“Wait a minute. You’re … you …”
“Yeah. Everyone has to sign a service contract on resurrection.” The suit glanced over his shoulder at the high-speed chaos unfolding behind him. “Nothing exotic. Standard boilerplate. So … uh … if you don’t mind …” The sheaf of papers advanced toward her again, this time accompanied by a cheap pen with the words
TITAN SECURITY SERVICES
spiraling down its shaft.
Li’s eyes narrowed. “You work for Titan?”
“Yes.” He flashed her the kind of conspiratorial grin that Li imagined usually accompanied a hot stock tip. “And so do you. As soon as you sign your contract, that is.”
“Uh, yeah,” Li said. “That’s not going to happen.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.” But he sounded like he’d heard it all before and wasn’t really all that sorry. He shuffled a second, slightly thinner stack of papers to the top of the stack and handed the whole thing to her. “Here’s your bill then. Look it over and let me know whether you can pay up front or need to do a credit workout.”
She took the printout and skimmed down the close-typed lines of numbers while her fingers bled blue virufacture fluid onto the pages.
Transport charges. Resurrection charges. Cold storage charges. Data storage charges. Parity check charges. Charges for tank time, virufluid, antibiotics, antivirals, retrovirals. Wetware virus protection. Charges for life support, food, gear, and personal tonnage. Charges for … charges for … charges for.
“That’s ridiculous,” she argued, knowing it wasn’t. “You can’t bill me for—”
“You’re right. Probably. But it would take a dirtside judge to determine that. And in the meantime …”
There was a nasty, knowing twist to his smile that Li decided she didn’t like one bit. A glance down the length of the open cargo hold confirmed first impressions. It was a makeshift armory, walls lined with racked weapons: Tasers, hollow-point shooters, firethrowers, every variety of weapon that could safely be used to defend a ship from a hostile boarding party without blowing it open to hard vac. And in tanks just like hers, marching from one end of the cavernous hold to the other, another kind of weapon, more complex and unpredictable, but equally necessary: warm bodies, coming not out of cold sleep, as she would have expected, but out of surgical-grade viral manufacturing tanks.
Of course
, she thought as her shattered brain gradually homed in on her surroundings. Mercenaries in cold sleep don’t have to eat or breathe, but they still have to be paid. And payroll climbs fast in a deep space long haul vessel. Downloads were a much better solution. And if you had high-bandwidth streamspace access and military-grade decryption software, you always had a workforce at your fingertips.
Meanwhile, weapons were being racked and loaded. People were moving fast, and talking in the low, tight monotone of professional soldiers whose long hours of rote training is the only thing standing between them and being scared shitless. Li could hear quiet conversations going down all around them, and she noted that the same name seemed to crop up in most of them: Llewellyn. There was something about the way people said that name that made her not want to meet its owner out here in the Deep, far from the nearest station.
Two obvious mercs strode past behind the salaryman’s back, and Li caught the tail end of a hurried conversation.
“Do they know which pirates?”
“Someone said it’s Lucky Llewellyn.”
“They always say it’s Llewellyn.”
“Yeah, but I heard it from a guy who used to know someone who—”
“Yeah yeah. Every drunk on every station in the Drift used to know
someone who used to know someone who fought with Llewellyn. And anyway, you’d better hope it ain’t Llewellyn, ’cause he honors warrants. And the captain’s had a warrant out on him ever since the Durham mutiny.”
“So what?”
“So he’s not going to roll over and we’re gonna have to fight is what.”
“As opposed to?”
“What the fuck do you think? Don’t act stupider than you are.”
They passed out of hearing and Li looked at the Titan rep with a new vision dancing in her head. One cheap suit. One shellac-shiny hairdo. One ex-corporate, ex–walking, talking, voided-into-space-by-pirates suitsicle.
“What the hell was that about?” she asked the suitsicle.
“That was your fellow crew members trying to decide whether they’re going to defend us or desert to the pirates and hang us out to dry.”
“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” Li said. And she indulged in the luxury of a little chuckle at life’s delicious ironies. “Office politics are hell in space.”
Her momentary victory turned out to be an empty one, though, because when all was said and done Titan still held the keys to the weapons locker. She looked at the service contract again, but only halfheartedly. What was the point in reading it when she already knew that it would be as bad as it possibly could be?
“And in the meantime,” she told the suitsicle, “I guess if I don’t sign your piece of paper you’re not going to issue me a weapon?”
“Thanks for understanding,” he told her as she signed on the line and handed the contract back to him. “The intake process is so much easier when we get a smart one.”
Five minutes later Li was fully armed courtesy of her new employers and trying to log on to shipnet. That, on the other hand, turned out to be not so easy. The system was barbershopping her—the only thing her internals were throwing up on her visual cortex was a processing bar that seemed to be stuck spinning in place at 87 percent.
98% complete, blinked the waitscreen in her peripheral vision.
The ship shuddered under the near-miss of a plasma barrage somewhere out in advance of its forward array. The lights browned out, flickered off, and powered up again with the groan, just below the human range of hearing, of the auxiliary generators kicking in.
47% complete, the waitscreen decided.
The ship flinched and rippled under another thumping shudder. Li was no sailor, but she still knew well enough what that second tremor meant; they were straddled. The pirates were done with the range-finding, exploratory bursts. The next shot would be a killing one.
“Can we get some help over here?” the suit shouted, his voice ratcheted up in what sounded to Li’s veteran ears like the seeds of panic.
A tech hurried over, tearing himself away from a nearby tank, and did his best. But he couldn’t link to Li’s internals through the shipboard systems because of a software glitch. And when he tried to do the job manually, the ship jerked into a violent evasive maneuver just as he got the handheld out of his pocket—and sent it skittering across the deck so hard that its screen shattered.
“Fuck!” said the suit—and it occurred to Li that this was the most human, and the most likable, he’d been since he first detanked her.
“Don’t you have somewhere else to be?” she asked him. “Not that I’m not having fun here, but—”
“You need to sign a release to get online,” he gasped.
“Seriously? ’Cause that seems like a very poorly designed intake procedure. Have you guys thought about, I don’t know, say, hiring an independent contractor to streamline your—”
“Are you insane?” The whites of his eyeballs were showing. “Can you stop cracking stupid jokes long enough to understand what’s about to happen here?”
She brushed the tech aside, knowing it was time now to cut her losses and do what she could with the only tools she was going to have to use. “I’m cracking stupid jokes because I understand what’s about to happen here,” she told the Titan man. “Better than you do.” She made a gentle shooing gesture. “Go. Go off to wherever people like you go when actual shit goes down. I’m busy right now.”
There was a public monitor on the other side of the cargo bay, and
she made her way over to it to join the cluster of confused resurrectees standing around it to goggle as the pirates swooped in on them.
It didn’t look like swooping, of course. It was hard to imagine the speed at which both ships were moving. But it was easy to see that no lumbering troop transport would ever be able to outrun that wicked silver needle. Li had seen pirates before, of course. UN space was rife with them, particularly out on the edges of the shrinking frontier, where imperial-grade weapons kept right on doing an honest day’s work for the local warlord long after the Peacekeepers and the IMF and the UN’s other colonial proxies had retreated to the other side of the dying Bose-Einstein relays. But this ship had nothing to do with the hit-and-run local pirates that preyed on in-system shipping on so many Periphery planets. This was a captured Navy ship, if Li was any judge. And its pilot—AI or human—was handling it with a push-it-to-the-wall flair that told Li everything she needed to know about how good the enemy pilot really was.
“Impact in twenty, nineteen, eighteen, seventeen …” the shipboard comm began to drone.
Everyone scrambled for the safety tie-ups, and that was the end of watching the monitor. But Li didn’t need to see fancy flying to recognize it. And the jolt and shudder of the impact told her that the pirate pilot had flown the pants off Titan’s shipboard AI, putting a little body English on his ship at the last moment in order to make the Titan transport suffer the brunt of the collision.
The two ships tumbled into a slow spiral, locked together by the pirates’ grapples. Shipboard gravity skewed and realigned nauseatingly. Of course, the pirates would have drilled in funny-g until they could handle it in their sleep, and they’d be betting that the Titan personnel hadn’t. Looking at the green faces of her fellow defenders Li had a feeling the pirates had put their money on the right odds. Still, any gravity was better than no gravity at all—especially when you were fighting with untested troops. Combat jitters and zero g made for a messy combination.
The command structure of the Titan mercenaries was simple: veterans in charge and freshly detanked resurrects filling in the ranks. This
division was pretty obvious; some of the resurrects might bring high skill levels to the table, but none of them had a clue about local conditions. So though it made economic sense to reinforce shipboard units with resurrectees, Titan still needed a core group of professionals on board to direct the efforts.
Or at least that was what Li thought before the battle started. But she soon realized that more than strategy lay behind the reliance on fresh resurrectees.
As the fighting heated up, she saw a puzzling dynamic unfolding around her. In every other battle she’d ever been in it was the reinforcements—and especially the rookies—who took the brunt of the casualties. But in this battle the veterans seemed to be vanishing with surprising frequency. And over time she realized that they weren’t going down with injuries, fatal or otherwise.
They were deserting.
Oh, no one called it deserting. And both the deserters and their fellow officers were careful to provide enough cover that nothing in Titan’s shipboard AI datafiles would justify charges of desertion. But still … you couldn’t miss it.
Li’s unit lost its two professional officers early on, one by desertion and the other to friendly fire. One by one, the other surrounding units lost their commanding officers and were reduced to confused and clueless groups of resurrectees.
Within an hour of the two ships coming to grapples the central comm went down—the pirates had taken out the shipboard AI, no doubt—and Li found herself falling back toward the bridge along a main-deck corridor with no fire cover, no support, and no functioning communications.
Not that she really wanted to be part of what she knew was happening right now throughout the ship’s networks. There would be a struggle going on there as well—and unlike the faux firefights in the ship’s corridors and cargo holds, it would be a fight to the death. The two shipboard AIs would be in the clinches by now, each one struggling to take over the other’s networks, shut his opponent down, and get control of the enemy ship’s security and life support systems. Human firepower
was a necessary adjunct to that lethal struggle, but the reality was that more naval battles were won and lost by AIs than by pulse rifles. And Li had spent enough time inside Emergent networks to know that having your mind shredded by a hostile AI was closer than she ever wanted to come to the true definition of a living Hell.
The shipboard AIs wouldn’t be true Emergents, of course. You couldn’t weaponize a sentient AI without violating both the UN’s banned-tech rules and the limited civil rights accorded to artificial life-forms. But ships’ captains had every incentive to push the envelope as far as possible. The closer an AI was to sentience, the more formidable its defenses. And the more easily it shredded a semi-sentient’s lumbering defenses. So people pushed it. And they pushed their AIs, too. Because there were limits on what you could legally do to an AI—but there were no limits on what you could make them do to one another.
Li must have been distracted by that thought, even if only momentarily. Because an instant later she turned a corner into a near-death experience.
Nervous faces. Heavy breathing. And guns, lots of them. Mostly waving around nervously with the safeties off.
She took stock of the situation—and decided that she didn’t like what she saw. She had already realized that this ship wasn’t exclusively a military transport. There had been plenty of resurrects fighting around her who clearly had no military experience at all. And here was a whole little clot of them, just drifting around the ship with lethal firepower and no one to look after them.
“Are you a ship’s officer?” one of them asked, seeing the Titan insignia that Li hadn’t even realized she was wearing.
“No. A resurrect.”
“So where did all the brass go?”
“From what I can tell they mostly deserted to the pirates. But whoever didn’t will be holed up on the bridge by now. We’d better get there too unless you guys are looking for a change of employment.”
The little group hesitated, its members looking at one another to gauge reactions and look for consensus. Muzzles drifted across arms, legs, torsos, expensive electronics. Li tracked them instinctively, knowing
where every one of those deadly little black eyes was pointing at every second. She didn’t even bother to check their safeties; it took six weeks of boot camp to drum into the average civilian that even in combat you’re usually safer with your safety on. Yep, it was amateur hour at the Alamo. And someone was going to lose a foot sooner or later. And unless someone took pity on them, they were going to shoot each other by accident before the pirates even showed up.