The lab’s security went far beyond the deadwall. There would be no slipping in under the radar; Cohen was going to have to meet their best stuff and better it. The network was broken into half a dozen separate zones. He’d have to crack each zone separately, and at the same time elude the quasi-intelligent game-playing agents that defended them. There was no back door, no way in or out without running the gauntlet of the security programs. And even if Cohen got by them, Kolodny would still be physically jacked in to the lab mainframe, vulnerable to whatever wet bugs and bioactive code the system threw at her.
As Li watched, Cohen spun out a sleek silver thread of code, tweaked it into a loose Möbius strip, and floated it into the main corporate site on a public-source message. Trojan horse, she thought. Oldest trick in the book.
Cohen was laughing before she finished the thought. ‹Good hacking requires a familiarity with the classics, Catherine.›
‹Did we just go off duty?›
‹No, ma’am.› The dark-haired schoolboy floated across her internals again, one arm buried to the elbow in a brightly colored cookie jar.
Li glared. The boy popped like a soap bubble.
‹Keep your mind on your job,› she said.
The security program caught the horse, just as it was meant to. In eight seconds alarms were going off all over the network. In twenty-three seconds the system’s anti-incursion software had corralled the horse and routed it to the off-site virus zoo. For a moment nothing happened. Then an area of confused activity boiled up inside the virus zoo and ballooned into a roiling mushroom cloud of self-reproducing, randomly mutating code.
Li held her breath, trying to follow code that was spinning faster than even her military-grade wetware could track it. She shut down her VR interface and dropped into the numbers, a swimmer in the shifting ocean of Emergent networks that was Cohen.
His strategy was working. Or at least she thought it must be. The security program tracked each new virus, broke its code, sent antidotes shooting off to its entire UN-wide customer base. But this was a game the defense lost before the first whistle. The virus mutated constantly, generating new code faster than the system broke the old code, causing the system’s outgoing mail to increase exponentially. And each new antidote-paired copy of the virus contained an embedded packet of active code that attacked the receiving system and sent yet another help request shooting back to the virus zoo.
In twelve seconds the off-site provider’s network exceeded capacity, locked up, and went down. The target was cut out of the flock, and Cohen was ready to go to work in earnest.
Li maxed her realspace feed. Her squad was still sampling tank contents. They moved systematically down the rows of tanks, scanning and logging their contents. No search and destroy on this mission, just information-gathering.
‹Retrieval minus 8:10,› she told them. ‹Keep it lively.› She went back on-line just in time to watch Cohen fish a series of clearance codes out of the lab’s personnel files and drop into the database as a system administrator. ‹All clear?› she queried.
‹Nothing left to do but sniff out the bone.›
‹Well, sniff faster. 7:41 to retrieval.›
And back to realspace.
They were running late. Li sent Shanna and the two new recruits over to the far end of the lab, signaling that she’d cover the middle rows herself. They were flirting dangerously with missing their retrieval, and she didn’t want to contemplate the possibility of a delayed pickup in the dust storm that was still raging above ground. Nor did she want to find out the hard way that Soza hadn’t arranged backup retrieval.
A few rows away, Dalloway stopped and put a hand into an open tank. He jerked it out and waved it in front of him while a rainbow oil slick of mutating viruses and counterviruses battled across it. ‹I’m melting! I’m melting!›
‹Knock it off, Dalloway.›
Then one of the newbies screamed.
A short scream; Shanna clapped a hard hand over his mouth before it really got started. But when Li saw what the two of them were looking at, she couldn’t blame the kid.
The tank had a body in it. All the tanks at that end of the lab had bodies in them. They were women. Or, more precisely, one woman: smallish, recognizably Korean—a rarity in and of itself in this fourth century of the human diaspora—and brown-skinned despite the artificial pallor induced by water and lab lights.
‹They can’t run a crèche in a nongovernment facility,› Dalloway said uncertainly. ‹Aren’t there laws about that?›
‹It’s not a crèche,› Li said. ‹They’re just wetware hosts.›
But this was no approved wetware she’d ever seen.
She looked into the tank in front of her. Took in the bar codes stamped on the sallow flesh, the atrophied limbs, the silver glint of ceramsteel filament twining through exposed nerve cells. At first glance the wetware being grown here was no different from the AI-supported wire job every soldier in the squad was equipped with, or even from the civilian VR rigs rich teenagers used to surf streamspace. But this wetware was growing in adult bodies, not viral matrix. And the pale, submerged faces were too identical, too regular, too inhumanly perfect to be anything but genetic constructs.
Li stared at the bodies, caught by an echo, a wisp of memory that skittered away like a spooked horse every time she tried to lay hands on it. Was this a geneline she’d seen before? On Gilead? Were they culturing wetware for Syndicate soldiers? And why? Who would be crazy enough to risk it?
‹Can you run some of those samples?› she asked Shanna.
‹Sure. But what do we do if it’s… what it looks like?›
Li checked their time. Seven minutes, twelve seconds. ‹We call Soza. Cohen, we’re going to need a line to HQ.›
‹No you’re not.›
‹We have a situation here.›
‹Irrelevant. Take the samples and forget about it.›
‹Have you seen what we’re looking at?›
‹Yes,› Cohen answered, this time on a private link. ‹But you’re not going to get Soza on the line no matter how many times you call. And if you miss your retrieval, illegal construct breeding is going to be the least of your worries.›
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 man-made 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. ‹How long have you known about the artillery?›
‹Just remembered it.›
‹You expect me to believe that?›
‹Believe what you want. Just be quiet and let me work.›
She gave him a full minute. ‹5:51,› she told him. ‹You’ve got a minute and twenty.›
‹I need more.›
&n
bsp; ‹We don’t have more.›
She toggled her realspace feed. The squad was hovering, eyeballing her nervously.
‹Secure the corridor,› 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.
‹Status?› she queried.
No answer.
‹Talk to me, Cohen.›
‹Got it!› 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.
‹What the hell was that, Cohen?›
‹I can’t—there’s something screwy with the interface. Just give me a minute.›
‹We haven’t got one.›
But a minute later he was still jacked in, and Li was still waiting.
‹Do I have to jack you out myself?› 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.
‹Man down!› 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.
‹Can she walk?› Li asked.
‹For now.›
‹What if you drop off-shunt?›
Cohen’s laugh flickered across the numbers like brushfire. ‹I’m the only thing holding her together.›
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.
‹Watch it!› 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.
‹What the hell?› 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 pai
n 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.
SYSTEMS WITH ONE DEGREE OF FREEDOM
Section (2). The registration requirement of Section (1)(a)(2), and such additional registration requirements, travel restrictions, and other restrictions as may be prescribed by relevant administrative regulations pursuant to this Resolution, shall apply to:
(a) all citizens of Syndicate-controlled systems, as defined in Section (2)(c) below;
(b) any United Nations citizen more than twenty-five percent (25%) of whose geneset, as defined in Section (2)(d)(ii) below, is comprised of proprietary genetic material included in the Controlled Technology List pursuant to General Assembly Resolution 235625-09, as hereafter amended.
—United Nations General Assembly Resolution 584872-32
51 Pegasi Field Array: 13.10.48.
‹14,000pF›
‹27,000pF›
‹DPLprompt›
Her own breathing woke her—harsh, panicked, the sound of a child waking from a nightmare. The memory of Metz was so close she could smell it. Everything else—name, rank, age, history—was darkness. She’d lost the part of her mind that remembered those things, and every time she reached for the pieces they skittered away like quicksilver.
Spin State Page 3
