“Shouldn’t have asked what?” Li said. And then she shivered. That was AI behavior. The odd non sequitur, the long shadow of some other internal conversation looping back into real time in unpredictable ways, as if Llewellyn’s mind were being pulled along by deep ocean currents that she could only measure by watching how fast they pulled him away from her.
“Don’t shrug it off.” She gestured at the creeping red line along the inside of his wrists and neck, which she could see clearly now that he had relaxed enough in the after-dinner hour to roll up his sleeves and unbutton his collar. “Your implant could be going toxic.”
He waved off her concern with an expression that seemed to say getting sick was for lesser mortals.
“You should at least talk to Okoro about it.”
“I have. He’s out of his depth.”
“Then talk to Cohen. He can—”
“No!”
He paused long enough to get control of himself, and then went on more calmly. “And anyway, I’m not sick. It’s just … a disconnect. As if I’ve somehow come unmoored from myself. I see all the usual things in the usual way. And yet, somehow, I don’t feel about them as I would expect to feel. And
he
”—Li had begun to notice already that he resisted calling Cohen by name; it was always
he
or
the ghost
or, most unnervingly,
your husband
—“
he
seems just as far out to sea as I am.”
They locked eyes again—and this time Llewellyn looked away first.
“Please,” Li begged. “Please let me upload the fragment and run a check on it.”
“Out of the question,” he answered impatiently.
“Why? You have a choice, William. Make it while you still can.”
“Don’t call me that!”
“Why? Because he does?”
He didn’t answer.
“And don’t change the subject. You have a choice. Make it a smart one.”
“What choice? The way I see it, I can either take whatever deal Cohen’s offering or accept the near certainty that my entire crew is going to be blown into hard vac or hanged as pirates the next time Avery catches up to us.”
“Why does she hate you so much, Llewellyn? What happened between the two of you?”
“Don’t change the subject. Not until you answer my question, anyway. What other choice do you see out there? Seriously, I’m asking. Because if you have an answer to the questions I ask myself when I lie awake at night, I’d love to hear it.”
But Li didn’t have an answer—and this time she was the one who couldn’t meet Llewellyn’s eyes.
“You’ve seen how paranoid Doyle is about this,” he said in a calmer voice. “And Sital’s hanging on by sheer faith right now. What do you
think they’d do if I admitted there was a problem—let alone a problem bad enough that I had to get station-side help for it?”
“You understand that you could die?”
“And then Cohen would have a healthy new body. And you’d have your husband back. I don’t see why it should concern you if it doesn’t worry me.” His mouth twisted in a rueful smile. “Really, it would be the best of all possible solutions from your standpoint.”
“No it wouldn’t. I’d feel terrible about it. And so would Cohen.”
“Ah, you see, now I know you’re just flattering me.”
“I’m not. He
would
feel terrible.”
“Oh, I don’t say he wouldn’t feel a twinge or two. But he wouldn’t be crying into his
Condrieu
about it.”
Li snorted, only partly in amusement. “Do you even know what
Condrieu
is, Llewellyn?”
“Sure,” he said bitterly. “I remember every vintage. That’s the deal, don’t you know? He gets my life, and I get an old box full of someone else’s memories.”
Li watched him across the table, trying to imagine what was going on inside his head, and realizing that even her own experience fell so far short of what he was going through that she had no basis for comparison. “Nothing I can say is going to make a difference, is it?”
“No.” He doled out another polite, carefully calibrated smile. The real smile seemed to have gone on permanent vacation. “But it’s nice of you to say it.”
Li had already spent enough time around Llewellyn to know when a conversation was over. She took a last swallow of her beer and stood up.
“By the way,” he said just as she hit the door. “We’ve got a freighter in our sights that should be in range sometime tomorrow. And you’re on the boarding party.”
“So you’ve decided you trust me after all?”
“No, I’m just running out of fighters.”
“Can I assume Sital will be coming along to keep an eye on me?”
Llewellyn smiled. “Closer than skin.”
MONONGAHELA HIGH
Meyer’s office was beyond luxurious. It would have been ostentatious even Ring-side, but here it was surreal. Thick, deep white carpets, framed paintings and sculptures, furniture by people whose names even Li recognized. She felt like she’d walked onto the set of the movie and just had to follow the director’s orders and say the lines she’d been told to say.
Wishful thinking. And the wish crashed into reality when she looked out the floor-to-ceiling picture window to a million-dollar view of Monongahela High’s hab ring and saw the pirates Avery had hanged yesterday—five scuffed and worn EVA suits that you could almost imagine were empty if the news spins hadn’t been running close-up footage on every channel for the entire news cycle.
Meyer didn’t match his office. He looked like he ought to be fixing the plumbing instead of sitting down behind the big desk and staring at Li over steepled hands.
“I know who you are,” he said when he’d gotten the preliminary staring over with. “You’re that bitch that’s banging Dolniak.”
“Uh, well, I wouldn’t jump the gun on that. So far we’ve only had dinner.”
Meyer made an eloquent and admirably self-explanatory gesture. “Eating, fucking, what’s the difference?”
Li wasn’t very good at wide-eyed innocence, but she gave it the old college try anyway. “You must really like eating.”
Meyer’s laugh was a clever crow’s cackle. “You’re okay,” he told her. “You’re probably here to fuck me over, but you’re still okay. You’ve got an evolved sense of humor. Drink?”
“Isn’t it a little early for that?”
“That all depends on how badly you plan to fuck me over.”
“I just want to talk to you, Mr. Meyer.”
He grinned seductively—which Li had never imagined a fat, short, balding man with bloodhound-worthy jowls could do. “That’s what all the ladies say.”
“A couple of questions. And then I’ll walk out the door and you’ll never see me again.”
The grin broadened. “And that’s what all the ladies
do
.”
“Well,” Li allowed, “it
is
hard to find a woman with a truly evolved sense of humor.”
“It’s hard to find a woman with
any
sense of humor. Especially on this shithole of a planet. And especially lately.” He padded over to a well-stocked wet bar—and Li noted that despite his pudge he moved like a man who needed to be taken seriously. “I’m having Scotch. You tell me what you want while I’m still standing up and I’ll pour you something, too.”
“Scotch sounds nice.”
He snorted dismissively. “My Scotch
is
nice.”
He brought back the drinks. “I didn’t ask if you wanted ice because I don’t have any, thanks to the Navy’s latest clusterfuck.”
“Seriously? The wild AI outbreak broke your ice machine? You must have a severe overstock of intelligent systems if you’re using one to run your wet bar.”
“I buy and sell AI for a living, Major. I’m swimming in the little fuckheads. And don’t give me that bleeding-heart AI liberation look. You think mixing cocktails is the worst thing an AI could get stuck doing in the Drift? Not by a long shot.”
He handed her the drink and stood in front of her while she raised it to her lips, taking the chance to get an unabashed closer look. Li waited patiently as his gimlet eyes traveled from the more obvious parts of female anatomy to other points of interest: the high-throughput jack
behind her left ear; the glimmer of military-grade optics along the edges of her irises; the tracery of ceramsteel at wrist and neckline.
“That’s actually what I want to talk to you about, Meyer. Whether you might have sold an Emergent AI to William Llewellyn to use as his NavComp.”
“Well now, Major, that would be trafficking in sentient systems, wouldn’t it?”
“We don’t have to call it that if you don’t want to.”
“Damn right we don’t. Because I didn’t do it. And if you try to prove I did, I’ll bury you in a mountain of intelligent systems trading approvals and CTC reporting forms and double-blind free-range simulations that you can spend the next ten years wading through without producing one scintilla of evidence that I broke any law on the books.”
“For what it’s worth, Dolniak didn’t send me.”
“I know that. Dolniak’s a straight shooter. When he wants information from me he gets a warrant, trashes my office, and drags me downtown like a civilized cop.”
“No fancy footwork from Dolniak?”
“Actually, he was a much better boxer than he is a cop. Or maybe being a cop on New Allegheny is just harder than fighting heavyweight. Still, I can see the appeal, from a woman’s perspective. Steady life, three kids, boring sex. It’s just that you don’t seem like the three-kids, boring-sex type to me.”
“How perceptive of you.”
“And anyway—I’m curious, humor me—did Xenogen even give their worker clones baby-making equipment?”
Li tried not to show her surprise. Xenogen had never had any corporate creches this far from Earth, and she would have bet good money that Meyer couldn’t recognize one on sight. So where had he heard that? From Dolniak? Or from someone else?
Meyer smiled, seeming to sense her confusion and to enjoy it. “No offense. I just wondered. I mean, wouldn’t it be bad for business if they let the clones breed on their own?”
“Who’d buy the cow when they can get the milk for free, you mean?”
“You said it, not me,” he agreed with a lascivious grin.
“Well, I guess Xenogen saw it the same way you do, because they didn’t. Can we get down to business now?”
“Aren’t you having fun yet? I’m having a hell of a time.”
“What can you tell me about William Llewellyn?”
“What did Avery tell you?”
It took a while for the name to register, but then she made the connection: Captain Astrid Avery, the pirate hunter—a woman of savage ambition and even more savage reputation. The woman who was responsible for the row of corpses hanging from the docking gantry outside Meyer’s window.
“I haven’t talked to her yet. Should I?”
“Well, she’s Navy. And you’re … something.”
“You think she’s got the information I want?”
“She’s got everything, right down to my fucking Household God. She stole him out from under me and gave me some bullshit piece of paper. I guess I should be grateful she left me a fucking chair to sit on.”
“I thought the infestation trashed your house AI,” Li protested, trying to catch up with the situation.
“It did. And then Avery took it.”
“Did she say why?”
“No. Avery never says anything. She lets that vampire bitch Holmes do her talking for her. And Holmes said she wanted to search my client database and put me out of business, and this seemed like a quick way to do both. Charming woman, Holmes. And her boss makes her look like Little Bo Fucking Peep.”
“So I keep hearing. Why does everyone hate Avery so much?”
“You mean other than the fact that she’s a stone-cold killer?”
“I know a lot of stone-cold killers. Most of them are pretty passable company as long as you’re not the person they’re shooting at.”
“Yeah, well, not Avery. And killing that poor son of a bitch ain’t just a job for her, either. She’s got no fucking sense of humor about it whatsoever. In fact, she’s got no fucking sense of humor at all.”
“Oh, I get it,” Li said with an indulgent grin. “It’s the old story of the girl trying to break into the boys’ treehouse.”
“No. It’s not the treehouse thing. And by the way, thanks for your
good opinion of me. It really makes my day to be called a sexist pig. It’s that Avery’s a fucking hypocrite. She shoves her perky little tits and her UN commission in your face, and she’s full of sanctimonious bullshit about rules and procedures and the need to sacrifice for the greater good. And underneath it you know she’s the worst fucking pirate of them all. I’m not saying I don’t hold my nose and do business with her when I have to. And I’m not saying her money’s not good. Hell, I got five kids to put through college and buy wire jobs for; I’ll take anyone’s money. But I still hate the bitch. And if Lucky William Llewellyn ever puts a load of lead into her with that fancy bespoke shotgun of his, he’ll be able to get drunk for free at any bar in the Drift for the rest of his life.”
“So,” Li said into the silence that followed that ringing endorsement of UN authority, “I guess that means you’re not going to tell me how to find Llewellyn?”
“Nope.”
“But you could tell me when he comes into dock.” She grinned, more because she hoped it would work than because she thought it would. “It’d save me from having to hang around making a pest of myself.”
More stony-eyed silence.
She sighed. “I’m just asking for a little help.”
“You’re asking for information about the movements of a wanted man. If I was going to give you that, I’d go straight to the cops and collect the reward myself.” He grinned back at her, a mocking imitation of her own grin. “Like I said, I got kids to put through college.”
“Did you ever sell him a NavComp?”
“That’s his business.”
“And Astrid Avery’s if she finds out about it.”
“You think you’re going to go tattle on me to Avery? Think again, clone. You don’t want to rise to the level of her notice. You don’t want to coexist in the same universe with her. Or her bitch vampire of a first officer. You look cross-eyed at them, and you just bought yourself a one-way ticket on a Navy press-gang.”
“Okay, okay, I never said it!”
“Yeah, whatever.” Meyer lifted the glass of Scotch from between her fingers with the dexterity of a pickpocket. “Don’t take it personal, but I don’t want to drink with you anymore. And anyway, you’re wasting your time buttering me up. Llewellyn blew out of here with hell on his tail two months ago.”