Chris Moriarty - Spin State

‹What you said about the lab AI. How did you survive so long? How did you survive being beaten?›

A pulse of emotion flowed over the line, but this one was pure AI—one of those ripples in the numbers that put the lie to the illusion of Cohen’s humanness, that reminded Li how foolish it was to let herself imagine she understood anything that happened on the other side of the interface. ‹I didn’t survive it,› he answered when the numbers smoothed out. ‹I’ve never been beaten.›

Then she passed through another security grid and lost him.

04:03:41.

She was deep in the lab section. Security was so solid here that the station’s admins hadn’t even tried to make the researchers observe normal security protocols. Whiteboards lined the walls, markers and erasers hooked into the low-g racks along their bottom rims. She passed a board that was covered with quantum equations, another, half-erased already, that held only two clean and concise Bussard drive efficiency calculations, the kind Li had wrestled with in her OCS math courses. Rounding one corner, she almost knocked over a half-full coffee cup someone had left sitting on the floor. She heard footsteps, scrambled into the ceiling pipes just in time to watch a skinny bald man shuffle past in rumpled pajamas. She smiled and wished Cohen could see him.

Alba was so big, its curve so slight, that it was easy to get disoriented. Especially easy for Li, just off the much smaller AMC Compson station, where the tight curve of the life-support ring was always rising in front of your feet, telling you where you were. Corridors branched off the backbone of the big hoop, running three or four hundred meters on either side. The fancy offices and conference rooms would be on the edges, in the relatively few rooms with side windows. The storage areas, the secured labs, and the deadwalled comps would be where Li was, in the narrow white world of the internal corridors.

04:06:27.

She’d made it. Here was the cross corridor Cohen had sent her to, and the fifth door. She scanned the room beyond the door. Empty. She picked the lock, using the code Cohen had already pulled off the system. Then she stepped through the door and crossed a mostly empty lab to a desktop terminal tucked behind an antiquated multichannel quantum ansible. She undid her suit’s hood and jacked in. This time there was no gatekeeper, no dark presence lurking behind the system. She opened the comm menu, trembling with relief. She dialed the number.

And heard the unmistakable metallic click of the safety lifting off a neural disruptor.

“Turn around,” said a hard voice. “Slowly. That is, if you want to be alive in ten seconds.”

She froze, raised her hands carefully, and turned. The guard was five meters away—just out of kicking range. Everything about him was cold, hard, professional. Li’s hope died as soon as she looked at him. He gestured at her rifle. “Eject the charge clip.”

She ejected it.

“Now throw it.”

She dropped it on the floor in front of her. The prongs of the disruptor jerked toward her chest. “Kick it over here.”

She kicked it.

“And the rifle.”

She sent that skittering across the floor behind the charge clip—her last hope rattling away across grip-treated deckplating.

“You alone?” he asked. Just as she opened her mouth to answer, the comp rang.

They both jumped. The muzzle of the disruptor flicked toward her again. “Step away from the terminal,” he said over the second ring. Li took a deep breath, flexed her knees and rolled.

She planned her roll to carry her behind the terminal’s condensate array, thinking the guard wouldn’t fire on her if it meant destroying the precious crystals inside it. She thought wrong.

As she rolled, she heard the whip-crack shot of the disruptor and felt the charge hit her. This hit had nothing to do with the throbbing numbness that followed a shot from a little handheld disruptor, though. It felt like someone had taken a hot scalpel and carved a hand-sized chunk out of her back, leaving every severed nerve exposed and screaming.

She scrambled sideways and crouched in the uncertain shelter of the ansible, struggling to force air into her still-convulsed lungs. A sour copper taste flooded her mouth; her teeth had clamped shut on the tip of her tongue when the charge hit.

“Goddamn,” she heard the guard mutter. His footsteps echoed across the room, stopped beside the mainframe. She heard the hiss of indrawn breath as he looked at the screen. Then she realized the phone wasn’t ringing anymore. Cohen was in.

If she could just distract the guard for a few moments, keep him from focusing on what was happening unseen inside the comp, maybe Cohen could get the data out. And then maybe he could get her out. If he decided to stick around and do it.

She stood up and drew her Beretta in a single smooth movement. It was crazy, a crazy gun to be shooting off. But she was so deep inside the station, there was no real risk of a breach into hard vacuum. And it was all she had left to shoot with, anyway.

The guard saw her drawing on him, then saw what she was drawing. The blood drained from his face as completely as if he’d already taken a heart shot. “I’ve got three men forty seconds away,” he said. “You’ll never get out of here. Don’t make it worse than it has to be.”

She looked at his pale face, at the familiar uniform, and she came as close as she’d ever come to losing her nerve. I can’t shoot him , she thought. Not for this .

But it turned out that she could.

He rolled and came up shooting for her head, at killing range. She aimed with the hardwired precision of ceramsteel and squeezed off a single shot. He went down in a spray of blood before her conscious mind even understood she had shot him.

Getting across the small room to where he lay was the hardest thing Li could ever remember doing. She’d fired on hardwired reflex, but as soon as the disruptor clattered out of his hands, the enemy trying to shoot her turned into what he really was: a UN grunt, bleeding out onto the same pale blue uniform she’d worn all her adult life. One of her own. A comrade. As she stumbled toward him, elbows still locked in firing position, she knew he’d seen her face. She was going to have to choose between killing him in cold blood and letting herself be identified.

Luck and a clean shot saved her; he was dead by the time she reached him. She looked at him, hot blood welling up in her mouth. An image of Nguyen flashed through her mind, sitting behind her graceful desk, wearing silk, talking about need-to-know security and how she’d be on her own if the Alba raid went wrong. She spit, and it wasn’t only her blood that tasted bitter to her.

04:09:50.

She walked back across the room and jacked back in.

‹What’s going on?› Cohen asked. ‹You’re setting off alarms all through the system.›

‹Guard caught me.›

‹You’re okay?›

She felt her still-frozen side. ‹Yes.›

‹Is he?›

‹No.›

An infinitesimal pause. ‹Well, let’s get you out of there.›

‹Do we have the software?›

‹Yes. Now go!›

‹Which way?› A grid flashed onto her internals. Red pulses converged on the lab from three sides. The only gap in the circle—and it was closing even as she looked at it—was the long corridor back up to the hydroponics domes.

‹I don’t know if I can make it.›

‹You have to make it.›

She jacked out and ran.

04:11:01.

She hit two guards at the first intersection and barreled past before they could even draw on her. The pressure suit’s sealed hood hid her face, and she didn’t plan to shoot anyone else. Not for this. Now it was only her flagging body and the clock she was fighting.