Ghost Spin (31 page)

“You can’t live on luck forever,” Doyle said in the sour tones of a man trudging down the well-worn rut of an old argument.

“Not luck. A calculated risk in the service of a clear-cut strategic goal.” Llewellyn grinned—the first glimpse Li had seen in this meeting of the charismatic leader who’d taken the Titan bridge a few days ago. “And besides, Doyle, haven’t you heard the rumors yet? I’m lucky.”

Doyle acknowledged his defeat with a shrug of his slab-sided shoulders. “So where do we go now?”

“Into the Drift. Really in, not just dabbling our toes in the shallows.
And when Avery follows us, we go on the attack and steal her goddamn ship right out from under her.”

A gasp eddied around the room, half fear and half appreciation at the outrageous boldness of the proposal.

“Are you forgetting the recent unpleasantness?” Okoro drawled in his slow, deep voice. He was sitting next to Sital, and from the way the two of them had been chatting before the meeting started Li guessed they were friends as well as crew mates.

“She’s a good ship,” Llewellyn insisted. “She just made a mistake. Anyone can make a mistake, Ike.”

He held Okoro’s eyes for a heartbeat. Li couldn’t have said which man looked away first; she wasn’t even sure they knew.

“That was one hell of a mistake,” Okoro observed mildly. “Wouldn’t like to be around when she makes the next one.”

Sital sat beside Okoro chewing her nails and looking miserable. Llewellyn glanced at her briefly, and he read something in her averted face that made his lips tighten into a frustrated line.

“Okay, Ike. Maybe you’re right. Let’s forget about the
Ada
. For now, anyway. Let’s just concentrate on figuring out where we stand and getting some supplies on board. I still say we need to make the Drift work for us.”

“But we need an Emergent AI to navigate the Drift safely,” Doyle protested.

“And we have one.”

“You mean
you
have one! But what if something happens to you?”

Llewellyn graced Doyle with a cool, sideways smile. “Are you expecting something to happen to me?”

“I’m just saying. Until you upload the ghost to the shipnet, we’ve got no guarantee the two of you won’t strand us out there.”

“All right. Find a way to upload it, and we’ll discuss the matter. Does that satisfy you?”

A chuckle swept around the room as Llewellyn’s faction and the undecideds appreciated his adroit outmaneuvering of the complainer. Everyone knew—and the certainty of their knowledge was a gauge for Li of just how important Llewellyn’s fragment was—that their new
NavComp was simply in a different class of AI from their old one. It had parasitized Llewellyn’s DNA and was sweeping through his body with visible and worrisome effects on him for one simple reason: The DNA of a complete, living person—replicating heartbeat by heartbeat in every nucleus of every cell in his body—was the only parallel processing platform on the creaking old
Christina
that was even remotely large enough to host such a being.

Doyle’s men subsided into inaudible mutters of discontent, but he had sense enough to know when he was beaten. And he also had the sense—or maybe he just hadn’t thought of it—not to suggest the other obvious alternative: infecting someone else with the virus and letting them host the NavComp. Li was glad he hadn’t gotten there, for his sake as well as Cohen’s. Because as she watched Llewellyn in action—and watched the curious blending of his personality and Cohen’s that was so unnervingly different from seeing Cohen on a passive shunt—she was starting to suspect that there was something else going on here. Llewellyn was fertile soil for Cohen’s memes as well as his source code. And she wasn’t at all sure that this ghost would take happily to being transplanted.

“Any other thoughts?” Llewellyn asked the room in general.

Several people began to speak, but Doyle’s voice cut across the rest. “I think it’s into the Drift. I don’t see that we have any other choice. I don’t see that you’ve left us any other choice.”

Li looked around, seeing crew members nodding their agreement, and realized that Doyle was dangerous in more than the obvious ways. He might not speak well, but that didn’t matter so much on a ship where everyone knew one another from long experience and bravery under fire spoke louder than empty words. Llewellyn was the ship’s unquestioned leader. He had the combination of brilliant military tactics and sheer, inexplicable gift-of-the-universe good fortune that every soldier wants in his leader. He was the crew’s lucky charm. They needed him and they knew it. But they
liked
Doyle. And all things being equal—in other words, when no one was trying to kill them—they’d rather follow Doyle than Llewellyn. Lucky for Llewellyn that Astrid Avery seemed to have made killing them into a full-time personal crusade.

Llewellyn gave Doyle a long, probing look, his pale eyes searching
the man’s face. “We’ll chart the course together, Doyle. You have full say in this. You’re the crew’s man. I’m not holding out on you. I never have been.”

“You’re always holding out on us,” Okoro interrupted. “It’s in your nature.”

“See—” Doyle began.

“No, Doyle, I’m not siding with you. I think Llewellyn’s right. And I don’t think we can risk trying to upload the ghost to shipnet. The last NavComp almost got us killed through sheer incompetence. This one’s good. Maybe even as good as
Ada
. We can’t risk ruining that.” His eyes flicked to Llewellyn. “But I do think you should be more forthcoming. It’s not that we don’t trust you, William. We do. You’ve earned it. But the ghost hasn’t. And which one of you is
really
in charge?”

They faced off against each other. No one else in the room even seemed to be breathing.

It was Llewellyn who finally broke the silence. “I’ve kept you alive for the last three years, Doyle. Doesn’t that earn me anything?”

Doyle made a bitter face. “According to Ike here, it earns you the right to take us into the Drift on your say-so without a NavComp.”

“But you don’t agree.”

Doyle scanned the room, looking for support and finding none. “Doesn’t look like it matters much what I think.”

“All right then,” Llewellyn said quietly. “At least we all know where we stand now.”

And Sital swept briskly in on his heels, fulfilling her assigned role in the trinity: whipping the hounds along and moving the hunt forward. “Shall we put it to a vote?” she asked in that deceptively mousy voice that made even statements sound like questions. “All in favor say aye?”

“Any other questions?” Llewellyn asked when the votes had been tallied and the big decision made.

Silence.

Llewellyn stood up, nodded tersely, and walked out without another word. Sital stood up one beat behind him, always the loyal adjutant. “Meeting adjourned. We all know what we have to do. Let’s get on it, people.”

“So” the ghost said, counting on the dainty fingers of the most implausibly beautiful body Llewellyn had yet seen it in. “You ordered Ada into battle. And she destroyed the creche ship. And she had the natural reaction that any person would have had. And then she went off and had a look at her source code, or at least whatever pieces of it Holmes and Titan were willing to let her see. And then she realized that she’s not any ordinary person at all but … a very special kind of person. And then what happened?”

“And then the fights started.”

“With Ada?”

“No! Of course not! What do you think I am? With Holmes.”

In the weeks after what they soon took to calling “Ada’s little identity crisis,” Llewellyn truly began to understand what an AI officer was and did—and that was when Holmes’s role on the ship really began to sink into his consciousness.

She began pushing, advocating, pressuring. And always ringing through the same limited set of talking points: dangerous signs of instability; better to nip things in the bud and stop the rot before it went further; a stitch in time saves nine; no time like the present; time is money.

It was all about time. Time and money, and Titan’s needs to deliver on their promises. One of which, apparently, was that the Navy would
never have to actually have nondeniable consciousness of any outright violation of the laws regarding the weaponization of sentient AIs.

“So what then?” the ghost asked, nudging him back on track and down the road toward the things he didn’t want to think about.

“So we had another knock-down, drag-out fight between Holmes and the bridge crew. Holmes thought Ada’s reaction was a serious red flag. She wanted to pull her off the line and go straight back to dry dock for a refit.”

“That’s one I haven’t heard before.”

“Don’t look like that. No one was talking about a hard reboot at that point, not even close. She just said there was some proprietary debugging software Titan could run. Something about a hybrid system—”

“They wanted to slave her to a semi-sentient.”

“No!” Llewellyn’s horror was instinctive, visceral. “That would be insane. You’d have a completely dysfunctional ship on your hands if you tried that. You’d end up with—”

“Something, I don’t know, perhaps a bit like the
Jabberwocky
?”

Llewellyn drew up short at that. But he wasn’t willing to go there yet. It just didn’t make sense to him. “Look,” he told the ghost, “you’re doing a twenty-twenty hindsight read of the situation. It just didn’t seem like that at the time. And I guarantee you no one was talking about hard reboots or semi-sentients.”

“But,” the ghost gently insinuated, driving him pitilessly back to the things he least wanted to remember, “it
was
during that argument that the first cracks between you and Avery began to show …”

“I guess so,” Llewellyn said reluctantly.

“And then came the death of the
Romola
.”

They picked up the
Romola
’s distress call before they even dropped out of superposition. It was coming out on multiple branchings—indeed in almost every branching that they could match up with a coherent spacetime model, let alone pull down a Hertzsprung-Russell diagram that was anything but unadulterated paradox.

The
Romola
was sending out a standard automated mayday. But the ship was talking over it, relaying not only her coordinates and heading
but also her life support systems status, which amounted to bad and getting worse.

Ada knew what to do, and Llewellyn let her do it. She talked the other ship down—always better to let that happen ship to ship instead of dragging organics into it. And all the while Llewellyn could see her sucking up parallel processing units while she tried to work through the three-body problem of setting up the fastest possible rendezvous for two Drift ships rocketing through a gravitationally complex slice of spacetime at speeds that turned relativistic effects into life-and-death practicalities.

And then suddenly everyone was looking at the odd blip on the scanners in the neighboring nebula that only Sital had been paying attention to—up until the instant when it broke out of cover and turned into a Syndicate hunter-destroyer.

They were all instream now, the whole bridge crew juiced up on synth and pumped up on adrenaline and oxytocin. And Ada sucking PPUs down what seemed like a bottomless hole of calculations as she hurled every ounce of brute calculating power she had at the dizzying three-body problem of ships, sandbar, stars all pivoting around one another in a cosmic dance playing out along multiple superimposed quantum branchings.

Coming in fast, Avery said. I think a preemptive strike is warranted here.

I don’t agree, Ada answered—and shocked the whole lot of them into a paralyzed, breathless silence that set Llewellyn’s ears ringing.

“She’s not going to fire.” Holmes spoke offstream, and barely in a whisper, but her voice ricocheted around the bridge like a gunshot.

“I haven’t told her to fire,” Llewellyn said curtly.

“I think—” Avery began.

But Llewellyn dropped back instream again without waiting to hear what she thought.

We’re not deciding anything yet, Ada, he said as soothingly as he could given the adrenaline pumping through his body.

Can’t we just talk to them?

Ada—

I’m sorry, William. I can’t do this again. Not without giving them a chance to—

We’re going to give them every chance to declare themselves, Ada. Just bracket the Syndicate ship. We’re not committing to anything.

“This is mutiny.”

“Not now.”

“And you’re covering for her.”

“Shut up, Holmes.”

“If you don’t—”

“This is my bridge, and
you will shut up or I make you shut up
!”

The Syndicate ship slid out of the cover of the sandbar and surged toward the
Romola
like a shark smelling blood in the water. Llewellyn tuned Holmes out and slipped back instream to try to reason with Ada. But before he could do more than assess the situation …

“Yank the plug!” Holmes was up in his face, close enough that he could taste her spit while she shouted at him. “Hard cycle her
now
or you can go back to New Allegheny in the brig.”

Okoro was at Holmes’s shoulder now, ready to haul her off the bridge, but it was too late. She had activated her AI officer’s override and she was onstream, and Llewellyn and the rest of the bridge officers were locked out, and there wasn’t a thing anyone could do about it.

“This is Holmes, Ada. You are now officially under my command and are to disregard any further orders from Captain Llewellyn.”

“What? I don’t under—”

“I want you to target the Syndicate ship and bracket it with plasma tracers. And when you’ve acquired your target, kill it.”

“No,” Ada said stubbornly. “They haven’t done anything, and we don’t even know they’re hostile, and—”

Llewellyn never knew for certain why the Syndicate ship did what it did next. Maybe they didn’t think their AI was a match for the
Romola
. Or maybe there was some hidden weakness in their intelligent systems that the
Ada
’s scans hadn’t uncovered and that they feared would betray
them in the heat of battle. Or maybe it was just that hoary old chestnut that people always trotted out when they wanted to excuse the inexcusable: the fog of war.