Spin State - Chris Moriarty [223]
Li waited.
“You’ll ship back to Alba with the rest of the station personnel for debriefing. When you arrive, you’ll request a leave of absence for health reasons. Once things have settled down a bit, you’ll resign. Quietly. A suitable job will be found for you in the private sector. And we’ll all forget about what happened or didn’t happen on Compson’s.”
“That’s clear enough.”
“Good, then. It’s agreed.”
“No.”
Nguyen caught her breath and leaned forward almost imperceptibly in her chair. “Do you actually think you can weather this scandal? Are you really that arrogant?”
“You have the right to drum me out of the Service. I’d probably do the same in your place.” Li laughed briefly. “Hell, in your place I’d probably put a bullet in my skull and call it even. But you don’t have the right to make me resign. You don’t have the right to make me slink off quietly.”
“That’s pretty sanctimonious under the circumstances.”
“Maybe.”
Comprehension dawned on Nguyen’s face, only to be chased away by disdain. “You weren’t thinking of the money at all, were you?” she asked. “You actually talked yourself into thinking you were doing the right thing. Or you let Cohen talk you into it. Did you actually think it was your decision to make? Did you think you had the right to put billions of UN citizens at risk because of your moral scruples?”
Li didn’t answer.
“Amazing,” Nguyen said. “But then traitors never seem to feel the normal rules apply to them, do they?”
Li didn’t have an answer for that either.
“I’m going to pretend we didn’t have this talk,” Nguyen said after a moment. “You’ll have months of slow time on the evac ship to think about what you want to do when you dock at Alba. If I were you, though, I wouldn’t even get on that ship. Trust me, you won’t find much to come home to. I intend to spend the next little while making sure of that.”
Li laughed, suddenly overcome by the ridiculousness of the situation. She shook her head and grinned into the VR field. “You’re fantastic, Helen.”
Nguyen blinked, paled. “I always hated that look on Cohen’s face,” she said. “I hate it even more on yours.”
In the end they shut down the last working Bose-Einstein relay and quarantined the whole system. There was no other way to keep the worldmind off the spinstream, no other way to keep it from sweeping through every UN system and rifling through every network. And even before the last ship pulled out there were rumors coursing through streamspace that the AIs would defy the quarantine, that the Consortium had sent out sublight probes to reinitiate contact, that FreeNet, or at least part of it, would be opened to the worldmind.
Li caught her ship in a daze, too numb to care where she was going, or what Nguyen would have waiting for her when she got there. She clung to the guy ropes of a half-ton flat of emergency rations as the ship lumbered out of port and watched Compson’s World slip away from her for the last time through the cargo bay’s narrow viewport.
The ship cast off and drifted a little before its maneuvering engines stuttered into life. The station’s belly loomed above her, slipped sternward, and was replaced by stars and darkness. The solar arrays brushed by like wings, their frozen joints crusted with eight days’ worth of unthawed condensation ice. Then they were out in open space, and she could look back and see it all spread out below her.
The station was crippled, dying. The Stirling engines had shut down in the first crisis, and once the massive interlocking rings stopped spinning against each other it was only a matter of time until the living and working spokes faded into flat, cold, weightless darkness. A third of the outer ring was still lit up and functioning. The rest was dark already, the shadowed side of a jeweled carnival mask.
They were being evicted, politely but firmly. Compson’s World and the skies above it no longer belonged to them.
Li blew on the cold viruflex until it frosted, then pressed her forehead against it. Her eyes felt hot and dry. She kept