Spin State - Chris Moriarty [217]
It was waiting for her, just as she’d known it would be; but it was no longer the alien, incomprehensible presence of the glory hole that she felt. Instead she heard the echoes of half-remembered voices in it. Mirce. McCuen. Her father. And, worst of all, Cohen.
He had been right, of course. The worldmind needed him. It had cannibalized him, anchoring a new structure in the ruins of his systems, and in the flimsy beginnings of the planetary net that he had helped Ramirez create for it. Because it was the worldmind that Ramirez’s net had been meant to serve all along. That was the secret that had taunted Li from behind Cartwright’s blind eyes. That was the secret her father had known, the secret Cohen himself had known, even if he had figured it out too late to save himself. And now Li watched the worldmind explode into orbit, crackle through the Bose-Einstein relays of every planet along the Periphery, across the unmonitored, uncontrolled tributaries of FreeNet and out into the deep, swift, living tide of the spinstream.
She followed, running on more tracks than she could consciously manage. She combed her subsystems, found two UN pension administration number crunchers and set them to work on the cuff locks. The communications AI wondered fleetingly if they had time to wait for them. She wondered along with him—and an instant later, so quick on the heels of the thought that she had no sense of having acted, she was on the FreeNet airspace control system searching the skies for a signal from a ship that had not yet reported in to the navigational authority.
She found Gould’s ship already in orbit, maintaining forced radio silence while the sleek, vicious shape of a UNSC frigate drifted above it, going through a search-and-seizure routine. She stayed just long enough to be sure that Nguyen’s net had closed around Gould. Then she was off and running, looking for the Medusa.
It wasn’t there. Not when she started looking, anyway. Then it exploded in-system at relativistic velocity, right on schedule, its navigational beacons howling in Dopplered harmonics, its retrorockets blazing like a man-made supernova.
Nguyen’s people lay in wait at the first system buoy. As the Medusa dropped into normal time, a second frigate detached itself from the buoy’s signal shadow and began pacing the civilian ship, hailing it.
As fast as the Medusa was moving, the hail couldn’t have come through as anything but twisted static. Still, it was on a closed military link. The ship slowed for it.
Li prowled through eight different Bose-Einstein-enabled networks before she could find a back door into the closed communications shooting between the two ships.
“—for boarding and security inspection,” the frigate’s captain was saying when she finally broke through the ship-to-ship encryption.
She didn’t wait to hear the freighter give the permission. She was accessing the Medusa’s data banks before the frigate completed its request, looking for anything Sharifi could have deposited there, hoping desperately that the precious dataset wasn’t deadwalled into an unwired storage locker.
Then someone logged on and began executing a massive data dump into the ship’s computer core. Sharifi’s unencrypted datasets. And more. As Li raced through the files she realized there was spinfeed with the datasets—feed that Sharifi must have thought was important enough to record live and send with the original data. Li looked to see who was doing the uploading and laughed at the obviousness of it when she finally saw it.
Sharifi had rented a locker with an automated data release. When the Medusa dropped into orbit over Freetown, the release program had looked for a streamspace signal—one Gould would presumably have sent had her own delivery been successful—and, not receiving