They hit a junction. Their captor lifted his lantern, and its light threw watery reflections on pooled runoff, picked out the stubbed-off ends of mined-out crystal deposits. It took him two turns around the walls to find what he was looking for: faint marks scratched into the rock at face level. Before the lantern moved on, Li saw a crescent moon, a pyramid, an eight-legged beast.
“This way,” he said, and pushed them toward the left-hand turning.
Li had grown so used to the dark by the time they surfaced that the first glimpse of daylight was painful. They clattered up a flight of gridplate stairs, passed down a long hallway full of uninsulated wiring, and reached a tall steel door bolted from the inside.
Bella leaned against the wall, panting and shivering. The hijacker reached into his pack and handed them each a rolled-up piece of cloth. “Put these on.”
Li unfolded the cloth and saw that it was an Interfaither’s chador. She wrapped the long bolt of green cloth around her, pulling it over her head and face, and helped Bella do the same. Then they stepped into the hazy sunlight of a late-fall afternoon in Shantytown.
For the next half hour, they hurried through a bewildering series of alleys and courtyards, spiraling deep into the heart of the old quarter. Just when Li had finally accepted that she was lost beyond any possibility of reorienting herself, they turned aside and stepped through an unmarked door into a low dark passage.
The hallway smelled of rust and boiled vegetein, and it was so dark that Li heard rather than saw Bella behind her. The guard gestured toward a closed airlock at the far end of the passage, and Li put her hand to the touchplate. The door irised open. She stepped through, blinking in the dusty, sun-strafed air of the dome beyond—and saw just who she should have expected to see.
Daahl.
As her eyes adjusted to the bright hazy air under the dome, she realized that Cartwright stood in the half-open airlock behind him—an airlock that could only lead to the little office where Daahl and Ramirez had talked to her less than a week ago. Cartwright shifted restlessly as she walked in, craning his head like a dog listening for distant footfalls. She’d never seen him outside the mine, she realized; he carried a blind man’s stick up here in the daylight world and his eyes were vague, milky, moonblind.
“What the hell is going on?” she asked as Bella stepped through into the dome behind her.
Daahl bent over the comm terminal on the table. “Arkady?” he said when the connection went through. “Tell him we’re ready.”
For a moment nothing happened. Daahl and Cartwright just sat staring across the table, waiting. It took Li a moment to realize they were watching Bella, not her.
Bella gave a little shiver as the shunt came on-line, and then she was gone.
“Excellent,” Korchow said, standing up. “Excellent. And the kidnapping was caught on tape? You made it look convincing?”
“The ransom note’s on its way to AMC station right now. We should have an answer in a few hours.” Daahl grinned. “Though of course the negotiations could be lengthy.”
“Right,” Korchow said. “Then I believe our business with each other is concluded.”
“Not quite,” Daahl said.
A tall figure appeared in the airlock behind them, its face shadowed by the sunbeams raking down through the streaky geodesic panels. Ramirez.
But he looked sleeker, glossier, finer. He had never moved with that fey, walking-on-eggshells grace. His eyes had never burned with the cold fire that now shone behind them.
He bent over her, touched a fleck of dried blood at the corner of her mouth. “Catherine,” he said. “Are you all right? If I’d suspected things would get that exciting, I’d have made them find another way to get you here.”
“Cohen,” she whispered, not knowing how to begin to ask him what was happening.
Ramirez was so much taller than Li that she had to throw her head back to meet his eyes. It bothered her. She was used to looking Cohen in the eye, used to being able to dominate him physically—a domination that mattered to her, she now saw, even if it was meaningless to him.
“He wasn’t to be involved,” Korchow said, speaking to Daahl and Cartwright.
Daahl shrugged. “ALEF approached us.”
“ALEF!” Korchow spat the word out as if it were a curse.
“God works through unlikely hands,” Cartwright said.
“Oh for pity’s sake,” Korchow snapped. “What did the AIs promise you?”
“A planetary network,” Daahl answered. “Under union control.”
“Then they’re lying. They can’t possibly deliver that.”
“We already have,” Cohen said. “The beginnings of one, anyway. What do you think I’m shunting through?”
“I brought you in to do a job,” Korchow told Cohen. “This isn’t it.”
Cohen made an impatient movement, a neat flick of one hand that was so characteristic of him it took Li’s breath away. “I’ll do your little job, Korchow. But not routing through your network. I’ve spent three centuries making sure no one had that kind of power over me. I’m not about to hand it to you.”
“So why go to them?” Korchow jerked Bella’s head toward Daahl and Cartwright. “And don’t tell me it’s selfless interest in the cause. Or are they your pet terrorist group of the week?”
Cohen flexed Ramirez’s big hands until Li heard the knuckles crack. “They had what I needed,” he said. “An on-site Emergent with Bose-Einstein capacity.”
Korchow started.
“Yes.” Cohen smiled. “The field AI.”
“How—”
“I don’t know. But Cartwright says he can speak to whoever or whatever is using the field AI. That he can control it.”
“And you’d trust yourself to that?”
“Sooner than I’d trust myself to you.”
“Why?” Korchow asked, turning to Daahl. “Why this? Why him?”
Daahl shrugged. “It’s not that complicated, Korchow. We don’t like the idea of running from the UN straight into the arms of the Syndicates. We want to run Compson’s World for the natives, for the miners. And to get that we need a planetary net that we control. We need access to streamspace, to Freetown and FreeNet, without going through the UN relays, without being at the mercy of the Security Council and the multiplanetaries. And we need a Bose-Einstein relay intact, on our net. That’s what ALEF’s giving us.”
“Come on, Korchow,” Cohen said. “We’re going to pull off a good deed together. A blow for freedom and planetary self-determination. After all, you need to put something on the white side of the ledger book every lifetime or so.”
“So the deal’s off?” Korchow asked, white with fury.
“Not at all,” Cohen answered, smiling glossily. “It’s just that the price has gone up.”
Barnard’s Star Field Array: 28.10.48.
They jumped into Alba in a KnowlesSyndicate Starling, a sleek swallow-winged craft whose cabin had been stripped to its ceramic compound struts and refitted with a tangled rat’s nest of fractal absorption gauges, x/r monitors, and assorted black boxes whose functions Li could only guess at.
There were three of them: Li, Arkady, Cohen. Or part of Cohen, anyway. Arkady piloted the ship—though Li never figured out if he was the same Arkady she’d talked to at the meet in Shantytown or just another number in the same series. She also never found out how he got them there. She guessed he’d piggybacked through Alba’s high-traffic Bose-Einstein relay on a legitimate cargo flight. However he’d done it, the Syndicates weren’t about to let Li in on their back door into the system; Arkady knocked her out before they took off from Compson’s World and kept her under until the Starling dropped into Alba’s lee side thirty-eight hours later.