Ghost Spin

by Chris Moriarty

  Dolniak’s office was such a perfect parody of a colonial police station that Li almost laughed at the sight of it. Pop-up prefab habitat cubes. Badly lit interior workspaces with all the charm and architectural subtlety of aircraft hangars. Cramped cubicles stuffed with outdated, oversized computer components. And all of it with the unloved look that Li had come to know from government buildings all over the Periphery: still raw and unfinished but already decaying.

  Dolniak came down to meet her, and walked her from the front door up a stair that was little more than a glorified fire escape, and into the decaying warren of the administrative offices.

  Dolniak’s office, if you could call it that, was a battle-scarred desk in a big room that Li guessed must be the homicide detectives’ bullpen. Fluorescent light. No windows. The higher-ups and their blue-eyed boys had private offices around the periphery of the room that hogged what little sun ever filtered down to the pothole’s soggy bottom. The bullpen was mostly empty, but Li counted a handful of detectives working at their desks or having hushed one-way conversations in streamspace with invisible suspects or supervisors or collaborators.

  Dolniak’s desk was messy, but the kind of messy where you knew the guy could still find any file he wanted in no time flat. On one corner of the desk sat a cup of black coffee. On the other, a shockingly large foot clad in a thick-soled spit-shined brogue, black socks, cheap slacks. Standard-issue interplanetary cop couture—but something about him made Li wonder if he dressed that way because that was who he was or because he enjoyed playing to stereotype. She also wondered how anybody’s feet could be that big. Dolniak was built on a scale that you didn’t usually encounter outside of elite professional athletes. Li thought he might be the largest human being she’d ever met, and she found herself wondering idly if she could take him. Probably not; even wired, she was giving away too much weight.

  He smiled across the desk at her—the same placid, good-natured smile he’d worn back at the hotel the first time he questioned her. But when he spoke it was in a cop’s voice, neutral, withholding judgment, giving nothing away. “Hello, soldier.”

  It occurred to Li to wonder when she had crossed the line between the world where soldier was a badge of pride and drifted into one where it was just an ironic euphemism. “Nice digs,” she told him.

  “Yeah, well. They’re not much, but they’re home. And if we had one of those fancy new buildings, we might have had the pleasure of being taken over by the Trusteeship fuckheads and bombed out of house and home.”

  “Who do we have to thank for today’s traffic jam, by the way? NALA again?”

  “Looks like it.”

  “Any inside scuttlebutt on who they are?”

  His smile broadened. “Naughty little boys.”

  “You don’t sound too broken up about it,” she said, remembering his crack about the new regime springing into action and wondering how the local police felt about having the Trusteeship dropped on their heads.

  “You guys are the ones who get paid the big bucks to keep the universe safe for democracy.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “They don’t hand out wire jobs like yours for party favors. I imagine this isn’t the first trip you’ve made to quell the troublesome locals.”

  She gave him a long, level look. “That’s not why I’m here, Dolniak.”

  He blinked, then rubbed one of his immense hands over his face. “Sorry. I’m in a mood today. Forget I said that. Enough about me, anyway. Let’s talk about you now.”

  Li looked around the bullpen.

  “Sorry it’s not more private,” Dolniak apologized. “But the only place you can get privacy in this zoo is an interrogation room, and it didn’t really seem warranted.” He grinned. “Yet.”

  “Don’t tease, Dolniak. I’ll start to think you’re all talk and no action.”

  His grin widened. “No one ever told me that before.”

  His hand descended to the desk, rummaged in the disorganized drift of paperwork, and came up holding a palm-sized spin recorder, which he held up in a tacit request for permission to record her.

  Li looked at the thing—a form of technology so primitive that it was almost exotic to her.

  “You’re not wired,” she said. She’d noticed at least subliminally the absence of the telltale ceramsteel tattooing at his pulse points. But she’d assumed that just meant he had a head job instead of a full body rig. The idea of a responsible adult with a paying job not being wired at all, even on a backwater Periphery planet, was almost inconceivable to her.

  “Nope.”

  “Not at all?”

  “Nope.”

  “Religious objections?”

  “Boxing.” He grinned. “By the time they figured out I wasn’t going all the way, I was too old for the implants to take.”

  Li nodded. Wire jobs worked best when they were done on adolescents. It was why professional couples paid top dollar to send their teenage kids away to private clinics with names like NewLife and Intellia. It was why the Peacekeepers recruited sixteen-year-olds, and why dirtball local warlords in every corner of UN space paid top dollar for child soldiers.

  “Rough,” she told Dolniak.

  “Not really. I already had this gig anyway, even without the wire job. You know how cops are. They just love a washed-up boxer.”

  Li smiled at the joke. But she made a mental note to herself not to underestimate Dolniak. Anyone who could do the job he did without augmentation—even on New Allegheny—bore careful watching.

  Then he started asking her questions, and she started feeding him the first version of the cover story she and Router/​Decomposer had concocted back at CalTech. Those comfortable conversations seemed like something that had happened in another lifetime. It was impossible to know how the story would fly here—or even if Dolniak believed it. But this wasn’t Li’s first rodeo, and if he didn’t bite she had several more versions, wrapped onion-like inside the first, that she could feed him. Sooner or later he’d believe he’d peeled down to the truth. They always believed that sooner or later. The only question was whether you had enough stories lined up to get them there.

  He listened in silence. And when she was done he just continued to watch her, arms crossed over his massive chest, eyes calm and expressionless.

  And then she just watched Dolniak watching her.

  She thought about him. She thought it was interesting that he didn’t have a private office. She thought it probably had less to do with lack of ability than lack of political instincts. She thought he might not be quite corrupt enough to get ahead in a colonial police department—but then she told herself she was just being romantic. He was probably just as corrupt as the next guy. Or maybe slightly less. He dressed so appallingly that it was hard to believe he had money coming in under the table.

  He shifted in his chair. It protested under his weight, sounding as if it might give way altogether. Christ, he was a big brute. Six and a half feet easy. He looked like his nose could have been broken once or twice, and the body under the loose suit had the massive slab-sided look of an ex-heavyweight slightly out of fighting trim.

  “So, you still box?”

  “Not seriously. I just mess around at the gym enough to maintain my beer habit without turning into a fat slob.”

  “And were you any good back when you were serious?”

  He shrugged. “Good enough to beat the local heroes. Not good enough to get off-planet. I didn’t have the fancy footwork to take it to the next level.”

  She couldn’t help laughing. “Why do I get the feeling that we’re not just talking about boxing anymore?”

  “I don’t know. I wasn’t trying to be cute with that. It’s actually true. But I am a pretty straightforward guy, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

  “Just your average small-town cop with a gun belt and a heart of gold? That why you’re out here instead of in one of those nice offices with nice windows?”

  The question didn’t seem
to ruffle him. “Those offices aren’t for guys who work cases.”

  Li gave him a questioning look and brushed her fingers and thumb together in the universal sign for graft.

  “Yeah, there’s a little of that involved. But mostly it’s just … the way it is. Doesn’t bother me. I’m not ambitious. And I like catching bad guys more than doing paperwork.” He frowned at her. It was funny how he suddenly didn’t look so dumb when he did that. “Why do you care so much?”

  “I like to know who I’m dealing with.”

  His frown deepened, and his gray-green eyes snapped with the intelligence that he was usually so successful at hiding. “But you don’t extend the same courtesy,” he pointed out.

  “I am what I’ve told you I am.”

  “And a hell of a lot more that you haven’t told me.”

  “What do you want, a CV?”

  “That’d be a good place to start. But I doubt it’s even worth bothering to ask for one, since I’m pretty sure it would be bullshit from start to finish. So why don’t you tell me what you’re really here for? And even better, who sent you? I’m an easygoing guy. I don’t stand on my jurisdiction. I’m always happy to cooperate with a colleague. But if UNSec is going to horn in on my crime scene, I’d like them to have the basic courtesy to tell me what the hell they’re doing here.”

  “I told you—”

  “And I’m telling you I don’t believe it. So come up with a better story.”

  “I told you the truth, Dolniak. But yes, this is a Peacekeeper wire job, and I am an ex-Peacekeeper. And I have worked for UNSec. But they’re not my employers in this case.”

  “Are they involved in this case?”

  She hesitated.

  He made a disgusted noise in the back of his throat.

  She felt a sudden twinge of sympathy for him. The poor guy was completely out of his league, walking blind into a situation where he could potentially piss off UNSec brass straight up the line to Helen Nguyen’s office. “Listen, Dolniak. If I said I could hand you a way to get yourself off this case, would you be interested?”

  “I don’t even know what that means. I’m not sure I want to know.”

  “You might not have jurisdiction. You might be able to hand it to AI Crimes.”

  His eyes narrowed. “I’m listening.”

  “This isn’t the first murder.” She ran through the facts for him again, leaving Cohen out of it and not mentioning that ALEF had fired her and she was running solo now. Not making anything up. Just limiting it to the facts that fit her purpose.

  When she was done he rubbed his face, then got up to refill both their coffees. When he came back he sat on the edge of his desk looking down at her as if he wanted to get a closer look at her face when he asked his questions.

  “So your employer is an association of AIs who are trying to buy back these … fragments that used to belong to one of their members. And you’re tracking the buyers down, but someone’s beating you to the punch, killing them and stealing the fragments before you get there.”

  “Three strikes in a row.”

  He rubbed his face again. He looked exhausted. “And the other murders happened where again?”

  “Freetown. Both in Freetown.”

  He stared hard at her for a long moment, and then seemed to reach some decision. “Do you mind going for a walk for half an hour and coming back? I have to make some calls.”

  Li nodded and stood to leave.

  “Oh, and I hate to be a stereotypical cop, but when you come back? Bring doughnuts?”

  “You miss breakfast or something?”

  He looked at her like she’d grown two heads. “Breakfast? You mean the meal that happened over two hours ago?”

  When she came back, Dolniak looked even more exhausted. She knew what he was going to say before he even opened his mouth.

  “I just got off the line with Freetown. They say your yard sale murders were both suicides, no sign of foul play. The local authorities have closed the cases. They say I have jurisdiction unless I can find evidence of an interplanetary conspiracy or a crime against an AI. Neither of which claims is supported, in their opinion, by the facts that you told me.”

  “In other words, they’re dumping it back in your lap.”

  “Pretty much.” He opened the bag of doughnuts without asking and fished one out. “Want one?” he asked around a mouthful of cinnamon crumble.

  “No thanks. That means that someone in Freetown paid them off. Or they’re afraid of trampling on UNSec’s toes.”

  “Or that they just don’t buy your theory.”

  “You didn’t, uh, mention me, did you?”

  “Why?” Dolniak asked, all wide-eyed innocence. “Was I not supposed to?”

  Li grinned.

  “Yeah, somehow I thought not.”

  “What about the local AI cops?”

  He grimaced. “They’re a little busy lately.”

  “Yeah, I noticed. I noticed the cops rounding up Trannies. You guys got a wild AI outbreak on your hands or is that standard local procedure?”

  “No, it’s not standard.” He sounded angry at the suggestion, which would have made Li like him if she didn’t already. “And those cops aren’t local.”

  “They’re not Peacekeepers, either.”

  He shrugged. “They’re working for the Peacekeepers, what’s the difference?”

  Li raised her eyebrows. “And what about the outbreak?”

  Dolniak shrugged. “So far the computers are still working.”

  “They always keep working. It’s just whether they keep working for you or not. And anyway, don’t worry. If it gets really bad the UN will just turn tail, get out of Dodge, and shut down the field array behind them.”

  “And some people would be very pleased to see them go. Not that you heard it from me or anything. So listen, you’re a nice lady, and the doughnuts are great. But are you going to come straight with me at some point here?”

  “I’m thinking about it. Why do you ask?”

  “Because when I tried to do a little digging on my own, I ran face-first into Titan Security Services.”

  Li flailed for a moment and then made the connection. “You mean the hired mercs that are all over the government zone like a cheap suit?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what did you find out about that?”

  “Nothing. Titan’s a police no-go zone on New Allegheny.”

  “I see,” Li said. And she did. More than Dolniak, probably, since she’d been on the operating end of several UN occupations of unruly Periphery planets. Companies like Titan operated above the law in the Trusteeships—which was exactly why the UN hired them in the first place. “Well, in the meantime what can you tell me about the DFT rush?”

  He raised his eyebrows.

  “Oh I know the basics. But what’s the view from here? Who are the players? How do the local yokels see it?”

  “The local yokels don’t exactly agree with each other on it, to be honest.”

  “Okay. Then how does—I don’t know, let’s say a basically smart and honest cop who spends his working days dealing with the fallout of the DFT rush? How would that guy see it?”

  As Caitlyn had expected, Dolniak’s explanation of local politics was cogent and highly logical. She could have sat in on a month of UNSec briefings without hearing as good a rundown of the strategic issues.

  “And that’s where the AI comes into it,” he concluded.

  “Who?”

  “Your friend. The one that was kidnapped. You think this is the first time I’ve heard that story? We’re swimming in kidnapped AIs.”

  “Why?”

  “The DFT rush. The Drift. You can’t navigate the Drift without an Emergent AI. Not reliably anyway. And certainly not safely.”

  Li nodded. This at least made sense to her. Ships navigating the Drift were essentially surfing superimposed histories of the universe—which amounted to coexisting in multiple “locations” in the universe at
a single time. In order to keep their bearings, they needed to process the vast sets of Hilbert space state vectors. That meant they needed powerful quantum computers. And the only entities that could operate such computers or even interface usefully with them were fully sentient Emergent AIs. Thus the press-ganging by governments—and outright kidnapping by private actors—of AIs for service in the Drift.

  “So if I were you,” Dolniak continued as if the connection were obvious, “I’d be asking around at the portside auction houses to see which one sold this one.”

  “But Emergent AIs are sentient,” she protested. “They’re limited citizens. They have rights. Some rights, anyway. You can’t just buy one at the local hardware store.”

  “Yeah, well, sentience isn’t exactly a bright line, is it? The portside auction houses sell off salvaged NavComps every day that they claim aren’t sentient.”

  Dolniak went on, and the more Li heard, the worse it got. Cohen’s death might have nothing to do with Nguyen or UNSec, she realized. Emergent AIs were being sucked into the region already to feed the insatiable NavComp market that the Drift prospectors relied on. Some of those Emergents were coming in legally, on limited contracts from their controlling associates. But most were little better than kidnapping victims. With a growing sense of frustration, Li realized that her list of suspects had just expanded to include every Drift prospector on New Allegheny. Even if she could track down all the yard sale buyers, that would only be the beginning of her task. The real challenge would be catching up with the scattered fragments before they shipped out into the Drift, whose quantum tides could carry them beyond her reach forever.