Spin State

Shantytown: 25.10.48.

Li made the meet early and scoped out the place—only sensible, since Korchow had chosen it.

She found it on the seedy outer fringe of what was euphemistically known as Shantytown’s entertainment district. This part of town looked right at night, somehow. It was less jarringly out of place when you couldn’t see the scrub hills and gypsum flats, or the bleak unterraformed wall of the Johannesburg Massif looming on the horizon.

It wasn’t raining in Shantytown, but it wasn’t not raining either. The water that dripped from the rooftops and doorways was part rain, part algae-laden condensation. It smelled sharp and fermented, and it wormed under Li’s collar and down her neck like prying fingers.

She was alone tonight. It hadn’t been easy to keep McCuen from coming, but it had been necessary. He could put things together far too quickly for comfort, and Saints knew what he’d do if he decided she was working for the Syndicates. Besides, if she was going to play the game Nguyen wanted her to play and still give Korchow enough to get that receipt from him, she was going to need some serious maneuvering room.

She checked her watch. Nearly an hour until the meet. Korchow’s man would arrive early too, of course. She aimed to be earlier still.

The bar was supposed to be called the Drift, but the only sign Li saw in the window was a flickering, fly-speckled halogen that looked like it must have read “$LOTS” before the L died. Still, this was the place Korchow had described: the narrow housefront sheathed in scaffolding, the bar entrance tucked between a peep show and a ComSat pay terminal, the drunks creaking up the rickety stairs to the second-story flophouse. She walked by, crossed the street half a block down, skirting around a poisonous mud puddle, and slipped under the jury-rigged arcade that shadowed the facing storefronts.

A loose panel rattled underfoot. Condensation dripped from mildewed girders and pooled on the walkway. She slipped into a darkened doorway, shook down a cigarette and lit it, masking its glowing tip with a cupped hand.

Korchow’s man arrived at twenty minutes of. There was no mistaking him; Syndicate birthlabs bred to an idealized pre-Migration genetic norm, and Li doubted anyone that close to human-looking had crossed the Drift’s threshold since the Riots.

She cursed Korchow for an overeager amateur. Then she saw his cool calculating professional’s face in her mind’s eye; whatever else he was, Korchow was no amateur. No, he wanted Sharifi’s data badly enough to blow the cover of an A Series operative. And he didn’t give a damn if Li got caught. He might even want her to get caught… down the line, when he had what he needed from her. She threw down her cigarette and heard it hiss in standing water as she stepped out of the shadows.

Inside, the Drift was less of a room than a haphazard string of loosely connected hallways. Li sidled through the initial bottleneck and dropped down an unmarked single step into what the regulars probably called the front room.

Korchow’s man sat halfway down the bar, hunched broodily over a beer. He looked up as Li came in, and their eyes met in the bar mirror. They’d done something to his face—broken the long narrow nose, blurred the lines of jaw and cheekbone—but they hadn’t been able to disguise the unnatural perfection of his features. He could have been Bella’s brother.

Li passed him by and took a seat toward the other end of the bar, back in the smeary half shadows beyond the cheap lighting panels. The bartender took her order without smiling, and the beer he brought her was flat and yeasty. She drank, eyes scanning the narrow room, and set the glass back down on a bartop still sticky with the faint rings of yesterday’s spilled beers. She was halfway through her second beer when Korchow’s man stood and walked past her into the back room.

“Where’s the bathroom?” Li asked a minute and a half later.

The bartender just gestured toward the back and muttered something that might have been “Left.”

There were tables in the back room, most of them empty. She threaded her way between them and pushed through a narrow door into a dim hallway that gave on the bathroom and the fire door. A surveillance camera blinked in an angle of wall and ceiling, but, as Korchow had promised, the little corner shelf screwed into the wall underneath it was just out of its field of view.

Korchow’s man came out of the toilet, coat slung over his arm. He squeezed between her and the shelf, mumbling an apology. She let him by, then went into the toilet herself. As she brushed past the shelf her hand slid across the datacube he had left there and palmed it.

She stepped through the door and scanned the narrow space. No cameras here—though there might be a voice-activated tap hidden in the wall. Even the camera out in the hall was probably no more than nonsentient-monitored company security. Still, why take chances? She went into the stall and sat down. She could feel the cube burning in her pocket. She turned it over, found the download switch by feel, and keyed it.

Nothing happened.

She knew what was supposed to be happening, what she hoped was happening. Somewhere in the labyrinth of her internal systems, an encryption program should be filtering through her hard files, searching out the hidden chinks in her internal security programs. If it worked, then Korchow would have opened up a secure protocol in her datafiles—a protocol through which he could pass her datafiles that would never show up on her directories, could never be accessed by Nguyen or any of the Corps psychtechs who had clearance to access her hard files. If it worked, she would see nothing. And neither would her recorder. If it didn’t work, she’d be up on treason charges as soon as she checked in for her next scheduled maintenance.

And then there was the third possibility, one so disastrous it didn’t bear thinking about. The possibility that Korchow’s program would clash with one of the private kinks she had thrown into her system.

Please let Korchow have gotten this right, she prayed to whatever saint looked out for cheats and traitors. And please let me be lucky.

When the data window opened in her peripheral vision, she caught her breath and realized she’d been holding it. She maxed the window, scrolled down the familiar gridlines of her datebook, and waited for Korchow’s encrypted window to appear.

It opened inside the datebook, an embedded halfscreen that showed up on her retina but left no record of its presence anywhere else in her internal systems. She could read it, work on it, store it, and nothing but the datebook would show in her files. When she had finished with it, Korchow’s program would wipe every trace of it from her systems. She hoped.

She leaned forward, closing her eyes and putting the heels of her hands against her eyelids in order to get the clearest picture of the data that was scrolling up the screen in front of her. There were four files. The first contained detailed schematics and navigational data for a massive orbital station that Li had no trouble recognizing as Alba, the Corps’s high-security installation in orbit around Barnard’s Star.

The second file contained an exhaustive description of security protocols, patrol routes and schedules, lab personnel protocols. The third held information on electronic security measures. The fourth file contained interface and requirements specs for what Li assumed had to be Sharifi’s intraface software.

As she looked at it, she felt a spinning sense of vertigo. It was obviously, flagrantly, completely illegal tech. It could only have been designed for use on an Emergent AI and a posthuman subject, in contravention of more wetware laws than she could count. And yet a dozen little tags and quirks told her that this software could only have been developed at Alba, by the same UNSC programmers who had designed her own software. Nguyen might have had to steal the wetware, but the rest of the intraface—the hardware, the psychware, the source code that ran the intraface into the Emergent—had been sitting at Alba all the time waiting for Sharifi, or any XenoGen construct, to pick them up and use them.

She shut the files, checked that they had downloaded properly, took the datacube out of her pocket, and flushed it down the toilet.

When she walked back into the front room, three moderately pretty girls were huddled halfway down the bar, eyeing Korchow’s man like crows parceling up a particularly fresh piece of carrion. She stepped up and took the seat beside him before the girls could initiate active stalking.

“What’s your name?” she asked. As she spoke, she could feel three resentful stares boring into her back like virusteel-sheathed augers.

Korchow’s man turned sad velvet brown eyes on her and answered as seriously as if she had asked a question that the fate of worlds turned on. “Arkady,” he said. “Very pleased to meet you.” He had the same curiously formal turn of phrase Bella had, the same air of believing that life was a serious and precarious business and not to be laughed at.

“Buy you a drink?” Li asked.

They made the usual small talk. When the beers came, still warm, still flat, they drank together. Arkady sipped his beer with a cautious frown that made Li suspect he wasn’t a drinker.

“Well?” he said finally.

Li glanced around. “You ask a lot.”

“Do I?”

“Maybe too much.”

He paused and touched his beer to his lips again. “But perhaps,” he said, “you have a friend who could help?”

A friend. Meaning Cohen. “Perhaps.”

“Have you asked him?”

“Not yet.”

Arkady’s handsome face froze for an instant, and Li saw what she should have suspected, what Cohen himself had tried to tell her. She wasn’t what they wanted. Or at least she wasn’t all they wanted. They needed Cohen. Li and her tawdry little secret had just been the bait they used to draw him.

“We would appreciate his help a great deal, of course,” Arkady was saying, “and the task brings its own rewards.”

“That doesn’t—” Li started to say. Then she stopped cold.

The task brings its own rewards. And what had Korchow told her? You’ll have to undergo a minor surgical procedure.

They were going to give Cohen a working intraface. With her, Li, on the other end of it.

She shuddered. “I’ll pass the message on,” she said, sticking to the troubles of the moment. “How can I get you an answer?”

“You don’t have to. Just be on the Helena shuttle the day after tomorrow.”

“And?”

“And that’s all you need to know.”

“Fine.” Li stood up to go, but Arkady put a hand to her arm, stopping her.

“You still haven’t told me what you want.”

“My life back,” she snapped, too angry to keep her voice down.

“Perhaps you want what we were going to give your predecessor?”

Li turned around slowly. “Voyt, you mean?” But even as she asked, she knew it was Sharifi. Korchow had been paying Sharifi, not blackmailing her. And Sharifi had sold him the information he wanted—the same information everyone wanted. She had promised him the missing datasets. “So what was Sharifi asking for?” she asked casually.

“Not what. Who.”

Li’s stomach churned, and she felt a dizzy nausea flooding over her. Of course Sharifi hadn’t had the money to buy out Bella’s contract. She had bartered; bartered something that was far more important to the Syndicates than a single B Series construct. Sharifi had traded Bose-Einstein technology, violating every security clearance she had passed during the course of her long and productive career, violating the Espionage and Sedition Act, betraying the UN and everyone who depended on it for survival.

And she had done it for Bella.

Three men were arguing in the street when Li stepped out into the arcade again. Something about a dog, she thought. Two of them looked like brothers. The third was a small, tired man who looked bruised and sickly under the raking light of the halogens.

A skinny girl stepped into Li’s peripheral vision, hawking smuggled cigarettes, weaving back and forth under the scaffolding to avoid the dripping water. She had cheap smokes. Unfiltered. The kind you could only get in places where people didn’t care much about the sky-high cost of lung bugs. Li turned aside, fishing in her pocket for the little wad of bills she carried.

When she turned around, a crowd had formed around the three men in the road.

The two brothers were still shouting, but one of them now had his hands hooked under the other’s armpits and was dragging him back into the shadows of the opposite arcade. A bystander knelt and picked a baseball bat out of the mud.

The third man stood alone in the muddy street, punch-drunk, blood streaming down his face and mixing with the gritty rain.

AMC Station: 25.10.48.

Li was in a white-hot rage by the time she got back to the station.

“Anything else you’d like to tell me?” she asked Bella when she finally tracked her down.

They stood in Haas’s quarters, Bella backed up against the long sleek sofa and shrinking away from Li.

“She was going to take me with her,” Bella whispered, unshed tears glittering in her eyes like polished condensate. “To the Ring. She already had the tickets.”

“And you never asked how she was going to square things with MotaiSyndicate?”

“I told you. She was going to buy out my contract.”

“Even Sharifi didn’t have that kind of money. She cut a deal with Korchow. And you were the go-between. Did they expect her to fall in love with you, or was that just a windfall?”

“It wasn’t like that,” Bella whispered, and now she really was crying.

“Wasn’t it?” Li asked. “Has anything you’ve told me been true, or has it all come from Korchow?”

“I never lied to you,” Bella sobbed, just as Li’s comm icon flared in her peripheral vision.

“Christ!” Li muttered, and shut the icon off.

“She wanted to do it,” Bella insisted. “It wasn’t just for me. It was for the principle.”

“It’s not Sharifi’s motives I’m questioning.”

The comm icon flared again, more urgently. The caller had disabled Li’s call filter and wouldn’t go away now until Li answered.

She made a sharp gesture of annoyance, and Bella flinched, fear rising in her eyes behind the tears. In any other mood, Li would have been horrified; now she felt only a grim satisfaction.

She took another step toward Bella, consciously intimidating the woman, God help her. “What was Korchow buying? And don’t even think about saying you don’t know.”

“I don’t—” Bella swallowed. “Information.”

“Information about Sharifi’s work.”

Bella nodded.

“And you were the go-between. The go-between and the payment.”

“No! It wasn’t like that. They just talked.”

“Well, those little talks got your girlfriend killed.”

“I loved her!”

“Like you love me?” Li said nastily. “How convenient.”

“I don’t love you,” Bella said in a voice suddenly tight with anger. “I never said I did. You think having the same geneset is enough? That I’ll fall all over you just because you look like her? You’re nothing but a cheap copy. You wouldn’t understand Hannah if you spent the rest of your life poking and prying!”

Bella swept out of the room before Li could answer—and if she could have slammed the door, Li was sure she would have.

Her comm icon flashed again, and Li opened the line with a feeling of rising fury. “What?” she snarled.

Nguyen.

“Have I caught you at a bad time?” the general asked as her sunny office took shape around Li.

Li took a deep breath and set her jaw. “Not at all.”

“Well, how do things stand, then?”

Li swallowed. She was drifting into shipwreck waters; any misstep now and she would be past the point at which she could credibly claim to have shared everything with Nguyen. Keep it true as far as you can, she told herself, remembering Nguyen’s own advice. The true lie is the best lie. And the hardest one to get caught in.

She had told Nguyen about Korchow’s nighttime visit, right up to the moment when he produced the chop shop receipt. Now she described her meeting with Arkady, the files he’d passed to her, his reaction to the news that Cohen was not yet committed, the appointment—only a day and a half away now—in Helena.

“What good will the intraface do him without Sharifi?” Nguyen asked.

It was the first question out of her mouth when Li finished—and Li had been waiting for it, had planned for it. Now she fed her the story Korchow had concocted, passed along his feigned confidence that Syndicate nanotech, Syndicate gene therapy, Syndicate expertise with mingling constructed genesets would be able to make a partial construct work where the UN had needed a full one.

Nguyen appeared to believe it. “We’ll have to take care,” she said. “Korchow’s played the double game before. He stung us badly that way on Maris. Or one of his crèche brothers did. Even the As are hard to tell apart sometimes. Anyway, he’ll have a safe house somewhere. He’ll try to narrow your options, isolate you, push you into a situation where you rely on him for everything.”

“I don’t know that we can avoid that.”

“I don’t know that we should. We’ll just have to handle things as they come up. And you’ll need to rely on your judgment.”

“I always do, don’t I?”

Nguyen smiled. “I’m counting on it.”

“Speaking of relying on my own judgment, I could use a little more information.”

Nguyen raised her eyebrows.

“The code Korchow wants. The intraface. It’s Alba-designed.”

“What, you saw a label?” Nguyen sounded politely incredulous.

“I’m not stupid. I know Corps work when I see it. And this is Corps work. Some of the best.”

“What’s your question?” Nguyen’s voice was as cold and hard as virusteel.

Li hesitated.

“The line’s secure.”

“I guess I’m asking just how much of this is about deniability. Whether we gave the intraface to Sharifi. Whether Metz was an off-the-grid contractor—”

“Who said anything about Metz?”

Li froze. Her mind raced as she tried to retreat, retrench, keep Nguyen from finding out just how much she remembered about the raid, and why. “Well,” she stammered, “Cohen said…”

Nguyen laughed bitterly. “Cohen.” She dipped a finger into her water and ran it around the rim of the glass, setting the crystal singing. “That brings us to our next topic of conversation,” she said at last. “I take it Korchow doesn’t think he can pull the job off without Cohen?”

“It looks that way.”

“Or someone’s been very careful to make it look that way. If all goes as planned, Cohen will walk away with just what he’s wanted from the beginning: the intraface. We’ll have handed it to him in order to catch Korchow. From where I’m sitting, it looks like Cohen and his friends in ALEF come out winners no matter what happens. And we both know Cohen too well to think that’s a coincidence.”

Li stiffened. “I can’t believe—”

“You can’t?” Nguyen interrupted. “Or you don’t want to?”

A shadow flickered across the windows of Nguyen’s office, sweeping over the planes and hollows of her unsmiling face.

Li shivered. “ALEF doesn’t want the intraface anyway,” she argued. “It’s Cohen who wants it. For personal reasons.”

“Cohen doesn’t have personal reasons. In order to have personal reasons, you have to be a person. Have you ever actually bothered to find out anything about ALEF? About what they advocate?”

“I don’t get involved in politics.”

“Don’t be disingenuous. Your relationship with Cohen is politics.”

Li flushed. “You have the right to look at my private files, but not to tell me what to put in them.”

“I do when your personal life clouds your judgment.”

“That’s not the case here,” Li said. All the same, she felt a twinge of relief at the thought that Nguyen couldn’t download her last dinner with Cohen. Yet.

“Isn’t it?” Nguyen said. “Then why aren’t you asking the questions you should be asking? The questions everyone else is already asking?”

She plucked a fiche from her desk, tapped through the index to pull a file up, and handed it to Li. “Read it.”

The era of the unitary sentient organism is over. This is not idle speculation. It’s reality—a reality that both Syndicates and UN member nations are now scrambling to catch up with.

Li looked up at Nguyen. “What is this?”

“Cohen wrote it. It’s a speech he gave at an ALEF meeting last week. An ALEF meeting that was downloaded by known Consortium members.”

“Oh,” Li said, and kept reading—the same words she had seen before back in Cohen’s sunny drawing room:

The Syndicates embody one evolutionary vector: the hive mentality of the cr`eche system, the thirty-year contract, the construction of a posthuman collective psychology, including cultural acceptance of euthanasia for individuals who deviate from gene-norm.

The UN, in contrast, has launched a series of what might best be described as rearguard actions. On the technological side, we have enslaved AIs (how very revealing programmers’ jargon can be); hardwired, task-dedicated artificial life of every possible description; wired humans and posthumans operating AI-platformed wetware. In essence, a plethora of attempts to subsume nonhuman intelligence into human-controlled operating systems. And in the political sphere, the General Assembly kindly picks up any stray items the technicians fail to account for by slamming the door on consciously engineered posthuman evolution, by slapping AIs with source-code patents, mandatory-feedback-loop legislation, encryption protocols, and, of course, the much-beloved thirty-year death tax.

Humanity has engineered its own obsolescence. They acknowledge it by act if not by deed. It is time for us to acknowledge it. Time for us to rethink the shape of UN politics—perhaps the very shape of the UN itself—and step into a wider, brighter posthuman future.

Li handed the fiche back to Nguyen, who snapped it off with a flourish of her fine-boned hand.

“Why show me this?”

“I want you to know what Cohen is capable of.”

“It’s just talk,” Li said uncomfortably. “You know Cohen.”

“That’s my point. He’s using you, Li. The same way he’s used the Security Council. The same way he used Kolodny.”

Li’s stomach contracted into an icy knot. “What do you mean the way he used Kolodny?” she whispered.

“You think what happened on Metz was an accident? He used Kolodny to get what he wanted, and then he left her to die. Left you all to die. Didn’t you understand why the review board tried so hard to find a way to go easy on you? Because we knew it was Cohen’s fault all along—and he was the one person we couldn’t afford to blame publicly.”

“He told me it was a malfunction,” Li said, too stunned to understand what Nguyen was saying about her own court-martial, too stunned to hear anything beyond the bare fact of the accusation.

“Well, he lied. He found the intraface. Then he started going after the wetware specs. Specs he had no business looking at. Specs we couldn’t afford to let him look at. And in doing so, he endangered the security of the mission. We had to pull him off the shunt to stop him.”

Li put a hand to her forehead, felt the fever rising beneath her skin. “You’re sure?” she asked.

“I’m sure,” Nguyen said. “I cut the link myself.”

Zona Angel, Arc Section 12: 25.10.48.

“Hell,” Cohen said. “The beastly thing’s stuck.”

He was opening a long matte-black canister, capped at both ends with silver disks of stamped metal. He was having a hard time of it, having to use Chiara’s starlet-straight front teeth to pry the lid off.

“Don’t break her pretty teeth,” Li said, and Cohen laughed.

“I’d grow her new ones,” he said. “Wouldn’t be the first time I had to tidy up a little collateral damage.”

They sat in his high-ceilinged drawing room, the chandeliers casting rippled reflections in the hand-laid panes of the garden doors. Chiara looked as beautiful as ever, perched like a bright bird on the sofa; but Li thought there was a pinched quality to the lovely face, a puffy hint of tiredness around the hazel eyes. She nearly asked Cohen if he was feeling all right—before she reminded herself that it wasn’t Cohen she was looking at. That whether some pretty girl felt tired or sad or sick had not a thing to do with the enigma sitting across the table from her.

He got the canister open at last, with a little grunt of satisfaction, and slid out a long shiny tube of architect’s fiche, which he unfurled on the low table between them. When one corner of the sheet refused to lie flat he borrowed Li’s beer to weight it down.

Li squinted doubtfully at the blank surface. “We’re supposed to read the plans off that? You’ve got something against VR now?”

“Only that I’ve been running VR scenarios ever since you sent me Korchow’s files, without getting anywhere near figuring out how to crack this nut.”

Li had been doing the same thing herself and coming up just as dry. But telling Cohen that now seemed less than productive.

He tapped the fiche. It whirred softly and lit up, casting a cool blue glow on the belly of Cohen’s wineglass, the curving flank of Li’s beer bottle. A spidery web of lines spread across the sheet and coalesced into a long, shallow curve like the arc of a twenty-kilometer-long suspension bridge. Cohen tapped in another command, and the ghostly parallelograms of solar arrays formed above and around the arc. “There. Alba. A place you ought to recognize faster than I do.”

“I guess,” Li said doubtfully.

Cohen snorted. “Spoken like a true member of the virtual generation. It took humans two hundred millennia to figure out how to read, and they’re forgetting it in a matter of centuries. Anyway.” He tapped the sheet emphatically. “These are the plans the contractor worked from. They’re much more detailed than what Korchow gave you. And, more important, I pulled them from the contractor’s files without having to go into the UNSC databases and get flagged for querying classified material.”

“Oh, right,” Li said as the flat image began to make sense to her. “There’s the commissary. And the main labs.” She grinned. “I’ve spent enough time in the tanks there to recognize them.”

“Indeed,” Cohen said. “But we’re not cracking the main labs. Our target is down here: biotech R D.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever been in that level,” Li said.

“You wouldn’t have. It’s very hush-hush. All controlled tech work. Even the researchers live in separate quarters. It’s a quarantine zone, really; look how the bulkheads cut all the way across the station on the lab levels.”

He tapped a section of the fiche, and the zone enlarged, revealing a warren of windowless, dead-end corridors and security checkpoints highlighted in red. “You’ll have to get through two security checkpoints on your way in, here and here.”

Li pointed to a cluster of bulging growths on the station’s outer skin. “What’s that?”

“Algae farm. Part of the oxygen cycle. But look here.” He pointed her back into the station’s interior. “Now what’s the job in front of us? One, we get you onto the station and into the lab wing. Two, you access the lab’s central database and manually open a line to the ship. Three, I go through the lab AI’s files, fielding any interference he sees fit to throw at us, and figure out which comp the intraface files are on. Four, you go get them. Five—and this is the real kicker—we get out without being detected. Or, in a less optimistic but more realistic scenario, at least without being positively identified.”

Li nodded, a little bemused at hearing all this from Chiara’s pretty mouth, especially since she’d always suspected the girl was rather stupid.

She picked up her beer, and the corner of the fiche popped up. She hunted around for something to set on it, and came up with a moldering first edition of Doctor Faustus.

“Can we do it?” she asked.

“Not in any way you’re likely to be very enthusiastic about, I’m afraid.” Cohen tapped up the scale on the area of the plans that included the lab spoke. “Physically, I have no idea where the intraface is. All I do know is that it’s in this lab. Unfortunately, the lab files—personnel, inventory, everything—are deadwalled.”

“Like Metz.”

“Worse than Metz.” He looked up at her. “Alba has a weapons-grade semisentient.”

A chill worked its way down Li’s spine and settled in her stomach. She hated logging on to semisentients. Her fear was unreasonable—or so she had tried many times to convince herself. Sometimes she wondered if it was just blind prejudice; the one time she’d mentioned it to Cohen, he’d gotten so offended it had taken weeks to smooth his ruffled feelings.

But still.

There was something sharklike about the big semisentients: brute computing power, unfettered by hard programming or by the all-too-human qualms and foibles of fully sentient Emergents. Logging on to a semisentient was like swimming in dark bottomless water. Impossible to believe that the wordless menace that lurked behind their numbers could become Cohen. Terrifying to think that Cohen was only a few operations, a few algorithms removed from them—and that no one could say for certain where to draw the line between the two.

“So how do we get you in?” Li asked.

Cohen raised an eyebrow. “You assume a lot. I haven’t agreed to help you yet.”

“What do you want me to do, say pretty please?”

“You’re magnificent. Why is it that the bigger the favor you’re asking for, the more unpleasant you become?”

“You’ll get paid,” Li said. “Last time I checked, that makes it a job, not a favor.”

Cohen lit a cigarette without offering Li one and set the case and lighter on the table, carefully aligning them with the gold-leafed corner scroll.

“I think we’ll just let that one slide, shall we?” he said. “Unless you actually want to pick a fight with me?”

Li kept silent.

“Right then. The lab AI has disabled external communications. You can’t call in. You can’t get wireless access. All you can do is call out to approved numbers, and you can only do that by direct contact jack.” He smiled and tapped the ash off the end of his cigarette with a Byzantine flourish. “Which means, my dear, that you’re going under the knife.”

Li fingered her temple, where she could just feel the flat disk of the remote commsystem transmitter under her skin. She’d never gotten a direct-contact wire-to-wire jack. She’d never had to. Those were reserved for techs, like Kolodny, the people who did the real grunt work of cracking target systems—and who ran risks from which the automatic cutouts of Li’s remote interface largely protected her.

“You come up with that idea yourself?” she asked Cohen. “Or did you get help from Korchow?”

“I wouldn’t waste my time arguing about it if I were you,” Cohen said. He shot a dark stare at her over the top of his wineglass. “A jack is nothing compared to what they’re going to need to do to you to get the intraface working.”

Li bit her lip and shifted uncomfortably as her thoughts roved from semisentients to contact jacks to the several hundred meters of prototype hardware Sharifi had been carrying around in her head when she died. How had they slid into actually planning this mission without any discussion of whether or not Li was going to let Korchow test-run the intraface on her?

Had she actually made that decision herself? Or had Cohen coaxed her into it like a chess master nudging his player across the board toward the enemy? Was Nguyen right about him? And even if she wasn’t, even if his intentions were good, what did he really want from her?

“Has anyone actually tested this intraface thing?” she asked, settling on an easy, emotionally neutral question.

“I think there’s a monkey somewhere who has one.”

“Oh.” Li laughed nervously. “How’s he doing?”

“He’s crazy.”

“Cohen!”

“But there’s some indication that he was crazy to begin with. And besides, he’s a monkey.”

He pointed to the network of alleys and firewalls around the lab’s back entrance. “Right. Here’s my first brilliant idea. We do a cutout around this door that would get you past the security network.”

“Which means you have to be on-station to fiddle the main AI. Which means a second person for you to shunt through. Which means twice as much chance of getting caught.”

The more they worked through it, the shorter the list of realistic options got. Cracking Alba was like building a house of cards; each piece of the puzzle that fell into place exposed another piece, another problem, another collapse waiting to happen.

They went at it again, teasing out the problems and pitfalls until they had something that looked like a plan in front of them. At least as far as getting through the security checks and actually retrieving the data went.

But they were still left with the problem of how to get Li into Alba undetected.

“Hang on,” Li said finally, grabbing at the fleeting tail of what looked like it might just be a viable option. “Go back to that first section we looked at. Hydroponics.”

Cohen tapped back through half a dozen screens to reach it.

“What about these turrets?” She pointed to a row of ten-meter-high towers jutting through the thick pelt of guy wires, sensor lenses, and communications equipment that bristled from the outer skin of the station. “They look like vents.”

“Sure.” A look crossed Chiara’s smooth face that made Li think Cohen knew exactly where she was going with this. “Decontamination vents for the algae flats. So what?”

“So the last time I was on Alba, it was overcrowded.”

“It always is.”

“Well, what’s the daily CO₂load?”

Cohen paused for a moment, searching. “Sixty thousand cubic meters. And, to anticipate your next question, they’re shipping in about 1.8 thousand of compressed oxygen every day.”

“So where’s the excess CO₂going?”

“Out those turret vents, obviously.”

“Where it can get out, I can get in.”

“Not without someone inside to open the vents.”

“Korchow says he’s got an inside man.”

“Not possible,” Cohen said, scanning the plans again. “They’re using the outgoing CO₂to turn the turbines that power this whole section of the solar array. And even if you get past the turbines, you’re still talking about crawling down a twenty-meter shaft in hard vacuum. And the vent diameter’s too small to take a suit and gear.” He tapped decisively on the tight print that gave the duct’s dimensions. “You can’t get in that way.”

“I could if I stashed my gear outside and went down the duct with just a pressure suit.”

“Too risky. You’re talking about crawling down an active ventilation duct in hard vacuum with no air, no heat, just a pressure suit. If anything goes wrong—even if you just run into a minor delay—you’re dead.”

Li smiled. “And you won’t have anyone to eat oysters with.”

The look Cohen gave her couldn’t have been more naked if he’d stripped his skin away. She saw fear, guilt, anger flash across his face. Then she looked away; whatever else was there, she couldn’t deal with it. Not now, anyway. She pushed her beer away from her. It left a ring on the table, but for once Cohen didn’t seem to care about the punishment her bad habits were inflicting on his furniture.

“What if I say I won’t do it?” he asked.

“We go forward with another AI,” she said, pushing down the thought that it might not be true.

“You’d be insane to try it without me.”

“It’ll be harder without you,” Li admitted, but that was as far as she was willing to go.

“Have you thought about what happens if you get caught?”

Li looked at the dark night beyond the tall windows. If she got caught, it would be treason. And treason had been a firing-squad crime since the outbreak of the Syndicate Wars. That was assuming that the Corps would let the hero of Gilead come up on treason charges. A quick shot to the head and a cover story about a “regrettable training accident” seemed more likely. It was what Li herself would do faced with such a betrayal.

“You could at least tell me why,” Cohen said.

“What do you care? You want the intraface. I’m showing you how to get it.”

“I don’t want it that much. And I doubt you’re helping me get it out of the goodness of your heart. What did Nguyen suck you into?”

“Nguyen has nothing to do with it.”

“Really, Catherine.” Someone who knew Cohen less well would have seen only the bemused smile on his face, but Li could hear the angry bite in his voice. “If you’re going to lie, at least have the respect to lie about things I can’t check up on.”

Li kicked at the table leg and was pleased to see she’d put a dent in it. “You’re in no position to accuse me of lying. Or anything else.”

“I think,” Cohen said slowly, “the time has come to discuss Metz.” A dark flame flickered behind Chiara’s eyes, and there was a rehearsed quality to the words that made Li wonder how long Cohen had been working his nerve up for this conversation.

“I’ve said everything I have to say about it,” Li told him.

Chiara’s long-lashed eyes narrowed. “You shelved it, didn’t you?”

It wasn’t a question. And even if it had been, it wasn’t one Li planned to answer. After a moment he shrugged and tried another line of attack.

“All right, then. This run. It’s too dangerous. And you’re not a traitor. So why?”

“ Whyisn’t your business. I want a job done, and I’m paying for it. Paying with something I know you want. Let’s stick to that. Then at least I’ll know what you’re after. And when I can expect you to walk out and leave me twisting in the wind.”

“I thought we were done talking about Metz,” he said. “And anyone can make a mistake, Catherine.”

“Anyone didn’t kill Kolodny for a damn piece of circuitry.”

Cohen went so still he might have turned to wax. He stared at her, mouth slightly open, until the only movement in the room was the play of a breeze from the garden over Chiara’s brown curls. Cohen looked like the stuffing had gone out of him. A pretty doll abandoned in the corner by children grown too old to play with toys.

“That’s not you talking,” he said at last. “What else did Helen whisper in your ear about me?”

“None of your goddamn business.”

Cohen huffed out a little breath that Li might have thought was a laugh in different circumstances. Then he stared into the air above her head, as if he were trying to access a hard-to-find piece of data.

“Oh,” he said, when he found it. “So that’s it. What a nasty little piece of work she is, when you scratch the nice manners and the freshly pressed uniform.” He leaned forward across the table, pinning Li with a hard stare. “I’ve gotten over being surprised that you believe the things she says about me, but for what it’s worth the link cut out because of an internal malfunction. Or so I thought, anyway. Now I’m not so sure.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning I’m putting two and two together and finally getting four instead of three.”

Cohen paused until Li began to wonder if he was going to say anything more at all. “When did you start planning the Metz raid?” he asked at last. “About four months ago? Something like that?”

Li nodded.

“Well, I took on a new associate around then. A newly emerged sentient from the Toffoli Group. His main recommendation was that he’d done a contract job for Nguyen.”

Li stirred impatiently, not sure where this was leading.

“Anyway,” Cohen went on, “he had a beast of a feedback loop. Far worse than the mandatory program and running on a brute force, everything but the kitchen sink program that was impossible to work with. I was negotiating with Toffoli to put him on my global compliance program. They kept delaying, for reasons that seemed… well… less than reasonable. And the problems on Metz, I am almost certain, came from that feedback loop.”

“I don’t see what this has to do with anything, Cohen.”

“Don’t you? Nguyen holds the purse strings for all the TechComm R D. She has Toffoli’s research division in her pocket. The Toffoli AI was her spy all along. He’s how she was able to cut me off on Metz.”

Li stared. “What are you going to do about it?”

“I’ve already done it,” Cohen said. “He’s gone.”

“But what if he talks to someone—”

Cohen looked at her out of Chiara’s guileless eyes. “I said he was gone. I meant it.”

Li looked away. Cohen started to speak, then stopped. For a moment they both sat staring at the floor, at the books, at the pictures on the walls. At anything but each other.

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“I tell you that Nguyen was planning to cut me out of the shunt at Metz before we even shipped out for the mission, and you have nothing to say about it? What are you thinking?”

“That I don’t know who to believe, you or Nguyen.”

“You believe the one you trust,” Cohen said.

“And why the hell should I trust you?”

He shrugged. “There’s no should about it. You either do or you don’t. You have a lot to learn about life if you think people have to earn your trust.”

“You can’t talk your way around this one, Cohen.”

He shook his head and went on as if she hadn’t spoken. “You don’t trust people because they’re a sure bet or even a good risk. You trust them because the risk that you’ll lose them is worse than the risk that they’ll hurt you. That took me a few centuries to learn, Catherine, but I did learn it. And you’d better catch on faster than I did. The way things are going right now, I don’t think you have a century to spare.”

Li stood up without answering, walked across the room, and stepped into the garden. It was night in Zona Angel. A moist breeze played across her face, carrying the smell of earth and wet leaves. Frogs and a few night birds sang in the green branches. All the little live things Cohen loved so much. A bird warbled from some hidden refuge in the wall above her, and her oracle identified it as a whippoorwill. It’s beautiful, she thought—and wondered if she would still have thought so if she hadn’t known its name.

Cohen came up to stand behind her, so close that she could smell the fresh-scrubbed scent of Chiara’s skin.

“I can’t imagine living in the Ring,” Li said. “How can people live somewhere where every time you look up at the sky, you see your biggest mistake staring right back at you?”

“Some people would say that being forced to examine one’s mistakes is a good thing.”

“Not when it’s too late to fix them.”

“It’s not too late. And they are fixing it.”

Li threw an exasperated look at Cohen. “That’s a story for schoolkids. They’re still killing each other down there. Christ, my own mother went to Ireland to fight. She had chronic vitamin A deficiency from living underground. Now why the hell would people fight to keep a country they can’t even survive in?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, I do. Because they like fighting. Too much to give it up, even when there’s nothing left to fight for.”

She walked farther into the darkness, eyes on the snowbound planet above them. “I don’t want you involved in this,” she said. “It’s not worth it. I don’t even know what I’m doing it for.”

“I do,” Cohen said. “I know everything.”

She started to turn around, but he put a soft hand on her shoulder to stop her. “I know about the gene work. I’ve known for years, Catherine. Or Caitlyn. Or whatever your name is. I dug that skeleton up long, long before Korchow tumbled to it.”

Li stood among the living shadows of his garden and thought of all the questions he carefully hadn’t asked, all the times he could have said he knew and hadn’t.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she whispered.

“Should I have? I wasn’t going to tell anyone else, and I certainly didn’t care, so what difference if I knew or not?”

“No.” She felt angry suddenly, betrayed and cheated. “I know you. You were waiting to see if I’d tell you myself. You were keeping it up your sleeve, using it like a goddamn caliper. How far does she trust me? How far is she going to let me in this time? It’s all just one big test for you!”

“That’s pure paranoia.”

“Is it?”

“And even if you’re right, so what? I certainly didn’t get an answer that made me happy. Just the same old thing. Li against the world, and anyone who touches you is going to get his hand chewed off and spat back in his face.”

“You know it’s not that way.”

“What way is it then?”

Li shrugged, suddenly tired.

“Tell me,” Cohen said.

“What is there to tell if you already know everything?”

“You have a choice, Catherine. What’s the worst that could happen to you? Losing your commission?

Are you really ready to throw your life away for lousy pay and an even lousier pension?”

Li laughed. “I’ve been risking my life for that lousy pension every day of the last fifteen years. What’s so special about this time?”

“This time it’s treason. Listen, Catherine. I meant what I said the other day about offering you a job.”

“I’m not a hanger-on, Cohen. Joining your primate collection doesn’t appeal to me.”

“It wouldn’t be like that. Not with you.”

“Don’t tell me bedtime stories,” she said, and stared at him until his eyes finally fell away from hers.

“Have you thought about Metz?” he asked. “You said it yourself. Whoever wired Sharifi would have had to plan it for years, get hold of the genesets, splice them, tank them. What are the odds that Sharifi and the officer investigating her death would have been tanked in the same lab, from the same geneset? What are the odds that we end up like this, with you playing Sharifi’s part, me stepping into the field AI’s shoes?”

“No,” Li whispered.

“Why not? If Korchow uncovered your secret, why couldn’t Nguyen uncover it too?”

“She doesn’t know. No one knows.”

“How sure are you of that?”

“I’d bet my life on it.”

“That’s exactly what you’re about to do, isn’t it?”

The moon had set while they were talking, and there was a cold breeze blowing. Li looked into the black shadows under the trees and shivered.

“Let me help you,” Cohen said, pleading with her.

“No.”

“That’s it? Just no?”

“Just no.”

Cohen came around to look into her face. Even in the faint light, he looked spent and defeated, a gambler who had put the one thing he couldn’t afford to lose on the table and watched the house take every hand. “If it’s about money—”

“It’s not about money. It’s about my life. About what I’ve earned. And what they want to take away from me. For nothing. Because of what some piece of paper says about me.”

“And you’d throw away your life for that?”

Li saw the ghost of a tremor around his mouth as he spoke, a suspicious shimmer in the hazel eyes. No, she told herself, squashing her reflexive response. Chiara’s mouth. Chiara’s eyes. Whatever she thought she saw in those eyes was mere physiological sleight of hand. A parlor trick generated by a code-driven superstructure and shot through a state-of-the-art biointerface. It didn’t mean anything. You might as well ask what rain meant.

She stepped back into the bright lamplight and began pulling her coat on. “What you’re offering… I appreciate it. But I don’t want it. Just let me know if you’ll do the job, okay?”

She had her hand on the door before he answered.

“You know I will.” He stood in the garden where she had left him, and all she could see when she looked back was the slow curve of a girl’s hip in refracted moonlight. “You knew I’d do it before you even asked.”

Li wavered, caught on the threshold. You could walk back into that room, she thought, and her heart flew up in her chest like a bird breaking cover in front of the gunsights. One word, one touch. You could change everything.

And then what?

Before she could decide whether to go or stay, Cohen spoke again. The voice from the shadows was quiet, measured, impersonal: a silicon voice for a circuitry lover.

“Just close the door on your way out,” he said.

She started to speak, but a cold, hard knot rose up her throat and choked the words off. She backed into the hall and pulled the door shut behind her.

Anaconda-Helena Shuttle: 26.10.48.

Li made the shuttle gate an hour early, but ten minutes before the flight was supposed to leave she was still waiting for Station Security to search the throng of passengers in front of her.

The chaos at the gate echoed the chaos on the planet’s surface. The union had wildcatted, locked down the mine even before all the rescuers were out. Within a day the strikers had set up an armed perimeter and the first militia units had arrived to reinforce AMC’s cadre of Pinkertons. Now, on the satellite images that dominated the local spins, the whole tailings-littered plain of the AMC coalfields had become a militarized no-man’s-land between two dug-in armies.

On-station, AMC security was taking no chances. All flights to Shantytown and the coalfield were canceled. And until AMC loosened its de facto embargo, the only way in or out of Shantytown was the grueling dangerous jeep road over the mountains from Helena—a road that would become completely impassable as soon as winter’s dust storms set in.

Legally AMC couldn’t keep anyone on-station against their will: planetary access was a holdover civil right from the Migration-era days of indentured labor on corporate orbital stations. Still, rights or no rights, AMC controlled the streets, the air, the station-to-surface shuttles. And Li had seen the guards turn back eight Helena-bound passengers in the space of fifteen minutes.

She doubted anyone would be complaining to her office. And she was dead certain she couldn’t get her superiors to do anything about it if someone did complain. Daahl had been right. It was war, a war in which the UN would side with whichever combatant could get the Bose-Einstein production lines moving soonest. And unless the union pulled a trump card out of its sleeve, AMC looked like the likeliest candidate.

When Li finally stepped onto the shuttle twenty minutes after its scheduled departure time, she realized she’d never been in danger of missing it. A river of passengers filled the aisles and overwhelmed the crew, bickering over duplicate seating assignments and cramming luggage into every inch of open space. She checked her seat number, uttered a fervent prayer of thanks when she finally reached her row and found it empty, and settled down to wait.

“Hey, boss,” a familiar voice said just as she was finally drifting into an uneasy doze. She looked up to find McCuen grinning down at her.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

“Friends in Helena. It’s my day off, remember?”

“Oh.” She did remember now. “Yeah.”

“You?”

“Just going down for the day.” She hoped.

“Want to join us?” he asked, folding his long frame into the seat next to her. “We can show you around.”

“I have an appointment,” she said evasively, hoping she could get rid of McCuen before Korchow’s man showed up. This was one wrinkle she didn’t need.

“Oh, by the way,” McCuen said. “I figured out where that storage chit in Sharifi’s journal came from.”

Sharifi and the investigation had been so far from Li’s mind for the last thirty-six hours that it took her a moment to remember what McCuen was talking about. “Oh?” she asked. “Where?”

“Remember how all her researchers got so conveniently shipped out on that survey mission? Well, one of them didn’t. He shipped out the day after Sharifi died. On the Medusa, bound for Freetown. And it looks like he checked a package through for her.”

“Let me guess when the Medusa makes Freetown.”

McCuen nodded. “Thirteen days, sixteen hours, and fourteen minutes from now. Or, to answer your real question, about twenty minutes after Gould’s ship is supposed to drop into orbit.”

Li frowned, thinking. “Remember what Sharifi wrote on that page, McCuen? Next to Gould’s address? Life insurance. I looked at it and thought it had to be some kind of protective measure, something to save her life. But what if it wasn’t like that at all? What if it was really like an actual life insurance policy, something that would go into effect only if she died?”

“Well, that’s when it did go into effect, right? I mean the student shipped out the day after Sharifi died. And, whatever she may have suspected, Gould didn’t actually leave for Freetown until your call gave her solid confirmation that Sharifi was dead.”

If McCuen was right, then Nguyen had thirteen days to go fishing for Korchow with Li as bait. And Li had thirteen days to get that chop-shop receipt back from Korchow—while he still needed her enough to keep his promise. Because once Gould and the mysterious package reached Freetown all bets were off.

She looked up at McCuen and found him frowning at her.

“What?” she said.

“Call logs.” He looked worried, hesitant. “Remember you told me to check for calls to Freetown?”

How the hell had she forgotten about that?

“Well, someone called a Freetown-based Consortium front company the night before Sharifi died. From Haas’s private terminal. With Haas’s password.”

A chill spread through the pit of Li’s stomach at the thought that Nguyen had been right all along, that ALEF and the Consortium lay at the bottom of Sharifi’s betrayal, and not the Syndicates.

McCuen’s eyes flicked to the aisle. Li followed his gaze and saw Bella standing a few rows up, waiting for a seat. Bella glanced at her and immediately glanced away, her lips set in a pale furious line. She passed by without speaking and found a seat four or five rows back from them.

“Oops,” McCuen said, and the look he shot at Li was full of questions she didn’t want to answer.

She tapped into the in-flight computer and watched the inevitable safety disclaimers scroll up her seat-back screen. “If you feel unable to sit in an exit row,” she told McCuen brightly, “please ask the crew for a change of seating assignment.”

“I have to piss,” Li said, as they stepped out of the boarding gate. Weak, but the ladies’ room was the one place in the airport she could think of that McCuen couldn’t follow her.

“Sure you don’t want to hit the town with us?” he asked, hovering.

“No. I need to check up on a few things. Talk to that nun again, maybe. You go on.”

They were cleaning the bathroom when she stepped in, two skinny, undergrown girls swabbing listlessly at the floor with mops so filthy that Li figured the net exchange of disinfectant and bacteria had reversed itself years ago. As she skirted the wet floor the flash of a gemstone at the older girl’s neck caught her eye.

It was a necklace. A stupid, tacky little charm that you could buy anywhere. But that wasn’t synthetic diamond glittering at the end of the chain. It was condensate. And she’d seen something like it before. Somewhere or someplace that she ought to remember if her hacked and kinked and decohering memory wasn’t playing tricks on her.

“Pretty,” she said, pointing. “Where’d you get it?”

The girl giggled and put a protective, embarrassed hand to her throat. “My boyfriend?” she half-said half-asked, giggling again.

“What’s it made of?”

“Crystal? It’s entangled?” Another giggle. “With his?”

“Oh. Right,” Li said. “It’s pretty,” she added, since some comment along those lines was obviously required at this point. After all, someone must think the gimmicky little things looked good; she’d been seeing them everywhere lately.

Then her oracle shook loose the right file, and she remembered who she’d last seen one on.

Gillian Gould.

Li turned back to stare at the pendant. The girl flinched and stepped backward under the intensity of her gaze. “Are you all right?” she asked, looking frightened.

“Yeah,” Li said. “Yeah, I’m fine. Sorry.”

She stepped into a stall and squatted to relieve herself, trying not to touch anything she didn’t have to. When she opened the door and stepped out again she ran head-on into Bella.

“Christ!” she gasped, heart pounding. “You scared me. Why the hell didn’t you say something?”

Bella didn’t answer. The cleaning girls had vanished, though the smell of standing water lingered.

“What are you doing here, Bella?”

The construct turned without acknowledging the question and walked toward the door. “Follow me,” she said, the words barely a murmur. “Not close. They’ll be watching.”

Li trailed her down the main axis of the spaceport, through the baggage claim, out past the taxi lines, into the yawning cement-smelling darkness of the underground parking. She must have let her guard down, because though she knew that she was gradually losing satellite access she didn’t see the trap until it had already closed on her.

“How ya doing?” said a voice high overhead, just as she heard the soft click of a safety being eased back.

She was crossing a ramp with no cover in sight—and even if there had been cover it was far, far too late to take advantage of it. She looked up and saw McCuen’s friend Louie sitting one level above her, legs swinging lazily, sighting down the snub-nosed barrel of a rebuilt Sten.

“Too bad about those Yankees,” Louie said.

“It’s not over yet. McCuen know what you’re up to down here?”

Louie grinned. “Let’s just say Brian doesn’t know me as well as he thinks he does.”

A flick of his eyes drew Li’s own gaze to the shadows below the ramp, and she found herself staring down the black barrel of a Colt Peacemaker, close enough to see just how long it had been since the gun had had a proper cleaning.

“Take it easy,” Ramirez said from the driver’s end of the Colt. “Both of you.”

Li glanced toward Bella and saw her standing halfway down the garage’s central aisle, looking poleaxed.

“Let Bella go, Ramirez. She’s got nothing to do with this.”

“Sorry,” he said. “Not an option.” He gestured to Bella. “Go on. Over by Li. Now!”

Bella scurried to Li’s side and stood there shivering while Ramirez frisked both of them with depressing thoroughness.

“I’d better get that back,” Li said when he took the Beretta, but it was pure bravado and they both knew it. She’d seen enough of Ramirez underground to know he wouldn’t hesitate or lose his nerve. And even if he did, Louie was up on the exit ramp training the Sten on them.

“I hate to burst your bubble,” Li told Ramirez, “but jail time for kidnapping isn’t going to look good on your college transcripts.”

“I got my master’s degree two years ago,” Ramirez said. “And they have to catch me before they can put me in jail, don’t they? Turn around and put your hands behind your back.”

Li did it, knowing it was a bad idea but unable to think of an alternative. Ramirez pulled a pair of virusteel cuffs out of his pocket and snapped them around her wrists, locking her arms behind her. As the cuffs snapped shut Li felt a slight sting at the nape of her neck and realized Ramirez had slapped a derm on her.

“Forgive me,” she heard him say through the rising haze of a sedative that must have been specially designed to outsmart her internals, “but better safe than sorry. You see that van over there? The white one? The back’s open. Get in and shut the door behind you.”

Li walked toward the van as slowly as she could, trying to catch Bella’s eye. Who’s following us? she wanted to ask. Where are they? Is help coming if we can wait it out a little longer?

But no one came. No one was intended to come. And as Li stepped into the van she glanced up toward the garage ceiling and saw why: the van had been parked a little crooked in its space, tail end facing out into the aisle, just where the garage’s security cameras could catch prime-time quality spinfeed of the kidnapping.

“Smile for the cameras,” Louie said, and the last thing she remembered before she passed out was his wide-open Irish laugh.

The next few hours were a dope-smeared blur. Sprinting across a rain-swept landing pad, half-held half-dragged by Ramirez. A brief struggle with Louie during which she refused, childishly, to let him scan her palm implant and he pulled a knife and told her he’d damn well cut it off her if she didn’t cooperate. A thwonking, shuddering hopper flight.

When she woke they were still in the air and someone had strapped an oxygen mask over her face. She opened her eyes to a bird’s-eye view of the granite teeth of the Johannesburg Massif, the vast rolling red ocean of the algae steppes. She started, feeling as if she were falling forward into the abyss, then blinked and twisted her head around and made sense of her surroundings.

She was on the deck of an old cropduster-rigged Sikorsky, an Earth-built antique that must have been broken down to its gearboxes and shipped out in the airless cargo hold of some long-abandoned generation ship. Like most of Compson’s presettlement tech, the Sikorsky had been rerigged to run on fossil fuel—and Li guessed from the grumbling shudder beneath her that it had been flying seeder runs for the terraforming authority ever since then.

Li had been tucked between the pilot’s and copilot’s seats and was now staring straight through the smooth Plexiglas bubble of the windshield. When she looked up she saw Louie at the pilot’s controls and Ramirez on her other side, staring at a handheld navcomp and frowning.

“Where are we?” she rasped, and Ramirez looked down, frowning.

“I thought that derm was supposed to last longer,” he said.

Louie glanced over and shrugged. “Tough motherfucker, isn’t she?”

“I don’t have another one, though. And she wasn’t supposed to wake up until we got there.”

“So what? She’d know the place in her sleep anyway.” He laughed a laugh that didn’t sound quite as friendly to Li as it once had. “They all do.”

Ramirez scowled over her head at Louie, and she found herself wondering just who was in charge of this kidnapping.

They landed twenty minutes later, setting down on a dusty stretch of hardpan that seemed implausibly level until Li realized it was an old shuttle runway.

“We’re there,” Ramirez said unnecessarily. “We’re going to get out and walk to the buildings, okay? Just cooperate and it’s all going to be fine.”

She could walk under her own steam now, and as she stumbled along trying to clear her hazed vision she heard Bella’s thin-soled shoes whispering across the ground just beside her. She knew this place, though she couldn’t yet put a name to it. She’d been here, not once but many, many times. She knew that the rutted jeep track beyond the landing strip would take her through the foothills to Shantytown if she had the strength to walk for a few hours in the unprocessed air of the foothills. She knew that the box canyon hidden behind that ridge harbored a steep-walled wash that she and her father had once used for target practice.

But she didn’t quite understand where they were until she squinted at the long-empty airplane hangar looming over the lab building and read the words that sent an atavistic fight-or-flight reaction flooding through every cell of her body:

XENOGEN MINING TECHNOLOGIES RESEARCH DIVISION

XenoGen Research Division: 26.10.48.

The sprawling lab complex had stood empty for decades, and the rats, roaches, and kudzu vine had had their way with it. As their captors steered them into the back corridors they stumbled over abandoned equipment and office supplies, ducked under torn-out wiring, waded through snowdrifts of shredded insulation tile.

The air was musty with rat dung and mildew. But under those smells—the smells humans and their pests had brought—Li could still catch a sharp desert scent that tugged at her childhood memories. It was a smell you only caught high in the foothills, under the dark wall of the mountains. The planet’s own smell. Compson’s World was taking back the birthlabs. Just as it would take back the whole planet if the thread of the UN’s far-flung trade lines ever snapped and the atmospheric processors and seeding operations ever shut down.

They turned a corner just like every other corner, and Ramirez stopped so abruptly that Li ran into him. “In there,” he said, and pushed her into a small windowless room.

As the door clanged shut, Li realized he had locked her into one of the lab’s old holding cells. It was a box. A box with soundproofed walls, a metal-sheathed door, with no furniture or windows or running water. A box built for a person. She heard footsteps echo beyond the door and the clang of another door slamming shut. Then silence.

A scrap of memory floated into her mind: a ghost story about a group of kids who had come up to the labs and locked one of their friends into a holding cell as a prank. They had been called back down to Shantytown in some childishly implausible plot twist. When they returned the next morning, they couldn’t find the cell their friend was in. They ran up and down the windowless corridors, trying every rusty lock, throwing open the food slots of a thousand dark bolt-holes. The boy was dead when they finally found him. Killed, according to the internal logic of the tale, by the ghost of some bloodily murdered construct.

Li shivered. How many psych-norm-deviant constructs had waited out cold nights and lightless days in this cell? How many had died in it? And how many of the people who walked free on the streets of Shantytown were the children of those dead, or of the lab guards and lab technicians and paper pushers who had helped kill them? The children remembered, even if no one else did; they told ghost stories about the very skeletons their parents couldn’t bury deep enough.

The door scraped open on protesting hinges. A line of light seeped into the cell, unbearable after the long darkness. Ramirez appeared in the doorway, bright and terrible as Gabriel.

Li struggled into a sitting position, back against the wall, head spinning. Her internals told her to lie back down. She ignored them.

He put a finger to his lips. Sshhhhh.

She stood, shaking, shocked and ashamed that simply sitting alone in the dark for a few hours had so undone her. She knew she should be wondering where Ramirez meant to take her, thinking about how to get control of the situation. But all she could really think about was getting out of this ghost-ridden hole. That and trying not to fall down.

Follow, Ramirez signaled.

She followed.

Another man walked beside Ramirez, one whose name she didn’t know and whom she had never seen before. Not Louie. After a few turnings, Ramirez disappeared and Li and the nameless hijacker continued on without him. Someone else joined them as they slipped down the dark corridor, but when Li tried to look back the man just grunted and pushed her forward.

They moved deeper into the complex, back into the windowless labs under the shadow of the cliff face. They had traveled almost a kilometer when the hijacker opened an unmarked door and Li felt a waft of cold underground air hit her face. He stood aside and waved her through. As she passed she heard the gentle snick of a bullet being chambered.

That’s it then, said a small voice in the pit of her stomach. She saw a blank wall in her mind’s eye, heard a single shot.

“Down,” the hijacker said and pushed her down a steep flight of stairs into darkness.

Thirty narrow steps of steel-reinforced concrete. A turn. A passage. Then forty more steps, these rough and uneven underfoot. Then a long, twisting passage that dipped and jigged but nonetheless kept trending unmistakably downward.

The person behind Li stumbled and cried out. Bella.

As they descended, the walls and floor began to run with water. The rock came alive around them, cracking and moaning like a house built on quicksand. Somehow, unbelievably, they were in the mine. Li tried to recall the location of the birthlabs. No drifts, no shafts, no passages ran within a kilometer of the complex. She was sure of that. Still, they were in a mineworks. It just wasn’t one that showed up on the company maps. And if her internals were to be trusted, someone was stockpiling live-cut condensate here.

They hit a junction. Their captor lifted his lantern, and its light threw watery reflections on pooled runoff, picked out the stubbed-off ends of mined-out crystal deposits. It took him two turns around the walls to find what he was looking for: faint marks scratched into the rock at face level. Before the lantern moved on, Li saw a crescent moon, a pyramid, an eight-legged beast.

“This way,” he said, and pushed them toward the left-hand turning.

Li had grown so used to the dark by the time they surfaced that the first glimpse of daylight was painful. They clattered up a flight of gridplate stairs, passed down a long hallway full of uninsulated wiring, and reached a tall steel door bolted from the inside.

Bella leaned against the wall, panting and shivering. The hijacker reached into his pack and handed them each a rolled-up piece of cloth. “Put these on.”

Li unfolded the cloth and saw that it was an Interfaither’s chador. She wrapped the long bolt of green cloth around her, pulling it over her head and face, and helped Bella do the same. Then they stepped into the hazy sunlight of a late-fall afternoon in Shantytown.

For the next half hour, they hurried through a bewildering series of alleys and courtyards, spiraling deep into the heart of the old quarter. Just when Li had finally accepted that she was lost beyond any possibility of reorienting herself, they turned aside and stepped through an unmarked door into a low dark passage.

The hallway smelled of rust and boiled vegetein, and it was so dark that Li heard rather than saw Bella behind her. The guard gestured toward a closed airlock at the far end of the passage, and Li put her hand to the touchplate. The door irised open. She stepped through, blinking in the dusty, sun-strafed air of the dome beyond—and saw just who she should have expected to see.

Daahl.

As her eyes adjusted to the bright hazy air under the dome, she realized that Cartwright stood in the half-open airlock behind him—an airlock that could only lead to the little office where Daahl and Ramirez had talked to her less than a week ago. Cartwright shifted restlessly as she walked in, craning his head like a dog listening for distant footfalls. She’d never seen him outside the mine, she realized; he carried a blind man’s stick up here in the daylight world and his eyes were vague, milky, moonblind.

“What the hell is going on?” she asked as Bella stepped through into the dome behind her.

Daahl bent over the comm terminal on the table. “Arkady?” he said when the connection went through. “Tell him we’re ready.”

For a moment nothing happened. Daahl and Cartwright just sat staring across the table, waiting. It took Li a moment to realize they were watching Bella, not her.

Bella gave a little shiver as the shunt came on-line, and then she was gone.

“Excellent,” Korchow said, standing up. “Excellent. And the kidnapping was caught on tape? You made it look convincing?”

“The ransom note’s on its way to AMC station right now. We should have an answer in a few hours.” Daahl grinned. “Though of course the negotiations could be lengthy.”

“Right,” Korchow said. “Then I believe our business with each other is concluded.”

“Not quite,” Daahl said.

A tall figure appeared in the airlock behind them, its face shadowed by the sunbeams raking down through the streaky geodesic panels. Ramirez.

But he looked sleeker, glossier, finer. He had never moved with that fey, walking-on-eggshells grace. His eyes had never burned with the cold fire that now shone behind them.

He bent over her, touched a fleck of dried blood at the corner of her mouth. “Catherine,” he said. “Are you all right? If I’d suspected things would get that exciting, I’d have made them find another way to get you here.”

“Cohen,” she whispered, not knowing how to begin to ask him what was happening.

Ramirez was so much taller than Li that she had to throw her head back to meet his eyes. It bothered her. She was used to looking Cohen in the eye, used to being able to dominate him physically—a domination that mattered to her, she now saw, even if it was meaningless to him.

“He wasn’t to be involved,” Korchow said, speaking to Daahl and Cartwright.

Daahl shrugged. “ALEF approached us.”

“ALEF!” Korchow spat the word out as if it were a curse.

“God works through unlikely hands,” Cartwright said.

“Oh for pity’s sake,” Korchow snapped. “What did the AIs promise you?”

“A planetary network,” Daahl answered. “Under union control.”

“Then they’re lying. They can’t possibly deliver that.”

“We already have,” Cohen said. “The beginnings of one, anyway. What do you think I’m shunting through?”

“I brought you in to do a job,” Korchow told Cohen. “This isn’t it.”

Cohen made an impatient movement, a neat flick of one hand that was so characteristic of him it took Li’s breath away. “I’ll do your little job, Korchow. But not routing through your network. I’ve spent three centuries making sure no one had that kind of power over me. I’m not about to hand it to you.”

“So why go to them?” Korchow jerked Bella’s head toward Daahl and Cartwright. “And don’t tell me it’s selfless interest in the cause. Or are they your pet terrorist group of the week?”

Cohen flexed Ramirez’s big hands until Li heard the knuckles crack. “They had what I needed,” he said. “An on-site Emergent with Bose-Einstein capacity.”

Korchow started.

“Yes.” Cohen smiled. “The field AI.”

“How—”

“I don’t know. But Cartwright says he can speak to whoever or whatever is using the field AI. That he can control it.”

“And you’d trust yourself to that?”

“Sooner than I’d trust myself to you.”

“Why?” Korchow asked, turning to Daahl. “Why this? Why him?”

Daahl shrugged. “It’s not that complicated, Korchow. We don’t like the idea of running from the UN straight into the arms of the Syndicates. We want to run Compson’s World for the natives, for the miners. And to get that we need a planetary net that we control. We need access to streamspace, to Freetown and FreeNet, without going through the UN relays, without being at the mercy of the Security Council and the multiplanetaries. And we need a Bose-Einstein relay intact, on our net. That’s what ALEF’s giving us.”

“Come on, Korchow,” Cohen said. “We’re going to pull off a good deed together. A blow for freedom and planetary self-determination. After all, you need to put something on the white side of the ledger book every lifetime or so.”

“So the deal’s off?” Korchow asked, white with fury.

“Not at all,” Cohen answered, smiling glossily. “It’s just that the price has gone up.”

Barnard’s Star Field Array: 28.10.48.

They jumped into Alba in a KnowlesSyndicate Starling, a sleek swallow-winged craft whose cabin had been stripped to its ceramic compound struts and refitted with a tangled rat’s nest of fractal absorption gauges, x/r monitors, and assorted black boxes whose functions Li could only guess at.

There were three of them: Li, Arkady, Cohen. Or part of Cohen, anyway. Arkady piloted the ship—though Li never figured out if he was the same Arkady she’d talked to at the meet in Shantytown or just another number in the same series. She also never found out how he got them there. She guessed he’d piggybacked through Alba’s high-traffic Bose-Einstein relay on a legitimate cargo flight. However he’d done it, the Syndicates weren’t about to let Li in on their back door into the system; Arkady knocked her out before they took off from Compson’s World and kept her under until the Starling dropped into Alba’s lee side thirty-eight hours later.

She woke up with a hammering headache that had less to do with the sedatives than with her rising apprehension about the run ahead of them, and listened halfheartedly as Arkady and Cohen talked through the bones of the run again. Her new wire jack itched atrociously, a nagging reminder of the irritation of the last few days in the union safe house. She reminded herself not to scratch it, scratched anyway, cursed Korchow, and brooded about staph infections.

Korchow and Cohen had infested the safe house like locusts, shunting haphazardly through Bella, Arkady, Ramirez until even Li hadn’t known who the hell she was talking to. Not that it would have made much difference; Cohen had been harder to talk to than Korchow recently. Was he just angry, or was this new distance more than anger, an obscure symptom of some shift in the tidal flow of the AI’s associated networks?

They had taken Cohen off-line for the run—dumped his systems into the Starling so that there would be no interstellar communications to give them away while they drifted off the station’s dark side. No shipboard comp could even come close to accommodating Cohen’s vast web of associated intelligences and enslaved subsystems, of course. Li doubted there was a self-contained net that big anywhere in UN space, outside of a few zealously defended corporate and military sites. So Cohen had dumped systems, left them behind, wherever “behind” was, and downloaded only what he thought was needed.

He had sworn it wouldn’t be a repeat of Metz, that when they powered down the Starling for the run and gave him control of the ship comp he would be there, willing and able to pull her out safely. But now that they were committed, all Li knew for certain was that Cohen, her Cohen, wasn’t there. He had stranded her in hostile space with no one to cover her back but a Syndicate agent and a stranger who didn’t seem to remember any of the promises the Cohen who claimed to be her friend had made her.

“Let’s go over it again,” said the disembodied ship’s comp voice that she still couldn’t think of as his. Li and Arkady settled at the narrow crew’s table, and they ran through the whole intricately choreographed plan again.

It was getting Li on-station that had been the real problem. And though it had taken days to work out the details, the solution was still the same blindingly simple one Li had spotted in the station schematics: the ventilation system.

Like most spacer-designed technologies, Alba’s O/CO₂cycle was obsessively efficient. It built on existing systems, recycling every available piece of material and energy, rolling many problems and purposes into one solution. It pushed breathable air down the long curve of the station’s inhabited zones, insulated the station’s pressurized inner bladder, sucked excess CO₂out into space, and powered the motors that turned the long dragonfly wings of the solar arrays. Air, warmth, and life-giving power all from one system. And the fuel that drove the system was always there, always free: space itself.

The pressure differential between the void outside and the full atmosphere of breathable air inside pulled freshly oxygenated air through the station, into the remote cold-storage bladders whose robot retrieval systems used no oxygen and created no CO₂load. When the CO₂-loaded air reached the end of its journey inside the life-support bladder, it flowed through vents into the soft vacuum of the station’s outer bladder, a second skin that provided insulation and radiation shielding, that protected the inner bladder’s life-support zones from the hard vac beyond the viewports.

The returning air served three functions in the outer bladder. First, it put a baffled, compartmentalized partial vacuum around the life-support bladder—a safety feature so universal in UN-designed stations that the station-killing blowouts of the colonial era were nearly forgotten, marked only by the sad little streams of wreckage that orbited so many periphery planets. Second, the rush of stale air venting the external turrets drove the big turbines that powered the solar arrays. Third, the turret vents served as a last line of defense against the parasitic plague that haunted all closed systems, orbital stations, and settlement biospheres alike: mold.

Mold thrived in the recycled, condensation-rich air of orbital stations, and an unchecked infestation could make a station uninhabitable in a matter of months. Some epidemics—and every station with any history remembered one or two of them—were so resistant that the only cure was to evacuate the station, void the atmosphere, and rebuild the O/CO₂cycle with fresh flora. Alba’s turret vents had been designed with that in mind. Each turret contained both an outer and an inner vent. The outer vents opened into the unused space off the station’s outer rim. The inner vents opened into the huge oxygen-producing algae flats. Faced with an incurable mold infestation, the station engineers could open both inner and outer vents and blow algae, air, condensation, and mold out into open space.

What Li’s soldier’s eye had seen was that, stripped down to its bones, the emergency venting system was an airlock. The inner vent separated life-support zones from the soft vacuum of the outer bladder; the outer vent staved off the void outside. In normal operations the outer vents opened only during the turbine’s power cycles. The inner vents never opened, except in the worst emergency. However, if they could open an inner vent, briefly, while the outer vent was closed, all that would show up on the station monitors was a barely noticeable local pressure drop as a few cubic meters of air flowed into the unsealed turret. And someone who had managed to slip through the turbine arms and into the duct at the end of the last power cycle could simply push the miter vent open and breach the station’s inner bladder.

If that someone was small enough to fit through the vent. If she was fast enough to climb the turret in the few minutes between venting cycles. If she was strong enough to push the inner vent open against a full g of rotational gravity and hoist herself through it.

But Li was all those things.

It was a risky way in. If it worked, though, it would put Li on-station undetected, and already through the manned security checks that separated the top-security labs from the station’s unrestricted zones.

Korchow’s inside man would open the inner seal for her. This was Li’s least favorite part of the plan. It introduced a dangerously large risk of human error. It left her life hanging on the actions of someone she had never met and had no reason to trust. Worse, she had to be down the duct when the seal opened, ready to drop through instantly. And to get there, she would have to shinny twenty meters against a full rotational g, up a chute so narrow that even her small shoulders would just pass through it. If the door failed to open, if anything went wrong, if the inside man failed her, there would be no way out except through the spinning turbines.

Li had laughed when she saw the schematics and told Cohen it was a good thing she’d started smoking young. She wasn’t laughing now.

“Let’s go over the plan again,” Cohen said, when they finished the run-through.

Li rolled her eyes. They’d gone over it four times already—which was three more than she wanted to. “Cohen,” she said, “don’t waste my fucking time, okay?”

Arkady turned to look at her, surprised. Cohen had no body on board the little Starling, but his disapproval came through the comp boards loud and clear as a bad day.

“I need food,” Li said into the suddenly silent cabin, and pushed off toward the galley.

The galley racks yielded nothing but a small sack of algae-colored imitation kasha and a thoroughly squashed packet of reconstituted vegetables. The kasha tasted like mold, and the vegetables looked worse, but they were food. Li fought the urge to skip dinner, telling herself she had a long cold night ahead of her. She shook the bags to jump-start the internal heating elements, dumped the now-lukewarm contents into a battered suckbag, and drifted back toward the foredeck.

“We have to work through your timing again,” Cohen said when she swam back into the main cabin.

“Later,” she said. “I need to put my kit together. I just came up to tell you I’m going down to the cargo deck.”

“That can wait.”

“No it can’t.” It was impossible to stare down someone without a body, but she shot her best glare at the main instrument panel. “You know your job, and I know mine. I need to get the arms and gear squared away more than I need to do another run-through. We’ll do that after. If I have time.”

“Make time,” Cohen said.

If they hadn’t been in zero g, Li would have kicked something.

Her mood improved briefly when she inventoried the weapons. Korchow had sent everything she had asked for. Even her most extravagant demands had been satisfied without murmur.

Two long sleek boxes held RPK midrange tactical precision non-structure-piercing pulse rifles, each fitted with custom-milled optical sights and refillable wipe baffle system silencers. Another blockier box, guarded with a double layer of vacuum seal, cradled the self-sealing pressure suit that Li would wear to crawl through the CO₂vents—and whose interactive camouflage overskin would hide her face if things went wrong and someone spotted her. A big crate held the rest of her gear and tackle: carabiners, grappling hooks, and rope for the climb outside the station; a handheld number cruncher; a lockpick’s kit for getting into the lab itself; a hacked passkey—provided by Korchow—that he claimed would get her out of the high-security lab and into the public-sector airlock where Arkady would pick her up when she had retrieved the target code.

It took an hour and forty minutes to unpack the lot and get it serviceable. The best hour and forty minutes of the last few weeks. If this was what the supply side of being private muscle was like, Li thought, she could get used to it.

When she had coiled her rope, ordered her climbing tackle, and stripped, oiled, and reassembled the pulse rifles, she stood back and surveyed the whole kit critically. Then she pulled herself forward to her cabin to retrieve the small, carefully wrapped package that she had hidden there just as a precaution.

She swam back to the cargo hold, unwrapped the Beretta, field-cleaned it, and loaded it, grunting with satisfaction at the clean, familiar snap of the ammo clip engaging the firing mechanism. She weighed the gun in her hand and glanced back toward the foredeck. She thought about the bulge it would make in her jumpsuit, the likelihood that Arkady would notice and take it away from her. She thought about just how crazy it would be to get into a solid-ammo fight on the little stripped-down Starling.

She sighed and tucked the Beretta into the pocket holster of the pressure suit. The pocket had been designed for bigger, more standard weapons; a Viper, maybe, or a snub-nosed pulse pistol. The Beretta slid in easily and barely made a bulge in the suit after she’d folded it.

“Just in case,” she whispered, and went back forward.

“I need to check ammo,” she told Arkady when she reached the foredeck. Hard as she tried, she couldn’t help letting her eyes flick to the fully charged pulse pistol at his belt.

“You checked it back on-planet.”

“And I need to check it again. Just because I saw it on the loading dock doesn’t mean it actually got on board.”

Arkady frowned. “You can do a visual check, that’s all.”

“Not good enough.”

“It has to be. Cohen checked it manually when we loaded it. Ask him.”

Right now, Li thought, Cohen was the last person she wanted to ask anything.

“It’s all there,” Cohen volunteered. “There’s no reason to check it again.”

“Gee, thanks for the help.” She shot a nasty glance at the comp board.

“Well, go look in the airlock.”

Li glanced at the instrument board again, then turned and left without meeting Arkady’s eyes.

She made her way to the airlock and looked out the viruflex check-port.

She saw the sun. The white, unbearably bright sun of space, seen through no atmosphere. She ducked her head away from the port, blinking burning tears out of her eyes.

“Jesus wept!”

“It was Korchow’s idea,” Arkady said. As if he were apologizing, for Christ’s sake.

She looked again, and understood what she was seeing through the check-port. The airlock was open to the void, completely unpressurized. Hard vac, right there, one triple-glazed viruflex porthole away from her. All her ammo for the run was neatly taped to the airlock wall. Two pulse rifle clips, their green charge lights blinking at her like eyes. A fully charged Viper for close fighting. Even her Syndicate-made butterfly knife, which Arkady had lifted from her without comment before letting her board the Starling back on Compson’s World. What the hell had they expected her to do, anyway? Cut his throat and steal their damn ship?

“The outer seal will close and the airlock will pressurize two minutes and four seconds before you’re scheduled to disembark,” Arkady said. “You’ll have four seconds to step into the airlock, two minutes to inspect the ammo and load and stow your weapons. Then you’re out. The same protocol applies when you come back; you’ll deposit any remaining live ammunition in the airlock stow compartment, lock it, and jettison the key. The outer door won’t close and the chamber won’t pressurize until I visually confirm that you’ve disarmed yourself.”

Li stared at him, but he just shrugged, pushed off the wall with the ease of a born spacer, and pulled himself back toward the foredeck.

He was deep in conversation with Cohen by the time Li joined them. “Can we run through it again, Major?” he said. “Please?” He sounded apologetic, as if he were asking for a favor instead of giving orders to an enemy agent Korchow was blackmailing.

“You’re the boss,” Li said. She wanted to smack him. Instead, she pressed the water bottle she’d been carrying into the sidewall restraint field, pushed off and hung in mid-air, stabilizing herself with outstretched hands. “Oh-two-twenty-oh-four, I jump ship,” she recited. “Oh-two-twenty-three-oh-eight, I hit station, turn toward the turrets.”

“Which direction are they?” Cohen asked.

“East,” Li said; spacer’s argot for whatever subjective direction took you into the spin of a rotating station, toward planet-rise.

“Not good enough. You may not be able to see planet-rise from where you hit station.”

“Well, I can feel it, even if I can’t see it.”

“The inner ear can play tricks on you.”

“Fine.” She shrugged. “At 02:49 I hit the vent.” She was fully into it, tracking the station map on her internals, accounting for the guards’ scheduled routes, thinking through her approach. “The vent cycle starts at 02:50. At 02:51, the turbines go off and I slip through the outer seal. At 03:00 the cycle starts again. That gives me one minute to stash my suit and gear, and nine minutes to climb.”

“Is that enough time?” Arkady asked nervously.

“It’s enough,” Cohen said. His tone, if you could say the ship comp had a tone, suggested that if it wasn’t, it would only be because the cog called Li hadn’t functioned properly.

Li shut her eyes, partly to visualize the layout of the vent system, partly to shut out a here and now that was less than confidence inspiring. “I should reach the intake into hydroponics by 02:59:30, latest. At 03:00:00 the next two-minute cycle starts, so…”

“Korchow’s inside man will open the internal miter flap at 02:59:30 exactly. He’s rigged it to stay open until the cycle starts. That gives you thirty seconds, which should be plenty.”

“Just as long as he really opens it.”

“He will.” Arkady gave her a dark, serious look. “I promise.”

“Thanks,” Li said, and felt a lump in her throat that made her ashamed. How had she ever let it come to this? Grappling onto the skin of a full-g station. Shinnying down a turbine shaft and waiting like a rat in a plugged hole for some traitor to sneak her into a station she could walk onto openly if her own business were anything but treason. She thought about backing out. But it was too late for that. She was on Korchow’s ship, with Korchow’s pilot at the controls, holding all the ammunition. She was going out that airlock tonight, one way or another.

If she could count on Cohen—really count on him—it might not be too late. But she’d be crazy to do that. Better to risk what she knew she could pull off, if all those little gambles broke her way. Better to settle her nerves, stop worrying about what she couldn’t change, and get ready for a walk in starlight.

“Well?” said the stranger who was Cohen. “What did you forget?”

Li sighed and pushed off the floor, coming to rest high up on the Starling’s curving bulkhead. “Nothing. I will goddamn well remember to hook in before the internal vent opens. I’m not an idiot.”

“You were the one who insisted on running off soft memory,” the not-Cohen insisted. “You’ll be off-line for twenty-seven minutes. Any memory lapse will result in a fatal loss of synchronization.”

Li flip-flopped so her feet were facing up, her head down. She looked at Arkady, at eye level but inverted, and raised an eyebrow. “I think she understands that,” Arkady said, sounding embarrassed.

“Look,” Li said. “I’ve been to the dance before. You boys just keep your flies zipped and make sure you save the last dance for the girl you came with.”

She picked out a faint spot on the opposite wall, a faded fingerprint left by some crewman of missions past. She closed her eyes and kicked off the bulkhead into a tight backflip, testing her inertial systems, troubleshooting, recalibrating the network of Fromherz nodes and ceramsteel filament that spidered down her spine and out to every muscle, tendon, and fingertip.

It was a neat trick, as well as a good diagnostic test. One of her favorites. Especially in zero g. And it was just the kind of silly thing Cohen always teased her for doing.

Well, he wasn’t teasing her tonight, she thought as her left foot hit the deck .28 centimeters off target—and she realized, suddenly, just how scared she was.

Alba: 28.10.48.

02:18:00.

The outer seal slid down on the other side of the airlock just as Li finished pulling on the bulky life-support suit and checking her heater and air feed. Arkady drew his pulse pistol, thumbed off the safety, and leveled it at Li’s chest. He lifted his thin shoulders in a sad little shrug. “Sorry.”

Li didn’t answer; he wouldn’t have heard her through the double-sealed faceplate of her helmet anyway. When the inner seal rose, she glanced back, checked her status lights again, and stepped forward.

02:20:04.

She floated out of the airlock and into open space, spinning slightly with the pull of an imperfectly calibrated frog kick. She did a fast recalculation of her trajectory, toggled her Zero-K jetpack to get back on course, assured herself she was still going to hit Alba’s exostructure reasonably close to target, and relaxed, watching the meters and seconds tick down on her internals.

She looked back at the Starling. It was already invisible, its fractal absorption sheeting effective enough to outsmart Li’s eyes even at this range. She toggled her infrareds just to be safe and scanned for a heat signature, but there was only a faint blur of warmth that could have been a heat plume from the station or the thermal wake of the last commuter shuttle. She hoped the shielding was good enough to fool not just her, but the Peacekeeper techs who monitored Alba’s fiercely enforced no-fly zone.

02:23:07.

As she neared the station, not even all her outside training and fighting experience could prevent the inevitable disorientation. The station’s metallic skin spun faster and faster. By the time she got within five meters of it, it was whipping by her like a freight train.

Cohen had put her on-station in the middle of a forest of radio and ansible receivers, reasoning that the thicket of antennae would camouflage her approach, making the risk of a hang-up worth running. She had to choose her spot carefully and toggle the ZKs to avoid getting tangled in the poles and guy wires.

Damn it, Cohen, she thought; it didn’t take a heat signature for a really sharp observer to spot a jetpack. And getting caught outside, even in a heated support suit, would be disastrous.

At the last moment before impact, she kicked her ZKs into reverse and hovered, trying to track the station’s spin. She took a deep breath, readied her grappling gear, and jumped.

The impact snapped her head back and left her eyes watering. The universe turned inside out and the sky fell on her head. The freight train that had been shooting past her face was now a wild horse intent on bucking her off into open space. The rotational gravity that had been purely theoretical when she was hanging in the void watching the station slide by was now a solid full g sucking her body back, out, and sideways.

She clung to the station and waited for her brain to accept the irreconcilable conflict between eye and inner ear. Then she half closed her eyes, questioning muscles and ligaments, forcing herself to ignore the deceptive visual cues and listen to gravity. A few heartbeats later, she pegged the direction of the Coriolis effect and was able to orient herself to station east and start climbing.

Her right shoulder was all wrong; she was favoring it before she had climbed ten meters. Korchow’s hired medics had tried to patch it up again—another jury-rigged field repair on top of the last one—but the whole arm was going to have to be stripped out and rewired. Not now, though. Now it had a job to get through.

She saw the fan turrets a long way off, knobby sixteen-meter towers that poked out of the station’s skin like mushrooms. She needed the fourth turret, and she counted down the line carefully, knowing that a mistake would mean an ugly death.

02:49:07.

She reached it seven seconds behind time.

Had she climbed too slowly? Was there something wrong with her internals? With Cohen’s schematics? She crouched under the turret, checked her systems, and cursed.

By her reckoning the turret was a good twenty meters farther from her landing point than their schematics had said it was. Any way you looked at it, the miscalculation spelled trouble.

Though Li might have fallen behind schedule, Alba hadn’t. At exactly 2:50 she felt a thud and shiver under her feet, looked up, and saw a glittering ice cloud burst from the vent hole. Dust and condensed moisture, freezing as they hit hard vacuum in the new morning’s first venting cycle; the station was getting ready for the CO₂overload of the coming workday.

She huddled in the lee of the turret until the ice cloud dispersed. Then she put her faceplate to the tower’s virusteel skin and listened as the vibration of the fans slowed and finally died. She imagined miter seals shutting twenty meters below, closing off the flow of pressurized air that drove the turbines. She tried not to imagine what would happen if both sets of seals opened while she was still in the turret. Well, it would be quick, anyway. That was something. She clipped onto the guard line that ringed the bottom of the turret and tapped the unseal code into the wrist plate of her suit. ‹Cannot unseal,› the suit told her internals. ‹Insufficient atmospheric pressure outside.›

‹Manual override,› she sent.

‹There is no air outside,› the suit said in deliberate tones designed to break through the dangerous euphoria of oxygen debt. ‹Are you sure you want to remove your life-support equipment?›

‹Unseal,› she sent again, and keyed in the emergency override code. A moment later, she heard the hiss of escaping air.

She pulled off her helmet. Her pressure suit activated as the hard vac hit it, dropping its reflective visor over her face. She felt the first bite of the burning cold that would leach through the suit’s thin membrane and kill her in a matter of minutes if she didn’t get inside. She removed the rest of her support suit, rolled it into a tight bundle, and stuffed it into her already-iced-over helmet. She tossed the helmet out into space and shot it with a disruptor blast, frying its circuits and making it indistinguishable from the rest of the abandoned deadware that littered Mars orbit.

No turning back now. The pressure suit would keep her alive for fifteen minutes in hard vac. Twenty at most. The amphibian genes engineered into her chromosomes for cold-shipping would buy her a little more time on top of that. But an hour in the pressure suit and it wouldn’t matter if she got what she’d come for, or if Alba security caught her.

She nudged the bladelike turbine arms to make sure there was no spring tension left in them. She wondered how Korchow pulled the inside man into his web. Either money was changing hands, and a lot of it, or Li wasn’t the only one with a dirty little secret. She took a breath, acutely aware that it was one of a limited number of breaths left in the suit. She put everything out of her mind except the next ten minutes. Then she wormed through the jagged half circle between the blades and into the chute.

02:51:43.

She pushed, legs straining, lungs burning. She made the best time she could, but she was climbing against the full rotational gravity of the station, and her enhanced strength and reflexes were little help in such tight quarters.

In the end, it was her haste that did her in. She took a wrong turn, disoriented in the narrow tunnels, strayed into one of the lateral vents that lined the inner bladder. She fetched up against the dust-fuzzed vent of a baffle like an exhausted salmon. She was so close. She could smell yeast, feel the soft, growing air of the algae bay on her face. But it was a cheat, a dead end. And the only way out was back up the shaft, into the teeth of the turbines.

She hit the junction with just fourteen seconds left. She was overheating. Her internals were hitting the red zone, warning lights flashing all over her peripheral vision. Too bad. They’d either fail or they wouldn’t. And if they failed, she wouldn’t be around to regret it. She hauled herself forward, internals blaring, her heart banging out a tempo as hot and urgent as the warning lights.

02:52:38.

She hit the end of the chute suddenly, with less than twelve seconds left, and slammed into the miter seal.

It wouldn’t budge.

At first she thought it was locked, that the inside man had betrayed her. Then she saw the problem; the hinges were clogged with a greasy coat of dust, hair, and organic matter from the hydroponics bays, all the things that drifted on the air currents of the station and washed ashore in the stagnant back eddies of the outtake ducts.

Now that she saw it, it was so obvious she could have kicked herself. But then the things that got you killed always were obvious. Obvious and stupid. This door hadn’t been opened in years. Decades maybe. Not since the last mold epidemic. And because it wasn’t really life-support vital, it would be chronically neglected. A system you could shortchange without getting caught. A system that went to the bottom of the list when it needed a new part—and stayed there.

Korchow’s man had done what he promised all right; she had heard the sharp snick of the catch flipping open, could still hear a trapped-fly buzzing from the hinge hydraulics. But flipping a switch with the name and number of the vent on it was one thing. Actually getting the door to open in realspace was something entirely different. And Li was stuck in realspace.

She poked her fingers through the parts of the door she could reach and scrabbled frantically at the scummy deposits. Her breath rasped in her throat. Her nails scratched on metal. Cohen had warned her about the need for silence, told her there could be people in the bays next to the vent, but she was beyond caring. The whole universe had narrowed into one pure and burning thought—getting out alive.

Finally she felt some give. She twisted in the cramped duct, wrenching her body around, using feet, hands, anything, to get a purchase. She gave a tremendous kick and drove into the seal shoulder first. It held. She felt a wrenching pain in her shoulder and a cold burn like a blade being drawn down the length of her triceps. She backed up the chute and rammed the seal again. It gave a little. But not enough. Not nearly enough.

Twenty meters below her, she heard a click, then the whirr of circuits flipping on to feed power to the turbines. She tried to get her left shoulder forward, protect her bad one, but she didn’t have the space or the time to get turned around. She flung herself at it again, right shoulder first. A lick of cold ran down her arm from shoulder to wrist and her hand went numb… but the vent opened. She shot through just as the outer vent opened, and found herself hanging along the wall above an algae tray.

A full atmosphere of air pressure hit the miter seal. It slammed shut behind her like a bear trap, and she dropped into the bright, humid air of the hydroponics dome.

02:53:19.

She crept into a sheltered space between the dome struts and a dripping-full rack of algae trays. She crouched there, panting, waiting for her internals to settle down a little, waiting while she pulled her head together.

Evaluate and adapt, she told herself. Accept what is, and act on it. She was behind schedule. They had somehow gotten bad information. Bad information that could still make or break the mission. Her arm was numb, weak, close to useless. But she was in. She was through the most dangerous part of the run, and the only way out now was through.

She checked the open sunlit expanse of the dome in front of her. Empty. She stepped forward—and slipped on something slick and wet. She caught her balance, looked down and saw blood dripping from her right hand and pooling on the decking.

Her combat-application virucules would break her blood down, destroying telltale genetic evidence, leaving only the sterile universal-type plasma the field medics needed for their IV feeds. But in the meantime, there was still blood on the floor. A lot of it. Rose red drops on the silver deck plating, a glistening gingerbread trail for the guards to follow—straight to her.

She unzipped her pressure suit, pulled up the thermal shirt she wore under it, and ripped, wincing at the loud sound of tearing fabric. It ripped easily though, and it was elastic enough to make a tourniquet. She knotted it around her arm and sealed up her pressure suit again, being careful to activate the reflective visor; it wouldn’t do to get caught on vid there. When she had stanched the bleeding, she surveyed the damage to her suit. It was repairing itself, or trying to. But the tear was so big that she doubted the smart fibers would form a solid seal again. And if the suit wasn’t spacetight, how the hell would she ever get back to the Starling?

She shook her head, forced everything out of her mind but the immediate problem. Get to the lab comp. And don’t bleed all over the floors doing it. She’d worry about the pressure suit and all the rest if and when she had to.

Alba: 28.10.48.

03:12:09.

Getting to the comp was easy. Li had expected to have trouble with the DNA reader at the start of the last corridor, but to her surprise, the field dropped almost instantly to let her through. She shivered with apprehension. Did Nguyen know more than Li had told her? Had she slipped her an ace under the table for her own inscrutable reasons? Or was someone else at work here?

She slipped down the corridor, alert for patrols, scanning the labyrinth of ducts and wires that lined the ceilings for the faint pulses of security cameras. Nothing. Could a high-security lab really be so lightly protected? Or was it just that this was Alba, and the Corps knew that no thief who managed to breach the orbital fortress would ever get out safely? She counted down the doors until she reached the one that separated her from the lab spoke’s mainframe. Here goes, she thought. She slipped the lockpick kit out of her suit’s kangaroo pocket and unrolled it on the deck.

The lock work went slowly; she was used to having Catrall do this. But Catrall was dead. And even if he weren’t, he wouldn’t be helping her on this job. Not when it meant selling out Alba to the people who had killed so many of their comrades on Gilead.

03:19:40.

Footsteps. She froze. Were they coming toward her or moving away? Toward. She rolled up her tools, ducked around the curve, and climbed into the shadows of the ceiling.

Two women walked by. Guards, not scientists; she could hear their lug-soled boots, and the coarse, hard-edged slang that was the UN grunt’s native tongue. “Catch the spins today?” one of them asked. “Assembly voted PKs to Compson’s to get the mines open.”

“What a shit hole. Well, long as we don’t have to do it.”

“Do what? Go to Compson’s or open the mines?”

“Either. I didn’t sign on to shovel coal. Or shoot miners. Whole planet’s fucked, ever since the Riots. Ask me, we oughta just cut ’em loose and kick ’em into hard vac.”

“And we would if they could get those synthcrystals over in Lab Eight to format properly.”

“Yeah, yeah. And if wishes were horses…”

“…horses wouldn’t be extinct!”

The guards laughed and their voices faded away down the corridor.

Li counted to twenty, holding her breath, then dropped to the floor. When she got back to the lab door, she saw something that nearly stopped her heart: her own quantum pick, sticking out of the control panel like a hangnail.

For one panicked moment she thought the patrol had seen it, that they were coming back for her, that the whole lazy gossiping act had been nothing but subterfuge. Then she got a grip on herself. It had been no trick. Luck had been with her; the two women had walked right past the pick, busy talking, and never seen it. The one plus of storming an impregnable fortress was that no one expected to turn a corner and catch an intruder.

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-to-mind 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.

‹Cohen!› 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. ‹You’re back with us?› he asked, when she mustered enough energy to try a cautious operation.

‹What happened?›

‹No need to worry about it now. I’ll explain later.›

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. ‹How come you’re not singing? › she asked.

‹What?›

‹You always sing when you’re cracking a system. Unless something’s wrong. Is something wrong?›

Digital laughter swirled around her, flickering through the numbers like brush fire. ‹Just because you can’t hear me doesn’t mean I’m not singing.›

‹Don’t try to snow me.›

‹Hang on a minute.› He scanned a promising file and cursed as it came up empty. ‹I’m thinking about the lab AI.›

‹It’s not coming back?› Li asked, feeling panicky.

‹No,› Cohen said. ‹He’s not coming back.› The emphasis on he was slight but unmistakable. A reproach.

‹Then what?›

When he answered, Li could feel the unease in his voice even across the remote line. ‹Ever watched flat film of a horse race?›

‹Sure. Beautiful.›

‹Know what a heartbreaker is?› He went on without waiting for a reply. ‹A heartbreaker is a horse so fast he doesn’t just beat his competitors, he breaks them. Beats them so badly they never run to win again. Horses used to die of it.›

‹You made that up. You’ve probably never seen a horse.›

‹No. Truly. Running to win is what racehorses were. The ultimate single-purpose organism. They couldn’t feed themselves, couldn’t even walk without special shoes humans made for them. But they could run. And they’d run themselves to death, run until their bones shattered. There’s footage of horses doing just that, coming apart on the track like ships burning up on reentry.›

‹That’s crazy, Cohen.›

‹Not crazy. Just human. They were human-built running machines. Just like I’m a thinking machine. Just like you’re a working machine, and every planet in UN space is a food-and-air machine. And when humans are building a machine, everything but the one thing they want it to do tends to fall by the wayside.›

Cohen paused, sidetracked to search a dead-end directory. ‹Anyway, AIs are like racehorses. They’re built to play games. Chess games, probability games, war games. They’re built so that the win is all they want, all they are.›

‹Why are you telling me this?›

‹You just watched a heartbreak race.›

‹With the lab AI?› Li couldn’t get her mind around this vision of how Cohen saw the Zed. ‹Is it… he… dead?›

‹No.› Cohen riffled through a new directory faster than Li could identify it, dropped it, moved on to the next one. ‹He’s still here. Can’t you feel him?›

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. ‹So now what?›

‹If he owned his own code, he could contract with a larger AI and try to make his way as an associate system, get some workout equity. Or he could get psychiatric help, reprogramming. But he doesn’t own his code. Alba does. So what will actually happen is this: The techs will come in tomorrow and find, first, that he got cracked by an outside AI, and second, that their top-of-the-line semisentient has just turned into an unbelievably expensive calculator. They’ll try to salvage him, because of the cost if nothing else, and when they can’t they’ll activate his terminal feedback loop, core out the mainframe, and install a new AI.›

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.

‹Christ, Cohen. It’s not your fault. What else were you supposed to do?›

‹Nothing. But that doesn’t make it any nicer, does it?›

‹You think you have to tell me that?›

Another long silence. ‹No.›

03:51:02.

‹Bad news.›

‹What?›

‹I found the data. But I can’t access it from here. You’ll need to get into another lab and jack a remote terminal before I can get it.›

Li checked their time and swallowed.

After a tense silence, Cohen said, ‹What do you want to do?›

She twitched, nerves stretched to the breaking point. ‹What do you mean, what do I want to do? We go get it.›

‹You’re sure?›

‹Of course I’m sure.›

04:01:00.

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

‹?›

‹What you said about the lab AI. How did you survive so long? How did you survive being beaten?›

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. ‹I didn’t survive it,› he answered when the numbers smoothed out. ‹I’ve never been beaten.›

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.

04:06:27.

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 grip-treated 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.

As she rolled, she heard the whip-crack shot of the disruptor and felt the charge hit her. This hit had nothing to do with the throbbing numbness that followed a shot from a little handheld disruptor, though. It felt like someone had taken a hot scalpel and carved a hand-sized chunk out of her back, leaving every severed nerve exposed and screaming.

She scrambled sideways and crouched in the uncertain shelter of the ansible, struggling to force air into her still-convulsed lungs. A sour copper taste flooded her mouth; her teeth had clamped shut on the tip of her tongue when the charge hit.

“Goddamn,” she heard the guard mutter. His footsteps echoed across the room, stopped beside the mainframe. She heard the hiss of indrawn breath as he looked at the screen. Then she realized the phone wasn’t ringing anymore. Cohen was in.

If she could just distract the guard for a few moments, keep him from focusing on what was happening unseen inside the comp, maybe Cohen could get the data out. And then maybe he could get her out. If he decided to stick around and do it.

She stood up and drew her Beretta in a single smooth movement. It was crazy, a crazy gun to be shooting off. But she was so deep inside the station, there was no real risk of a breach into hard vacuum. And it was all she had left to shoot with, anyway.

The guard saw her drawing on him, then saw what she was drawing. The blood drained from his face as completely as if he’d already taken a heart shot. “I’ve got three men forty seconds away,” he said. “You’ll never get out of here. Don’t make it worse than it has to be.”

She looked at his pale face, at the familiar uniform, and she came as close as she’d ever come to losing her nerve. I can’t shoot him, she thought. Not for this.

But it turned out that she could.

He rolled and came up shooting for her head, at killing range. She aimed with the hardwired precision of ceramsteel and squeezed off a single shot. He went down in a spray of blood before her conscious mind even understood she had shot him.

Getting across the small room to where he lay was the hardest thing Li could ever remember doing. She’d fired on hardwired reflex, but as soon as the disruptor clattered out of his hands, the enemy trying to shoot her turned into what he really was: a UN grunt, bleeding out onto the same pale blue uniform she’d worn all her adult life. One of her own. A comrade. As she stumbled toward him, elbows still locked in firing position, she knew he’d seen her face. She was going to have to choose between killing him in cold blood and letting herself be identified.

Luck and a clean shot saved her; he was dead by the time she reached him. She looked at him, hot blood welling up in her mouth. An image of Nguyen flashed through her mind, sitting behind her graceful desk, wearing silk, talking about need-to-know security and how she’d be on her own if the Alba raid went wrong. She spit, and it wasn’t only her blood that tasted bitter to her.

04:09:50.

She walked back across the room and jacked back in.

‹What’s going on?› Cohen asked. ‹You’re setting off alarms all through the system.›

‹Guard caught me.›

‹You’re okay?›

She felt her still-frozen side. ‹Yes.›

‹Is he?›

‹No.›

An infinitesimal pause. ‹Well, let’s get you out of there.›

‹Do we have the software?›

‹Yes. Now go!›

‹Which way?› A grid flashed onto her internals. Red pulses converged on the lab from three sides. The only gap in the circle—and it was closing even as she looked at it—was the long corridor back up to the hydroponics domes.

‹I don’t know if I can make it.›

‹You have to make it.›

She jacked out and ran.

04:11:01.

She hit two guards at the first intersection and barreled past before they could even draw on her. The pressure suit’s sealed hood hid her face, and she didn’t plan to shoot anyone else. Not for this. Now it was only her flagging body and the clock she was fighting.

She hit the first hydroponics dome at a tendon-snapping sprint and was through the open containment door and halfway across before she realized she had made it.

The dome was separate from the main curve of the station—a self-contained, light-flooded globe of zero-g-manufactured viruflex. Li’s feet clattered on a narrow catwalk between stacked, dripping algae flats. High overhead, bright heating panels blazed on the station’s underbelly. Below her, clearly visible between the catwalk’s gridplate, curved a finger’s width of clear viruglass… and beyond that only bright, blinding sunlight.

She looked back and saw her pursuers charging through the open pressure door behind her. Okay. Next dome. And she’d have to be quicker this time. She sprinted across the slick decking, skidding on a wet patch, wrenching herself upright, pushing her ligaments and tendons to near rupture. Another corridor, ribbed with heavy struts, armored with virusteel. At the end, like the lights of an oncoming train, more sunlight.

She raced into the second dome, whirled to face her pursuers, leveled the Beretta at them. They skidded to a stop and threw themselves into the inadequate shelter of the corridor’s pressure struts. “What the hell are you doing?” one of them shouted.

She jerked the gun at him. “I’d stay there if I were you.”

He looked at her, and she knew he was thinking about whether she would shoot or not, whether he could talk her down or not. She saw his eyes flick toward her shoulder, note the blood on her sleeve, the partly repaired rent in her suit. She watched him consider what it meant to go into hard vac in an emergency pressure suit, even one that wasn’t compromised. She saw him think about suicide attacks. That thought, and the single heartbeat of indecision that accompanied it, gave her the time she needed. She stepped to the catwalk railing and let herself fall backwards over it like a diver flipping off the side of a landing boat.

She’d planned to catch herself and hang from the walkway just long enough to get the first few critical shots off before she fell. But she’d forgotten about her shoulder. Her hand came up a fraction of a second too late. She felt the rail slip between her weakened fingers, just too far away to grab hold of.

This would be the time to pop that emergency chute, she thought, and remembered an idiotic joke from jump school about a malfunctioning parachute. She aimed the Beretta between her feet and squeezed off two shots. As the shots hit the dome, the containment plates slammed down at both ends of the catwalk, locking the guards out. A spider’s web of fractures raced across the dome, but it held. Then the curve of cold, hard viruflex was rushing up at her and it was time to think about not getting her legs broken.

She landed hard, but she kept her knees together, thank God. She even managed to hang on to the Beretta through her tuck and roll. As she hit the dome, she felt a ripple run through the viruflex like an earthquake. She caught her breath, twisted onto her stomach. For a fraction of a second, she lay there belly to space, blinking at the blazing infinity of stars reflected in the shattered viruflex. Then the dome blew and launched her into a blinding, glittering glass storm.

She couldn’t orient herself in the spinning chaos of algae, metal, viruflex shards, so she let herself drift. She’d played her whole hand, maybe her last hand. Now it was up to Cohen to pull it out of the hole. If he could. If he was willing to risk it.

‹Suit breach,› her oracle told her. ‹Reestablish outside pressure in seventy seconds maximum.›

She counted to seventy, but no ship showed up to rescue her. According to her scans, she and her debris field were the only things moving this side of the vast station.

She opened her eyes. The glittering storm still whirled around her, but it had dispersed enough for her to see open space beyond it. Stars wheeled across the far horizon. The station rose and set in her visor as if it were orbiting her. She watched its gossamer wings flash in the perfect, blinding light of the void and thought about the life she’d lived.

Then a door opened, blinding white in the black star field, and a silver line rippled out like the hand of God and caught her.