“Someone else’s.”
“Whose then? Think.”
Her hand moved reluctantly, as if she were keying instructions over a bad link. She squinted at it. It was hers, all right. Short nails. Strong, brown, blunt-ended fingers. Still. There was something not quite right about it. She turned it so the palm faced her.
No wires.
She looked at the hand again, more carefully. The nails were longer than hers, better cared for. She counted old scars that weren’t there, new ones that shouldn’t have been there. And the fresh burn, a slim crescent of raised scar tissue between thumb and forefinger.
“It’s Sharifi,” she said. “It’s Sharifi’s memory.”
Then Sharifi turned at the sound of approaching footsteps, and Li was helpless, along for the ride like any other ghost.
It was the same sequence she’d seen in the last hijacking. But this time she understood what she was seeing. The strange patterns chasing each other across the cavern were light from Sharifi’s lantern. The pinging sound was dripping water. The booming rifle reports were bootheels slapping on bedrock.
“What are you doing here?” Sharifi said, as Voyt climbed down the ladder.
He reached the bottom, turned, and grinned nastily. “Just keeping an eye on the merchandise.”
“Fine. Stay out of the way then.”
“Where’s our honored guest? Off stealing the silverware?”
“Right here,” Bella said, stepping into the lamplight.
Li watched through Sharifi’s eyes as Bella approached. This was not the subdued woman she had met on-station. This Bella met Voyt’s stare and returned it. This Bella moved with the arrogant loose-limbed grace of a fighter, smiled the cool smile of someone who knew she could outsmart you, humiliate you. No matter what the game was. “Are you ready to deliver?” she asked.
Sharifi looked hard at her, frowning a little. “Are you?”
Bella opened her mouth to answer, and the flickering, lamplit shadows of the glory hole gave way to a blast of white light.
Li was back in her quarters.
“Cohen?”
“Here.” Her livewall flickered on to reveal Cohen, shunting through Chiara again, sitting in his sun-filled Ring-side drawing room.
“Do you know what we just saw?” Li asked.
“I know what you think we saw.”
“It’s there, in Sharifi’s memory. Everything we need to know. We have to go back.”
“We have to do no such thing. We almost got trapped there. And you still don’t know if what we saw was real or not.”
“I’ll chance it.”
“No you won’t. And if you decide to be stupid about it, I’ll personally lock you offstream.”
A dark suspicion tugged at the back of Li’s brain. “Why are you so scared? What are you not telling me?”
“I’ve told you everything I know, Catherine.”
She laughed. “How can someone who’s had two hundred years to practice be such a shitty liar?”
She expected him to at least smile at that, but he just sat staring at the ground, arms crossed, swinging one sandal-shod foot back and forth in a nervous rhythm. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, hands clasped together so tightly that Chiara’s knuckles whitened.
“Listen. Drop this investigation. Tell Nguyen you’re sick, or you need maintenance. Which you do, obviously; I haven’t seen you pick anything up with that arm since you hit station.”
Li stared. A roach crawled across the floor and started up the livewall. She saw it with surreal clarity, each leg arcing forward, setting itself down against the glowing matrix of the viewscreen. When the roach began to crawl across Cohen’s leg, she reached out and flicked it away.
“I can’t drop it,” she said. “I’m one mistake away from getting chaptered out.”
“I can think of worse fates than a discharge.”
“Well, I can’t.” She paced around the narrow room. “You got me into this mess. And I’m not talking about just now. I’m talking about Metz. Whatever you know, I want to hear it.”
Cohen sighed, and Li wondered, not for the first time, how he managed to stamp his personality so strongly on his shunts. It was impossible to imagine Chiara’s lovely face wearing that tired, ancient expression—just as it was impossible to imagine Cohen not suffusing every ’face with that self-deprecating irony born out of a thousand lies, half lies, and compromises.
“I don’t know anything,” he said. “I only suspect. Helen, for one. Where else could Sharifi have gotten the intraface?”
“That’s crazy, Cohen. And anyway, Nguyen never had the intraface. The raid on Metz failed.”
“Did it? Look at the timing, for God’s sake. We pull the source code and wetware for the intraface off Metz and a few weeks later Sharifi’s on Compson’s World, wearing it? You run the numbers.”
“But you said that wetware couldn’t just be grown in viral matrix. That it had to be tanked in place, in a clone. So if Sharifi used it, it must have been cultured for her. And if TechComm was in on this from the get-go, then… why would Nguyen steal something she already owned?”
“What better way to get hold of illegal wetware without leaving a paper trail than to seize it in a TechComm raid?”
Li rolled her eyes. “Oh, come on!”
“Sharifi wasn’t just a victim, Catherine. She was involved. She came here to do a very specific job. A job she needed the intraface to do—or why would someone like her have risked experimental implants?”
“Fine. But to say that there was UN involvement—”
“Of course there was. Sharifi was working for TechComm. They controlled her budget. They controlled access to the mine. They controlled the old construct genelines, Sharifi’s included. And if TechComm controls something, that means the Security Council controls it. Which means Helen. Helen who sent you to Compson’s World before Sharifi was even cold. Or should I say before she was even dead?”
Li caught her breath.
“Come on, Catherine. Don’t be an idiot. I put transit time from Metz to Compson’s World at almost three weeks. You hit planet ten days after the fire. That means she decided to send you here at least a week before Sharifi died.”
“I know,” Li said reluctantly. “You think I hadn’t thought of it?”
“But you damn well haven’t done anything about it, have you? Have you considered asking her why she really sent you here?”
“I considered it. And I decided not to.”
“Why the hell not?” She didn’t answer, and after a moment Cohen continued. “I’ll tell you why not. Because you don’t want to know. You don’t want to think about what she’s doing, about what you’re doing. You don’t want to think, period.”
“Are you finished, Cohen?”
He stood up, cursing, and paced in a tight circle before the viewscreen. “My God,” he said, when he was facing her again, “that’s why she loves you so much. She gives her orders and it’s over. You don’t question, you don’t think, you don’t hesitate. You’re her creature!”
“No. I’m a soldier. And I’m loyal. Something you wouldn’t understand.”
“Don’t bait me. You need me. Our little chat in the white room back there? Whoever engineered that was toying with us, playing with us like a cat plays with a dead bird. And they’re targeting you, Catherine.”
Li stood in front of the screen, looking at the floor. The roach she’d flicked away was still rolling around on its back trying to right itself. She stepped toward it, set the toe of her boot on it, and crushed it.
“It’s not just Helen,” Cohen continued. “There’s an Emergent involved. And not just any Emergent. Someone’s using AMC’s field AI. Someone who’s managed to turn me back every time I tried to track them. Someone strong enough to trap me, play with me. And they’re after you.”