Ghost Spin

by Chris Moriarty

  “I’ve never tried to say I wasn’t at fault. I’ve said all along that—”

  “Hush, child. I’m not saying you haven’t taken responsibility. I’m only saying you haven’t told me the whole story. I’m only saying that there’s one memory you haven’t shared with me. I can feel it. I see the threads that bind it to your other memories. I can map its boundaries. And I think we both know what you did—or what you believe or fear or suspect you might have done. Do you really want to try to rewrite your entire life to avoid that memory? Wouldn’t it be easier just to look it in the face and be done with it?”

  Cohen fell silent and sat looking calmly at nothing in particular, as if he were waiting politely for Llewellyn to finish an important conversation with someone else before interrupting him. Llewellyn listened to the birds singing in the sunlight outside the ancient stone building, and the boy still selling cakes from his heavy tray, and the shoes of a passing horse sliding on the rounded cobblestones.

  When it became clear that Llewellyn wasn’t going to answer, the ghost pushed again—gently, yes, but in a place where even the slightest pressure brought instant, searing agony.

  “The mutineers didn’t take the Ada in streamspace. They didn’t use the kill switch, or there would have been nothing left for Holmes to hard cycle, and the ship would have gone back to New Allegheny as salvage. So what did you do, William Llewellyn? What did you do that you never testified to at your trial because Helen Nguyen oh-so-carefully set it up to preclude any possibility of your testifying to what really happened out there? What did you say to Ada that made her surrender herself to the Navy and go willingly back to dry dock, where they murdered her?”

  The fight went out of Llewellyn in that instant. He could feel it leave him, like air rushing out of a punctured tire. Like breath rattling out of a dying man.

  “I talked her down. I convinced her to turn control of the ship over to them. I told her I could broker a deal. I told her I could save her life if she trusted me.”

  “And did you believe it?”

  “I wanted to. Haven’t you ever wanted to believe something so much that you almost convinced yourself it was really true?”

  The ghost smiled gently. “Every minute of every day.”

  “Does it work?”

  “I’ll let you know when the universe ends and we can total everything out.”

  Llewellyn laughed and then grew suddenly serious again. “I honestly don’t know if I can live with this.”

  “You look alive to me. Not very comfortable, perhaps. But definitely alive.”

  “I’ve thought about killing myself. Maybe I should.”

  “Maybe. But having actually tried it, I can assure you that suicide’s not all it’s cracked up to be. Also, what would be the point exactly? At the risk of seeming like I’m meddling in things that are none of my business—because you know how I hate to meddle—might I suggest that you consider sticking around and trying to fix things?”

  (Caitlyn)

  “Ah shit,” Holmes muttered as they swooped in on the Datatrap. “I hate fighting in free fall.”

  Li peered at the tiny window in the corner of the monitor—the best view she was likely to get of the action, the way things were going. She could see the pirate ship, embedded in the outer rim of the Datatrap like a nail stuck into a cart wheel. But the wheel, which should have been spinning and imparting its rotational gravity to the docked ship, was strangely still.

  “Christ, have they lost spin? I’ve never seen a whole station lose spin before.”

  “They don’t have spin,” the Cohen frag of the day told her. “It’s a deep space datatrap. They have no human crew. Why would they waste money on rotational gravity?”

  “I don’t know,” Li said, feeling stupid and annoyed about it. “Then why have a hab ring, either?”

  “Because they need a hab ring for the cat herders. And it’s cheaper to use the same design they always use than it is to go back to the drawing board and design something different.”

  She’d never actually seen one of these before, though she’d known they existed. It was funny, she thought, the way the UN’s deep space datatraps were essentially invisible technology. She’d never even so much as seen one in her fighting career, and for the first time that struck her as odd. But in fact even when the structures became military targets, it was easier to bomb them than to devote troops to capturing them.

  As the battle unfolded, Li realized that she was going to see even less of it than she’d expected. They were firewalled inside their little room with nothing but the little monitor and Cohen’s streamspace simulation of the battle to tell them what was happening beyond the walls. And Holmes was playing gatekeeper, which today’s Cohen fragment didn’t like at all.

  He made his move when she dropped the firewalls to let him tap the enemy ship’s datastream. It was just an instant. But it was enough.

  The simulation shivered and flashed and words appeared where a moment before there had been only the scrolling chaos of the two shipboard AIs’ dueling networks. Now words were reeling up the screen instead of numbers, flicking back and forth across the glimmering surface in a pattern that reminded Li of something she couldn’t put her finger on … something disturbingly familiar, something that was both domestic and violent, both tame and dangerous, and that she knew she ought to be able to put a name to …

  Fury said to

  a mouse, That

  he met

  in the

  house,

  “Let us

  both go

  to law:

  I will

  prosecute

  you.”

  At first Holmes didn’t notice it because she was so focused on the battle outside. But then she turned and caught the tail end of a line as it whipped by.

  “What the hell?” she muttered. She tapped at the keys, trying to fix it. But the simulation onscreen wasn’t slowing down. It was speeding up.

  “What the hell is that?” Holmes snapped.

  Li just shook her head.

  “Come, I’ll

  take no

  denial;

  We must

  have a

  trial;

  For

  really

  this

  morning

  I’ve

  nothing

  to do.”

  “He’s through the firewall!” Holmes was starting to sound panicked.

  Caitlyn reached for the keyboard, but Holmes swatted her hand away. And then before Caitlyn even saw it coming, she had a weapon to her head.

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she told Holmes.

  Maybe Holmes could have saved herself if she’d acted faster. Or maybe it wouldn’t have made any difference what she did. Li wasn’t sure she wanted to know.

  Holmes was gasping now, her eyes streaming and her face so flushed that Li thought at first she’d choked on something. She dropped her weapon, which clattered to the floor unnoticed. “Need water!” she gasped. “Hot!”

  Li put a hand on her. She was burning up. And still the words flickered through the air in front of them, the text flowing faster as the font size diminished.

  Said the

  mouse to

  the cur,

  “Such a

  trial,

  dear sir,

  With no

  jury or

  judge,

  would be

  wasting

  our breath.”

  “Stop it!” Li screamed. But the ghost didn’t answer.

  Holmes made a spitting sound, put her hand over her mouth, and then jackknifed onto the floor and began thrashing around in the grip of a grand mal seizure.

  Li dropped to her knees and began to shake the other woman, trying to pull her out of it. But she was on fire. Li knew the moment she touched her that the seizures wouldn’t stop unless the fever went down. And a moment after that she knew that it wouldn’t go down, no matter what an
yone did.

  Because it wasn’t Holmes who was on fire. It was the ceramsteel filaments of her internals, miles and miles of them, snaking through every organ in her body. The ghost had come through the shipboard AI, parasitized Holmes’s diagnostic subroutines, and was burning the wires right out of her.

  “I’ll be

  judge, I’ll be jury,”

  Said

  cunning

  old Fury:

  “I’ll try

  the whole

  cause,

  and

  condemn

  you

  to

  death.”

  (Catherine)

  Li came awake to the sharp crack! of distant rifle fire, and only remembered where she was when she heard the clang and rumble of the great iron dogs turning on the inner airlock door of the Christina’s portside auxiliary fantail cargo hold.

  She didn’t know what she expected to come through the door. But it certainly wasn’t what actually did come through: one of Doyle’s men with her webbing, armor, and weapons, which he tossed in a pile at her feet before retreating back into the relative safety of the gangway.

  “You can shoot me in the back if you want,” he said, “but if I were you I’d save my mustard for Avery. The Ada’s inbound on a hard bounce out of Boomerang, and she’ll be fully out of superposition in about five minutes. So it’s all hands to battle stations. Even you.”

  Li heard the screech of the rusted locks on the starboard bay while she was settling the vest webbing over her shoulders. She began running through the ritual pre-combat checklist, letting muscle memory kick in and carry her through until her brain could catch up to events. She was cinching tight the tie-down on the holster of the close-quarters EM rifle when Llewellyn appeared in the doorway.

  He had a gun belt wrapped around his hips above his Navy-issue sidearm, and the old Holland & Holland double broken down over the crook of his elbow. He looked gaunt and sick and grimly satisfied. And there was a hard gleam in his eye that she hadn’t seen since the first day on the bridge of the Titan transport.

  “So much for the fucking mutiny,” he said. “You see who they come running to when real trouble shows up.”

  “Don’t get a big head over it,” Li told him. “After all, they let me out first.”

  Llewellyn laughed at that—but he wasn’t laughing by the time they got to the bridge. Avery had caught them completely off guard. The Christina was still docked to the Datatrap, unable to blow its umbilicals and because she was at cold iron and couldn’t depend on clearing the Datatrap without mishap on attitudinals alone. So the bridge crew had to sweat it out while engineering got things up and running and the Ada howled in like an avenging angel.

  And even when they cleared the Datatrap their situation was little better. Avery papered the entire Driftpoint with electronic chaff, blinding their sensors and cutting them off from the Datatrap and all of Router/​Decomposer’s systems that couldn’t be housed in the Christina’s woefully overloaded systems. So they fought blind, both in streamspace and realspace. And this time Li had the access she’d been denied before, so she had ringside seats to the carnage.

  Within moments it became clear that the real battle was not in the dark void outside the ship’s skin but deep within its digital soul. The Ada was eating them alive. The mad, tattered fragments of Ada that had survived Holmes’s hard reboot might be no match for Cohen by themselves. But slaved to the new semi-sentient, they had a crushing, overweening brute computing power that the nimbler, smaller ship couldn’t begin to match.

  Eight minutes into the engagement, Llewellyn began shutting down auxiliary systems and ordered the bridge crew to the airlocks to reinforce the boarding parties. This was it—the great do-or-die moment in every storied pirate battle whose name was passed down by the death-dealing denizens of the Deep. This was the moment when you knew your AI was about to go down in flames, and your ship had been swallowed under you, and the only way to pluck victory from defeat was to board the enemy ship—and take it in realspace with blood and gunpowder.

  “Not you,” he told Catherine as she began to follow the mass exodus to the airlocks. “You’re with me.”

  And then he sat down at Sital’s freshly vacated nav station, jacked into the ship’s intelligent systems, and began uploading a datastream so massive that Li knew instantly what it was that Llewellyn was pushing into the shipboard systems.

  “Is that wise?” Li asked, suddenly apprehensive.

  “Of course not. But today I need all the help I can get.” He grinned his most piratical grin. “Even if the hired help kills me in the morning.”

  And then it was done, and they were running for the airlocks while Sital counted down to detonation on the head-up channel.

  I’m here, Cohen whispered to her as the airlock blew.

  I’m back, he told her as she went over the top and into the line of fire, adrenaline surging through every cell of every muscle in her trembling body.

  I’m with you, he repeated through the blood and the fire and the soul-flaying horror of the battle for the Ada.

  And then, without reason or warning, he was gone again.

  Li fell out of streamspace—and fell to the floor, dry-retching in a mingled wave of revulsion and vertigo. Llewellyn was half a body’s length farther down the galleyway they’d been fighting along, dead in the sights of one of the Ada’s marine riflemen. Li looked up, her vision tunneling into a hazy, blood-tinged pinprick, and realized that her collapse had taken away his only covering fire—and he was about to die right in front of her while she puked up her guts like a raw recruit.

  The rifleman raised his weapon. Llewellyn slipped to a halt, and—

  Nothing.

  The rifle’s sharp muzzle sank, twitched back on target, and then fell clattering to the floor as the marine slumped to the ground.

  Li lurched to her feet and staggered up the galleyway to join Llewellyn. The marine lay in a slack-limbed heap, his eyes slightly open and a thin trickle of blood oozing out of one ear.

  “We’re in,” Llewellyn said. He sniffed slightly and wiped his nose on his sleeve. Blood came away on the cuff, but he seemed otherwise untouched. Li stared stupidly at the blood on Llewellyn’s shirt cuff and inventoried the aching, ringing bruise that her brain seemed to have turned into, and realized that she must have been about as close to dying in those final, frantic moments of the battle as she’d ever come. She felt no particular reaction to the idea—only a stunned, dull, thickheaded lack of interest.

  “It’s over,” Llewellyn said, as if he weren’t sure she’d understood him the first time. Or as if he still couldn’t believe it himself. “We’ve taken the Ada in streamspace.”

  “But how?”

  “I … don’t know.” He sounded stunned, confused. “Inside help. Someone on the Ada just handed us the ship lock, stock, and barrel.”

  “And where did Cohen go? He was here and then—” She felt sick and dizzy again, and for a flicker of an instant it occurred to her that passing out right now seemed like a lot better idea than going to the Ada’s bridge and facing the cold, hard reality of whatever the fuck had just happened.

  Llewellyn shook his head again. Something was wrong, Li realized. Something she’d seen before on AI jobs when the link got iffy.

  “Who?” she asked more urgently.

  Llewellyn shook his head as if a cloud of virtual gnats were biting at him. “I think … me?”

  As it turned out, the battle wasn’t quite over yet.

  Avery refused to go down with her ship. She didn’t give up until long after it was clear that the fight was lost. And when she did surrender, it was with an icy self-possession that bordered on disdain.

  Li and Llewellyn arrived ten minutes after she finally struck her colors, stepping onto a scene that looked like something out of a samurai movie full of medieval revenge, lust, and superhuman carnage.

  Llewellyn walked straight to Avery, ignoring the mayhem all around,
as if pulled to her by an invisible wire. They stood toe to toe, both of them dirty and bloody and battered, and just stared at each other.

  “What are you going to do now?” he asked her.

  She was sweating slightly, and her pupils were dilated with fear or shock, turning her eyes to near black. But her back was still rigid and her face set in a mask of defiance. “What do you want me to do?”

  Llewellyn’s shoulders slumped on an exhaled breath. He looked spent, utterly weary. Watching them, it seemed to Li that the world had turned upside down. If she hadn’t known better, she’d have said that Astrid was standing battered but victorious on her enemy’s bridge, and Llewellyn was the beaten prisoner. His next word was little more than a whisper, so quiet that Li heard it only because she was standing right beside them:

  “Why?”

  Li saw the other Catherine Li—she couldn’t help thinking of her as Avery’s Li—glance sharply toward Astrid, as if the question itself were dangerous, or as if she herself wanted the answer to it.

  But before Avery could respond, Llewellyn was gone.

  It happened in a blink—and the transition was so swift and smooth that only Li’s long familiarity with Cohen alerted her to it. And yet somehow Avery seemed to sense the change almost as soon as Li did.

  Avery stepped back from Cohen with a look of fear and revulsion. “You!”

  “Mmmm,” Cohen murmured in an ominously soft purr that never would have come out of William Llewellyn’s mouth. “It seems the worm has turned, my dear.”

  “What are you going to do to him?”

  “Nothing you haven’t already done.”

  And then Llewellyn wasn’t looking at Avery anymore. He was looking at Li.

  “Cohen?” she breathed, not allowing herself to believe it yet.

  But she knew. She knew that look. Just as she knew the words that followed:

  “May the rocks melt and the seas burn …”

  He stretched out a hand to her and she took it—and was in his arms before she’d even thought about whether it was a good idea or not.

  “What happened? Where did you go? Why did you leave?”