Spin 01 - Spin State (2 page)
Bad liars always think they can make a lie stick with eye contact
, Nguyen had murmured, an unnerving smile playing across her lips.
But they’re wrong, of course. There’s no trick to lying well except practice. So go practice. That is, if you want to work for me.
Li stood up and flicked a thumb toward the door. “Can we speak privately, Captain?”
Squad members caught their breath, muttered, shifted on their benches. Fine, Li thought; it wouldn’t hurt morale if they knew she was willing to go to bat for them. But that didn’t mean she was going to dress down a TechComm liaison officer in front of them.
She followed Soza toward the door. In the back of the room, Cohen stood, stretched casually, and slipped out after them without even asking if he was wanted.
“Come on,” Li said as soon as the three of them were out in the empty corridor. “Let’s hear the real story.”
“That is the real story,” Soza said, still standing by his lie and putting his faith in eye contact. “That’s what Intel gave us.”
“No, it’s not. Even Intel isn’t that stupid. This your first trip to the Periphery, Soza?” He didn’t answer.
“Right. Well, let me tell you what they didn’t tell you in your official briefing. Half the population of this planet are registered genetic constructs. The other half don’t know what the hell they are and couldn’t qualify for a clean passport even if they had the money to pay for a genetic assay. The only human in-system besides you is the governor. His air’s shipped in, his food and water’s shipped in, his official car has a full-blown life-support system, and he might as well be on Earth itself for all he has to do with anything. I could put you in a cab and drive you to places where people have never seen a human, where they’d look at you like you’d look at a mastodon. The Syndicates, on the other hand, are practically neighbors. We’re eight months sublight from KnowlesSyndicate, fifteen from MotaiSyndicate. You can catch a ride to Syndicate space on half the freighters in-system as long as you’re willing to pay cash, keep your mouth shut, and forget you ever met your fellow passengers.”
Soza started to speak, but Li put up a hand impatiently. “I’m not being disloyal. Just realistic. We put riot troops on-surface here during the incursions. That’s not the kind of thing people get over, whichever side of the gun they’re on. And the Secretariat knows it. That’s why they tread so lightly in the Trusteeships these days. And why they wouldn’t in a million years call down a tech raid just because some local company is a little too friendly with the Syndicates. No. There’s a reason for this raid. And the right thing for you to do is play straight with me about it.”
“I can’t,” Soza said. He glanced at Cohen for support, but the AI just shrugged. Li waited.
Soza laughed awkwardly. “General Nguyen warned me about your, uh, persuasiveness, Major. Look, I really admire you. You should have made colonel in your last go-round. Everyone who doesn’t have his head stuck in a hole knows it. You’re a credit to … well, all colonials. But you know that kind of politically sensitive information isn’t cleared for release to line troops.”
“It’s cleared for release to you, though.” “Well … of course.”
“And you’ll be dropping with us tomorrow?” She asked the question in a carefully neutral voice. She didn’t want to humiliate him—but she sure as hell wasn’t going to sugarcoat it.
“No,” Soza said. At least he had the grace to blush.
“So when the shooting starts, we’ll have no one on the ground who knows enough to tell us when it’s time to cut our losses and leave. I’m not willing to send my people into action under those conditions.”
That hit Soza where he lived.
“They’re not your people, Major. They’re UN Peacekeepers. And they’re under TechComm command for the duration of this mission.”
“TechComm doesn’t have to visit their parents when we send them home in boxes,” Li said.
She stood toe-to-toe with Soza and looked straight into his eyes so he could see the green status light blink off behind her left pupil as she shut down her black box. “Look. Feed’s off. This is soft memory only. It’ll wipe as soon as we jump out-system.” Well, not quite. But hopefully Soza was too young to know all the ways you could kink Peacekeeper datafiles.
“You’re not authorized for that information,” Soza said stiffly. This time he didn’t call her Major.
Li ignored him.
“How can we do the job,” she asked Soza, “if no one who’s coming with us even knows what we’re looking for? That kind of nonsense may seem like a good idea back on Alba, but out here it’s deadly.”
Soza’s eyes flicked toward Cohen so briefly that Li wouldn’t have seen the look unless some part of her was already watching for it.
“Oh,” she said. “So that’s how it is.”
She turned and stared at Cohen. Cohen cleared his throat and glanced at Soza. “I believe you have just been let off the hook,” he told him.
Soza looked at Li hesitantly.
“Fine, go,” she said. “And get the briefing back on track. I’ll pull whatever I miss off Kolodny’s feed.” “I’m just following orders,” Soza said apologetically.
Li shrugged, smiled. “I know it.”
Cohen closed the door behind Soza and set his back against it.
“Well?” Li said once it was obvious he wasn’t going to volunteer anything.
“Well, what?” he asked, smiling the little-boy-in-trouble smile she’d seen shunted through a dozen different interfaces.
Today’s ’face was another of Cohen’s soft-skinned boys—or was it even a boy? Either way it was beautiful, and just far enough over the threshold of adulthood to fill out the expensively tailored suit. Where did Cohen find these kids? And assuming even half of them were as young as they looked, how did he finesse the laws about implanting shunts in minors?
Well, at least it’s not Roland
, she thought. That was one mistake she didn’t need to be reminded of at the moment.
“Were you even planning to tell me?” she asked.
“I can’t,” Cohen said. “
Desolée
.”
“Can’t? Or won’t?”
“Can’t. Truly.” He looked embarrassed. “I’m persona non grata at Alba ever since the Tel Aviv fiasco.”
“Yeah,” Li said. She’d thought Cohen would never work for TechComm again after Tel Aviv. If he was on Metz, then Nguyen must be after something so important that she had to use the best AI she could find—even though the best meant Cohen. “What happened in Tel Aviv, by the way?”
“The usual story. Good intentions gone sour.”
“Gone rancid, from what I hear. There’s a rumor going the rounds that they tried to strip you of your French citizenship.”
He glanced sidelong at her, an enigmatic smile curving the ’face’s lips. “Is there?”
“Fine, don’t tell me. It’s none of my business anyway. Unlike Soza’s little secret.”
“My dear, I’d tell you that, of course. I’d tell you anything and everything if only I could be sure my confessions wouldn’t work their way back to the charming General Nguyen. But, as I’ve said once already, I can’t. TechComm made me give them every cutout and back door in my networks before they’d clear me for this job. Then they sicced one of their tame AIs on me. He fiddled me so good I can’t even find the kinks.” The soft girlish mouth twitched. “Humiliating.”
“So why take the job?” Li asked. “And don’t tell me the money. I know better.” Cohen looked away.
“Jesus wept! You’re getting paid in tech? On a shooting mission? How could you do that to Kolodny? To all of us?”
He fished in his trouser pocket and pulled out a slim enameled cigarette case. “Smoke?” he asked.
“No,” she said angrily. But then she said yes and took one; Ring-made cigarettes were too good to pass up, even on principle. And Cohen only smoked the best.
He reached over and lit it for her—not touching her, not leaning too far into her space, not making eye contact. All the elaborate
nots
of friends who have been lovers but no longer are.
They smoked in silence. She wondered what he was thinking, but when she glanced at him he was just staring at the floor and blowing smoke rings.
“Listen,” he said when she was about to tell him it was time to get back into the briefing room. “We need it. I wouldn’t do this to you, to Kolodny, if we didn’t.”
“We need it? We who?”
“We me.” He spoke with the typical Emergent AI’s disregard of individual boundaries. Pronouns meant nothing to him;
me
and
not me
changed every time he signed a network share or associative contract.
We
could be no one or a hundred someones. But at least it sounded like he wasn’t planning to auction the tech off to the highest bidder. That was something, Li supposed.
She threw down her cigarette and crushed it under a bootheel. The virufactured alloy floor mobilized its scrubbers as soon as the butt landed, and within seconds there was no sign on its matte gray surface that the cigarette had ever been there.
“I hate those floors,” Cohen said, scowling prettily at the place where the cigarette had been. “I have yet to see one that can actually tell the difference between something you meant to throw out and something that just fell out of your pocket. I’ve lost some really nice jewelry that way. Not to mention the address of the prettiest boy I never slept with.”
“You’re a martyr,” Li drawled.
“Yes, well. We all have our trials.” He looked at her, waiting. “What are you going to do about this one?”
“Call up Nguyen and ask for my orders in writing,” Li said, her voice heavy with sarcasm. “What else?” Cohen gave her a long straight serious look. “You could always trust me.”
He watched her in absolute inhuman stillness—a puppet whose electronic strings had been cut. Li had learned to notice that stillness over the years, to track it along the horizon of their friendship like a climber tracks the thunderhead looming over the next mountain range. She didn’t know what it meant, any more than she knew what the weather meant. But it was a sign. It was the only one she had sometimes.
me.>
She stared at him. At the eyes that changed with every new ’face he shunted through. At the shifting mystery behind the eyes. He was the closest thing she’d found to a friend in the fifteen years since she’d enlisted—the only years that were backed up in Corps data banks. And that was as good as saying he was the closest thing to a friend she’d ever had. She knew his luxurious habits, his sly feints and twists of humor, the beautiful bodies that he put on as easily as the soft shirts his tailor made him. She knew what countries he called home, what God he prayed to. But whenever she tried to touch anything real, anything solid, he poured through her fingers and left her dry-mouthed and empty-handed.
She didn’t know him. She doubted anyone could know him.
And trusting him? Even the thought of it was like diving blind into dark water.
* * *
“You see it?” Kolodny asked, throwing back the bolt of her carbine with such machine precision that Li had a sudden vision of microrelays ratcheting back ceramsteel filaments. Only long familiarity told her that Cohen was off-shunt and Kolodny herself had asked the question.
They were coming in low, hiding the hopper’s trace in Metz’s violent predawn dust storms. Checkerboard-square fields flashed beneath them. Flatlands faded into a featureless horizon that had never known glaciers or river flows. The hopper whipped up black plumes of virufactured topsoil in its backwash, filling Li’s nose with the hot exotic spice of rotting things.
She crossed the hopper’s bucking flight deck and leaned out into the wind, searching. Her GPS told her that the target was close, close enough to be visible in this flat country. But Metz was only partially terraformed, the atmosphere still swarming with active von Neumanns and virucules, and her optics struggled to pierce the haze of radiation. She squinted, switched to infrared, then quantum telemetry. Hopeless.
“Hey, Kolodny,” someone asked. “The AI. Is it on-line yet?”
Li didn’t have to turn around to know the speaker was one of the new recruits; newbies were always fascinated by the AIs.
“Not yet,” Kolodny answered. “And don’t call him an ‘it’ to his face unless you want to annoy him. AIs are ‘he’ just like ships are ‘she.’ ”
“What’s it feel like when it—when he’s on shunt?”
“Like running into a burning house,” Kolodny said—and Li heard the grin in her voice even through the rattle and roar of the hopper. “Only you’re the house.”
She glanced over and saw Kolodny still cleaning the old carbine she always carried. She should have said something about it, of course. This raid was nonlethal arms only. But Kolodny had earned the right to break a few rules. And that was one rule Li was breaking herself, truth be told.
She looked out the door again and spotted the target, a bright point of silver tossed on the dark fields. It appeared and vanished with each pitch and yaw of the hopper. It grew, splitting into two buildings, then five. A gate. A tower. A double fence of bright, freshly milled razor wire walled the compound off from the surrounding fields. The fence enclosed a strip of hard-packed earth about the width of the warning track around a baseball diamond. Li upped the magnification on her optics and saw paw prints in the
dirt. Intel had said there were dog patrols, and it looked like they had it right for once.
Beyond the track rose a sleek virufactured alloy cube—a prefab office module that had been replicated through Metz’s orbital Bose-Einstein relay and dropped from orbit. Li guessed it was this little luxury that led to the lab’s discovery; the shipping bills must have set red lights blinking all the way back to Alba. The cube had glimmered like a pearl on the satellite feed, but today it was as drab as the sooty sky reflected in its windows. Just south of it, crouched behind long low Quonset huts full of farm equipment, lay the ramshackle bulk of the beet plant.