“Shotguns.”
“Excuse me?” Li gasped—almost as startled by the way the word had been snatched out of her own brain as she was by the silent arrival of another person on the ruined bridge.
“They do it with shotguns.”
The voice was clipped, efficient, practical. And it belonged to a clipped, efficient, practical woman with a strong-jawed, unreadable face that could just as easily have been a healthy fifty as a weather-beaten thirty.
“I guess they think it’s dashing and romantic,” the woman mused. “Personally, I think it just makes a godawful mess. And if there’s one thing I hate in life it’s people who don’t clean up after themselves. Can I help you?”
“I don’t know.” Li scrambled to put her thoughts together. “I guess I’m looking for whoever’s in charge here.”
“You just found her.”
No surprise there. And yet …
“Sheila Holmes, first mate of the Ada.”
Ah, that made more sense. Holmes had the air of second-in-command: no-nonsense get-the-job-in-on-time anti-charisma. She wouldn’t run a warm-and-fuzzy ship, but she’d run a tight one. And she’d run it by the numbers, even when all hell was breaking loose.
“Caitlyn Perkins,” Li said.
Holmes smiled blandly. Too blandly. And a half beat too late as well.
She knew who Li was. And she hadn’t been expecting the name Caitlyn Perkins.
That was potentially dangerous, and certainly important. But Li wasn’t going to gain anything by letting on that she’d noticed. So she smoothed over the slip, trying not to be too obvious about it.
“The
Ada
. That’s Captain Avery’s ship? The pirate hunter? Do I need to ask what you’re doing here?”
“If you do, you’re not too quick on the uptake.”
“So what’s going on here?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“The owner of this ship had something that belonged to me.” The truth seemed like the wisest choice—especially since she was starting to suspect that Astrid Avery already knew it.
“Something that belonged to you,” Holmes repeated. “Contraband tech, by any chance?”
“Are you asking me officially?”
“No. But I’m not kicking you off this ship, either.”
“So I should be helpful.”
Holmes smiled her not-quite smile. “Helpful’s nice. I like helpful people.”
Li watched the woman, trying to gauge how much she knew. Impossible. She had a face like a brick wall.
“I’m looking for Yoichi Iba,” she told Holmes.
“He’s dead.”
Li let her gaze travel around the wasted bridge. “I sort of guessed that much.”
“Don’t you want to know how?”
“I’m guessing you want to tell me.”
“Llewellyn’s information officer did a hard data dump. Fried Iba’s brain like a fucking egg.”
Li winced.
“Yeah, I thought you’d like that. If you’re really nice to me, I’ll take you along to his cabin and let you have a look at what’s left of him.”
“No thanks.”
“Really?” Holmes’s voice took on a dangerous edge. Suddenly Li thought of the lethal silver stiletto of the
Ada
looming over the hab ring. “I would have thought you’d want to go through his luggage. Being as how he’s got something that belongs to you and all.”
She met the Navy woman’s eyes squarely. “If you’ve got something to say, Holmes, why don’t you go ahead and say it?”
Holmes jerked her head toward the locked-down hab ring. “Just wondering how well you really knew our mutual friend in there.”
“Not well at all. And he wasn’t my friend.”
“What was he then?”
“A thief, as far as I’m concerned.”
“Well, that’s not the story he told. And as a matter of fact we have an interest in him ourselves. You see, he was on his way here to sell us something. Something that William Llewellyn now has in his possession.”
“A NavComp?”
“More than a NavComp. An Emergent. A fully sentient fragment of an Emergent AI with a stable personality architecture.”
Oh God. Korchow’s surviving fragment. And she was too late.
“Is that what they force-dumped?”
“Yeah. Iba was a small fish, a messenger for a much bigger player. Apparently they’d implanted a firewalled quantum datatrap into his mind. He didn’t have the key, so Llewellyn decided to kick down the door. Story over. No Iba. No frag. No nothing.”
Li stifled a curse.
“You and Captain Avery ought to have a talk about this,” Holmes observed, as if she were commenting on the weather or the latest sports story.
“Now?” Li asked.
Holmes smiled her not-quite smile and waited, stringing out the silence long enough for both of them to appreciate that all the power lay on the side of the
Ada
’s captain.
“Captain Avery’s pretty busy now,” Holmes said at last. “If I took you in now, I really don’t know when she’d get to you. But don’t worry. She’ll let you know when she wants you.”
MONONGAHELA PIT
Li stood in the doorway of Dolniak’s office holding up a bag of doughnuts as if she were presenting papers at a border crossing.
He grinned. “Beautiful.”
“Are you ever not hungry?”
“Not that I can remember.”
She sat down, opened the bag, and waited while he fetched coffee.
“So,” she said when he was sitting across the desk from her again. “Tell me about William Llewellyn.”
“Will Llewellyn? Christ, that’s a blast from the past.”
“Yeah?”
“You know we grew up together, right?”
“I heard a rumor to that effect.”
“From Liar Meyer?”
“Who?”
“Meyer runs the main portside auction house on Monongahela High. He’ll tell you he’s a legitimate businessman till he’s blue in the face. Which he is, as far as that goes. But everyone knows that he’s also the fence for half the pirates running in the Drift.”
“Is he worth talking to?”
“Oh sure. As long as you wash your mouth out with soap afterward.” Dolniak grinned around the remains of his second doughnut. “But don’t let me give you a bad impression of him. He doesn’t lie all the time. Only when he thinks there’s money in it.”
“I didn’t hear about you and Llewellyn from Meyer, as a matter of fact. But maybe the person who told me did.”
“Probably. At least indirectly. Meyer knows more about Llewellyn than anyone on New Allegheny. That’s why Astrid Avery’s been riding his ass like a tick on a hound dog. She’s going to put the poor guy out of business if she keeps it up, and then the UN really will have a problem on their hands. Most of the big shipping fortunes on New Allegheny have been built on keeping the Navy happy with the right hand and the pirates happy with the left hand. This vendetta of Avery’s is just plain bad for business.”
“So tell me about Llewellyn.”
“Not much to tell. We’re both from upland farming families. That’s a pretty small community. Everyone knows each other. We even started school in the same one-room schoolhouse.”
“But he did a little better than you did.”
“Will was smart. And the best guy I ever saw with a shotgun. I’m guessing you got a firsthand look at his fancy shooting when you were up portside yesterday.”
“I got a look at it. Couldn’t tell how good a shot he was, though. It didn’t seem like he was being very careful what he hit.”
“Sometimes you’ve got to come in with a bang.”
“He did that all right.”
“Well, he always did have a flair for the dramatic.”
Li blinked—and then realized that the echo she was hearing was of Korchow’s voice. He’d used exactly the same phrase two days ago—only he’d been talking about Cohen, not Llewellyn. She pondered that for a brief moment and then filed it away to take out and think about later.
“Okay then, Will Llewellyn. To tell you about Will, I’d have to start with pirates in general. Stop me if I’m telling you what you already know.”
Li nodded, knowing already that she wouldn’t stop him. He was a subtle one, despite his bluff Irish cop’s face. He had opinions, though he was enough of a workhorse to keep them buttoned up pretty tight on government time. Even if he told her an old story, the way he told it would be worth something.
“So. You know about the Compson’s World embargo and the BE transit snafu. Probably a lot more than I do. And from the inside, if my little bout of lunchtime research into your past is any indication.”
She nodded.
“And I guess you pulled enough tours of duty out here to understand that whatever the collapse of the FTL transit grid means to the Ring, it means a lot worse to the colonies. Most colonies won’t be able to survive when their field arrays go offline. And even the ones that can won’t be able to support their current populations. Not even close. They don’t have the food supply. They don’t have the technical know-how. They don’t have the ecosystems. They don’t have the genetic diversity. They’re walking ghosts and they know it.”
“The only chance is to do what the UN has kept us from doing for centuries: to forge local alliances, local economies, local transportation hubs.”
“So the UN’s moving in on the local powers.”
“And they’re moving to control the shipping lanes. And that’s where the pirates come in. Basically, you’ve got a multiplanetary economy where shipping has just been routed out of closely regulated government-controlled channels and into the wide blue yonder where any boy with a gun and a grappling hook can try to get a piece of it. Sailing the Wall isn’t an obvious proposition. It takes guts and know-how. And a certain degree of … I don’t know … intuition? Experience? Seamanship? Some captains are better than other captains. Some NavComps are better than others. And a crack captain with a crack NavComp and a crew that knows how to play rough can really clean up out there in the dark between stations. Add on top of that the fact that stationers in these parts have no love for the UN, and that even the UN gunship crews are mostly press-ganged locals who’d turn pirate themselves if they got half a chance, and … well, we’ve got ourselves all the ingredients of a new Golden Age of Piracy.”
“Sounds fun.”
“Yeah, well, it was fun. And profitable, too, until the pirate hunters showed up. Some of them are private bounty hunters, but the worst are the actual UNSec ships. They’re supposedly working for the UN just like
everyone else at the Navy shipyards, but they’ve got these papers that give them the right to capture and hang anyone they decide to call a pirate.”
“Letters of marque,” Li said.
“Yeah. I’ve heard them called that. Whatever they’re called, they’re a damned menace. Turning a ship’s captain loose with that kind of authority causes more trouble than it solves. The UN ought to know that by now.”
“They’ll never know that, Dolniak. They’re running an empire. And you can’t run an empire without shitting on the colonies. If you could, then empires would last forever.”
“And we’d still be speaking Latin?”
Li smirked. “Try Chinese, round eyes.”
Dolniak smiled at the joke, and then grew earnest again. “The problem is UNSec doesn’t see it that way. They think they can live forever. And they think they can do it by making a land grab in the Drift.”
“Hence the pirate hunters.”
“Yeah. Except that it’s a tad more complicated than that.”
“Oh? Is the UN backing some of the pirates, too?”
Interestingly, Dolniak wasn’t willing to go that far. “Let’s just say that the line between pirate and pirate hunter is … fluid.”
“So what’s the complicated part?”
“I guess there’s two, mainly. One, pirates make money. They’re about the only people making money along the Wall these days. And that money’s got to go somewhere. Some of it goes into legitimate businesses—nice, upstanding, respectable, campaign-contributing businesses. And some of it goes into buying cooperation. Or at least discretion.”
“From nice, upstanding, respectable cops like you.”
He flushed. Or maybe Li just wanted to think he did. “Yeah.”
“And how discreet are you, Dolniak?”
“Not very. But I’m not willing to lose my job over it. Or any of the other things you can lose when you start getting in the way of those nice, upstanding, respectable business types.”
“Shooting down cops on the street seems a little crude, Dolniak. I’d like to think better of them.”
“Then you’re about to be a happy woman. They got hotshot lawyers, these people. And some of their hotshot lawyers work in Internal Affairs.”
Li laughed shortly. “I guess I should have thought of that trick myself. Why waste your time trying to buy cops if you already own the cops who investigate the cops? That tactic also has the advantage of putting even honest cops under their thumb.”
“Yeah.” His mouth quirked into that pleasantly self-deprecating smile again. “And thanks for the honest-cops bit. I like that you care enough about my pride to say it even if you don’t believe it. Anyway, a couple of years ago, some sharp, clever young captain from Ringside shows up with a Navy ship of the line and fresh-minted letters of marque. He starts roughing up the local pirates, but apparently that’s not all he was doing. Because about a year later he gets dragged into port in chains and put in prison and tried on charges of piracy himself.”
“And that was Llewellyn.”
“Yeah. Hometown boy made good—or not so good, as it turned out.”
Li knew the bare bones of the story already, of course. She’d run a search on Llewellyn after she’d talked to Korchow, and the trial press coverage had been the first thing that came up. But she’d wanted the local version of the story. And she still wasn’t sure she’d gotten it in its entirety.
“What did people here think about the trial? People who knew him, I mean.”
“That it was a setup. No one could believe he would have done that.”
“Anything else?”
Dolniak hesitated. “There were rumors that the piracy charges were only a cover story. That he’d gotten mixed up with NALA.”
“Seems to me I’ve seen that name on some of the local graffiti,” she quipped.
“Yeah, well … what can I say? People are in a bad mood at the moment.”
He swirled his coffee and frowned down at it as if it had suddenly turned bitter in the cup.
“You don’t add up,” he said finally. “You’re too nice to be what you want me to think you are.”