Llewellyn let his eyes stray once to that screen, then turned away. Some things in life it was better not to think about. No one could live forever—and if the ghost was as good as it claimed to be, then at least it would be pirate hunters and not the Drift that killed them. You had to be grateful for the little things life handed you.
So what do we do next, Will?
We make port at Boomerang. If you’re good enough. And the name’s William.
You really want me to call you William? Your mother only called you William when you got in trouble. And you were a good boy, weren’t you? I’d remember if you hadn’t been. Unless your memory’s playing tricks on me I don’t think you ever got in real trouble until you started working for Titan.
“I never worked for Titan!” Llewellyn snapped, goaded into speaking out loud.
Didn’t you? Come on, William. Every Navy captain in the Drift works for Titan. Every AI officer in the Drift sure as hell works for them. You worked for them. You just didn’t know it until Helen Nguyen set you straight.
Llewellyn flinched. He didn’t want to think about Nguyen. It only brought the whole sordid mess back to him in images that burned with shame and fury and the rising knowledge of his own unbelievable helplessness in the face of UNSec’s arrayed forces.
First the command of the
Ada
, which he’d received with pride and joy and a pathetic lack of suspicion. Then the slow slide from pride into confusion as he realized that something was terribly wrong with the ship. Then the heartbreaking moment when it all fell apart, and he realized that he was going to be hung out to dry—and that he’d made it so, so easy for them.
The betrayals had come one after another, until he didn’t think he had any illusions left to lose. But he did, of course. Because there was still Avery. Bright, beautiful, pure, and noble Avery—who’d looked just as bright and pure and beautiful when she sold him down the river as she had when she welcomed him into her bed.
Poor Will. You really loved her, didn’t you?
Llewellyn decided not to dignify that with an answer.
Don’t feel too bad about Nguyen making a fool of you. She made a fool of my wife, too, and you’re a blushing innocent compared to Catherine. You didn’t stand a chance, so you might as well take your
licking and forget about it. The main point is, what are you going to do now?
“There’s nothing to do. That life’s over. And it’s no concern of yours anyway.”
Given that we’re stuck in the same body, I beg to differ. And while your long-suffering mother may be the only person who cares if you get your neck stretched, I actually have friends who’d like to see me again.
“Other than your war criminal wife, you mean?”
But the ghost just laughed at that.
And this from the man who commanded the Ada at Flinders Island!
“What do you know about that?” Llewellyn gasped.
Nothing but the naked name. But I know you’re ashamed of it. And I reckon I’ll find out why sooner or later. Come on, remember it for me. Remember anything you like. Let me know your mind. I’m not going to turn you into an Uploader Zombie. I just want a little room to breathe in here.
Llewellyn blinked, struck by that idea. “You need me to remember things for you? That gives you processing capacity or something? Are you running on my memories?”
Memories. Thoughts. Focus. Love. Or if I can’t get love, at least attention. I can’t help it. It’s built into my source code. And I can be really annoying when people persist in ignoring me.
“I hadn’t noticed.”
Oh good, you do have a sense of humor. If you could pull it out of mothballs and refit it for action we’d get along better. Now, come on, remember something for me. Remember Catherine?
“How can I remember someone I’ve never met?” Llewellyn protested.
But in fact he did remember her. And what he remembered was terrifying. Almost as terrifying as the idea of sharing his head with a creature who kept wanted war criminals as house pets.
All through their talk he had felt the ghost at work within and around him: running the ship’s myriad intelligent systems with effortless
grace; mapping Llewellyn’s mind for entry points as easily as it mapped the quantum currents and eddies of the Drift; sidling into Llewellyn’s thoughts and tweaking and twisting and adjusting them as he rebuilt Llewellyn’s psyche and synapses to carry
its
memories and its overlapped, nesting, superimposed identities. He took control of the ship effortlessly, almost carelessly, as if it were such a little thing that he could push it here and there across the quantum chessboard of the Drift without even putting his whole mind to the job.
Well, he wouldn’t take charge of Llewellyn so effortlessly. Llewellyn didn’t dare say so aloud, but he thought it, with determination, in the secret recesses of his mind beneath and below the words that he shared with the AI.
I suppose you’d rather play ball with Helen Nguyen instead?
the ghost drawled lazily.
Three square meals a day and a nice comfortable cell until they get around to hanging you?
“I could always go to the Syndicate side of the Line,” Llewellyn bluffed, trying not to show how shocked he was that the ghost had read him so easily.
You have about as much idea of life in the Syndicates as a newborn babe has of running a Drift ship.
“Are you condescending to me, you sanctimonious bugger?”
Anyone who says something that stupid deserves to be condescended to. And anyway, you can’t run to the Syndicates. Not anymore. They just signed an extradition treaty with the UN.
“How can you possibly know that?”
Because I’m hacked into the station AI.
That took a moment to sink in. “Right now?”
Yes, Will. Right now.
The ghost sounded like it was speaking to a child.
“Can you check their files on us? See if we need to run?”
I thought about it. But then I thought it would arouse undue suspicion. I’m planning to wait until they’ve relinquished navigation back to me before I run the check for you.
He didn’t want to admit it, but the smug bastard was right. And smart. Creepy smart. “You’re not a normal AI,” he said.
No. I’m one of a kind—and not a mere device.
Llewellyn snorted. “Go in for funny hats, do you?”
That earned a chuckle.
Very good, Will. I like a man who knows his Thurber.
“My mum read me the book when I was a kid.”
I know. I remember. You’re her only son, Will. She adores you. How is she going to bear it when they hang you?
“Don’t talk to me about my mother. You don’t know me. And you certainly don’t know her!”
Don’t I?
the ghost asked. And then it took hold of Llewellyn’s brain and turned it inside out and shook out all the memories that make up a man, as if they were just a pocketful of loose change. Until now the ghost had been all charm and finesse, strolling daintily through his memories like a beautiful woman who knew perfectly well why she’d been invited up to see the etchings and was playing hard to get merely as a matter of form. But now, just for a moment, it unveiled its power. It would take what it wanted from him. It would turn him into what it needed. And the only choice he had was whether the conquest would be a polite flirtation or unconditional war.
He’d grappled with hostile Emergents before, of course. But usually in the heat of battle, where it was clear to everyone just who was friend and who was enemy. This was different. In fact it was verging perilously close to what he’d let Holmes do to the Ada. But he wasn’t going to think about that. There were some things in his past that he wasn’t going to share with the ghost unless he had to.
All through the chatter, the ghost had been working navigational solutions, spinning out long, complex, nonlinear equations as effortlessly as a carny pulling cotton candy. Llewellyn felt a tense satisfaction at the sight. The
Christina
’s old NavComp had been no match for the Navy pirate hunters’ state-of-the-art shipboard AIs. And every trip into the Drift had brought the risk that they would be captured or shipwrecked or shunted off course by a minuscule miscalculation and left to drift in the eddies and backwaters of the Drift until they ran out of air and water.
Well, at least that problem was gone. The man who’d sold him the
new NavComp hadn’t been lying. It
was
platformed on an Emergent: an Emergent of vast power and exceptional stability. God only knew where the poor wretch had been kidnapped from, since no such creature would willingly let himself be crammed into a lowly NavComp. But Llewellyn told himself with a ruthlessness born of desperation that he had lives depending on him and that the ghost’s misfortunes were beyond the scope of his captain’s duties.
“You’re good at your job,” he told the ghost. “I’ll give you that. No Navy ship of the line could have run that course more prettily.”
Ah, you silver-tongued Irish devil. Keep on like this and I’m going to start missing my wife even more than I already do.
“Welsh, not Irish. By way of Pittsburgh. And your so-called wife is even less Irish than I am. She’s not even human if I understand the whole story right. Not to mention the fact that she’s a war criminal.”
Another thing you two have in common.
God have mercy, it did know about Flinders. But no, perhaps it was just talking about the piracy trial. He started to make a crack about having been seduced into piracy by a highborn lady, but then he realized abruptly that he really didn’t want to continue this conversation. In fact, he really didn’t want to talk about Catherine Li at all.
Even thinking her name was a mistake. It made her suddenly present and pressing. A real person, and one about whom he knew things that only a lover of many years’ standing should know. And some things that no one, not even a lover, should know about another person.
She does have several redeeming qualities,
the machine pointed out, responding to his unspoken thoughts with unnerving accuracy.
Though I admit it’s hard to explain exactly what they are.
And then it hit him again: that wave of intermingled memory and emotion. What on earth was the ghost doing to him? And how was it doing it? How could anyone make a person feel actual physical desire for someone they’d never met before? And not just desire, either. Because what he was feeling right now made him jealous and sad. Jealous of the ghost and what he’d had with his woman. Sad about the fact that he, William Llewellyn, was going to end his short and pointless life
hanging on some docking gantry before he ever had the chance to find a woman who’d feel that way about
him
.
He was struck by a profoundly disturbing thought. Was love just a matter of knowing—really truly knowing—another person? Could you cross a line to where you knew someone so well that you could no longer hold yourself apart from them? And if so, then how was he going to fare in this unholy trinity of man, woman, and machine that he’d entered into? Had he accidentally sold his soul for a new NavComp? And how had a nice boy who’d never meant to get into trouble—because the ghost was right about that, even if it was wrong about everything else—how had he ever managed to get himself into this mess?
“If you say so,” he said, shrugging off his doubts and regrets. “It really doesn’t matter since I’m never going to meet the bitch.”
The ghost’s eldritch laughter tickled across his mind again. And there was something else behind the laughter. Something sharp and bright and silver that twisted in his mind like a poacher’s snare tightening around a rabbit’s neck.
I wouldn’t be too sure of that, William. I’m sure Catherine’s very eager to meet you. Though for your sake, I suppose I should hope she never does. If she ever finds out what you did to me, she’ll kill you.
Llewellyn started to protest—but whatever he might have said in his defense was cut off by the ship’s warning Klaxon.
“Station Nav’s telling us to stand down and return to dock,” Sital called from the conn.
Llewellyn turned to find his first mate’s face looking up at him—and looking worried.
Ignore them,
the ghost whispered.
“I can’t ignore them!” Llewellyn snapped.
You’d better. Unless you want to end up outside the airlocks next to the poor devils Avery hanged last week.
Llewellyn shook his head, wishing he could shake off the voice inside it and get his mind back in focus. His internals tried to dump a load of synthetic myelin enhancer into his bloodstream, but he quashed the reflex; this wasn’t an emergency yet, but it might become one, and
he ought to save the juice for when he needed it. You couldn’t stay on synth too long without paying for it.
“Do they say why we should stand down?” he asked Sital.
“No.”
It’s Avery. She’s sitting off the closest Drift entry point, waiting for you. I’m looking at her encrypted spinfeed right now.
God Almighty, now the NavComp was intercepting Navy communiqués and decoding quantum-encrypted spinfeeds? What kind of monster had Meyer sold him?
You can’t know it’s Avery for certain, he protested, dropping into AI-space instinctively as his internals revved up for action.
And then the ghost said something that it should never have been able to say—and that made Llewellyn break out in a cold, panicked sweat underneath his uniform.
You think I don’t know Holmes when I smell her? I know her better than I know you, William.
Llewellyn cleared his throat and spoke into a silence that suddenly seemed as dangerous as drawn knives. “The NavComp says it’s Avery.”
“The
NavComp
?” Sital echoed.
“It’s hacked into the station AI.”
“How—”
“I don’t know.”
“Is it
talking to you
?” Doyle’s voice cut across the silence. Dangerous, that. The fear in his voice was natural. Reasonable, even. And when the quartermaster spoke, you could bet he had others behind him. Llewellyn realized suddenly that danger was facing him from within the ship as well as without.