Another voice spoke. Words she couldn’t make out. Whispers. Suddenly the room was boiling with whispers. She stepped back, feeling for the door behind her. “But Cohen said—”
“Yes.” A new voice now, even colder than the first. “Tell us about Cohen. Tell us what Cohen said to you.”
“It wasn’t my fault,” she breathed.
“Wasn’t it?”
She felt for the doorknob again, her hand trembling. She touched something, gripped it. But instead of metal, she felt skin.
Someone shoved her forward into the center of the room, and she fell on her knees, hands pressed over her ears to shut out the hateful, hissing accusations.
“It’s not my fault!” she screamed, over and over again. But she couldn’t block the voices out. It was her fault, they kept saying. It was all her fault. All of it.
* * *
“Are you all right?” McCuen asked.
She looked at him, chest heaving. She glanced at Bella, who was staring at her, wide-eyed. “I’m fine,” she lied. “Glitch on my commsystem.”
Then she heard Cohen talking to her.
* * *
She opened her eyes in VR to find Hyacinthe taking her hand, drawing her to her feet, tugging her back toward the terrible room.
But this was no Hyacinthe she had ever known. This was a mere memory dump, an interactive tutorial triggered by her entry into the memory palace. It explained how to access networks, bank accounts, corporate records, how to run an empire it kept insisting was hers now. It explained everything except the only thing that mattered: that if she was here, if this program was running, Cohen must be gone.
“I still need to get into the AMC net,” she said when he was done. She felt numb, as if her voice were coming from someone else’s throat.
But the others wouldn’t let her in, wouldn’t do it for her. And even with Hyacinthe’s help she couldn’t make them do it. “Cohen wanted this!” she said finally, frightened and furious.
That got a bitter laugh from a voice she hadn’t even heard before: a powerful, saturnine presence who made it clear that he despised her so much he hadn’t bothered to participate before. “Cohen wanted you too,” the voice told her. “And look what that got him.”
As it spoke, she felt a burning jealousy behind the words. A child’s jealousy? A lover’s? Or was this some other thing entirely, some splinter of Cohen’s inhuman soul? But this was no child, she realized. It was Cohen’s old communications AI—the only entity in the shifting ruin of his networks that was capable of controlling its fellows.
She started to answer, to argue. But before she could form a thought, a wave of anger battered her, cold as ice water, and she was cut off, out of the link, kicked off the intraface.
* * *
“Where are you going?” McCuen asked.
“To take a piss.” She forced a grin. “You want to come?”
He flushed. Like a little boy, for Christ’s sake. But he stayed put. And that was all she had really wanted from him.
She stepped into the shadows and slipped her butterfly knife from her belt, relearning its balance, feeling the blade blossom, lilylike, from the cross-gripped handle.
She could smell their pursuer. She could feel him with the hairs of her arms, with her raised hackles, with the skin of her face. She could have found him by touch if she’d had to. She was deep into her own territory now. She didn’t need maps, not even Cohen’s maps. She was about to murder someone. And she’d known how to do that for as long as she could remember.
She eased around the corner, stopped, listened, stopped again. She weighed the dark and the silence, took their measure.
She took her own measure too. Heavy-soled boots that could crunch against grit or scrape on rock. Cloth that could rustle and whisper treacherously. Loose buckles, loose straps, loose bootlaces. And her own breathing, sweating, shedding body, casting off trace faster than her skinbugs could scramble to camouflage it. She’d heard it said that Earth’s extinct carnivores had no scent, but that was a lie, like so many other things people said about the planet. The truth was they’d just known how to hide their scent from those they preyed on—a last, deadly secret.
She found her prey two meters past the bend in the drift. He sat in the dark, back to the wall, rebreather hanging lose around his jaw, infrared goggles laid on the ground beside him. He was eating.
She inched along the wall, arms out, knife ready. Waiting for him to turn. Waiting for the telltale catch of breath that would tell her he’d heard her.
It never came.
He struggled at the last, standing up, trying to throw her off as her left hand grasped his head and stretched his throat taut. But by then it was over.
* * *
“Christ!”
McCuen. With the gun in his hand that she should have, damn her, taken from him.
She let the dead man slide down the length of her body to the ground.
“You killed him,” McCuen said, his voice a ragged whisper. “I didn’t believe her. I didn’t believe you’d do it.”
Li shook her head. Her ? What was he talking about?
Bella came around the corner before she could ask him. She saw the fallen guard, gave a strangled cry, stopped and drew back, her hand over her mouth.
“Go up the drift and wait for me,” Li told her. “You’re just in the way here.” And I don’t want you to see this. I don’t want anyone to see it.
Bella started to speak. Then her eyes slid away from Li’s. She turned and walked back up the drift, leaving Li and McCuen alone.
They stared at each other. His betrayal and her knowledge of it hung in the air between them. He made a move, just the slightest flexing of his ankles.
She lunged, still hoping to keep the fight quiet and not alert the other three pursuers. She feinted toward McCuen’s face with the knife, and he threw up his left arm to cover himself, just as she’d known he would. He kept the gun more or less pointed at her while he did it, but he lost time. And in that instant, she reached up, wrapped her left hand around his wrist and broke it.
He screamed. The gun fired high and wild, then dropped from his hand and rattled along the slate floor into the darkness. She heard it come to rest behind her, fixed the point in her hard files, and set a subroutine to track it so she could retrieve it when she needed to.
She cursed her own slowness. That one shot could set Kintz on her before she had time to take care of McCuen. And even if it didn’t, she no longer had surprise on her side. Now they would know she was coming for them.
She brushed her regrets aside to focus on the job in front of her. McCuen was crippled. Not just by his lack of internal wetware or his broken wrist, but because Li could push back her mask and breathe freely, for a few moments at least, while he had to keep struggling to suck air through the cumbersome mouthpiece. He’d never fought her either. Not for real. He had no idea what he was up against.
Forty seconds into the fight she landed a clean kick, and McCuen’s leg collapsed under him with a grinding snap that told her she’d found her target. She was on top of him before he hit the ground, thumb and forefinger locked on his windpipe.
She lifted her knife hand to his face and ripped off his infrared goggles, leaving him blind. Then she straddled him, got a good purchase with her boot soles, sat on his stomach. As she did it, she had a flash of Voyt doing the same thing to Sharifi, and it turned her stomach.
“Who did Haas send?” she asked.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t play with me, Brian.” She dug her fingers under his windpipe and squeezed. “Who’d he send? Kintz? He the one who cut Mirce’s throat for no fucking good reason? Nice friends you’ve got.”
He was choking. She let up a little—just enough so he could talk.
“I didn’t know they were going to kill her,” he said when he could breathe again. “I would never have…” He swallowed, Adam’s apple jerking. “It’s not like you thin
k it is.”
“Oh? How is it then? What’s Haas paying you?”
McCuen’s face twisted in anger. “No one’s paying me.”
“Then talk to me.”
McCuen put on a resisting-interrogation face. A little boy playing at cowboys and cybercops. Li could have screamed with frustration.
“I don’t have time for this,” she said. She flicked her knife under McCuen’s rebreather feed, pulling the thin tube taut.
“God, no!” he pleaded. He was panicking, a trapped animal thrown back on instinct and adrenaline. She felt his legs twitching under her as if his backbrain believed he could overpower ceramsteel-enhanced muscles, outtwitch hardwired reflex. “Don’t make me die like that. Please, Li!”
She remembered her father, blue-gummed, drowning in his own bile. The growth had filled 20 percent of his remaining lung when they took the last X ray. The doctor had said it was bigger than most of the babies born in Shantytown that year.
Her knife hand was shaking. She took the information in coldly, as if it were someone else’s hand. Dealt with it. Rerouted. Adjusted. “Then talk,” she said, and let the blade scrape along the thin sheathing of the feedline.
“Okay! Okay. Shit. It’s Kintz. And two more.” He said two names she didn’t recognize. “They weren’t supposed to kill anyone. They were supposed to wait until Korchow and the AI were taken care of, and then take you and Bella in. Alive, if they could.”
Li’s breath caught in her throat. “What do you mean until the AI was taken care of?”
“I don’t know.”
She twisted the knife.
“I swear I don’t! All she said was that she’d get rid of it. That we wouldn’t have to worry about it.”
All she said?
Of course, she realized. It had been right there in front of her all the time. The answer that she had blinded herself to because she didn’t want to see it, couldn’t afford to see it.
This was a chess match, and one that had gone on far too long to be anything but a deadly fight between two equally devious and experienced opponents. Haas wasn’t the player on the other side of the chess board from Korchow. He never had been.
All along, every time Haas railroaded her or sabotaged her investigation, she had gone running to Nguyen like a little idiot. Never quite listening to Cohen’s warnings. Never looking up long enough to see the shadowy hand that hovered behind Haas, behind Voyt, behind McCuen. And now, when it was too late, she saw with painful clarity.
Who was the one person in a position to control both her and Sharifi? To orchestrate Metz and the mine investigation and the secret work at Alba? Who was the one person who knew just what Cohen would risk to save her? Who knew so well how to sow the seeds of mistrust that would keep her from confiding in Cohen even as she used him to save herself? And who, ever since Tel Aviv, had more or better reasons to want Cohen dead?
“What else did Nguyen say?” she asked casually, her eyes fixed on McCuen’s, praying that he was too scared and too confused to hear the question that hid behind her words.
“I don’t know. Oh, God, Li! Don’t! I swear I don’t know. I only talked to her that once.”
“Tell me exactly what she said, Brian. That’s all I’m asking. Do that and I won’t have any reason to hurt you.”
“She said to go with you. Keep an eye on you. That Kintz would bag you afterward.”
“And the AI?” Li couldn’t stop herself from asking.
“She just said she’d take care of it. It’d be gone when you came off the link.”
Holy Mother of Christ, she thought—and then thrust aside the knowledge of what she had helped Nguyen do to Cohen. “What is Kintz supposed to do with us?”
McCuen hesitated.
“What, Brian?”
“He’s supposed to try to take you alive.”
“Try?”
“If he can’t, he’s supposed to kill you. You and Bella both.”
A cold knot ground itself into the pit of Li’s stomach. “What about Gould and the Medusa ? What about Sharifi’s package?”
“Nguyen’s going to catch both ships in open space when they drop out of slow time. Intercept Gould before she can get the package.”
“What did she give you, Brian? Money? A promotion? What did she come up with that was worth killing Mirce and Cohen for?”
McCuen looked at her, his eyes round and childish above the rebreather’s insectlike mouthpiece. “She told me you were a traitor.”
Li went slack, let the blade drop away from the feedline.
“What if I told you I wasn’t?” she asked finally.
“I would have believed you. Until today.”
She looked into his eyes, forgetting that he couldn’t see her. “And you would have been right,” she said, “until today.”
“What are you going to do with me?” McCuen asked. His voice sounded very small—a child asking his mother to tell him that nightmares weren’t real, that monsters didn’t really exist.
“I don’t know,” Li said truthfully. Kintz must have heard her shot, must already be on the move. “Brian, I need to know where Kintz is going to ambush me.”
“I can’t tell you.”
“Let’s not do this again, Brian.”
“No! I really don’t know. They were supposed to pick up Mirce and bag us when we got to the rendezvous with her. So… well, you saw. They’re not doing what they said they would.”
Li laughed bitterly. “It looks like Kintz has already decided he’s just not going to be able to bring us in alive.”
“Yeah,” McCuen said. If he wondered what Kintz’s decision meant for him personally, he didn’t say so. “Listen,” he said after a moment. “You can contact the station, can’t you? You could call Nguyen. It’s not too late. Maybe you can’t fix everything. But enough. Enough not to get killed down here. Enough to keep the Syndicates from getting what they want.”
“And then what?”
“I don’t know what. But it has to be better than getting killed!” He shivered. “Or going over to the Syndicates. Come on, Li. I can’t believe you want that.”
She looked down at his pleading face. She thought about dying in the mine. She thought about the long list of ugly, violent things she would have to do to get back to the surface alive. She thought about Nguyen, about what she might be willing to trade Li’s life for.
What difference would it make to anyone? Mirce was already dead. Cohen was gone. What did she care about what happened to a planet she’d never thought of as anything but a trap to escape from?
“But Nguyen’s going to kill the crystals,” she said. “She’s going to kill the whole planet.”
She knew it was the truth as soon as she spoke the words. It wasn’t a plan or a conspiracy; even now she didn’t believe that Daahl’s stolen memo had been more than an unfortunate turn of phrase. But it would happen. It was already happening.
The UN couldn’t survive without live condensate. Left to its own devices it would swallow Compson’s World whole, just as the worldmind had swallowed Cohen, just as the Security Council had swallowed Kolodny and Sharifi and all the other quiet casualties of their covert tech wars. Not out of malice, but with the best intentions. Not because they wanted to, but because they had to. Because that was how their code was written.
And Sharifi—Sharifi had known that the only way to stop them was to take the choice out of their hands.
“It’s not our job to decide those things,” McCuen said, as if he had tracked every turn and twist of her thoughts.
Li knew he was saying no more than she’d have said a few short weeks ago. He hadn’t seen what she’d seen. He hadn’t lived it. He could only see the choice she faced as black or white, loyalty or treason, UN or Syndicate.
And if she chose the side he wanted her to choose? The side that loyalty to comrades dead and alive made her want to choose, that everything in her long years of training and service had taught her to choose? Then the UN would be saved fr
om the Syndicates, for a while anyway. It would survive, feeding off the condensates in a kind of cannibal existence that was no worse, when all was said and done, than any other creature’s struggle to survive at the expense of all the other life in the universe.
But the condensates—Cartwright’s sainted dead, Li’s father, Sharifi, Cohen—would die. And this time there would be no second birth, no dreaming afterlife, however alien. This time they wouldn’t be coming back.
“I’m sorry,” she said. She sat back on her haunches and took the knife off the rebreather line.
McCuen’s body turned to water under her as terror collapsed into shivering relief. “Jesus, Li, you scared the hell out of me. I really thought—”
She slit his throat cleanly, making sure the first cut finished it. It was messy, but it was kinder than anything else she could do for him. He died with a confused expression on his face, an idealistic little boy who still couldn’t believe this game of cops and robbers had turned real.
“It’s not personal,” she whispered into the void of his dilating pupils. But that was a lie too, the biggest lie of all. And she knew it even if McCuen didn’t.
* * *
Bella was waiting by their packs. She started to say something, then saw the blood covering Li’s hands and clothes and stopped, backing up a step.
Li hated her for that step, for the disgusted, fearful look on her face. She hated her so much she could feel her hands shaking with it. She emptied McCuen’s pack, took what she could carry, and left the rest for the rats. She didn’t trust herself to look at Bella.
“Did he… did you find out how many of them there are?”
Li held up three fingers.
“Kintz?”
“Yes.”
Li was drowning. Suffocating. She shouldered her pack and started down the drift, leaving Bella to follow any way she could.
Neither of them said McCuen’s name, then or later.
The Anaconda Strike: 9.11.48.
Spin State Page 49
