Ghost Spin (39 page)

Li shook her head.

“We were in the Deep, just like we are now, with a crew that was worse than useless. We met up with this Navy cruiser—”

“You stole this ship out from under the Navy?” Li looked around with fresh eyes. She should have seen it before, of course. But she wasn’t a sailor; all ships were foreign countries to her. And the idea of pirates actually taking down a Navy cruiser was so outlandish that she hadn’t seen the clues—or at least hadn’t put them together properly.

“One thing you have to give the man, he doesn’t think small.”

“So how did you take the
Christina
?”

Okoro laughed. “We didn’t.
He
did. We grappled up with her only to have the new recruits decide they didn’t want to fight. And our AI was totally outclassed, so no help there. So what does Himself do? He casts off the lifeboats, sets our old ship afire, and tells them they can board the new ship and fight like men or stay behind and die in their own piss like dogs.”

“He
said that
?” Li was incredulous. She could imagine him doing it all right. But that bit about dying in their piss like dogs seemed far too flamboyant for the buttoned-down Llewellyn.

“Well, not in so many words,” Okoro allowed. “That’d be a bit too much of a speech for him. But he got the point across.”

“I’ll bet.”

Okoro grabbed her elbow and urged her down the hall, pointing out the newer insulation tiles—most of them right about head height. And then one, right at the turn of an otherwise anonymous corner, that hadn’t been replaced. It had taken a vicious shot from a pulse rifle.

“That’s where Himself almost got his head blown off. And he left it there to remind the young ’uns not to get giddy on a raid until they’ve cuffed wrists, counted heads, and locked down the armory.”

She noticed that Okoro didn’t call him Llewellyn or even the captain. And as they moved around the ship she began to realize that most of the veteran crew members had the same odd habit: “Has Himself done his morning rounds yet?”; or “That summing out looks off, better show it to Himself”; or “Look sharp, Himself is on the foredeck.” They said it with a capital
H
that you couldn’t miss, as if he were a god. Or as if they were afraid that speaking his name would end his impossible run of luck and rub off whatever improbable magic it was that made him survive when any normal man would long ago have died.

“What about friends?”

“What?” Okoro asked blankly.

“Does the captain have any friends on board? Old comrades from his Navy days, that kind of thing?”

“Well, I’m as old as they get. I was with him on the
Ada
.” Had Li just imagined the faint hesitation before that final word, or the lurch in his voice when he named his old ship? “Sital was too.”

“Lot of history between the two of them.”

“Well, that’s between the two of them, isn’t it?”

Li glanced sideways at him. “And you?”

“I consider him my friend,” Okoro said carefully. And this time Li was quite sure that the hesitation wasn’t imagined.

“He’s a cool one,” Li said.

“Oh, you noticed?”

“Yeah,” Li said wryly. “But then I notice the little subtle things. I’m sure not everyone can see it.”

Okoro snorted. “You shouldn’t joke about it. People are upset and confused. That’s a bad way for things to be on a ship full of pirates.”

“You mean they’re upset about me.”

“Maybe upset is too strong a word. But still … it does put a question in everyone’s mind.”

“Oh?” Li wondered privately if “everyone” meant Sital.

“No,” he said, reading her expression with uncanny accuracy. “Not Sital. But there’ve been a couple of women on board who’ve made fools of themselves over him. Not that it got them anywhere … well, it all goes back to what I said before. He’s a good captain. And a good captain
understands that people will make fools of themselves on a long voyage, but your mates’ll forgive you pretty much anything as long as you don’t shove it up their noses.”

Li grinned. It really was too bad Cohen wasn’t here. He’d be enjoying this immensely. “So hypocrisy is the social glue that holds a pirate ship together?”

“Well …” Okoro was not willing to go that far. “Let’s just say that you need to allow for more than the normal amount of social friction. Mature and rational men don’t set out onto the high seas to chase each other around in search of violence. That’s not me, by the way. It’s from an old book Himself likes to quote.”

They walked on a moment in the companionable silence of strangers who have … not friendship, or even necessarily the seeds of real friendship … but at least a fleeting sense of encountering a reasonable and sympathetic fellow thinker.

“The thing is,” Okoro said into the silence, “being upset about you is just a surface thing. The real thing they’re upset about is the NavComp. And whatever past you have with him.”

She turned to stare at him, stopping abruptly enough to make a crewman stumble into her and walk off cursing under his breath. “Why are you telling me this? What do you care?”

Okoro had stopped, too, equally oblivious to the workaday bustle all around them. “Can’t you guess?” he asked.

“You’ve talked to Cohen.”

“Of course.”

“Why
of course
?”

“Don’t you understand who I am?”

“You’re a doctor.”

Okoro laughed out loud. “I’m only playing at being a people doctor because we don’t have a real one on board. I’m an AI specialist. I was Llewellyn’s cat herder on the
Ada
. And now I’m the cat herder on the
Christina
, too. And the psychtech. And anything else that has to do with helping a hundred-some humans share a very small ship with an alarmingly large Emergent.”

Li stared, coming to grips with what Okoro was telling her. That he,
not Llewellyn, was the gatekeeper to Cohen. That he, not Llewellyn, had the answers—and the access—she needed so desperately. “Then you can—”

“No, I can’t. All I can do is give you some good advice. Don’t shove yourself in people’s faces. Don’t do anything to make them nervous about you. And back off on trying to get direct access to the NavComp.”

“He’s not a NavComp, he’s—”

“You see?” Okoro dropped his voice to a murmur, somehow managing to sound relaxed and routine—as if he were conducting a trivial and innocent conversation that anyone could have even the faintest reason for wanting to eavesdrop on. “That’s just what I’m trying to say to you. Why would you want to keep saying things like that? Do you really think your friend is going to be safer if people stop thinking of him as a NavComp—useful, competent, trustworthy, and nonsentient—and start thinking of him as some kind of hungry, crazy ghost who’s taking their ship who knows where to do who knows what?”

“What about Llewellyn? What does
he
think?”

Okoro got an odd, inward-looking expression on his face, as if he were measuring what he was about to say against some complex internal truth-telling metric that existed only inside his head. “I really can’t say. And that’s a true ‘can’t,’ not just a ‘won’t’ pretending to be a ‘can’t.’ I trust the man. I trust him to do the right thing under difficult circumstances. But what
he’ll
think the right thing is … I couldn’t begin to tell you.”

“So you trust him, but he doesn’t trust you.”

“He doesn’t trust anyone. And given what happened on the
Ada
, I can’t say I blame him.”

Li thought of Llewellyn’s closed and narrow face. She remembered the clear, fierce, measuring eye staring sidelong at her down the smoke-swirled length of Damascus steel. She wondered what leverage Cohen was bringing to bear on the finely honed mind behind that eye. And what Llewellyn would be willing to do to fight him off.

A man who would burn his own ship to make his men fight.

You might have met your match, Cohen. You might have finally picked the wrong fellow to fuck with
.

“The
Ada
?” she asked Okoro after a moment. “Was that Llewellyn’s old ship?”

“Aye.”

“And what happened to her?”

“Nothing. She’s Avery’s ship now, that’s all. God help the poor woman.”

She stared in outright disbelief. “Llewellyn commanded the
Ada
?”

He frowned incredulously at her. “Where’ve you been for the last ten years? I thought everyone with spinstream access followed that trial.”

“No. And I can’t find out, either, because I’m cut out of the shipboard systems.” She gave him a sour look. “But then you’d know all about that, wouldn’t you?”

“Actually, no. That’s way below my pay grade. But I’ll see what I can do about it.”

They had reached the bridge now, and to Li’s surprise Sital turned away from the main monitor when she saw them and came over to cut in on Okoro.

“I’ll take over from here,” she told him. “You go check on that thing we talked about this morning.”

“And which thing exactly would that be?” Okoro asked with a teasing grin. “She thinks she’s being subtle,” he told Li. “She only wants to get you alone. But she’s a dreadful liar, take it from me. You mustn’t believe a word she says to you!”

“No ice cream for you,” Sital deadpanned.

And then Okoro was off to wherever—and Li was alone with Llewellyn’s quietly formidable first officer.

It took Li about three minutes from their first exchange of friendly fire to decide that Sital was … complicated. For one thing, Sital was wound about as tight as anyone could be and not snap. Some of it was sheer physical and mental energy: a body honed for combat carting around a brain that cycled several orders of magnitude faster than the average monkey’s. But it was more than that. There was a prickliness to the woman that you couldn’t miss from a mile away. She was that most formidable and dangerous of all opponents: a hardheaded perfectionist
driven to excel by her own flaws, real or self-perceived. It was no surprise she’d ended up in the military, Li thought. Strand a woman like that in a peaceful civilian life and she’d drive everyone around her insane and eventually chew her own leg off in a desperate effort to escape. But in a war zone, when all hell was breaking loose, a woman like that was a blessing.

And she was a perfect second-in-command, and you couldn’t be on the
Christina
for half an hour without understanding that the crew was just as loyal to her as it was to Llewellyn. And she’d earned that loyalty, Li suspected. She was the kind of person who made things work, brought the trains in on time, and took care of her people. And—much more than Llewellyn, Li suspected—she was the glue that held this crew together.

She was also, unfortunately, a seething, roiling bundle of obsessions, fixations, and compulsive insecurities—most of them having to do with Llewellyn.

“This your first trip into the Drift?” Sital asked.

“Yes.”

“Well, don’t worry. Boomerang’s a well-established route. We’re not going to run into anything unexpected. We’re not even using the new NavComp for this jump. There’s nothing to calculate. The entry and exit points are already mapped and buoyed and locked into the old system. It’s hardly even a jump at all, by pirate standards.”

“So how does it work on a real jump? Do you have to turn the ship over to the NavComp for those?” She realized she’d fallen into Sital’s way of talking without even thinking about it. Did the other woman want to avoid Cohen’s name for some reason? Did she even know his name?

“Hang on,” Sital answered. “It’s better if I just show you.”

Sital led her over to the navigational charts. It always amazed Li that ships still bothered with them. She’d asked a few ship’s officers about it, on those rare occasions when she had anything to do with ship’s officers, but all she’d ever gotten from them were tradition-drenched speeches about Captain Bligh navigating past the Great Barrier Reef with a map and a toothpick. Finally she had decided that it was just an
atavistic urge for tactility. Sailors didn’t feel comfortable without their charts. They craved that concrete proof of their place in the universe. They needed to map their worldline the old-fashioned way, even if their more evolved selves knew that time was merely an Emergent phenomenon and that reality on the most basic quantum level erased all distinctions between past, present, and future. They needed to feel that their destiny was something they could see and touch—and, if push came to shove, something they could roll up and carry onto the lifeboats.

“Here’s what Will’s planning,” Sital told her. “We jump in at Point Charon. That takes us to Perseus, where we know there’s heavy commercial shipping traffic. If we were really hurting, we could knock off a ship for replacement air. But luckily we don’t need to this time. Then we reenter the Drift point-double-zero-two light-years away, right … here. This is a pirate point, no civvies. We got it from Jenny Wheelan, straight from the horse’s mouth, so we know Navy doesn’t have it on their charts. And even better, it’s a one-way point that drops you out here, just offshore of Boomerang.”

She pointed to a big vortex that was annotated with navigational coordinates indicating that it had intakes and outlets to half a dozen other entry points.

“We’ll be just out of active sensor range, so no one should see us come into Boomerang. So as long as we run silent, we can sit out there in the Deep listening to the comm chatter and figuring out where Avery is—and, more important, where she thinks we are.”

“You can decrypt Navy communications?”

“No, but Navy ships have loose lips. If Avery’s out there we’ll hear about it. And since every commercial shipper running the Drift knows she’s got a hard-on for us, they’ll be rerouting their ships just as fast as they can to stay out of the combat zone.”

And to keep from getting their best crew press-ganged
, Li thought. She wondered idly whether the merchant marine sailors were more frightened of getting press-ganged by Avery or by Llewellyn. Judging from what she’d seen during her own capture, the answer might not be the one that Avery and UNSec wanted to hear.

On the other hand, the more she looked at the charts, the more that seemed like the least of their problems.