separate zones. He’d have to crack each zone separately, and at the same time elude the quasi-intelligent game-playing agents that defended them. There was no back door, no way in or out without running the gauntlet of the security programs. And even if Cohen got by them, Kolodny would still be physically jacked in to the lab mainframe, vulnerable to whatever wet bugs and bioactive code the system threw at her.
As Li watched, Cohen spun out a sleek silver thread of code, tweaked it into a loose Möbius strip, and floated it into the main corporate site on a public-source message.
Trojan horse
, she thought.
Oldest trick in the book
.
Cohen was laughing before she finished the thought.
Li glared. The boy popped like a soap bubble.
The security program caught the horse, just as it was meant to. In eight seconds alarms were going off all over the network. In twenty-three seconds the system’s anti-incursion software had corralled the horse and routed it to the off-site virus zoo. For a moment nothing happened. Then an area of confused activity boiled up inside the virus zoo and ballooned into a roiling mushroom cloud of self-reproducing, randomly mutating code.
Li held her breath, trying to follow code that was spinning faster than even her military-grade wetware could track it. She shut down her VR interface and dropped into the numbers, a swimmer in the shifting ocean of Emergent networks that was Cohen.
His strategy was working. Or at least she thought it must be. The security program tracked each new virus, broke its code, sent antidotes shooting off to its entire UN-wide customer base. But this was a game the defense lost before the first whistle. The virus mutated constantly, generating new code faster than the system broke the old code, causing the system’s outgoing mail to increase exponentially. And each new antidote-paired copy of the virus contained an embedded packet of active code that attacked the receiving system and sent yet another help request shooting back to the virus zoo.
In twelve seconds the off-site provider’s network exceeded capacity, locked up, and went down. The
target was cut out of the flock, and Cohen was ready to go to work in earnest.
Li maxed her realspace feed. Her squad was still sampling tank contents. They moved systematically down the rows of tanks, scanning and logging their contents. No search and destroy on this mission, just information-gathering.
And back to realspace.
They were running late. Li sent Shanna and the two new recruits over to the far end of the lab, signaling that she’d cover the middle rows herself. They were flirting dangerously with missing their retrieval, and she didn’t want to contemplate the possibility of a delayed pickup in the dust storm that was still raging above ground. Nor did she want to find out the hard way that Soza hadn’t arranged backup retrieval.
A few rows away, Dalloway stopped and put a hand into an open tank. He jerked it out and waved it in front of him while a rainbow oil slick of mutating viruses and counterviruses battled across it.
Then one of the newbies screamed.
A short scream; Shanna clapped a hard hand over his mouth before it really got started. But when Li saw what the two of them were looking at, she couldn’t blame the kid.
The tank had a body in it. All the tanks at that end of the lab had bodies in them. They were women. Or, more precisely, one woman: smallish, recognizably Korean—a rarity in and of itself in this fourth century of the human diaspora—and brown-skinned despite the artificial pallor induced by water and lab lights.
But this was no approved wetware she’d ever seen.
She looked into the tank in front of her. Took in the bar codes stamped on the sallow flesh, the atrophied limbs, the silver glint of ceramsteel filament twining through exposed nerve cells. At first glance the wetware being grown here was no different from the AI-supported wire job every soldier in the squad was equipped with, or even from the civilian VR rigs rich teenagers used to surf streamspace. But this wetware was growing in adult bodies, not viral matrix. And the pale, submerged faces were too identical, too regular, too inhumanly perfect to be anything but genetic constructs.
Li stared at the bodies, caught by an echo, a wisp of memory that skittered away like a spooked horse every time she tried to lay hands on it. Was this a geneline she’d seen before? On Gilead? Were they culturing wetware for Syndicate soldiers? And why? Who would be crazy enough to risk it?
