Chris Moriarty - Spin State

She stood, shaking, shocked and ashamed that simply sitting alone in the dark for a few hours had so undone her. She knew she should be wondering where Ramirez meant to take her, thinking about how to get control of the situation. But all she could really think about was getting out of this ghost-ridden hole. That and trying not to fall down.

Follow , Ramirez signaled.

She followed.

Another man walked beside Ramirez, one whose name she didn’t know and whom she had never seen before. Not Louie. After a few turnings, Ramirez disappeared and Li and the nameless hijacker continued on without him. Someone else joined them as they slipped down the dark corridor, but when Li tried to look back the man just grunted and pushed her forward.

They moved deeper into the complex, back into the windowless labs under the shadow of the cliff face. They had traveled almost a kilometer when the hijacker opened an unmarked door and Li felt a waft of cold underground air hit her face. He stood aside and waved her through. As she passed she heard the gentle snick of a bullet being chambered.

That’s it then , said a small voice in the pit of her stomach. She saw a blank wall in her mind’s eye, heard a single shot.

“Down,” the hijacker said and pushed her down a steep flight of stairs into darkness.

Thirty narrow steps of steel-reinforced concrete. A turn. A passage. Then forty more steps, these rough and uneven underfoot. Then a long, twisting passage that dipped and jigged but nonetheless kept trending unmistakably downward.

The person behind Li stumbled and cried out. Bella.

As they descended, the walls and floor began to run with water. The rock came alive around them, cracking and moaning like a house built on quicksand. Somehow, unbelievably, they were in the mine. Li tried to recall the location of the birthlabs. No drifts, no shafts, no passages ran within a kilometer of the complex. She was sure of that. Still, they were in a mineworks. It just wasn’t one that showed up on the company maps. And if her internals were to be trusted, someone was stockpiling live-cut condensate here.

They hit a junction. Their captor lifted his lantern, and its light threw watery reflections on pooled runoff, picked out the stubbed-off ends of mined-out crystal deposits. It took him two turns around the walls to find what he was looking for: faint marks scratched into the rock at face level. Before the lantern moved on, Li saw a crescent moon, a pyramid, an eight-legged beast.

“This way,” he said, and pushed them toward the left-hand turning.

Li had grown so used to the dark by the time they surfaced that the first glimpse of daylight was painful. They clattered up a flight of gridplate stairs, passed down a long hallway full of uninsulated wiring, and reached a tall steel door bolted from the inside.

Bella leaned against the wall, panting and shivering. The hijacker reached into his pack and handed them each a rolled-up piece of cloth. “Put these on.”

Li unfolded the cloth and saw that it was an Interfaither’s chador. She wrapped the long bolt of green cloth around her, pulling it over her head and face, and helped Bella do the same. Then they stepped into the hazy sunlight of a late-fall afternoon in Shantytown.

For the next half hour, they hurried through a bewildering series of alleys and courtyards, spiraling deep into the heart of the old quarter. Just when Li had finally accepted that she was lost beyond any possibility of reorienting herself, they turned aside and stepped through an unmarked door into a low dark passage.

The hallway smelled of rust and boiled vegetein, and it was so dark that Li heard rather than saw Bella behind her. The guard gestured toward a closed airlock at the far end of the passage, and Li put her hand to the touchplate. The door irised open. She stepped through, blinking in the dusty, sun-strafed air of the dome beyond—and saw just who she should have expected to see.

Daahl.

As her eyes adjusted to the bright hazy air under the dome, she realized that Cartwright stood in the half-open airlock behind him—an airlock that could only lead to the little office where Daahl and Ramirez had talked to her less than a week ago. Cartwright shifted restlessly as she walked in, craning his head like a dog listening for distant footfalls. She’d never seen him outside the mine, she realized; he carried a blind man’s stick up here in the daylight world and his eyes were vague, milky, moonblind.

“What the hell is going on?” she asked as Bella stepped through into the dome behind her.

Daahl bent over the comm terminal on the table. “Arkady?” he said when the connection went through. “Tell him we’re ready.”

For a moment nothing happened. Daahl and Cartwright just sat staring across the table, waiting. It took Li a moment to realize they were watching Bella, not her.

Bella gave a little shiver as the shunt came on-line, and then she was gone.

“Excellent,” Korchow said, standing up. “Excellent. And the kidnapping was caught on tape? You made it look convincing?”

“The ransom note’s on its way to AMC station right now. We should have an answer in a few hours.” Daahl grinned. “Though of course the negotiations could be lengthy.”

“Right,” Korchow said. “Then I believe our business with each other is concluded.”

“Not quite,” Daahl said.

A tall figure appeared in the airlock behind them, its face shadowed by the sunbeams raking down through the streaky geodesic panels. Ramirez.

But he looked sleeker, glossier, finer. He had never moved with that fey, walking-on-eggshells grace. His eyes had never burned with the cold fire that now shone behind them.

He bent over her, touched a fleck of dried blood at the corner of her mouth. “Catherine,” he said. “Are you all right? If I’d suspected things would get that exciting, I’d have made them find another way to get you here.”

“Cohen,” she whispered, not knowing how to begin to ask him what was happening.

Ramirez was so much taller than Li that she had to throw her head back to meet his eyes. It bothered her. She was used to looking Cohen in the eye, used to being able to dominate him physically—a domination that mattered to her, she now saw, even if it was meaningless to him.

“He wasn’t to be involved,” Korchow said, speaking to Daahl and Cartwright.

Daahl shrugged. “ALEF approached us.”

“ALEF!” Korchow spat the word out as if it were a curse.

“God works through unlikely hands,” Cartwright said.

“Oh for pity’s sake,” Korchow snapped. “What did the AIs promise you?”

“A planetary network,” Daahl answered. “Under union control.”

“Then they’re lying. They can’t possibly deliver that.”

“We already have,” Cohen said. “The beginnings of one, anyway. What do you think I’m shunting through?”

“I brought you in to do a job,” Korchow told Cohen. “This isn’t it.”

Cohen made an impatient movement, a neat flick of one hand that was so characteristic of him it took Li’s breath away. “I’ll do your little job, Korchow. But not routing through your network. I’ve spent three centuries making sure no one had that kind of power over me. I’m not about to hand it to you.”

“So why go to them?” Korchow jerked Bella’s head toward Daahl and Cartwright. “And don’t tell me it’s selfless interest in the cause. Or are they your pet terrorist group of the week?”

Cohen flexed Ramirez’s big hands until Li heard the knuckles crack. “They had what I needed,” he said. “An on-site Emergent with Bose-Einstein capacity.”

Korchow started.

“Yes.” Cohen smiled. “The field AI.”