Spin State - Chris Moriarty [167]
03:19:40.
Footsteps. She froze. Were they coming toward her or moving away? Toward. She rolled up her tools, ducked around the curve, and climbed into the shadows of the ceiling.
Two women walked by. Guards, not scientists; she could hear their lug-soled boots, and the coarse, hard-edged slang that was the UN grunt’s native tongue. “Catch the spins today?” one of them asked. “Assembly voted PKs to Compson’s to get the mines open.”
“What a shit hole. Well, long as we don’t have to do it.”
“Do what? Go to Compson’s or open the mines?”
“Either. I didn’t sign on to shovel coal. Or shoot miners. Whole planet’s fucked, ever since the Riots. Ask me, we oughta just cut ’em loose and kick ’em into hard vac.”
“And we would if they could get those synthcrystals over in Lab Eight to format properly.”
“Yeah, yeah. And if wishes were horses . . .”
“. . . horses wouldn’t be extinct!”
The guards laughed and their voices faded away down the corridor.
Li counted to twenty, holding her breath, then dropped to the floor. When she got back to the lab door, she saw something that nearly stopped her heart: her own quantum pick, sticking out of the control panel like a hangnail.
For one panicked moment she thought the patrol had seen it, that they were coming back for her, that the whole lazy gossiping act had been nothing but subterfuge. Then she got a grip on herself. It had been no trick. Luck had been with her; the two women had walked right past the pick, busy talking, and never seen it. The one plus of storming an impregnable fortress was that no one expected to turn a corner and catch an intruder.
Inside the lab, Li saw her target immediately: a Park 35-Zed, the biggest mainframe made by any of the top military contractors. She walked around it apprehensively, looking for the input port. She found the port on one side of the mainframe, in a little tech’s cubbyhole equipped with a fold-down desk and rolling stool. She deactivated her pressure suit and peeled back the hood to bare the socket at her temple. She sat on the stool, keeping her feet planted beneath her center of gravity so she could get up fast if she had to. She pulled the wire out of her pocket.
She thought of the times she’d ordered Kolodny to jack into hostile systems. Then she told herself that she wasn’t jacking into a hostile system this time. She was just accessing the external communications program and dialing out to Cohen, waiting on the Starling. And the system wasn’t going to be hostile, because if everything went right, it would never know she’d been there. It didn’t help. She opened the main menu and began scanning through the settings, going as fast as she could without alerting any AI or human sysops, trying to make sure she wasn’t setting off any unseen trip wires. The Zed was more powerful than the smaller comps she was used to manipulating, and the direct line gave her a disorienting, vertiginous speed of connection.
It was like diving into the spinstream—but a stream without VR, a stream of pure numbers. The numbers fed directly into Li’s brain, and her oracle processed them at speeds beyond reach of any keyboard operator. But she still had to process them. And, even skewed by her own interface settings, there was something in the feel of these numbers that hinted at the vast, alien mind of the semisentient behind them. There was no mistaking this for surfing the spinstream, not if you had a feel for the code you were running. Streamspace was alive, in its own way, but only as a planet or a star system was alive. This was different. Here Li felt with every calculation, every operation, that she was inside something. Or someone. She found herself ducking and dodging mentally, not wanting to come to grips with the presence behind the Zed’s operating programs. She thought of Sharifi, trapped in the pit, locked mind-to-mind with the semisentient field AI of Compson’s orbital relay, and shuddered. It was an image burst straight from the subterranean depths of her nightmares.
Still, the lab AI remained comfortingly