Chris Moriarty - Spin State

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Spin State: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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From a stunning new voice in hard science fiction comes the thrilling story of one woman’s quest to wrest truth from chaos, love from violence, and reality from illusion in a post-human universe of emergent AIs, genetic constructs, and illegal wetware...
UN Peacekeeper Major Catherine Li has made thirty-seven faster-than-light jumps in her lifetime—and has probably forgotten more than most people remember. But that’s what backup hard drives are for. And Li should know; she’s been hacking her memory for fifteen years in order to pass as human. But no memory upgrade can prepare Li for what she finds on Compson’s World: a mining colony she once called home and to which she is sent after a botched raid puts her on the bad side of the powers that be. A dead physicist who just happens to be her cloned twin. A missing dataset that could change the interstellar balance of power and turn a cold war hot. And a mining “accident” that is starting to look more and more like murder…
Suddenly Li is chasing a killer in an alien world miles underground where everyone has a secret. And one wrong turn in streamspace, one misstep in the dark alleys of blackmarket tech and interstellar espionage, one risky hookup with an AI could literally blow her mind.

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Her right shoulder was all wrong; she was favoring it before she had climbed ten meters. Korchow’s hired medics had tried to patch it up again—another jury-rigged field repair on top of the last one—but the whole arm was going to have to be stripped out and rewired. Not now, though. Now it had a job to get through.

She saw the fan turrets a long way off, knobby sixteen-meter towers that poked out of the station’s skin like mushrooms. She needed the fourth turret, and she counted down the line carefully, knowing that a mistake would mean an ugly death.

02:49:07.

She reached it seven seconds behind time.

Had she climbed too slowly? Was there something wrong with her internals? With Cohen’s schematics? She crouched under the turret, checked her systems, and cursed.

By her reckoning the turret was a good twenty meters farther from her landing point than their schematics had said it was. Any way you looked at it, the miscalculation spelled trouble.

Though Li might have fallen behind schedule, Alba hadn’t. At exactly 2:50 she felt a thud and shiver under her feet, looked up, and saw a glittering ice cloud burst from the vent hole. Dust and condensed moisture, freezing as they hit hard vacuum in the new morning’s first venting cycle; the station was getting ready for the CO 2overload of the coming workday.

She huddled in the lee of the turret until the ice cloud dispersed. Then she put her faceplate to the tower’s virusteel skin and listened as the vibration of the fans slowed and finally died. She imagined miter seals shutting twenty meters below, closing off the flow of pressurized air that drove the turbines. She tried not to imagine what would happen if both sets of seals opened while she was still in the turret. Well, it would be quick, anyway. That was something. She clipped onto the guard line that ringed the bottom of the turret and tapped the unseal code into the wrist plate of her suit. ‹Cannot unseal,› the suit told her internals. ‹Insufficient atmospheric pressure outside.›

‹Manual override,› she sent.

‹There is no air outside,› the suit said in deliberate tones designed to break through the dangerous euphoria of oxygen debt. ‹Are you sure you want to remove your life-support equipment?›

‹Unseal,› she sent again, and keyed in the emergency override code. A moment later, she heard the hiss of escaping air.

She pulled off her helmet. Her pressure suit activated as the hard vac hit it, dropping its reflective visor over her face. She felt the first bite of the burning cold that would leach through the suit’s thin membrane and kill her in a matter of minutes if she didn’t get inside. She removed the rest of her support suit, rolled it into a tight bundle, and stuffed it into her already-iced-over helmet. She tossed the helmet out into space and shot it with a disruptor blast, frying its circuits and making it indistinguishable from the rest of the abandoned deadware that littered Mars orbit.

No turning back now. The pressure suit would keep her alive for fifteen minutes in hard vac. Twenty at most. The amphibian genes engineered into her chromosomes for cold-shipping would buy her a little more time on top of that. But an hour in the pressure suit and it wouldn’t matter if she got what she’d come for, or if Alba security caught her.

She nudged the bladelike turbine arms to make sure there was no spring tension left in them. She wondered how Korchow pulled the inside man into his web. Either money was changing hands, and a lot of it, or Li wasn’t the only one with a dirty little secret. She took a breath, acutely aware that it was one of a limited number of breaths left in the suit. She put everything out of her mind except the next ten minutes. Then she wormed through the jagged half circle between the blades and into the chute.

02:51:43.

She pushed, legs straining, lungs burning. She made the best time she could, but she was climbing against the full rotational gravity of the station, and her enhanced strength and reflexes were little help in such tight quarters.

In the end, it was her haste that did her in. She took a wrong turn, disoriented in the narrow tunnels, strayed into one of the lateral vents that lined the inner bladder. She fetched up against the dust-fuzzed vent of a baffle like an exhausted salmon. She was so close. She could smell yeast, feel the soft, growing air of the algae bay on her face. But it was a cheat, a dead end. And the only way out was back up the shaft, into the teeth of the turbines.

She hit the junction with just fourteen seconds left. She was overheating. Her internals were hitting the red zone, warning lights flashing all over her peripheral vision. Too bad. They’d either fail or they wouldn’t. And if they failed, she wouldn’t be around to regret it. She hauled herself forward, internals blaring, her heart banging out a tempo as hot and urgent as the warning lights.

02:52:38.

She hit the end of the chute suddenly, with less than twelve seconds left, and slammed into the miter seal.

It wouldn’t budge.

At first she thought it was locked, that the inside man had betrayed her. Then she saw the problem; the hinges were clogged with a greasy coat of dust, hair, and organic matter from the hydroponics bays, all the things that drifted on the air currents of the station and washed ashore in the stagnant back eddies of the outtake ducts.

Now that she saw it, it was so obvious she could have kicked herself. But then the things that got you killed always were obvious. Obvious and stupid. This door hadn’t been opened in years. Decades maybe. Not since the last mold epidemic. And because it wasn’t really life-support vital, it would be chronically neglected. A system you could shortchange without getting caught. A system that went to the bottom of the list when it needed a new part—and stayed there.

Korchow’s man had done what he promised all right; she had heard the sharp snick of the catch flipping open, could still hear a trapped-fly buzzing from the hinge hydraulics. But flipping a switch with the name and number of the vent on it was one thing. Actually getting the door to open in realspace was something entirely different. And Li was stuck in realspace.

She poked her fingers through the parts of the door she could reach and scrabbled frantically at the scummy deposits. Her breath rasped in her throat. Her nails scratched on metal. Cohen had warned her about the need for silence, told her there could be people in the bays next to the vent, but she was beyond caring. The whole universe had narrowed into one pure and burning thought—getting out alive.

Finally she felt some give. She twisted in the cramped duct, wrenching her body around, using feet, hands, anything, to get a purchase. She gave a tremendous kick and drove into the seal shoulder first. It held. She felt a wrenching pain in her shoulder and a cold burn like a blade being drawn down the length of her triceps. She backed up the chute and rammed the seal again. It gave a little. But not enough. Not nearly enough.

Twenty meters below her, she heard a click, then the whirr of circuits flipping on to feed power to the turbines. She tried to get her left shoulder forward, protect her bad one, but she didn’t have the space or the time to get turned around. She flung herself at it again, right shoulder first. A lick of cold ran down her arm from shoulder to wrist and her hand went numb… but the vent opened. She shot through just as the outer vent opened, and found herself hanging along the wall above an algae tray.

A full atmosphere of air pressure hit the miter seal. It slammed shut behind her like a bear trap, and she dropped into the bright, humid air of the hydroponics dome.

02:53:19.

She crept into a sheltered space between the dome struts and a dripping-full rack of algae trays. She crouched there, panting, waiting for her internals to settle down a little, waiting while she pulled her head together.

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