Ghost Spin

by Chris Moriarty

  “That address is just an alley,” he told her, as if there was something problematic about alleys that he thought she ought to be aware of.

  “So?”

  “So it’s not on the city maps.”

  They looked at each other blankly for a moment.

  “It’s not a real street,” he explained when it was clear he was going to have to explain something. “No paving, no sewage, no listing in the city directories.”

  “So how do I find it?”

  He shrugged and pointed to a point deep inside Shadyside’s crooked crescent. “Try asking at the Homestead Incline Station. They might know.”

  It took Li almost an hour just to find the incline station. And by that time she’d decided that she never wanted to set foot in Shadyside again. In the old Pittsburgh, Shadyside had been an elegant suburb that later became the home of Henry Ford’s first motorcar factory. In Monongahela Pit, Shadyside’s name was literal; New Allegheny’s already weak sun never rose above Mount Monongahela’s broad shoulders in the winter, and Shadyside was cloaked in dank, impenetrable shadows from early fall to late spring. The predictable result was pestilence, tuberculosis, and suicide. The neighborhood had soon lost anything resembling a permanent population or decent housing. For as long as anyone could now remember, Shadyside had been synonymous with rookeries, tenement houses, and refugees. And if you wanted to know which group of impoverished refugees was least wanted and most abused, all you had to do was walk the streets of Shadyside and see whose children were sitting on the crumbling front stoops and playing in the fetid gutters.

  Mostly, of course, they were the children of genetic constructs like Li herself. And in the topsy-turvy worldview of human prejudice, being a natural-born human—subject only to the chance damage of radiation and mutation of the ancient generation ships—made you different from and better than those whose ancestors had missed the boat in the first wave of the Great Migration and had to sell their genesets to the corporations in order to get a ticket to all the wonderful new terraformed worlds that were supposed to be so much better than the one they’d left behind … and whose sponsors carefully didn’t mention that terraforming was a work in progress and that certain changes to the basic human geneset would be regrettable but inevitable.

  Li found the boardinghouse—silently thanking her corporate geneset as she strode up and down the plunging alleys of Shadyside at a pace far beyond merely human lung capacity—only to hear that the man she was looking for had moved out weeks ago. Then she descended down a chain of increasingly sordid worker’s hotels and flophouses, each one leading her to the next, and each one telling the same sordid story: late hours and late rent payments, final warnings and eviction notices. In the end she wound up on the other end of Shadyside looking for someone last heard traveling under the name of Kusak.

  “Oh. Yeah. Kusak,” said the woman at the door of the last and most decrepit lodging house. “Which one you want?”

  “There’s more than one?” Li asked, her attention sharpening.

  “Yes and no,” the landlady said grimly. “If you know what I mean.”

  Li lowered her head in what could have passed for assent, just to keep the woman talking.

  “They were different enough ages to be father and son. And they looked plenty alike, too. But … they weren’t. Sometimes you just get a feeling. You know?”

  Li did know. In fact she was getting a feeling herself, though she didn’t know enough about New Allegheny’s local brand of angry to guess whether the nasty innuendos were aimed at clones or homosexuals.

  “Can you describe them?”

  The woman tried, just like the others had. Her description of the older man was no better than the ones Li had heard before; he could have been any down-on-his-luck dirtsider along the entire sorry arc of the Periphery. But the younger man was another thing entirely.

  “He was too pretty,” the woman said. “Not that he made anything of it. But he just didn’t look like anyone you’d ever expect to see around here.”

  “How so?”

  “He looked like those fellows you see on the entertainment spins.”

  “A spin star?” Li asked incredulously.

  “No.” The woman’s face hardened. “He looked like one of the bad guys. He looked like a bad guy from an old war movie.”

  Li’s mind raced, flipping between flashbacks from her tours on Gilead and newer, less painful memories. There had been a vogue for anti-Syndicate war spins just before the last campaign on Gilead went sour and people decided they’d rather forget about the war entirely. Most of them had been awful. And one of the worst problems had been getting people to play the Syndicate soldiers. There’d been a little cottage industry of aspiring male starlets getting themselves cut to look like Syndicate constructs. It had never worked, though; you couldn’t sculpt that kind of inhuman perfection onto an imperfect and asymmetrical human bone structure. Still, Li had seen the real thing: score upon score of physically perfect, inhumanly disciplined, utterly identical soldiers.

  “When do you expect them back?” she asked, her heart pounding in anticipation.

  “I don’t. They moved out yesterday.”

  Li almost cursed out loud. And then she wondered, with a little chill of apprehension: Why yesterday? What had happened yesterday that had scared them into deeper cover? Another buyer on the list had died. And Li had arrived on-planet. Did they know about her?

  “What else can you tell me about them?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing at all?”

  “All I know’s they paid their rent on time.”

  “So they must have been working. Where?”

  The woman laughed harshly. “Where does anyone work who lives here? Mencken.”

  “Mencken?” Li repeated.

  “Mencken,” the woman repeated, as if the single word were explanation enough. “It’s the biggest steel mill in the Crucible.”

  “How long will it take me to get there from here?”

  The boardinghouse owner gave her a pitying look. “Too long. Day shift’ll be shutting down in twenty minutes, and you won’t be able to catch a trolley anywhere within miles of here until night shift gets under way. And by then it’ll be dark anyway.”

  Li gave a baffled glance at the sky, which as far as she could tell had been dark all day.

  “Trust me,” the woman told her. “Wired or not, you don’t want to walk the Crucible at night. That’s flat out taking your life in your hands.”

  (Catherine)

  THE DRIFT

  She woke up in the cargo hold of a corporate troop transport. She knew where she was the minute she came out of the tank, though it took a few more moments to identify the subliminal signals that had led her to that conclusion.

  By that time, however, she was past worrying about why and where she was, because it was clear that the ship was in full emergency mode. The call to quarters wailed in the distance. Hurried figures rushed back and forth, many of them carrying weapons or EVA suits.

  And, incongruously, there was a suit-and-tie-clad middle-management type sitting at the side of her tank with no life support gear in sight and a thick sheaf of papers in his hand.

  Li sat up, blinking, and took a closer look at him. Smooth-skinned face. Corporate-issue hair. Corporate-issue smile. Salaryman.

  “What the hell is going on here?”

  “We’re under attack by pirates. Uh … I think.”

  “You think?”

  “Well, they don’t exactly fly the Jolly Roger,” said the salaryman. “First of all, it’d look like puke on a false-color conformal array display. And then there’s, you know, the element of surprise and all.”

  “Have they boarded us yet?”

  “No, but when I left the office to come down here they were refusing to reply to our hails and screaming in like a bat out of hell at .18 light local frame.”

  “Then you don’t even know whether or not they’re really—”

 
“Look, do you actually give a shit? I mean, would it be better if they were Syndicate?” He thrust the sheaf of papers toward her. “I need your signature on this.”

  Li rubbed her eyes. “You came all the way down here in the middle of a pirate attack for my autograph?”

  “Well, everyone’s actually.”

  Li looked around and realized that her tank was only one of dozens. They stretched all down the echoing length of the hold, one after another, their proprietary virufacture solutions glistening luridly under the naked arc lights.

  “Wait a minute. You’re … you …”

  “Yeah. Everyone has to sign a service contract on resurrection.” The suit glanced over his shoulder at the high-speed chaos unfolding behind him. “Nothing exotic. Standard boilerplate. So … uh … if you don’t mind …” The sheaf of papers advanced toward her again, this time accompanied by a cheap pen with the words TITAN SECURITY SERVICES spiraling down its shaft.

  Li’s eyes narrowed. “You work for Titan?”

  “Yes.” He flashed her the kind of conspiratorial grin that Li imagined usually accompanied a hot stock tip. “And so do you. As soon as you sign your contract, that is.”

  “Uh, yeah,” Li said. “That’s not going to happen.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.” But he sounded like he’d heard it all before and wasn’t really all that sorry. He shuffled a second, slightly thinner stack of papers to the top of the stack and handed the whole thing to her. “Here’s your bill then. Look it over and let me know whether you can pay up front or need to do a credit workout.”

  She took the printout and skimmed down the close-typed lines of numbers while her fingers bled blue virufacture fluid onto the pages.

  Transport charges. Resurrection charges. Cold storage charges. Data storage charges. Parity check charges. Charges for tank time, virufluid, antibiotics, antivirals, retrovirals. Wetware virus protection. Charges for life support, food, gear, and personal tonnage. Charges for … charges for … charges for.

  “That’s ridiculous,” she argued, knowing it wasn’t. “You can’t bill me for—”

  “You’re right. Probably. But it would take a dirtside judge to determine that. And in the meantime …”

  There was a nasty, knowing twist to his smile that Li decided she didn’t like one bit. A glance down the length of the open cargo hold confirmed first impressions. It was a makeshift armory, walls lined with racked weapons: Tasers, hollow-point shooters, firethrowers, every variety of weapon that could safely be used to defend a ship from a hostile boarding party without blowing it open to hard vac. And in tanks just like hers, marching from one end of the cavernous hold to the other, another kind of weapon, more complex and unpredictable, but equally necessary: warm bodies, coming not out of cold sleep, as she would have expected, but out of surgical-grade viral manufacturing tanks.

  Of course, she thought as her shattered brain gradually homed in on her surroundings. Mercenaries in cold sleep don’t have to eat or breathe, but they still have to be paid. And payroll climbs fast in a deep space long haul vessel. Downloads were a much better solution. And if you had high-bandwidth streamspace access and military-grade decryption software, you always had a workforce at your fingertips.

  Meanwhile, weapons were being racked and loaded. People were moving fast, and talking in the low, tight monotone of professional soldiers whose long hours of rote training is the only thing standing between them and being scared shitless. Li could hear quiet conversations going down all around them, and she noted that the same name seemed to crop up in most of them: Llewellyn. There was something about the way people said that name that made her not want to meet its owner out here in the Deep, far from the nearest station.

  Two obvious mercs strode past behind the salaryman’s back, and Li caught the tail end of a hurried conversation.

  “Do they know which pirates?”

  “Someone said it’s Lucky Llewellyn.”

  “They always say it’s Llewellyn.”

  “Yeah, but I heard it from a guy who used to know someone who—”

  “Yeah yeah. Every drunk on every station in the Drift used to know someone who used to know someone who fought with Llewellyn. And anyway, you’d better hope it ain’t Llewellyn, ’cause he honors warrants. And the captain’s had a warrant out on him ever since the Durham mutiny.”

  “So what?”

  “So he’s not going to roll over and we’re gonna have to fight is what.”

  “As opposed to?”

  “What the fuck do you think? Don’t act stupider than you are.”

  They passed out of hearing and Li looked at the Titan rep with a new vision dancing in her head. One cheap suit. One shellac-shiny hairdo. One ex-corporate, ex–walking, talking, voided-into-space-by-pirates suitsicle.

  “What the hell was that about?” she asked the suitsicle.

  “That was your fellow crew members trying to decide whether they’re going to defend us or desert to the pirates and hang us out to dry.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought,” Li said. And she indulged in the luxury of a little chuckle at life’s delicious ironies. “Office politics are hell in space.”

  Her momentary victory turned out to be an empty one, though, because when all was said and done Titan still held the keys to the weapons locker. She looked at the service contract again, but only halfheartedly. What was the point in reading it when she already knew that it would be as bad as it possibly could be?

  “And in the meantime,” she told the suitsicle, “I guess if I don’t sign your piece of paper you’re not going to issue me a weapon?”

  “Thanks for understanding,” he told her as she signed on the line and handed the contract back to him. “The intake process is so much easier when we get a smart one.”

  Five minutes later Li was fully armed courtesy of her new employers and trying to log on to shipnet. That, on the other hand, turned out to be not so easy. The system was barbershopping her—the only thing her internals were throwing up on her visual cortex was a processing bar that seemed to be stuck spinning in place at 87 percent.

  98% complete, blinked the waitscreen in her peripheral vision.

  The ship shuddered under the near-miss of a plasma barrage somewhere out in advance of its forward array. The lights browned out, flickered off, and powered up again with the groan, just below the human range of hearing, of the auxiliary generators kicking in.

  47% complete, the waitscreen decided.

  The ship flinched and rippled under another thumping shudder. Li was no sailor, but she still knew well enough what that second tremor meant; they were straddled. The pirates were done with the range-finding, exploratory bursts. The next shot would be a killing one.

  “Can we get some help over here?” the suit shouted, his voice ratcheted up in what sounded to Li’s veteran ears like the seeds of panic.

  A tech hurried over, tearing himself away from a nearby tank, and did his best. But he couldn’t link to Li’s internals through the shipboard systems because of a software glitch. And when he tried to do the job manually, the ship jerked into a violent evasive maneuver just as he got the handheld out of his pocket—and sent it skittering across the deck so hard that its screen shattered.

  “Fuck!” said the suit—and it occurred to Li that this was the most human, and the most likable, he’d been since he first detanked her.

  “Don’t you have somewhere else to be?” she asked him. “Not that I’m not having fun here, but—”

  “You need to sign a release to get online,” he gasped.

  “Seriously? ’Cause that seems like a very poorly designed intake procedure. Have you guys thought about, I don’t know, say, hiring an independent contractor to streamline your—”

  “Are you insane?” The whites of his eyeballs were showing. “Can you stop cracking stupid jokes long enough to understand what’s about to happen here?”

  She brushed the tech aside, knowing it was time now to cut her losses and
do what she could with the only tools she was going to have to use. “I’m cracking stupid jokes because I understand what’s about to happen here,” she told the Titan man. “Better than you do.” She made a gentle shooing gesture. “Go. Go off to wherever people like you go when actual shit goes down. I’m busy right now.”

  There was a public monitor on the other side of the cargo bay, and she made her way over to it to join the cluster of confused resurrectees standing around it to goggle as the pirates swooped in on them.

  It didn’t look like swooping, of course. It was hard to imagine the speed at which both ships were moving. But it was easy to see that no lumbering troop transport would ever be able to outrun that wicked silver needle. Li had seen pirates before, of course. UN space was rife with them, particularly out on the edges of the shrinking frontier, where imperial-grade weapons kept right on doing an honest day’s work for the local warlord long after the Peacekeepers and the IMF and the UN’s other colonial proxies had retreated to the other side of the dying Bose-Einstein relays. But this ship had nothing to do with the hit-and-run local pirates that preyed on in-system shipping on so many Periphery planets. This was a captured Navy ship, if Li was any judge. And its pilot—AI or human—was handling it with a push-it-to-the-wall flair that told Li everything she needed to know about how good the enemy pilot really was.

  “Impact in twenty, nineteen, eighteen, seventeen …” the shipboard comm began to drone.

  Everyone scrambled for the safety tie-ups, and that was the end of watching the monitor. But Li didn’t need to see fancy flying to recognize it. And the jolt and shudder of the impact told her that the pirate pilot had flown the pants off Titan’s shipboard AI, putting a little body English on his ship at the last moment in order to make the Titan transport suffer the brunt of the collision.

  The two ships tumbled into a slow spiral, locked together by the pirates’ grapples. Shipboard gravity skewed and realigned nauseatingly. Of course, the pirates would have drilled in funny-g until they could handle it in their sleep, and they’d be betting that the Titan personnel hadn’t. Looking at the green faces of her fellow defenders Li had a feeling the pirates had put their money on the right odds. Still, any gravity was better than no gravity at all—especially when you were fighting with untested troops. Combat jitters and zero g made for a messy combination.