Spin 01 - Spin State (43 page)

“He told me it was a malfunction,” Li said, too stunned to understand what Nguyen was saying about her own court-martial, too stunned to hear anything beyond the bare fact of the accusation.

“Well, he lied. He found the intraface. Then he started going after the wetware specs. Specs he had no business looking at. Specs we couldn’t afford to let him look at. And in doing so, he endangered the security of the mission. We had to pull him off the shunt to stop him.”

Li put a hand to her forehead, felt the fever rising beneath her skin. “You’re sure?” she asked. “I’m sure,” Nguyen said. “I cut the link myself.”

Hell,” Cohen said.
“The beastly thing’s stuck.”

He was opening a long matte-black canister, capped at both ends with silver disks of stamped metal. He was having a hard time of it, having to use Chiara’s starlet-straight front teeth to pry the lid off.

“Don’t break her pretty teeth,” Li said, and Cohen laughed.

“I’d grow her new ones,” he said. “Wouldn’t be the first time I had to tidy up a little collateral damage.”

They sat in his high-ceilinged drawing room, the chandeliers casting rippled reflections in the hand-laid panes of the garden doors. Chiara looked as beautiful as ever, perched like a bright bird on the sofa; but Li thought there was a pinched quality to the lovely face, a puffy hint of tiredness around the hazel eyes. She nearly asked Cohen if he was feeling all right—before she reminded herself that it wasn’t Cohen she was looking at. That whether some pretty girl felt tired or sad or sick had not a thing to do with the enigma sitting across the table from her.

He got the canister open at last, with a little grunt of satisfaction, and slid out a long shiny tube of architect’s fiche, which he unfurled on the low table between them. When one corner of the sheet refused to lie flat he borrowed Li’s beer to weight it down.

Li squinted doubtfully at the blank surface. “We’re supposed to read the plans off that? You’ve got something against VR now?”

“Only that I’ve been running VR scenarios ever since you sent me Korchow’s files, without getting anywhere near figuring out how to crack this nut.”

Li had been doing the same thing herself and coming up just as dry. But telling Cohen that now seemed less than productive.

He tapped the fiche. It whirred softly and lit up, casting a cool blue glow on the belly of Cohen’s wineglass, the curving flank of Li’s beer bottle. A spidery web of lines spread across the sheet and coalesced into a long, shallow curve like the arc of a twenty-kilometer-long suspension bridge. Cohen tapped in another command, and the ghostly parallelograms of solar arrays formed above and around the arc. “There. Alba. A place you ought to recognize faster than I do.”

“I guess,” Li said doubtfully.

Cohen snorted. “Spoken like a true member of the virtual generation. It took humans two hundred millennia to figure out how to read, and they’re forgetting it in a matter of centuries. Anyway.” He tapped the sheet emphatically. “These are the plans the contractor worked from. They’re much more detailed than what Korchow gave you. And, more important, I pulled them from the contractor’s files without having to go into the UNSC databases and get flagged for querying classified material.”

“Oh, right,” Li said as the flat image began to make sense to her. “There’s the commissary. And the main labs.” She grinned. “I’ve spent enough time in the tanks there to recognize them.”

“Indeed,” Cohen said. “But we’re not cracking the main labs. Our target is down here: biotech R&D.” “I don’t think I’ve ever been in that level,” Li said.

“You wouldn’t have. It’s very hush-hush. All controlled tech work. Even the researchers live in separate quarters. It’s a quarantine zone, really; look how the bulkheads cut all the way across the station on the lab levels.”

He tapped a section of the fiche, and the zone enlarged, revealing a warren of windowless, dead-end corridors and security checkpoints highlighted in red. “You’ll have to get through two security checkpoints on your way in, here and here.”

Li pointed to a cluster of bulging growths on the station’s outer skin. “What’s that?”

“Algae farm. Part of the oxygen cycle. But look here.” He pointed her back into the station’s interior. “Now what’s the job in front of us? One, we get you onto the station and into the lab wing. Two, you access the lab’s central database and manually open a line to the ship. Three, I go through the lab AI’s files, fielding any interference he sees fit to throw at us, and figure out which comp the intraface files are on. Four, you go get them. Five—and this is the real kicker—we get out without being detected. Or, in a less optimistic but more realistic scenario, at least without being positively identified.”

Li nodded, a little bemused at hearing all this from Chiara’s pretty mouth, especially since she’d always suspected the girl was rather stupid.

She picked up her beer, and the corner of the fiche popped up. She hunted around for something to set on it, and came up with a moldering first edition of
Doctor Faustus
.

“Can we do it?” she asked.

“Not in any way you’re likely to be very enthusiastic about, I’m afraid.” Cohen tapped up the scale on the area of the plans that included the lab spoke. “Physically, I have no idea where the intraface is. All I do know is that it’s in this lab. Unfortunately, the lab files—personnel, inventory, everything—are deadwalled.”

“Like Metz.”

“Worse than Metz.” He looked up at her. “Alba has a weapons-grade semisentient.”

A chill worked its way down Li’s spine and settled in her stomach. She hated logging on to semisentients. Her fear was unreasonable—or so she had tried many times to convince herself. Sometimes she wondered if it was just blind prejudice; the one time she’d mentioned it to Cohen, he’d gotten so offended it had taken weeks to smooth his ruffled feelings.

But still.

There was something sharklike about the big semisentients: brute computing power, unfettered by hard programming or by the all-too-human qualms and foibles of fully sentient Emergents. Logging on to a semisentient was like swimming in dark bottomless water. Impossible to believe that the wordless menace that lurked behind their numbers could become Cohen. Terrifying to think that Cohen was only a few operations, a few algorithms removed from them—and that no one could say for certain where to draw the line between the two.

“So how do we get you in?” Li asked.

Cohen raised an eyebrow. “You assume a lot. I haven’t agreed to help you yet.” “What do you want me to do, say pretty please?”

“You’re magnificent. Why is it that the bigger the favor you’re asking for, the more unpleasant you become?”

“You’ll get paid,” Li said. “Last time I checked, that makes it a job, not a favor.”

Cohen lit a cigarette without offering Li one and set the case and lighter on the table, carefully aligning them with the gold-leafed corner scroll.

“I think we’ll just let that one slide, shall we?” he said. “Unless you actually want to pick a fight with me?”

Li kept silent.

“Right then. The lab AI has disabled external communications. You can’t call in. You can’t get wireless access. All you can do is call out to approved numbers, and you can only do that by direct contact jack.” He smiled and tapped the ash off the end of his cigarette with a Byzantine flourish. “Which means, my dear, that you’re going under the knife.”

Li fingered her temple, where she could just feel the flat disk of the remote commsystem transmitter under her skin. She’d never gotten a direct-contact wire-to-wire jack. She’d never had to. Those were reserved for techs, like Kolodny, the people who did the real grunt work of cracking target systems— and who ran risks from which the automatic cutouts of Li’s remote interface largely protected her.

“You come up with that idea yourself?” she asked Cohen. “Or did you get help from Korchow?”

“I wouldn’t waste my time arguing about it if I were you,” Cohen said. He shot a dark stare at her over the top of his wineglass. “A jack is nothing compared to what they’re going to need to do to you to get the intraface working.”

Li bit her lip and shifted uncomfortably as her thoughts roved from semisentients to contact jacks to the several hundred meters of prototype hardware Sharifi had been carrying around in her head when she died. How had they slid into actually planning this mission without any discussion of whether or not Li was going to let Korchow test-run the intraface on her?

Had she actually made that decision herself? Or had Cohen coaxed her into it like a chess master nudging his player across the board toward the enemy? Was Nguyen right about him? And even if she wasn’t, even if his intentions were good, what did he really want from her?

“Has anyone actually tested this intraface thing?” she asked, settling on an easy, emotionally neutral question.

“I think there’s a monkey somewhere who has one.”

“Oh.” Li laughed nervously. “How’s he doing?”

“He’s crazy.”

“Cohen!”

“But there’s some indication that he was crazy to begin with. And besides, he’s a monkey.”

He pointed to the network of alleys and firewalls around the lab’s back entrance. “Right. Here’s my first brilliant idea. We do a cutout around this door that would get you past the security network.”

“Which means you have to be on-station to fiddle the main AI. Which means a second person for you to shunt through. Which means twice as much chance of getting caught.”

The more they worked through it, the shorter the list of realistic options got. Cracking Alba was like building a house of cards; each piece of the puzzle that fell into place exposed another piece, another problem, another collapse waiting to happen.

They went at it again, teasing out the problems and pitfalls until they had something that looked like a plan in front of them. At least as far as getting through the security checks and actually retrieving the data went.

But they were still left with the problem of how to get Li into Alba undetected.

“Hang on,” Li said finally, grabbing at the fleeting tail of what looked like it might just be a viable option. “Go back to that first section we looked at. Hydroponics.”

Cohen tapped back through half a dozen screens to reach it.

“What about these turrets?” She pointed to a row of ten-meter-high towers jutting through the thick pelt of guy wires, sensor lenses, and communications equipment that bristled from the outer skin of the station. “They look like vents.”

“Sure.” A look crossed Chiara’s smooth face that made Li think Cohen knew exactly where she was going with this. “Decontamination vents for the algae flats. So what?”

“So the last time I was on Alba, it was overcrowded.” “It always is.”

“Well, what’s the daily CO2load?”

Cohen paused for a moment, searching. “Sixty thousand cubic meters. And, to anticipate your next question, they’re shipping in about 1.8 thousand of compressed oxygen every day.”

“So where’s the excess CO2going?” “Out those turret vents, obviously.” “Where it can get out, I can get in.” “Not without someone inside to open the vents.”

“Korchow says he’s got an inside man.”

“Not possible,” Cohen said, scanning the plans again. “They’re using the outgoing CO2to turn the turbines that power this whole section of the solar array. And even if you get past the turbines, you’re still talking about crawling down a twenty-meter shaft in hard vacuum. And the vent diameter’s too small to take a suit and gear.” He tapped decisively on the tight print that gave the duct’s dimensions. “You can’t get in that way.”

“I could if I stashed my gear outside and went down the duct with just a pressure suit.”

“Too risky. You’re talking about crawling down an active ventilation duct in hard vacuum with no air, no heat, just a pressure suit. If anything goes wrong—even if you just run into a minor delay—you’re dead.”

Li smiled. “And you won’t have anyone to eat oysters with.”

The look Cohen gave her couldn’t have been more naked if he’d stripped his skin away. She saw fear, guilt, anger flash across his face. Then she looked away; whatever else was there, she couldn’t deal with it. Not now, anyway. She pushed her beer away from her. It left a ring on the table, but for once Cohen didn’t seem to care about the punishment her bad habits were inflicting on his furniture.

“What if I say I won’t do it?” he asked.

“We go forward with another AI,” she said, pushing down the thought that it might not be true.

“You’d be insane to try it without me.”

“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.