Spin State - Chris Moriarty [209]
That got a bitter laugh from a voice she hadn’t even heard before: a powerful, saturnine presence who made it clear that he despised her so much he hadn’t bothered to participate before. “Cohen wanted you too,” the voice told her. “And look what that got him.”
As it spoke, she felt a burning jealousy behind the words. A child’s jealousy? A lover’s? Or was this some other thing entirely, some splinter of Cohen’s inhuman soul? But this was no child, she realized. It was Cohen’s old communications AI—the only entity in the shifting ruin of his networks that was capable of controlling its fellows.
She started to answer, to argue. But before she could form a thought, a wave of anger battered her, cold as ice water, and she was cut off, out of the link, kicked off the intraface.
“Where are you going?” McCuen asked.
“To take a piss.” She forced a grin. “You want to come?”
He flushed. Like a little boy, for Christ’s sake. But he stayed put. And that was all she had really wanted from him.
She stepped into the shadows and slipped her butterfly knife from her belt, relearning its balance, feeling the blade blossom, lilylike, from the cross-gripped handle.
She could smell their pursuer. She could feel him with the hairs of her arms, with her raised hackles, with the skin of her face. She could have found him by touch if she’d had to. She was deep into her own territory now. She didn’t need maps, not even Cohen’s maps. She was about to murder someone. And she’d known how to do that for as long as she could remember.
She eased around the corner, stopped, listened, stopped again. She weighed the dark and the silence, took their measure.
She took her own measure too. Heavy-soled boots that could crunch against grit or scrape on rock. Cloth that could rustle and whisper treacherously. Loose buckles, loose straps, loose bootlaces. And her own breathing, sweating, shedding body, casting off trace faster than her skinbugs could scramble to camouflage it. She’d heard it said that Earth’s extinct carnivores had no scent, but that was a lie, like so many other things people said about the planet. The truth was they’d just known how to hide their scent from those they preyed on—a last, deadly secret.
She found her prey two meters past the bend in the drift. He sat in the dark, back to the wall, rebreather hanging lose around his jaw, infrared goggles laid on the ground beside him. He was eating.
She inched along the wall, arms out, knife ready. Waiting for him to turn. Waiting for the telltale catch of breath that would tell her he’d heard her.
It never came.
He struggled at the last, standing up, trying to throw her off as her left hand grasped his head and stretched his throat taut. But by then it was over.
“Christ!”
McCuen. With the gun in his hand that she should have, damn her, taken from him.
She let the dead man slide down the length of her body to the ground.
“You killed him,” McCuen said, his voice a ragged whisper. “I didn’t believe her. I didn’t believe you’d do it.”
Li shook her head. Her? What was he talking about?
Bella came around the corner before she could ask him. She saw the fallen guard, gave a strangled cry, stopped and drew back, her hand over her mouth.
“Go up the drift and wait for me,” Li told her. “You’re just in the way here.” And I don’t want you to see this. I don’t want anyone to see it.
Bella started to speak. Then her eyes slid away from Li’s. She turned and walked back up the drift, leaving Li and McCuen alone.
They stared at each other. His betrayal and her knowledge of it hung in the air between them. He made a move, just the slightest flexing of his ankles.
She lunged, still hoping to keep the fight quiet and not alert the other three pursuers. She feinted toward McCuen’s face with the knife, and he threw up his left arm to cover himself, just as she’d known he would. He kept the gun more or less pointed at her while he did it, but he lost time. And in that instant, she reached up, wrapped her left hand around his wrist and broke it.
He screamed.