“You know, you could stand to dial down the nose-holding disdain a little.”
The ghost chuckled. “It’s not disdain,” he told Llewellyn. “It’s an affectionate appreciation for the poignant contradictions of the male psyche.”
“This is incredibly stupid,” Llewellyn told Avery the first time they slept together.
And she’d agreed—of course she had. She wasn’t a child or a fool not to understand how close to disaster they were sailing. Nor could he honestly say she’d ever led him on, let alone seduced him. Neither of them had done that to the other. It had been a shared insanity, a madness in the blood. And it had ripped through both of them, forcing
them face-to-face with a deep current of need that reduced everything they were to the fleeting froth driven ashore by the dark tides of a mighty ocean.
“Maybe I had the right idea before,” she said. “Maybe if we just get it out of our systems.”
But even as she said it, Llewellyn knew better. The smell, the taste, the feel of her, was stealing into his blood like a drug. And he’d known. He’d known it was going to end worse than badly. He’d known they were walking off a cliff together, and there was no happy ending at the bottom of the long drop. He’d known that neither of them was ever going to get over it. He’d known it all, with a perfect certainty that even her final betrayal hadn’t been able to erase.
And Avery had known it, too, even though she’d never spoken of it. He could feel it in the way she held him, in the way she lapsed into long, oblique silences during their times together or avoided talking altogether.
They had been weaving an imaginary universe around themselves, building a memory palace of their own that was every bit as constrained and constricted and sandboxed as the one Ada lived in. But it wasn’t Holmes or Titan or even the Navy who held the keys to their prison. It was the Drift. The Drift that swallowed ships and people like a great snake swallowing its own tail: chewing its way through blood and treasure and sanity to produce nothing but more war, more death, more ravening hunger. The Drift that would never belong to them no matter who won the war, because they weren’t going to live through it.
So they had retreated from the real world into a carefully circumscribed and blinkered imaginary one. And they had pretended to have a future there, knowing that they could only pretend for so long, and that sooner or later they would crash headlong into reality in the form of some burning datum, incoming at relativistic speeds, that would hole them to hard vac if they didn’t take evasive action.
But they hadn’t known that the fatal impact would come from within, not from a Syndicate bioship lying in wait forty klicks off some lonely Drift entry point. And they hadn’t known how soon it would hit
them, far sooner than either of them expected it to: with Ada’s first blood in a lonely backwater of the Drift called Flinders Island.
Flinders Island wasn’t an island, or even a star system. It was more like an upwelling of an intergalactic sandbar: a dark intergalactic structure that could only be seen by the way it deformed stars and other objects that passed through it. Point Boomerang’s namesake galaxy was in the process of passing through the sandbar eleven thousand light-years farther down the Drift, and it owed its unmistakable shape to the gravitational blowback of the ancient and ongoing collision. At Flinders, the vast dark structure had captured a once-grand nebula from a neighboring galaxy and shredded it into mare’s tails and smoke rings that glowed wanly as they scattered the light of stars too distant and insignificant to have any names that were more than naked identity numbers. To Llewellyn Flinders looked less like an island than it did a flock of spectral geese wheeling and side-slipping to keep formation as they struggled through a stormy sky under black thunderheads.
“What are we supposed to do there?” Avery had asked incredulously when they got their orders.
“There’s a Syndicate hunter-killer picking off civilian shipping in the neighborhood. Fleet thinks it’s sitting off the Flinders Island entry point, hiding in the dust and intercepting local scattercast traffic. We’re supposed to trawl the dust and find it.”
“That’s going to require some delicate spectroscopy,” Ada pointed out.
Llewellyn had taken to letting Ada listen in on tactical discussions, despite Holmes’s disapproval. And when Holmes bitched about it, he’d pointed out—quite reasonably, he thought—that Ada’s very existence was classified, along with any even remotely current information about the state of UN AI design and the scope and mission of the entire AI design facility at New Allegheny. So if Ada ever started talking to the press, worrying about mission details would be like worrying about the fleas drowning when your dog fell overboard.
“Actually,” he told her, “it’s not as bad as it sounds. Fleet has
spectroscopy”—he checked his orders—“and a drive signature, too. So we’re really just running straightforward search algorithms.”
“If they’ve gotten close enough to the hunter-killer to get all that, then why haven’t they already killed it?”
“Good question,” Llewellyn acknowledged.
“And there’s an obvious answer to it, too,” Avery said from the other side of the table, where she was nursing her cup of coffee. “Tell me, Ada, have you ever heard the word
spy
?”
“Avery’s no fool, is she?” the ghost interrupted.
“Did I ever say she was?”
“And I bet she was right on the button about how Fleet got that drive signature, too.”
“Can’t say I’d bet against.”
“That must have been fun, flying blind into a dust cloud on the say-so of a Syndicate double agent.”
Llewellyn snorted. “If there is such a thing.”
“Are you some kind of secret Wilsonite, Llewellyn? You think you can pull a couple of plugs in the geneset and wipe out vice and greed and blackmail? You don’t believe Syndicate constructs are capable of betrayal?”
“I don’t know what they’re capable of. I don’t even know what they are.” He shuddered. “Not human, that’s for damn sure.”
“Are you so certain of that?”
“They’re a swarm, not a society. They’ve turned themselves into ants, for God’s sake!”
“And what do you have against ants, if you don’t mind my asking? I’m mostly based on swarm algorithms myself—virtual models of the same sorts of eusocial behaviors that the Syndicate society and Syndicate genetics are built on. Eusociality isn’t some brute-force human behavioral kluge like fascism or communism. The Syndicates are part of a much longer lineage, one that stretches from ants to termites to honeybees to Syndicate series clones, and no doubt beyond them to posthuman life-forms that neither you nor I have the mental wherewithal to begin to imagine. The superorganism is a powerful and elegant adaptation
to harsh environments. It’s Evolution’s answer to the problem of environments too hostile for individual organisms to have any hope of surviving long enough to pass on their genetic material to the next generation. And I doubt I have to tell
you
that space is about as hostile as it gets.”
“Well, what about the new planets in the Drift? Doesn’t that change the calculus?”
“Perhaps on a human time scale,” the ghost replied with a lazy shrug. “But in the long run? Well, even the cleaned-up UN-standard version of the last half millennium of human history suggests that free, unevolved, uncentralized humans have a worrisome habit of using up every planet they get their hands on. So I’d say at a glance that the future of humanity is looking cold and hungry with a high chance of eusociality.”
“I don’t want anything to do with that future.”
“Funny, I missed the part where they invited you.”
“You talk about the war as if it was already over,” Llewellyn protested.
“It is already over. It was over before it started. The UN isn’t just fighting the Syndicates. They’re fighting evolution. They fought evolution on Gilead, where they spent a decade making teenage soldiers commit appalling war crimes, and wiping their memories and throwing them back into the slaughterhouse again and again, before they finally faced the fact that they couldn’t exterminate the Syndicates on their home planet. They fought it on Compson’s World and ended up losing control of the only known source of Bose-Einstein condensates and trashing their entire FTL system. They fought evolution on Maris and Depford and Skandia and a dozen other Periphery planets—every place in UN space where the post-human colonials dared to stand up and demand some reasonable say over their lives and their planets and their raw resources. And they’re fighting evolution every day all over UN space every time the AI cops flip a kill switch or someone threatens to report an undocumented sentient to the Controlled Tech Committee. And now they’re fighting it in the Drift. Or rather they’re making poor slobs like you and Avery fight it.”
The ghost laughed a scathing, melodious, uncannily androgynous laugh that scraped along Llewellyn’s already raw nerves like fingernails on a blackboard.
“The only common denominator between all those wars is a bunch of damn fool humans playing at being God and so busy trying to chop the forest down one tree at a time that they haven’t done the math and realized that they’re going to run out of arms and axes long before the forest runs out of trees.”
“Just wait,” Llewellyn said. “You’ll be laughing even harder when you hear what happened at Flinders. You’ll laugh yourself to death over it, just like Ada did.”
Llewellyn might laugh sitting comfortably in the ghost’s memory palace, but he sure as hell hadn’t been laughing when they’d gone into the dust. No one on board trusted the unnamed source that had passed along the drive signature. And no one wanted to join the long line of Drift ships that had gone into such places looking for an easy target and never come out again.
It was Ada herself who came up with the solution: Don’t look for them, let them call us.
“If we ping the dust with active sensors, then whoever’s in there will know we’re out here. But we don’t need to, do we? Wouldn’t it be easier to make them come to us?”
Llewellyn cast a triumphant glance at Holmes at this piece of news—because obviously Ada wouldn’t have been able to come up with the undeniably clever idea if she hadn’t been in on the tactical meeting in the first place.
But Holmes was frowning, and not just in annoyance. “That’s not what our orders say to do.”
“Oh give it a rest, Holmes,” Avery said.
“Fleet ordered us to look for
this
ship,
this
spectroscopy.”
“Fleet ordered us to protect the shipping lanes. I hardly think they care
which
Syndicate hunter-killer we take down. Trust me, Holmes, we won’t be cutting anyone else out of their fair share of the fight. There are plenty to go around.”
“That’s not the point—”
“You’re right, it’s not,” Llewellyn snapped, finally pushed beyond all endurance. “The point is that the
Ada
’s a ship of the line, not a golf ball for Fleet to knock around the Drift’s back forty on whatever whim happens to strike them. And I’m her captain, and it’s my place, not yours, to interpret Fleet orders. And they didn’t tell us to hunt down
this
ship with
this
spectroscopy and drive signature. They told us to protect the shipping lane and simply sent along the spec and sig as additional information. Or am I missing something? Is there some additional information that you’re privy to and that Fleet didn’t feel obligated to share with the rest of us? Because if there is, I’d really like to hear about it now, before I put my ship and crew at risk in some desk admiral’s idea of an Easter egg hunt.”
That shut Holmes up good and proper. And from then on in, they ignored Holmes and listened to Ada. Which, in retrospect, probably did very little to endear the ship to her AI officer.
They spoofed their own spectroscopy and drive signature in order to make the
Ada
look like a defenseless cargo vessel to anything short of direct visual inspection. And then Llewellyn went one better than that, pulling out a trick he’d been wanting to use for years. He disabled the
Ada
’s attitudinals and opened up her belly to hard vac to vent the main cargo bay contents. There wasn’t much in there, since they were only out on a quick hunt-and-destroy, so they were mainly venting air and water vapor. But that was just what Llewellyn wanted to vent. And when it was done, and the ship was spinning gently on the rebound, he sent his AI-piloted forward artillery spotters out to take a look at his handiwork. They streamed back exactly the picture he’d hoped he’d see: a ghost ship wallowing through a glittering spray of ice crystals that completely obscured any identifying markings and said
holed to hard vac and dead in the Deep
to any seasoned sailor.
And then they went in. And … nothing. Two nerve-racking, temper-straining days of nothing.
“They’re not in there,” Sital finally decided. “They can’t be. Any hunter-killer looking at the spectroscopy through this fucking dust would have attacked us a hundred times by now. Hell, if
I’d
been looking
at what they’ve been looking at I’d have attacked by now. We’re a safe, juicy, quick-in-and-out target. And they get paid by the scalp just like we do.”
Holmes moved restlessly in her chair, drawing all eyes to her. “Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe you made it look too easy.”
“No, we did not,” Sital snapped. “And don’t try to blame this on us instead of Fleet’s latest wonderboy Syndicate informer.”
“But Fleet said—”
“Fleet said, Fleet said, Fleet said!”
“I say we do what Fleet told us to do in the first place and scan the dust with active sensors.”
“No need to,” Ada interrupted. “I just found them.”
It turned out she’d fed the drive sig into her search algorithms and had been running it on close-range passive sensors. And when Llewellyn flipped into streamspace to look at what Ada was seeing, there the Syndicate ship was: drifting at the heart of the nearest dust cloud with its engines shut down and its shipboard systems running as close to silent as was compatible with keeping its crew alive.
They had them. They had them at cold iron, dead in the water, without a hope in Hell of escape or rescue.