Ghost Spin (65 page)

“You can shoot me in the back if you want,” he said, “but if I were you I’d save my mustard for Avery. The
Ada
’s inbound on a hard bounce out of Boomerang, and she’ll be fully out of superposition in about five minutes. So it’s all hands to battle stations. Even you.”

Li heard the screech of the rusted locks on the starboard bay while she was settling the vest webbing over her shoulders. She began running through the ritual pre-combat checklist, letting muscle memory kick in and carry her through until her brain could catch up to events. She was cinching tight the tie-down on the holster of the close-quarters EM rifle when Llewellyn appeared in the doorway.

He had a gun belt wrapped around his hips above his Navy-issue sidearm, and the old Holland & Holland double broken down over the crook of his elbow. He looked gaunt and sick and grimly satisfied. And there was a hard gleam in his eye that she hadn’t seen since the first day on the bridge of the Titan transport.

“So much for the fucking mutiny,” he said. “You see who they come running to when real trouble shows up.”

“Don’t get a big head over it,” Li told him. “After all, they let
me
out first.”

Llewellyn laughed at that—but he wasn’t laughing by the time they got to the bridge. Avery had caught them completely off guard. The
Christina
was still docked to the Datatrap, unable to blow its umbilicals and because she was at cold iron and couldn’t depend on clearing the Datatrap without mishap on attitudinals alone. So the bridge crew had to sweat it out while engineering got things up and running and the
Ada
howled in like an avenging angel.

And even when they cleared the Datatrap their situation was little better. Avery papered the entire Driftpoint with electronic chaff, blinding their sensors and cutting them off from the Datatrap and all of Router/​Decomposer’s systems that couldn’t be housed in the
Christina
’s woefully overloaded systems. So they fought blind, both in streamspace and realspace. And this time Li had the access she’d been denied before, so she had ringside seats to the carnage.

Within moments it became clear that the real battle was not in the dark void outside the ship’s skin but deep within its digital soul. The
Ada
was eating them alive. The mad, tattered fragments of Ada that had survived Holmes’s hard reboot might be no match for Cohen by themselves. But slaved to the new semi-sentient, they had a crushing, overweening brute computing power that the nimbler, smaller ship couldn’t begin to match.

Eight minutes into the engagement, Llewellyn began shutting down auxiliary systems and ordered the bridge crew to the airlocks to reinforce the boarding parties. This was it—the great do-or-die moment in every storied pirate battle whose name was passed down by the death-dealing denizens of the Deep. This was the moment when you knew your AI was about to go down in flames, and your ship had been swallowed under you, and the only way to pluck victory from defeat was to board the enemy ship—and take it in realspace with blood and gunpowder.

“Not you,” he told Catherine as she began to follow the mass exodus to the airlocks. “You’re with me.”

And then he sat down at Sital’s freshly vacated nav station, jacked into the ship’s intelligent systems, and began uploading a datastream so massive that Li knew instantly what it was that Llewellyn was pushing into the shipboard systems.

“Is that wise?” Li asked, suddenly apprehensive.

“Of course not. But today I need all the help I can get.” He grinned his most piratical grin. “Even if the hired help kills me in the morning.”

And then it was done, and they were running for the airlocks while Sital counted down to detonation on the head-up channel.

I’m here
, Cohen whispered to her as the airlock blew.

I’m back
, he told her as she went over the top and into the line of fire, adrenaline surging through every cell of every muscle in her trembling body.

I’m with you
, he repeated through the blood and the fire and the soul-flaying horror of the battle for the
Ada
.

And then, without reason or warning, he was gone again.

Li fell out of streamspace—and fell to the floor, dry-retching in a mingled wave of revulsion and vertigo. Llewellyn was half a body’s length farther down the galleyway they’d been fighting along, dead in the sights of one of the
Ada
’s marine riflemen. Li looked up, her vision tunneling into a hazy, blood-tinged pinprick, and realized that her collapse had taken away his only covering fire—and he was about to die right in front of her while she puked up her guts like a raw recruit.

The rifleman raised his weapon. Llewellyn slipped to a halt, and—

Nothing.

The rifle’s sharp muzzle sank, twitched back on target, and then fell clattering to the floor as the marine slumped to the ground.

Li lurched to her feet and staggered up the galleyway to join Llewellyn. The marine lay in a slack-limbed heap, his eyes slightly open and a thin trickle of blood oozing out of one ear.

“We’re in,” Llewellyn said. He sniffed slightly and wiped his nose on his sleeve. Blood came away on the cuff, but he seemed otherwise untouched. Li stared stupidly at the blood on Llewellyn’s shirt cuff and inventoried the aching, ringing bruise that her brain seemed to have
turned into, and realized that she must have been about as close to dying in those final, frantic moments of the battle as she’d ever come. She felt no particular reaction to the idea—only a stunned, dull, thickheaded lack of interest.

“It’s over,” Llewellyn said, as if he weren’t sure she’d understood him the first time. Or as if he still couldn’t believe it himself. “We’ve taken the
Ada
in streamspace.”

“But how?”

“I … don’t know.” He sounded stunned, confused. “Inside help. Someone on the
Ada
just handed us the ship lock, stock, and barrel.”

“And where did Cohen go? He was here and then—” She felt sick and dizzy again, and for a flicker of an instant it occurred to her that passing out right now seemed like a lot better idea than going to the
Ada
’s bridge and facing the cold, hard reality of whatever the fuck had just happened.

Llewellyn shook his head again. Something was wrong, Li realized. Something she’d seen before on AI jobs when the link got iffy.

“Who?” she asked more urgently.

Llewellyn shook his head as if a cloud of virtual gnats were biting at him. “I think … me?”

As it turned out, the battle wasn’t quite over yet.

Avery refused to go down with her ship. She didn’t give up until long after it was clear that the fight was lost. And when she did surrender, it was with an icy self-possession that bordered on disdain.

Li and Llewellyn arrived ten minutes after she finally struck her colors, stepping onto a scene that looked like something out of a samurai movie full of medieval revenge, lust, and superhuman carnage.

Llewellyn walked straight to Avery, ignoring the mayhem all around, as if pulled to her by an invisible wire. They stood toe to toe, both of them dirty and bloody and battered, and just stared at each other.

“What are you going to do now?” he asked her.

She was sweating slightly, and her pupils were dilated with fear or shock, turning her eyes to near black. But her back was still rigid and her face set in a mask of defiance. “What do you want me to do?”

Llewellyn’s shoulders slumped on an exhaled breath. He looked spent, utterly weary. Watching them, it seemed to Li that the world had turned upside down. If she hadn’t known better, she’d have said that Astrid was standing battered but victorious on her enemy’s bridge, and Llewellyn was the beaten prisoner. His next word was little more than a whisper, so quiet that Li heard it only because she was standing right beside them:

“Why?”

Li saw the other Catherine Li—she couldn’t help thinking of her as Avery’s Li—glance sharply toward Astrid, as if the question itself were dangerous, or as if she herself wanted the answer to it.

But before Avery could respond, Llewellyn was gone.

It happened in a blink—and the transition was so swift and smooth that only Li’s long familiarity with Cohen alerted her to it. And yet somehow Avery seemed to sense the change almost as soon as Li did.

Avery stepped back from Cohen with a look of fear and revulsion. “You!”

“Mmmm,” Cohen murmured in an ominously soft purr that never would have come out of William Llewellyn’s mouth. “It seems the worm has turned, my dear.”

“What are you going to do to him?”

“Nothing you haven’t already done.”

And then Llewellyn wasn’t looking at Avery anymore. He was looking at Li.

“Cohen?” she breathed, not allowing herself to believe it yet.

But she knew. She knew that look. Just as she knew the words that followed:

“May the rocks melt and the seas burn …”

He stretched out a hand to her and she took it—and was in his arms before she’d even thought about whether it was a good idea or not.

“What happened? Where did you go? Why did you leave?”

“I’m not sure.”

“I don’t remember.” He bent his head and looked deep into her eyes. “But I’m back now. And isn’t that all that matters?”

She felt what she had always felt when he looked at her. His heat, his
strength. The overwhelming
presence
that made him feel more real, more alive than anyone else she’d ever known. The vast, swirling, more-than-human complexity of him, all focused with obliterating power on
her
. It was like being trapped in the core of a sun. All you could do was burn.

She had no idea if this was love. She had no idea
what
it was. And when she wasn’t with him it frightened her into desperate resolutions, promises of better behavior in the future, and bargains with fate about how she was going to do things better next time. But when he was there all that fell away, and all she knew was that she wanted to burn.

He looked up for a moment, scanning the bridge over her head. Then, just as she was starting to think she might be able to breathe again, he looked back down at her.

“We need to talk,” he said. And then his hand was clasped around hers, tugging her away down the shot-scarred corridors and through the still-yawning airlock to the
Christina
and all the way back to her quarters.

Before the door was even closed behind them he had pushed her against the wall and was taking her clothes off.

“I thought we were going to talk!” Li protested.

“In a minute.”

But then he did stop. He held her by the shoulders and touched his forehead to her forehead and just stood there for a long moment, his eyes locked on hers.

“I thought I was never going to touch you again,” he said. “I thought I was never going to see you. It was worse than dying. I need you now. I can’t … I can’t explain it. I just do.” His eyes closed. “Please.”

For the briefest moment, less than a heartbeat, Li thought about Llewellyn. She wondered what he would have said to Avery—what he would have done on the bridge if Cohen hadn’t intervened. What chunk of his future life had Cohen stolen when he took that moment from him? And what else would Cohen take over the coming days and weeks?

But she couldn’t hold those doubts in her mind with any kind of clarity. They drifted across her consciousness every now and then only
to evaporate in the brilliant heat of Cohen’s presence. With Cohen’s return, Llewellyn had vanished. He was a memory, without weight or substance, and the memory grew fainter every time Cohen spoke to her or looked at her. Llewellyn had become the ghost, and Cohen the living man.

She raised her arms and took Cohen’s head between her hands and drew him down into her kiss.

“So what are you going to do?” Catherine asked him later.

“About what?”

“I mean, when he … wakes up.” They’d never talked much about Cohen’s “faces.” It wasn’t a comfortable subject, for reasons Catherine had never wanted to look too closely at. Until now.

“Why do you care?” Was there an edge in his voice, or was she just being paranoid? “You never cared before.”

“This is different.”

“How?” No. It wasn’t just paranoia. It was there all right.

She gave Cohen a look, and he shrugged it off. The reaction was so intensely Cohen—tone, expression, gesture, everything. Catherine marveled that he could stamp his personality so completely on another man’s body. It made her rethink her ideas about his other shunts. She’d always experienced them as weak, vacant, lacking in precisely the
something
that Cohen filled them with when he was on shunt. But what did it mean that even a William Llewellyn could be wiped from his own body as cleanly as if he had never owned it?

“Well, for one thing, you’re not paying him.”

“No,” Cohen answered in his best sullen little boy’s voice. “I’m not paying him. Just saving his life. For which he’s been spectacularly ungrateful so far.”

“Well Jesus, Cohen, this is the man’s
self
we’re talking about, not a time-share condo.”

“So you agree with him.”

“I don’t agree with either of you. I just—”

“Look, can we drop this? It is what it is. We’re grown-ups, all three
of us. We all understand it. And there’s nothing any of us can do about it. Not right now, anyway.”

“But later?”

“I don’t know.” He rolled over and got out of bed—again that surreal sense of Llewellyn’s body having been transformed and alienated, and made completely
Cohen
. “I’ll figure something out.”

At times Truth blazes so bright that we see it clear as day. But then nature and habit draw a veil over our minds, and we return again to darkness. We are like travelers who, in between each flash of lightning, still find themselves in the deepest black of night.

—Maimonides