Spin State - Chris Moriarty [219]
Li jumped faster. She was on him before Bella’s body had taken a step, surrounding him, suffocating him, penetrating him. The station AI fought her, but she ground it to dust, barely stopping to think what she was doing, and slid toward Haas through the numbers, bright and pitiless as a shark. He cried out once. Then there was only Li. Her incandescent purpose. Her glacial, inhuman clarity. Her all-too-human fury.
She’d forgotten about the derms, though. At the last instant Haas quivered, mustered his strength, and ripped them off, leaving her with nothing but the empty vessel of Bella’s shunt-suppressed mind.
The last thing she heard as she collapsed was the cool, disembodied echo of Haas’s laughter.
She woke to pain and darkness. Her lungs burned. She put a hand to her face, and it came away wet with blood. Hers or Kintz’s, she couldn’t tell.
She sat up and saw Bella stretched out on the floor in front of her, unmoving but still breathing, thank God. There were voices in her ear. Not the whispers and echoes of the memory palace, but real human voices.
“Daahl?” she called. “Ramirez?”
No answer but crackling, hissing static.
After an eternity something came over the line. It was indistinct at first, lost in interference. But when it cleared, she heard Ramirez calling her name.
“We’re ready to come up,” she told him.
“Good. Hurry. We’d just about decided to let them go down and look for you.”
“Let who down?”
Another garbled, crackling stretch of static.
“What?”
“I said the strike’s over. The troops are pulling out. And there’s a General Nguyen looking for you.”
Nguyen. Christ.
“I need to send a message first. To ALEF.”
“Forget ALEF. It’s over. Just get up here. It’ll make sense as soon as you see the spinfeed.”
AMC Station: 9.11.48.
The news was all over the station. The streets were still, hushed, dark but for the flickering light of the livewalls and the low murmur of the crowds gathered around them.
Sharifi was on every channel. Interrupting news hour, NowNet programming, the last game of the Series. As they passed the All Nite Noodle, Li glanced at the livewall and saw the Mets and Yankees huddled on the infield, staring up at a two-story-high holomonitor Sharifi who smiled as she explained the unprecedented, unlooked-for, inconvenient miracle that was Compson’s World.
FreeNet’s AIs had been the first to catch the transmission, just as Sharifi must have planned it. Once they realized what they had, they spun it to every channel, every terminal, every press pool in UN space. In a matter of minutes, reporters were calling the General Assembly and the mining companies for position statements.
It wasn’t over yet, of course. There would be debates, compromises, and unholy alliances in the days to come. But they would happen onstream, in public. Compson’s fate wouldn’t be sealed in Nguyen’s office or other equally discreet offices. All of humanity, UN and Syndicate alike, would have a say in it. Sharifi had done that, at least. Her death, Mirce’s death, Cohen’s death had done that.
Security was deserted; everyone was on the street, dealing with the changes, trying to figure out who was in charge now. Li collapsed in a chair, rubbing her eyes. She wanted a shower. And then she needed to see Sharpe, probably.
She looked up. Bella stood over her.
“What are you still doing here?” she asked.
“Who killed her?” It was the first thing Bella had said to Li since they’d hit station.
“What does it matter, Bella? It’s over.”
“It’s not over for me.”
Li stared. The room was so silent she could hear her own pulse drumming in her ears. Bella’s body was taut, every muscle rigidly contracted. Her hands were trembling, the nails dirty and broken. There was blood on her. Her own blood. Li’s blood. Kintz’s blood.
“I have to know,” she said.
Li thought back to the vision of Sharifi in the glory hole. To the lost, desperate, adoring way Bella had looked at Sharifi. Whatever else Bella had done, she’d loved her. And been loved in return. Li was sure of that much.
“Voyt killed