Ghost Spin (6 page)

“Oh, for God’s sake! Do we have to do the endless AI quibbling thing right
now
?”

“Sorry.” He cleared his throat. “Anyway, it still doesn’t change the fact that I’m better suited to go out there than you are. Bose-Einstein relays all along the Wall are being decommissioned even as we speak in order to try to stretch the UN’s FTL resources a little further and keep more important colonies from falling offstream or falling prey to the Syndicates. There’s simply no way an organic entity can investigate his death in any meaningful time frame. It’ll take an AI to track his surviving fragments down. Or an army. But UNSec is still letting through low-bandwidth civilian communications, so I can do the compressed data packet boogie and inject a parasitical program into the New Allegheny’s noosphere. I’d lay even odds that’s how Cohen got out there himself. So just let me handle the New Allegheny end of things and you concentrate on Freetown.” He hesitated. “Besides, ALEF’s more likely to talk to you than to me.”

Li frowned. “That doesn’t make any sense. I thought they were separatists.”

“Hah! Little do you know! In their eyes you’re just an inferior life-form. You don’t kick a donkey back when it kicks you, et cetera, et cetera. I, on the other hand, am a traitor.”

“If you’re a traitor, what does that make Cohen?”

The visual equivalent of a laugh flared across his representational matrix. “What was that nice nickname they had for you back in Israel?”

“An abomination?”

“Yep. That gets the general idea across pretty well.”

“Still,” Li insisted. “Whatever happened, it happened in the Crucible. On New Allegheny. That’s where I need to be, not Freetown.”

“Well, UNSec still controls the only in-system BE relay. So if you’re not hitching a ride with them, you’re shotgunning.”

Li cursed under her breath and kicked at the leg of the desk in frustration. Shotgunning was refugee tech: quick and dirty, and the last refuge of people who’d run out of hope, time, and credit. The technical name for it was scattercasting. Which pretty much told the whole story: People on Periphery planets without access to the Bose-Einstein FTL network or enough credit to emigrate on the lumbering slow ships had begun simply broadcasting their unencrypted jump files through the quantum spinfoam. The broadcasts were horribly corrupted and unstable. There was no way to control who downloaded them or what they did with them. There was only the slim hope—if you could even call it hope—that someone somewhere would decide to resurrect your pattern. And that the spacetime region of your resurrection would be preferable to the one in which you’d immolated yourself in the scattercaster.

Scattercasting was illegal in UN space for all the obvious reasons. It was a legal nightmare, spawning potentially infinite copies of the broad-castee, all of whom had the same rights and legal status as the original. And, the milk of human kindness running as sweet as it did, scattercasting had spawned every kind of abuse imaginable, from quantum kidnapping to indentured servitude and (if the rumors about some of the more remote Periphery planets were true) outright slavery.

“Not that I want you to go,” Router/​Decomposer said, “but that face really isn’t warranted. It’s technically no different than Bose-Einstein-assisted
quantum teleportation. Technically speaking you
always
die in this universe and are resurrected in some other quantum branching of the multiverse. You just choose to think of BE jumps as faster than light travel and scattercasting as some kind of quantum death warrant.”

“I think of it that way,” Li said acerbically, “because that’s the way it is.”

“The way you think it is.” Characteristically, Router/​Decomposer had now completely lost sight of his larger goals and was arguing the technical point every bit as enthusiastically as if he
wanted
her to scattercast to New Allegheny. “But only because that’s what’s consistent with your mammalian identity architecture. The truth is, there’s no such thing as FTL. No matter what technology you’re talking about. Spinfoam-assisted quantum teleportation, the Drift, scattercasting, clicking your heels together twice and thinking of Kansas—you name it, it’s all the same. If it gets you outside your light cone, then you’ve gone to a different universe. The math is simply too elegant to deny.”

“Anyway,” Li said, unwilling to waste time splitting cosmological hairs, “it’s not the copies of me in other worlds I’m worried about. It’s the ones in this one.”

“But that’s my point. I don’t think you’ve grasped the kinds of distances we’re dealing with. The FTL age is over. Now that the New Allegheny field array is kaput, the entire Drift is outside your light cone barring some extraordinary act of God or General Nguyen. So basically the copy of you on New Allegheny might as well be in a parallel universe.”

“Not copy.
Copies
.”

Router/​Decomposer shrugged. “You’re assuming someone will go to the trouble of resurrecting more than one copy. But why would they bother? Not everyone even has the technical know-how. And besides, it’s expensive. I can’t imagine who’d even think it was worth it.”

“Can’t you?”

If Router/​Decomposer had been human she would have seen him remember Gilead. But even though she couldn’t see it, she knew it was happening. At least he didn’t flinch. And that mattered more than she wanted to admit to herself. Now that Cohen was gone the list of people
for whom Catherine Li the person was more real than the bloodthirsty caricature in her war crimes dossier was short to vanishing.

She tried to think about what a scattercast pattern for Catherine Li, ex-Peacekeeper, ex–UNSec operative, ex–Butcher of Gilead, would mean in the multiverse—and the images that came to mind weren’t comforting.

“Look,” Router/​Decomposer said. “Just forget about New Allegheny for now. Go to Freetown. See what you find out. And meanwhile I’ll see what I can find out, and we’ll talk when you get back. Okay?”

Li’s mouth tightened in frustration.

“Okay?” Router/​Decomposer repeated.

“Okay.”

But she might as well not have promised, because as things turned out she didn’t need any help from Router/​Decomposer in getting to Freetown. If anything she could have used his help getting out of it.

The extradition team struck just before she crossed into the AI enclave on her way home. They piled out of an unmarked van in full SWAT gear and had her surrounded before she could even wonder why she hadn’t heard them coming.

“Catherine Li?” one of the plainclothes operatives asked, flashing his ID so quickly that even her wired systems had to resort to coarse graining to make any sense of the badge.

“Yes?”

“I have a warrant for your arrest under clause 23(c) of the Maris Accord.”

At first the word Maris meant nothing to her, except that it was the name of one of the simmering Trusteeships she’d policed during her tours of duty in the Syndicate Wars. Then she realized he was talking about the new peace treaty—the one with the extradition clause.

“You guys sure don’t waste time,” she joked. “You must have been knocking on the judge’s door before the pooh-bahs put their pens down.”

She might as well joke after all; there was nothing else she could do. She’d realized that when her internal systems hung, stopped in their
tracks by a government security loop. Those security loops were scandalous—such a violation of civil rights that normal cops wouldn’t dream of using them. Even UNSec operatives feared to tread there. Only the International War Crimes Tribunal could wield such a hammer.

“Do you mind telling me where we’re going?” she asked mildly.

“That’s for the politicians to decide. Our job is just to take you into preventive custody for now.”

“Oh. I see. What do they call that? A flight risk?”

He bristled a little. “You have money. And friends. Of course you’re a flight risk.”

“Well, money at least. My friends are getting a little thin on the ground.”

He cleared his throat. “I have to ask you to wear these,” he said, and held up the handcuffs.

Li put out her wrists obediently and stood while he fastened them to her good wrist. He was a little flustered about the prosthetic, but he finally settled for cuffing her one hand to his own wrist and they began walking back to the waiting van like that.

When he broke stride with her she thought at first he’d only stumbled. But then he slumped to the ground—and so did his entire SWAT team, in the same instant, as perfectly coordinated as a well-drilled ballet troupe.

“What the—” Li began.

But then she saw the telltale trickle of blood seeping from his nose and ears. And a moment later her internals unhung themselves and roared back into motion. She was free. But God, at what a price!

“No, Cohen,” she whispered. “Don’t start killing for me. Not you. Not innocent people who are just doing their jobs.”

But it wasn’t Cohen who had just killed for her, even if there was some part of Cohen still ghosting in the empty places of the noosphere. She knew even as she spoke the words that it wasn’t Cohen who had done it. That wasn’t Cohen she felt skirling across the grid. It was something colder and larger and far less human. And why it had saved her was as much a mystery as what it had planned for her.

That brain of mine is something more than merely mortal; as time will show; (if only my breathing & some other et-ceteras do not make too rapid a progress towards instead of from mortality). Before ten years are over, the Devil’s in it if I have not sucked out some of the life-blood from the mysteries of this universe, in a way that no purely mortal lips or brains could do.

—Ada, Countess Lovelace

NEW ALLEGHENY: MONONGAHELA PIT ORBITAL STATION

There were pirates hanging in the docking bays when the
Christina
made port at Monongahela High.

It was hard to know exactly how they’d died—especially since Llewellyn didn’t want to look too closely at them in front of his bridge crew. Airlocked into hard vac, most likely. And the hemp ropes noosed around their necks were just for show. After all it was a relatively simple matter to hang a man at the bottom of a gravity well, but doing the deed on an orbital station was an entirely different proposition.

Where did you even find the g’s on-station to hold a proper hanging? You’d have had to drag the poor buggers kicking and cursing to the top of the spindle. Or figure out some way to use the rotational gravity of a docked ship’s hab ring.

Or—awful thought—someone had jumped on their shoulders like hangmen used to do to real pirates in the days when the British Crown had displayed their corpses all along the shipping lanes to dissuade young sailors from choosing the merrie life of a rogue and sea dog.

The very thought was grotesque even by Periphery standards. And it bespoke a degree of vindictiveness that didn’t bode well in a port where Llewellyn had always counted on people to welcome easy money and ask no questions.

He wasn’t worried about station control recognizing the
Christina
. They’d repainted her, changed the cut of her jib, and swapped out transponder boxes with a captured freighter in a dark eddy of the Drift
forty days ago. And just now they’d successfully spoofed the station’s NavComp to get their berth assignment. It would take hard and purposeful looking for anyone to see that they weren’t the harmless tramp freighter they claimed to be. But still … something was afoot. Something that had to do with the UN troop buildup everyone was whispering about. Something to do with the rumors that UNSec was going to shut down the FTL relay to everything except military traffic and cut New Allegheny adrift from the rest of the human planets.

Finally Llewellyn saw what it was that troubled him about the bodies. Their necks were too long. Of course, there could be reasons for that. The Drift was full of oddly shaped humanoids. When the FTL rush started prospectors had flocked here from every stretch of the Periphery. Few of them were human, strictly speaking, and Hox cluster expression was one of the easiest tweaks in the genome. Still, this looked like something else. Something that put Llewellyn in mind of moonless nights in the Monongahela Uplands, and his father slipping home across the biopreserve with his long-striding countryman’s walk—one step ahead of the game wardens with a fat brace of tweaked-for-terraforming pheasants hanging from his belt. Later, when Llewellyn was old enough to go poaching with him, he’d learned the quick flick of the wrist that wrung their fragile necks.

A bright, clean, healthy kind of death—learned from a gentle farmer for whom death, even his own death, was just the ebb tide of evolution’s life-giving ocean.

Which was one hell of a long way from what his son had turned into.

Llewellyn glanced at the bodies out of the corner of one eye one last time, just to confirm what he already knew. They’d been hanged first and
then
airlocked. And you didn’t even have to
be
a pirate to get a cold feeling in your belly at the sight of it.

He could see the crew sliding sideways looks at him out of the corners of their eyes. And if it’d been anything but a new NavComp he was needing he would have turned around right then and there—and let the quartermaster shove his persnickety procedural objections where the sun didn’t shine. But they’d been caught out on a lonely stretch of
the Wall by a UN ship of the line, and barely escaped the encounter with their hull intact. Worse, they’d lost their navigational AI.