Spin 01 - Spin State (4 page)

she asked Shanna.

Li checked their time. Seven minutes, twelve seconds.

Cohen answered, this time on a private link.

Li made sense of Cohen’s words just as Shanna pulled up the first DNA read. “They’re constructs, all right,” Shanna said.

Catrall cursed. “Those bastards dropped us in a Syndicate facility without even telling us? What kind of shi—”

“Stow it,” Li told him. “What Syndicate?” she asked Shanna. “What series?”

Shanna hesitated. “They’re … not. I don’t think they’re Syndicate genesets at all. This is obsolete tech. Prebreakaway corporate product. These things are fucking dinosaurs.”

And suddenly Li knew with sickening certainty what she was looking at. She remembered that face not because it was the face of her old enemy, but because it was her own face.

These constructs were her twins, their genesets spliced and assayed and patented to survive the manmade hell of the Bose-Einstein mines on Compson’s World. And they were here despite the fact that it had been illegal to tank a genetic construct anywhere in UN space for over twenty years.

She turned away, feeling sick and dizzy, hoping that the eerie resemblance was only visible to her eyes.

“Let’s finish up and get the hell out of here,” she said. “And keep your heads screwed on. We need to make that retrieval, or we’re going to be on the receiving end of a hot package. Seven minutes and counting.”

She flicked open her VR window and found Cohen still scanning datafiles. <6:51 to retrieval,> she sent.

She gave him a full minute. <5:51,> she told him.

She toggled her realspace feed. The squad was hovering, eyeballing her nervously. she told Dalloway.

Back on-line. Cohen was running twenty-odd parallel searches now, working so fast she could only track him as a vast icy sweep of light cutting through the lab comp’s numbers.

she queried.

No answer.

he said.

The link wavered. “Shit!” Kolodny said, shaking her head and blinking. Then she was gone, and the link was back up before Li even had time to feel the vertigo hit.

But a minute later he was still jacked in, and Li was still waiting.

she asked, turning to stare at him. That was when she saw the blood on Kolodny’s face.

She jerked Kolodny away from the comp station and yanked the jack from her head, knowing even as she did it that she was too late. She was still standing there with the wire in her hands when the first shots whined down the corridor.

Dalloway broadcast.

Li flipped to VR, picked up Dalloway’s feed. Catrall lay in a twisted heap at the foot of the stairs. Four guards rattled into view, the last one down stopping to turn Catrall over with a booted foot and take his rifle.

“We’re leaving,” she told Cohen.

The only answer she got was the clatter of Kolodny’s carbine hitting the floor.

Kolodny was bleeding out. Fluid dripped from her nostrils, leaving watery pink splatters on the white tiles. She moved jerkily; the muscles of her back and legs were going into spasm. Li had seen wet bugs at work before. Cohen didn’t have to tell her Kolodny was only minutes away from being unable to walk at all. Or that she was slipping down a slope that would only end in one thing unless they got her out: flatlining.

Li asked.

Cohen’s laugh flickered across the numbers like brushfire.

She heard gunfire in the corridor—and this time it wasn’t the muffled whine of discharging pulse rifles but the crack of real bullets hitting concrete and ceramsteel. She toggled Dalloway’s channel and saw that he was pinned down at the far end of the corridor, and Shanna and the others were too far out of position even to give him covering fire.

The lab seemed three times longer than it had on the way in. By the time they’d covered half its length, Kolodny’s vitals were jagging and skipping, status alarms exploding behind Li’s eyes like rescue flares.

“Wait!” Cohen gasped, jerking out of her grip to turn back toward the comp station. Li followed his gaze to Kolodny’s empty hand—and she remembered the carbine jangling, unnoticed, unretrieved, onto the tiles.

“Too far,” she said—and handed him her own pulse rifle.

“No,” he said. “Keep it. You’re going to be covering me anyway. And the Viper’s useless in this. You shouldn’t be using it.”

“No one’s using the Viper,” Li said, reaching down to ease the Beretta out of its ankle holster.

She saw Cohen’s look of shock even through the mess Kolodny’s face had become. “Catherine, if you shoot someone with that—”

“I know,” she said, already moving again. “Let’s just make sure I don’t have to.”

Only fifteen meters to go. But they were the worst fifteen. No cover, just the slick white tiles underfoot, and the only shelter the flat of saline canisters just this side of the doorway. And they had to cross the whole width of the lab to reach those canisters.

As they started across, the first two guards skidded around the corner. One of them had Catrall’s carbine in his hands and was trying to override the DNA lock. The other had a sleek, expensive-looking firearm that Li’s oracle identified as a .308 Kalinin with Vologda optics.

She dove forward, head down, and slammed into the first guard at knee level before he had time to react.

She kept driving with both legs as she hit him and felt his knee give out with a wrenching snap.

Before the other guard could swing the Kalinin’s long barrel around to bear on her, Li jerked the injured man to his feet and jammed the Beretta to his temple.

His partner froze. The Kalinin’s black muzzle wavered.

Li smiled grimly and hoisted her hostage up, keeping the Beretta pressed to his skull. She started toward the shelter of the saline canisters. If they walked out of here alive, someone was going to catch hell for that little piece of bad housekeeping.

Two more guards appeared in the doorway. Like the first pair, they wore unmarked coveralls and carried top-shelf weaponry. Li heard them shouting to the hostage to get his head down.

“I don’t think that’s good advice,” Li said. She tightened her arm on his neck, both to keep his head up and to remind him what a Peacekeeper’s wire job could do to flesh and bone.

Her internals were going crazy, targeting alarms screaming on and off as the gunmen’s range finders fixed on her, lost her, fixed on her again. If they were willing to shoot her hostage to get to her, she was finished. Anyone Li had trained would have pulled the trigger the instant she made the grab and accepted the risk of shooting a friendly for what it was: unavoidable. But so far these guys were acting like amateurs.

If her luck held, she and Kolodny would escape because of it.

She got behind the canisters and threw her hostage against the wall. “Listen,” she said. “I don’t have a clear shot on your friends, but I sure as hell have one on you. So let me tell you what you’re going to do.”

A moment later he was inching out from behind the canisters toward Cohen.

By the time the guards at the door figured out what she was doing, Cohen was already making the crossing behind the hostage, Kolodny’s carbine shoved against his rib cage. It worked, at least until they got halfway across the lab. Then Cohen stopped for no clear reason and slackened his hold on the guard’s neck.

Li said down his channel.

But even as she thought the words, she felt him blowing off the link like leaves on a hard wind.

Shanna said from the corridor. Then the link went down for good, and Cohen was gone.

Kolodny stumbled and fell, unable to keep her bearings when the AI went off-shunt. She knelt in the lab’s central aisle, slack-jawed, shaking herself like a diver coming too fast out of deep water. “Kolodny!” Li shouted.

For a moment that must have lasted less than a heartbeat everything ground to a halt. Li saw the bloodshot whites of Kolodny’s eyes as she turned to stare at her, a faint stain on the left sleeve of her uniform, the fading burn mark where she’d scorched her hand on a hot pulse-rifle barrel at target practice.

Then the hostage backed away and the guards at the door fired and Kolodny staggered to her feet, fell facedown and lay still.

* * *

The rest of the raid was just a series of isolated snapshots.

Running down the corridor under flickering emergency lights with Kolodny slung across her shoulders. Rushing the stairs in a ceramsteel-enhanced tendon-snapping burst of speed and charging head-on into a skinny kid in civilian clothes armed with a cheap pulse rifle. A hundredth-of-a-second blink in which Li knew that things had spiraled too far out of control for it to be about anything but surviving.

Then enhanced reflexes kicking in, wetware and ceramsteel filament driving Li’s body faster than human flesh was meant to move. The kid’s shocked look when her bullet shattered his neck before he could even start to pull his own gun’s trigger.

A final dash across the endless expanse of grit-scoured concrete. A lightning strike of pain from elbow to shoulder.

Then nothing.

Her last memory was of flat gray sky, wind, rain on her face. Kolodny lay next to her, eyes open. Smoke curled lazily above them, and Li smelled something that she recognized with bemused detachment as her own flesh burning.

Dalloway appeared above her, leaned over, and grabbed her beneath the armpits. “Kolodny first!” she said, but he just shook his head.

She passed out again and came to with flight-deck plating under her back. Someone was fussing with her legs, lifting them up and shoving things under them. A medtech pressed something into her left hand —an IV bag—and told her to squeeze it.

She kept trying to tell him she was right-handed; but her right arm was off somewhere outside her peripheral vision and didn’t seem to want to obey the orders her brain was sending. So she lay there holding the IV, slipping in and out of consciousness while the hopper labored into a sky gone dead and cold as Kolodny’s eyes.