Free Cosmonaut Keep by Ken MacLeod Page A

like that are the bane of her fucking life.
    "Thought it was all set up," he mumbles. His London accent is so thick she can barely follow it. "Shit."
    She'll let the implications of that pass, for now.
    "Run," she says, gesturing with the pistol.
    "And then what did you do?"
    "Ran in the opposite direction, down another alley. Just a minute later I'd circled back and crossed York Way again, farther up, and the cops were like flies on shit around the junction I'd been at. That's why I reckon your hardware's fucked. Decided not to go back to my place, headed for a safe house and found it wasn't. Door was getting the heavy boot just as I turned the corner, so I turned the other way pretty sharp. Back in the red-light area, I had a few stashes of spare clothes and ID and shit. Sealed containers spot-glued inside dump bins, places like that. So I used one of them to get changed and ditch the tarty gear. Went into my cover job -- it's deliberately a suspicious-looking job, American book import company -- phoned you at coffee break and got the midday train. And, like I said, the busies were giving me funny looks."
    I stared at her, somewhat shaken by this account -- for its implied sex as much as its explicit violence. How long had I known her? A couple of years, at the outside. She'd wandered into a codeshop down Leith Walk, where I was working between contracts -- this was before I'd achieved my current high rep as a manager, I hasten to add -- dropped a set of Calvin Klein eyewear on the counter and asked for a few interesting modifications. Serious warranty-voiding and copyright-violating stuff, and the kind of thing that there really was no legitimate use for: as blatant and illegal as sawing off a shotgun. I took it on, without asking questions, and gave her back the kit a day later. Repeat business was assured, and she'd started turning up in the sort of places I hung out in. We'd chat, maybe have a coffee or do some drugs, but nothing more came of it than that. I wasn't too sure, now, when I'd first become aware that she was involved in the English resistance; she must have told me explicitly at some point, but I couldn't remember when. We'd never actually discussed it.
    "Do you still have the thing the Russian guy passed to you?"
    "Of course." An object appeared in her uncurling palm like a conjuring effect. I picked it up and turned it over.
    "It's a datadisk," I said, not surprised but vaguely disappointed, as though I'd been subconsciously expecting it to be a new secret weapon.
    "Tell me something I don't know!"
    "Maybe I can," I said. "I can tell you what's on it."
    She shook her head. "I ran it in my reader on the train. It's garbage, or encrypted."
    "Feh." I took my own reader from my pocket, patched it to my phone, and slid the disk in. "It's probably not one of the commercial codes, but I doubt it's the latest mil-spec or there wouldn't have been much point in passing it on, would there?"
    "You got a point there." Her voice sounded sad. "Josif wouldn't have had access to real hard secrets anyway -- this must be important more because it's current than because it's restricted."
    I called up my file of thousands of keys and set them to work throwing themselves at it. This wasn't code-breaking as such, just matching the code to keys which, legally speaking, I had no business having, which is why I kept them stashed on a server far away. On the side of the screen a little red line shrank slowly as the program ran.
    "Doesn't seem like enough to die for."
    "He didn't know he was risking that," she said.
    "Or to kill for."
    "You think he was set up?" She made a sour mouth. "It's possible."
    Ding, went the reader.
    "Wah-hey!"
    I started paging through the decoded text. Jadey leaned in to look, murmuring interest and appreciation. I paged faster, suddenly suspecting that it all looked familiar. It was.
    "This is an ESA spec. Remember -- the space station stuff?"
    "Can you check it out?"
    "Yeah, sure. Can't do very much with