Ghost Spin (30 page)

“I don’t mean to be nosey,” Dolniak said. “But … well … let’s just say I have professional reasons for wanting to know what baggage you’ve brought with you.”

“I’m not going to do anything stupid, if that’s what you’re asking.”

Dolniak gazed at her seriously for several moments. No reaction. Just that flat, level cop’s stare. Watching her, reading her, measuring her. She imagined him assessing each word, each look, each gesture, like a jeweler inspecting gemstones. “I learned a lot from those old spinfeeds,” he said finally. “I didn’t know AIs could die, either. There was a whole bunch of stuff I didn’t quite get about decoherence. Or disassociation. I wasn’t sure if it was two different things or two words for the same thing. When an AI disassociates is it … well,
gone
? Like a person who dies? Or are there still pieces hanging around?”

“That depends.”

“Ah.” He leaned back in his chair. “Now things are starting to make a little more sense. Albeit in a down-the-rabbit-hole kind of way. So this AI died.” Li noticed he didn’t say Cohen’s name or call him her husband. She didn’t know what to make of that, but she filed it away for future consideration. “He died, and there was a yard sale, and now the buyers are turning up dead. And
you
turned up in the middle of my crime scene because you’re trying to track down those same buyers.”

“And not doing a very good job of it. Someone else keeps finding them first and killing them.”

“And stealing the parts.”

“Right.”

“The parts you’re looking for too and probably would have stolen first if you’d gotten to the victims first.”

Li grinned. “Let’s say I would have discussed their right of possession with an eye to persuading them to do the right thing.”

“Oh, I see. And I’m sure someone with your service record would know how to be quite persuasive.”

“Well, I wouldn’t have
killed
them. I can tell you that much.”

“Funny, but I believe you. Not that I have any reason to. And that’s a problem.” He waved a large, powerful, yet surprisingly delicate hand at the chaos of the bullpen surrounding them. “You might have intuited from my palatial office that the scope of my authority in this organization is not unlimited. But just in case you’re still wondering, the sad reality is that if I write in my case file that I’ve turned you loose because I think you’re a classy lady who can be trusted to play nice I’d be out of a job in twenty-four hours—and before I’d even packed up my desk you’d be inside of a jail cell.”

He crossed his arms, leaned back in his chair, and stared at her. Li stared back, waiting it out. But this time he didn’t crack first.

“So is this the part where you arrest me?”

“No.” He sighed and sat down heavily. “You can go for now. Just don’t leave town. And please, please try not to stumble into any more of my crime scenes. My sense of humor only stretches so far.”

THE DRIFT

Li spent most of her first week on board the
Christina
trying and failing to talk to Llewellyn. The pirates expected the Navy to come after them. And they expected it to happen soon. So until they were safely away from the capture point, Li and her fellow prisoners found themselves locked into various crew cabins, cut off from the shipboard communications network, and sentenced to the equivalent of solitary confinement.

And when the immediate danger was past and they were finally let out, it was only to be summoned to—of all things—a crew meeting.

Li had heard about these meetings. Most pirate ships operated not by Navy rules but by a sort of rough one-man-one-vote form of democracy. Or so they claimed when they were wooing recruits, at any rate. But she’d always assumed these votes were a sort of after-the-fact ratification of decisions taken under fire. She’d never imagined pirates dabbling in democracy out in the Deep and one step ahead of armed pursuit.

As she filed into the main cargo bay—the only internal space on board that was large enough to accommodate the crew count of a fully operational pirate ship—Li took another long, careful look at William Llewellyn.

This was her first sight of him since the capture, and she could get a better sense of the man now that he wasn’t riding a combat high. She studied him covertly, trying to get a read on him, and not really coming
up with anything. The piratical rogue was gone, replaced by a buttoned-down ship’s captain who seemed to have systematically eliminated every trace of individuality from his dress, person, and demeanor. All he let you see was the physical package.

Pale English skin made even paler by a life shipboard. Dark hair that would have been curly if it hadn’t been hacked to within an inch of its life by the barber’s shears. An athlete’s body edging toward the kind of disciplined, whipcord-thin, zero-body-fat middle age that Li associated with special forces field instructors. Clothes freshly washed and ironed. A close but somehow perfunctory shave. Like the haircut, it hinted at a man whose only use for a mirror was to check that he hadn’t missed any spots.

The only glint of individuality was in the eyes—and at the moment those betrayed only a wary, waiting, highly disciplined intelligence. That was the real essence of the man, she decided—or at least of the outward man. Control. Order. Discipline. And above all, self-discipline.

Soldiers followed men like this. They often revered them, imbuing them with quasi-magical powers. But they didn’t understand them. And they rarely loved them.

Llewellyn seemed to know this as well as Li did. He was on his own ship, in the midst of his own crew, and at least temporarily safe from UNSec. He should be relaxed, but he wasn’t. And that
was
interesting, Li decided. Maybe this all-hands meeting wasn’t just about paperwork.

Five minutes into the meeting she knew she’d been right. And she also knew that there were two other crew members worth watching. Llewellyn didn’t lead the ship alone—or at least he didn’t lead without resistance. He was locked into a complex triumvirate. And from the tense set of his shoulders and the tight line of his mouth, he believed that the other two members each had the power to topple him if things went wrong.

Llewellyn’s obvious opponent was Doyle, the quartermaster. Li hadn’t seen much of Doyle yet, but she had heard his name invoked often enough to guess that he was a major power on the ship. The quartermaster’s domain lay deep in the bowels of the vessel, far from the bridge and the officers’ quarters, and Li barely understood what a
quartermaster did on a normal Navy ship. She understood much less the complex power structure of the pirate ship, in which the quartermaster seemed to be almost a shadow captain with authority to contradict and even overrule the captain himself in any decision that didn’t involve the immediate risk of engagement with the enemy.

Not that Doyle was any stranger to combat. He was a tall man, short of leg and long of body, running ever so slightly to fat but still obviously dangerous. Li had seen him fight during the taking of the corporate troop transport, and she pegged him as the kind of man who’d be a valuable friend and a lethal enemy. And even if she hadn’t seen him in action, his face would have told her everything she needed to know about his service; a white flurry of scar tissue glistened across the bridge of his nose and feathered over his cheekbone to his jawline. Li was so busy puzzling over what had caused those scars that she all but missed the first minute of his obviously prepared speech.

Plasma weapon, she finally decided, right around the time he was getting down to his main talking point—which seemed to concern some arcane algorithm for divvying up intellectual property seized in the raid.

When Doyle sat down, Li expected Llewellyn to respond, but instead it was Sital who rose to answer. Li watched the small, dark woman critically. She didn’t make the mistake of underestimating her; a small woman herself, Li knew that weight counted for little in ship or station fighting, and nothing at all in true zero g. But there was something about Sital’s manner—the buttoned-down competence of a woman who looked more like a life-systems engineer than a pirate—that would have made it easy to overlook her in any case.

Easy, but foolish, Li soon realized. Sital was the third leg of the stool. She pulled just as much weight with the crew as Doyle did. But hers was a different, softer kind of power. For the moment it was all on Llewellyn’s side. But it was power nonetheless, and power always has to be reckoned with.

The first order of business today was division of the spoils. Theoretically this should have been wrangled out between Llewellyn and Doyle in his capacity as the crew’s elected quartermaster. In reality,
though, the battle was between Doyle and Sital, who defended Llewellyn’s interests like a pit bull while he stood off to the side, affecting to be nobly disinterested in filthy lucre.

As Li watched Doyle and Sital battle it out, she realized that Sital was more than just Llewellyn’s pit bull. She also led her own faction, composed of crew members who were loyal first to her, and only second to Llewellyn. Nor was Doyle simply Llewellyn’s opposite pole. Yes, he might be a lightning rod for opposition to the current captain—the quartermaster was always that, since he served as the main check to the captain’s otherwise overweening power—but Doyle represented something more as well. He stood for something in the minds of the men and women who sided with him. And, just like Sital, he had put in the blood and sweat necessary to earn their loyalty.

Sital, Doyle, Llewellyn. Public opinion on the ship flowed between the three of them in a delicate balance, with a few committed to one faction or another but most genuinely undecided and willing to go with whoever seemed to have the strongest arguments on their side at any given moment.

And the more Li saw, the more she started to think that Sital had more power than she or anyone else suspected—precisely because she used that power on Llewellyn’s behalf and not in her own interest. As long as things stayed that way, she would hold the line against Doyle and his supporters. But if she ever split with Llewellyn, all hell would break loose.

Today, though, Sital was clearly on Llewellyn’s side. The intellectual property booty question was put to bed with minimal debate, and no expenditure of significant political capital—at least for Llewellyn. Li couldn’t read the deeper currents that might tell her how much it had cost Doyle to even raise the issue.

And then they moved on to what was clearly the real business of the meeting.

“All right, Doyle, run the numbers for us,” Llewellyn said. “What are we looking at?”

As Doyle ran down the take of weapons, ammunition, and technicals, murmurs of approval surged around the room. But when he
shifted to the vitals—oxy, nitro, and hydrogen—the mood turned ugly. Li didn’t know the normal operational losses of this ship, or how many days or weeks of drive time those numbers bought. But she’d been on enough other ships to know that oxy/​nitro/​hydro stores were the only thing sailors care more about than engines and NavComps. A modern ship might not need to carry much resupply in absolute terms, but if it ran out then there was nothing to replace the precious molecules that the scrubbers and water filters took out, and that was the end of your breathable air and drinkable water. And without air and water, those fancy engines and NavComps would just be pushing corpses.

“Why so little oxy?” someone asked.

“They burned off their supplies before we could get to them,” Sital answered.

“Jesus, that’s fucked up! Who would do that?”

“People who don’t like pirates,” Llewellyn said wryly.

“So what does that give us?”

“Two weeks. Three at the outside if we skimp on water.”

“Shit,” someone muttered in the back—but the sound carried like a bell in the sudden silence that greeted this bad news.

“All right,” Llewellyn said. “So at least we lengthened our leash a bit.”

“Not much,” Doyle said. “We got a bad connection the first time we grappled up. Remember? That cost us a fair bit of air pressure.”

“How much?”

“I’d say we’ve got a month at the outside before we need to put into a friendly port.”

“Or we make another capture,” Llewellyn pointed out. “Well … yeah. Of course.”

Llewellyn cast his eyes around the room. “So where do we go? Suggestions, anyone?”

“I say we make for Boomerang,” Doyle said. “And then—”

“But that’s almost a week’s trip. And we don’t even know that Boomerang’s still a friendly port,” Sital interrupted.

“—and then we can hang fire at the entry point and listen to the comm traffic. If it sounds good we go in.”

“And if not?” Llewellyn asked quietly.

“Then we hunt around the entry point where we can get out fast if Avery comes after us.”

Llewellyn laughed derisively.

“Come on. Why the hell not? I call that a winning strategy!”

Llewellyn turned his pale eyes toward the ceiling and laughed quietly. “That’s not winning, Doyle. That’s just losing a little more slowly.”

“Fine. Then what do you call winning?”

“We go on offense. We take the fight to Avery personally.”

“Oh no. No way, Will. You’re not dragging us into your little personal vendetta.”

“What am I dragging you into? You think any of you can jump ship and stroll into some friendly port in this quadrant? Last time I checked, half the crew had a price on their heads.” He fixed his gaze on Doyle. “You certainly do.”

“I’m not saying that, William. I’m just saying—”

“You’re just saying we should keep running scared. Well, we tried that. It’s all we’ve tried so far. And look what it’s gotten us. Now you want to run some more? On what possible logical grounds? Haven’t you ever heard that the definition of a crazy person is someone who keeps doing the same thing and expecting different results?”

“You’re a fine one to talk about crazy—”

“Crazy is as crazy does. Do the math, Doyle. Every time you’ve convinced the crew to run scared, we’ve lost. Sometimes we lost big, sometimes we lost small. But we never did anything except lose. Whereas every time I’ve convinced you to take a gamble, it’s paid off in spades.”