Spin State - Chris Moriarty [212]
She knew it was the truth as soon as she spoke the words. It wasn’t a plan or a conspiracy; even now she didn’t believe that Daahl’s stolen memo had been more than an unfortunate turn of phrase. But it would happen. It was already happening.
The UN couldn’t survive without live condensate. Left to its own devices it would swallow Compson’s World whole, just as the worldmind had swallowed Cohen, just as the Security Council had swallowed Kolodny and Sharifi and all the other quiet casualties of their covert tech wars. Not out of malice, but with the best intentions. Not because they wanted to, but because they had to. Because that was how their code was written.
And Sharifi—Sharifi had known that the only way to stop them was to take the choice out of their hands.
“It’s not our job to decide those things,” McCuen said, as if he had tracked every turn and twist of her thoughts.
Li knew he was saying no more than she’d have said a few short weeks ago. He hadn’t seen what she’d seen. He hadn’t lived it. He could only see the choice she faced as black or white, loyalty or treason, UN or Syndicate.
And if she chose the side he wanted her to choose? The side that loyalty to comrades dead and alive made her want to choose, that everything in her long years of training and service had taught her to choose? Then the UN would be saved from the Syndicates, for a while anyway. It would survive, feeding off the condensates in a kind of cannibal existence that was no worse, when all was said and done, than any other creature’s struggle to survive at the expense of all the other life in the universe.
But the condensates—Cartwright’s sainted dead, Li’s father, Sharifi, Cohen—would die. And this time there would be no second birth, no dreaming afterlife, however alien. This time they wouldn’t be coming back.
“I’m sorry,” she said. She sat back on her haunches and took the knife off the rebreather line.
McCuen’s body turned to water under her as terror collapsed into shivering relief. “Jesus, Li, you scared the hell out of me. I really thought—”
She slit his throat cleanly, making sure the first cut finished it. It was messy, but it was kinder than anything else she could do for him. He died with a confused expression on his face, an idealistic little boy who still couldn’t believe this game of cops and robbers had turned real.
“It’s not personal,” she whispered into the void of his dilating pupils. But that was a lie too, the biggest lie of all. And she knew it even if McCuen didn’t.
Bella was waiting by their packs. She started to say something, then saw the blood covering Li’s hands and clothes and stopped, backing up a step.
Li hated her for that step, for the disgusted, fearful look on her face. She hated her so much she could feel her hands shaking with it. She emptied McCuen’s pack, took what she could carry, and left the rest for the rats. She didn’t trust herself to look at Bella.
“Did he . . . did you find out how many of them there are?”
Li held up three fingers.
“Kintz?”
“Yes.”
Li was drowning. Suffocating. She shouldered her pack and started down the drift, leaving Bella to follow any way she could.
Neither of them said McCuen’s name, then or later.
The Anaconda Strike: 9.11.48.
Kintz must not have been expecting them to come after him. He’d let his men straggle. He was acting like he expected Li to run, like he thought he’d have to corner her before she’d fight. What did he know that she didn’t?
She took down the first man with a single shot; no hope of surprise anyway, and the best tactic now was speed. Unfortunately, her shot took him in the neck, shattering the feedlines of his oxygen tank. She listened to the air whistling out of the tubes and cursed herself for being impatient. For not having thought things through more carefully. For having hands that shook too much. For not being as sharp as she’d been five years ago. Five months ago, even.
Behind him was another man she’d never seen before. Probably planet-side mine security. He had the instincts and training to duck