Spin State - Chris Moriarty [174]
Slowly the wail trailed off to a low moan and her vision cleared. “What the hell was that?” she panted.
“Traffic.” She heard him stand up and cross the room, heard running water, felt the cool touch of water as he wiped a damp cloth across her forehead.
Traffic?
“Comm traffic. Mine. You’re hearing me.”
“No,” she whispered. “Something’s wrong, Cohen.”
“Nothing’s wrong. Korchow’s had me running tests all morning. Accessing your internals, running checks, startup subroutines, downloading data. Your commsys is a dinosaur, by the way. A disgrace. I ran a Schor check on your oracle workspace though. Properly. Which those idiots at Alba never do. That should help a bit.”
She opened her eyes to find him smiling down at her. “Feeling better now?”
She had to think about it for a moment. “Yes.”
“Hmm.”
“What does that mean? Am I adjusting?”
“No. I just took the intraface off-line.”
They looked at each other. “Oh,” Li said.
Cohen stood up, patting her hand. “Don’t worry. You’re still barely conscious. We’ll get on top of it tomorrow.”
But they didn’t get on top of it the next day. Or the day after that. Korchow had set up a lab and medical facility in the safe house, and over the next three days, Li’s universe narrowed to two sterile rooms of monitoring equipment, her own cramped bunk, and the empty echoing dome that functioned as the safe house’s common room.
The first time they brought the intraface on-line, she ended up curled on the floor, hands over her ears, screaming for someone—anyone—to turn it off. Cohen shut the link down so fast it took him half an hour to get himself straightened out.
“I’ll go crazy,” Li said when she’d recovered enough to speak. “It’s like a hundred people fighting in my head.”
“Forty-seven,” Cohen interjected. “Well, this week.”
“What’s gone wrong?” Korchow asked Cohen. He didn’t even look at Li, just talked past her like she was a piece of tech.
“Nothing,” Cohen answered, tapping a fingernail on the console in front of him. “It’s an organic software problem.”
Cohen was shunting through Ramirez, and Li noticed again the cold fire in Leo’s dark eyes, the extra measure of decisiveness in his already-powerful movements. Those two I’d like to have next to me in a fight, she thought—and felt a sudden razor-sharp stab of grief for Kolodny.
“Sharifi didn’t have these problems,” Korchow said, a threat lurking behind the words.
Cohen shrugged. “She wouldn’t have, would she? She was interfacing with a simple field AI. And she wasn’t wired for anything but communications. Catherine’s a different beast entirely. You try to crowbar new programs into a military system and all bets are off. You knew that before we started.”
“Well, what do we do about it?” Li asked.
Cohen crossed the room more quickly than Li would have thought Ramirez could move. He leaned over and put a cool hand to her forehead. “You don’t do anything. You get your pulse rate down and go to bed. I’ll figure out where we go from here.”
But the next session was worse. After three hours Li collapsed into a chair, pressing the heels of her hands into her burning eye sockets. “I can’t. I can’t do it again.”
“Yes you can,” Korchow said. He was still being patient. “Why didn’t the pulse compression work?” he asked Cohen over her head.
“If I knew, I’d be able to fix it.”
“Does she need a new signal processor?”
Li didn’t have to see Cohen to imagine his dismissive shrug.
“Well, what then?”
Cohen shook his head. “I have to think.”
“Let’s check the settings and try it again.”
Li wanted to say no. That she’d throw up if they tried again. That everything she’d eaten in the last two days had come up already, and she couldn’t stand it anymore. But she was too sick and too tired to say anything.
It was Cohen who finally came up with the idea of the memory palace. He was shunting through Arkady when he explained it to her, and his excitement