"Or forced to spend the day with Sykes and his buddies." Gently, he reached out and touched her shoulder. "God, I was worried about you."
She pulled away out of his reach. "Please," she said. "No."
"Sorry..."
"I'm sorry. It's not the mud," she added hastily as he looked at his hand. "It's not you. It's me. It's . . . inside. . ."
"I know,"
"I just need ... a little time. To get my head right."
"Sure, I understand. Alita. Is she okay?"
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"I think so." She managed a half smile. "She told me, though, at one point, when we were alone for a few minutes, that she was going to see that our friend on the hill was fixed up even if she had to dismantle a dozen floaters herself."
"Dismantle . . ."
"Wires. Feed circuits. Spare parts."
He nodded. "Of course. I'm not thinking too straight. Sony."
"After twenty-two straight hours in the pits? It's amazing you're thinking at all."
"I need . . . sleep," he said, his voice little more than a mumble. "Sleep. Then .. ."
After a while, when he'd said nothing more and his breathing was even, Shari rose and returned to her side of the Barracks. She'd been afraid, during the too-long day with the trusties, that Wal Prescott might have convinced Jaime to call Valhalla off.
She'd seen the light in Jaime's eyes, though, when she'd pulled away from him, and she knew now that there was absolutely no danger of that.
CHAPTER Six
/ have continued to recover memories, accepting each as it rises from my primary banks and storing it in the special file, labeled Rising, in working memory. TheyfaU into place like sections of a complex tapestry, each piece telling a small part of a much larger, still only dimly glimpsed story.
To avoid overloading my working memory, I have arbitrarily allotted 10s bytes to the Rising file. With 9.172643 x 107 bytes already recovered and stored, however, I have used up over ninety percent of my available file storage space.
What I have recovered thus far, though patchy, is ominous in the extreme. It is clear now that a hostile force has conquered Cloud, capturing or destroying all CDF personnel. My Commander is dead, and all contact with CDF HQ has ceased, suggesting that I am on my own. Worse, it is now clear that the Enemy has somehow manipulated my own inner workings. That Intruder I detected is an Enemy mechanism responsible for reshaping the flow of data through my working memory. There is, in essence, another me, a part of me that responds to orders from the /*/'/ Masters and carries out their
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directives, while I, the real "I," am kept isolated and helpless.
