Chris Moriarty - Spin State

Nothing happened.

She knew what was supposed to be happening, what she hoped was happening. Somewhere in the labyrinth of her internal systems, an encryption program should be filtering through her hard files, searching out the hidden chinks in her internal security programs. If it worked, then Korchow would have opened up a secure protocol in her datafiles—a protocol through which he could pass her datafiles that would never show up on her directories, could never be accessed by Nguyen or any of the Corps psychtechs who had clearance to access her hard files. If it worked, she would see nothing. And neither would her recorder. If it didn’t work, she’d be up on treason charges as soon as she checked in for her next scheduled maintenance.

And then there was the third possibility, one so disastrous it didn’t bear thinking about. The possibility that Korchow’s program would clash with one of the private kinks she had thrown into her system.

Please let Korchow have gotten this right , she prayed to whatever saint looked out for cheats and traitors. And please let me be lucky .

When the data window opened in her peripheral vision, she caught her breath and realized she’d been holding it. She maxed the window, scrolled down the familiar gridlines of her datebook, and waited for Korchow’s encrypted window to appear.

It opened inside the datebook, an embedded halfscreen that showed up on her retina but left no record of its presence anywhere else in her internal systems. She could read it, work on it, store it, and nothing but the datebook would show in her files. When she had finished with it, Korchow’s program would wipe every trace of it from her systems. She hoped.

She leaned forward, closing her eyes and putting the heels of her hands against her eyelids in order to get the clearest picture of the data that was scrolling up the screen in front of her. There were four files. The first contained detailed schematics and navigational data for a massive orbital station that Li had no trouble recognizing as Alba, the Corps’s high-security installation in orbit around Barnard’s Star.

The second file contained an exhaustive description of security protocols, patrol routes and schedules, lab personnel protocols. The third held information on electronic security measures. The fourth file contained interface and requirements specs for what Li assumed had to be Sharifi’s intraface software.

As she looked at it, she felt a spinning sense of vertigo. It was obviously, flagrantly, completely illegal tech. It could only have been designed for use on an Emergent AI and a posthuman subject, in contravention of more wetware laws than she could count. And yet a dozen little tags and quirks told her that this software could only have been developed at Alba, by the same UNSC programmers who had designed her own software. Nguyen might have had to steal the wetware, but the rest of the intraface—the hardware, the psychware, the source code that ran the intraface into the Emergent—had been sitting at Alba all the time waiting for Sharifi, or any XenoGen construct, to pick them up and use them.

She shut the files, checked that they had downloaded properly, took the datacube out of her pocket, and flushed it down the toilet.

When she walked back into the front room, three moderately pretty girls were huddled halfway down the bar, eyeing Korchow’s man like crows parceling up a particularly fresh piece of carrion. She stepped up and took the seat beside him before the girls could initiate active stalking.

“What’s your name?” she asked. As she spoke, she could feel three resentful stares boring into her back like virusteel-sheathed augers.

Korchow’s man turned sad velvet brown eyes on her and answered as seriously as if she had asked a question that the fate of worlds turned on. “Arkady,” he said. “Very pleased to meet you.” He had the same curiously formal turn of phrase Bella had, the same air of believing that life was a serious and precarious business and not to be laughed at.

“Buy you a drink?” Li asked.

They made the usual small talk. When the beers came, still warm, still flat, they drank together. Arkady sipped his beer with a cautious frown that made Li suspect he wasn’t a drinker.

“Well?” he said finally.

Li glanced around. “You ask a lot.”

“Do I?”

“Maybe too much.”

He paused and touched his beer to his lips again. “But perhaps,” he said, “you have a friend who could help?”

A friend. Meaning Cohen. “Perhaps.”

“Have you asked him?”

“Not yet.”

Arkady’s handsome face froze for an instant, and Li saw what she should have suspected, what Cohen himself had tried to tell her. She wasn’t what they wanted. Or at least she wasn’t all they wanted. They needed Cohen. Li and her tawdry little secret had just been the bait they used to draw him.

“We would appreciate his help a great deal, of course,” Arkady was saying, “and the task brings its own rewards.”

“That doesn’t—” Li started to say. Then she stopped cold.

The task brings its own rewards. And what had Korchow told her? You’ll have to undergo a minor surgical procedure.

They were going to give Cohen a working intraface. With her, Li, on the other end of it.

She shuddered. “I’ll pass the message on,” she said, sticking to the troubles of the moment. “How can I get you an answer?”

“You don’t have to. Just be on the Helena shuttle the day after tomorrow.”

“And?”

“And that’s all you need to know.”

“Fine.” Li stood up to go, but Arkady put a hand to her arm, stopping her.

“You still haven’t told me what you want.”

“My life back,” she snapped, too angry to keep her voice down.

“Perhaps you want what we were going to give your predecessor?”

Li turned around slowly. “Voyt, you mean?” But even as she asked, she knew it was Sharifi. Korchow had been paying Sharifi, not blackmailing her. And Sharifi had sold him the information he wanted—the same information everyone wanted. She had promised him the missing datasets. “So what was Sharifi asking for?” she asked casually.

“Not what. Who.”

Li’s stomach churned, and she felt a dizzy nausea flooding over her. Of course Sharifi hadn’t had the money to buy out Bella’s contract. She had bartered; bartered something that was far more important to the Syndicates than a single B Series construct. Sharifi had traded Bose-Einstein technology, violating every security clearance she had passed during the course of her long and productive career, violating the Espionage and Sedition Act, betraying the UN and everyone who depended on it for survival.

And she had done it for Bella.

Three men were arguing in the street when Li stepped out into the arcade again. Something about a dog, she thought. Two of them looked like brothers. The third was a small, tired man who looked bruised and sickly under the raking light of the halogens.

A skinny girl stepped into Li’s peripheral vision, hawking smuggled cigarettes, weaving back and forth under the scaffolding to avoid the dripping water. She had cheap smokes. Unfiltered. The kind you could only get in places where people didn’t care much about the sky-high cost of lung bugs. Li turned aside, fishing in her pocket for the little wad of bills she carried.

When she turned around, a crowd had formed around the three men in the road.

The two brothers were still shouting, but one of them now had his hands hooked under the other’s armpits and was dragging him back into the shadows of the opposite arcade. A bystander knelt and picked a baseball bat out of the mud.

The third man stood alone in the muddy street, punch-drunk, blood streaming down his face and mixing with the gritty rain.