Chris Moriarty - Spin State

Evaluate and adapt, she told herself. Accept what is, and act on it. She was behind schedule. They had somehow gotten bad information. Bad information that could still make or break the mission. Her arm was numb, weak, close to useless. But she was in. She was through the most dangerous part of the run, and the only way out now was through.

She checked the open sunlit expanse of the dome in front of her. Empty. She stepped forward—and slipped on something slick and wet. She caught her balance, looked down and saw blood dripping from her right hand and pooling on the decking.

Her combat-application virucules would break her blood down, destroying telltale genetic evidence, leaving only the sterile universal-type plasma the field medics needed for their IV feeds. But in the meantime, there was still blood on the floor. A lot of it. Rose red drops on the silver deck plating, a glistening gingerbread trail for the guards to follow—straight to her.

She unzipped her pressure suit, pulled up the thermal shirt she wore under it, and ripped, wincing at the loud sound of tearing fabric. It ripped easily though, and it was elastic enough to make a tourniquet. She knotted it around her arm and sealed up her pressure suit again, being careful to activate the reflective visor; it wouldn’t do to get caught on vid there. When she had stanched the bleeding, she surveyed the damage to her suit. It was repairing itself, or trying to. But the tear was so big that she doubted the smart fibers would form a solid seal again. And if the suit wasn’t spacetight, how the hell would she ever get back to the Starling?

She shook her head, forced everything out of her mind but the immediate problem. Get to the lab comp. And don’t bleed all over the floors doing it. She’d worry about the pressure suit and all the rest if and when she had to.

Alba: 28.10.48.

03:12:09.

Getting to the comp was easy. Li had expected to have trouble with the DNA reader at the start of the last corridor, but to her surprise, the field dropped almost instantly to let her through. She shivered with apprehension. Did Nguyen know more than Li had told her? Had she slipped her an ace under the table for her own inscrutable reasons? Or was someone else at work here?

She slipped down the corridor, alert for patrols, scanning the labyrinth of ducts and wires that lined the ceilings for the faint pulses of security cameras. Nothing. Could a high-security lab really be so lightly protected? Or was it just that this was Alba, and the Corps knew that no thief who managed to breach the orbital fortress would ever get out safely? She counted down the doors until she reached the one that separated her from the lab spoke’s mainframe. Here goes , she thought. She slipped the lockpick kit out of her suit’s kangaroo pocket and unrolled it on the deck.

The lock work went slowly; she was used to having Catrall do this. But Catrall was dead. And even if he weren’t, he wouldn’t be helping her on this job. Not when it meant selling out Alba to the people who had killed so many of their comrades on Gilead.

03:19:40.

Footsteps. She froze. Were they coming toward her or moving away? Toward. She rolled up her tools, ducked around the curve, and climbed into the shadows of the ceiling.

Two women walked by. Guards, not scientists; she could hear their lug-soled boots, and the coarse, hard-edged slang that was the UN grunt’s native tongue. “Catch the spins today?” one of them asked. “Assembly voted PKs to Compson’s to get the mines open.”

“What a shit hole. Well, long as we don’t have to do it.”

“Do what? Go to Compson’s or open the mines?”

“Either. I didn’t sign on to shovel coal. Or shoot miners. Whole planet’s fucked, ever since the Riots. Ask me, we oughta just cut ’em loose and kick ’em into hard vac.”

“And we would if they could get those synthcrystals over in Lab Eight to format properly.”

“Yeah, yeah. And if wishes were horses…”

“…horses wouldn’t be extinct!”

The guards laughed and their voices faded away down the corridor.

Li counted to twenty, holding her breath, then dropped to the floor. When she got back to the lab door, she saw something that nearly stopped her heart: her own quantum pick, sticking out of the control panel like a hangnail.

For one panicked moment she thought the patrol had seen it, that they were coming back for her, that the whole lazy gossiping act had been nothing but subterfuge. Then she got a grip on herself. It had been no trick. Luck had been with her; the two women had walked right past the pick, busy talking, and never seen it. The one plus of storming an impregnable fortress was that no one expected to turn a corner and catch an intruder.

Inside the lab, Li saw her target immediately: a Park 35-Zed, the biggest mainframe made by any of the top military contractors. She walked around it apprehensively, looking for the input port. She found the port on one side of the mainframe, in a little tech’s cubbyhole equipped with a fold-down desk and rolling stool. She deactivated her pressure suit and peeled back the hood to bare the socket at her temple. She sat on the stool, keeping her feet planted beneath her center of gravity so she could get up fast if she had to. She pulled the wire out of her pocket.

She thought of the times she’d ordered Kolodny to jack into hostile systems. Then she told herself that she wasn’t jacking into a hostile system this time. She was just accessing the external communications program and dialing out to Cohen, waiting on the Starling. And the system wasn’t going to be hostile, because if everything went right, it would never know she’d been there. It didn’t help. She opened the main menu and began scanning through the settings, going as fast as she could without alerting any AI or human sysops, trying to make sure she wasn’t setting off any unseen trip wires. The Zed was more powerful than the smaller comps she was used to manipulating, and the direct line gave her a disorienting, vertiginous speed of connection.

It was like diving into the spinstream—but a stream without VR, a stream of pure numbers. The numbers fed directly into Li’s brain, and her oracle processed them at speeds beyond reach of any keyboard operator. But she still had to process them. And, even skewed by her own interface settings, there was something in the feel of these numbers that hinted at the vast, alien mind of the semisentient behind them. There was no mistaking this for surfing the spinstream, not if you had a feel for the code you were running. Streamspace was alive, in its own way, but only as a planet or a star system was alive. This was different. Here Li felt with every calculation, every operation, that she was inside something. Or someone. She found herself ducking and dodging mentally, not wanting to come to grips with the presence behind the Zed’s operating programs. She thought of Sharifi, trapped in the pit, locked mind-to-mind with the semisentient field AI of Compson’s orbital relay, and shuddered. It was an image burst straight from the subterranean depths of her nightmares.

Still, the lab AI remained comfortingly passive as she accessed screen after screen, gradually closing in on the back door that Cohen had shown her in their final planning sessions. All that changed when she tried to dial out. The moment she opened the outside line, she felt a shift, a push in the system. It reminded her of the ear-popping wall of air that swept through a ship when someone breached a pressure seal. And whatever was doing the pushing was more than the sum of the lab comp’s files and operating platforms. It was aware of her, Li. Knew she was on the move. Knew she’d dialed out. And it was thinking about it. At eight billion parallel-processed operations per picosecond.