Spin 01 - Spin State (44 page)

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?”

“
Why
isn’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.

L
i 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?”