“You sure he won’t be back?”
Meyer gestured toward the window and the pathetic row of dangling EVA suits. “Would you?”
Ten minutes later Li was out of Meyer & Sons Marine Auctioneers and back in the station’s crowded public corridors. As on every trip to the orbital station she was struck by the heavy military presence. Some were Peacekeepers and security contractors cold-shipped in to jumpstart the machinery of the Trusteeship, but most were Navy, on leave from the orbital shipyards. They gave the place the feel of a port town in wartime. And they gave Li the feeling that a dozen pairs of sharp eyes were boring into an invisible spot smack dab between her shoulder blades.
At some point she realized consciously what her instincts had been telling her for several minutes; it wasn’t just a feeling. Someone really was watching her.
She stopped in front of a noodle joint and gazed into its steamed-up windows until she caught a flicker of movement that seemed to swirl against the surrounding crowd instead of flowing with it.
She turned—and looked across the concourse straight into the phlegmatic gaze of Astrid Avery’s first mate.
“Holmes, isn’t it?” she asked, stepping toward the woman.
“That’s right.”
“You following me?”
“That sort of thing’s a little below my pay grade.”
“So I can just write this encounter down to lucky chance?”
“Not entirely. We keep a pretty close watch on Ben Meyer. Just a matter of taking sensible precautions.” Holmes smiled without showing her teeth. “I suppose I can guess why you were talking to him this morning. Did you get anything out of him?”
“No. He was too scared of Avery to talk to me.”
Holmes’s smile broadened into a full-out grin. She had unusually white and slightly crooked teeth with curiously long canines.
“You like the idea of civilians being afraid of you?”
“It’s not whether I like it or not. It’s whether it’s useful.”
Li stared at the other woman, but she didn’t flinch. Li was starting to suspect that Holmes had less flinch in her than anyone she’d ever met.
“Let me give you a piece of advice, little girl.” Holmes spoke evenly, almost gently. But there was something about the woman that made her mere presence menacing. “Go home while you still can. Don’t make us decide we have to notice you.”
THE PIT
“You’re going to do something crazy now, aren’t you?” Router/Decomposer asked through the hotel livewall when Li stormed back into their room straight off the station-to-surface shuttle.
He’d been trying to talk to her all the way down on the shuttle, and during the taxi ride, too. But New Allegheny’s noosphere had turned into a jigsaw puzzle of blind spots and bandwidth bottlenecks because of the wild AI infestation—or, as Router/Decomposer had cynically suggested more than once, because of the Trusteeship Administration’s incompetent attempts to fight it. So it was getting easier and easier to avoid talking to him. Still, he’d picked up enough of her conversations with Meyer and Holmes to know that she hadn’t gotten what she wanted. And he knew Li well enough to be worried about what kind of Plan B she’d come up with if left to her own devices.
She settled herself on the platform bed, lotus-style, and stripped off her shirt. The hotel’s climate control had held out a little longer than the police station systems, but it was down now, too. And it was amazing how hot it could get even under the constant fug of the Crucible.
“Will you please talk to me, Catherine? You’re about to do something so stupid you don’t even want to tell me about it, and I’m going to get stuck watching from the sidelines and trying to pick up the pieces later.”
She dove into streamspace and slipped through the back door that Router/Decomposer had already installed in the hotel’s intelligent systems,
and began a systematic search for every open port into the information systems of Meyer’s auction house.
“You really have to learn to take no for an answer,” Router/Decomposer told her, as soon as he saw what she was up to.
“Don’t like nofrinanser,” she answered absentmindedly, pronouncing it as if it were some prescription medicine he was foisting on her. “It’s got a nasty aftertaste.”
He didn’t laugh. They both knew that she was daring him to stop her. And they both knew that he wouldn’t stop her. Cohen would have. But Router/Decomposer didn’t have it in him to bring the hammer down. And though Li should have respected him for his moral qualms, the truth was … she didn’t.
“All right,” he said. “Do what you’re going to do anyway. I’m just going to say one thing about it. You think Cohen would never have killed himself without figuring out some way to come back to you.”
“I never said—”
“You didn’t have to say. It’s hovering behind every fight we have about this. You think he owed it to you—”
“You’re goddamn right he di—”
She broke off, horrified by what she’d just said.
“You think he owed it to you to come back because you would have done the same for him. And that’s fine. I think he owed it to you, too. I don’t know what the fuck he thought he was doing out here, or how he got himself into whatever trouble he was in. But here’s the thing I’d just like you to think about. You keep saying we’re out here because he would never have killed himself. But is that really why you’re doing this? Or is it because you can’t figure out how to forgive him if he
did
kill himself?”
Li glared up at the buzzing livewall speaker, stone-faced, as if Router/Decomposer were somehow
inside
the wall and she could pierce through the paint and plaster to stare him into submission.
But her insides were roiling and her ears were filled with shrieking, howling static. And the only words that she could scrape together would have been a mocking, humiliating admission that he was right.
She went back to work because she couldn’t think of anything else to do.
“You shouldn’t have let me drag you into this,” she said after a while. But he didn’t answer. Then or later. She couldn’t even tell if he was still listening.
Li spent the rest of that day trying to crack Meyer’s database. She kept trying as the daytime twilight of Pit bottom darkened to true night outside her window. She kept trying long after it was obvious that she wasn’t getting anywhere. She didn’t ask herself why she put so much into it. She didn’t really want to know the answer, which she suspected had less to do with professional pride than with the memory of Holmes’s long, white, gleaming canines.
Finally she gave up, stretching in her chair until her spine crackled. Router/Decomposer was still gone, either sulking or offline. Just as well, she told herself, suppressing the twinge of guilt she felt about it before it could blossom into anything she’d really have to deal with.
She went to the dresser and opened the carefully wrapped package she’d picked up during her last trip to Shadyside. All of the tools in the little cloth roll had numerous perfectly legal and legitimate uses, but that wouldn’t have fooled Dolniak if he’d gotten a look at them. And it wouldn’t fool security on the dirt-to-station shuttle, either. So Li stashed the little packet at the bottom of an innocuous-looking shoulder bag and then went into the immense tiled bathroom and took a long, hard look in the mirror. Innocent civilian was utterly beyond her reach, she decided, so she settled for the next best thing, and spent a tedious half hour massaging her exterior into something that she hoped would say cash-flush security contractor instead of … well, whatever she was these days.
She made it on-station without mishap. By the time the dinner hour was winding to a close and the bars and nightclubs were starting to heat up, Li was standing in a darkened public access corridor that abutted the rear boundaries of Meyer’s warehouse.
She tried the door—more for form’s sake than because she actually
thought she’d get anywhere with it—and then she started down the long curve of the hab ring along the internal wall dividing the auction house’s ample square footage from the public corridor.
It didn’t take her long to find what she’d been hoping to find:
A window.
It was a funny thing about windows. Humans just couldn’t resist them. Li had noticed during the war that Syndicate habitat rings didn’t have internal windows. As in so many other ways, Syndicate constructs had adapted to life in space more completely than the UN citizenry—both physiologically and psychologically. But humans weren’t there yet. They wanted windows. And not just windows onto stars and the void. They wanted lights and action and breathable air outside their windows. And, annoying though it was to security types, they usually wanted those windows to open.
Li grinned to herself, unrolled her tools, and carefully selected the appropriate one from the bunch. Then she set to work jimmying the lock.
She might have been concentrating a little too hard on it, but even in retrospect she didn’t think so. The guard caught her flat-footed not because she’d forgotten to keep a lookout, but because he really was good at his job. Which, in retrospect, was her big mistake. Meyer might joke about the nonessentials, but she should have known he wouldn’t fool around when it came to hiring security.
The guard was old, though, pushing fifty. If he hadn’t already drawn by the time she turned around she probably could have handled him. But he had. And she couldn’t.
She looked her captor over, assessing her options. Clean-cut and clean-shaven, with the razor burn to prove it. Cheap haircut, cheap clothes, cheap everything. Government-issue shoes. Built like an ox and carrying fifteen pounds of flab on top of two hundred pounds of street fighter’s muscle. Flat, expressionless face. Eyes that had seen it all for so long that they didn’t even remember what being shocked felt like.
Christ
, Li thought.
Another cop
. Or an ex-cop. Or a rent-a-cop. Or some kind of cop.
“Grab the wall, sweet pea.”
She did it, and was frisked and handcuffed with bored efficiency. When he had disarmed her, he stepped back to a good, safe distance and cocked his head curiously—but still with that same flat, expressionless face, so that the gesture seemed choreographed. Or maybe it was just habit—the habit of curiosity hanging on long after he’d seen more of the world than any sane person would ever want to see. “Wanna tell me what you’re doing here?”
She fed him her prepackaged story.
“Oh,” he said when she’d finished. Pleasantly, as if she’d cleared everything up nicely and wasn’t he glad about it. “You must think I’m as dumb as I look. I’m not. And I may be a rent-a-cop, but that’s only ’cause the union sold us down the river twenty years ago and my pension’s a piece of shit. So try again, sweetcakes. And give me the real story if you don’t want your teeth knocked in. I’ve been on my feet for fourteen hours, and these fuckheads don’t pay overtime.”
The cargo spindle howled toward the
Christina
, hogging deep into the gravity well. It was an impossible monster of a craft, no match for the hard g’s of dogfights or gravity wells. It was little more than a subluminal coatrack: a bare-bones frame on which any shipping companies willing to pay fuel and port fees could hang all the cargo containers they wanted to get from one system to another without anyone looking too closely at their contents.
The cargo was nothing—most of it was either worthless altogether or unsellable by wanted men. But there would be a crew, and a few paying passengers. And they would need air and water. And after the last mauling encounter with the
Ada
, the
Christina
was officially running joker: low on fuel, low on air, low on drinking water, with all nonessential life support systems shut down to conserve scarce resources. So air and water were things worth fighting for.
Sital eyed the spindle with a speculative gleam in her eye. “You think they’re running joker, too?”
Llewellyn’s eyes narrowed, and the gazes of half a dozen bridge officers turned toward the monitor. Li could feel the sudden charge in the air as the pirates sensed a possible vulnerability.
“That’d be awful risky,” Llewellyn pointed out. “What do they do if we call their bluff?”
“Maybe they figure we’d drag them back out of the gravity well for salvage.”
“That’s assuming we have enough fuel ourselves. And what if we didn’t?”
Now it was Sital’s turn to shrug. “In that case, they’re fucked anyway, aren’t they?”
Llewellyn cocked his head, listening to the ghost. It drove Catherine crazy knowing that Cohen—or at least part of him—was right here in the room with her, talking to Llewellyn. And that she was locked out of the conversation. She didn’t think it was simple jealousy. She’d never thought of herself as the jealous type, really. But then she was starting to wonder if she knew herself quite as well as she’d always thought she did.
“The ghost says they’ve already passed their optimal break point. He agrees with you. He thinks they’re out of fuel and hoping to hitch a ride on us.”
Sital grinned. It was a quick, tight grin, and it looked strangely ferocious on her buttoned-down navigator’s face.
“You know,” she murmured. “I could almost start to like this guy.”
Twelve minutes later Li was crushed into an airlock with as many other pirates as could be shoehorned in alongside her, watching the final approach to target.
Everyone around her was tense, wired, and waiting. Most of them had the classic “hearing his master’s voice” look of people ignoring reality because there was something running on their internal optical feeds that they just couldn’t stop looking at. With a start, Li remembered that she had full crew member privileges now and could look at it as easily as they could.
Li tensed, too, her muscles and nerves readying themselves for the explosive push of the hand-to-hand fighting ahead, but she felt strangely disconnected from it all. She knew that the real heart of the battle lay elsewhere. The real fight was already under way, and it was between the two AIs, with their human crews as mere pawns and auxiliaries.
As the two craft approached each other, the two AIs would be testing each other, each feeling out the other’s open ports and hidden vulnerabilities.
And as the ships grappled up and the two crews started battling for control of the boarding umbilicals, the AIs would be grappling with each other in their own silent but equally violent battle.