Ghost Spin (38 page)

“I’m not as nice as you think I am.”

“See? That’s what I mean. You’re warning me off. I can tell you think it’s for my own good. You reek of it. It’s like you’re into something, and you can’t get out of it, and you know it’s going to turn ugly and you’re trying to limit the collateral damage. Bad guys don’t do that. Bad guys are too worried about their own skins most of the time to give a shit who else gets hurt. That’s why they’re bad guys, because they care too much about their own skin and too little about other people’s. So what gives with you? Who’s got their claws into you?”

“You’ve got it all wrong, Dolniak. I don’t need a white knight riding to my rescue.”

“No, you’ve got it all wrong. This is my job. I’m not going to go away, no matter how often you ask me to. And the safest thing for everyone, you and me included, is if you level with me and tell me what’s going on and who all the players are.”

“I told you. I can’t.”

“Then you’re going to get someone killed. Maybe yourself. But just as likely me or some other cop. And if you do, nice lady or not, you
are
going to be sitting across the table from me in an interrogation room.”

“Aren’t we getting a little overdramatic here?”

“I don’t think so. For what it’s worth, I spent a little time looking up the law on Emergents. If your friend’s fragments have gone through a yard sale, then they don’t belong to him anymore. In fact they can’t, because once he decohered he had no legal identity and no right to own anything, including his own hardware and source code. If you think he’s somehow still alive, then you’re going to have an uphill road convincing any judge that you have some quasi-mystical right to get his components back from whoever has them now. And even if you do, he has no legal protection from any less friendly parties who might be looking for him. They could cut him down in broad daylight on a crowded street, and it wouldn’t be murder. It wouldn’t be anything. There isn’t a law on the books you could go after them with. It’d be less than kicking a dog.”

Li stared at him, face set stubbornly. There wasn’t a thing he was saying that she didn’t know already, but that didn’t make it any more pleasant to listen to.

Dolniak stared back for a while, and then sighed and shook his head. “You are one stubborn bitch, aren’t you?”

Slowly, Li smiled. “Can’t say this is the first time I’ve heard that.”

“I’ll bet.”

Dolniak was sweating, and Li realized she was, too. The climate control was on the fritz, another symptom of the burgeoning wild AI outbreak that the news spins were now talking openly about even though the Trusteeship Administration kept denying it.

She wiped her forehead and then wiped her hand on her pants.

“Now that you mention it,” Dolniak said, and unbuttoned his shirt cuffs to roll his sleeves up above his elbows.

On the inside of his left arm, just above the point where the silver ceramsteel filaments would have faded into the muscle if he’d had a wire job, were four short words tattooed into his skin in blue-black ink. The letters were small and plain and unadorned. The words were upside down from where Li was sitting, but would be right-side up when Dolniak read them:

IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU

“So who
is
it about?” Li asked him.

He grinned. “Damned if I know.”

He looked down at the tattoo for a moment, as if her question had reminded him of something so long a part of him that he hardly remembered it anymore.

“And the hell of it is,” he said, still looking at the tattoo instead of her, “I like you. I really really like you. Do you want to come to dinner?”

“Is that wise?”

And now he did look up, with a big grin on his face. “Do you really give a shit?”

“You got me there. When should I show up?”

He wrote an address on a scrap of paper and pushed it across the
desk at her. “Six thirty. It’s easy to find. Just get off the Duquesne Incline at Beech Street and go down the stairs and you’ll run straight into it. And now that you’re coming to dinner, you can answer a personal question for me.”

Li waited.

“What do I call you?”

“Excuse me?”

“Your name. Is it Caitlyn or Catherine?”

“Does it matter?”

“It matters to me, or I wouldn’t ask.”

She shrugged. “Then use whichever name you like.”

“Not good enough. Names mean something. Which one is it?”

She looked at him for a long moment before answering. “I think … Caitlyn.”

He nodded as if he’d read something in her answer. Li wondered what it was, and whether he was making some naïve assumption that would end up getting them both in trouble. Quiet people were hard to deal with. You never knew quite what they read into your words—which meant that you could never be completely sure you weren’t lying to them.

“Caitlyn it is, then. So why are you asking me about Will, anyway? He shoot one of your yard sale buyers? And isn’t that sort of a couldn’t-happen-to-a-nicer-guy situation?”

“Actually, it looks like he has one of the surviving fragments.”

“Oh. Shit.”

“Yeah.”

“He must be using it as a NavComp.”

“Probably. I’m sure it’s better than any other NavComp he could buy out here, legally or illegally.”

“He’ll never give it back then. Maybe he
can’t
give it back. Hell, it’s probably running on his own internal wetware.”

“What?”

“A lot of the pirates do that. They’re almost all ex–Navy men. You can’t realistically run a modern fighting ship without a military grade wire job. So they wire the NavComp through their own internals … 
um … what would be a tactful way of saying it? In order to promote cooperation and teamwork?”

“In other words, so their crews can’t mutiny unless they want to be stranded in the Drift without a NavComp?”

“You said it, not me.”

“The thing is,” Li said after a moment, “I need that ghost.”

“Then you’re going to have to learn to live with disappointment.”

“Yeah, but I need it.”

They stared at each other for a moment.

“I don’t think you heard me the first time,” Dolniak told her. “I heard you. Really.” She stood up to leave. “See you at dinner tonight.”

His sigh followed her out into the hallway. It didn’t sound impatient. It sounded like the sigh of a man who felt things. Who felt sorry for people in general, and for her in particular, even if she had used him and lied to him. Li wanted to warn him that feeling sorry for people had only ever gotten her in trouble, but he probably wouldn’t listen. And even if he did listen, he probably wouldn’t be able to stop himself. Some people were just put together that way.

“Caitlyn,” he called after her. “Listen to me. Don’t mess with Will Llewellyn. I haven’t seen hide nor hair of the guy since he joined the Navy, but I can tell you one thing about him that I figured out when we were five years old. It hasn’t changed, and it never will.
He. Doesn’t. Lose
.”

“I can’t believe
that!
” said Alice.

“Can’t you?” the Queen said in a pitying tone. “Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.”

Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said, “one
can’t
believe impossible things.”

“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

—Lewis Carroll

THE DRIFT

However unsatisfactory their dinnertime talk had been, Llewellyn seemed to have reached some conclusion about Li. Forty minutes after she went back to her cabin, she was mysteriously granted limited access to the shipboard computers. It wasn’t enough. But it was better than nothing.

That night she sat in her cabin, chewing at her fingernails and trying to piece together a clear story from the bits and scraps of old news files in the shipboard archives. She couldn’t. It was all dark intrigue and treasure and bloody mayhem. And in the middle of the darkness was this man, this Black William, this thief who had been smart enough to steal Cohen—and disciplined enough to control him once he’d done it.

He had a lot of Cohen, more than any of the fragments she’d encountered so far. Those memories weren’t part of the shifting froth of autonomous agents and peripherals. They were wrapped into core programs. If he had that, then he had unlocked the core programs. And he had Cohen’s cooperation, however grudging. She didn’t underestimate that. She knew what it took to ride that horse. And she was a willing passenger—not a hijacker.

Her first impression of the man had been right. He was driven, disciplined, all fury tamped down and power held in check, coiled tautly around some central purpose. What was it? And why did he need Cohen in order to achieve it?

She ran in review the little that she knew about the man, trying to organize her thoughts into a coherent search strategy.

The
Ada
. And letters of marque. And a Navy hero turned pirate. And bad blood with Astrid Avery.

It wasn’t much, but at least it was somewhere to start looking.

The next morning she got a bright and early knock on her door and the information that she was on duty—whatever that meant under the circumstances—in half an hour. At eight bells on the chime she heard a knock on the door and opened it to find herself face-to-face with Ike Okoro.

She knew a lot about Okoro just by looking at him. Like her, he was a rarity in UN space: someone who retained an easily identifiable ethnic identity that matched up in a geographically consistent way with the spot on Earth his ancestors had migrated from. But whereas Li’s Korean genes came from corporate colonists who had sold their genesets in order to get out of Earth’s gravity well, no corporation had ever owned Okoro’s geneset. His parents had no doubt purchased the best tweaks to his DNA that money could buy; thanks to a timely revolution and brilliantly farsighted administration of oil company reparations, New Lagos had emerged from the Great Migration as a wealthy independent planet with a thriving information technologies sector and a full permanent voting membership in the UN Security Council. But no one held a patent on Okoro’s genes. And any adjustments to his West African genetics had been made for his benefit by loving parents, and not simply to make him a more profitable worker in a corporate colony. That made all the difference between him and Li, whose black-market geneset still couldn’t overwrite the damning corporate serial numbers that were stamped into her mitochondrial DNA. And it made it all the more surprising that Okoro would be here, in the Drift, with a price on his head.

“You were recruited?” she asked incredulously. “Why would anyone even
want
to join up from New Lagos? What in the name of God can the Navy offer them?”

“Excitement.” Okoro grinned, showing teeth that had obviously had
regular childhood dentists’ visits—almost as rare a sight on a Navy ship as a fully human geneset. “That’s what I wanted. Paradise is boring. Especially when you’re seventeen and impatient and think you know better than your parents.”

Li snorted. “I’ll take your word for it. Personally, I joined up for the three square meals a day.”

Okoro laughed. And then he led her through the ship to the bridge, explaining that even though she was going to be on the boarding detachment—“because, no offense, you don’t know shit about sailing”—she would need to know where everything was.

Li looked at the crew members they passed in the corridors, noting the gunmetal-gray tracery of military-grade wire jobs at the pulse points of most of the pirates.

“Lot of ex-military here,” she observed.

“Yep. They have the best training. And the best wire jobs. Though some of the Titan mercs are wired to the gills lately.”

Li thought of the men she’d fought beside on the bridge of the Titan ship. “How’s McPherson doing?” she asked Sital.

“Who?” Sital said. But not quite quickly enough to make it convincing.

So, Li thought. She hadn’t just imagined that untrusting look Llewellyn had given McPherson. And now McPherson wasn’t on board the
Christina
. Had they put him on one of the lifeboats, or just airlocked the poor bastard? She thought of the cold, calculating glint she’d seen in Llewellyn’s eyes and decided she might not want her question answered. Cohen had always had a quality of ruthlessness about him, but it was the ruthlessness of an AI: cool, logical, and dispassionate. She didn’t like to imagine what that AI ruthlessness could lead to when mingled with the tight-wound passions of a man like Llewellyn.

“Has the crew always been mostly ex-Navy?” she asked Sital, mostly to avoid seeming to take too much notice of McPherson’s vanishing.

“Oh no! We had a bad stretch back after we first broke out of New Allegheny. Had to take on a bunch of new hands, and we didn’t have the time to be particular. Things weren’t so pretty for a while.”

“They don’t look so pretty now, to tell you the truth.”

That got her a sideways grin and a nod of acknowledgment. “Well, it was worse before. We were really scraping the bottom of the barrel. Llewellyn turned it around, though.” He waved her through a neatly dogged hatchway and into the long passage that led back to the airy superstructure of the ship’s fantail. “You heard the story of how he captured this ship?”