“So Sharifi woke them up,” Cohen said. “Or blasting that galley through the Trinidad did. And now that they’re awake they expect to be listened to.”
“Then God help us,” Korchow whispered.
Li’s heart skittered and locked in to a fast uneven rhythm. “What really happened down here?”
“One minute everything was fine,” he answered. “The next I was off the shunt. As if an immense arm had reached out and… pushed me. I never got back on.”
He’s telling the truth, Cohen whispered in her head. Don’t you see what happened? What must have happened?
Li caught the edge of the thought as it swirled through his mind. But all she saw was a confused image of Sharifi, betrayed and frightened. And whether the image sprang from Cohen’s mind or hers she couldn’t tell.
Then she was back in the glory hole.
“I’m on,” Sharifi said.
Bella started. Voyt turned away from the monitor he’d been watching, his eyes flicking back and forth between the two women. As if, Li realized, he too were waiting for something.
She heard Cohen echo the thought and knew that he was there with her. She reached out cautiously, touched him, was comforted.
Bella stepped forward. “You have the dataset?”
“Can you see what Bella sees, Korchow? Can you hear them?”
“No.”
“Then you don’t know yet.” Sharifi smiled. “But you will.”
Voyt made a spitting noise.
“Remember,” Sharifi said. “You have two weeks to get it there. Miss that deadline and all deals are off.”
Korchow dipped his head in an almost courtly gesture. Then he was gone, and Bella was standing there, blinking, swaying a little as she took back her own posture and balance.
Sharifi reached out and smoothed Bella’s hair back from her face. It was a protective gesture, a gesture that could have been a mother’s as easily as a lover’s, and Bella moved her head like a cat to meet the caress. She stared into Sharifi’s eyes, devouring her, surrendering to her. She drank up Sharifi as if she were the only real thing in the universe.
Sharifi touched her temple and flipped a contact switch. She held out her left hand, palm open. Bella set her own palm against it, and Li saw subliminals flicker into life in Sharifi’s peripheral vision.
‹Data transfer initiated,› Sharifi’s internals announced. Numbers spun down, counting out the units of a massive data transfer.
Her eyes on the numbers, Sharifi didn’t see Voyt step toward her. But Li saw him. And she saw the charged and primed Viper in his hand.
The next thing she knew, Sharifi was picking herself up off the ground and pulling a gun out of her coverall pocket. “You’re too late, Voyt. It’s already done.”
“Not until Bella walks out of here,” Voyt said. “Not until you walk out of here.”
He stepped toward her.
Sharifi flipped the safety off her gun. Her aim wavered and she was trembling with adrenaline, but she was still acting like a woman who meant business.
“I’ll shoot you if I have to, Voyt, but I’d rather deal. What’s your price?”
“My price?” Voyt laughed. “I’m a soldier, not a whore.”
“There’s a difference?”
He took another step toward her.
She pulled the trigger. Sparks arced from the rock floor a few centimeters from his right foot.
He stopped. Not scared exactly; he was Li’s kind, and it would have taken more than a stray bullet from a civilian’s hand to really frighten him. But he was at least wary.
“Take his gun,” Sharifi told Bella.
Bella stepped up to Voyt and wrapped her hand over the Viper’s blocky barrel. He let her take it from him. He even smiled when she took it—a smile that raised Li’s hackles.
“Good girl,” Sharifi said. “Now give it to me.”
We have a problem, Cohen said.
Christ, not now!
A realtime problem. Someone just fired a surface-to-air missile from the planet. Li felt the shock of the news pulling her out of Sharifi, jerking her out of step with Sharifi’s dream memory. They’re aiming at the orbital relay.
Cohen didn’t voice the next thought, but she caught it anyway: Maybe Korchow had made his move early.
What do we do?she asked.
But she knew the answer before she asked the question. The missile would hit the relay in a matter of minutes whether they did anything or not, and if the relay went down when it hit, then so would Cohen’s link with the outside world. And any hope of getting Sharifi’s information—or Cohen himself—out of the mine would go with it.
They had to get out before that happened.
“What’s Haas paying you?” Sharifi asked. “I can top it.”
Voyt laughed again. “No one’s paying me shit. You may have caught me dipping into the till, but that’s not treason, and I’m not a traitor. And speaking of payments, what’s Korchow offering besides Haas’s little piece of bought-and-paid-for hospitality?”
“Shut your mouth, Voyt!”
“That got to you, huh? Don’t like the idea that you’re selling state secrets in exchange for used merchandise?”
Sharifi glanced at Bella. She stood frozen between them, her face a pale blur in the lamplight.
“I’m not selling them,” Sharifi said. “Knowledge doesn’t belong to anyone. Life doesn’t belong to anyone.”
“Save your justifications for someone who gives a shit.”
Bella made her move so fast that it caught even Li by surprise. In one smooth gesture, she had her arm around Sharifi’s neck and the Viper against her temple. “Drop the gun,” she said.
Sharifi tried to turn and stare at her, but Bella just tightened her hold on her neck and jabbed her with the Viper’s sharp prongs. Sharifi dropped the gun. It skittered across the slate floor of the cavern and fetched up under a correction channel monitor.
“Get the gun, Jan,” Bella said. It took Li a heartbeat to remember that Jan was Voyt’s name. “We’ll need it if she gives us trouble.”
“Korchow?” Sharifi asked. Her voice was trembling. Her whole body was trembling.
Bella laughed.
I know that laugh, Li thought. And even as she thought it, she knew Sharifi had recognized him too.
“Haas.” Sharifi said. “I need to see Nguyen.”
“Bullshit,” Haas said.
“Can you really afford to gamble? It’s not your choice to make. Nguyen needs to know about this.”
“Oh, she’ll know about it.” Haas jerked Sharifi around and pushed her up the ladder. “Don’t you worry about that.”
Sharifi turned at the top of the ladder. “Listen, Haas—”
“No, you listen.” He spun her around, laid the Viper against her temple. “You open your mouth again,” he said, very quietly, “and it’ll be the last time you open it.”
Sharifi looked into Bella’s violet eyes and saw Haas looking back at her. Something passed along the line of that gaze, some backbrain survival instinct that Sharifi had no words for, but that Li knew from a hundred killing fields.
Sharifi ran.
Anaconda Strike: 8.11.48.
She might have made it if she hadn’t slipped on a slick bit of slate and fallen.
Voyt caught Sharifi as she set her foot on the bottom step of the stairs up out of the Trinidad. The edge of his hand slammed into her head, and she crumpled.