The command structure of the Titan mercenaries was simple: veterans in charge and freshly detanked resurrects filling in the ranks. This division was pretty obvious; some of the resurrects might bring high skill levels to the table, but none of them had a clue about local conditions. So though it made economic sense to reinforce shipboard units with resurrectees, Titan still needed a core group of professionals on board to direct the efforts.
Or at least that was what Li thought before the battle started. But she soon realized that more than strategy lay behind the reliance on fresh resurrectees.
As the fighting heated up, she saw a puzzling dynamic unfolding around her. In every other battle she’d ever been in it was the reinforcements—and especially the rookies—who took the brunt of the casualties. But in this battle the veterans seemed to be vanishing with surprising frequency. And over time she realized that they weren’t going down with injuries, fatal or otherwise.
They were deserting.
Oh, no one called it deserting. And both the deserters and their fellow officers were careful to provide enough cover that nothing in Titan’s shipboard AI datafiles would justify charges of desertion. But still … you couldn’t miss it.
Li’s unit lost its two professional officers early on, one by desertion and the other to friendly fire. One by one, the other surrounding units lost their commanding officers and were reduced to confused and clueless groups of resurrectees.
Within an hour of the two ships coming to grapples the central comm went down—the pirates had taken out the shipboard AI, no doubt—and Li found herself falling back toward the bridge along a main-deck corridor with no fire cover, no support, and no functioning communications.
Not that she really wanted to be part of what she knew was happening right now throughout the ship’s networks. There would be a struggle going on there as well—and unlike the faux firefights in the ship’s corridors and cargo holds, it would be a fight to the death. The two shipboard AIs would be in the clinches by now, each one struggling to take over the other’s networks, shut his opponent down, and get control of the enemy ship’s security and life support systems. Human firepower was a necessary adjunct to that lethal struggle, but the reality was that more naval battles were won and lost by AIs than by pulse rifles. And Li had spent enough time inside Emergent networks to know that having your mind shredded by a hostile AI was closer than she ever wanted to come to the true definition of a living Hell.
The shipboard AIs wouldn’t be true Emergents, of course. You couldn’t weaponize a sentient AI without violating both the UN’s banned-tech rules and the limited civil rights accorded to artificial life-forms. But ships’ captains had every incentive to push the envelope as far as possible. The closer an AI was to sentience, the more formidable its defenses. And the more easily it shredded a semi-sentient’s lumbering defenses. So people pushed it. And they pushed their AIs, too. Because there were limits on what you could legally do to an AI—but there were no limits on what you could make them do to one another.
Li must have been distracted by that thought, even if only momentarily. Because an instant later she turned a corner into a near-death experience.
Nervous faces. Heavy breathing. And guns, lots of them. Mostly waving around nervously with the safeties off.
She took stock of the situation—and decided that she didn’t like what she saw. She had already realized that this ship wasn’t exclusively a military transport. There had been plenty of resurrects fighting around her who clearly had no military experience at all. And here was a whole little clot of them, just drifting around the ship with lethal firepower and no one to look after them.
“Are you a ship’s officer?” one of them asked, seeing the Titan insignia that Li hadn’t even realized she was wearing.
“No. A resurrect.”
“So where did all the brass go?”
“From what I can tell they mostly deserted to the pirates. But whoever didn’t will be holed up on the bridge by now. We’d better get there too unless you guys are looking for a change of employment.”
The little group hesitated, its members looking at one another to gauge reactions and look for consensus. Muzzles drifted across arms, legs, torsos, expensive electronics. Li tracked them instinctively, knowing where every one of those deadly little black eyes was pointing at every second. She didn’t even bother to check their safeties; it took six weeks of boot camp to drum into the average civilian that even in combat you’re usually safer with your safety on. Yep, it was amateur hour at the Alamo. And someone was going to lose a foot sooner or later. And unless someone took pity on them, they were going to shoot each other by accident before the pirates even showed up.
“We should probably get going,” she said casually. “You guys know how to hold your weapons when you’re on the move? You want to point the muzzle toward the ceiling. And see this little switch here? That’s your safety, and your safety is your second best friend. Your first best friend is the safety of the guy walking behind you. So keep it on until you’re actually ready to kill someone.”
“Shouldn’t we divide up into squads and give each other covering fire?”
Yeah, right. “Do any of you have infantry training.”
Two hands went up, somewhat sheepishly. “Um … real? Or VR?”
“Let’s just walk to the bridge. That’ll be faster.” Not to mention safer.
“You know where the bridge is?” someone asked incredulously. They made it sound like she’d just offered to take them to El Dorado.
“Trust me,” Li said, stifling the urge to laugh. “Finding the bridge is not going to be a problem. It’s where all the cool kids are headed.”
As they approached the bridge, things started to heat up noticeably. Everyone had had the same idea as Li, and the core of defenders who were still determined to stand against the pirates was quickly collecting in the hallways and access shafts surrounding the two main bridge entrances.
The pirates were there first, of course. But Li’s group got lucky; they reached the starboard bridge door at the same time as a more coherent unit that was clearly made up mostly of professional soldiers. Li conferred briefly with the ad hoc leaders of the other group and they were able to muster something like covering fire on both sides and fall back in relative safety.
When the bridge security lock finally irised shut behind them in a clatter and shimmer of pulse rifle fire, Li slumped back against the wall to catch her breath and take stock of her companions in battle.
They were a pretty sorry bunch. Half a dozen obvious mercenaries, and not even high-class mercs at that. A skinny kid with Orozco stamped on his company name tag and the universal green circle of a life support systems tech emblazoned on his jumpsuit’s shoulder patch. Only one of the bunch even looked like a professional soldier, and he was a big blond high school quarterback type with a name tag that read: McPherson. If Li’s decades of leading troops in combat were anything to go by, he’d be good on shooting skills, long on self-confidence, and only fair to medium on tactical smarts.
Bad enough. But what came next was worse. The adrenaline-fueled masculine posturing started as soon as everyone had figured out they were out of the immediate line of fire. Li watched it with jaded eyes, thinking wistfully of whippet-built Israeli special forces guys and suave but deadly French Foreign Legionnaires. And meanwhile she hung back, waiting to see how the group dynamic would play out. She knew from long experience that there would always be some overmuscled male eager to take charge—and that she was better off letting him do it. This wasn’t a complex tactical situation, just a matter of holding the bridge as long as they could in the hopes that the cavalry would arrive. Brains weren’t required; self-confidence would get the job done just fine. And nervous and inexperienced soldiers had more confidence in leaders who looked like leaders.
Besides, if they lost—and it was looking more and more likely they would—she had good reasons for wanting to be inconspicuous.
Sure
enough, it was McPherson who leaped into the breach.
“All right,” he announced, taking charge as if his right to command were some kind of biological imperative. “Here’s what we do.”
His plan was perfectly serviceable, as Li had expected it would be. So she kept hanging back and keeping her mouth shut. And while he converted the other men to his cause, she went online to check the status of the shipboard AI.
She heard the strategy session winding down to resolution behind her. And then she heard confident, solid footfalls heading her way. “What are you doing?” he asked over her shoulder.
“Trying to figure out if the pirates have turned the ship AI.”
The look he gave her was measuring, but far from dismissive. Good. Li had no problem with letting the bucks run the show, but things went smoother if the buck who won the rut was smart enough to realize that big antlers didn’t mean you knew everything.
“And have they?”
“I think so.”
“I guess you know what that means?” he said. There was a hint of a question in his voice. He was testing her out, too. Li started to think there might be a little more to McPherson than met the eye.
“Well, for one thing it means it’s no coincidence that everyone here is a resurrect and they didn’t have time to get us logged on to the shipboard system. And for another thing … probably the only reason those doors aren’t already open is that the pirates aren’t ready to open them.”
His look turned frankly measuring. “You military?”
“Ex.”
His eyes flicked to the monitor, where she was deep inside the guts of the ship’s AI core trying to figure out what was sucking CPUs and whether it was their ship or the other pirates’.
“Tech Specialist?”
“Close enough,” she answered stolidly. And it was, sort of. She had been a sniper—which was a kind of a technical specialist—until the fighting in the Syndicate Wars became so lethal that just staying alive had earned her her captain’s bars. And if two decades of marriage to an Emergent AI didn’t gain you a little inside knowledge of the hardware … then you had to have a pretty odd notion of marriage.
“Peacekeepers or Navy?”
“Peacekeepers.” She couldn’t lie about that since you could never really fake all the little verbal and procedural tics that separated the two services.
“Combat experience?”
“Three tours on Gilead.”
That earned her a sharp stare and a few notches of respect. The war with the Syndicates had never really ended—just slowed down to the quietly bloody simmer that civilians called peace. But the UN’s attempted invasion of Gilead had been almost thirty years ago, and there weren’t many infantry officers left who’d personally seen combat against Syndicate troops instead of just the local mercs in the cold war’s dirtball proxy wars.
The Navy, of course, was different. It was always wartime in the Navy—just like it was always teatime for the Mad Hatter. And out in the lonely reaches of the Drift, light-years from anyone whose opinion mattered, neither superpower bothered with the polite fiction of proxies.
“Ever fought on board a ship?” McPherson asked.
“Enough to know what not to shoot at.”
He glanced back at the group of men gathered in the bridge’s central well. “I’m Navy,” he told her in a quiet rush of words. “But those guys over there, they’re all independent contractors. I don’t trust them not to fold. I don’t even trust them to know how to do their jobs if they don’t fold. You’re in charge of the starboard door if you want to be.”
“I want to be.”
“Hold it for as long as you can, and tell me when you can’t.” McPherson’s gaze flicked to the skinny life systems tech. “And take care of him, will you? I don’t have the time.”
Li got her squad organized into basic defensive positions and then squatted next to Orozco. He was small and intimidated. And if she’d had any lingering doubts about whether he was a mercenary, the life support systems patch on his overalls laid them to rest.
“What’s your name?” Li asked.
“Orozco.”
She smiled. “I meant your first name.”
“Oh. Jim.”
“I’m Catherine.” Li moved his weapon gently into a safe direction and reached over to engage the safety. “Do you mind? I’ve got nothing against being shot, but I’d rather not have it happen by accident.”
He gave her a panicky look. She put her hands up, grinning. “Not that I’m backseat driving. You’re doing great. But they put that switch there for a reason. All the cool kids use it.”
The pirates came through both doors simultaneously. The defenders were outnumbered and outgunned, and even if they hadn’t been, it was obvious that the battle was over. The pirates didn’t even have to blow the doors; their AI had already handed the ship over to them.
The hired mercenaries folded as soon as they realized there was no hope of keeping the ship. And to Li’s surprise, McPherson folded right along with them.
Not that she had any objection to that. Li knew when she was beaten. And she didn’t intend to die in order to preserve the sanctity of Titan Corp.’s property rights. She put down her weapon and put up her hands as the pirate leveled his weapon at her.
Only then did she realize just how strange that weapon was.
It was the Damascus steel barrel that really threw her. Its surface glistened like running water, the curving lines of blue and gray rippling down either side of the midline like twin singularities spiraling down to the binary neutron star system of the paired muzzles.
The pirate stood easily with his weight on his front foot, head upright, hands soft and steady, and sighted down the barrels with the easy grace of a born shotgunner. And the gray eye at the other end of the shotgun barrels seemed to be looking at her across a stream of clear running water.
Li had never seen a bespoke shotgun before she met Cohen. She hadn’t even known there were such things. But Cohen’s tastes were eclectic, and his memories were ancient, and there was a room in the rear half basement in his elegant house in the Zona Angeles that still contained a pitted wooden gun-cleaning table and a shot loader and crimper and a ceiling-high glass-fronted gun case full of hand-finished London best shotguns.
“Nice gun,” she said. “Parker?”
“Parkers are for farmers.”
Li tilted her head until she could just see the delicate wrist of the weapon, curving out of the pirate’s hand with the muscular grace of a serpent preparing to strike. An unaugmented eye would only have been able to make out the general outline of the delicate filigreed engraving on the stock’s silvered surface. But Li could see every line of the baroque scrollwork, every leaf and cloud and blade of grass from a long-ago fall day on a long-dead Earth, every sleek tendon of the highly bred pointer straining after the pair of flushed pheasants exploding into the silver sky. And she could read the tiny letters scrolling around the edge of the plate: Holland & Holland.
“That ought to be in a museum,” she said.
He smiled wolfishly. “It was.” The pirates knew their business. They looked to Li to be mostly ex-Navy, and it showed in the quiet discipline and efficiency with which they took control of the bridge. Watching them in action, Li couldn’t help thinking that Titan—and the UN Navy generally—had a serious brain drain on their hands.
Within minutes after McPherson’s surrender, they had the bridge defenders lined up for review and were taking names and checking papers. Li knew what was about to happen. She’d never been through it, but she’d heard the stories. The pirates would go down the line, taking volunteers and identifying crew members with vital skill sets. Then they’d force the unwilling and unwanted to the lifeboats. And for the rest, it would be welcome to the pirate life. You could call it volunteering. Or you could call it a press-gang. But no matter what you called it, this was how things worked out in the Deep. And though the Navy howled about it, everyone knew they weren’
t above doing the same thing to merchant ships whenever they were shorthanded.
So Li stood quietly in the line of nervous, fidgeting, battle-hyped prisoners and seized the opportunity to take stock of her captors.
The tall one with the fancy shotgun was clearly the man in charge. He was a wolf of a man. Long, straight nose in a long-jawed face. Long, powerful body, all bone and muscle and sinew. Dark hair dusted with white so that it glimmered like snow on a forest floor where the light caught it. Gray eyes that looked transparent when you saw them sideways, but sharpened to a dangerous knife’s-edge gray when he looked straight at you.
Li had seen a real wolf once: on night patrol, deep in the heart of the biological miracle that was Gilead’s northern continent. It had had the same long legs and startling eyes. But that beast had looked tame and safe compared to William Llewellyn.
There was an obvious second-in-charge, too. Perhaps Llewellyn’s first mate? She was small, dark-skinned, unobtrusive. If Li hadn’t seen her fight she would have mistaken her for a sysop or a cat herder.
“Sital?” Llewellyn asked as he began passing down the line of prisoners. “Papers?”
His second-in-command extracted a thick sheaf of papers from her jumpsuit and handed them to him. He flicked through them, looking bored and frustrated.
“My God, it’s never ending,” he muttered. Again, that curious glance toward Li, this time a little wry … as if he were sharing a private joke with her. “I turned pirate to get away from the paperwork, and just look at this. I could be back in the damn Navy.”
He seemed to find what he was looking for. Was he scanning a list of names? Li couldn’t be certain.
“All right people, listen up. You’re all experienced men, you fought hard but not dirty, and I’m sure you know what happens next. So who’s for the lifeboats, and who’s for the merry life of a pirate?”
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