Chris Moriarty - Spin State

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 from 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.