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.
‹Well,› Cohen said on-line. ‹That wasn’t exactly a smashing success.›
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.
‹Catherine.› He spoke on-line, in the sinuous tenor she still thought of, however naively, as his voice. ‹I wouldn’t put you at risk. Not for anything. You know that. You know 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.