Shantytown: 25.10.48.
Li made the meet early and scoped out the place—only sensible, since Korchow had chosen it.
She found it on the seedy outer fringe of what was euphemistically known as Shantytown’s entertainment district. This part of town looked right at night, somehow. It was less jarringly out of place when you couldn’t see the scrub hills and gypsum flats, or the bleak unterraformed wall of the Johannesburg Massif looming on the horizon.
It wasn’t raining in Shantytown, but it wasn’t not raining either. The water that dripped from the rooftops and doorways was part rain, part algae-laden condensation. It smelled sharp and fermented, and it wormed under Li’s collar and down her neck like prying fingers.
She was alone tonight. It hadn’t been easy to keep McCuen from coming, but it had been necessary. He could put things together far too quickly for comfort, and Saints knew what he’d do if he decided she was working for the Syndicates. Besides, if she was going to play the game Nguyen wanted her to play and still give Korchow enough to get that receipt from him, she was going to need some serious maneuvering room.
She checked her watch. Nearly an hour until the meet. Korchow’s man would arrive early too, of course. She aimed to be earlier still.
The bar was supposed to be called the Drift, but the only sign Li saw in the window was a flickering, fly-speckled halogen that looked like it must have read “$LOTS” before the L died. Still, this was the place Korchow had described: the narrow housefront sheathed in scaffolding, the bar entrance tucked between a peep show and a ComSat pay terminal, the drunks creaking up the rickety stairs to the second-story flophouse. She walked by, crossed the street half a block down, skirting around a poisonous mud puddle, and slipped under the jury-rigged arcade that shadowed the facing storefronts.
A loose panel rattled underfoot. Condensation dripped from mildewed girders and pooled on the walkway. She slipped into a darkened doorway, shook down a cigarette and lit it, masking its glowing tip with a cupped hand.
Korchow’s man arrived at twenty minutes of. There was no mistaking him; Syndicate birthlabs bred to an idealized pre-Migration genetic norm, and Li doubted anyone that close to human-looking had crossed the Drift’s threshold since the Riots.
She cursed Korchow for an overeager amateur. Then she saw his cool calculating professional’s face in her mind’s eye; whatever else he was, Korchow was no amateur. No, he wanted Sharifi’s data badly enough to blow the cover of an A Series operative. And he didn’t give a damn if Li got caught. He might even want her to get caught… down the line, when he had what he needed from her. She threw down her cigarette and heard it hiss in standing water as she stepped out of the shadows.
Inside, the Drift was less of a room than a haphazard string of loosely connected hallways. Li sidled through the initial bottleneck and dropped down an unmarked single step into what the regulars probably called the front room.
Korchow’s man sat halfway down the bar, hunched broodily over a beer. He looked up as Li came in, and their eyes met in the bar mirror. They’d done something to his face—broken the long narrow nose, blurred the lines of jaw and cheekbone—but they hadn’t been able to disguise the unnatural perfection of his features. He could have been Bella’s brother.
Li passed him by and took a seat toward the other end of the bar, back in the smeary half shadows beyond the cheap lighting panels. The bartender took her order without smiling, and the beer he brought her was flat and yeasty. She drank, eyes scanning the narrow room, and set the glass back down on a bartop still sticky with the faint rings of yesterday’s spilled beers. She was halfway through her second beer when Korchow’s man stood and walked past her into the back room.
“Where’s the bathroom?” Li asked a minute and a half later.
The bartender just gestured toward the back and muttered something that might have been “Left.”
There were tables in the back room, most of them empty. She threaded her way between them and pushed through a narrow door into a dim hallway that gave on the bathroom and the fire door. A surveillance camera blinked in an angle of wall and ceiling, but, as Korchow had promised, the little corner shelf screwed into the wall underneath it was just out of its field of view.
Korchow’s man came out of the toilet, coat slung over his arm. He squeezed between her and the shelf, mumbling an apology. She let him by, then went into the toilet herself. As she brushed past the shelf her hand slid across the datacube he had left there and palmed it.
She stepped through the door and scanned the narrow space. No cameras here—though there might be a voice-activated tap hidden in the wall. Even the camera out in the hall was probably no more than nonsentient-monitored company security. Still, why take chances? She went into the stall and sat down. She could feel the cube burning in her pocket. She turned it over, found the download switch by feel, and keyed it.
Nothing happened.
She knew what was supposed to be happening, what she hoped was happening. Somewhere in the labyrinth of her internal systems, an encryption program should be filtering through her hard files, searching out the hidden chinks in her internal security programs. If it worked, then Korchow would have opened up a secure protocol in her datafiles—a protocol through which he could pass her datafiles that would never show up on her directories, could never be accessed by Nguyen or any of the Corps psychtechs who had clearance to access her hard files. If it worked, she would see nothing. And neither would her recorder. If it didn’t work, she’d be up on treason charges as soon as she checked in for her next scheduled maintenance.
And then there was the third possibility, one so disastrous it didn’t bear thinking about. The possibility that Korchow’s program would clash with one of the private kinks she had thrown into her system.
Please let Korchow have gotten this right, she prayed to whatever saint looked out for cheats and traitors. And please let me be lucky.
When the data window opened in her peripheral vision, she caught her breath and realized she’d been holding it. She maxed the window, scrolled down the familiar gridlines of her datebook, and waited for Korchow’s encrypted window to appear.
It opened inside the datebook, an embedded halfscreen that showed up on her retina but left no record of its presence anywhere else in her internal systems. She could read it, work on it, store it, and nothing but the datebook would show in her files. When she had finished with it, Korchow’s program would wipe every trace of it from her systems. She hoped.
She leaned forward, closing her eyes and putting the heels of her hands against her eyelids in order to get the clearest picture of the data that was scrolling up the screen in front of her. There were four files. The first contained detailed schematics and navigational data for a massive orbital station that Li had no trouble recognizing as Alba, the Corps’s high-security installation in orbit around Barnard’s Star.
The second file contained an exhaustive description of security protocols, patrol routes and schedules, lab personnel protocols. The third held information on electronic security measures. The fourth file contained interface and requirements specs for what Li assumed had to be Sharifi’s intraface software.
As she looked at it, she felt a spinning sense of vertigo. It was obviously, flagrantly, completely illegal tech. It could only have been designed for use on an Emergent AI and a posthuman subject, in contravention of more wetware laws than she could count. And yet a dozen little tags and quirks told her that this software could only have been developed at Alba, by the same UNSC programmers who had designed her own software. Nguyen might have had to steal the wetware, but the rest of the intraface—the hardware, the psychware, the source code that ran the intraface into the Emergent—had been sitting at Alba all the time waiting for Sharifi, or any XenoGen construct, to pick them up and use them.