Spin State - Chris Moriarty [67]
Li shivered. “The constructs we saw in the lab were just . . . hosts, then?”
“Exactly.”
“And what about that?” She gestured to the wire on the table between them.
“Forget that. It’s nothing. An accessory. The kind of thing you get with the real equipment and shove in a bottom drawer somewhere and forget about. No, the thing you really need is the AI component of the intraface. That’s loaded onto an AI somewhere, probably an AI that’s enslaved to an Emergent network. Find that, and you’ll know exactly who you’re up against.”
“That’s what I’m asking you, Cohen. Who is it? Nguyen was paying you in tech. What were you going to do with it? What does ALEF want it for?”
“They don’t want it,” Cohen said. “I do.”
“Why?”
Cohen started to speak, then snapped his mouth shut and turned away to light another cigarette. “Stay offstream,” he said. “I’ll nose around in ALEF’s databases, chat up a few old acquaintances and see what I can turn up without drawing unwanted attention. You go back down that mine shaft. Find out exactly what Sharifi was doing. And who she was talking to. And don’t call me. Nguyen will certainly have your outgoing mail monitored, and I think it’s safer if we don’t talk until I get an offstream entanglement source set up.”
He rose and looked at his wristwatch, a paper-thin affair of buttery pink gold whose smooth face was embossed with a stylized Templar’s cross. Time was up. Li had clearly gotten all the answers she was going to get today.
“Come on then.” He smiled, catching up her hand in his and coaxing her to her feet. “Let’s go out through the garden. Perhaps the birds will be out. Did I tell you that our bioresearch division has reengineered a naturally reproducing cliff swallow? And I have a new lilac to show you. One that even your barbarously practical soul will appreciate.”
He drew her arm through his, and they stepped through the tall doors together into the green-speckled sunlight of his personal jungle.
Anaconda Strike: 16.10.48.
They were bringing the rats back in when Li and McCuen got to the pithead the next morning.
They brought them in traps and dented rusty cages and every imaginable kind of container. The miners even humped them in from Shantytown on the surface shuttles when they came on shift. Six full traps traveled down in the cage with Li and McCuen, and when they hit pit bottom the pit ponies were already waiting to load them onto the coal carts and send them trundling off into the mine’s far corners. Judging from the heap of empty cages piling up at pit bottom, Li guessed the relocation had been in full swing for at least a shift or two.
No manager showed up to stop it. They wouldn’t dare; some of the fiercest wildcat strikes in Compson’s history had sparked over the poisoning of mine rats. Miners loved their rats. Befriended them. Believed in them. The rats smelled poison gas long before any human or posthuman could, and they were attuned to the roof’s settling and cracking, to the silent hang-ups that preceded a big cave-in. When the rats left the mine, disaster was on the horizon. If the rats stayed, it was safe—or at least no riskier than usual.
“How can they stand it?” McCuen muttered as they started down the main gangway.
Li followed his gaze to a miner who was sitting on a gob pile breaking off pieces of his sandwich and tossing them to a trio of rats. It made an eerie picture: the black of the man’s coal-coated skin, the black of the rats’ fur, their round black eyes riveted on the grimy fingers that reached again and again into the gleaming lunch pail.
“They’re pretty clean,” she said. “You can’t catch much from them except plague. And even that you’re more likely to get from people these