Spin State - Chris Moriarty [93]
Sharifi had arrived.
“Guess where the reports were deleted from?” Cohen asked, arching a slender eyebrow and forwarding the still-legible remnant of an erased access log to her. “The station exec’s office.”
“So, Haas deep-sixed the accident reports the day before I arrived.”
“And he was embezzling crystal, or at least we suspect he was.”
“And,” Li said, feeling vaguely dirty, “we know Haas is not unfriendly to the Syndicates.”
They looked at each other.
“It all keeps coming back to Haas,” Li said. “Doesn’t it?”
Instead of answering her, Cohen vanished.
Li staggered to her feet, knocking her chair over. Her quarters looked wrong somehow. She checked her internals and realized that she was no longer in limited VR interaction mode, but in full two-way.
She tried to access realspace.
Nothing.
Code.
Nothing
She’d been bagged, warehoused, shunted into virtual deadspace. She closed her eyes and rubbed her face, thinking. When she opened them again, she was no longer on-station.
She stood in a perfectly square, perfectly empty room. Blank white walls. Blank floors and ceilings. Nominal squares of windows opening on an eternity of white nothingness. Her heartbeat hammered in the silence like a kettledrum. She focused on a corner where floor met wall in order to stave off vertigo and waited, counting her heartbeats.
A door opened. One moment she was staring at a blank wall. The next someone had stepped into the room with her. But when she tried to recapture the moment of entry, it was missing, skipped over as if there had been a bad splice in her optical feed.
The new person in the room was small, dark, slender. It took Li a few heartbeats to focus on him after the long blank whiteness. When she did, she saw coltish, gangling legs below striped shorts. A red-and-black football jersey. Dark hair. Olive skin.
“Cohen?”
“Sshhhh!” he whispered.
He had nothing on his feet but tall striped socks with bulky shin guards poking out over their tops; his old-fashioned soccer cleats were tied together by the shoelaces and thrown over one bony shoulder. He circled the room, stopping several times to peer at sections of wall that looked, to Li’s eyes, completely unremarkable. He walked up one wall and sat down cross-legged a few feet below the ceiling. “Well, here we are,” he said.
“We? I don’t know who the hell you are, except that you look like Cohen. Which proves nothing.”
He grinned. “Looks don’t always deceive, my dear. Even mine.”
“Prove it.”
“How?”
“Tell me something.”
“Like what?” he said, sounding for all the world like the ten-year-old he appeared to be.
“Something no one else would know.”
He wrapped his arms around his legs and put his sharp little chin on his knees, thinking. “Right,” he said. “Well, you’re two centimeters shorter than you tell people you are.”
“You could pull that out of my transport files.”
“And you’re an evil-tempered beast in the morning.”
She snorted. “As opposed to the rest of the time?”
“Good point,” he said, and laughed.
He peered owlishly at her, rubbing at a fresh scab on his knee. “There’s always your deepest, darkest, awfulest secret.”
She froze. She tried for a laugh but couldn’t quite get there. “Which one?”
“That I love you.”
She looked up to find him watching her as if she were a suspicious package that might explode without warning. “Oh, for God’s sake,” he said after a brief awkward silence. “You don’t have to look like you’re ready to chew your leg off to get away from me every time I say it.”
“Don’t exaggerate, Cohen.”
“It’s no exaggeration. Trust me.” He shot her a resentful look from under dark eyelashes. “And it’s ridiculous. It’s not like you’re some fainting virgin, for Heaven’s sake.”
“Now you just want to sleep with me? You’ve lowered your sights. Last time I was supposed to be wife number seven. Or was it eight? Christ, Cohen, you get married like normal people buy puppies!”
“Normal humans, you mean.” He gave her a long naked defenseless look. “That’s what it’s all about for you, isn’t it? Trying to pass. Getting the signed, sealed, and delivered