Spin State - Chris Moriarty [12]
Then the hostage backed away and the guards at the door fired and Kolodny staggered to her feet, fell facedown and lay still.
The rest of the raid was just a series of isolated snapshots.
Running down the corridor under flickering emergency lights with Kolodny slung across her shoulders. Rushing the stairs in a ceramsteel-enhanced tendon-snapping burst of speed and charging head-on into a skinny kid in civilian clothes armed with a cheap pulse rifle. A hundredth-of-a-second blink in which Li knew that things had spiraled too far out of control for it to be about anything but surviving.
Then enhanced reflexes kicking in, wetware and ceramsteel filament driving Li’s body faster than human flesh was meant to move. The kid’s shocked look when her bullet shattered his neck before he could even start to pull his own gun’s trigger.
A final dash across the endless expanse of grit-scoured concrete. A lightning strike of pain from elbow to shoulder.
Then nothing.
Her last memory was of flat gray sky, wind, rain on her face. Kolodny lay next to her, eyes open. Smoke curled lazily above them, and Li smelled something that she recognized with bemused detachment as her own flesh burning.
Dalloway appeared above her, leaned over, and grabbed her beneath the armpits.
“Kolodny first!” she said, but he just shook his head.
She passed out again and came to with flight-deck plating under her back. Someone was fussing with her legs, lifting them up and shoving things under them. A medtech pressed something into her left hand—an IV bag—and told her to squeeze it.
She kept trying to tell him she was right-handed; but her right arm was off somewhere outside her peripheral vision and didn’t seem to want to obey the orders her brain was sending. So she lay there holding the IV, slipping in and out of consciousness while the hopper labored into a sky gone dead and cold as Kolodny’s eyes.
SYSTEMS WITH ONE DEGREE OF FREEDOM
Section (2). The registration requirement of Section (1)(a)(2), and such additional registration requirements, travel restrictions, and other restrictions as may be prescribed by relevant administrative regulations pursuant to this Resolution, shall apply to:
(a) all citizens of Syndicate-controlled systems, as defined in Section (2)(c) below;
(b) any United Nations citizen more than twenty-five percent (25%) of whose geneset, as defined in Section (2)(d)(ii) below, is comprised of proprietary genetic material included in the Controlled Technology List pursuant to General Assembly Resolution 235625–09, as hereafter amended.
—United Nations General Assembly Resolution
584872–32.
51 Pegasi Field Array: 13.10.48.
<14,000pF>
<27,000pF>
Her own breathing woke her—harsh, panicked, the sound of a child waking from a nightmare. The memory of Metz was so close she could smell it. Everything else—name, rank, age, history—was darkness. She’d lost the part of her mind that remembered those things, and every time she reached for the pieces they skittered away like quicksilver. No answer. She opened her eyes and saw nothing. She spat out her tongue guard, tried to speak, and realized that the buzzing in her ears was her teeth chattering. She sensed a wall in front of her and put out hands stiff and brittle as sticks to feel it. Her fingers tangled in feedlines, dislodged biomonitors dabbed with adhesive jelly. Wrists and elbows knocked painfully against cold metal, feeding her rising claustrophobia. Coffin. She pulled the word out of some unexpected reserve of soft memory. It placed her, anchored her. She was in a coffin in the cryobay of a Bose-Einstein transport, waking after a jump. There must have been some malfunction, some glitch in the ship’s systems, or her own, to pull her off ice so early. But it hadn’t been a fatal malfunction,