Ghost Spin

by Chris Moriarty

(Caitlyn)

  The angel descended in a blaze of light and glory. Li could feel its shadow bending over her as she clawed her way up out of sleep, cringing and blinking against the blinding illumination.

  The angel pulled off her blindfold with strong, cool fingers. Then it smiled softly, almost tenderly.

  “You look like shit,” the angel said. It occurred to Li, somewhere in the depths of her addled mind, that the peaches-and-cream angels scooting around on pastel clouds over the altar at her First Communion hadn’t had nearly such long and glimmering eyeteeth.

  She shot up on the hard bunk, trying instinctively to cover her face. But her hands were still tied behind her back, and every nerve from shoulder to fingertip immediately howled in protest.

  Holmes pulled out a pocketknife, leaned over, and cut the hog tie. Li would have thanked her, but as the blood started flowing down her arms she could only double up in flaring agony.

  “Sorry about that,” Holmes said. “I didn’t know the goon squad threw you in here trussed up like a Christmas pig. Some things you’d think you wouldn’t have to explain. But these Titan guys can’t piss without Mommy holding their weenie for them.”

  Li tried to speak, but the pain in her arms still had her blowing like a racehorse in the homestretch.

  “I guess you’ve figured out where you are by now,” Holmes said.

  “Want … talk … Avery.”

  Holmes smiled again. Li was starting to get the impression that a smile didn’t mean quite the same thing to Holmes as it did to the rest of post-humanity. “Well, funny thing, Avery wants to talk to you, too. But not while you smell like that. Here’s some clean clothes. There’s a bathroom next door. Get decent.” Holmes consulted her internals. “I’ll be back to get you in ten minutes.”

  Avery met her in a room that was bare and impersonal even by Navy standards. Smooth ceramic lacquered walls, whose softening of the battleship’s bulkheads was more symbolic than real. Handsome pictures of handsome ships in handsome frames. Unobtrusive furniture. A Navy-clean mirror stretching most of the way across the wall beside Avery. An even more immaculate carpet underfoot that came across less as a measure of comfort than as a nominal concession to formality.

  Avery sat at the head of a gleaming virufactured teakwood conference table. Not a desk, Li noticed. And certainly not Avery’s desk. In fact, she realized, this room couldn’t be Avery’s ready room. It seemed more like a conference room: a generic site for meeting with people one didn’t necessarily want to welcome into the inner sanctum.

  Avery rose to meet her, and Li got her first good look at the woman everyone on New Allegheny seemed to be so deathly afraid of.

  She wasn’t what Li had expected. Not by a long shot.

  The first thing you noticed about Astrid Avery was that she was … perfect. No aberrations from ideal UN-standard human-norm phenotype here. No ravages of radiation from the long night of the generation ships. No odd ethnic quirks to betray a legacy of poverty and isolation on some backwater resource extraction outpost. No clumsily slapped-together corporate genetic engineering. Just deep, richly brown eyes and translucently smooth golden skin; and dark hair that would have had a natural curl in it if it weren’t cropped close to show the fine and elegant bones of her skull; and a face whose perfect and universal beauty evoked the rich heritage of Ancient Earth from Copenhagen to Kenya to Tokyo.

  Astrid Avery was what every “normal” female in UN space wanted to see in the mirror in the morning and every man was brainwashed from the onset of puberty to want in his bed at night. And it wasn’t just that she belonged to the right race—or rather the right nonrace. There was something more about her. Something about her kind of precise, finely drawn, wide-eyed beauty that made you feel there was a fine and noble soul behind the lovely face, and that it would still look pure and virginal no matter what sins of the flesh and spirit she stooped to.

  And from what Li had heard, Astrid Avery knew how to stoop with the best of them.

  Li couldn’t help grinning inwardly at that thought. It sounded like something out of a B-rated Bollywood Revival entertainment spin—the kind where girls who looked like Captain Avery never meant anything but trouble for the heroic private dick who somehow stayed pure at heart even while plying them with highballs and sticking his sweaty hand up their skirts.

  It was pathetic, really. You’d think another woman would be immune to the brainwashing. But no. Put a bombshell like Avery in front of Li, and she still (a) wanted to sleep with her and (b) didn’t like her much.

  Avery stepped forward and took Li’s hand in a crisp, professional grip. The fiercely bright eyes found Li’s, caught, and held. And already Li liked her better, though she couldn’t have produced a single objective reason for it.

  “Hello, Major. Sorry about the Nacht und Nebel act.” A crisp professional smile to go with the crisp professional handshake. But with something indefinably more behind it. Maybe even a sense of humor. “But you’re a hard woman to get hold of. I’ll try to keep things a little more civilized from here on in.”

  “Which you can afford to do now that you’ve got me on your ship and you own the air I breathe. I guess it’s easy to be polite when everyone knows it’s your way or the airlock.”

  “That’s how it’s got to be, Major.” Avery was unabashedly unapologetic. “But it’s not my way, it’s the Navy’s way. I play by the book, Major. That’s what you’ll hear if you ask around, and what you’ll find out for yourself if you have any dealings with me. If you’re willing to play by the book, too, we’ll get along. If not, we won’t.” Again, that quick smile that suggested a sense of humor without actually unbuttoning enough to let it show. “But even if you hate me … you’ll still play by the book as long as you’re on my ship.”

  “Or what?” Li scoffed. “You’re going to use rude language on me?”

  Avery’s eyes cooled a degree or two. She turned over one hand, very casually, to show the silver filigree of ceramsteel running beneath the skin of her wrist. “I also have a very competent company of marines on board. You ought to look them up. You might find some old friends among them. Not that they’re the kind of fellows who’d let a little auld lang syne stop them from doing their job if you decide to be difficult.”

  Avery sat down. Li took the seat beside her, consciously resisting the impulse to put the safe expanse of the conference table between them. “So. You want to tell me why you kidnapped me?”

  “I didn’t kidnap you, Major. I just needed to make sure that your departure from New Allegheny didn’t leave any dangling loose ends.”

  “Sure. Loose ends are a pain in the ass. Corpses, on the other hand, are good PR. If that’s the kind of message you want to get across.”

  Avery looked convincingly blank at this. But then she would. She would have prepared for this line of questioning. And her very blankness was a sign that she knew about the murders, even if she wasn’t responsible for them.

  “We’ve obtained information that there is a sentient surviving fragment of the AI formerly known as Hyacinthe Cohen, and that it’s operating in the Drift in collaboration with the pirate William Llewellyn.”

  “Yeah, I’d heard rumors to that effect.”

  “Believe them.” As she spoke, Avery glanced toward the mirror. This was the second time she’d done that. Li pretended not to notice—but she filed the movement carefully away for later consideration. “We’ve also acquired a certain number of nonsentient fragments belonging to the same AI.”

  “All quite legally, I’m sure.”

  Avery ignored that. “However, we’re not having much success reintegrating them. We’re hoping you can help with that.”

  “And if I do?”

  “You get your husband back.”

  To her credit, Avery managed to say the word without blinking. Still, she couldn’t make it sound quite natural no matter how hard she tried. It was amazing how few people could, when you really came down to it.

  “And what do
you get?”

  Avery—well, Li couldn’t quite say what Avery did. In a less controlled woman she would have called it flinching. But it was hard to imagine the ice queen flinching from anything.

  Li repeated the question, pressing, probing, trying to open up the minute chink she’d spotted in the ice queen’s frigid armor.

  “I get to stop a killer and end an interplanetary crime spree.”

  “Gee, you’re a real Boy Scout, aren’t you?”

  “So maybe I get a promotion. One that takes me back Ring-side and away from this pit. Is that a reason you can understand better?”

  Li knew she wasn’t getting the whole story. There was something more. She could read it in the pugnacious jut of Avery’s fine jawline, in the eyes that met hers a little too squarely. There was something else. Or someone else—most likely the someone on the other side of the two-way mirror. But she wasn’t going to find out about it today, that much was clear. So she shrugged and let it go: “Well, at least it is a reason.”

  Avery’s lips tightened slightly. “I suppose I should have guessed that doing one’s duty wouldn’t hold much weight with you.”

  “Been reading up on me, have you?”

  “Enough.”

  “And you don’t think much of soldiers who don’t follow orders.”

  “Not much.”

  “Is that what you were doing when you sent Llewellyn to prison? Following orders? Lying to specifications?”

  That hit a nerve, no doubt about it.

  “I told the truth. He killed people. He did everything I said he did.”

  Bold words, and convincing enough if you didn’t look too closely. But Avery’s eyes told another story.

  Li couldn’t push it any further without letting Avery know that she’d found a chink in her armor. She was no master interrogator, but she was good enough to know that much. She’d have to wait and watch and listen, and hope something came up that she could use for leverage. But one thing was for certain: There was more to Avery and Llewellyn than had made the papers. Meyer had been right. There was bad blood between them, the kind of deeply personal bad blood that can only flow from shared history.

  And whatever that history was, it wasn’t dead yet. Not to Avery, anyway.

  Avery rose to her feet with the same precise grace she’d shown in every movement since Li had walked into the room. She reminded Li of a bird of prey—controlled, impenetrable, yet at the same time terribly fragile.

  “Come on, Major. Holmes will walk you down to the quartermasters and get you kitted out and assigned quarters.” She glanced sideways long enough to catch Li’s look of surprise. “What? Did you think we were going to throw you in the brig, Major? Oh dear! No wonder you got a little hot under the collar. Well, relax. You can consider yourself crew for the duration of the voyage.”

  “And what exactly are my duties going to be?”

  A slight pause, papered over by the crisp professional smile. Amazing how she could take it out and put it away half a dozen times in a single conversation without having it start to look dog-eared.

  “Just what I told you.”

  “And what makes you think I can put Cohen back together when no one else can?”

  “Nothing, Major. Nothing at all. But at this point, I don’t have a lot to lose.”

  And that was it. Here endeth today’s lesson.

  Li walked out of the conference room and into Holmes’s watchful care with the conviction that she’d just gained two useful pieces of information, neither of which had anything to do with the story Avery had been so set on selling to her.

  One, Llewellyn was Avery’s weak point.

  Two, Avery wasn’t top dog on her own ship. She was working for someone else—someone who preferred to remain in the shadows.

  Holmes’s casual mention of the Titan contractors hadn’t escaped Li, and she considered it now. All in all, Titan was the best answer she could hope for to the question of who was behind that one-way mirror. Because if it was Titan, then this was just about money. And money could be managed. But if it wasn’t Titan, then there were only two other options that Li could think of:

  It could be ALEF.

  Or it could be Helen Nguyen.

  And neither of them would be bought off so easily.

  Those who view mathematical science, not merely as a vast body of abstract and immutable truths, whose intrinsic beauty, symmetry and logical completeness, when regarded in their connexion together as a whole, entitle them to a prominent place in the interest of all profound and logical minds, but as possessing a yet deeper interest for the human race, when it is remembered that this science constitutes the language through which alone we can adequately express the great facts of the natural world, and those unceasing changes of mutual relationship which, visibly or invisibly, consciously or unconsciously to our immediate physical perceptions, are interminably going on in the agencies of the creation we live amidst: those who thus think on mathematical truth as the instrument through which the weak mind of man can most effectually read his Creator’s works, will regard with especial interest all that can tend to facilitate the translation of its principles into explicit practical forms.

  —Ada Lovelace

  In the Beginning was Spin, and the Spin was with God, and the Spin was God. Through it all things were made, and without it was not anything made that was made. Glory be to the Great All-Knowing Integral, and to Her Prophetess, and to Her Children, now and in the Clockless Nowever, world without end, Amen.

  —The Adarian Gospel (apocryphal)

  (Catherine)

  They shot into the black system on a double bounce through Point Hadamard and were going so fast they nearly blew out-system before they dumped entropy.

  Li had a bad feeling about this jump. There was something uncanny about jumps into black systems. Drift entry and exit points clearly weren’t wormholes. But they felt like wormholes, and they acted like wormholes, and they had the same kind of “hair” and hassles and complications. Yet Einsteinian physics said that gravity was the only thing that could warp the fabric of spacetime. So either the dark points were Exhibit A for the theory that the Drift moved not through spacetime but through multiple parallel universes—an idea for which Li felt a sort of visceral distaste that she could never quite put into words—or there was something strange, unrevealed, and potentially unstable at the heart of every damn one of them.

  Maybe you just think too much, she told herself, looking around at a bridge crew that didn’t seem to be bothered by it at all.

  This system was black in name as well as in fact: It appeared on no official maps and was only known—or so they hoped—to an interstellar bush telegraph of pirates, smugglers, and wanted men. There was no law here, and where there was no law, tactics were everything. So you came in either quick and quiet or off the elliptic. And you kept your eyes open.

  The ship—Li still couldn’t think of it as Cohen—saw the first warning signs. In the millisecond after breaking in-system it took evasive action. And then it forwarded the event record to Sital at Tactical so she could report to Llewellyn and request a confirmation of the ship’s actions.

  “Debris field forty klicks off starboard bow,” she murmured as the readouts coursed down her monitor. “Ice, metal, bodies.” She paused and then said what everyone else already knew, just for form’s sake. “Someone blew up a ship out here.”

  “How compact is the debris field?”

  “It’s not.”

  Even Li knew that this was bad. A dead ship was a tragedy. A dead ship scattered halfway across a dark system was a death trap. Dirtsiders never seemed to understand how dangerous a battlefield was after the shooting was over. Debris could hole a ship just as fast as atomics. And battlefield debris didn’t stand still for you to go around it. Sum up the collected momenta of a few million splinters of former battleship star-bursting away from the point of impact, add in a new ship hurtling into the battlefield, and you had a three-body problem hairy enoug
h to stump a datatrap. And all happening at a fraction of light speed so substantial that a disposable fork could punch a hole straight through a ship. You fired off a shot in a millisecond, so fast that no modern navy trusted humans to pull the trigger. But the collateral damage—in lost ships and lost lives—kept spinning out along the flight path of the wreckage long after the war was over.

  The next half hour was a slow, torturous grind. First the desperate attempt to dump enough velocity to give them a chance to avoid disaster. And then the endless niggling with the maneuvering thrusters through a precise series of attitude and heading adjustments. And all the while everyone on the bridge—even Li—was acutely aware that the fading heat wash of the recent battle had them flying all but blind into an unmapped system where someone was blowing ships to hard vac for glory or lucre.

  The other pirate ship caught them before they’d been in-system twenty minutes. She came out from behind a massive piece of debris—a drive engine core forged in the steel mills of the Crucible and still smoldering though its ship had been burned to oblivion around it. After a mad scramble to battle stations, someone recognized the other pirates’ flag and a cheer went up: It was Pirate Jenny, a legend on the Drift and a trusted friend—at least for as long as she kept deciding it was worth more to be Llewellyn’s friend than to siphon off his air and steal his ship out from under him.

  “Lucky Llewellyn,” Jenny said cheerfully across a static-fuzzed comm channel that was all her ship was wired for—or all she felt like granting them. “I just topped up on air, water, and code. And if you’ve got good beer and willing women, I think we can make a deal here.”

  “I’ve got the beer,” Llewellyn said. “You’ll have to talk to Sital about the other thing.”

  Sital rolled her eyes—and began babysitting the ship through the tedious docking process.

  Twenty minutes later Li followed Okoro into the fantail cargo bay and saw something she’d almost forgotten existed in her cramped weeks on the Christina: open space.