Spin State - Chris Moriarty [171]
“Goddamn,” she heard the guard mutter. His footsteps echoed across the room, stopped beside the mainframe. She heard the hiss of indrawn breath as he looked at the screen. Then she realized the phone wasn’t ringing anymore. Cohen was in.
If she could just distract the guard for a few moments, keep him from focusing on what was happening unseen inside the comp, maybe Cohen could get the data out. And then maybe he could get her out. If he decided to stick around and do it.
She stood up and drew her Beretta in a single smooth movement. It was crazy, a crazy gun to be shooting off. But she was so deep inside the station, there was no real risk of a breach into hard vacuum. And it was all she had left to shoot with, anyway.
The guard saw her drawing on him, then saw what she was drawing. The blood drained from his face as completely as if he’d already taken a heart shot. “I’ve got three men forty seconds away,” he said. “You’ll never get out of here. Don’t make it worse than it has to be.”
She looked at his pale face, at the familiar uniform, and she came as close as she’d ever come to losing her nerve. I can’t shoot him, she thought. Not for this.
But it turned out that she could.
He rolled and came up shooting for her head, at killing range. She aimed with the hardwired precision of ceramsteel and squeezed off a single shot. He went down in a spray of blood before her conscious mind even understood she had shot him.
Getting across the small room to where he lay was the hardest thing Li could ever remember doing. She’d fired on hardwired reflex, but as soon as the disruptor clattered out of his hands, the enemy trying to shoot her turned into what he really was: a UN grunt, bleeding out onto the same pale blue uniform she’d worn all her adult life. One of her own. A comrade. As she stumbled toward him, elbows still locked in firing position, she knew he’d seen her face. She was going to have to choose between killing him in cold blood and letting herself be identified.
Luck and a clean shot saved her; he was dead by the time she reached him. She looked at him, hot blood welling up in her mouth. An image of Nguyen flashed through her mind, sitting behind her graceful desk, wearing silk, talking about need-to-know security and how she’d be on her own if the Alba raid went wrong. She spit, and it wasn’t only her blood that tasted bitter to her.
04:09:50.
She walked back across the room and jacked back in.
She felt her still-frozen side. An infinitesimal pause. She jacked out and ran. 04:11:01. She hit two guards at the first intersection and barreled past before they could even draw on her. The pressure suit’s sealed hood hid her face, and she didn’t plan to shoot anyone else. Not for this. Now it was only her flagging body and the clock she was fighting. She hit the first hydroponics dome at a tendon-snapping sprint and was through the open containment door and halfway across before she realized she had made it. The dome was separate from the main curve of the station—a self-contained, light-flooded globe of zero-g-manufactured viruflex. Li’s feet clattered on a narrow catwalk between stacked, dripping algae flats. High overhead, bright heating panels blazed on the station’s underbelly. Below her, clearly visible between the catwalk’s gridplate, curved a finger’s width of clear viruglass . . . and beyond that only bright, blinding sunlight. She looked back and saw her pursuers charging through the open pressure door behind