Spin State

by Chris Moriarty

  “It’s like the Medusa,” Li said. “A dead drop. She wants the information circulating. She wants redundancy, I guess you could say. But she doesn’t want anyone to be able to actually read it. Not yet, anyway.”

  “Then what was she waiting for?”

  “I wish I knew,” Li said. She sat down heavily on her bunk and rubbed at her eyes with fingers that still smelled of the beer at the Molly. “What’s this about going tomorrow?” she asked.

  “Daahl’s got a source that’s leaking plans to him for something within the next forty-eight hours, and he’s worried that a move now could keep us from getting our job done. I’m inclined to agree with him, frankly. It does us no good to get the live field up if we can’t get the data out afterwards. Or ourselves out. And the sooner I get the miners linked to FreeNet, the better. This wouldn’t be the first time TechComm locked out the press and let a planetary militia run conveniently amok.”

  Running amok would probably be the right word for it, Li thought. She wondered what, if anything, Nguyen had to do with the expedited plans. Was this just a subtle encouragement to get their job done before Gould’s ship hit Freetown?

  “What does Ramirez think?” she asked, suppressing that thought and hoping Cohen hadn’t caught it. “Is the network ready?”

  “As ready as it’s going to be.” He detached himself from the doorframe and walked into the room. “Korchow was going mad looking for you. There’s such a thing as luck running out, you know. Even yours. Where were you?”

  “I went to see my mother.”

  Cohen had been looking everywhere but at her, but at those words his eyes snapped back to her face. “Tell me.”

  “I will,” Li said. And though it made her queasy even to think about telling him, she knew she wanted to. “But not now. I need to concentrate on tomorrow now. And so do you.”

  It’ll be fine. The thought floated across her mind as easily and naturally as if it were her own thought, and it was only in the next astonished breath that she realized it was Cohen thinking at her. You can make the link work. You knew you could. We’ll figure out the rest somehow.

  She thought back a cautious yes, and felt him hear it.

  “Have you asked the techs about that?” Cohen asked out loud. “It hurts like the devil.”

  Li realized he was talking about her arm, that he was feeling it across the intraface, that he could feel everything she felt. She flexed it cautiously. Stiff. Definitely not great. But it would get her through. Hopefully.

  “It’s fine,” she said.

  “It’s agony. I don’t know how you stand it.”

  She looked across the little distance between them and had a sudden shadowy glimpse of herself as he saw her. A fierce dark mystery, gloriously tangled in a too-fragile body, slipping away from him down a hall-of-mirrors perspective of increasingly pessimistic statistical wave functions.

  “It’s late,” she said. “I need sleep even if you don’t. Let’s not worry about anything but tomorrow, all right? Let’s just get the job done and go home.”

  Something flashed behind Arkady’s eyes.

  Together?

  “That’s not tomorrow’s problem.”

  Be careful, Catherine.

  “You too.”

  KILLING VECTORS

  This is the patent age of new inventions

  For killing bodies, and for saving souls,

  All propagated with the best intentions.

  —George Gordon, Lord Byron

  Anaconda Strike: 8.11.48.

  The rats were leaving, boiling up out of the pit like survivors of a firebombing.

  “They know the roof’s hung up,” Daahl told Li when one skittered into the room, panicked, and ran over her foot before it found its way back out. “There’s a big fall coming. I wouldn’t stay down there any longer than you have to.” He glanced at her, his pale eyes flashing blue as a Davy lamp’s flame in whitedamp. “I wouldn’t go down at all, frankly.”

  They were at the strikers’ de facto command center in the Pit 2 headframe. It had taken Li and Bella a long, hard day and much of a night to get there, traveling through the tunnels beneath the birthlabs.

  Cohen had ridden Li all through that long night journey—if ridden was the right word for it. He heard every thought, felt every twinge and misstep. And she felt him, knew him, all but was him. Finally she understood Cohen’s habitual confusion of pronouns. I, you, we. Yours. Mine. None of those words meant what she was used to them meaning. And none of them meant the same thing for more than a breath or two.

  There were still borders between them, even now that the intraface was fully up. There were doors and walls, some of them solid enough to keep him out—or, more often, to keep her out of him. But no line of separation stayed put long enough for her to set a mark on it and say, Here I end, here he begins. In the end the walls only reminded her of how tangled up in him she was, how impossible it was to think or feel or even breathe without brushing up against him.

  The headframe had changed since Li’s last visit. Strikers crowded the creaking corridors. Someone had brought in a truckload of mattresses and microlaminate blankets, and people were bedding down in the halls and changing rooms, even cooking on home-built methane stoves. Everyone was moving too fast, talking too loud, their voices pitched a little high for comfort. Li knew the mood. She’d seen it in students, navvies, line workers. It was the feel of any ragtag amateur army waiting for the riot troops to move in. But of course, she’d always seen it from the other side of the lines.

  She pushed that thought away and stepped to the window. Someone had parked a mine truck outside so that its undercarriage partially shielded the window. She scanned the horizon between the truck’s wheels. The night was dark except for a scattering of cloud-strafed stars. The flat plain of the coalfield stretched away for miles, broken only by mountainous tailings piles and the rust-gnawed bones of mining machines. The place was chaos on infrared. The tailings piles were smoldering, as always. The junked vehicles and empty oil barrels still threw the sun’s heat back into the air hours after nightfall. But Li didn’t need infrared to see where the troops were; her eyes instinctively sought out each rim and hollow that could hide a soldier, snapped into focus every time firelight reflected off a sniper’s optical sight. Please God, she thought, just get me underground before I have to decide whether or not I’m willing to shoot at those kids.

  “When will they move in?” she asked Daahl as Ramirez and Mirce Perkins walked in.

  Daahl turned to them. “Any word?”

  “Nothing new,” Ramirez said. Mirce didn’t answer at all, except for a curt shake of her head.

  “We think we’ve got another day or two,” Daahl said.

  “What happens if they move in while we’re underground?”

  Mirce shrugged. “If they come, they come. And our biggest problems underground are going to be air and time, not ground troops.”

  She rolled out a map and traced their path on it. Daahl’s guide would get them into the Trinidad, then split off into the back tunnels toward a vertical borehole that didn’t show up on the AMC maps. With a little scaling, the hole should be clean enough for someone at the top to lower fresh oxy canisters as long as there was a man at the bottom with a guide rope. When the live field run was complete, Li and Bella would make their way back to the oxygen dump, and Daahl’s men would haul them to the surface.

  Li listened to Mirce with half her mind and traced the route on the maps with the other. It was doable. Eminently doable. She’d taken dicier gambles more than once. The only question this time was whether the mine was going to let them get away with it.

  “You just get yourselves back to the drop,” Mirce concluded. “Once we rendezvous there we’ll evaluate the situation, and I’ll either get you out through the main gangway or up into the hills through the bootlegger tunnels.”

  “You?” Li stared at her. “You’re not going. You can’t go.”

  “Of course I am,” Mir
ce said. “I’m the best.”

  Li looked toward Daahl, but before she could speak she heard a sound that raised her hackles and sent Daahl and Mirce diving toward the window. Rifle shots. And the shots came from this side of the line.

  Li stepped up behind Daahl and Mirce and tried to see out the window herself. Hopeless. All she could see was movement, out across the flat plain in the twisting fire-shot shadows. Then the movement turned into a shape, the shape into a man. A man walking, holding a white flag.

  “Tell them not to shoot!” Daahl snapped, and Ramirez took off out the door, running.

  “Christ,” Li muttered. “That guy’s taking his life in his hands.”

  “More than just his life,” Daahl said.

  They waited. Ramirez reappeared in the doorway.

  “We know who it is,” he said. “A militia officer seconded to Station Security. Shantytown kid too, I guess. Brian McCuen.”

  Li caught her breath.

  “Now why the hell would they send Brian?” Daahl asked slowly, quietly.

  “Because,” Mirce said, her eyes as cold as the night side of a dead space station, “they think we won’t kill him.”

  The miners outside, and maybe a few of the ones inside, got to McCuen before Li could. By the time she finally saw him, one eye was threatening to puff shut and he looked more than a little tattered around the edges.

  “Are you crazy?” she said.

  He just gave her a lost-puppy-dog look. “I need to talk to you alone.”

  Li glanced at Daahl standing just behind her, at Mirce slouching in the open door.

  “We’ll give you ten minutes,” Daahl said.

  Mirce said nothing, just detached herself from the doorframe as Daahl went by and pulled the door shut behind her. Li sure as hell hoped she’d never stared at any Syndicate prisoners the way Mirce stared at McCuen.

  “I haven’t told them anything,” McCuen said when they were alone, “except that I had to talk to you.”

  “Well, you’re talking to me. What have you got to say for yourself?”

  He just kept staring at her, trust, fear, suspicion chasing across his boyish face.

  “Who sent you, Brian?”

  His eyes evaded hers for a moment. “Don’t you know?”

  “Haas?”

  He glanced around the room hesitantly, searching the ramshackle walls for surveillance plants. Then he mouthed a single, silent syllable: Nguyen.

  Don’t trust him, Cohen breathed into her backbrain. Not if he comes from Helen.

  Li brushed the thought aside. She couldn’t afford not to trust Brian. Not if it might mean Nguyen had decided to slip her a much-needed ace under the table.

  She pulled up a chair, sat down, and bent her head toward him so he could keep whispering at her. The room wasn’t bugged as far as she knew. And if it was bugged, then Mirce, for one, wasn’t going to waste much time beating whatever McCuen had whispered to her out of him. But if he wanted to play secret agent, let him. What harm could it do?

  “She knows everything,” he told her, so close she could feel his breath in her ear. “I sent her the tape from airport security and she worked out the whole thing. Who’s holding you. Why. What Korchow wants from you.”

  Li could just imagine. Nguyen would have pumped McCuen for every spin of data he had without his even realizing he’d been squeezed dry. She would have had him hypnotized, wrapped around her finger from that first riveting streamspace glance. But that was Nguyen’s job, of course. You could bet your life on her doing it right—and on her being there to bail you out when it really counted. As long as you delivered. As long as you were loyal. As long as it was in the Secretariat’s best interests to bail you out.

  “What about Gould?” she asked, brushing Cohen’s nagging questions aside. “Any progress there?”

  “That’s why Nguyen moved up the troop landings. To keep Korchow on schedule. To make sure we get this wrapped up before Gould gets to Freetown. She says to keep cooperating for now and just bide your time. I’m supposed to go down with you. Stay with you through the whole thing. I’m supposed to tell you that Korchow’s planning to turn on you. They think he’ll try to kill you when he has his data.”

  That wasn’t exactly news, though Korchow seemed too pragmatic to kill anyone as long as he thought he could still wring a little more information out of them under threat of blackmail.

  “And she says not to worry about Alba either,” McCuen added. “It’s taken care of.”

  Li stared at McCuen, shocked, but he didn’t seem to have any idea of the enormity of what he’d just said. “So when do we make our move?” she asked when she had gotten her composure back.

  “As soon as live field run’s over. You and me.”

  “And Cohen.”

  McCuen blinked. “What?”

  “You and me and Cohen. The AI.”

  “Oh. The AI. Of course.” Had she imagined it, or was there the slightest hint of hesitation there?

  “And what are we supposed to do with Korchow?”

  “Improvise.”

  Li felt the slim hardness of her Beretta at her waist. She looked at McCuen. He looked away.

  What had Nguyen really told him? Was he holding out on her, or was it just the nerves any new operative went through on a first covert mission? Could she afford to turn down an ally with a strong back and a steady trigger hand? She sure as hell didn’t want to be down in the pit with no one but Bella to back her up. Assuming Bella would back her up.

  “Right,” she said after a pause she knew had lasted a few beats too long. “We’ll play it Nguyen’s way. You up to it?”

  McCuen nodded.

  “Then put on your game face and let’s get out there.”

  * * *

  Mirce moved through the mine with the surefootedness of a pit dog. Her deceptively slow stride ate up ground at a pace that seemed totally unaffected by the steep grades and rough shale layers. She wasted nothing. Every step was thought out, every flick of her pale eyes was calculated. Her gestures, her breath, her steadily pumping muscles all embodied a chillingly elegant syllogism: wasted motion was wasted air; wasted air was wasted time; and miners who ran out of time in a gas-logged mine died.

  She made them take regular breaks “for safety reasons.” During the breaks, when everyone but McCuen took their masks off for a few brief minutes of unobstructed breathing, Mirce began to talk to Li.

  She talked about her work, her new husband, her new children. Quietly. Not naming names. Not touching on the past. Just talking. She talked only during the breaks at first; then Li fell in next to her and she spoke while they walked, the blurred and impersonal voice that filtered through her rebreather oddly mismatched with the intimate daily details she was telling Li. She asked nothing about Li’s life. From little ends and pieces she let drop, Li realized that she knew a lot. But it was all just the same stuff anyone who’d been watching the spins would know. Nothing personal. Nothing dangerous.

  As Mirce talked, Li realized that it wasn’t a bridge she was building between them with her words, but a wall. Whatever common ground the two of them might once have traveled, Mirce seemed to be saying, Li’s life was now a foreign country from which no road led back to Compson’s World. They’d chosen, back in that past Li no longer remembered. A father’s life for a few doctor’s visits. Li’s old future for a new, better future. And Mirce lived in a world where there was no room for regrets or refunds.

  By the time Mirce left them at the stairs down to the Trinidad, Li knew she was right. There was no going home. From the moment she’d stepped into that chop shop, there’d been no home to go back to.

  * * *

  She felt the glory hole long before they reached it. The condensates had been sleeping the last time she’d been there, she realized, dreaming fitfully. Now they were wide-awake.

  Quantum currents licked through the dark mine, searching, scanning, questioning. You feel them too? Cohen asked.

  She didn’t have
to wonder why he asked; she could feel him, feel the havoc the crystals were wreaking on his all-too-fragile networks. As if whoever controlled them were looking for something. Or someone.

  We won’t have to worry about setting up Korchow’s link, Cohen said before she could finish fitting words to the thought. They’ve already done it for us.

  He had locked down all his systems in a last-ditch effort to hold off the condensates’ assault, and she was amazed for a moment that he could even speak over the intraface. But then he wasn’t speaking, was he? The link between them had gone beyond speaking. And when she answered him, she was just thinking to herself, thinking to the part of Cohen that was her.

  What do we do?she thought, and the answer was there before she knew she had asked the question.

  We let them in.

  Then there was just light facing off against darkness and a confused sensation of Cohen pushing her behind him with the hopeless bravado of a child trying to protect another smaller child.

  It was like waiting for a tsunami to hit. The wave loomed, crested, crashed down on them. Then they were inside it, and its boiling undertow was sucking at their knees and ankles, threatening to topple them, leaving them soaked to the skin and in danger of losing their footing on the shifting sands beneath them.

  The crystals probed more gently after the first assault. They moved in probability sets, long spiraling quantum operations as incomprehensibly elegant as the sinuous columns that filled Sharifi’s notebooks. But there was something behind the equations. A single presence. A presence as much bigger than Cohen as Cohen had been bigger than the semisentient on Alba. Li felt it thinking, seeking, considering. And most of all she felt its ominous fascination with Cohen. With the intricate manyness of this strange new not-animal. With what he was. With what he could be used for.