Spin State - Chris Moriarty [1]
“No,” she told Soza finally. “Not to me.”
Slip of the tongue or no, Soza was all smooth, cultured confidence when he stood up to give the briefing. His uniform hung the way only real wool could, and he spoke in smooth diplomatic Spanish that even the two newest enlisted men could follow without accessing hard memory. The very picture of a proper UN Peacekeeper.
“The target is located below a beet-processing plant,” he told them, “hiding in its heat signature.” He subvocalized, and a streamspace schematic of the target folded into realspace like a spiny asymmetrical flower. “There are five underground labs, each one of them a small-run virufacture facility. The system is deadwalled. No spinstream ports, no VR grid, not even dial-in access. The only way to break it is to shunt the cracker in on a human operative.”
Soza nodded toward Kolodny, who straightened out of her habitual slouch and grinned wolfishly. There was a new scar along the rake of Kolodny’s cheekbone. Fresh, but not so fresh that Li shouldn’t remember it. She searched her active files, came up empty. Ran a parity check. Nothing. Christ, she thought, feeling queasy, how much is missing this time?
She was going to have to get someone to put a patch on her start-up files. Someone who could keep a secret. Before she forgot more than she could afford to forget.
“The rest of you will get the cracking team past the deadwall,” Soza was saying, “and collect biosamples while the AI goes fishing. We’re after whatever you can get on this raid. Source code, hardware, wetware. Especially wetware. Once the AI has the target code on cube, he wipes his tracks, and you withdraw. Hopefully without being detected.”
“Which AI are we using?” Li asked.
But before Soza could answer, Cohen walked in.
Cohen wasn’t his real name, of course. Still, he’d been calling himself that for so long that few people even remembered his Toffoli number. Today’s interface wasn’t one Li had seen before, but she knew it was Cohen on shunt before he closed the door behind him. He wore a silk suit the color of fall leaves—real silk, not tank-grown stuff—and he moved with the smooth, spare grace of a multiplanetary network shunting through cutting-edge wetware. And there was the ironic smile, the hint of laughter behind the shunt’s long-lashed eyes, the faint but ever-present suggestion that whatever he was talking to you about couldn’t possibly be as important as the countless other pies he had his fingers in.
As usual, he’d appeared at exactly the right moment, but with no apparent idea what he was doing there. “Hallo?” he said, blinking vaguely. “Oh. Right. The briefing. Did I miss anything?”
“Not yet,” Soza answered. “Glad you could make it.” He spoke French to Cohen, and Li glanced between the two men, wondering how they knew each other—and how well they knew each other—in the privileged world Ring-siders called normal life.
Cohen caught her looking at him, smiled, took a half step toward the empty place next to her. She turned away. He took a seat in the back. He leaned over and whispered something in Kolodny’s ear as he sat down, and she smothered a laugh.
“We interfering with your social life, Cohen?” Li asked. “Like us to take the briefing elsewhere?”
“Sorry,” Kolodny muttered.
Cohen just raised an eyebrow. As he did, a thin, dark-haired schoolboy trotted into Li’s frontbrain, dribbling a soccer ball. He pantomimed an elaborate apology,