Chris Moriarty - Spin State

“It’ll be harder without you,” Li admitted, but that was as far as she was willing to go.

“Have you thought about what happens if you get caught?”

Li looked at the dark night beyond the tall windows. If she got caught, it would be treason. And treason had been a firing-squad crime since the outbreak of the Syndicate Wars. That was assuming that the Corps would let the hero of Gilead come up on treason charges. A quick shot to the head and a cover story about a “regrettable training accident” seemed more likely. It was what Li herself would do faced with such a betrayal.

“You could at least tell me why,” Cohen said.

“What do you care? You want the intraface. I’m showing you how to get it.”

“I don’t want it that much. And I doubt you’re helping me get it out of the goodness of your heart. What did Nguyen suck you into?”

“Nguyen has nothing to do with it.”

“Really, Catherine.” Someone who knew Cohen less well would have seen only the bemused smile on his face, but Li could hear the angry bite in his voice. “If you’re going to lie, at least have the respect to lie about things I can’t check up on.”

Li kicked at the table leg and was pleased to see she’d put a dent in it. “You’re in no position to accuse me of lying. Or anything else.”

“I think,” Cohen said slowly, “the time has come to discuss Metz.” A dark flame flickered behind Chiara’s eyes, and there was a rehearsed quality to the words that made Li wonder how long Cohen had been working his nerve up for this conversation.

“I’ve said everything I have to say about it,” Li told him.

Chiara’s long-lashed eyes narrowed. “You shelved it, didn’t you?”

It wasn’t a question. And even if it had been, it wasn’t one Li planned to answer. After a moment he shrugged and tried another line of attack.

“All right, then. This run. It’s too dangerous. And you’re not a traitor. So why?”

“ Why isn’t your business. I want a job done, and I’m paying for it. Paying with something I know you want. Let’s stick to that. Then at least I’ll know what you’re after. And when I can expect you to walk out and leave me twisting in the wind.”

“I thought we were done talking about Metz,” he said. “And anyone can make a mistake, Catherine.”

“Anyone didn’t kill Kolodny for a damn piece of circuitry.”

Cohen went so still he might have turned to wax. He stared at her, mouth slightly open, until the only movement in the room was the play of a breeze from the garden over Chiara’s brown curls. Cohen looked like the stuffing had gone out of him. A pretty doll abandoned in the corner by children grown too old to play with toys.

“That’s not you talking,” he said at last. “What else did Helen whisper in your ear about me?”

“None of your goddamn business.”

Cohen huffed out a little breath that Li might have thought was a laugh in different circumstances. Then he stared into the air above her head, as if he were trying to access a hard-to-find piece of data.

“Oh,” he said, when he found it. “So that’s it. What a nasty little piece of work she is, when you scratch the nice manners and the freshly pressed uniform.” He leaned forward across the table, pinning Li with a hard stare. “I’ve gotten over being surprised that you believe the things she says about me, but for what it’s worth the link cut out because of an internal malfunction. Or so I thought, anyway. Now I’m not so sure.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning I’m putting two and two together and finally getting four instead of three.”

Cohen paused until Li began to wonder if he was going to say anything more at all. “When did you start planning the Metz raid?” he asked at last. “About four months ago? Something like that?”

Li nodded.

“Well, I took on a new associate around then. A newly emerged sentient from the Toffoli Group. His main recommendation was that he’d done a contract job for Nguyen.”

Li stirred impatiently, not sure where this was leading.

“Anyway,” Cohen went on, “he had a beast of a feedback loop. Far worse than the mandatory program and running on a brute force, everything but the kitchen sink program that was impossible to work with. I was negotiating with Toffoli to put him on my global compliance program. They kept delaying, for reasons that seemed… well… less than reasonable. And the problems on Metz, I am almost certain, came from that feedback loop.”

“I don’t see what this has to do with anything, Cohen.”

“Don’t you? Nguyen holds the purse strings for all the TechComm R D. She has Toffoli’s research division in her pocket. The Toffoli AI was her spy all along. He’s how she was able to cut me off on Metz.”

Li stared. “What are you going to do about it?”

“I’ve already done it,” Cohen said. “He’s gone.”

“But what if he talks to someone—”

Cohen looked at her out of Chiara’s guileless eyes. “I said he was gone. I meant it.”

Li looked away. Cohen started to speak, then stopped. For a moment they both sat staring at the floor, at the books, at the pictures on the walls. At anything but each other.

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“I tell you that Nguyen was planning to cut me out of the shunt at Metz before we even shipped out for the mission, and you have nothing to say about it? What are you thinking?”

“That I don’t know who to believe, you or Nguyen.”

“You believe the one you trust,” Cohen said.

“And why the hell should I trust you?”

He shrugged. “There’s no should about it. You either do or you don’t. You have a lot to learn about life if you think people have to earn your trust.”

“You can’t talk your way around this one, Cohen.”

He shook his head and went on as if she hadn’t spoken. “You don’t trust people because they’re a sure bet or even a good risk. You trust them because the risk that you’ll lose them is worse than the risk that they’ll hurt you. That took me a few centuries to learn, Catherine, but I did learn it. And you’d better catch on faster than I did. The way things are going right now, I don’t think you have a century to spare.”

Li stood up without answering, walked across the room, and stepped into the garden. It was night in Zona Angel. A moist breeze played across her face, carrying the smell of earth and wet leaves. Frogs and a few night birds sang in the green branches. All the little live things Cohen loved so much. A bird warbled from some hidden refuge in the wall above her, and her oracle identified it as a whippoorwill. It’s beautiful , she thought—and wondered if she would still have thought so if she hadn’t known its name.

Cohen came up to stand behind her, so close that she could smell the fresh-scrubbed scent of Chiara’s skin.

“I can’t imagine living in the Ring,” Li said. “How can people live somewhere where every time you look up at the sky, you see your biggest mistake staring right back at you?”

“Some people would say that being forced to examine one’s mistakes is a good thing.”

“Not when it’s too late to fix them.”

“It’s not too late. And they are fixing it.”

Li threw an exasperated look at Cohen. “That’s a story for schoolkids. They’re still killing each other down there. Christ, my own mother went to Ireland to fight. She had chronic vitamin A deficiency from living underground. Now why the hell would people fight to keep a country they can’t even survive in?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, I do. Because they like fighting. Too much to give it up, even when there’s nothing left to fight for.”