Spin State - Chris Moriarty [201]
She smiled—and she didn’t know whether she was smiling at him or at herself or at the whole hopeful ridiculous mess they’d made of things.
“I think I can manage that,” she said.
She was cold when she woke, cold to the point of pain. Her head ached. Her mouth felt as dry as if she were coming out of cryo. Someone was shaking her.
She opened her eyes and saw Bella.
No. Korchow. It had to be Korchow.
“I’m paying you to do a job,” he said, “not fuck in the fields. What exactly do you two think you’re doing?”
She opened her mouth to answer him, but all that came out was a weak croak.
McCuen’s face appeared above and behind Bella’s. “She’s going into shock,” he said.
Korchow brushed the words aside impatiently. “Where’s Cohen?” he asked.
She panicked. Where was he? What had he said when they first felt the worldmind? That it was tasting them? Using them? How much of Cohen could it use before what made him Cohen was gone? How much time did they have?
Korchow pulled her into a more or less sitting position and trickled some water into her mouth. Her thirst shocked her, and when she checked her internals she saw it had been almost two hours since they’d reached the glory hole. How much time was unfolding for every minute she spent in those visions? Were these the dreams Dawes had spoken of? The dreams the first settlers had warned Compson about?
Those who hear it stay and listen and sleep and die there.
She shuddered hard enough to knock her teeth against the rim of the bottle Korchow was holding to her lips.
“You need to make contact again,” Korchow said.
She laughed bitterly. “They contacted us,” she said. But that was Cohen speaking—speaking through her mouth in a way that had somehow come to seem normal, reasonable. “They’ve been doing it for days, weeks. From the first time Catherine came down here.”
The blood drained from Korchow’s face. “Sharifi said that.”
“So Sharifi woke them up,” Cohen said. “Or blasting that galley through the Trinidad did. And now that they’re awake they expect to be listened to.”
“Then God help us,” Korchow whispered.
Li’s heart skittered and locked in to a fast uneven rhythm. “What really happened down here?”
“One minute everything was fine,” he answered. “The next I was off the shunt. As if an immense arm had reached out and . . . pushed me. I never got back on.”
He’s telling the truth, Cohen whispered in her head. Don’t you see what happened? What must have happened?
Li caught the edge of the thought as it swirled through his mind. But all she saw was a confused image of Sharifi, betrayed and frightened. And whether the image sprang from Cohen’s mind or hers she couldn’t tell.
Then she was back in the glory hole.
“I’m on,” Sharifi said.
Bella started. Voyt turned away from the monitor he’d been watching, his eyes flicking back and forth between the two women. As if, Li realized, he too were waiting for something.
She heard Cohen echo the thought and knew that he was there with her. She reached out cautiously, touched him, was comforted.
Bella stepped forward. “You have the dataset?”
“Can you see what Bella sees, Korchow? Can you hear them?”
“No.”
“Then you don’t know yet.” Sharifi smiled. “But you will.”
Voyt made a spitting noise.
“Remember,” Sharifi said. “You have two weeks to get it there. Miss that deadline and all deals are off.”
Korchow dipped his head in an almost courtly gesture. Then he was gone, and Bella was standing there, blinking, swaying a little as she took back her own posture and balance.
Sharifi reached out and smoothed Bella’s hair back from her face. It was a protective gesture, a gesture that could have been a mother’s as easily as a lover’s, and Bella moved her head like a cat to meet the caress. She stared into Sharifi’s eyes, devouring her, surrendering to her. She drank up Sharifi as if she were the only real thing in the universe.
Sharifi touched her temple and flipped a contact switch. She held out her left hand, palm open. Bella set her own palm against