“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.
Li looked around at her team. Shanna, Dalloway, Catrall, and Kolodny were veterans. No worries there. Cohen was Cohen. He’d do his job superbly as usual, for his own incomprehensible AI reasons, and she didn’t have to worry about him getting hurt because he’d never be physically present except through Kolodny. Her big worry was the two fresh-faced privates, shipped in three days ago. They needed time, training. Well, they wouldn’t get it. They’d figure things out in the first minutes or not at all.
“Two minutes,” she shouted over the wind. No one answered; they were all waiting for Cohen to get the link up.
She ran a final check on her weapons: the long-muzzled pulse rifle, the Corps-issue neural disruptor—called a Viper because of its distinctive fanglike anode prongs—and her own hand-rebuilt Beretta. Then she moved around the flight deck, feet spread to counter the hopper’s bucks and slides, checking weapons, checking equipment, checking eyes.
She paid special attention to the new recruits, talking to them, mustering a confident smile that belied her fears about this mission. As she bent over the younger boy’s rifle, her crucifix slipped out of her shirt collar and swung forward in a brief gold flash.
“That’s nice,” the boy said. And then flushed and added a belated ma’am. “Where’d you get it?”
She shoved it back into her shirt. “My father gave it to me.”
She finished with the others, came around to Kolodny, crouched in front of her. Not to check anything—Kolodny was too much of a pro for that. Mostly just to say good-bye before she went under the shunt.
“So,” Kolodny said. “This should be interesting. Total fuck fest, obviously.”
Li shrugged. “Looks that way.”
“Too bad I won’t be around to see it.” Kolodny grinned her toothy grin. “You’ll have to catch me up when we get home.”
“I will,” Li said.
She leaned over to check Kolodny’s carbine. No harm in checking. And Kolodny knew her too well to get offended. As she reached across her, the crucifix swung forward again.
Kolodny caught it. Before Li could react, she tucked the chain in and hooked it around the top button of Li’s collar to hold it in place. “There. Better, no?”
Li turned to look into the gray eyes. “Cohen,” she said.
He smiled. “You always can tell,” he said. “How do you do it?”
Li pulled away, walked back across the flight deck, and sat down facing him. A moment later Kolodny’s husky alto sang out a few lines of a Charles Trenet song.
It was Cohen’s favorite—or at least his favorite when they were going into anything that looked like trouble. He’d told her to get her feet wet and look it up the one time she’d asked about it, but all she’d found were a few long-dead noninteractive sites and a cryptic reference to the French Foreign Legion that made her wonder just how old Cohen really was.
“Are we go?” she asked.
The only answer she got was a few more lines of the song, not in Kolodny’s voice this time, but on-line, in Cohen’s liquid tenor:
Quand tu souris, tout comme toi je pleure en secret.
Un rêve, chérie, un amour timide et discret.
Her oracle translated the words for her, but damned if she knew what secret dreams or singing for money had to do with tech raids.
Then the link broke over her, and she was being swept out to sea on the massive undertow of the AI’s interlocking neural nets. He held her on the link, sharpened it, refined it, brought on the other squad members one by one until there were seven clean clear voices. Only Kolodny was missing; her reflexes and combat programming were at Cohen’s disposal, but she herself would be gone until the raid ended, her life riding on the choices Cohen made while he was on shunt.
‹One minute,› Li told the squad. ‹Terminate GPS.›
She switched off her GPS and felt the others do the same. Then there was the long, frozen, disorienting pause before Cohen picked up the slack and started supplying position corrections to her inertial systems. This was always the worst moment for Li. The sharp, subliminal anxiety at the missing datastream. The unnerving knowledge—unthinkable to someone who’d been wired her whole adult life —that she didn’t know where she was, that only Cohen stood between her and being lost.
Cohen’s nav feed came up at last, and Li felt her limbs go limp with relief. Then, without any warning of trouble, the link flickered and died. Kolodny surfaced where a few seconds ago Li had felt only the vast glacial sweep of the AI’s networks.
One of the new recruits groaned as the twisting backwash of net vertigo washed over them. Li’s stomach clenched, and she closed her eyes and waited, knowing that trying to pull out of the link would only make things worse now.