Spin State - Chris Moriarty [216]
“I had other fires to put out,” he said. “And I didn’t want to get on the shunt and show my hand too soon. Bella’s been getting . . . difficult.”
“Christ,” Li whispered, sick at the thought of what Haas had done, at the sure knowledge that this had been the nightmare behind Bella’s eyes every time she’d spoken of Sharifi’s death. She might not have remembered, but she had suspected. And she had used Li to chase down that suspicion—hoping all the while that it would turn out to be wrong, that Li would find some other explanation.
Haas bent over Kintz, pulled a second pair of cuffs out of his belt and tossed them to Li. “Cuff your ankles,” he said, and watched while she did it. “Now give me your hand,” he said.
Fear prickled down Li’s spine. Haas wanted her dataset, the record of her interface with the condensates. And once he got it, there would be no reason at all to take Li above ground.
Haas saw her hesitation. “Nguyen may want the data enough to play games with you,” he said, his voice level, “but I personally don’t give a shit. Bear that in mind.” He nodded toward the cuffs already encircling her wrists. “You might crack those given a few hours, of course. But you don’t have a few hours. I leave you here without air and you’ll be dead inside of one hour. I’m your ticket out of here, my friend. You better fucking keep me happy.”
Li stretched out her hands, fingers spread wide, palms toward him. He put Bella’s left hand against hers, clasped Bella’s fingers around hers, and started the data transfer.
It was a strange thing to feel information being pulled out of her internals without her consent, to feel Haas taking the last chip she had to bargain with.
Or was the data all she had now? There was something else. Something Cohen had been ready to use. Something she could use too—if she was willing to put it all on the table and gamble everything, the way Sharifi had. She hesitated, knowing that the hard knot in her stomach was simple fear. Then she looked into the cold black pit of Bella’s dilated pupils and knew she was already risking everything. She closed her eyes, took a last, trembling breath, and stepped into the memory palace.
The numbers hit her like a riptide. Code coursed through her, rolled her over, dragged her under. She reached out—tentatively at first, then more confidently—to the myriad sentient systems that made up Cohen. She felt their squabbling, bickering personalities—and the glue of shared goals, shared memories, shared passions that bound them together. None of these splintered shards was Cohen. But they remembered him. They remembered everything he had felt and believed and wanted. They shared that with her, even if they shared nothing else.
She just hoped it would be enough.
She found the communications AI almost before she began looking. His fury spun at the core of the memory palace like a dead star, sucking her in, absorbing the dead AI’s last functioning subsystems, devouring every remaining bit of heat and warmth and light in the place.
“I need you,” she said. “I need to get a line out to Freetown.”
“We can’t get a line to Freetown without the field AI. We have no network.”
“Yes we do,” she said. “We have the worldmine. The worldmine can give us streamspace access completely outside UN control or oversight. All we have to do is get Daahl’s network up. All we have to do is finish the job Cohen started.”
A cold shiver ran through the numbers. “Why should we?”
“It’s what Cohen would have done if he were still here.”
“He was different. We believed in him. Trusted him. He earned that. You, on the other hand, had better have something to bargain with.”
So she bargained.
She gave them the intraface. She promised to do what she had already promised Cohen she would do. What they would have known she would still do if they’d trusted her as he had.
She promised to set them free.
The Anaconda Strike: 9.11.48.
She rode Cohen’s networks like a hawk riding an updraft.
She wheeled and soared, sideslipping into subnetworks, enslaved systems, communications programs.