Spin 01 - Spin State (49 page)

Inside the lab, Li saw her target immediately: a Park 35-Zed, the biggest mainframe made by any of the top military contractors. She walked around it apprehensively, looking for the input port. She found the port on one side of the mainframe, in a little tech’s cubbyhole equipped with a fold-down desk and rolling stool. She deactivated her pressure suit and peeled back the hood to bare the socket at her temple. She sat on the stool, keeping her feet planted beneath her center of gravity so she could get up fast if she had to. She pulled the wire out of her pocket.

She thought of the times she’d ordered Kolodny to jack into hostile systems. Then she told herself that she wasn’t jacking into a hostile system this time. She was just accessing the external communications program and dialing out to Cohen, waiting on the Starling. And the system wasn’t going to be hostile, because if everything went right, it would never know she’d been there. It didn’t help. She opened the main menu and began scanning through the settings, going as fast as she could without alerting any AI or human sysops, trying to make sure she wasn’t setting off any unseen trip wires. The Zed was more powerful than the smaller comps she was used to manipulating, and the direct line gave her a disorienting, vertiginous speed of connection.

It was like diving into the spinstream—but a stream without VR, a stream of pure numbers. The numbers fed directly into Li’s brain, and her oracle processed them at speeds beyond reach of any keyboard operator. But she still had to process them. And, even skewed by her own interface settings, there was something in the feel of these numbers that hinted at the vast, alien mind of the semisentient behind them. There was no mistaking this for surfing the spinstream, not if you had a feel for the code you were running. Streamspace was alive, in its own way, but only as a planet or a star system was alive. This was different. Here Li felt with every calculation, every operation, that she was inside something.

Or someone. She found herself ducking and dodging mentally, not wanting to come to grips with the presence behind the Zed’s operating programs. She thought of Sharifi, trapped in the pit, locked mind-tomind with the semisentient field AI of Compson’s orbital relay, and shuddered. It was an image burst straight from the subterranean depths of her nightmares.

Still, the lab AI remained comfortingly passive as she accessed screen after screen, gradually closing in on the back door that Cohen had shown her in their final planning sessions. All that changed when she tried to dial out. The moment she opened the outside line, she felt a shift, a push in the system. It reminded her of the ear-popping wall of air that swept through a ship when someone breached a pressure seal. And whatever was doing the pushing was more than the sum of the lab comp’s files and operating platforms. It was aware of her, Li. Knew she was on the move. Knew she’d dialed out. And it was thinking about it. At eight billion parallel-processed operations per picosecond.

Though any speed she could muster was meaningless, she hurried. The call went out. The dedicated line on the Starling lit up like a distant star in the darkness.

First ring.

No answer.

“Come on, Cohen. Be there!”

Second ring. Li felt the AI rising up like a great beast, flexing its computational muscles, gathering its immense bulk to flick off the irritating mote that was her.

“Don’t do this to me, Cohen!”

Third ring. And the Zed was on top of her.

It spun through its security operations so fast that the whole dataspace became an incomprehensible dizzying blur. Li was sinking, spinning. She knew she should jack out, but she couldn’t navigate the system, couldn’t orient herself or even control her own body. Code twisted and convulsed as the Zed overloaded her systems. Her internals froze, jerked, skittered off course. The datastream corrupted. Her own mind, unable to process the overload, betrayed her. She began to hallucinate. The numbers came alive. They pulsed with a cold, deep-sea wakefulness. A mind moved within them, dark, sightless, unsleeping. A mind without words. A mind forged in the pressure of a hundred atmospheres. It circled, searching for her. Stalking her. And she knew with bone-crushing certainty that when it found her she would die.

Far away someone else’s body convulsed and a stool skittered across the deck, wheels shrieking. The phone rang again, but the external datastream was so slow and uncompressed next to the Zed’s dizzying parallel calculations that the ring reached Li’s brain only as a low, Dopplered groan. Even the white noise on the line stretched out until each click and rasp of static became a distorted howl. The darkness within the darkness gathered itself and slid toward her.

Click.

She sensed Cohen’s arrival more than she actually saw it. A river of light washed through the numbers, driving back the darkness. It shone white, as pure and deceptively placid as the sweep of a Himalayan ice field. But it was crushing the Zed, cutting through the semisentient as implacably as a glacier grinding at a mountain. If she’d ever wondered what it was to be the scrap of flesh two sharks fought over, she knew now. She felt … nothing. She heard only her pulse pounding in her skull, and behind that a rushing, whirling silence. She was lost, floating, watching from a tremendous height while two battling giants tore apart the universe.

The lab comp writhed and twisted, desperately spinning through its programs in search of anything that would blunt Cohen’s relentless attack. Then it focused on her, and an icy finger of fear brushed down her spine.

she called. And with that one betraying thought, the darkness was upon her.

03:42:12.

The next thing she saw was Cohen. Not the implacable and terrible light, but his normal on-line self. He was running the numbers, doing the job he always did, the job any cracker did. he asked, when she mustered enough energy to try a cautious operation.

She waited, still weak. There was something comforting about watching him dial through the comp, watching the security codes untangle themselves under his touch and the numbers smooth out and tick past easily, the way they always did for him. Something was off though. she asked.

Digital laughter swirled around her, flickering through the numbers like brush fire.

He scanned a promising file and cursed as it came up empty.

Li asked, feeling panicky.

Cohen said. The emphasis on
he
was slight but unmistakable. A reproach.

When he answered, Li could feel the unease in his voice even across the remote line.

He went on without waiting for a reply.

Cohen paused, sidetracked to search a dead-end directory.

Li couldn’t get her mind around this vision of how Cohen saw the Zed.

Cohen riffled through a new directory faster than Li could identify it, dropped it, moved on to the next one.

Cautiously, Li probed the network. She felt something, a dark, vaguely sentient presence. But it was confused, chaotic, diminished. As if the Zed had crept into some dark corner of the network to lick its wounds.

Li felt something come through the numbers. Something that was partly indecipherable AI emotion and partly a feeling she didn’t need anyone to explain to her: guilt.

Another long silence.

03:51:02.

Li checked their time and swallowed.

After a tense silence, Cohen said,

She twitched, nerves stretched to the breaking point.

04:01:00.

She looked around the corner, saw an empty passage and started forward. she asked.

A pulse of emotion flowed over the line, but this one was pure AI—one of those ripples in the numbers that put the lie to the illusion of Cohen’s humanness, that reminded Li how foolish it was to let herself imagine she understood anything that happened on the other side of the interface. he answered when the numbers smoothed out.

Then she passed through another security grid and lost him.

04:03:41.

She was deep in the lab section. Security was so solid here that the station’s admins hadn’t even tried to make the researchers observe normal security protocols. Whiteboards lined the walls, markers and erasers hooked into the low-g racks along their bottom rims. She passed a board that was covered with quantum equations, another, half-erased already, that held only two clean and concise Bussard drive efficiency calculations, the kind Li had wrestled with in her OCS math courses. Rounding one corner, she almost knocked over a half-full coffee cup someone had left sitting on the floor. She heard footsteps, scrambled into the ceiling pipes just in time to watch a skinny bald man shuffle past in rumpled pajamas. She smiled and wished Cohen could see him.

Alba was so big, its curve so slight, that it was easy to get disoriented. Especially easy for Li, just off the much smaller AMC Compson station, where the tight curve of the life-support ring was always rising in front of your feet, telling you where you were. Corridors branched off the backbone of the big hoop, running three or four hundred meters on either side. The fancy offices and conference rooms would be on the edges, in the relatively few rooms with side windows. The storage areas, the secured labs, and the deadwalled comps would be where Li was, in the narrow white world of the internal corridors.

4:06:27.

She’d made it. Here was the cross corridor Cohen had sent her to, and the fifth door. She scanned the room beyond the door. Empty. She picked the lock, using the code Cohen had already pulled off the system. Then she stepped through the door and crossed a mostly empty lab to a desktop terminal tucked behind an antiquated multichannel quantum ansible. She undid her suit’s hood and jacked in. This time there was no gatekeeper, no dark presence lurking behind the system. She opened the comm menu, trembling with relief. She dialed the number.

And heard the unmistakable metallic click of the safety lifting off a neural disruptor. “Turn around,” said a hard voice. “Slowly. That is, if you want to be alive in ten seconds.”

She froze, raised her hands carefully, and turned. The guard was five meters away—just out of kicking range. Everything about him was cold, hard, professional. Li’s hope died as soon as she looked at him. He gestured at her rifle. “Eject the charge clip.”

She ejected it. “Now throw it.”

She dropped it on the floor in front of her. The prongs of the disruptor jerked toward her chest. “Kick it over here.”

She kicked it. “And the rifle.”

She sent that skittering across the floor behind the charge clip—her last hope rattling away across griptreated deckplating.

“You alone?” he asked. Just as she opened her mouth to answer, the comp rang.

They both jumped. The muzzle of the disruptor flicked toward her again. “Step away from the terminal,” he said over the second ring. Li took a deep breath, flexed her knees and rolled.

She planned her roll to carry her behind the terminal’s condensate array, thinking the guard wouldn’t fire on her if it meant destroying the precious crystals inside it. She thought wrong.