Cohen looked wonderingly at her.
“But then what happens? We can’t go home. And you …” She hardly knew how to ask the question, but she desperately needed to hear the answer.
“I can’t go home, Catherine. I’m not the person that left and I never will be again. Not in the way that you need me to be.”
“But I don’t need—”
“Hush. You know what I meant to say.”
“Then where does that leave us? What do we do?”
“Begin at the beginning,” Cohen said, very gravely. “And go on till we come to the end. Then stop.”
THE
CHRISTINA
“It can’t be done!” Doyle said when Caitlyn started to explain the plan she and Avery had cooked up, working late into the night fueled by steaming cups of coffee and the artificial endorphin dumps that coursed through their internals. “There’s a contingent of UNSec security on Monongahela High and the entire Navy shipyard just over the horizon. We’ll never take the relay.”
“We will if we get NALA’s help.”
“And why would they help us? It would be suicide. They’re not fools. They know they can’t hold the relay. Not when they can muster reinforcements through the array within the hour.”
“No,” she agreed. “They can’t hold it. But they can take it.”
“And then what?”
“And then we burn it all down.”
The room exploded. Everyone had an argument, an objection, a question. But the die was cast; the sheer bravado of the idea had been enough to get them all moving in the right direction.
As the solution took shape, Caitlyn watched the ghost’s face. It was amazing how easy it was now to think of him as just “the ghost.” Llewellyn was gone. Even for Avery, for whom he was so much more real than for any of the rest of them.
He is as good as dead
, Caitlyn thought. And she couldn’t repress a shudder at the image.
The ghost, on the other hand, was looking more alive with every passing moment. He was practically jubilant.
Why?
Caitlyn had been avoiding both him and Catherine for days, but now she found herself across the table from them trying to decide what to do—and knowing that they were all going to depend on one another if they wanted to have any chance of staying alive.
She had expected opposition from them when she broached her plan, but to her surprise it never came. Then she realized why: He didn’t care. He didn’t care one way or another about the final outcome. He just wanted to be left alone to enjoy himself in Llewellyn’s body.
And this solution gave him that. The relay would be destroyed. Nguyen and the lethal power of UNSec’s semi-sentients would be several hundred light-years away. And he would be left alone to live his life—in Llewellyn’s body.
Avery had come to the meeting, too, having agreed after a long, hard night of argument that she would help capture the relay as long as it was guaranteed not to fall into Syndicate hands. But she couldn’t possibly understand what she was doing, could she? Caitlyn scanned her pale, serious features. No, she decided. Avery hadn’t thought around that corner yet. She might never think around it. She had no idea she was in the very act of signing Llewellyn’s death warrant.
The ghost knew, though. And the way he was looking at her across the table made her feel as if he could strip the thoughts right out of her neurons.
She crossed her arms over her chest—in defiance or self-protection?—and stared back at him. “What do you think of the plan?”
“I like it.”
“Really? I would have thought it would rub you the wrong way.”
“And why is that?” the Llewellyn ghost asked with the faintly disdainful tone that he always seemed to have when he spoke to her.
“You died to protect Ada from Nguyen. Why? Why did it matter so much to you?”
They were playing a game of brinksmanship now, Caitlyn trying to make out whether the Llewellyn ghost still knew what Ada was—and whether he still cared about it.
“I don’t remember,” the ghost said with a smile that was close enough to Cohen’s to be charming.
“Maybe we should talk to some other fragments and see if they can help jog your memory.”
“That seems risky. Is it really worth destabilizing the current personality architecture in search of some hypothetical piece of information that may not even be retrievable?”
Beside the ghost, Catherine stirred restlessly. He put a hand on her to silence her—and to Caitlyn’s annoyance she actually settled down and shut up.
Looking across the table at them, Caitlyn realized half guiltily that she identified not with Catherine or the ghost but with William Llewellyn. In his self-loss she saw her own. In the ghost’s possession of him she saw a starker and more sinister version of Cohen’s possession of the part of Catherine that still lived in her.
She watched Catherine’s face, but she couldn’t read it. Her gestures and expression were so opaque that she might have been a stranger. Where had the two of them separated? Did your memories make you? Or could a different person walk off with all your memories, run them through the moral calculator, and come out with entirely different answers than you would?
And wasn’t that what Cohen risked when he turned the entire future of the species over to Li? That she’d do the math and come up with a different answer? Or, worse, that she’d flinch, and not do the math at all?
Well, she wasn’t going to flinch. She was going to see this through to the bitter end.
“You still haven’t answered me,” she told the ghost coldly. “What do you think about blowing the relay?”
When the ghost finally answered, it was in the voice of a man who had nothing to lose and knew it. “I guess I can live with it.”
The contact with NALA was almost laughably cloak-and-dagger. Not that it was exactly incompetent, Caitlyn told herself as she and Llewellyn were disgorged from the incline in the midst of the late afternoon day shift crowd. More like a small-town cop’s idea of the kind of security measures real spies would use.
Which might have been why, when they reached the NALA safe house, she wasn’t entirely surprised to find Dolniak waiting for them.
He looked at home, she thought. And not only because the safe house was an old prefab farmhouse that dated from the earliest days of the settlement and wouldn’t have been out of place in the Uplands. No, Dolniak had been here before. She could read his familiarity with the place in every movement. It was there in the comfortable, proprietary way he shuffled across the kitchen to pour coffee for the new arrivals. And it was there in the relaxed set of his shoulders—the attitude of a man who didn’t have to cast an eye around for the exits because he already knew them.
The man sitting next to Dolniak on the NALA side of the table looked very far from at home, however. And she was a lot more surprised to see him than she was to see Dolniak.
“Arkady,” she said, nodding. “I didn’t know the Syndicates would be here.”
He gave her a look out of his martyr’s eyes that was about as far
from Christian forgiveness as it was possible to get. “We thought it was wise.”
“Fine,” she said. “No point in wasting time.”
Quickly, she laid out the plan for them. Launch a surprise attack on the station systems at Monongahela High; use Avery’s security codes and the station-to-navy-yard link to neutralize the Navy; blow the field array.
And then, in the silence that followed her pitch, she tried to read the two men’s reactions.
Dolniak still looked sullen and angry, as if he were being dragged into something against his will. Arkady, on the other hand, was about as close to smiling as she’d seen him. He rocked his chair back onto two legs, hooked his thumbs into his pockets, and gave her a look that was pure Korchow. “Now that,” he said smugly, “is what I call burning your bridges behind you!”
“Does that mean you’re in?”
“No. But it means I’m willing to think about it.”
And he did think about it, right there in front of them. Caitlyn could almost see him running the math in his head. And she knew he’d come up with the same numbers she’d come up with.
The closest UN Trusteeship to New Allegheny was centuries distant. But Gilead—itself clinging to a wispy minor tributary of the Drift—was practically a neighbor at seventy years subluminal travel time.
He would accept her deal. He might pretend reluctance, but in the end it would be acceptable to him. She knew it would be, because as soon as she had thought through the time and distance factor she had realized that—at least for the Syndicate taste for realpolitik—the simple option of blowing the relay must have been on the table from the very beginning.
Whatever the Syndicates’ plans were for New Allegheny, blowing the relay only meant a delay of less than a century in getting started.
And that still gave them a three-hundred-year head start on the competition.
So that was taken care of. Arkady was on board. And that was the quarter where she’d expected the most resistance.
Instead, to Caitlyn’s amazement and fury, it was Dolniak who dug in his heels. He launched one objection after the other, each one more beside the point than the last. It wouldn’t work. And even if it could work, it shouldn’t be done. It would plunge New Allegheny into a dark age. It would kill their steel industry—never mind that they could walk into the Navy shipyard as its owners and masters the minute the UN pulled out. It would leave them defenseless against the Novalis aliens—never mind that the odds were a billion to one that the UN would make it back to New Allegheny before the aliens ever showed up.
So what the hell was going on here?
“Can I talk to you?” she asked Dolniak.
He stood up, his chair scraping across the peeling floor tiles in the sudden silence that followed her words. “Sure.”
He led her out of the kitchen, down a dingy hall tiled with the same green-and-white linoleum, and out into a weedy yard full of abandoned, rain-sodden furniture.
As soon as the door shut behind them she turned on him furiously. “What the hell was that about?”
“What?”
“Don’t ‘what’ me. Why the hell are you dragging your heels when I’ve just handed you a get-out-of-jail-free card? Or do you want to end up as Syndicate broodstock?”
“Korchow’s told you about his little plan for us?”
“Enough.”
“Touching, isn’t it? Pet-quality Syndicate constructs free to a good home and all that.”
“
Free
isn’t exactly the word I’d use.”
Dolniak just shrugged.
“You know what it’s got to mean for your people in the long run. They’ll arrive as slaves and end up running the place. They’ve done it already on some of the neutral Periphery planets. And the only reason they haven’t done it in the UN as a whole is that the Ring has the money and muscle to steamroller them. New Allegheny, on the other hand, has nothing except steel and potatoes. So why are you going along with it?”
“Because maybe I don’t believe we’ll live down to Syndicate expectations.”
Caitlyn rolled her eyes.
“No, really. Maybe I think we can turn the tables on them. Anyway, it’s not much of a choice, is it? Die now for certain, or take the offer of a chance to fight again another day.” He shrugged. “Anyway, if we do what the Syndicates expect of us, then we aren’t fit to rule ourselves. That I really do believe.”
“You make it sound theoretical.”
“Not really. But I can’t abide the kind of make-believe fairy-dust nonsense that passes for patriotism. I’m not going to pretend we’re fighting for freedom or liberty or the sacred bonds of humanity. We’re fighting for survival just like everyone else. We don’t have some special claim to deserve it. No one does. You’ve got to earn it.”
“And yet you’re willing to carry the Syndicates’ water.”
He shrugged, looking nettled. “Is that worse than carrying the UN’s water?”
“I don’t get it, Dolniak. Do I need to connect the dots for you? We’re offering you seventy years free of outside interference before the first Syndicate ship gets here. And if you play it right, you’ve got a whole goddamn navy thrown into the bargain, complete with shipyards and steel mills to keep it afloat ad infinitum. Think of what you can do with that! Think of what it would mean to face them as a strong, independent colony rather than low-hanging fruit ripe for the picking!”
Caitlyn stepped back and peered up into Dolniak’s face. It wasn’t easy to read his expression given their height difference. But she saw enough to know that her suspicions were right.
“That’s not what this is about, is it?” she asked him. “This is about me. Us.”
He crossed his arms over his chest. “Of course it is. You lied to me once. Why wouldn’t you lie to me again?”
“I’m not lying to you—”
“Well, that’s the thing, Katie. I think you are lying to me. I think you plan to get something else out of this whole deal, and you’re not leveling
with us about it. And that makes me just a little bit suspicious of your newfound altruism.”
“I’m being straight with you.”
He shook his head doggedly. “No, you’re not. I can see it in your face every time you talk about blowing the relay. You’re in this for something else. And I can’t really see putting people’s lives in your hands until I know what it is. I don’t think that’s so unreasonable. Do you?”
She laughed softly. “When did you get to know me so well? Okay, so I do have other plans. But they won’t keep me from doing what I promised.”
“I’d like to be the judge of that, if you don’t mind.”
“You’re best staying out of it,” she warned him—but he just looked away over the rain-slicked rooftops.
She hesitated, and then she jumped. She didn’t see another choice. And she wasn’t sure she could lie to him convincingly enough to make him swallow anything but the truth.
“The person who killed Cohen is on the other side of the relay.”
His eyes widened in surprise, but he kept his mouth shut.
“I plan to pay them a visit before the relay goes down.”
“And how do you plan to get back afterward?”
“I don’t think that will be an issue, actually.”
He stared at her. “You care enough about this to die over it?”