Spin State - Chris Moriarty [158]
“Not quite,” Daahl said.
A tall figure appeared in the airlock behind them, its face shadowed by the sunbeams raking down through the streaky geodesic panels. Ramirez.
But he looked sleeker, glossier, finer. He had never moved with that fey, walking-on-eggshells grace. His eyes had never burned with the cold fire that now shone behind them.
He bent over her, touched a fleck of dried blood at the corner of her mouth. “Catherine,” he said. “Are you all right? If I’d suspected things would get that exciting, I’d have made them find another way to get you here.”
“Cohen,” she whispered, not knowing how to begin to ask him what was happening.
Ramirez was so much taller than Li that she had to throw her head back to meet his eyes. It bothered her. She was used to looking Cohen in the eye, used to being able to dominate him physically—a domination that mattered to her, she now saw, even if it was meaningless to him.
“He wasn’t to be involved,” Korchow said, speaking to Daahl and Cartwright.
Daahl shrugged. “ALEF approached us.”
“ALEF!” Korchow spat the word out as if it were a curse.
“God works through unlikely hands,” Cartwright said.
“Oh for pity’s sake,” Korchow snapped. “What did the AIs promise you?”
“A planetary network,” Daahl answered. “Under union control.”
“Then they’re lying. They can’t possibly deliver that.”
“We already have,” Cohen said. “The beginnings of one, anyway. What do you think I’m shunting through?”
“I brought you in to do a job,” Korchow told Cohen. “This isn’t it.”
Cohen made an impatient movement, a neat flick of one hand that was so characteristic of him it took Li’s breath away. “I’ll do your little job, Korchow. But not routing through your network. I’ve spent three centuries making sure no one had that kind of power over me. I’m not about to hand it to you.”
“So why go to them?” Korchow jerked Bella’s head toward Daahl and Cartwright. “And don’t tell me it’s selfless interest in the cause. Or are they your pet terrorist group of the week?”
Cohen flexed Ramirez’s big hands until Li heard the knuckles crack. “They had what I needed,” he said. “An on-site Emergent with Bose-Einstein capacity.”
Korchow started.
“Yes.” Cohen smiled. “The field AI.”
“How—”
“I don’t know. But Cartwright says he can speak to whoever or whatever is using the field AI. That he can control it.”
“And you’d trust yourself to that?”
“Sooner than I’d trust myself to you.”
“Why?” Korchow asked, turning to Daahl. “Why this? Why him?”
Daahl shrugged. “It’s not that complicated, Korchow. We don’t like the idea of running from the UN straight into the arms of the Syndicates. We want to run Compson’s World for the natives, for the miners. And to get that we need a planetary net that we control. We need access to streamspace, to Freetown and FreeNet, without going through the UN relays, without being at the mercy of the Security Council and the multiplanetaries. And we need a Bose-Einstein relay intact, on our net. That’s what ALEF’s giving us.”
“Come on, Korchow,” Cohen said. “We’re going to pull off a good deed together. A blow for freedom and planetary self-determination. After all, you need to put something on the white side of the ledger book every lifetime or so.”
“So the deal’s off?” Korchow asked, white with fury.
“Not at all,” Cohen answered, smiling glossily. “It’s just that the price has gone up.”
Barnard’s Star Field Array: 28.10.48.
They jumped into Alba in a KnowlesSyndicate Starling, a sleek swallow-winged craft whose cabin had been stripped to its ceramic compound struts and refitted with a tangled rat’s nest of fractal absorption gauges, x/r monitors, and assorted black boxes whose functions Li could only guess at.
There were three of them: Li, Arkady, Cohen. Or part of Cohen, anyway. Arkady piloted the ship—though Li never figured out if he was the same Arkady she’d talked to at the meet in Shantytown or just another number in the same series. She also never found out how he got them there. She guessed he’d piggybacked through Alba’s high-traffic Bose-Einstein