She followed, running on more tracks than she could consciously manage. She combed her subsystems, found two UN pension administration number crunchers and set them to work on the cuff locks. The communications AI wondered fleetingly if they had time to wait for them. She wondered along with him —and an instant later, so quick on the heels of the thought that she had no sense of having acted, she was on the FreeNet airspace control system searching the skies for a signal from a ship that had not yet reported in to the navigational authority.
She found Gould’s ship already in orbit, maintaining forced radio silence while the sleek, vicious shape of a UNSC frigate drifted above it, going through a search-and-seizure routine. She stayed just long enough to be sure that Nguyen’s net had closed around Gould. Then she was off and running, looking for the Medusa.
It wasn’t there. Not when she started looking, anyway. Then it exploded in-system at relativistic velocity, right on schedule, its navigational beacons howling in Dopplered harmonics, its retrorockets blazing like a man-made supernova.
Nguyen’s people lay in wait at the first system buoy. As the Medusa dropped into normal time, a second frigate detached itself from the buoy’s signal shadow and began pacing the civilian ship, hailing it.
As fast as the Medusa was moving, the hail couldn’t have come through as anything but twisted static. Still, it was on a closed military link. The ship slowed for it.
Li prowled through eight different Bose-Einstein-enabled networks before she could find a back door into the closed communications shooting between the two ships.
“—for boarding and security inspection,” the frigate’s captain was saying when she finally broke through the ship-to-ship encryption.
She didn’t wait to hear the freighter give the permission. She was accessing the Medusa’s data banks before the frigate completed its request, looking for anything Sharifi could have deposited there, hoping desperately that the precious dataset wasn’t deadwalled into an unwired storage locker.
Then someone logged on and began executing a massive data dump into the ship’s computer core. Sharifi’s unencrypted datasets. And more. As Li raced through the files she realized there was spinfeed with the datasets—feed that Sharifi must have thought was important enough to record live and send with the original data. Li looked to see who was doing the uploading and laughed at the obviousness of it when she finally saw it.
Sharifi had rented a locker with an automated data release. When the Medusa dropped into orbit over Freetown, the release program had looked for a streamspace signal—one Gould would presumably have sent had her own delivery been successful—and, not receiving it, had begun dumping its data into the ship’s comp. The ship in turn was programmed to broadcast the data on FreeNet when the upload was complete.
This was Sharifi’s insurance policy: dumping her raw data onto the most unregulated and chaotic sea in streamspace’s ocean. It amounted to little more than shouting out her discoveries in an electronic town square. Bella and Cohen and everyone else who knew Sharifi had been right about her all along. Sharifi hadn’t been trying to sell her information. She’d been trying to give it away, to anyone and everyone who could use it. And she had trusted that someone—enough someones to make a difference—would take care of Compson’s World.
The Medusa was too slow, though. Its onboard systems were hopelessly obsolete and in uncertain repair. Li spun through the ship comp, tweaking, adjusting, speeding things up wherever she could; but even so the first files had barely loaded before she felt the clank and pressure shift of the frigate’s boarding tube locking onto the Medusa’s fragile skin.
Christ! All this, only to lose everything because of a slow ship’s comp? She pushed and prodded furiously, but still the numbers seeped through the shipboard systems as reluctantly as cold diesel fuel. And meanwhile it was just a matter of time until the frigate’s techs accessed the Medusa’s systems and shut down the file transfer.
But they never did. They ran a cursory search that didn’t turn up anything—didn’t even seem intended to turn up anything. Then they closed the airlock and pulled away, leaving a welter of relieved, if confused, internal mail between the freighter’s crew and passengers.
Li breathed a sigh of relief and let her guard down. The frigate kicked in its attitudinals and pulled away. The Medusa continued its radically slowed drift toward Freetown.
Then she saw it. It was as chillingly, breathtakingly clear as sunlight in hard vacuum. The frigate’s crew hadn’t boarded the freighter to take Sharifi’s data off it, but to leave something else on it. Something that would be sitting in one of the dark cargo bays waiting for a signal from the frigate’s bridge.
Nguyen didn’t need the files on the Medusa anymore. She hadn’t fired on the field AI until she knew Li and Cohen had retrieved everything she needed. And the frigate’s crew hadn’t boarded the Medusa until Haas had Li’s hand locked in his and was already stripping the precious data out of her hard files. Nguyen had the data now. So why would she run the risk that someone else might access the Medusa’s files, that Sharifi’s message might get through? Why would she let the rest of the world in on TechComm’s most jealously guarded secret?
The others were with her before the thought was even a word. They hijacked every navigational buoy within broadcast distance of the Medusa. They hijacked the NowNet lines that ran through the Ring-Freetown axis and out to the Periphery. Then they started shooting Sharifi’s files over every open link they could find.
Your files too, the communications AI said—and before Li could argue he was shooting out the unedited spinfeed of all those long hours in the mine, broadcasting everything she and Cohen had seen and felt since the worldmind first engulfed them.
Watching through the Medusa’s nav systems, Li saw the frigate slow and turn. Was she too late? Had it all been for nothing?
But no. They had caught the outbound transmissions. Li saw a quick FTL exchange of encrypted data between the frigate and Corps headquarters on Alba. Then the frigate turned tail, fired up its Bussard drives, and vanished into slow time.
The Medusa kept inching toward Freetown, its crew blissfully unaware of their deadly cargo. Meanwhile, Sharifi’s message flashed onto FreeNet and across a dozen Bose-Einstein relays onto a dozen planetary nets throughout the length and breadth of streamspace.
Li opened her eyes, amazed at her ability to act simultaneously in realspace and the whirling chaos of Cohen’s systems. The cuffs fell away from her wrists and ankles with a clatter. Haas looked at them unbelievingly for a split second, then jumped away from her.
Li jumped faster. She was on him before Bella’s body had taken a step, surrounding him, suffocating him, penetrating him. The station AI fought her, but she ground it to dust, barely stopping to think what she was doing, and slid toward Haas through the numbers, bright and pitiless as a shark. He cried out once. Then there was only Li. Her incandescent purpose. Her glacial, inhuman clarity. Her all-too-human fury.
She’d forgotten about the derms, though. At the last instant Haas quivered, mustered his strength, and ripped them off, leaving her with nothing but the empty vessel of Bella’s shunt-suppressed mind.
The last thing she heard as she collapsed was the cool, disembodied echo of Haas’s laughter.
* * *
She woke to pain and darkness. Her lungs burned. She put a hand to her face, and it came away wet with blood. Hers or Kintz’s, she couldn’t tell.
She sat up and saw Bella stretched out on the floor in front of her, unmoving but still breathing, thank God. There were voices in her ear. Not the whispers and echoes of the memory palace, but real human voices.
“Daahl?” she called. “Ramirez?”
No answer but crackling, hissing static.
After an eternity something came over the line. It was indistinct at first, lost in interference. But when it cleared, she heard Ramirez calling her name.
“We’re ready to come up,” she told him.
�
��Good. Hurry. We’d just about decided to let them go down and look for you.”
“Let who down?”
Another garbled, crackling stretch of static.
“What?”
“I said the strike’s over. The troops are pulling out. And there’s a General Nguyen looking for you.”
Nguyen. Christ.
“I need to send a message first. To ALEF.”
“Forget ALEF. It’s over. Just get up here. It’ll make sense as soon as you see the spinfeed.”
AMC Station: 9.11.48.
The news was all over the station. The streets were still, hushed, dark but for the flickering light of the livewalls and the low murmur of the crowds gathered around them.
Sharifi was on every channel. Interrupting news hour, NowNet programming, the last game of the Series. As they passed the All Nite Noodle, Li glanced at the livewall and saw the Mets and Yankees huddled on the infield, staring up at a two-story-high holomonitor Sharifi who smiled as she explained the unprecedented, unlooked-for, inconvenient miracle that was Compson’s World.
FreeNet’s AIs had been the first to catch the transmission, just as Sharifi must have planned it. Once they realized what they had, they spun it to every channel, every terminal, every press pool in UN space. In a matter of minutes, reporters were calling the General Assembly and the mining companies for position statements.
It wasn’t over yet, of course. There would be debates, compromises, and unholy alliances in the days to come. But they would happen onstream, in public. Compson’s fate wouldn’t be sealed in Nguyen’s office or other equally discreet offices. All of humanity, UN and Syndicate alike, would have a say in it. Sharifi had done that, at least. Her death, Mirce’s death, Cohen’s death had done that.
Security was deserted; everyone was on the street, dealing with the changes, trying to figure out who was in charge now. Li collapsed in a chair, rubbing her eyes. She wanted a shower. And then she needed to see Sharpe, probably.
She looked up. Bella stood over her.
“What are you still doing here?” she asked.
“Who killed her?” It was the first thing Bella had said to Li since they’d hit station.
“What does it matter, Bella? It’s over.”
“It’s not over for me.”
Li stared. The room was so silent she could hear her own pulse drumming in her ears. Bella’s body was taut, every muscle rigidly contracted. Her hands were trembling, the nails dirty and broken. There was blood on her. Her own blood. Li’s blood. Kintz’s blood.
“I have to know,” she said.
Li thought back to the vision of Sharifi in the glory hole. To the lost, desperate, adoring way Bella had looked at Sharifi. Whatever else Bella had done, she’d loved her. And been loved in return. Li was sure of that much.
“Voyt killed her,” she said.
“I don’t believe you.”
She looked Bella square in the face, unblinking. “It’s true.”
“I have a right to know. I need to know.”
Li sighed. “You know already, Bella. Think about it.”
Li saw the knowledge unfold in her, blossoming like a night flower. She put a hand over her mouth, turned on her heel, and walked across the holding pen into the bathroom. Li heard her retch again and again until there couldn’t have been anything left to bring up.
When she came back her face and arms were wet, and there was water on her clothes. But she looked clear-eyed, calm, reasonable. “Who was on-shunt?”
Li started to answer, but Bella spoke before she could. “It was Haas, wasn’t it? You don’t have to say it, just nod.”
Li nodded.
“What are you going to do about it?”
Li shifted in her chair. “What do you mean?”
“Are you going to arrest me?”
“You didn’t kill her, Bella. No one’s crazy enough to hold someone responsible for crimes committed when they’re under a shunt.”
“A crime was committed.” Bella still sounded rational, but Li was beginning to hear an ominous edge in her voice. “I thought that was what you were doing here. Finding her murderer. Punishing him. Do I have to show you the way to his office? Or was all that talk about right and wrong and punishment just something you made up to get me to believe in you?”
Li pushed her chair back and stood, swaying with exhaustion.
“Sit down, Bella.” She put a hand on Bella’s shoulder, steered her to a chair and pushed her into it. “Listen to yourself. You want me to march over and arrest Haas? On whose authority? He killed Sharifi on what amounts to Security Council orders. No one’s going to punish him. He won’t spend a day in jail, no matter what you or I do.”
“He killed her.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake! She was as good as selling information to the Syndicates.”
Neither of them breathed for a moment. Then Bella walked across the room, opened the door, stepped into the street. She turned and looked at Li, her eyes glistening. “So you won’t do it?”
“What’s the point?”
“What’s in it for you, you mean.”
Li grabbed the chair Bella had been sitting in and slammed it down hard enough to set the pens and coffee cups rattling on the nearby desks.
“Just leave, Bella. Leave and don’t come back and don’t ever talk to me again. Because if I have to look at your face for one more second, I swear I won’t be responsible for myself. I lost friends down there. And I killed four people to save your worthless carcass. What I do and why and what I get out of it is none of your fucking business!”
Bella stared for a moment, then turned on her heel and left.
Li stood gripping the chair, white-knuckled, while the big doors swung to and fro, regained their equilibrium, and came to a standstill. Then she borrowed someone’s forgotten uniform coat, curled up on the duty-room couch, and cried herself into a numb, dead, dreamless sleep.
* * *
She woke up falling.
She’d had enough stations shot out from under her in the war to know the feeling. AMC station had just lost rotational stability. And they were about to lose gravity.
Even as she sat up, the emergency systems kicked in and she felt the lurching, shuddering deceleration of four thousand permanent residents and all the clutter that went with them. Her arms and legs lightened, her stomach lurched as the grav lines wavered. The lights dimmed and the ventilation ducts overhead fell silent. The systems picked up again, but the rush of air was fainter now, the overhead panels dimmer. Someone had just shut down the massive Stirling cycle engines buried in the station’s core; they were running on emergency power.
There was still partial gravity, enough to make things easier than they would be in a very few minutes. She tapped in to the station net, trying to figure out what was going on; but the net was down, or she was locked out of it. She got carefully to her feet and began moving out into the main room of the HQ, where the duty officer hovered behind the counter looking bewildered by this sudden reversal of the laws of gravity as stationers knew them.
“What’s going on?” Li asked.
He started so violently at the sight of her that he bounced off the counter and had to scrabble for traction to keep from drifting sideways. Only then did she look down at herself and realize she hadn’t washed or changed since reaching the station.
“Christ. Sorry.” She rummaged through the lockers at the back of the room until she’d found something almost small enough. Meanwhile, others were starting to filter into HQ, all trying to figure out what had shut down the gravity and what they were supposed to do about it.
It wasn’t until the chief engineer called saying he couldn’t find Haas that she finally put the pieces together.
* * *
She burst into Haas’s office just as the precession ring ground to a stop and gravity gave out completely. It caught her off guard, and she careened across the room, her feet stranded in midair above the star-filled floorport.
She saw Haas out of the corner of her eye. He sat in the chair behind the big desk. His face looked peaceful, except for the mottled bruises spreading beneath his eyes.
Bella stood, or rather floated, above him.
She hung weightless over the tide-swept slab of the crystal desk. Her hair writhed like a vipers’ nest. Her eyes were closed, her face pale, her chest rising and falling in a sinister parody of a sleeper’s breathing. Her smile sent cold fingers brushing down Li’s spine.
Something—her own subconscious or one of Cohen’s remnant systems—nudged at her, prompting her to run a network scan.
Spitting, flaring lines of current shot out from Bella, splicing into each of the station’s embedded systems, running back and forth between station and planet, between surface and mine shaft. And all that immense power was being channeled into the single frail wire that connected Bella’s jack to the derms at Haas’s temples.
She was breaking him. Slowly, pitilessly, irresistibly. She had locked him into the loop shunt somehow and was running the whole vast power of the worldmind through him, killing him.
Li looked at Haas, slumped over the glowing desk. She looked at Bella’s peaceful face, at the hair circling her head like the flaming corona of an eclipsed star.
She is coming down from the mountains, she thought. Singing. With stones in her hands.
She called Security.
“I’m in Haas’s office,” she said. “Don’t send anyone. Everything’s fine here.”
SLOW TIME
[There lies] the mountain called Atlas, very tapered and round; so lofty, moreover, that the top (it is said) cannot be seen, the clouds never quitting it either summer or winter… The natives are reported not to eat any living thing and never to have any dreams.
Spin State Page 51
