Ghost Spin

by Chris Moriarty

  New Allegheny’s future had been blown wide open, but the smart money was betting that it wouldn’t belong to the locals.

  Monongahela Pit was really a pothole, just like the terraforming potholes on dozens of other Periphery planets. But in the rust-beltdescended local dialect, incline-plane railroads were “planes” and the region’s booming coal mines—which Li, with her mostly Irish Compson’s World heritage, would have called pits—were “works”—pronounced in a roundheeled Yankee drawl that made the word rhyme with cork. And the Monongahela Pothole was simply the Pit.

  The Pittsburgh Pit, twelve hundred kilometers northward, was the nominal capital and the pothole that the original settlers had designated their colony’s main city. But unexpectedly severe seasonal dust storms had crippled its off-planet commerce and Pittsburgh High had withered into a mere local stopover, while Monongahela Pit’s reliable weather had turned Monongahela High into the planet’s real spaceport.

  Monongahela High was a typical rough-and-tumble Periphery spaceport—more rough-and-tumble than most, thanks to the massive orbital chain of the Navy shipyards and to a healthy local pirating tradition specializing in short-hop shipping.

  But Monongahela Pit was something else—as intensely, peculiarly local as any of the isolated “lost colonies” strung out along the Periphery and still not incorporated into the UN’s system of member states and trusteeships.

  Heirs to the slow suicide of North America’s heavy industrial base, they were as betrayed and abandoned and disillusioned as any local population in UN space. They hadn’t forgotten their history on the generation ships—to be honest, few emigrants did; the close quarters and appalling living conditions were more conducive to nursing old grievances than starry-eyed dreams of future adventures. They had brought their rust belt politics with them: fiercely local, violently xenophobic, unbendingly protectionist. Free trade was anathema. The UN was a hostile foreign entity. Li couldn’t think of a worse candidate for Trusteeship—and the fact that UNSec had waded into this mess only drove home how desperate the FTL crunch really was.

  Even the names radiated the kind of fierce local pride that colonists had fought and died for on Periphery planets like Maris and Compson’s World. The Duquesne Incline … Southside Flats … Windygap … Polish Hill … Homestead … The Crucible …

  The Crucible was where Cohen had died, and where she would have to start the search for his surviving fragments. She could see its steel mills from here. You could see them from everywhere in and around Monongahela Pit—if not the smelters themselves, then the towering flames that shot heavenward day and night like volcanic eruptions. Looking down at the little strip of Pit that was the foundry to half the UN Navy, it was unimaginable—even to Li, a child of the Trusteeships—that human beings could live in that fire-belching subterranean hell. It was Vulcan’s Forge, made real on a planet the Greeks never dreamed existed. It was no place for ordinary humans. It was an abode of giants and demigods.

  Li shuddered and turned away, looking for a taxi. But the first taxi she found refused to take her down into the city. And the second driver just laughed and said, “Catch a Plane, sweetheart!”

  And she did just that, riding the Duquesne Incline Plane down the near-vertical wall of the Pit and into the permanent twilight of Shadyside.

  As they dropped below the smog line, the view outside the windows gradually took on the sepia-toned, underwater dimness of an old photograph. Li stepped out of the Liberty Avenue incline station and into a scene out of an old movie. It was raining—an acidic drizzle that she would soon learn was the default weather pattern at Pit Bottom. Pedestrians hurried along the slick streets clutching umbrellas. The city streetlights were off in honor of the fact, largely theoretical, that it was daytime. But the headlights of the street trolleys were on and the storefronts stretching down both sides of the broad avenue bristled with neonized holograms. Overhead the densely packed particles of smog reflected and amplified the city’s lights with the luminous, smoky luster of black pearls.

  As she grew used to the unearthly light, she began to pick up details that had at first eluded her. The signs littering the building fronts mostly touted furniture rentals, easy credit, and paycheck advances, but there were a few outliers: a ballroom dancing academy; a purveyor of uniforms and nursing supplies; a piano store. And then there were the bars. The bars, and the pubs, and the clubs, and the pool halls, and all the other tired, sorry, lonely places that filled in for real life whenever war or money stranded more single men on a planet than the local population of females could handle. Li had long ago learned to stop going to such places. They had nothing to do with the Irish bars of her childhood memories—places that, for all their seediness, had functioned as volunteer-staffed day-care centers, local gossip mills, and de facto community centers. For that you had to get off the wide avenues and into the back alleys and neighborhoods. Even then you didn’t often find it. And if you did, you were an outsider looking in, because it wasn’t home and this wasn’t your neighborhood. Which almost made finding it worse than not finding it at all.

  She caught a cab—again struggling against the closemouthed reluctance of the local cabbies to take paying fares—and huddled into the backseat as the blood-warm rain seeped down the back of her shirt.

  New Allegheny’s capital city turned out to be one huge, hot, stinking, carbon-burning traffic jam. Li had seen the phenomenon before. It was a classic syndrome that seemed to strike most forgotten-by-humanity Migration-era colonies right around the time they got interesting enough to the rest of the UN to earn their own BE relay. On the bright side, though, the traffic problem usually went away once the UN had overleveraged the local economy, strip-mined its natural and human resources, and sent in the International Monetary Fund to impose the usual austerity measures.

  Li used her transit time to do a little light reading: the accumulated news feeds that Router/​Decomposer had forwarded to her in answer to her questions about Skibereen.

  New Allegheny had started out life as a free colony—which basically just meant that it was too poor in natural resources for either the UN or the multiplanetaries to bother with. It had been settled by one of the earliest generation ships—a straight-out refugee ship, no corporate stake, no geneset contracts. The passengers had come from Pittsburgh, Youngstown, Detroit—the shattered remnants of America’s once-proud industrial cities. Tough people for a tough planet, and the long struggle to carve out a place on a hostile and only partially terraformed planet had only made them tougher.

  And then, predictably, the UN had barged in, reincorporated the formerly free colony, and declared a Trusteeship. It was the kind of move that tended to get people’s Irish up. And indeed, a local rebellion had flared up within days of the declaration of Trusteeship. They had bombed the newly commandeered colonial administration building. At night. No one had actually gotten hurt, but it didn’t make any difference. Even the timeserving bureaucrats in the General Assembly could hear opportunity when it stopped merely knocking and kicked the door down. They’d shipped in the first Peacekeepers before the locals had finished bulldozing the rubble.

  Nothing surprising there—except the surprise she always felt that the UN could pull the same stupid shit so many times, and always the same stupid way, right down to the same stupid press releases. Forget learning from history. These clowns couldn’t even seem to learn from last week’s screw-ups. It was enough to make you wonder if all empires were the same everywhere because there was something in their organizational DNA that compelled them to shoot themselves in the foot.

  Probably, Li reflected, it was a version of the same something that compelled her white trash cousins back on Compson’s World to do things like rob the corner liquor store where everyone had known them since they were in diapers and then go home and get drunk on their own front porch until the cops showed up.

  Some people just never got tired of learning the hard way.

  As the cab forged into the clotted str
eets of the colonial administration district, she started to understand why the driver hadn’t wanted to take her fare. The Peacekeepers were engaged in some kind of full-scale citywide security alert. Police tape everywhere. Soldiers standing around trying to look busy. Troop carriers pulled up onto the sidewalks. Roadblocks on every other corner. Either someone important was visiting or a bomb had just gone off.

  The view out of the cab’s dusty windows was at least as predictable as the news spins: Tanks and armored personnel carriers ruining the roads and annoying law-abiding taxpayers with pointless traffic jams. Peacekeepers frisking disgruntled-looking locals at roadblocks. Hard-bodied mercenaries, wired to the gills and shipped in by the hundredweight. Thank God for the mercenaries, she told herself. They’d probably been cluttering up the local bars and chasing the local girls for months, making such a public nuisance of themselves that no one would wonder for a second what Li was doing here. And even if someone did wonder enough to go digging, it would take a miracle for them to sort through the chaos of UNSec no-bid contracts and off-the-books satellite companies to find out who had really sent her there. She smothered a grin at the prospect of any poor fool even trying. Helen Nguyen herself couldn’t have come up with a better cover.

  “The thing I appreciate about Peacekeepers,” Li commented as they accelerated cautiously away from the third road block, “is that they’re always so polite.”

  The driver snorted.

  “Any idea what the kerfuffle’s about?”

  “Yeah.” He pointed to a dark plume of smoke twisting up from the center of the administrative zone a few dozen blocks ahead of them. “NALA bombed the governor’s palace.”

  She checked local streams for references to NALA and got back a flurry of hits for a newly minted entry on the terrorist watch list called the New Allegheny Liberation Army. NALA had appeared out of nowhere a few days after the Peacekeepers had arrived in-system. So far they hadn’t done much: a few cryptic announcements through the local news spins, some clichéd revolutionary graffiti; two bombings of Trusteeship buildings, both staged at night when no one was around to get hurt. And UNSec’s reaction had been just as predictable: house searches, nighttime arrests, indiscriminate detentions. All perfectly logical to the administrative mind—and all perfectly calculated to send new recruits flocking to NALA, thus ensuring that an organization that was still only an acronym and a few cans of paint would soon swell into a realtime, boots-on-the-ground armed insurrection.

  None of it surprised Li at all. She’d seen the same scenarios unfold on Maris, and in countless other Periphery planets suddenly thrust under the unyielding thumb of UN Trusteeship. Both sides were simply executing the standard playbook.

  “Score one for the home team?” she asked the cabby.

  “You said it, not me.”

  “So how many roadblocks do you run into in an average day?”

  “Enough to lose money.”

  “If it’s any consolation, I was on Maris during their occupation, and it was even worse.”

  “Maris!” The driver snorted. “What the hell did the UN want with Maris, anyway? I can’t even remember.”

  “Sand.” But that only earned her a blank look in the rearview mirror. “You know, for computers?”

  “Computers,” he said with the disdain for high tech that Li would soon find was characteristic of Monongahelans.

  “And you’ve got the Drift. For now, anyway.”

  “Forget the Drift,” he scoffed. “We got steel. And you can’t spell ceramsteel without steel, can you?”

  Li was still shaking her head over that when the taxi started talking to her.

  It took her a moment to realize that it wasn’t the taxi at all, but just Router/​Decomposer, newly arrived in-system and hacking the taxi’s network.

  “What in the name of God are you doing in there? They didn’t kidnap you, too, did they?”

  “Who, ALEF? I’m assuming that’s who offed the extradition team and whisked you into thin air.”

  Li felt her heart sink. “I was hoping they weren’t actually dead.”

  Router/​Decomposer didn’t answer that.

  “Well, I can’t say I’m surprised. But I am surprised to see you here.” She peered at his GUI on the taxi’s grainy screen. “I hope you haven’t done anything foolish for my sake.”

  “I have. But don’t mention it. Let’s do a memory dump, shall we? If I’m going to do any good out here, I’d better have some clue what we’re up against.”

  Li dumped … but he couldn’t seem to take up the data as fast as she could push it to him.

  “Can’t you get more bandwidth?” she asked.

  “Hey, I’m improvising. There’s some kind of rolling streamspace brownout moving through the city. I’m too high bandwidth. Every time I get my executables a little elbow space I get throttled back down and kicked off the system.”

  “Can’t you just—”

  “You have no idea how long it took me to even pull this patch together!”

  “Hush!” she told him, glancing nervously toward the cabbie. But he wasn’t listening; many passengers on a planet like New Allegheny would lack the wetware that allowed for direct streamspace uplinks, so he probably assumed she was using the cab’s uplink to make a streamspace call.

  “What’s wrong with the system?”

  “I’m not sure anything is wrong with it. Mostly they just seem to be shutting servers down for maintenance. And they’ve got an army of cat herders crawling all over the noosphere.”

  “You think they’re chasing ALEF’s wild AI infestation?”

  “I don’t know.” The cab’s rudimentary intelligent systems couldn’t give Router/​Decomposer enough bandwidth to get creative, but he morphed into something rude. “The cat herders were all from some no-name military contractor who actually uses humans for their IT work, can you imagine? I tried to figure out what they were doing, but I got bored and gave up after a while. It’s like watching a glacier try to swat flies.”

  “Hey, the more security contractors the better. UNSec is going to have a hell of a time tracking us down in the middle of this clusterfuck.”

  “Don’t get cocky.”

  She sobered immediately. “Where’s the first buyer on the list?”

  “My last data point puts him in Room 428 of the New Caledonia Hotel. Heart of the administrative district. It wouldn’t be a bad place for you to stay, either, cover-wise.”

  “Oh good. I love a little bombing with my morning coffee.”

  R/D’s strange attractor flared sharply and then compressed. “Don’t even joke about that. This place is worse than Jerusalem.”

  “No it’s not,” Li told him. “Israel’s problems are homegrown. These people are fine. They have a nice little planet with a generally well-behaved population. They’ll go right back to normal as soon as UNSec pulls out the Peacekeepers and shuts down the field array.”

  “They’ll never do that now.” The AI’s voice sounded oddly muffled—Li would have said by awe if he’d been human. “The rumors aren’t just rumors anymore. That planet we looked at the spectroscopy for? It’s all over the spinfeeds now. And rumors are someone’s found another one.”

  Li didn’t have anything to say to that. She looked at the street beyond the grimy windows with new eyes. This was only the beginning, she realized. There would be more soldiers, more contractors, more boosters and hucksters and government-funded flimflam men. Life would never go back to normal now. Hell, if ALEF was right, normal would never go back to normal … at least not as defined by the only slightly tweaked UN-standard human genome.

  “Well, we can’t do anything about that,” she told Router/​Decomposer. “But we can try to save Cohen before all Hell breaks loose.” She tapped on the glass screen dividing her from the cabdriver and waited while it rolled silently down. “I changed my mind,” she told him. “Do you know where the New Caledonia Hotel is?”

  But instead of answering her, the driver stepped on
the brakes and brought the car lurching to a halt. They had come to another checkpoint.

  This checkpoint wasn’t manned by Peacekeepers at all, but by mercs in civvies with weapons that no Peacekeeper would have been allowed to carry in a population center. The man in charge was a hard-worn colonial who Li would have bet good money had been a Peacekeeper noncom in a prior (and less well-paid) life. He squinted at Li’s ID with a dubious look on his face, then ducked to look into the back and squint at her in person.

  “Out of the car.”

  She hesitated, more from surprise than anything else. It had been a hell of a long time since anyone had spoken to her that way.

  His face hardened. “Get out!”

  She got out—and Router/​Decomposer slipped into her brain, ghosting on her internal networks, closer than her shadow’s shadow.

  “I’m outa here,” the cabdriver protested. “I’m not losing half the day waiting for them!” But when the merc shot a quelling look in his direction, he shut up fast and developed a sudden and passionate interest in his newspaper.

  The merc gestured her toward a truck-high, poured-concrete antibomber barrier. She rounded one corner of it with him at her elbow—and suddenly realized that they must have been pulling people out of cars all morning. They had amassed quite the collection, and as Li looked from one detainee to the other she could practically see the mercs’ standing orders stamped in black and white on their frightened faces. Other than Li, every single person the mercs had plucked out of the passing stream of humanity was a Trannie or an Uploader. The Uploaders were as easy to pick out as the Buddhist monks whose dress and shaved heads they emulated. But even without the external markets, there was no missing the preternatural stillness with which they awaited whatever the police had planned for them, or the in-turned looks on their faces as they contemplated the superimposed and entangled quantum Truth of their Clockless Nowever. The secular transhumanists were not as obviously identifiable as the Uploaders, of course. But many of them visibly deviated from UN human-normal in some visible way. And every single one of them had a better class of wire job than you’d expect to meet on a backwater manufacturing planet like New Allegheny.