Spin State - Chris Moriarty [73]
“I didn’t do anything, Katie. Whatever Sharifi found, she came here looking for it. We all walk all Her paths. No choice can change that. Nothing that happens isn’t meant to happen.”
“Was it worth it, Cartwright? How long will it take Haas to get a nonunion crew down there? A week? Two? That’s all the time you have your precious glory hole for. And how many people died for it?”
“No one dies, Katie.” Cartwright was doing something to the condensates around them. Li felt them pressing in on her, shorting out her internals, smothering her. “The wave is more than the sum of its paths.”
“I remember.” She was trembling, her breath coming tight and angry. “I remember what you did to my father. I remember.”
“He’s here, Katie. Don’t you want to talk to him? All you have to do is believe in Her. She lost Her only Son. She knows your sorrow, even if you’ve forgotten it. She can forgive you.”
Whatever he said next, Li didn’t hear it. She was already running, scrambling down the steep slope, tearing the cloth of her uniform and the skin of her palms on the sharp rocks.
She ran blind, her internals a wash of useless static. She stumbled over something in the dark, patted it until she recognized the angles of her Davy lamp. It had gone out. She lit it by feel with trembling fingers, strapped it on, and just sat staring at the walls for thirty seconds.
McCuen was waiting in the gangway, looking far better than he had the last time she’d seen him. “You okay?” he asked.
Li remembered her torn hands and clothes, wondered what her face looked like. “I’m fine. I just fell, that’s all.”
He gave her a strange look. “Did you talk to him?”
“Couldn’t get up there. No air.” She pulled on her rebreather, jammed the mouthpiece between her lips, glad of how it masked and muffled her voice. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
Lalande 21185 MetaServ: 17.10.48.
Sharifi’s hand was warm, her handshake firm and professional.
“Major,” she said, smiling. “Welcome.”
“Nice to meet you,” Li said, wondering what corporate database McCuen had hacked to find this goldmine.
She looked around, gaping unabashedly. They stood in an interactive set designer’s dream of a physics lab: high ceilings, clean Ring-side sunlight streaming through two-story-tall faux-steel casement windows, cutting-edge lab equipment carefully arranged to produce an effect of frenzied but impeccably organized activity.
She turned back to Sharifi, who was still talking at her. She was charismatic, in a hard-sciency kind of way. She came across as thoughtful, rational, feminine. And obviously—very obviously—a genetic. A youthful, vigorous fiftysomething. Shorter than UN norm. Thick black hair framing a square, flat-boned Han face. Not fat, but compact, solid.
Li knew that body. She knew the heft of the long thighbones, the sharp ridge of the nose, the smooth curve of skull from ear to temple. So that’s what I would have looked like, she thought and shuddered.
“Let’s start with a quick overview,” Sharifi said.
As she spoke, Li felt the fund-raising program’s enslaved AI trying to crack her system. Fishing for financial data, donation patterns, anything that would help narrow its sales pitch. Her own AI moved to counter the probes, and she gave it permission to open a set of decoy personal files.
A holodisplay unrolled beside Sharifi. She drew a finger through the grid to activate it, pulling a sparkling wake of ripples behind her. The display sprang to life, and Li found herself staring at one of the iconic images of the age: a simplified-for-laymen flowchart of the Bose-Einstein teleportation process.
Sharifi smiled, flashing straight, well-cared-for teeth. “Quantum-teleportation—or, more accurately, quantum-corrected spinstream replication—has been described as the worst system of faster-than-light travel, except for all the others. A more accurate way of putting it might be to say that QCSR unites two fatally flawed methods of transport in order to capitalize on their strengths