Spin 01 - Spin State Read Free Page A

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.
     He spoke on-line, in the sinuous tenor she still thought of, however naively, as his voice.
    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.
    * * *
    “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