Ghost Spin (33 page)

Avery couldn’t seem to let it go. And Llewellyn … Llewellyn could
feel himself wanting to leap to Ada’s defense, wanting to protect her, wanting to stop what he saw was coming. The need was all raw emotion with him, the human instinct to leap to a drowning child’s rescue, to pull a blind person out from in front of a bus, to rescue a bird with a broken wing. He said the word, but he hadn’t thought about what actually helping Ada might cost him. He hadn’t even really attached a specific meaning to the word.

“We can’t help her,” Avery said, low and fast and fierce as if the very walls were listening. “That’s Holmes’s job.”

“You know what Holmes’s idea of help would be!”

“And so what? She’s the professional. You think you know better than her?”

“I think I have a heart. And morals.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? That I don’t? You think I’m some kind of monster?”

“I didn’t say that, Astrid.”

“You didn’t have to. I can see it in your eyes. You’re already despising me. And you have no right. You have no fucking right to look at me that way. Not when you’re playing footsie with Ada while the fucking ship burns down around you!”

Llewellyn actually stepped back at the expression on her face. He felt as shocked as if she’d reached out and slapped him.

“That’s what this is really about, isn’t it? You’re jealous of her.”

Avery’s beautiful face twisted into something halfway between disgust and fury. “Don’t go there, William. Just don’t. I’m doing my job. And part of my job is making sure this ship doesn’t turn into the next
Jabberwocky
.”

“
Ada
’s not the
Jabberwocky
and you know it!”

“Do I? Do I really? Holmes gets to sit behind the screen and run your training sessions, but I don’t have the clearance, do I? I have to take your word for it. I know all about what happens when you’re in there with her.”

“When I am in there with her? Listen to yourself! You can barely even say her name anymore!”

Avery straightened her spine and hardened her jaw. Llewellyn watched the hot anger drain out of her eyes, along with any last trace of life or light or forgiveness.

“I’m going to talk to Sital and Okoro about this, William. That’s my job, and I intend to do it. And now I’m going to tell you something that I’m only going to say once, so you really need to listen to it: If you go there—if you make this about you—anything there ever was between us is over.”

As it turned out, they could have skipped that fight. Holmes stepped in before Avery even had a chance to talk to Sital and Okoro and took the ship back to dry dock. And Holmes was there when the maintenance reports were filed and the Titan cat herders arrived and Okoro read them the passwords—with a blank look on his face that wasn’t just about accessing the high security content on his AI doc’s firewalled Cantor modules—and handed them the keys to the kingdom.

By then the only option Llewellyn had left was asking for his orders in writing. Which he duly did. And which duly led to his being cut out of the loop from that moment forward—and getting to twiddle his thumbs uselessly while
his
first officer and
his
bridge crew and
his
AI officer decided the fate of
his
ship without him.

And that was it. Holmes swept out of the room without even looking at them. When Avery finally met Llewellyn’s stare, she looked almost as sick at heart as he felt.

“I’m sorry. Whatever I said before I … I didn’t want this to happen.”

“You didn’t want what to happen, Astrid? What comes next? And don’t hide behind Titan’s trade secrets. I think I have a right to know. Are they going to help her or are they just going to cycle the fucking hardware?”

The look on Avery’s face was all the answer he needed.

The fear of infinity is a form of myopia that destroys the possibility of seeing the actual infinite, even though it in its highest form has created and sustains us, and in its secondary transfinite forms occurs all around us and even inhabits our minds.

—Georg Cantor

The Crucible’s boundary wasn’t marked on any map, but it was tangible nonetheless. She could feel the change in the air. The change in the noise and bustle and energy of the streets. The endless vistas of high gray walls and vast stock car yards and looming chimneys. The sudden and total absence of women. The choking smoke that seemed to roll off the very streets. And above all the noise and stench and red-hot glow of the blast furnaces that burned day and night because they were so hot that allowing them to cool would shatter them.

If Carrick and Glen Hazel were the Pit’s heaven, and Shadyside its wasting purgatory, then the Crucible was the inner ring of Hell. The Crucible was poor, like Shadyside. But in every other possible way the two districts were dead opposites. The Crucible encompassed the great flat crescent of dry ground on the sunny side of Monongahela Pit. It boasted the most consistent year-round solar gain values, the most accessible bedrock, and the easiest access to the spaceport’s launchpads and mass boosters. And it was swept by brutal year-round winds that wafted industrial pollution out of the lowlands and up over Mount Monongahela’s barren summit.

The Crucible was the engine that drove Monongahela Pit, both economically and politically. Here were the steel mills, and the miscellaneous heavy industry that fueled the local economy, and the preprocessing foundries that supplied the orbital ceramsteel factories with the components of the modern era’s zero-g-manufactured white gold. And
here, too, were the steelworkers and stokers and linemen who epitomized New Allegheny. A blazing inferno, its flames stoked night and day by broad-shouldered giants—with politics to match. If New Allegheny was a powder keg, then the Crucible was its lit and smoldering fuse.

The steel mills were built to the scale of the steel they rolled, not the people who worked in them. By the time Li found the front gate of Mercer, she had walked past miles of railroad sidings, blank gray foundry walls, and open storage sheds.

We need to leave, Router/​Decomposer said, as categorically as if he were stating an unspoken law of the universe. That woman must have been wrong. Korchow can’t possibly be here.

“Why not?”

“Because. Just look around you.”

“I’m looking.”

“Then listen.”

“For what? I don’t hear anything.”

“That’s my point. I’m squeezed down to a single fiber optic, for God’s sake. I can barely think, let alone talk to you. I’d kill myself before I went to ground in this hellhole.”

Li raised an eyebrow but didn’t answer him.
Korchow
couldn’t possibly be here. Not
we shouldn’t be here
. Let alone
you shouldn’t be here
. It was one of those AI comments that she had no answer for. A little shaft of light penetrating the darkness. A disturbing hint that somewhere in that unplumbed darkness of his teeming networks Router/​Decomposer thought of himself as evolutionarily closer to Korchow than to Li or the other poor lost souls of the Crucible.

She wasn’t sure what bothered her more about that realization: the fact that Router/​Decomposer thought it, or the fact that his thinking it still bothered her.

After the long walk along the sidings, the factory gate was almost an anticlimax: a narrow door surrounded by barbed wire and guard sheds and loitering out-of-work steelmen. Some entrepreneurial spirit had cobbled together a coffee shed across the street out of what looked like mostly old shipping crates, and its open-grill kerosene heater was a
splash of warmth and color in the landscape. But other than that, the whole scene was as hard and grim and gray as the racked steel in the freight yards.

Li shouldered through the listless ranks of the day-work pickup line and made her way to the guardhouse. They let her in without comment when she flashed an out-of-date military ID, and a harried-looking clerk in the front office looked up the shift roster and sent her to Foundry Five.

“Who you looking for?” the foreman asked when she got there. He didn’t imagine for a moment that she worked at the mill, or that she had any business there at all except finding someone who did.

“Kusak.”

“Oh,
him
,” he said in a flat, unfriendly voice. It could have been the same brute bigotry Li had heard from Korchow’s landlady, but somehow this felt different. And she didn’t think it was simply anti-construct sentiment, either. More likely it was that subtle discomfort that almost everyone displayed around Syndicate constructs even if they didn’t know what they were: an instinctive withdrawing from beings that, however subtle the external differences, were no longer even arguably human.

He jerked his chin toward a second man, still bent over the blast furnace. He was smaller than most of the others—not short, but slight of build, and wiry in the way middle-aged men become when they’ve seen too many years of scant food and hard labor. His hair was a gray-speckled brown, and cut cheaply, like every other middle-aged steelman’s hair. His overalls were dirty, patched, nondescript. Li would have passed him by in the street without a second glance.

“Korchow,” she said coming up behind him.

He didn’t hear her. The din of the foundry would have drowned out any normal voice, and when she got closer she saw that he was wearing earplugs. She tapped him on the shoulder.

He turned around—and she nearly cried out in surprise.

It wasn’t Korchow at all.

It was Arkady.

But it was an Arkady so changed that Li barely recognized him. She
had last seen him on Earth, in Jerusalem, just over a decade ago. In that span of time Li had changed only slightly, but Arkady had aged two decades. And this wasn’t a soft, well-cared-for, comfortable age. The years since Jerusalem had clearly been brutal ones, marked by poverty, work, and sickness. He was still handsome. He was a Rostov Syndicate A Series, after all; nothing could change that. His body was still slender and graceful under the rough clothes. He still had the pale, wide-eyed, finely drawn face of a Russian icon. But he didn’t look like a saint anymore, let alone an innocent; he looked like a martyr in the final stages of his personal calvary.

Arkady recognized Li instantly, as if he had been expecting her. He didn’t say hello, though. He just put down his tools and walked off the foundry floor, beckoning her with a curt nod of his ravaged head to follow him.

She followed him down the line of foundries until they came to the dark archway of a foundry whose fires had been doused after some long-ago but still visibly catastrophic structural failure. Li smiled in pure aesthetic appreciation. Eight-foot-thick steel-clad walls arced up to the partially shattered vault of the foundry’s ceiling. The ruined chimney clawed the sky high overhead, shooting down a twilight-dim blade of daylight that made Li wonder if there were stained-glass windows in hell. It was the perfect place to talk to a doomed martyr.

Don’t go in there! Router/​Decomposer warned, as if he thought she had a choice. And then they stepped through the door, past the eight-foot steel-clad walls of the old foundry, and Li’s struggling internals cut out completely.

As always, the fall out of streamspace was accompanied by a turbulent wash of vertigo as a body habituated to constant input, lost GPS signals, stream uplinks, and the constant, tidal back-and-forth of backups, parity checks, and wetware updates that were as much a part of Li’s body as the flow of blood through her veins. She recovered quickly—but not in time to block Arkady’s stinging slap to her face.

“Stupid stupid woman! What are you doing here? And how many of Nguyen’s bloodhounds are on your tail?”

She squinted through the gloom at her attacker—if you could really
call being slapped in the face an attack. She had moved instinctively to neutralize the threat, and now she was gripping his wrist in her left hand hard enough to make him wince in pain.

“Sit down and talk to me like a grown-up, Arkady. And while you’re at it, tell me when the Syndicates started using DNA-platformed AI.”

“When we started building Drift ships and couldn’t breed pilots fast enough to stop UNSec from exterminating us.” He squinted at her. “How did you know, anyway?”

She shrugged. “You were never fast enough to get the jump on me before. Something had to have changed. Besides, all the cool kids seem to have AI in the blood these days. I’m starting to feel downright obsolete.”

Arkady laughed at that—and Li saw a trace of the soft boy he’d been when she last knew him.

“I’m surprised the Syndicate Central Committee didn’t think bloodborne AI was a fate worse than death.”

“It’s unorthodox, of course. But it’s not contrary to Syndicate philosophy.” He cast a distasteful glance at Li’s own all-too-visible wire job. “It’s not putting machines in your body. It’s just using an existing natural process for information processing.”

“Why do I suddenly feel like we’re arguing over how many Turing machines can dance on the head of a chromosome?”

“And why do I feel like this isn’t what you came to the Crucible to talk about?”