Spin State - Chris Moriarty [147]
“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