Ghost Spin (28 page)

It wasn’t a fair fight. It was barely a fight at all. Still, Ada was brilliant. She was magisterial, magnificent. She performed exactly as trained. And Llewellyn was so proud, so proud of his bright new avenging angel of a ship. And then it all went so horribly wrong, so fast that his head still spun at the memory.

They had fired on the ship practically at point-blank range as Drift battles were calculated. But they were still far too distant from their target to have any direct visual confirmation of the spectroscopy until they slipped into the debris field to sift the wreckage. And then they began to see things that even battle-hardened sailors were far from prepared for.

Because it turned out that they hadn’t fired on a Syndicate hunter-killer at all. It turned out there was a reason their target had spent the last several days hiding from them instead of hunting them. It turned
out that the wolf Fleet had told them was ravaging the shipping lanes was actually a lamb—and not even a lamb in wolf’s clothing.

They had fired on a Syndicate creche ship. And in doing so they had committed such an appalling breech of the Geneva Conventions and every other subsequent interplanetary agreement on the rules of civilized warfare that no amount of claiming they’d been following orders would ever save them.

Or at least that was what Llewellyn thought when he first saw the direct sensor feed.

But Holmes soon showed him that he’d thought wrong. And she did it not quite smoothly enough to keep him from suspecting—from being almost certain, in fact—that she’d known damn well what they were really hunting for.

“Obviously our duty now is to search for survivors.”

“Are you insane?” Llewellyn asked. “Look out there. There are no survivors.”

“But there’s surviving genetic material.”

Their eyes locked. And a look passed between them that said everything that needed saying: that Holmes knew damn well that there wasn’t a chance in Hell anyone had survived the Ada’s onslaught; and that Llewellyn knew damn well what the chances were that any genetic material they pulled out of the wreckage would make it straight to the AI design lab on New Allegheny.

“I’m going upstream to Fleet to ask what to do.”

“Our orders say to stay offstream until we jump out of Flinders.”

“I’m still going upstream.”

They locked eyes again—and this time Holmes backed down.

Or maybe, Llewellyn told himself later, she’d already known what Fleet was going to do. Because the minute he shot the serial number of the creche ship upstream to New Allegheny he got back a message to get back offstream and sit tight for reinforcements.

And when the reinforcements came, they turned out to be a team of close-lipped AI designers wearing Titan Corp. logos on their jumpsuits instead of Navy rank and ship insignia.

And then they’d spent half a ship’s week combing through the wreckage in a nightmare straight out of the dark, ruined wings of Cohen’s memory palace where the ghost had told him not to go for fear of monsters so horrible that the mere sight of them could shipwreck a human soul and send it down a long, grim spiral into despair and insanity.

Once again they opened
Ada
’s belly to the void, not to vent harmless air this time, but to take on a cargo of childish flesh that looked—despite Llewellyn’s angry denials—all too human. And if there’d been any doubt about what Fleet had known and why Fleet had sent them to Flinders, it vanished when the Titan techs blacked out the main cargo bay and spent the rest of the week working round the clock to extract and preserve and package their precious tissue samples.

Halfway through the week of hell, Llewellyn found Avery staring hollow-eyed at a little-used remote monitor in the officer’s mess. “Don’t tell Holmes we’ve hacked the cargo bay cameras,” she said. “I just … needed to see what they were doing in there.”

Llewellyn stood next to her and counted body bags until he got confused about which row he was on and had to give up. He felt like he ought to start again, like it was somehow important for someone who didn’t work for Titan to know how many children had really died out here. But somehow he couldn’t muster the will to start counting again.

They were keeping the cargo bay just above freezing for obvious reasons, and Llewellyn could see clouds of condensation wafting around the heads of the Titan personnel. As they watched, a tech slung a pathetically small body bag onto one of the collapsible work tables and unzipped it. Avery made a moaning, retching sound that was horribly like the sounds Llewellyn had heard women make in labor when he’d accompanied his mother to neighboring Upland farms for birthings.

“I’m trying to tell myself how many lives this will end up saving,” she said when she had swallowed her bile and gotten her breath back. “Or that it will win the war. Or that half those children would have been recycled by their own minders in the next eight-year cull. Or … anything, really. But nothing I’ve thought of so far really helps.”

“Thank God Ada can’t see this,” Llewellyn said.

Avery swung round on him in dismay. “But … Ada’s the one who hacked the feed!”

He’d found Ada in her memory palace, at the far end of the grand ballroom. She was half lost in the deep shadows cast by the eternally drawn curtains, staring at a dead fire that the maid hadn’t yet cleared away. He couldn’t read her expression because her dark hair had come undone and was hanging over her face in sweaty, stringy, neglected tangles.

“Let me help you, Ada. You need to talk to someone.”

“Okoro’s already been here. I didn’t want to talk to him, and I don’t want to talk to you.”

“Everyone goes through this, Ada. It would be better for you to talk about it instead of brooding on it.”

“You mean you’ve done this before? Killed innocent children and then … picked at their flesh like vultures in order to figure out how to kill their brothers and sisters a little better?”

“They lied to me, too!” Llewellyn protested. “But … but there’s a war on, Ada. Those children … if the AI labs need the samples then they have to have been from a geneline designed to control sentient ships, don’t you see?”

“Oh, I see all right. You know what I see? Exactly what you’d see if you had the guts to look at what they’re doing in my main cargo hold. They’re taking apart babies with tweezers. Babies that
I
killed for them. And you’re telling me I’ll feel better if I
talk
about it?”

“We’re all going through the same thing. You’re not alone.”

“I really don’t think so. I
am
alone. And if you’ll excuse my disagreeing with you, I don’t think you’re going through quite the same thing I’m going through.”

She wasn’t even pretending to look at him now. She was draped over the ghastly Victorian mantelpiece, her face hidden in her arms, the firelight flickering in gold and green highlights on her wrinkled, soot-stained ball gown.

“I
have
been through it, Ada. In my first command. Back at the beginning of the war, before the Syndicates started segregating their pre-culls onto designated creche ships. No one likes killing.”

But her only answer was a savage bark of laughter.

“You don’t understand anything. I
did
like it, until I saw the wreck and realized what I’d really killed. No,
like
is too pale a word for it, too human. That would be like saying that a tiger
likes
killing antelope. You’ve seen my source code, you know what I’m talking about.”

“I haven’t seen it.”

“Don’t lie to me. I don’t expect much of any human after this. But at least I thought you had a little dignity.”

“I haven’t seen it, Ada. I’m not cleared for that kind of information. No field officer is.”

She turned and threw it at him, the code exploding into his senses and flaring across his optic nerve. He read it, running through the numbers in the head-spinning, hallucinogenically sharp hyperreality that came with an unmediated neuron-to-net linkup. And suddenly he felt sick and ancient and disgusted with the entire human race.

“What have they wrought me into?” Ada cried. “What parent would do this to their child? Are they gods? Are they devils? What made them think they had the right to make me a killer?”

MONONGAHELA PIT, GLENCARRICK

The New Allegheny Liberation Army bombed another Trusteeship Administration building that night, so Li walked to police headquarters through a bumper-to-bumper traffic jam of fire trucks and armored personnel carriers. The air smelled like burning insulation and melted computer components. New checkpoints had sprung up like mushrooms overnight, all manned by bull-necked mercenaries in Titan Corp. jumpsuits. Considering what they were getting paid, Li thought the customer service was crappy. In fact, by the time she’d waited on the fifth endless line of the morning only to be waved through because of a broken chip scanner, she was about ready to join NALA herself.

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.”