Spin State - Chris Moriarty [206]
For one wild, surreal moment she saw it all. The dark cavern around her. The flesh and ceramsteel mélange inside her own ringing skull. The blazing silicon vistas of Cohen’s networks. The antique shop, smelling of tea and sandalwood. Arkady’s unconscious figure sprawled among the sleek curves of the generation-ship artifacts. And above, around, and through all of it, the endless weight and darkness, the million voices of the worldmind.
The stones were singing.
In the end Cohen, or whatever was left of him, cut her out of the link. She begged, in that last moment, not even sure he could hear her. She cursed him, cursed herself, Korchow, Nguyen, the whole killing planet.
Then she was alone in the darkness, and there was nothing left of Cohen but the hole inside her where he should have been.
The Anaconda Strike: 9.11.48.
A dry breeze blew across her face, winding from nowhere to nowhere like a desert river.
Her internals were shattered. Ghosts, fragments. She felt the abuse her body had taken through the long hours in the pit. And behind it, worse than the physical pain, the memory of what Voyt had done to Sharifi, and of the whirling, chaotic, living darkness Cohen had cast himself into to save her.
Bella and McCuen were staring down at her, their faces white, drawn, terrified.
“Did you see that?” Li asked, sitting up.
Bella nodded. “Cohen?”
Li looked away.
“I’m sorry,” Bella said, and when Li searched her face she saw that she really was sorry. “He was . . . kind.”
Li checked her rebreather gauge instead of answering. She checked her internals, found with relief that at least the basic programs were working, and ran a quick air-use calculation.
“We’ve got to go,” she said. “We have twenty-eight minutes to get to Mirce and the fresh canisters. Maybe less.”
She glanced at McCuen. His face looked shockingly pale, but maybe it was just the lamplight. “I . . . didn’t see much of anything,” he said. “Just stuck around to pick up the pieces.”
“You didn’t miss much,” she said, hefting her rebreather.
“Catherine?” Bella asked. Where had she picked that habit up? “Can we make it to Mirce? How long will it take us?”
“Less than twenty-eight minutes,” Li said. “Or forever. Let’s go.”
The mine had come alive. It rumbled, rang, sang. The sound resonated in Li’s chest, set her fingers twitching and her teeth buzzing. And along the intraface, beyond her control but still flickering in and out of life according to some obscure rhythm, coursed a bustle and roar of high-speed traffic that shorted out her internals and flashed cryptic status messages across her retinas like tracer bullets.
She probed the intraface as they walked. It seemed to work regardless of whether Cohen was on the other end of it. At one point she almost managed to access the memory palace and its operating systems. But the framework wouldn’t evolve, and she ended up cut off, stranded in a blind alley of the loading program. Cohen himself was a ghost presence: an absence given flesh and substance by her own body’s refusal to admit that he was no longer part of her. That feeling, the sense that he was both there and not there, reminded her of stories about amputees who still kept waking up years later feeling the pain of lost limbs.
They reached the rendezvous at twenty-nine minutes and twenty seconds. Bella’s rebreather, which she had used sparingly, had four minutes to run. Li had already given her own rebreather to McCuen. Mirce wasn’t there to meet them, but as they turned the corner they saw the fresh tanks glimmering in the darkness.
“We’re still one tank short,” Li said, counting the tanks. She strained her ears for the sound of ropes and canisters being lowered, but heard only creaking lagging and the ominous silence of the hung-up roof.
She dropped to the ground beside the nearest tank and began hurriedly booting up the onboard comp