Spin State - Chris Moriarty [150]
“That’s not you talking,” he said at last. “What else did Helen whisper in your ear about me?”
“None of your goddamn business.”
Cohen huffed out a little breath that Li might have thought was a laugh in different circumstances. Then he stared into the air above her head, as if he were trying to access a hard-to-find piece of data.
“Oh,” he said, when he found it. “So that’s it. What a nasty little piece of work she is, when you scratch the nice manners and the freshly pressed uniform.” He leaned forward across the table, pinning Li with a hard stare. “I’ve gotten over being surprised that you believe the things she says about me, but for what it’s worth the link cut out because of an internal malfunction. Or so I thought, anyway. Now I’m not so sure.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning I’m putting two and two together and finally getting four instead of three.”
Cohen paused until Li began to wonder if he was going to say anything more at all. “When did you start planning the Metz raid?” he asked at last. “About four months ago? Something like that?”
Li nodded.
“Well, I took on a new associate around then. A newly emerged sentient from the Toffoli Group. His main recommendation was that he’d done a contract job for Nguyen.”
Li stirred impatiently, not sure where this was leading.
“Anyway,” Cohen went on, “he had a beast of a feedback loop. Far worse than the mandatory program and running on a brute force, everything but the kitchen sink program that was impossible to work with. I was negotiating with Toffoli to put him on my global compliance program. They kept delaying, for reasons that seemed . . . well . . . less than reasonable. And the problems on Metz, I am almost certain, came from that feedback loop.”
“I don’t see what this has to do with anything, Cohen.”
“Don’t you? Nguyen holds the purse strings for all the TechComm R&D. She has Toffoli’s research division in her pocket. The Toffoli AI was her spy all along. He’s how she was able to cut me off on Metz.”
Li stared. “What are you going to do about it?”
“I’ve already done it,” Cohen said. “He’s gone.”
“But what if he talks to someone—”
Cohen looked at her out of Chiara’s guileless eyes. “I said he was gone. I meant it.”
Li looked away. Cohen started to speak, then stopped. For a moment they both sat staring at the floor, at the books, at the pictures on the walls. At anything but each other.
“Well?”
“Well what?”
“I tell you that Nguyen was planning to cut me out of the shunt at Metz before we even shipped out for the mission, and you have nothing to say about it? What are you thinking?”
“That I don’t know who to believe, you or Nguyen.”
“You believe the one you trust,” Cohen said.
“And why the hell should I trust you?”
He shrugged. “There’s no should about it. You either do or you don’t. You have a lot to learn about life if you think people have to earn your trust.”
“You can’t talk your way around this one, Cohen.”
He shook his head and went on as if she hadn’t spoken. “You don’t trust people because they’re a sure bet or even a good risk. You trust them because the risk that you’ll lose them is worse than the risk that they’ll hurt you. That took me a few centuries to learn, Catherine, but I did learn it. And you’d better catch on faster than I did. The way things are going right now, I don’t think you have a century to spare.”
Li stood up without answering, walked across the room, and stepped into the garden. It was night in Zona Angel. A moist breeze played across her face, carrying the smell of earth and wet leaves. Frogs and a few night birds sang in the green branches. All the little live things Cohen loved so much. A bird warbled from some hidden refuge in the wall above her, and her oracle identified it as a whippoorwill. It’s beautiful, she thought—and wondered if she would still have thought so if she hadn’t known its name.
Cohen came up to stand behind her, so close that she could smell the fresh-scrubbed scent of Chiara’s skin.
“I can’t imagine living in the Ring,” Li said. “How can people live somewhere where every time