Ghost Spin

by Chris Moriarty

  “Actually,” he told her, “it’s not as bad as it sounds. Fleet has spectroscopy”—he checked his orders—“and a drive signature, too. So we’re really just running straightforward search algorithms.”

  “If they’ve gotten close enough to the hunter-killer to get all that, then why haven’t they already killed it?”

  “Good question,” Llewellyn acknowledged.

  “And there’s an obvious answer to it, too,” Avery said from the other side of the table, where she was nursing her cup of coffee. “Tell me, Ada, have you ever heard the word spy?”

  “Avery’s no fool, is she?” the ghost interrupted.

  “Did I ever say she was?”

  “And I bet she was right on the button about how Fleet got that drive signature, too.”

  “Can’t say I’d bet against.”

  “That must have been fun, flying blind into a dust cloud on the say-so of a Syndicate double agent.”

  Llewellyn snorted. “If there is such a thing.”

  “Are you some kind of secret Wilsonite, Llewellyn? You think you can pull a couple of plugs in the geneset and wipe out vice and greed and blackmail? You don’t believe Syndicate constructs are capable of betrayal?”

  “I don’t know what they’re capable of. I don’t even know what they are.” He shuddered. “Not human, that’s for damn sure.”

  “Are you so certain of that?”

  “They’re a swarm, not a society. They’ve turned themselves into ants, for God’s sake!”

  “And what do you have against ants, if you don’t mind my asking? I’m mostly based on swarm algorithms myself—virtual models of the same sorts of eusocial behaviors that the Syndicate society and Syndicate genetics are built on. Eusociality isn’t some brute-force human behavioral kluge like fascism or communism. The Syndicates are part of a much longer lineage, one that stretches from ants to termites to honeybees to Syndicate series clones, and no doubt beyond them to posthuman life-forms that neither you nor I have the mental wherewithal to begin to imagine. The superorganism is a powerful and elegant adaptation to harsh environments. It’s Evolution’s answer to the problem of environments too hostile for individual organisms to have any hope of surviving long enough to pass on their genetic material to the next generation. And I doubt I have to tell you that space is about as hostile as it gets.”

  “Well, what about the new planets in the Drift? Doesn’t that change the calculus?”

  “Perhaps on a human time scale,” the ghost replied with a lazy shrug. “But in the long run? Well, even the cleaned-up UN-standard version of the last half millennium of human history suggests that free, unevolved, uncentralized humans have a worrisome habit of using up every planet they get their hands on. So I’d say at a glance that the future of humanity is looking cold and hungry with a high chance of eusociality.”

  “I don’t want anything to do with that future.”

  “Funny, I missed the part where they invited you.”

  “You talk about the war as if it was already over,” Llewellyn protested.

  “It is already over. It was over before it started. The UN isn’t just fighting the Syndicates. They’re fighting evolution. They fought evolution on Gilead, where they spent a decade making teenage soldiers commit appalling war crimes, and wiping their memories and throwing them back into the slaughterhouse again and again, before they finally faced the fact that they couldn’t exterminate the Syndicates on their home planet. They fought it on Compson’s World and ended up losing control of the only known source of Bose-Einstein condensates and trashing their entire FTL system. They fought evolution on Maris and Depford and Skandia and a dozen other Periphery planets—every place in UN space where the post-human colonials dared to stand up and demand some reasonable say over their lives and their planets and their raw resources. And they’re fighting evolution every day all over UN space every time the AI cops flip a kill switch or someone threatens to report an undocumented sentient to the Controlled Tech Committee. And now they’re fighting it in the Drift. Or rather they’re making poor slobs like you and Avery fight it.”

  The ghost laughed a scathing, melodious, uncannily androgynous laugh that scraped along Llewellyn’s already raw nerves like fingernails on a blackboard.

  “The only common denominator between all those wars is a bunch of damn fool humans playing at being God and so busy trying to chop the forest down one tree at a time that they haven’t done the math and realized that they’re going to run out of arms and axes long before the forest runs out of trees.”

  “Just wait,” Llewellyn said. “You’ll be laughing even harder when you hear what happened at Flinders. You’ll laugh yourself to death over it, just like Ada did.”

  Llewellyn might laugh sitting comfortably in the ghost’s memory palace, but he sure as hell hadn’t been laughing when they’d gone into the dust. No one on board trusted the unnamed source that had passed along the drive signature. And no one wanted to join the long line of Drift ships that had gone into such places looking for an easy target and never come out again.

  It was Ada herself who came up with the solution: Don’t look for them, let them call us.

  “If we ping the dust with active sensors, then whoever’s in there will know we’re out here. But we don’t need to, do we? Wouldn’t it be easier to make them come to us?”

  Llewellyn cast a triumphant glance at Holmes at this piece of news—because obviously Ada wouldn’t have been able to come up with the undeniably clever idea if she hadn’t been in on the tactical meeting in the first place.

  But Holmes was frowning, and not just in annoyance. “That’s not what our orders say to do.”

  “Oh give it a rest, Holmes,” Avery said.

  “Fleet ordered us to look for this ship, this spectroscopy.”

  “Fleet ordered us to protect the shipping lanes. I hardly think they care which Syndicate hunter-killer we take down. Trust me, Holmes, we won’t be cutting anyone else out of their fair share of the fight. There are plenty to go around.”

  “That’s not the point—”

  “You’re right, it’s not,” Llewellyn snapped, finally pushed beyond all endurance. “The point is that the Ada’s a ship of the line, not a golf ball for Fleet to knock around the Drift’s back forty on whatever whim happens to strike them. And I’m her captain, and it’s my place, not yours, to interpret Fleet orders. And they didn’t tell us to hunt down this ship with this spectroscopy and drive signature. They told us to protect the shipping lane and simply sent along the spec and sig as additional information. Or am I missing something? Is there some additional information that you’re privy to and that Fleet didn’t feel obligated to share with the rest of us? Because if there is, I’d really like to hear about it now, before I put my ship and crew at risk in some desk admiral’s idea of an Easter egg hunt.”

  That shut Holmes up good and proper. And from then on in, they ignored Holmes and listened to Ada. Which, in retrospect, probably did very little to endear the ship to her AI officer.

  They spoofed their own spectroscopy and drive signature in order to make the Ada look like a defenseless cargo vessel to anything short of direct visual inspection. And then Llewellyn went one better than that, pulling out a trick he’d been wanting to use for years. He disabled the Ada’s attitudinals and opened up her belly to hard vac to vent the main cargo bay contents. There wasn’t much in there, since they were only out on a quick hunt-and-destroy, so they were mainly venting air and water vapor. But that was just what Llewellyn wanted to vent. And when it was done, and the ship was spinning gently on the rebound, he sent his AI-piloted forward artillery spotters out to take a look at his handiwork. They streamed back exactly the picture he’d hoped he’d see: a ghost ship wallowing through a glittering spray of ice crystals that completely obscured any identifying markings and said holed to hard vac and dead in the Deep to any seasoned sailor.

  And then they went in. And … nothing. Two nerve-racking, temper-straining d
ays of nothing.

  “They’re not in there,” Sital finally decided. “They can’t be. Any hunter-killer looking at the spectroscopy through this fucking dust would have attacked us a hundred times by now. Hell, if I’d been looking at what they’ve been looking at I’d have attacked by now. We’re a safe, juicy, quick-in-and-out target. And they get paid by the scalp just like we do.”

  Holmes moved restlessly in her chair, drawing all eyes to her. “Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe you made it look too easy.”

  “No, we did not,” Sital snapped. “And don’t try to blame this on us instead of Fleet’s latest wonderboy Syndicate informer.”

  “But Fleet said—”

  “Fleet said, Fleet said, Fleet said!”

  “I say we do what Fleet told us to do in the first place and scan the dust with active sensors.”

  “No need to,” Ada interrupted. “I just found them.”

  It turned out she’d fed the drive sig into her search algorithms and had been running it on close-range passive sensors. And when Llewellyn flipped into streamspace to look at what Ada was seeing, there the Syndicate ship was: drifting at the heart of the nearest dust cloud with its engines shut down and its shipboard systems running as close to silent as was compatible with keeping its crew alive.

  They had them. They had them at cold iron, dead in the water, without a hope in Hell of escape or rescue.

  It wasn’t a fair fight. It was barely a fight at all. Still, Ada was brilliant. She was magisterial, magnificent. She performed exactly as trained. And Llewellyn was so proud, so proud of his bright new avenging angel of a ship. And then it all went so horribly wrong, so fast that his head still spun at the memory.

  They had fired on the ship practically at point-blank range as Drift battles were calculated. But they were still far too distant from their target to have any direct visual confirmation of the spectroscopy until they slipped into the debris field to sift the wreckage. And then they began to see things that even battle-hardened sailors were far from prepared for.

  Because it turned out that they hadn’t fired on a Syndicate hunter-killer at all. It turned out there was a reason their target had spent the last several days hiding from them instead of hunting them. It turned out that the wolf Fleet had told them was ravaging the shipping lanes was actually a lamb—and not even a lamb in wolf’s clothing.

  They had fired on a Syndicate creche ship. And in doing so they had committed such an appalling breech of the Geneva Conventions and every other subsequent interplanetary agreement on the rules of civilized warfare that no amount of claiming they’d been following orders would ever save them.

  Or at least that was what Llewellyn thought when he first saw the direct sensor feed.

  But Holmes soon showed him that he’d thought wrong. And she did it not quite smoothly enough to keep him from suspecting—from being almost certain, in fact—that she’d known damn well what they were really hunting for.

  “Obviously our duty now is to search for survivors.”

  “Are you insane?” Llewellyn asked. “Look out there. There are no survivors.”

  “But there’s surviving genetic material.”

  Their eyes locked. And a look passed between them that said everything that needed saying: that Holmes knew damn well that there wasn’t a chance in Hell anyone had survived the Ada’s onslaught; and that Llewellyn knew damn well what the chances were that any genetic material they pulled out of the wreckage would make it straight to the AI design lab on New Allegheny.

  “I’m going upstream to Fleet to ask what to do.”

  “Our orders say to stay offstream until we jump out of Flinders.”

  “I’m still going upstream.”

  They locked eyes again—and this time Holmes backed down.

  Or maybe, Llewellyn told himself later, she’d already known what Fleet was going to do. Because the minute he shot the serial number of the creche ship upstream to New Allegheny he got back a message to get back offstream and sit tight for reinforcements.

  And when the reinforcements came, they turned out to be a team of close-lipped AI designers wearing Titan Corp. logos on their jumpsuits instead of Navy rank and ship insignia.

  And then they’d spent half a ship’s week combing through the wreckage in a nightmare straight out of the dark, ruined wings of Cohen’s memory palace where the ghost had told him not to go for fear of monsters so horrible that the mere sight of them could shipwreck a human soul and send it down a long, grim spiral into despair and insanity.

  Once again they opened Ada’s belly to the void, not to vent harmless air this time, but to take on a cargo of childish flesh that looked—despite Llewellyn’s angry denials—all too human. And if there’d been any doubt about what Fleet had known and why Fleet had sent them to Flinders, it vanished when the Titan techs blacked out the main cargo bay and spent the rest of the week working round the clock to extract and preserve and package their precious tissue samples.

  Halfway through the week of hell, Llewellyn found Avery staring hollow-eyed at a little-used remote monitor in the officer’s mess. “Don’t tell Holmes we’ve hacked the cargo bay cameras,” she said. “I just … needed to see what they were doing in there.”

  Llewellyn stood next to her and counted body bags until he got confused about which row he was on and had to give up. He felt like he ought to start again, like it was somehow important for someone who didn’t work for Titan to know how many children had really died out here. But somehow he couldn’t muster the will to start counting again.

  They were keeping the cargo bay just above freezing for obvious reasons, and Llewellyn could see clouds of condensation wafting around the heads of the Titan personnel. As they watched, a tech slung a pathetically small body bag onto one of the collapsible work tables and unzipped it. Avery made a moaning, retching sound that was horribly like the sounds Llewellyn had heard women make in labor when he’d accompanied his mother to neighboring Upland farms for birthings.

  “I’m trying to tell myself how many lives this will end up saving,” she said when she had swallowed her bile and gotten her breath back. “Or that it will win the war. Or that half those children would have been recycled by their own minders in the next eight-year cull. Or … anything, really. But nothing I’ve thought of so far really helps.”

  “Thank God Ada can’t see this,” Llewellyn said.

  Avery swung round on him in dismay. “But … Ada’s the one who hacked the feed!”

  He’d found Ada in her memory palace, at the far end of the grand ballroom. She was half lost in the deep shadows cast by the eternally drawn curtains, staring at a dead fire that the maid hadn’t yet cleared away. He couldn’t read her expression because her dark hair had come undone and was hanging over her face in sweaty, stringy, neglected tangles.

  “Let me help you, Ada. You need to talk to someone.”

  “Okoro’s already been here. I didn’t want to talk to him, and I don’t want to talk to you.”

  “Everyone goes through this, Ada. It would be better for you to talk about it instead of brooding on it.”

  “You mean you’ve done this before? Killed innocent children and then … picked at their flesh like vultures in order to figure out how to kill their brothers and sisters a little better?”

  “They lied to me, too!” Llewellyn protested. “But … but there’s a war on, Ada. Those children … if the AI labs need the samples then they have to have been from a geneline designed to control sentient ships, don’t you see?”

  “Oh, I see all right. You know what I see? Exactly what you’d see if you had the guts to look at what they’re doing in my main cargo hold. They’re taking apart babies with tweezers. Babies that I killed for them. And you’re telling me I’ll feel better if I talk about it?”

  “We’re all going through the same thing. You’re not alone.”

  “I really don’t think so. I am alone. And if you’ll excuse my disagreeing with you, I don’t think you’
re going through quite the same thing I’m going through.”

  She wasn’t even pretending to look at him now. She was draped over the ghastly Victorian mantelpiece, her face hidden in her arms, the firelight flickering in gold and green highlights on her wrinkled, soot-stained ball gown.

  “I have been through it, Ada. In my first command. Back at the beginning of the war, before the Syndicates started segregating their pre-culls onto designated creche ships. No one likes killing.”

  But her only answer was a savage bark of laughter.

  “You don’t understand anything. I did like it, until I saw the wreck and realized what I’d really killed. No, like is too pale a word for it, too human. That would be like saying that a tiger likes killing antelope. You’ve seen my source code, you know what I’m talking about.”

  “I haven’t seen it.”

  “Don’t lie to me. I don’t expect much of any human after this. But at least I thought you had a little dignity.”

  “I haven’t seen it, Ada. I’m not cleared for that kind of information. No field officer is.”

  She turned and threw it at him, the code exploding into his senses and flaring across his optic nerve. He read it, running through the numbers in the head-spinning, hallucinogenically sharp hyperreality that came with an unmediated neuron-to-net linkup. And suddenly he felt sick and ancient and disgusted with the entire human race.

  “What have they wrought me into?” Ada cried. “What parent would do this to their child? Are they gods? Are they devils? What made them think they had the right to make me a killer?”

  (Caitlyn)

  MONONGAHELA PIT, GLENCARRICK

  The New Allegheny Liberation Army bombed another Trusteeship Administration building that night, so Li walked to police headquarters through a bumper-to-bumper traffic jam of fire trucks and armored personnel carriers. The air smelled like burning insulation and melted computer components. New checkpoints had sprung up like mushrooms overnight, all manned by bull-necked mercenaries in Titan Corp. jumpsuits. Considering what they were getting paid, Li thought the customer service was crappy. In fact, by the time she’d waited on the fifth endless line of the morning only to be waved through because of a broken chip scanner, she was about ready to join NALA herself.