Chris Moriarty - Spin State

A gust of wind buffeted the flophouse, and the big sheet of viruflex that sealed the window snapped and billowed like a ship’s sail. Bella jumped, trembling. “Why don’t you believe me?” she whispered.

“I do believe you,” Li said. “I do. I just… I don’t know what it means.”

Li had put a hand on Bella’s shoulder while they talked, and now Bella turned into her arms and buried her head in the hollow of her neck. Li started to pull away, then realized the other woman was crying. She put her arms around her, reluctantly, and found herself patting Bella’s fine-boned shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” Bella said, “it’s just…”

“No, I’m sorry,” Li said. “It’s none of my business what you do. You didn’t promise me anything.”

“I would, though.” Bella looked up at her. The violet eyes had cleared, though there were still tears hanging on her eyelashes. Bella reached a pale finger up and touched Li’s mouth, just where Cohen had touched her. “What I said about… you and Hannah. I was just angry.”

Oh, Christ, Li thought. It’s time to leave. Now. So why did she feel like her feet were bolted to the floor?

Someone coughed. Li jumped away from Bella like a dog caught with its nose in the trash can. “Arkady,” she said.

“No,” Cohen said from the doorway. “It’s me.”

“I—”

“I have to go,” Bella said. “Korchow will want me.”

Cohen turned and watched Bella down the hall until they both heard the slap of the blanket against the airlock and the shuffle of her soft-soled shoes moving away across the dome.

Li started to speak, but he put a hand up. “You don’t have to explain yourself to me.” He lounged against the doorframe in a casual posture that Li suspected was a put-on, and when he spoke, it was in that neutral, inflectionless voice that she’d long ago learned meant storms ahead. “Watch out, Catherine.”

“Watch out for what?” Li asked. But the answer was obvious; Bella’s perfume still hung in the air between them.

“She’s out for revenge. And revenge is a tricky kind of idea. It makes people shortchange the future. It makes them take the kind of risks that can drag everyone down.”

“Now you’re the expert in human motivation?”

Cohen shrugged. “Fine,” he said, as coolly as if they were discussing the weather. “Do what you want. But I think you know she’s using you.”

“Then she has plenty of company, doesn’t she?”

Cohen just sighed and inspected Arkady’s fingernails. When had he learned to make her feel so damn guilty by standing there doing nothing?

“I figured out what Sharifi was up to,” Li said. “Now that it’s too late to do anything about it. She was the one who sent the message from Haas’s quarters. Bella gave her his password. Nguyen’s ‘corrupted’ file was actually encrypted—encrypted so that only Gould could decode it. They used a set of those stupid charm necklaces as their entanglement source. Of all goddamn things. A piece of costume jewelry!”

She felt a curious tickling sensation that she realized was Cohen accessing her files, seeing Gould’s cheap necklace, the cleaning girl in the airport bathroom, Bella’s “gift” from Sharifi.

“All right,” he said, visibly thinking about it. “So she found a ready-made source of entanglement. Maybe she and Gould even set the necklace thing up as a joke, long before she knew she’d actually need it. They used the necklaces as a one-time pad. Unbreakable encryption that Sharifi didn’t have to go through TechComm or any of her corporate backers to get. Now no one can read Sharifi’s transmission unless they have Gould’s pendant, which is conveniently stuck in slow time with her until—”

“Until tomorrow,” Li interrupted.

They stared at each other.

“It’s like Hannah,” Cohen said finally. “A joke, practically, hiding what she knew we’d all be looking for in a cheap trinket. But where does it leave us?”

“That message was Sharifi’s insurance policy, for one thing. Along with whatever she put in that storage compartment on the Medusa .”

“Well, her policy didn’t work, did it?” Cohen said, and then flinched at the harshness of his words. “Poor Hannah. What a damn mess.”

“I don’t get it,” he continued after a moment. “Sharifi gets her results. Then she encrypts them and sends unreadable versions to Nguyen, Korchow, Freetown. Then she erases every trace of her work off the AMC system. Then she—at least we have to assume it was her—tells Gould to go to Freetown. And gives Bella her used-up crystal after making her promise not to tell anyone about the encrypted message. Why? Why go to such absurd lengths to protect information and then send it to so many people? And if she wanted to spread the dataset over all of UN and Syndicate space, then why use the crystals? Why encrypt it so that only Gould’s crystal could make the dataset readable?”

“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.