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.
Spin State Page 37
