Spin 01 - Spin State Read Free Page B

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