Ghost Spin

by Chris Moriarty

  “So tell me about Llewellyn.”

  “Not much to tell. We’re both from upland farming families. That’s a pretty small community. Everyone knows each other. We even started school in the same one-room schoolhouse.”

  “But he did a little better than you did.”

  “Will was smart. And the best guy I ever saw with a shotgun. I’m guessing you got a firsthand look at his fancy shooting when you were up portside yesterday.”

  “I got a look at it. Couldn’t tell how good a shot he was, though. It didn’t seem like he was being very careful what he hit.”

  “Sometimes you’ve got to come in with a bang.”

  “He did that all right.”

  “Well, he always did have a flair for the dramatic.”

  Li blinked—and then realized that the echo she was hearing was of Korchow’s voice. He’d used exactly the same phrase two days ago—only he’d been talking about Cohen, not Llewellyn. She pondered that for a brief moment and then filed it away to take out and think about later.

  “Okay then, Will Llewellyn. To tell you about Will, I’d have to start with pirates in general. Stop me if I’m telling you what you already know.”

  Li nodded, knowing already that she wouldn’t stop him. He was a subtle one, despite his bluff Irish cop’s face. He had opinions, though he was enough of a workhorse to keep them buttoned up pretty tight on government time. Even if he told her an old story, the way he told it would be worth something.

  “So. You know about the Compson’s World embargo and the BE transit snafu. Probably a lot more than I do. And from the inside, if my little bout of lunchtime research into your past is any indication.”

  She nodded.

  “And I guess you pulled enough tours of duty out here to understand that whatever the collapse of the FTL transit grid means to the Ring, it means a lot worse to the colonies. Most colonies won’t be able to survive when their field arrays go offline. And even the ones that can won’t be able to support their current populations. Not even close. They don’t have the food supply. They don’t have the technical know-how. They don’t have the ecosystems. They don’t have the genetic diversity. They’re walking ghosts and they know it.”

  “The only chance is to do what the UN has kept us from doing for centuries: to forge local alliances, local economies, local transportation hubs.”

  “So the UN’s moving in on the local powers.”

  “And they’re moving to control the shipping lanes. And that’s where the pirates come in. Basically, you’ve got a multiplanetary economy where shipping has just been routed out of closely regulated government-controlled channels and into the wide blue yonder where any boy with a gun and a grappling hook can try to get a piece of it. Sailing the Wall isn’t an obvious proposition. It takes guts and know-how. And a certain degree of … I don’t know … intuition? Experience? Seamanship? Some captains are better than other captains. Some NavComps are better than others. And a crack captain with a crack NavComp and a crew that knows how to play rough can really clean up out there in the dark between stations. Add on top of that the fact that stationers in these parts have no love for the UN, and that even the UN gunship crews are mostly press-ganged locals who’d turn pirate themselves if they got half a chance, and … well, we’ve got ourselves all the ingredients of a new Golden Age of Piracy.”

  “Sounds fun.”

  “Yeah, well, it was fun. And profitable, too, until the pirate hunters showed up. Some of them are private bounty hunters, but the worst are the actual UNSec ships. They’re supposedly working for the UN just like everyone else at the Navy shipyards, but they’ve got these papers that give them the right to capture and hang anyone they decide to call a pirate.”

  “Letters of marque,” Li said.

  “Yeah. I’ve heard them called that. Whatever they’re called, they’re a damned menace. Turning a ship’s captain loose with that kind of authority causes more trouble than it solves. The UN ought to know that by now.”

  “They’ll never know that, Dolniak. They’re running an empire. And you can’t run an empire without shitting on the colonies. If you could, then empires would last forever.”

  “And we’d still be speaking Latin?”

  Li smirked. “Try Chinese, round eyes.”

  Dolniak smiled at the joke, and then grew earnest again. “The problem is UNSec doesn’t see it that way. They think they can live forever. And they think they can do it by making a land grab in the Drift.”

  “Hence the pirate hunters.”

  “Yeah. Except that it’s a tad more complicated than that.”

  “Oh? Is the UN backing some of the pirates, too?”

  Interestingly, Dolniak wasn’t willing to go that far. “Let’s just say that the line between pirate and pirate hunter is … fluid.”

  “So what’s the complicated part?”

  “I guess there’s two, mainly. One, pirates make money. They’re about the only people making money along the Wall these days. And that money’s got to go somewhere. Some of it goes into legitimate businesses—nice, upstanding, respectable, campaign-contributing businesses. And some of it goes into buying cooperation. Or at least discretion.”

  “From nice, upstanding, respectable cops like you.”

  He flushed. Or maybe Li just wanted to think he did. “Yeah.”

  “And how discreet are you, Dolniak?”

  “Not very. But I’m not willing to lose my job over it. Or any of the other things you can lose when you start getting in the way of those nice, upstanding, respectable business types.”

  “Shooting down cops on the street seems a little crude, Dolniak. I’d like to think better of them.”

  “Then you’re about to be a happy woman. They got hotshot lawyers, these people. And some of their hotshot lawyers work in Internal Affairs.”

  Li laughed shortly. “I guess I should have thought of that trick myself. Why waste your time trying to buy cops if you already own the cops who investigate the cops? That tactic also has the advantage of putting even honest cops under their thumb.”

  “Yeah.” His mouth quirked into that pleasantly self-deprecating smile again. “And thanks for the honest-cops bit. I like that you care enough about my pride to say it even if you don’t believe it. Anyway, a couple of years ago, some sharp, clever young captain from Ringside shows up with a Navy ship of the line and fresh-minted letters of marque. He starts roughing up the local pirates, but apparently that’s not all he was doing. Because about a year later he gets dragged into port in chains and put in prison and tried on charges of piracy himself.”

  “And that was Llewellyn.”

  “Yeah. Hometown boy made good—or not so good, as it turned out.”

  Li knew the bare bones of the story already, of course. She’d run a search on Llewellyn after she’d talked to Korchow, and the trial press coverage had been the first thing that came up. But she’d wanted the local version of the story. And she still wasn’t sure she’d gotten it in its entirety.

  “What did people here think about the trial? People who knew him, I mean.”

  “That it was a setup. No one could believe he would have done that.”

  “Anything else?”

  Dolniak hesitated. “There were rumors that the piracy charges were only a cover story. That he’d gotten mixed up with NALA.”

  “Seems to me I’ve seen that name on some of the local graffiti,” she quipped.

  “Yeah, well … what can I say? People are in a bad mood at the moment.”

  He swirled his coffee and frowned down at it as if it had suddenly turned bitter in the cup.

  “You don’t add up,” he said finally. “You’re too nice to be what you want me to think you are.”

  “I’m not as nice as you think I am.”

  “See? That’s what I mean. You’re warning me off. I can tell you think it’s for my own good. You reek of it. It’s like you’re into something, and you can’t get out of it, and you know it’s going
to turn ugly and you’re trying to limit the collateral damage. Bad guys don’t do that. Bad guys are too worried about their own skins most of the time to give a shit who else gets hurt. That’s why they’re bad guys, because they care too much about their own skin and too little about other people’s. So what gives with you? Who’s got their claws into you?”

  “You’ve got it all wrong, Dolniak. I don’t need a white knight riding to my rescue.”

  “No, you’ve got it all wrong. This is my job. I’m not going to go away, no matter how often you ask me to. And the safest thing for everyone, you and me included, is if you level with me and tell me what’s going on and who all the players are.”

  “I told you. I can’t.”

  “Then you’re going to get someone killed. Maybe yourself. But just as likely me or some other cop. And if you do, nice lady or not, you are going to be sitting across the table from me in an interrogation room.”

  “Aren’t we getting a little overdramatic here?”

  “I don’t think so. For what it’s worth, I spent a little time looking up the law on Emergents. If your friend’s fragments have gone through a yard sale, then they don’t belong to him anymore. In fact they can’t, because once he decohered he had no legal identity and no right to own anything, including his own hardware and source code. If you think he’s somehow still alive, then you’re going to have an uphill road convincing any judge that you have some quasi-mystical right to get his components back from whoever has them now. And even if you do, he has no legal protection from any less friendly parties who might be looking for him. They could cut him down in broad daylight on a crowded street, and it wouldn’t be murder. It wouldn’t be anything. There isn’t a law on the books you could go after them with. It’d be less than kicking a dog.”

  Li stared at him, face set stubbornly. There wasn’t a thing he was saying that she didn’t know already, but that didn’t make it any more pleasant to listen to.

  Dolniak stared back for a while, and then sighed and shook his head. “You are one stubborn bitch, aren’t you?”

  Slowly, Li smiled. “Can’t say this is the first time I’ve heard that.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  Dolniak was sweating, and Li realized she was, too. The climate control was on the fritz, another symptom of the burgeoning wild AI outbreak that the news spins were now talking openly about even though the Trusteeship Administration kept denying it.

  She wiped her forehead and then wiped her hand on her pants.

  “Now that you mention it,” Dolniak said, and unbuttoned his shirt cuffs to roll his sleeves up above his elbows.

  On the inside of his left arm, just above the point where the silver ceramsteel filaments would have faded into the muscle if he’d had a wire job, were four short words tattooed into his skin in blue-black ink. The letters were small and plain and unadorned. The words were upside down from where Li was sitting, but would be right-side up when Dolniak read them:

  IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU

  “So who is it about?” Li asked him.

  He grinned. “Damned if I know.”

  He looked down at the tattoo for a moment, as if her question had reminded him of something so long a part of him that he hardly remembered it anymore.

  “And the hell of it is,” he said, still looking at the tattoo instead of her, “I like you. I really really like you. Do you want to come to dinner?”

  “Is that wise?”

  And now he did look up, with a big grin on his face. “Do you really give a shit?”

  “You got me there. When should I show up?”

  He wrote an address on a scrap of paper and pushed it across the desk at her. “Six thirty. It’s easy to find. Just get off the Duquesne Incline at Beech Street and go down the stairs and you’ll run straight into it. And now that you’re coming to dinner, you can answer a personal question for me.”

  Li waited.

  “What do I call you?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Your name. Is it Caitlyn or Catherine?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “It matters to me, or I wouldn’t ask.”

  She shrugged. “Then use whichever name you like.”

  “Not good enough. Names mean something. Which one is it?”

  She looked at him for a long moment before answering. “I think … Caitlyn.”

  He nodded as if he’d read something in her answer. Li wondered what it was, and whether he was making some naïve assumption that would end up getting them both in trouble. Quiet people were hard to deal with. You never knew quite what they read into your words—which meant that you could never be completely sure you weren’t lying to them.

  “Caitlyn it is, then. So why are you asking me about Will, anyway? He shoot one of your yard sale buyers? And isn’t that sort of a couldn’t-happen-to-a-nicer-guy situation?”

  “Actually, it looks like he has one of the surviving fragments.”

  “Oh. Shit.”

  “Yeah.”

  “He must be using it as a NavComp.”

  “Probably. I’m sure it’s better than any other NavComp he could buy out here, legally or illegally.”

  “He’ll never give it back then. Maybe he can’t give it back. Hell, it’s probably running on his own internal wetware.”

  “What?”

  “A lot of the pirates do that. They’re almost all ex–Navy men. You can’t realistically run a modern fighting ship without a military grade wire job. So they wire the NavComp through their own internals … um … what would be a tactful way of saying it? In order to promote cooperation and teamwork?”

  “In other words, so their crews can’t mutiny unless they want to be stranded in the Drift without a NavComp?”

  “You said it, not me.”

  “The thing is,” Li said after a moment, “I need that ghost.”

  “Then you’re going to have to learn to live with disappointment.”

  “Yeah, but I need it.”

  They stared at each other for a moment.

  “I don’t think you heard me the first time,” Dolniak told her. “I heard you. Really.” She stood up to leave. “See you at dinner tonight.”

  His sigh followed her out into the hallway. It didn’t sound impatient. It sounded like the sigh of a man who felt things. Who felt sorry for people in general, and for her in particular, even if she had used him and lied to him. Li wanted to warn him that feeling sorry for people had only ever gotten her in trouble, but he probably wouldn’t listen. And even if he did listen, he probably wouldn’t be able to stop himself. Some people were just put together that way.

  “Caitlyn,” he called after her. “Listen to me. Don’t mess with Will Llewellyn. I haven’t seen hide nor hair of the guy since he joined the Navy, but I can tell you one thing about him that I figured out when we were five years old. It hasn’t changed, and it never will. He. Doesn’t. Lose.”

  “I can’t believe that!” said Alice.

  “Can’t you?” the Queen said in a pitying tone. “Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.”

  Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said, “one can’t believe impossible things.”

  “I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

  —Lewis Carroll

  (Catherine)

  THE DRIFT

  However unsatisfactory their dinnertime talk had been, Llewellyn seemed to have reached some conclusion about Li. Forty minutes after she went back to her cabin, she was mysteriously granted limited access to the shipboard computers. It wasn’t enough. But it was better than nothing.

  That night she sat in her cabin, chewing at her fingernails and trying to piece together a clear story from the bits and scraps of old news files in the shipboard archives. She couldn’t. It was all dark intrigue and treasure and bloody mayhem. And in the
middle of the darkness was this man, this Black William, this thief who had been smart enough to steal Cohen—and disciplined enough to control him once he’d done it.

  He had a lot of Cohen, more than any of the fragments she’d encountered so far. Those memories weren’t part of the shifting froth of autonomous agents and peripherals. They were wrapped into core programs. If he had that, then he had unlocked the core programs. And he had Cohen’s cooperation, however grudging. She didn’t underestimate that. She knew what it took to ride that horse. And she was a willing passenger—not a hijacker.

  Her first impression of the man had been right. He was driven, disciplined, all fury tamped down and power held in check, coiled tautly around some central purpose. What was it? And why did he need Cohen in order to achieve it?

  She ran in review the little that she knew about the man, trying to organize her thoughts into a coherent search strategy.

  The Ada. And letters of marque. And a Navy hero turned pirate. And bad blood with Astrid Avery.

  It wasn’t much, but at least it was somewhere to start looking.

  The next morning she got a bright and early knock on her door and the information that she was on duty—whatever that meant under the circumstances—in half an hour. At eight bells on the chime she heard a knock on the door and opened it to find herself face-to-face with Ike Okoro.

  She knew a lot about Okoro just by looking at him. Like her, he was a rarity in UN space: someone who retained an easily identifiable ethnic identity that matched up in a geographically consistent way with the spot on Earth his ancestors had migrated from. But whereas Li’s Korean genes came from corporate colonists who had sold their genesets in order to get out of Earth’s gravity well, no corporation had ever owned Okoro’s geneset. His parents had no doubt purchased the best tweaks to his DNA that money could buy; thanks to a timely revolution and brilliantly farsighted administration of oil company reparations, New Lagos had emerged from the Great Migration as a wealthy independent planet with a thriving information technologies sector and a full permanent voting membership in the UN Security Council. But no one held a patent on Okoro’s genes. And any adjustments to his West African genetics had been made for his benefit by loving parents, and not simply to make him a more profitable worker in a corporate colony. That made all the difference between him and Li, whose black-market geneset still couldn’t overwrite the damning corporate serial numbers that were stamped into her mitochondrial DNA. And it made it all the more surprising that Okoro would be here, in the Drift, with a price on his head.