Spin State - Chris Moriarty [218]
This was Sharifi’s insurance policy: dumping her raw data onto the most unregulated and chaotic sea in streamspace’s ocean. It amounted to little more than shouting out her discoveries in an electronic town square. Bella and Cohen and everyone else who knew Sharifi had been right about her all along. Sharifi hadn’t been trying to sell her information. She’d been trying to give it away, to anyone and everyone who could use it. And she had trusted that someone—enough someones to make a difference—would take care of Compson’s World.
The Medusa was too slow, though. Its onboard systems were hopelessly obsolete and in uncertain repair. Li spun through the ship comp, tweaking, adjusting, speeding things up wherever she could; but even so the first files had barely loaded before she felt the clank and pressure shift of the frigate’s boarding tube locking onto the Medusa’s fragile skin.
Christ! All this, only to lose everything because of a slow ship’s comp? She pushed and prodded furiously, but still the numbers seeped through the shipboard systems as reluctantly as cold diesel fuel. And meanwhile it was just a matter of time until the frigate’s techs accessed the Medusa’s systems and shut down the file transfer.
But they never did. They ran a cursory search that didn’t turn up anything—didn’t even seem intended to turn up anything. Then they closed the airlock and pulled away, leaving a welter of relieved, if confused, internal mail between the freighter’s crew and passengers.
Li breathed a sigh of relief and let her guard down. The frigate kicked in its attitudinals and pulled away. The Medusa continued its radically slowed drift toward Freetown.
Then she saw it. It was as chillingly, breathtakingly clear as sunlight in hard vacuum. The frigate’s crew hadn’t boarded the freighter to take Sharifi’s data off it, but to leave something else on it. Something that would be sitting in one of the dark cargo bays waiting for a signal from the frigate’s bridge.
Nguyen didn’t need the files on the Medusa anymore. She hadn’t fired on the field AI until she knew Li and Cohen had retrieved everything she needed. And the frigate’s crew hadn’t boarded the Medusa until Haas had Li’s hand locked in his and was already stripping the precious data out of her hard files. Nguyen had the data now. So why would she run the risk that someone else might access the Medusa’s files, that Sharifi’s message might get through? Why would she let the rest of the world in on TechComm’s most jealously guarded secret?
The others were with her before the thought was even a word. They hijacked every navigational buoy within broadcast distance of the Medusa. They hijacked the NowNet lines that ran through the Ring–Freetown axis and out to the Periphery. Then they started shooting Sharifi’s files over every open link they could find.
Your files too, the communications AI said—and before Li could argue he was shooting out the unedited spinfeed of all those long hours in the mine, broadcasting everything she and Cohen had seen and felt since the worldmind first engulfed them.
Watching through the Medusa’s nav systems, Li saw the frigate slow and turn. Was she too late? Had it all been for nothing?
But no. They had caught the outbound transmissions. Li saw a quick FTL exchange of encrypted data between the frigate and Corps headquarters on Alba. Then the frigate turned tail, fired up its Bussard drives, and vanished into slow time.
The Medusa kept inching toward Freetown, its crew blissfully unaware of their deadly cargo. Meanwhile, Sharifi’s message flashed onto FreeNet and across a dozen Bose-Einstein relays onto a dozen planetary nets throughout the length and breadth of streamspace.
Li opened her eyes, amazed at her ability to act simultaneously in realspace and the whirling chaos of Cohen’s systems. The cuffs fell away from her wrists and ankles with a clatter. Haas looked at them unbelievingly for a split